To have approached Laure with any suit that was not reverentially
tender would have been simply a contradiction of his whole feeling
towards her.
"You have come all the way from Paris to find me?" she said to him the
next day, sitting before him with folded arms, and looking at him with
eyes that seemed to wonder as an untamed ruminating animal wonders.
"Are all Englishmen like that?"
"I came because I could not live without trying to see you. You are
lonely; I love you; I want you to consent to be my wife; I will wait,
but I want you to promise that you will marry me--no one else."
Laure looked at him in silence with a melancholy radiance from under
her grand eyelids, until he was full of rapturous certainty, and knelt
close to her knees.
"I will tell you something," she said, in her cooing way, keeping her
arms folded. "My foot really slipped."
"I know, I know," said Lydgate, deprecatingly. "It was a fatal
accident--a dreadful stroke of calamity that bound me to you the more."
Again Laure paused a little and then said, slowly, "_I meant to do it._"
Lydgate, strong man as he was, turned pale and trembled: moments seemed
to pass before he rose and stood at a distance from her.
"There was a secret, then," he said at last, even vehemently. "He was
brutal to you: you hated him."
"No! he wearied me; he was too fond: he would live in Paris, and not in
my country; that was not agreeable to me."
"Great God!" said Lydgate, in a groan of horror. "And you planned to
murder him?"
"I did not plan: it came to me in the play--_I meant to do it._"
Lydgate stood mute, and unconsciously pressed his hat on while he
looked at her. He saw this woman--the first to whom he had given his
young adoration--amid the throng of stupid criminals.
"You are a good young man," she said. "But I do not like husbands. I
will never have another."
Three days afterwards Lydgate was at his galvanism again in his Paris
chambers, believing that illusions were at an end for him. He was
saved from hardening effects by the abundant kindness of his heart and
his belief that human life might be made better. But he had more
reason than ever for trusting his judgment, now that it was so
experienced; and henceforth he would take a strictly scientific view of
woman, entertaining no expectations but such as were justified
beforehand.
No one in Middlemarch was likely to have such a notion of Lydgate's
past as has here been faintly shadowed, and indeed the respectable
townsfolk there were not more given than mortals generally to any eager
attempt at exactness in the representation to themselves of what did
not come under their own senses. Not only young virgins of that town,
but gray-bearded men also, were often in haste to conjecture how a new
acquaintance might be wrought into their purposes, contented with very
vague knowledge as to the way in which life had been shaping him for
that instrumentality. Middlemarch, in fact, counted on swallowing
Lydgate and assimilating him very comfortably.