“Yes, suppose!” said Will Ladislaw, in
a contemptuous undertone, intended to dismiss the
subject. He was conscious of being irritated
by ridiculously small causes, which were half of his
own creation. Why was he making any fuss about
Mrs. Casaubon? And yet he felt as if something
had happened to him with regard to her. There
are characters which are continually creating collisions
and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is
prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities
will clash against objects that remain innocently
quiet.
“A child forsaken, waking
suddenly,
Whose gaze afeard on
all things round doth rove,
And seeth only that
it cannot see
The meeting eyes of
love.”
Two hours later, Dorothea was seated in an inner room
or boudoir of a handsome apartment in the Via Sistina.
I am sorry to add that she was sobbing bitterly, with
such abandonment to this relief of an oppressed heart
as a woman habitually controlled by pride on her own
account and thoughtfulness for others will sometimes
allow herself when she feels securely alone.
And Mr. Casaubon was certain to remain away for some
time at the Vatican.
Yet Dorothea had no distinctly shapen grievance that
she could state even to herself; and in the midst
of her confused thought and passion, the mental act
that was struggling forth into clearness was a self-accusing
cry that her feeling of desolation was the fault of
her own spiritual poverty. She had married the
man of her choice, and with the advantage over most
girls that she had contemplated her marriage chiefly
as the beginning of new duties: from the very
first she had thought of Mr. Casaubon as having a mind
so much above her own, that he must often be claimed
by studies which she could not entirely share; moreover,
after the brief narrow experience of her girlhood
she was beholding Rome, the city of visible history,
where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in
funeral procession with strange ancestral images and
trophies gathered from afar.
But this stupendous fragmentariness heightened the
dreamlike strangeness of her bridal life. Dorothea
had now been five weeks in Rome, and in the kindly
mornings when autumn and winter seemed to go hand
in hand like a happy aged couple one of whom would
presently survive in chiller loneliness, she had driven
about at first with Mr. Casaubon, but of late chiefly
with Tantripp and their experienced courier.
She had been led through the best galleries, had been
taken to the chief points of view, had been shown
the grandest ruins and the most glorious churches,
and she had ended by oftenest choosing to drive out
to the Campagna where she could feel alone with the
earth and sky, away-from the oppressive masquerade
of ages, in which her own life too seemed to become
a masque with enigmatical costumes.
