She spoke with coolness.
"I cannot possibly make admissions or promises in answer to such words as you have used towards me.
I have not been accustomed to language of that kind.
You have spoken of my 'secret meddling,' and my 'interfering ignorance,' and my 'false assent.'
I have never expressed myself in that way to you, and I think that you ought to apologize.
You spoke of its being impossible to live with me.
Certainly you have not made my life pleasant to me of late.
I think it was to be expected that I should try to avert some of the hardships which our marriage has brought on me."
Another tear fell as Rosamond ceased speaking, and she pressed it away as quietly as the first.
Lydgate flung himself into a chair, feeling checkmated.
What place was there in her mind for a remonstrance to lodge in?
He laid down his hat, flung an arm over the back of his chair, and looked down for some moments without speaking.
Rosamond had the double purchase over him of insensibility to the point of justice in his reproach, and of sensibility to the undeniable hardships now present in her married life.
Although her duplicity in the affair of the house had exceeded what he knew, and had really hindered the Plymdales from knowing of it, she had no consciousness that her action could rightly be called false.
We are not obliged to identify our own acts according to a strict classification, any more than the materials of our grocery and clothes.
Rosamond felt that she was aggrieved, and that this was what Lydgate had to recognize.
As for him, the need of accommodating himself to her nature, which was inflexible in proportion to its negations, held him as with pincers.
He had begun to have an alarmed foresight of her irrevocable loss of love for him, and the consequent dreariness of their life.
The ready fulness of his emotions made this dread alternate quickly with the first violent movements of his anger.
It would assuredly have been a vain boast in him to say that he was her master.
"You have not made my life pleasant to me of late"—"the hardships which our marriage has brought on me"—these words were stinging his imagination as a pain makes an exaggerated dream.
If he were not only to sink from his highest resolve, but to sink into the hideous fettering of domestic hate?
"Rosamond," he said, turning his eyes on her with a melancholy look, "you should allow for a man's words when he is disappointed and provoked.
You and I cannot have opposite interests.
I cannot part my happiness from yours.
If I am angry with you, it is that you seem not to see how any concealment divides us.
How could I wish to make anything hard to you either by my words or conduct?
When I hurt you, I hurt part of my own life.
I should never be angry with you if you would be quite open with me."
"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.