“May I come out to you in the garden presently?” said Dorothea, winning a little breathing space in that way.
“I shall be in the Yew-tree Walk for the next half-hour,” said Mr. Casaubon, and then he left her.
Dorothea, feeling very weary, rang and asked Tantripp to bring her some wraps. She had been sitting still for a few minutes, but not in any renewal of the former conflict: she simply felt that she was going to say “Yes” to her own doom: she was too weak, too full of dread at the thought of inflicting a keen-edged blow on her husband, to do anything but submit completely. She sat still and let Tantripp put on her bonnet and shawl, a passivity which was unusual with her, for she liked to wait on herself.
“God bless you, madam!” said Tantripp, with an irrepressible movement of love towards the beautiful, gentle creature for whom she felt unable to do anything more, now that she had finished tying the bonnet.
This was too much for Dorothea’s highly-strung feeling, and she burst into tears, sobbing against Tantripp’s arm. But soon she checked herself, dried her eyes, and went out at the glass door into the shrubbery.
“I wish every book in that library was built into a caticom for your master,” said Tantripp to Pratt, the butler, finding him in the breakfast-room.
She had been at Rome, and visited the antiquities, as we know; and she always declined to call Mr. Casaubon anything but “your master,” when speaking to the other servants.
Pratt laughed. He liked his master very well, but he liked Tantripp better.
When Dorothea was out on the gravel walks, she lingered among the nearer clumps of trees, hesitating, as she had done once before, though from a different cause.