Middlemarch

HAPTER LXXIII.

Pity the laden one; this wandering woe
May visit you and me.

When Lydgate had allayed Mrs. Bulstrode’s anxiety by telling her that
her husband had been seized with faintness at the meeting, but that he
trusted soon to see him better and would call again the next day,
unless she sent for him earlier, he went directly home, got on his
horse, and rode three miles out of the town for the sake of being out
of reach.

He felt himself becoming violent and unreasonable as if raging under
the pain of stings: he was ready to curse the day on which he had come
to Middlemarch. Everything that had happened to him there seemed a mere
preparation for this hateful fatality, which had come as a blight on
his honorable ambition, and must make even people who had only vulgar
standards regard his reputation as irrevocably damaged. In such moments
a man can hardly escape being unloving. Lydgate thought of himself as
the sufferer, and of others as the agents who had injured his lot. He
had meant everything to turn out differently; and others had thrust
themselves into his life and thwarted his purposes. His marriage seemed
an unmitigated calamity; and he was afraid of going to Rosamond before
he had vented himself in this solitary rage, lest the mere sight of her
should exasperate him and make him behave unwarrantably. There are
episodes in most men’s lives in which their highest qualities can only
cast a deterring shadow over the objects that fill their inward vision:
Lydgate’s tenderheartedness was present just then only as a dread lest
he should offend against it, not as an emotion that swayed him to
tenderness. For he was very miserable. Only those who know the
supremacy of the intellectual life—the life which has a seed of
ennobling thought and purpose within it—can understand the grief of one
who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting
struggle with worldly annoyances.

How was he to live on without vindicating himself among people who
suspected him of baseness? How could he go silently away from
Middlemarch as if he were retreating before a just condemnation? And
yet how was he to set about vindicating himself?

For that scene at the meeting, which he had just witnessed, although it
had told him no particulars, had been enough to make his own situation
thoroughly clear to him. Bulstrode had been in dread of scandalous
disclosures on the part of Raffles. Lydgate could now construct all the
probabilities of the case. “He was afraid of some betrayal in my
hearing: all he wanted was to bind me to him by a strong obligation:
that was why he passed on a sudden from hardness to liberality. And he
may have tampered with the patient—he may have disobeyed my orders. I
fear he did. But whether he did or not, the world believes that he
somehow or other poisoned the man and that I winked at the crime, if I
didn’t help in it. And yet—and yet he may not be guilty of the last
offence; and it is just possible that the change towards me may have
been a genuine relenting—the effect of second thoughts such as he
alleged. What we call the ‘just possible’ is sometimes true and the
thing we find it easier to believe is grossly false. In his last
dealings with this man Bulstrode may have kept his hands pure, in spite
of my suspicion to the contrary.”

There was a benumbing cruelty in his position. Even if he renounced
every other consideration than that of justifying himself—if he met
shrugs, cold glances, and avoidance as an accusation, and made a public
statement of all the facts as he knew them, who would be convinced? It
would be playing the part of a fool to offer his own testimony on
behalf of himself, and say, “I did not take the money as a bribe.” The
circumstances would always be stronger than his assertion. And besides,
to come forward and tell everything about himself must include
declarations about Bulstrode which would darken the suspicions of
others against him. He must tell that he had not known of Raffles’s
existence when he first mentioned his pressing need of money to
Bulstrode, and that he took the money innocently as a result of that
communication, not knowing that a new motive for the loan might have
arisen on his being called in to this man. And after all, the suspicion
of Bulstrode’s motives might be unjust.

But then came the question whether he should have acted in precisely
the same way if he had not taken the money? Certainly, if Raffles had
continued alive and susceptible of further treatment when he arrived,
and he had then imagined any disobedience to his orders on the part of
Bulstrode, he would have made a strict inquiry, and if his conjecture
had been verified he would have thrown up the case, in spite of his
recent heavy obligation. But if he had not received any money—if
Bulstrode had never revoked his cold recommendation of bankruptcy—would
he, Lydgate, have abstained from all inquiry even on finding the man
dead?—would the shrinking from an insult to Bulstrode—would the
dubiousness of all medical treatment and the argument that his own
treatment would pass for the wrong with most members of his
profession—have had just the same force or significance with him?

That was the uneasy corner of Lydgate’s consciousness while he was
reviewing the facts and resisting all reproach. If he had been
independent, this matter of a patient’s treatment and the distinct rule
that he must do or see done that which he believed best for the life
committed to him, would have been the point on which he would have been
the sturdiest. As it was, he had rested in the consideration that
disobedience to his orders, however it might have arisen, could not be
considered a crime, that in the dominant opinion obedience to his
orders was just as likely to be fatal, and that the affair was simply
one of etiquette. Whereas, again and again, in his time of freedom, he
had denounced the perversion of pathological doubt into moral doubt and
had said—“the purest experiment in treatment may still be
conscientious: my business is to take care of life, and to do the best
I can think of for it. Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma.
Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a
contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.” Alas! the
scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of money
obligation and selfish respects.

“Is there a medical man of them all in Middlemarch who would question
himself as I do?” said poor Lydgate, with a renewed outburst of
rebellion against the oppression of his lot. “And yet they will all
feel warranted in making a wide space between me and them, as if I were
a leper! My practice and my reputation are utterly damned—I can see
that. Even if I could be cleared by valid evidence, it would make
little difference to the blessed world here. I have been set down as
tainted and should be cheapened to them all the same.”

Already there had been abundant signs which had hitherto puzzled him,
that just when he had been paying off his debts and getting cheerfully
on his feet, the townsmen were avoiding him or looking strangely at
him, and in two instances it came to his knowledge that patients of his
had called in another practitioner. The reasons were too plain now. The
general black-balling had begun.

No wonder that in Lydgate’s energetic nature the sense of a hopeless
misconstruction easily turned into a dogged resistance. The scowl which
occasionally showed itself on his square brow was not a meaningless
accident. Already when he was re-entering the town after that ride
taken in the first hours of stinging pain, he was setting his mind on
remaining in Middlemarch in spite of the worst that could be done
against him. He would not retreat before calumny, as if he submitted to
it. He would face it to the utmost, and no act of his should show that
he was afraid. It belonged to the generosity as well as defiant force
of his nature that he resolved not to shrink from showing to the full
his sense of obligation to Bulstrode. It was true that the association
with this man had been fatal to him—true that if he had had the
thousand pounds still in his hands with all his debts unpaid he would
have returned the money to Bulstrode, and taken beggary rather than the
rescue which had been sullied with the suspicion of a bribe (for,
remember, he was one of the proudest among the sons of
men)—nevertheless, he would not turn away from this crushed
fellow-mortal whose aid he had used, and make a pitiful effort to get
acquittal for himself by howling against another. “I shall do as I
think right, and explain to nobody. They will try to starve me out,
but—” he was going on with an obstinate resolve, but he was getting
near home, and the thought of Rosamond urged itself again into that
chief place from which it had been thrust by the agonized struggles of
wounded honor and pride.

How would Rosamond take it all? Here was another weight of chain to
drag, and poor Lydgate was in a bad mood for bearing her dumb mastery.
He had no impulse to tell her the trouble which must soon be common to
them both. He preferred waiting for the incidental disclosure which
events must soon bring about.