Will re-entered the drawing-room, took up his hat, and looking irritated as he advanced towards Mrs. Lydgate, who had seated herself at her work-table, said--"It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted. May Icome another day and just finish about the rendering of `Lungi dal caro bene'?""I shall be happy to be taught," said Rosamond. "But I am sure you admit that the interruption was a very beautiful one. I quite envy your acquaintance with Mrs. Casaubon. Is she very clever?
She looks as if she were."
"Really, I never thought about it," said Will, sulkily.
"That is just the answer Tertius gave me, when I first asked him if she were handsome. What is it that you gentlemen are thinking of when you are with Mrs. Casaubon?""Herself," said Will, not indisposed to provoke the charming Mrs. Lydgate. "When one sees a perfect woman, one never thinks of her attributes--one is conscious of her presence.""I shall be jealous when Tertius goes to Lowick," said Rosamond, dimpling, and speaking with aery lightness. "He will come back and think nothing of me.""That does not seem to have been the effect on Lydgate hitherto.
Mrs. Casaubon is too unlike other women for them to be compared with her.""You are a devout worshipper, I perceive. You often see her, I suppose.""No," said Will, almost pettishly. "Worship is usually a matter of theory rather than of practice. But I am practising it to excess just at this moment--I must really tear myself away.
"Pray come again some evening: Mr. Lydgate will like to hear the music, and I cannot enjoy it so well without him."When her husband was at home again, Rosamond said, standing in front of him and holding his coat-collar with both her hands, "Mr. Ladislaw was here singing with me when Mrs. Casaubon came in.
He seemed vexed. Do you think he disliked her seeing him at our house?
Surely your position is more than equal to his--whatever may be his relation to the Casaubons.""No, no; it must be something else if he were really vexed, Ladislaw is a sort of gypsy; he thinks nothing of leather and prunella.""Music apart, he is not always very agreeable. Do you like him?""Yes: I think he is a good fellow: rather miscellaneous and bric-a-brac, but likable.""Do you know, I think he adores Mrs. Casaubon.""Poor devil!" said Lydgate, smiling and pinching his wife's ears.
Rosamond felt herself beginning to know a great deal of the world, especially in discovering what when she was in her unmarried girlhood had been inconceivable to her except as a dim tragedy in by-gone costumes--that women, even after marriage, might make conquests and enslave men.
At that time young ladies in the country, even when educated at Mrs. Lemon's, read little French literature later than Racine, and public prints had not cast their present magnificent illumination over the scandals of life. Still, vanity, with a woman's whole mind and day to work in, can construct abundantly on slight hints, especially on such a hint as the possibility of indefinite conquests.
How delightful to make captives from the throne of marriage with a husband as crown-prince by your side--himself in fact a subject--while the captives look up forever hopeless, losing their rest probably, and if their appetite too, so much the better! But Rosamond's romance turned at present chiefly on her crown-prince, and it was enough to enjoy his assured subjection. When he said, "Poor devil I"she asked, with playful curiosity--
"Why so?"
"Why, what can a man do when he takes to adoring one of you mermaids?
He only neglects his work and runs up bills.""I am sure you do not neglect your work. You are always at the Hospital, or seeing poor patients, or thinking about some doctor's quarrel;and then at home you always want to pore over your microscope and phials. Confess you like those things better than me.""Haven't you ambition enough to wish that your husband should be something better than a Middlemarch doctor?" said Lydgate, letting his hands fall on to his wife's shoulders, and looking at her with affectionate gravity. "I shall make you learn my favorite bit from an old poet--`Why should our pride make such a stir to be And be forgot? What good is like to this, To do worthy the writing, and to write Worthy the reading and the worlds delight?'
What I want, Rosy, is to do worthy the writing,--and to write out myself what I have done. A man must work, to do that, my pet.""Of course, I wish you to make discoveries: no one could more wish you to attain a high position in some better place than Middlemarch.
You cannot say that I have ever tried to hinder you from working.
But we cannot live like hermits. You are not discontented with me, Tertius?""No, dear, no. I am too entirely contented.""But what did Mrs. Casaubon want to say to you?""Merely to ask about her husband's health. But I think she is going to be splendid to our New Hospital: I think she will give us two hundred a-year."