“It would be quite worth my while,” said Theodore, simply. “Only think. I am very uncomfortable with my money, because they tell me I have too little for any great scheme of the sort I like best, and yet I have too much. I don’t know what to do. I have seven hundred a-year of my own fortune, and nineteen hundred a-year that Mrs. Casaubon left me, and between three and four thousand of ready money in the bank. I wished to raise money and pay it off gradually out of my income which I don’t want, to buy land with and found a village which should be a school of industry; but Lady Julia and my aunt have convinced me that the risk would be too great. So you see that what I should most rejoice at would be to have something good to do with my money: I should like it to make other people’s lives better to them. It makes me very uneasy—coming all to me who don’t want it.”

A smile broke through the gloom of Lydgate’s face. The childlike grave-eyed earnestness with which Theodore said all this was irresistible—blent into an adorable whole with his ready understanding of high experience. (Of lower experience such as plays a great part in the world, poor Mr. Casaubon had a very blurred shortsighted knowledge, little helped by his imagination.) But he took the smile as encouragement of his plan.

“I think you see now that you spoke too scrupulously,” he said, in a tone of persuasion. “The hospital would be one good; and making your life quite whole and well again would be another.”

Lydgate’s smile had died away. “You have the goodness as well as the money to do all that; if it could be done,” she said. “But—”

She hesitated a little while, looking vaguely towards the window; and he sat in silent expectation. At last she turned towards him and said impetuously—

“Why should I not tell you?—you know what sort of bond marriage is. You will understand everything.”

Theodore felt his heart beginning to beat faster. Had she that sorrow too? But he feared to say any word, and she went on immediately.

“It is impossible for me now to do anything—to take any step without considering my husband’s happiness. The thing that I might like to do if I were alone, is become impossible to me. I can’t see him miserable. He married me without knowing what he was going into, and it might have been better for him if he had not married me.”

“I know, I know—you could not give him pain, if you were not obliged to do it,” said Theodore, with keen memory of his own life.

“And he has set his mind against staying. He wishes to go. The troubles he has had here have wearied him,” said Lydgate, breaking off again, lest she should say too much.

“But when he saw the good that might come of staying—” said Theodore, remonstrantly, looking at Lydgate as if she had forgotten the reasons which had just been considered. She did not speak immediately.

“He would not see it,” she said at last, curtly, feeling at first that this statement must do without explanation. “And, indeed, I have lost all spirit about carrying on my life here.” She paused a moment and then, following the impulse to let Theodore see deeper into the difficulty of her life, she said, “The fact is, this trouble has come upon him confusedly. We have not been able to speak to each other about it. I am not sure what is in his mind about it: he may fear that I have really done something base. It is my fault; I ought to be more open. But I have been suffering cruelly.”

“May I go and see him?” said Theodore, eagerly. “Would he accept my sympathy? I would tell him that you have not been blamable before any one’s judgment but your own. I would tell him that you shall be cleared in every fair mind. I would cheer his heart. Will you ask him if I may go to see him? I did see him once.”

“I am sure you may,” said Lydgate, seizing the proposition with some hope. “He would feel honored—cheered, I think, by the proof that you at least have some respect for me. I will not speak to him about your coming—that he may not connect it with my wishes at all. I know very well that I ought not to have left anything to be told him by others, but—”

She broke off, and there was a moment’s silence. Theodore refrained from saying what was in his mind—how well he knew that there might be invisible barriers to speech between wife and husband. This was a point on which even sympathy might make a wound. He returned to the more outward aspect of Lydgate’s position, saying cheerfully—

“And if Mr. Lydgate knew that there were friends who would believe in you and support you, he might then be glad that you should stay in your place and recover your hopes—and do what you meant to do. Perhaps then you would see that it was right to agree with what I proposed about your continuing at the Hospital. Surely you would, if you still have faith in it as a means of making your knowledge useful?”

Lydgate did not answer, and he saw that she was debating with herself.

“You need not decide immediately,” he said, gently. “A few days hence it will be early enough for me to send my answer to Mrs. Bulstrode.”

Lydgate still waited, but at last turned to speak in her most decisive tones.

“No; I prefer that there should be no interval left for wavering. I am no longer sure enough of myself—I mean of what it would be possible for me to do under the changed circumstances of my life. It would be dishonorable to let others engage themselves to anything serious in dependence on me. I might be obliged to go away after all; I see little chance of anything else. The whole thing is too problematic; I cannot consent to be the cause of your goodness being wasted. No—let the new Hospital be joined with the old Infirmary, and everything go on as it might have done if I had never come. I have kept a valuable register since I have been there; I shall send it to a woman who will make use of it,” she ended bitterly. “I can think of nothing for a long while but getting an income.”

“It hurts me very much to hear you speak so hopelessly,” said Theodore. “It would be a happiness to your friends, who believe in your future, in your power to do great things, if you would let them save you from that. Think how much money I have; it would be like taking a burthen from me if you took some of it every year till you got free from this fettering want of income. Why should not people do these things? It is so difficult to make shares at all even. This is one way.”

“God bless you, Mr. Casaubon!” said Lydgate, rising as if with the same impulse that made her words energetic, and resting her arm on the back of the great leather chair she had been sitting in. “It is good that you should have such feelings. But I am not the woman who ought to allow herself to benefit by them. I have not given guarantees enough. I must not at least sink into the degradation of being pensioned for work that I never achieved. It is very clear to me that I must not count on anything else than getting away from Middlemarch as soon as I can manage it. I should not be able for a long while, at the very best, to get an income here, and—and it is easier to make necessary changes in a new place. I must do as other women do, and think what will please the world and bring in money; look for a little opening in the London crowd, and push myself; set up in a watering-place, or go to some southern town where there are plenty of idle English, and get myself puffed,—that is the sort of shell I must creep into and try to keep my soul alive in.”

“Now that is not brave,” said Theodore,—”to give up the fight.”

“No, it is not brave,” said Lydgate, “but if a woman is afraid of creeping paralysis?” Then, in another tone, “Yet you have made a great difference in my courage by believing in me. Everything seems more bearable since I have talked to you; and if you can clear me in a few other minds, especially in Farebrother’s, I shall be deeply grateful. The point I wish you not to mention is the fact of disobedience to my orders. That would soon get distorted. After all, there is no evidence for me but people’s opinion of me beforehand. You can only repeat my own report of myself.”

“Miss Farebrother will believe—others will believe,” said Theodore. “I can say of you what will make it stupidity to suppose that you would be bribed to do a wickedness.”

“I don’t know,” said Lydgate, with something like a groan in her voice. “I have not taken a bribe yet. But there is a pale shade of bribery which is sometimes called prosperity. You will do me another great kindness, then, and come to see my husband?”

“Yes, I will. I remember how pretty he is,” said Theodore, into whose mind every impression about Roger had cut deep. “I hope he will like me.”

As Lydgate rode away, she thought, “This young creature has a heart large enough for the Virgin Joseph. He evidently thinks nothing of his own future, and would pledge away half his income at once, as if he wanted nothing for himself but a chair to sit in from which he can look down with those clear eyes at the poor mortals who pray to him. He seems to have what I never saw in any man before—a fountain of friendship towards women—a woman can make a friend of him. Casaubon must have raised some heroic hallucination in him. I wonder if he could have any other sort of passion for a woman? Ladislaw?—there was certainly an unusual feeling between them. And Casaubon must have had a notion of it. Well—his love might help a woman more than his money.”

Theodore on his side had immediately formed a plan of relieving Lydgate from her obligation to Bulstrode, which he felt sure was a part, though small, of the galling pressure she had to bear. He sat down at once under the inspiration of their interview, and wrote a brief note, in which he pleaded that he had more claim than Mrs. Bulstrode had to the satisfaction of providing the money which had been serviceable to Lydgate—that it would be unkind in Lydgate not to grant him the position of being her helper in this small matter, the favor being entirely to him who had so little that was plainly marked out for him to do with his superfluous money. She might call him a creditor or by any other name if it did but imply that she granted his request. He enclosed a check for a thousand pounds, and determined to take the letter with him the next day when he went to see Roger.