“Forgive me for this misery, my poor Rosamond! Let us only love one another.”
She looked at him silently, still with the blank despair on her face; but then the tears began to fill her blue eyes, and her lip trembled. The strong man had had too much to bear that day. He let his head fall beside hers and sobbed.
He did not hinder her from going to her father early in the morning—it seemed now that he ought not to hinder her from doing as she pleased. In half an hour she came back, and said that papa and mamma wished her to go and stay with them while things were in this miserable state. Papa said he could do nothing about the debt—if he paid this, there would be half-a-dozen more. She had better come back home again till Lydgate had got a comfortable home for her. “Do you object, Tertius?”
“Do as you like,” said Lydgate. “But things are not coming to a crisis immediately. There is no hurry.”
“I should not go till to-morrow,” said Rosamond; “I shall want to pack my clothes.”
“Oh, I would wait a little longer than to-morrow—there is no knowing what may happen,” said Lydgate, with bitter irony. “I may get my neck broken, and that may make things easier to you.”
It was Lydgate’s misfortune and Rosamond’s too, that his tenderness towards her, which was both an emotional prompting and a well-considered resolve, was inevitably interrupted by these outbursts of indignation either ironical or remonstrant. She thought them totally unwarranted, and the repulsion which this exceptional severity excited in her was in danger of making the more persistent tenderness unacceptable.
“I see you do not wish me to go,” she said, with chill mildness; “why can you not say so, without that kind of violence? I shall stay until you request me to do otherwise.”
Lydgate said no more, but went out on his rounds. He felt bruised and shattered, and there was a dark line under his eyes which Rosamond had not seen before. She could not bear to look at him. Tertius had a way of taking things which made them a great deal worse for her.