Middlemarch George Eliot (essential reading txt) 📖

in one place rather than in another. It was below the boudoir, and had also a bow-window looking out on the avenue. But when Pratt showed Will Ladislaw into it the window was open; and a winged visitor, buzzing in and out now and then without minding the furniture, made the room look less formal and uninhabited.

“Glad to see you here again, sir,” said Pratt, lingering to adjust a blind.

“I am only come to say goodbye, Pratt,” said Will, who wished even the butler to know that he was too proud to hang about Mrs. Casaubon now she was a rich widow.

“Very sorry to hear it, sir,” said Pratt, retiring. Of course, as a servant who was to be told nothing, he knew the fact of which Ladislaw was still ignorant, and had drawn his inferences; indeed, had not differed from his betrothed Tantripp when she said, “Your master was as jealous as a fiend⁠—and no reason. Madam would look higher than Mr. Ladislaw, else I don’t know her. Mrs. Cadwallader’s maid says there’s a lord coming who is to marry her when the mourning’s over.”

There were not many moments for Will to walk about with his hat in his hand before Dorothea entered. The meeting was very different from that first meeting in Rome when Will had been embarrassed and Dorothea calm. This time he felt miserable but determined, while she was in a state of agitation which could not be hidden. Just outside the door she had felt that this longed-for meeting was after all too difficult, and when she saw Will advancing towards her, the deep blush which was rare in her came with painful suddenness. Neither of them knew how it was, but neither of them spoke. She gave her hand for a moment, and then they went to sit down near the window, she on one settee and he on another opposite. Will was peculiarly uneasy: it seemed to him not like Dorothea that the mere fact of her being a widow should cause such a change in her manner of receiving him; and he knew of no other condition which could have affected their previous relation to each other⁠—except that, as his imagination at once told him, her friends might have been poisoning her mind with their suspicions of him.

“I hope I have not presumed too much in calling,” said Will; “I could not bear to leave the neighborhood and begin a new life without seeing you to say goodbye.”

“Presumed? Surely not. I should have thought it unkind if you had not wished to see me,” said Dorothea, her habit of speaking with perfect genuineness asserting itself through all her uncertainty and agitation. “Are you going away immediately?”

“Very soon, I think. I intend to go to town and eat my dinners as a barrister, since, they say, that is the preparation for all public business. There will be a great deal of political work to be done by-and-by, and I mean to try and do some of it. Other men have managed to win an honorable position for themselves without family or money.”

“And that will make it all the more honorable,” said Dorothea, ardently. “Besides, you have so many talents. I have heard from my uncle how well you speak in public, so that everyone is sorry when you leave off, and how clearly you can explain things. And you care that justice should be done to everyone. I am so glad. When we were in Rome, I thought you only cared for poetry and art, and the things that adorn life for us who are well off. But now I know you think about the rest of the world.”

While she was speaking Dorothea had lost her personal embarrassment, and had become like her former self. She looked at Will with a direct glance, full of delighted confidence.

“You approve of my going away for years, then, and never coming here again till I have made myself of some mark in the world?” said Will, trying hard to reconcile the utmost pride with the utmost effort to get an expression of strong feeling from Dorothea.

She was not aware how long it was before she answered. She had turned her head and was looking out of the window on the rosebushes, which seemed to have in them the summers of all the years when Will would be away. This was not judicious behavior. But Dorothea never thought of studying her manners: she thought only of bowing to a sad necessity which divided her from Will. Those first words of his about his intentions had seemed to make everything clear to her: he knew, she supposed, all about Mr. Casaubon’s final conduct in relation to him, and it had come to him with the same sort of shock as to herself. He had never felt more than friendship for her⁠—had never had anything in his mind to justify what she felt to be her husband’s outrage on the feelings of both: and that friendship he still felt. Something which may be called an inward silent sob had gone on in Dorothea before she said with a pure voice, just trembling in the last words as if only from its liquid flexibility⁠—

“Yes, it must be right for you to do as you say. I shall be very happy when I hear that you have made your value felt. But you must have patience. It will perhaps be a long while.”

Will never quite knew how it was that he saved himself from falling down at her feet, when the “long while” came forth with its gentle tremor. He used to say that the horrible hue and surface of her crape dress was most likely the sufficient controlling force. He sat still, however, and only said⁠—

“I shall never hear from you. And you will forget all about me.”

“No,” said Dorothea, “I shall never forget you. I have never forgotten anyone whom I once knew. My life has never been crowded, and seems not likely