He was fuming under a repressive law which he was forced to acknowledge: he was dangerously poised, and Rosamond's voice now brought the decisive vibration.
In flute-like tones of sarcasm she said—
"You can easily go after Mrs. Casaubon and explain your preference."
"Go after her!" he burst out, with a sharp edge in his voice.
"Do you think she would turn to look at me, or value any word I ever uttered to her again at more than a dirty feather?—Explain!
How can a man explain at the expense of a woman?"
"You can tell her what you please," said Rosamond with more tremor.
"Do you suppose she would like me better for sacrificing you?
She is not a woman to be flattered because I made myself despicable—to believe that I must be true to her because I was a dastard to you."
He began to move about with the restlessness of a wild animal that sees prey but cannot reach it.
Presently he burst out again—
"I had no hope before—not much—of anything better to come.
But I had one certainty—that she believed in me.
Whatever people had said or done about me, she believed in me.—That's gone!
She'll never again think me anything but a paltry pretence—too nice to take heaven except upon flattering conditions, and yet selling myself for any devil's change by the sly.
She'll think of me as an incarnate insult to her, from the first moment we—"
Will stopped as if he had found himself grasping something that must not be thrown and shattered.
He found another vent for his rage by snatching up Rosamond's words again, as if they were reptiles to be throttled and flung off.
"Explain!
Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell!
Explain my preference!
I never had a preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing.
No other woman exists by the side of her.
I would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any other woman's living."
Rosamond, while these poisoned weapons were being hurled at her, was almost losing the sense of her identity, and seemed to be waking into some new terrible existence.
She had no sense of chill resolute repulsion, of reticent self-justification such as she had known under Lydgate's most stormy displeasure: all her sensibility was turned into a bewildering novelty of pain; she felt a new terrified recoil under a lash never experienced before.
What another nature felt in opposition to her own was being burnt and bitten into her consciousness.
When Will had ceased to speak she had become an image of sickened misery: her lips were pale, and her eyes had a tearless dismay in them.
If it had been Tertius who stood opposite to her, that look of misery would have been a pang to him, and he would have sunk by her side to comfort her, with that strong-armed comfort which, she had often held very cheap.
Let it be forgiven to Will that he had no such movement of pity.
He had felt no bond beforehand to this woman who had spoiled the ideal treasure of his life, and he held himself blameless.
He knew that he was cruel, but he had no relenting in him yet.
After he had done speaking, he still moved about, half in absence of mind, and Rosamond sat perfectly still.
At length Will, seeming to bethink himself, took up his hat, yet stood some moments irresolute.
He had spoken to her in a way that made a phrase of common politeness difficult to utter; and yet, now that he had come to the point of going away from her without further speech, he shrank from it as a brutality; he felt checked and stultified in his anger.
He walked towards the mantel-piece and leaned his arm on it, and waited in silence for—he hardly knew what.
The vindictive fire was still burning in him, and he could utter no word of retractation; but it was nevertheless in his mind that having come back to this hearth where he had enjoyed a caressing friendship he had found calamity seated there—he had had suddenly revealed to him a trouble that lay outside the home as well as within it.
And what seemed a foreboding was pressing upon him as with slow pincers:—that his life might come to be enslaved by this helpless woman who had thrown herself upon him in the dreary sadness of her heart.
But he was in gloomy rebellion against the fact that his quick apprehensiveness foreshadowed to him, and when his eyes fell on Rosamond's blighted face it seemed to him that he was the more pitiable of the two; for pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.
And so they remained for many minutes, opposite each other, far apart, in silence; Will's face still possessed by a mute rage, and Rosamond's by a mute misery.
The poor thing had no force to fling out any passion in return; the terrible collapse of the illusion towards which all her hope had been strained was a stroke which had too thoroughly shaken her: her little world was in ruins, and she felt herself tottering in the midst as a lonely bewildered consciousness.
Will wished that she would speak and bring some mitigating shadow across his own cruel speech, which seemed to stand staring at them both in mockery of any attempt at revived fellowship.
But she said nothing, and at last with a desperate effort over himself, he asked,
"Shall I come in and see Lydgate this evening?"
"If you like," Rosamond answered, just audibly.
And then Will went out of the house, Martha never knowing that he had been in.
After he was gone, Rosamond tried to get up from her seat, but fell back fainting.
When she came to herself again, she felt too ill to make the exertion of rising to ring the bell, and she remained helpless until the girl, surprised at her long absence, thought for the first time of looking for her in all the down-stairs rooms.
Rosamond said that she had felt suddenly sick and faint, and wanted to be helped up-stairs.
When there she threw herself on the bed with her clothes on, and lay in apparent torpor, as she had done once before on a memorable day of grief.