MIDDLEMARCH (Completed)

Chapter 20

"A child forsaken, waking suddenly,

Whose gaze afeard on all things round doth rove,

And seeth only that it cannot see

The meeting eyes of love."

Two hours later, Dorothea was seated in an inner room or boudoir

of a handsome apartment in the Via Sistina.

I am sorry to add that she was sobbing bitterly, with such abandonment

to this relief of an oppressed heart as a woman habitually

controlled by pride on her own account and thoughtfulness for others

will sometimes allow herself when she feels securely alone.

And Mr. Casaubon was certain to remain away for some time at the Vatican.

Yet Dorothea had no distinctly shapen grievance that she could

state even to herself; and in the midst of her confused thought

and passion, the mental act that was struggling forth into clearness

was a self-accusing cry that her feeling of desolation was the fault

of her own spiritual poverty. She had married the man of her choice,

and with the advantage over most girls that she had contemplated

her marriage chiefly as the beginning of new duties: from the very

first she had thought of Mr. Casaubon as having a mind so much above

her own, that he must often be claimed by studies which she could

not entirely share; moreover, after the brief narrow experience

of her girlhood she was beholding Rome, the city of visible history,

where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession

with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

But this stupendous fragmentariness heightened the dreamlike strangeness

of her bridal life. Dorothea had now been five weeks in Rome,

and in the kindly mornings when autumn and winter seemed to go hand

in hand like a happy aged couple one of whom would presently survive

in chiller loneliness, she had driven about at first with Mr. Casaubon,

but of late chiefly with Tantripp and their experienced courier.

She had been led through the best galleries, had been taken to the

chief points of view, had been shown the grandest ruins and the most

glorious churches, and she had ended by oftenest choosing to drive

out to the Campagna where she could feel alone with the earth

and sky, away-from the oppressive masquerade of ages, in which

her own life too seemed to become a masque with enigmatical costumes.

To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a

knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes,

and traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts,

Rome may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world.