“I wonder if Sir James would drive me to Lowick. I want to look over everything—to see if there were any words written for me.”
“You are not to go till Mr. Lydgate says you may go. And he has not said so yet (here you are, nurse; take baby and walk up and down the gallery). Besides, you have got a wrong notion in your head as usual, Dodo—I can see that: it vexes me.”
“Where am I wrong, Kitty?” said Dorothea, quite meekly. She was almost ready now to think Celia wiser than herself, and was really wondering with some fear what her wrong notion was. Celia felt her advantage, and was determined to use it. None of them knew Dodo as well as she did, or knew how to manage her. Since Celia’s baby was born, she had had a new sense of her mental solidity and calm wisdom. It seemed clear that where there was a baby, things were right enough, and that error, in general, was a mere lack of that central poising force.
“I can see what you are thinking of as well as can be, Dodo,” said Celia. “You are wanting to find out if there is anything uncomfortable for you to do now, only because Mr. Casaubon wished it. As if you had not been uncomfortable enough before. And he doesn’t deserve it, and you will find that out. He has behaved very badly. James is as angry with him as can be. And I had better tell you, to prepare you.”
“Celia,” said Dorothea, entreatingly, “you distress me. Tell me at once what you mean.” It glanced through her mind that’ Mr. Casaubon had left the property away from her—which would not be so very distressing.
“Why, he has made a codicil to his will, to say the property was all to go away from you if you married—I mean—”
“That is of no consequence,” said Dorothea, breaking in impetuously.
“But if you married Mr. Ladislaw, not anybody else,” Celia went on with persevering quietude. “Of course that is of no consequence in one way—you never WOULD marry Mr. Ladislaw; but that only makes it worse of Mr. Casaubon.”
The blood rushed to Dorothea’s face and neck painfully. But Celia was administering what she thought a sobering dose of fact. It was taking up notions that had done Dodo’s health so much harm. So she went on in her neutral tone, as if she had been remarking on baby’s robes.
“James says so. He says it is abominable, and not like a gentleman. And there never was a better judge than James. It is as if Mr. Casaubon wanted to make people believe that you would wish to marry Mr. Ladislaw—which is ridiculous. Only James says it was to hinder Mr. Ladislaw from wanting to marry you for your money— just as if he ever would think of making you an offer. Mrs. Cadwallader said you might as well marry an Italian with white mice! But I must just go and look at baby,” Celia added, without the least change of tone, throwing a light shawl over her, and tripping away.
Dorothea by this time had turned cold again, and now threw herself back helplessly in her chair. She might have compared her experience at that moment to the vague, alarmed consciousness that her life was taking on a new form that she was undergoing a metamorphosis in which memory would not adjust itself to the stirring of new organs. Everything was changing its aspect: her husband’s conduct, her own duteous feeling towards him, every struggle between them— and yet more, her whole relation to Will Ladislaw. Her world was in a state of convulsive change; the only thing she could say distinctly to herself was, that she must wait and think anew. One change terrified her as if it had been a sin; it was a violent shock of repulsion from her departed husband, who had had hidden thoughts, perhaps perverting everything she said and did. Then again she was conscious of another change which also made her tremulous; it was a sudden strange yearning of heart towards Will Ladislaw. It had never before entered her mind that he could, under any circumstances, be her lover: conceive the effect of the sudden revelation that another had thought of him in that light— that perhaps he himself had been conscious of such a possibility,— and this with the hurrying, crowding vision of unfitting conditions, and questions not soon to be solved.
It seemed a long while—she did not know how long—before she heard Celia saying, “That will do, nurse; he will be quiet on my lap now. You can go to lunch, and let Garratt stay in the next room.” “What I think, Dodo,” Celia went on, observing nothing more than that Dorothea was leaning back in her chair, and likely to be passive, “is that Mr. Casaubon was spiteful. I never did like him, and James never did. I think the corners of his mouth were dreadfully spiteful. And now he has behaved in this way, I am sure religion does not require you to make yourself uncomfortable about him. If he has been taken away, that is a mercy, and you ought to be grateful. We should not grieve, should we, baby?” said Celia confidentially to that unconscious centre and poise of the world, who had the most remarkable fists all complete even to the nails, and hair enough, really, when you took his cap off, to make—you didn’t know what:— in short, he was Bouddha in a Western form.
At this crisis Lydgate was announced, and one of the first things he said was, “I fear you are not so well as you were, Mrs. Casaubon; have you been agitated? allow me to feel your pulse.” Dorothea’s hand was of a marble coldness.
“She wants to go to Lowick, to look over papers,” said Celia. “She ought not, ought she?”
Lydgate did not speak for a few moments. Then he said, looking at Dorothea. “I hardly know. In my opinion Mrs. Casaubon should do what would give her the most repose of mind. That repose will not always come from being forbidden to act.”
“Thank you;” said Dorothea, exerting herself, “I am sure that is wise. There are so many things which I ought to attend to. Why should I sit here idle?” Then, with an effort to recall subjects not connected with her agitation, she added, abruptly, “You know every one in Middlemarch, I think, Mr. Lydgate. I shall ask you to tell me a great deal. I have serious things to do now. I have a living to give away. You know Mr. Tyke and all the—” But Dorothea’s effort was too much for her; she broke off and burst into sobs. Lydgate made her drink a dose of sal volatile.
“Let Mrs. Casaubon do as she likes,” he said to Sir James, whom he asked to see before quitting the house. “She wants perfect freedom, I think, more than any other prescription.”
His attendance on Dorothea while her brain was excited, had enabled him to form some true conclusions concerning the trials of her life. He felt sure that she had been suffering from the strain and conflict of self-repression; and that she was likely now to feel herself only in another sort of pinfold than that from which she had been released.
Lydgate’s advice was all the easier for Sir James to follow when he found that Celia had already told Dorothea the unpleasant fact about the will. There was no help for it now—no reason for any further delay in the execution of necessary business. And the next day Sir James complied at once with her request that he would drive her to Lowick.
“I have no wish to stay there at present,” said Dorothea; “I could hardly bear it. I am much happier at Freshitt with Celia. I shall be able to think better about what should be done at Lowick by looking at it from a distance. And I should like to be at the Grange a little while with my uncle, and go about in all the old walks and among the people in the village.”
“Not yet, I think. Your uncle is having political company, and you are better out of the way of such doings,” said Sir James, who at that moment thought of the Grange chiefly as a haunt of young Ladislaw’s. But no word passed between him and Dorothea about the objectionable part of the will; indeed, both of them felt that the mention of it between them would be impossible. Sir James was shy, even with men, about disagreeable subjects; and the one thing that Dorothea would have chosen to say, if she had spoken on the matter at all, was forbidden to her at present because it seemed to be a further exposure of her husband’s injustice. Yet she did wish that Sir James could know what had passed between her and her husband about Will Ladislaw’s moral claim on the property: it would then, she thought, be apparent to him as it was to her, that her husband’s strange indelicate proviso had been chiefly urged by his bitter resistance to that idea of claim, and not merely by personal feelings more difficult to talk about. Also, it must be admitted, Dorothea wished that this could be known for Will’s sake, since her friends seemed to think of him as simply an object of Mr. Casaubon’s charity. Why should he be compared with an Italian carrying white mice? That word quoted from Mrs. Cadwallader seemed like a mocking travesty wrought in the dark by an impish finger.