"I thank you, Mr. Lydgate," said Mr. Casaubon, after a moment's pause.
"One thing more I have still to ask: did you communicate what you have
now told me to Mrs. Casaubon?"
"Partly--I mean, as to the possible issues." Lydgate was going to
explain why he had told Dorothea, but Mr. Casaubon, with an
unmistakable desire to end the conversation, waved his hand slightly,
and said again, "I thank you," proceeding to remark on the rare beauty
of the day.
Lydgate, certain that his patient wished to be alone, soon left him;
and the black figure with hands behind and head bent forward continued
to pace the walk where the dark yew-trees gave him a mute companionship
in melancholy, and the little shadows of bird or leaf that fleeted
across the isles of sunlight, stole along in silence as in the presence
of a sorrow. Here was a man who now for the first time found himself
looking into the eyes of death--who was passing through one of those
rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of a commonplace,
which is as different from what we call knowing it, as the vision of
waters upon the earth is different from the delirious vision of the
water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue. When the
commonplace "We must all die" transforms itself suddenly into the acute
consciousness "I must die--and soon," then death grapples us, and his
fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as
our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be
like the first. To Mr. Casaubon now, it was as if he suddenly found
himself on the dark river-brink and heard the plash of the oncoming
oar, not discerning the forms, but expecting the summons. In such an
hour the mind does not change its lifelong bias, but carries it onward
in imagination to the other side of death, gazing backward--perhaps
with the divine calm of beneficence, perhaps with the petty anxieties
of self-assertion. What was Mr. Casaubon's bias his acts will give us a
clew to. He held himself to be, with some private scholarly
reservations, a believing Christian, as to estimates of the present and
hopes of the future. But what we strive to gratify, though we may call
it a distant hope, is an immediate desire: the future estate for which
men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love.
And Mr. Casaubon's immediate desire was not for divine communion and
light divested of earthly conditions; his passionate longings, poor
man, clung low and mist-like in very shady places.