Middlemarch

Dorothea's distress on leaving the church came from seeing that Casaubon was determined not to speak to his cousin — Will's visit had only deepened the alienation. Casaubon was unwell that morning (some difficulty in breathing) and had not preached. The Sunday afternoon is desolate. She opens one book after another from her little heap on the window-table — Herodotus, Pascal, Keble's Christian Year — and can read none of them. "All alike were as flat as tunes beaten on wood." Even the spring flowers have a dull shiver under the afternoon clouds. It was not books she needed: "It was another or rather a fuller sort of companionship that poor Dorothea was hungering for, and the hunger had grown from the perpetual effort demanded by her married life." She thought of Will, "turning his face towards her as he went" — the figure standing at the entrance to the warm world of activity from which she was shut. After dinner, Casaubon takes her to the library, where he has ordered fire and lights and newly arranged a row of notebooks on the table. He puts into her hand the table of contents to all of them, and asks her to read it through aloud, penciling a cross at each point he says "mark" — "the first step in a sifting process which I have long had in view." Since Lydgate's diagnosis, his original reluctance to let Dorothea work with him has given place to a contrary disposition: to demand much interest and labor from her. He has "begun to feel that these qualities were a peculiar possession for himself, and he wanted to engross them." At midnight, Dorothea wakes to find Casaubon seated in the armchair, having lit two candles. He is wakeful; "my mind is remarkably lucid." She reads for another hour while he directs her with bird-like speed — "That will do — mark that. Pass on to the next head — I omit the second excursus on Crete." She is amazed at the speed with which his mind is now surveying ground it had been creeping over for years. Then, in darkness by the dying fire, he makes his request: "It is that you will let me know, deliberately, whether, in case of my death, you will carry out my wishes: whether you will avoid doing what I should deprecate, and apply yourself to do what I should desire." Dorothea asks to be granted until tomorrow. "Till to-morrow then," says Casaubon. He sleeps. Dorothea lies still for four hours in conflict. She sees clearly that the work would mean sifting "shattered mummies, and fragments of a tradition which was itself a mosaic wrought from crushed ruins" for a theory "already withered in the birth like an elfin child." And yet — could she deny him? Could she refuse to do for him dead what she was almost sure to do for him living? "There was a deep difference between that devotion to the living and that indefinite promise of devotion to the dead. While he lived, he could claim nothing that she would not still be free to remonstrate against, and even to refuse." At last, helpless as a child which has sobbed and sought too long, she falls into a late morning sleep. She wakes to find Casaubon already up and in the library. "I never saw you look so pale, madam," says Tantripp. Dorothea goes down having decided she will say yes — but "not yet." Casaubon tells her he is going to the Yew-tree Walk and would fain have her answer. "May I come out to you in the garden presently?" She sits passively while Tantripp puts on her bonnet and shawl — passive, which is unusual with her, for she likes to wait on herself. Tantripp says "God bless you, madam!" — and Dorothea bursts into tears. Then she dries her eyes and goes. She is "going to say 'Yes' to her own doom" — too weak, too full of dread of inflicting pain on a stricken soul, to do anything but submit. She goes to the Yew-tree Walk; he is not visible; she turns towards the summer-house. She can see him seated on the bench close to the stone table, his arms resting on it, his brow bowed down on them, the blue cloak draped forward, screening his face on each side. She thinks he is asleep. She goes in and says, "I am come, Edward; I am ready." He takes no notice. She says it again. She lays her hand on his shoulder. She leans down, takes off his velvet cap, leans her cheek close to his head, crying in a distressed tone, "Wake, dear, wake! Listen to me. I am come to answer." But Dorothea never gave her answer. Later in the day, Lydgate is seated by her bedside while she talks deliriously: "Tell him I shall go to him soon: I am ready to promise. Only, thinking about it was so dreadful — it has made me ill. Not very ill. I shall soon be better. Go and tell him. But the silence in her husband's ear was never more to be broken."