“She wants to go to Lowick, to look over papers,” said Celia. “She ought not, ought she?”
Lydgate did not speak for a few moments. Then he said, looking at Dorothea, “I hardly know. In my opinion Mrs Casaubon should do what would give her the most repose of mind. That repose will not always come from being forbidden to act.”
“Thank you,” said Dorothea, exerting herself, “I am sure that is wise. There are so many things which I ought to attend to. Why should I sit here idle?” Then, with an effort to recall subjects not connected with her agitation, she added, abruptly, “You know every one in Middlemarch, I think, Mr Lydgate. I shall ask you to tell me a great deal. I have serious things to do now. I have a living to give away. You know Mr Tyke and all the” But Dorothea’s effort was too much for her; she broke off and burst into sobs.
Lydgate made her drink a dose of sal volatile.
“Let Mrs Casaubon do as she likes,” he said to Sir James, whom he asked to see before quitting the house. “She wants perfect freedom, I think, more than any other prescription.”
His attendance on Dorothea while her brain was excited, had enabled him to form some true conclusions concerning the trials of her life. He felt sure that she had been suffering from the strain and conflict of self-repression; and that she was likely now to feel herself only in another sort of pinfold than that from which she had been released.
Lydgate’s advice was all the easier for Sir James to follow when he found that Celia had already told Dorothea the unpleasant fact about the will. There was no help for it now—no reason for any further delay in the execution of necessary business. And the next day Sir James complied at once with her request that he would drive her to Lowick.
“I have no wish to stay there at present,” said Dorothea; “I could hardly bear it. I am much happier at Freshitt with Celia. I shall be able to think better about what should be done at Lowick by looking at it from a distance. And I should like to be at the Grange a little while with my uncle, and go about in all the old walks and among the people in the village.”
“Not yet, I think. Your uncle is having political company, and you are better out of the way of such doings,” said Sir James, who at that moment thought of the Grange chiefly as a haunt of young Ladislaw’s. But no word passed between him and Dorothea about the objectionable part of the will; indeed, both of them felt that the mention of it between them would be impossible. Sir James was shy, even with men, about disagreeble subjects; and the one thing that Dorothea would have chosen to say, if she had spoken on the matter at all, was forbidden to her at present because it seemed to be a further exposure of her husband’s injustice. Yet she did wish that Sir James could know what had passed between her and her husband about Will Ladislaw’s moral claim on the property: it would then, she thought, be apparent to him as it was to her, that her husband’s
