“I have only wished to prevent you from hurrying
us into wretchedness without any necessity,”
said Rosamond, the tears coming again from a softened
feeling now that her husband had softened. “It
is so very hard to be disgraced here among all the
people we know, and to live in such a miserable way.
I wish I had died with the baby.”
She spoke and wept with that gentleness which makes
such words and tears omnipotent over a loving-hearted
man. Lydgate drew his chair near to hers and
pressed her delicate head against his cheek with his
powerful tender hand. He only caressed her;
he did not say anything; for what was there to say?
He could not promise to shield her from the dreaded
wretchedness, for he could see no sure means of doing
so. When he left her to go out again, he told
himself that it was ten times harder for her than for
him: he had a life away from home, and constant
appeals to his activity on behalf of others.
He wished to excuse everything in her if he could—
but it was inevitable that in that excusing mood he
should think of her as if she were an animal of another
and feebler species. Nevertheless she had mastered
him.
CHAPTER LXVI.
“’Tis one thing to
be tempted, Escalus,
Another thing to fall.”
—Measure for
Measure.
Lydgate certainly had good reason to reflect on the
service his practice did him in counteracting his
personal cares. He had no longer free energy
enough for spontaneous research and speculative thinking,
but by the bedside of patients, the direct external
calls on his judgment and sympathies brought the added
impulse needed to draw him out of himself. It
was not simply that beneficent harness of routine
which enables silly men to live respectably and unhappy
men to live calmly—it was a perpetual claim
on the immediate fresh application of thought, and
on the consideration of another’s need and trial.
Many of us looking back through life would say that
the kindest man we have ever known has been a medical
man, or perhaps that surgeon whose fine tact, directed
by deeply informed perception, has come to us in our
need with a more sublime beneficence than that of
miracle-workers. Some of that twice-blessed mercy
was always with Lydgate in his work at the Hospital
or in private houses, serving better than any opiate
to quiet and sustain him under his anxieties and his
sense of mental degeneracy.
Mr. Farebrother’s suspicion as to the opiate
was true, however. Under the first galling pressure
of foreseen difficulties, and the first perception
that his marriage, if it were not to be a yoked loneliness,
must be a state of effort to go on loving without
too much care about being loved, he had once or twice
tried a dose of opium. But he had no hereditary
constitutional craving after such transient escapes
from the hauntings of misery. He was strong,
could drink a great deal of wine, but did not care
