MIDDLEMARCH (Completed)

Chapter 78

"Would it were yesterday and I i' the grave,

With her sweet faith above for monument"

Rosamond and Will stood motionless--they did not know how long--

he looking towards the spot where Dorothea had stood, and she looking

towards him with doubt. It seemed an endless time to Rosamond,

in whose inmost soul there was hardly so much annoyance as

gratification from what had just happened. Shallow natures dream

of an easy sway over the emotions of others, trusting implicitly

in their own petty magic to turn the deepest streams, and confident,

by pretty gestures and remarks, of making the thing that is not

as though it were. She knew that Will had received a severe blow,

but she had been little used to imagining other people's states

of mind except as a material cut into shape by her own wishes;

and she believed in her own power to soothe or subdue. Even Tertius,

that most perverse of men, was always subdued in the long-run:

events had been obstinate, but still Rosamond would have said now,

as she did before her marriage, that she never gave up what she had set

her mind on.

She put out her arm and laid the tips of her fingers on Will's

coat-sleeve.

"Don't touch me!" he said, with an utterance like the cut of a lash,

darting from her, and changing from pink to white and back again,

as if his whole frame were tingling with the pain of the sting.

He wheeled round to the other side of the room and stood opposite to her,

with the tips of his fingers in his pockets and his head thrown back,

looking fiercely not at Rosamond but at a point a few inches away

from her.

She was keenly offended, but the Signs she made of this were such

as only Lydgate was used to interpret. She became suddenly quiet

and seated herself, untying her hanging bonnet and laying it down with

her shawl. Her little hands which she folded before her were very cold.

It would have been safer for Will in the first instance to have taken

up his hat and gone away; but he had felt no impulse to do this;

on the contrary, he had a horrible inclination to stay and shatter

Rosamond with his anger. It seemed as impossible to bear the fatality

she had drawn down on him without venting his fury as it would be

to a panther to bear the javelin-wound without springing and biting.

And yet--how could he tell a woman that he was ready to curse her?

He was fuming under a repressive law which he was forced to acknowledge: