As he threw down his book, stretched his legs towards the embers in the
grate, and clasped his hands at the back of his head, in that agreeable
afterglow of excitement when thought lapses from examination of a
specific object into a suffusive sense of its connections with all the
rest of our existence--seems, as it were, to throw itself on its back
after vigorous swimming and float with the repose of unexhausted
strength--Lydgate felt a triumphant delight in his studies, and
something like pity for those less lucky men who were not of his
profession.
"If I had not taken that turn when I was a lad," he thought, "I might
have got into some stupid draught-horse work or other, and lived always
in blinkers. I should never have been happy in any profession that did
not call forth the highest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in good
warm contact with my neighbors. There is nothing like the medical
profession for that: one can have the exclusive scientific life that
touches the distance and befriend the old fogies in the parish too. It
is rather harder for a clergyman: Farebrother seems to be an anomaly."
This last thought brought back the Vincys and all the pictures of the
evening. They floated in his mind agreeably enough, and as he took up
his bed-candle his lips were curled with that incipient smile which is
apt to accompany agreeable recollections. He was an ardent fellow, but
at present his ardor was absorbed in love of his work and in the
ambition of making his life recognized as a factor in the better life
of mankind--like other heroes of science who had nothing but an obscure
country practice to begin with.
Poor Lydgate! or shall I say, Poor Rosamond! Each lived in a world of
which the other knew nothing. It had not occurred to Lydgate that he
had been a subject of eager meditation to Rosamond, who had neither any
reason for throwing her marriage into distant perspective, nor any
pathological studies to divert her mind from that ruminating habit,
that inward repetition of looks, words, and phrases, which makes a
large part in the lives of most girls. He had not meant to look at her
or speak to her with more than the inevitable amount of admiration and
compliment which a man must give to a beautiful girl; indeed, it seemed
to him that his enjoyment of her music had remained almost silent, for
he feared falling into the rudeness of telling her his great surprise
at her possession of such accomplishment. But Rosamond had registered
every look and word, and estimated them as the opening incidents of a
preconceived romance--incidents which gather value from the foreseen
development and climax. In Rosamond's romance it was not necessary to
imagine much about the inward life of the hero, or of his serious
business in the world: of course, he had a profession and was clever,
as well as sufficiently handsome; but the piquant fact about Lydgate
was his good birth, which distinguished him from all Middlemarch
admirers, and presented marriage as a prospect of rising in rank and
getting a little nearer to that celestial condition on earth in which
she would have nothing to do with vulgar people, and perhaps at last
associate with relatives quite equal to the county people who looked
down on the Middlemarchers. It was part of Rosamond's cleverness to
discern very subtly the faintest aroma of rank, and once when she had
seen the Miss Brookes accompanying their uncle at the county assizes,
and seated among the aristocracy, she had envied them, notwithstanding
their plain dress.