The Honeymoon (31 page)

Arriving back in London from Rome, they walked in the door of the Priory and saw a figure sitting in the darkness of
the parlor. On hearing the door opening, the person struggled up from his chair and stood before them. “Thornie!” George cried.

He was recognizable, he looked like a skeleton. George went to him, and he sank back down immediately into the chair. “I’m in some pain,” he said.

Thornie had written from Natal saying that he was suffering from back pain because he’d been in a wrestling match. He was losing weight, he wrote. George had urged him to come back to England to get medical attention.

At once, George sent for Sir James Paget — he was the queen’s own doctor. They tried to carry Thornie up to a bedroom, but he couldn’t bear to be moved. Instead, he lay on the floor writhing in agony. When Sir James arrived, he examined him, and then shook his head. “I really don’t know what it is, but I will give him morphia.”

For a few hours it helped, and he slept. But then the pain returned. Sir James called in a surgeon, Henry Roberts. Roberts told them, out of earshot, “I suspect it’s tuberculosis of the glands.”

“Is there a cure?” she begged.

“I’m afraid not,” he said. “We can continue with the morphia. And pray for a miracle.”

They made him a bed on the couch. Sometimes, when the pain faded, the old Thornie would return, and he’d sing Zulu songs to amuse them and try and make them laugh.

She put aside her work on
Middlemarch
to take care of him. At night, George dozed in a chair beside him, ready to give him more morphia when he awoke. She played the piano to try to soothe him, Beethoven and Schubert sonatas.

Barbara Bodichon bustled in one day, bringing fresh chicken and fruit from her estate in Hastings. “Please,” she said, “let me sit with him and you go out for the day and rest.”

She and George took the train down to Weybridge to have lunch with their new friends, the Crosses, who had a large house at the foot of St. George’s Hill. It was full of family and youth. There were two tall brothers in residence, Johnnie and his older brother, Willie, both of them bachelors and living with their mother. Willie was not as handsome as Johnnie, he was dark-haired like his mother, Anna, with small, narrow eyes, somewhat quiet and withdrawn. Johnnie Cross was the outgoing one, always trying to please everyone and thinking up games. Some of the unmarried sisters were there, Mary, Eleanor, who was round and plump like her mother, and Emily, a pretty, demure girl. Zibbie was visiting with her husband, Henry Bullock. Zibbie was big with pregnancy, and Anna Cross was fussing over her, for she was bearing the first grandchild.

“I have something I’d like you to hear,” Zibbie told Marian. She sat down at the piano. “Oh dear,” she said, “I hope I can still reach the keys.”

She stretched her arms across her swollen belly and began to play and sing:
“Oh through the pines! The pillared woods, where silence breathes sweet breath …”

“The Spanish Gypsy,”
Marian cried.

“I made a song of it,” Zibbie said. “The music’s mine.”

Marian got up and hugged her as best she could, gently, across Zibbie’s big stomach.

Thornie became paralyzed from the waist down. As Marian sat by his bed hour after hour, all she could do was write poetry:
“Death was now Lord of Life,”
she wrote,
“And at his word / Time, vague as air before / new terror stirred.”

The end was near. They sent for Agnes, his mother, and Marian absented herself from the house so Agnes could sit alone with her son.

In October he died, only twenty-five years old. Marian was forty-nine now, George was fifty-two. She felt as if Thornie’s death was the beginning of their own. A few nights after Thornie died, George was standing by the bed when suddenly he dropped to the floor. She ran to his side. He soon recovered consciousness. Was George himself ill as well? He’d been complaining of terrible headaches and a constant ringing in his ears.

They went away to Surrey and rented Park Farm, a supremely quiet place, and they mourned. They saw almost no one, though one day they rode over to Weybridge to visit the Crosses, to grieve together with them, for they’d suffered their own tragedy. Zibbie Cross had died giving birth to a baby boy, who survived her, and Johnnie Cross announced that he was retiring from Dennistoun & Cross and moving back to England to be with his mother.

It was not until the following spring that she and George had the strength once more to take up their work. George had embarked on a new project he was calling
Problems of
Life and Mind
. “I’ve spent my career popularizing other people’s ideas,” he said. “Now I want to make my own contribution.” The book would be an attempt to reconcile his belief in science with metaphysics.

Again she took up her novel about the idealistic country doctor. To boost her spirits, she changed the color of her ink, from dark brown to purple — at least purple was a slightly more cheerful color.

She invented a new character, Dorothea, who wants to devote herself to a higher cause, and thinks she must do it through a man — just as Marian herself had done, she thought, through Charles Bray, and awful Dr. Brabant, and Chapman. Only she made Dorothea beautiful,
“high-colored but with a bloom like a Chiny rose,”
and a gemlike brightness to her hair.

Dorothea makes a terrible marriage with Edward Casaubon, whom she believes is engaged in a great intellectual work, “The Key to All Mythologies,” he calls it. But she discovers he’s unable to finish it and all he does is rewrite his few paltry pages. (Silly George, taking his break from laboring over his
Problems
, took to calling his own manuscript “The Key to all Psychologies.”)

For Casaubon, she summoned up her memories of Brabant and his unfinished manuscript. She gave him the little white moles Brabant had on his face — with hairs sticking out of them, and made him slurp his soup.

As she wrote, she laughed out loud to herself. When
Middlemarch
was published and people asked her who the real Casaubon was, she’d reply primly, “I fear that the Casaubon-tints are not quite foreign to my own mental complexion.”

She made Dorothea fall in love with Casaubon’s nephew, Ladislaw, and then she killed Casaubon off. She had two main stories going at once now, one about the idealistic young doctor, Lydgate, and his wife, pretty, vain Rosamond Vincy, and the other about Dorothea and Ladislaw.

But she had to bring them together. “Why not have Dorothea suddenly come upon Rosamond and Ladislaw and think that they’re lovers?” George suggested.

And she did just that. Of course Dorothea is completely wrong. Rosamond and Ladislaw are certainly not having an affair and Dorothea and Ladislaw marry and live happily ever after.

She wrote the last pages of the book in Germany, in Homburg. Afterward they traveled to Hamburg to take the waters and heal their various illnesses — headaches and general biliousness (both of them), and decaying teeth (hers).

They went to the Kursaal to watch the gamblers (as theater only). The gamblers were mostly old women with gaunt faces and wigs and crablike hands, and vaguely louche foreigners. The room was hot, the lights bright, the air filled with the desperate chink and rattle of the croupier’s wheel, the exclamations of the losers.

One person among them seemed out of place, a young woman, purer-seeming than the rest, a sylphlike beauty in a sea-green dress, bent over the table intently. An older woman was teaching her how to gamble. Someone next to them whispered, “That’s Lord Byron’s grandniece, Lady Geraldine Leigh.”

At first the young woman was winning. Then she began to lose. She still had a pile of louis in front of her. The old woman, her teacher, tried to get her to come away, but she ignored her.

“Faites vos jeux,”
the croupier commanded. The sylph pushed her last louis forward, watching the wheel, biting her lower lip.

“Jeu zéro!”
the croupier cried. She’d lost again. The girl turned to her companion, the old woman, terror on her face.

“Poor thing,” Marian said to George. “What could her story be?”

She couldn’t get the image of the young girl out of her head.

When
Middlemarch
was published, her celebrity lifted her like the crest of a wave. They called it her
“masterpiece.”
She was
“a great teacher,”
they said. Barbara Bodichon, her dear friend, so incapable of telling her anything but the truth, wrote to her that it was her best book ever.

She and George had been living together for almost eighteen years in defiance of the world. Now she was so important that women overcame their scruples and began to call on her. She was invited to dinner everywhere, with women now, with Dean Stanley of Westminster
and
his wife, Lady Augusta, and with Mrs. Henry Frederick Ponsonby, who’d been maid of honor to the queen. The queen’s own daughters wanted to meet her. One of them, Princess Louise, heard that the banker George Goschen was giving a dinner for Marian and asked to be invited so she could meet her.

The moment the princess walked in the door, she caught sight of Marian and went up to her. The princess was tall and slim, with brown hair and blue eyes, the most attractive of the royal children. She sat down beside Marian and they talked all evening, about art and women’s higher education. The princess said that her mother, the queen, had allowed her to go to art school, and she was a serious sculptor.

Next, her sister, the princess royal, and her husband, the crown prince of Prussia, wanted to meet Marian as well. Now she’d received the blessings of the royal family
and
the Church of England, in the person of Dean Stanley.

But as her fame grew, death stalked them. She learned that Emanuel Deutsch, her dear little Silesian Jew, was ill with cancer. He’d been taken in by a clergyman, the Reverend Haweis, who lived on Welbeck Street. She went to visit him there.

He was gaunt and in pain, all his roundness and ebullience gone. “I think the pain is God’s punishment for revealing the secrets of the Talmud,” he told her.