After his wedding journey Lydgate answers Casaubon's summons to Lowick. Casaubon has never asked directly about his illness or shown Dorothea his fear; pity is intolerable to him, and suspected pity is embittering. His real labor has produced not the Key to all Mythologies but morbid consciousness that others withhold the place he has not merited, melancholy absence of passion in effort and passionate resistance to admitting failure. Jealousy of Will Ladislaw and of Dorothea's ardent mind frames darker futures: if he dies, Will waits to enter his nest.
That fear at last overcomes reticence; he asks Lydgate to meet him in the Yew-tree Walk among falling lime leaves and rook's cawing like dirge or lullaby. Casaubon speaks in formal sing-song of incomplete labors he would fain leave committable to others. Lydgate names fatty degeneration of the heart: death may be sudden, or fifteen tolerable years may remain; prediction cannot narrow life's tremendous uncertainty.
Casaubon thanks him, learns Dorothea was told possible issues, and dismisses him to remark on the beauty of the day while alone he paces with yew shadows and for the first time feels the commonplace become acute: I must die, and soon. His mind keeps its lifelong bias; his passionate longings cling low in shady places.
Dorothea approaches in the garden, takes his arm; he keeps his hands behind him and lets her cling with difficulty against his rigid arm. Something horrible lives in that trivial hardness. He shuts himself in the library. She flares into anger, nearly hates, then waits in the dark. When he comes upstairs haggard, he says gently, Come, my dear, you are young and need not extend your life by watching; she takes his hand though the rigid arm in the garden still haunts her. Book V, The Dead Hand, begins with diagnosis spoken aloud in falling leaves and marriage unspoken in the library door he shuts against her anger, her pity, and the question of who may finish the Key if he dies before the Tabulation is done and before Dorothea learns whether pity is cruelty or duty in a marriage that has turned diagnosis into siege.
Coming Up in Chapter 43
Two days later Dorothea drives into Middlemarch alone to find Lydgate at the New Hospital, and at his house discovers she is not the only visitor with urgent questions Two days after the Yew-tree Walk, Dorothea drives into Middlemarch alone to ask Lydgate whether Casaubon has concealed depressing symptoms or insisted on knowing the utmost about his illness. She feels almost guilty seeking knowledge.
