Middlemarch
of himself, he is forced to think chiefly of release, though he had a
scheme of the universe in his soul.
Eighteen months ago Lydgate was poor, but had never known the eager
want of small sums, and felt rather a burning contempt for any one who
descended a step in order to gain them. He was now experiencing
something worse than a simple deficit: he was assailed by the vulgar
hateful trials of a man who has bought and used a great many things
which might have been done without, and which he is unable to pay for,
though the demand for payment has become pressing.
How this came about may be easily seen without much arithmetic or
knowledge of prices. When a man in setting up a house and preparing for
marriage finds that his furniture and other initial expenses come to
between four and five hundred pounds more than he has capital to pay
for; when at the end of a year it appears that his household expenses,
horses and et caeteras, amount to nearly a thousand, while the proceeds
of the practice reckoned from the old books to be worth eight hundred
per annum have sunk like a summer pond and make hardly five hundred,
chiefly in unpaid entries, the plain inference is that, whether he
minds it or not, he is in debt. Those were less expensive times than
our own, and provincial life was comparatively modest; but the ease
with which a medical man who had lately bought a practice, who thought
that he was obliged to keep two horses, whose table was supplied
without stint, and who paid an insurance on his life and a high rent
for house and garden, might find his expenses doubling his receipts,
can be conceived by any one who does not think these details beneath
his consideration. Rosamond, accustomed from her childhood to an
extravagant household, thought that good housekeeping consisted simply
in ordering the best of everything—nothing else “answered;” and Lydgate
supposed that “if things were done at all, they must be done
properly”—he did not see how they were to live otherwise. If each head
of household expenditure had been mentioned to him beforehand, he would
have probably observed that “it could hardly come to much,” and if any
one had suggested a saving on a particular article—for example, the
substitution of cheap fish for dear—it would have appeared to him
simply a penny-wise, mean notion. Rosamond, even without such an
occasion as Captain Lydgate’s visit, was fond of giving invitations,
and Lydgate, though he often thought the guests tiresome, did not
interfere. This sociability seemed a necessary part of professional
prudence, and the entertainment must be suitable. It is true Lydgate
was constantly visiting the homes of the poor and adjusting his
prescriptions of diet to their small means; but, dear me! has it not by
this time ceased to be remarkable—is it not rather that we expect in
men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by
side and never compare them with each other? Expenditure—like ugliness
and errors—becomes a totally new thing when we attach our own
personality to it, and measure it by that wide difference which is
manifest (in our own sensations) between ourselves and others. Lydgate
believed himself to be careless about his dress, and he despised a man
who calculated the effects of his costume; it seemed to him only a
matter of course that he had abundance of fresh garments—such things
were naturally ordered in sheaves. It must be remembered that he had
never hitherto felt the check of importunate debt, and he walked by
habit, not by self-criticism. But the check had come.
Its novelty made it the more irritating. He was amazed, disgusted that
conditions so foreign to all his purposes, so hatefully disconnected
with the objects he cared to occupy himself with, should have lain in
ambush and clutched him when he was unaware. And there was not only the
actual debt; there was the certainty that in his present position he
must go on deepening it. Two furnishing tradesmen at Brassing, whose
bills had been incurred before his marriage, and whom uncalculated
current expenses had ever since prevented him from paying, had
repeatedly sent him unpleasant letters which had forced themselves on
his attention. This could hardly have been more galling to any
disposition than to Lydgate’s, with his intense pride—his dislike of
asking a favor or being under an obligation to any one. He had scorned
even to form conjectures about Mr. Vincy’s intentions on money matters,
and nothing but extremity could have induced him to apply to his
father-in-law, even if he had not been made aware in various indirect
ways since his marriage that Mr. Vincy’s own affairs were not
flourishing, and that the expectation of help from him would be
resented. Some men easily trust in the readiness of friends; it had
never in the former part of his life occurred to Lydgate that he should
need to do so: he had never thought what borrowing would be to him; but
now that the idea had entered his mind, he felt that he would rather
incur any other hardship. In the mean time he had no money or prospects
of money; and his practice was not getting more lucrative.
No wonder that Lydgate had been unable to suppress all signs of inward
trouble during the last few months, and now that Rosamond was regaining
brilliant health, he meditated taking her entirely into confidence on
his difficulties. New conversance with tradesmen’s bills had forced his
reasoning into a new channel of comparison: he had begun to consider
from a new point of view what was necessary and unnecessary in goods
ordered, and to see that there must be some change of habits. How could
such a change be made without Rosamond’s concurrence? The immediate
occasion of opening the disagreeable fact to her was forced upon him.
Having no money, and having privately sought advice as to what security
could possibly be given by a man in his position, Lydgate had offered
the one good security in his power to the less peremptory creditor, who
was a silversmith and jeweller, and who consented to take on himself
the upholsterer’s credit also, accepting interest for a given term. The
security necessary was a bill of sale on the furniture of his house,
which might make a creditor easy for a reasonable time about a debt
amounting to less than four hundred pounds; and the silversmith, Mr.
Dover, was willing to reduce it by taking back a portion of the plate
and any other article which was as good as new. “Any other article” was
a phrase delicately implying jewellery, and more particularly some
purple amethysts costing thirty pounds, which Lydgate had bought as a
bridal present.
Opinions may be divided as to his wisdom in making this present: some
may think that it was a graceful attention to be expected from a man
like Lydgate, and that the fault of any troublesome consequences lay in
the pinched narrowness of provincial life at that time, which offered
no conveniences for professional people whose fortune was not
proportioned to their tastes; also, in Lydgate’s ridiculous
fastidiousness about asking his friends for money.
However, it had seemed a question of no moment to him on that fine
morning when he went to give a final order for plate: in the presence
of other jewels enormously expensive, and as an addition to orders of
which the amount had not been exactly calculated, thirty pounds for
ornaments so exquisitely suited to Rosamond’s neck and arms could
hardly appear excessive when there was no ready cash for it to exceed.
But at this crisis Lydgate’s imagination could not help dwelling on the
possibility of letting the amethysts take their place again among Mr.
Dover’s stock, though he shrank from the idea of proposing this to
Rosamond. Having been roused to discern consequences which he had never
been in the habit of tracing, he was preparing to act on this
discernment with some of the rigor (by no means all) that he would have
applied in pursuing experiment. He was nerving himself to this rigor as
he rode from Brassing, and meditated on the representations he must
make to Rosamond.
It was evening when he got home. He was intensely miserable, this
strong man of nine-and-twenty and of many gifts. He was not saying
angrily within himself that he had made a profound mistake; but the
mistake was at work in him like a recognized chronic disease, mingling
its uneasy importunities with every prospect, and enfeebling every
thought. As he went along the passage to the drawing-room, he heard the
piano and singing. Of course, Ladislaw was there. It was some weeks
since Will had parted from Dorothea, yet he was still at the old post
in Middlemarch. Lydgate had no objection in general to Ladislaw’s
coming, but just now he was annoyed that he could not find his hearth
free. When he opened the door the two singers went on towards the
key-note, raising their eyes and looking at him indeed, but not
regarding his entrance as an interruption. To a man galled with his
harness as poor Lydgate was, it is not soothing to see two people
warbling at him, as he comes in with the sense that the painful day has
still pains in store. His face, already paler than usual, took on a
scowl as he walked across the room and flung himself into a chair.
The singers feeling themselves excused by the fact that they had only
three bars to sing, now turned round.
“How are you, Lydgate?” said Will, coming forward to shake hands.
Lydgate took his hand, but did not think it necessary to speak.
“Have you dined, Tertius? I expected you much earlier,” said Rosamond,
who had already seen that her husband was in a “horrible humor.” She
seated herself in her usual place as she spoke.
“I have dined. I should like some tea, please,” said Lydgate, curtly,
still scowling and looking markedly at his legs stretched out before
him.
Will was too quick to need more. “I shall be off,” he said, reaching
his hat.
“Tea is coming,” said Rosamond; “pray don’t go.”
“Yes, Lydgate is bored,” said Will, who had more comprehension of
Lydgate than Rosamond had, and was not offended by his manner, easily
imagining outdoor causes of annoyance.
“There is the more need for you to stay,” said Rosamond, playfully, and
in her lightest accent; “he will not speak to me all the evening.”
“Yes, Rosamond, I shall,” said Lydgate, in his strong baritone. “I have
some serious business to speak to you about.”
No introduction of the business could have been less like that which
Lydgate had intended; but her indifferent manner had been too
provoking.
“There! you see,” said Will. “I’m going to the meeting about the
Mechanics’ Institute. Good-by;” and he went quickly out of the room.
Rosamond did not look at her husband, but presently rose and took her
place before the tea-tray. She was thinking that she had never seen him
so disagreeable. Lydgate turned his dark eyes on her and watched her as
she delicately handled the tea-service with her taper fingers, and
looked at the objects immediately before her with no curve in her face
disturbed, and yet with an ineffable protest in her air against all
people with unpleasant manners. For the moment he lost the sense of his
wound in a sudden speculation about this new form of feminine
impassibility revealing itself in the sylph-like frame which he had
once interpreted as the sign of a ready intelligent sensitiveness. His
mind glancing back to Laure while he looked at Rosamond, he said
inwardly, “Would _she_ kill me because I wearied her?” and then, “It is
the way with all women.” But this power of generalizing which gives men
so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals, was
immediately thwarted by Lydgate’s memory of wondering impressions from
the behavior of another woman—from Dorothea’s looks and tones of