Middlemarch
This streak of bitterness came from a plenteous source, and kept
widening in the current of his thought as he neared Lowick Gate. He had
not been there since his first interview with Bulstrode in the morning,
having been found at the Hospital by the banker’s messenger; and for
the first time he was returning to his home without the vision of any
expedient in the background which left him a hope of raising money
enough to deliver him from the coming destitution of everything which
made his married life tolerable—everything which saved him and Rosamond
from that bare isolation in which they would be forced to recognize how
little of a comfort they could be to each other. It was more bearable
to do without tenderness for himself than to see that his own
tenderness could make no amends for the lack of other things to her.
The sufferings of his own pride from humiliations past and to come were
keen enough, yet they were hardly distinguishable to himself from that
more acute pain which dominated them—the pain of foreseeing that
Rosamond would come to regard him chiefly as the cause of
disappointment and unhappiness to her. He had never liked the
makeshifts of poverty, and they had never before entered into his
prospects for himself; but he was beginning now to imagine how two
creatures who loved each other, and had a stock of thoughts in common,
might laugh over their shabby furniture, and their calculations how far
they could afford butter and eggs. But the glimpse of that poetry
seemed as far off from him as the carelessness of the golden age; in
poor Rosamond’s mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look
small in. He got down from his horse in a very sad mood, and went into
the house, not expecting to be cheered except by his dinner, and
reflecting that before the evening closed it would be wise to tell
Rosamond of his application to Bulstrode and its failure. It would be
well not to lose time in preparing her for the worst.
But his dinner waited long for him before he was able to eat it. For on
entering he found that Dover’s agent had already put a man in the
house, and when he asked where Mrs. Lydgate was, he was told that she
was in her bedroom. He went up and found her stretched on the bed pale
and silent, without an answer even in her face to any word or look of
his. He sat down by the bed and leaning over her said with almost a cry
of prayer—
“Forgive me for this misery, my poor Rosamond! Let us only love one
another.”
She looked at him silently, still with the blank despair on her face;
but then the tears began to fill her blue eyes, and her lip trembled.
The strong man had had too much to bear that day. He let his head fall
beside hers and sobbed.
He did not hinder her from going to her father early in the morning—it
seemed now that he ought not to hinder her from doing as she pleased.
In half an hour she came back, and said that papa and mamma wished her
to go and stay with them while things were in this miserable state.
Papa said he could do nothing about the debt—if he paid this, there
would be half-a-dozen more. She had better come back home again till
Lydgate had got a comfortable home for her. “Do you object, Tertius?”
“Do as you like,” said Lydgate. “But things are not coming to a crisis
immediately. There is no hurry.”
“I should not go till to-morrow,” said Rosamond; “I shall want to pack
my clothes.”
“Oh, I would wait a little longer than to-morrow—there is no knowing
what may happen,” said Lydgate, with bitter irony. “I may get my neck
broken, and that may make things easier to you.”
It was Lydgate’s misfortune and Rosamond’s too, that his tenderness
towards her, which was both an emotional prompting and a
well-considered resolve, was inevitably interrupted by these outbursts
of indignation either ironical or remonstrant. She thought them totally
unwarranted, and the repulsion which this exceptional severity excited
in her was in danger of making the more persistent tenderness
unacceptable.
“I see you do not wish me to go,” she said, with chill mildness; “why
can you not say so, without that kind of violence? I shall stay until
you request me to do otherwise.”
Lydgate said no more, but went out on his rounds. He felt bruised and
shattered, and there was a dark line under his eyes which Rosamond had
not seen before. She could not bear to look at him. Tertius had a way
of taking things which made them a great deal worse for her.
CHAPTER LXX.
“Our deeds still travel with us from afar,
And what we have been makes us what we are.”
Bulstrode’s first object after Lydgate had left Stone Court was to
examine Raffles’s pockets, which he imagined were sure to carry signs
in the shape of hotel-bills of the places he had stopped in, if he had
not told the truth in saying that he had come straight from Liverpool
because he was ill and had no money. There were various bills crammed
into his pocketbook, but none of a later date than Christmas at any
other place, except one, which bore date that morning. This was
crumpled up with a hand-bill about a horse-fair in one of his
tail-pockets, and represented the cost of three days’ stay at an inn at
Bilkley, where the fair was held—a town at least forty miles from
Middlemarch. The bill was heavy, and since Raffles had no luggage with
him, it seemed probable that he had left his portmanteau behind in
payment, in order to save money for his travelling fare; for his purse
was empty, and he had only a couple of sixpences and some loose pence
in his pockets.
Bulstrode gathered a sense of safety from these indications that
Raffles had really kept at a distance from Middlemarch since his
memorable visit at Christmas. At a distance and among people who were
strangers to Bulstrode, what satisfaction could there be to Raffles’s
tormenting, self-magnifying vein in telling old scandalous stories
about a Middlemarch banker? And what harm if he did talk? The chief
point now was to keep watch over him as long as there was any danger of
that intelligible raving, that unaccountable impulse to tell, which
seemed to have acted towards Caleb Garth; and Bulstrode felt much
anxiety lest some such impulse should come over him at the sight of
Lydgate. He sat up alone with him through the night, only ordering the
housekeeper to lie down in her clothes, so as to be ready when he
called her, alleging his own indisposition to sleep, and his anxiety to
carry out the doctor’s orders. He did carry them out faithfully,
although Raffles was incessantly asking for brandy, and declaring that
he was sinking away—that the earth was sinking away from under him. He
was restless and sleepless, but still quailing and manageable. On the
offer of the food ordered by Lydgate, which he refused, and the denial
of other things which he demanded, he seemed to concentrate all his
terror on Bulstrode, imploringly deprecating his anger, his revenge on
him by starvation, and declaring with strong oaths that he had never
told any mortal a word against him. Even this Bulstrode felt that he
would not have liked Lydgate to hear; but a more alarming sign of
fitful alternation in his delirium was, that in-the morning twilight
Raffles suddenly seemed to imagine a doctor present, addressing him and
declaring that Bulstrode wanted to starve him to death out of revenge
for telling, when he never had told.
Bulstrode’s native imperiousness and strength of determination served
him well. This delicate-looking man, himself nervously perturbed, found
the needed stimulus in his strenuous circumstances, and through that
difficult night and morning, while he had the air of an animated corpse
returned to movement without warmth, holding the mastery by its chill
impassibility, his mind was intensely at work thinking of what he had
to guard against and what would win him security. Whatever prayers he
might lift up, whatever statements he might inwardly make of this man’s
wretched spiritual condition, and the duty he himself was under to
submit to the punishment divinely appointed for him rather than to wish
for evil to another—through all this effort to condense words into a
solid mental state, there pierced and spread with irresistible
vividness the images of the events he desired. And in the train of
those images came their apology. He could not but see the death of
Raffles, and see in it his own deliverance. What was the removal of
this wretched creature? He was impenitent—but were not public criminals
impenitent?—yet the law decided on their fate. Should Providence in
this case award death, there was no sin in contemplating death as the
desirable issue—if he kept his hands from hastening it—if he
scrupulously did what was prescribed. Even here there might be a
mistake: human prescriptions were fallible things: Lydgate had said
that treatment had hastened death,—why not his own method of treatment?
But of course intention was everything in the question of right and
wrong.
And Bulstrode set himself to keep his intention separate from his
desire. He inwardly declared that he intended to obey orders. Why
should he have got into any argument about the validity of these
orders? It was only the common trick of desire—which avails itself of
any irrelevant scepticism, finding larger room for itself in all
uncertainty about effects, in every obscurity that looks like the
absence of law. Still, he did obey the orders.
His anxieties continually glanced towards Lydgate, and his remembrance
of what had taken place between them the morning before was accompanied
with sensibilities which had not been roused at all during the actual
scene. He had then cared but little about Lydgate’s painful impressions
with regard to the suggested change in the Hospital, or about the
disposition towards himself which what he held to be his justifiable
refusal of a rather exorbitant request might call forth. He recurred to
the scene now with a perception that he had probably made Lydgate his
enemy, and with an awakened desire to propitiate him, or rather to
create in him a strong sense of personal obligation. He regretted that
he had not at once made even an unreasonable money-sacrifice. For in
case of unpleasant suspicions, or even knowledge gathered from the
raving of Raffles, Bulstrode would have felt that he had a defence in
Lydgate’s mind by having conferred a momentous benefit on him. But the
regret had perhaps come too late.
Strange, piteous conflict in the soul of this unhappy man, who had
longed for years to be better than he was—who had taken his selfish
passions into discipline and clad them in severe robes, so that he had
walked with them as a devout choir, till now that a terror had risen
among them, and they could chant no longer, but threw out their common
cries for safety.
It was nearly the middle of the day before Lydgate arrived: he had
meant to come earlier, but had been detained, he said; and his
shattered looks were noticed by Balstrode. But he immediately threw
himself into the consideration of the patient, and inquired strictly
into all that had occurred. Raffles was worse, would take hardly any
food, was persistently wakeful and restlessly raving; but still not
violent. Contrary to Bulstrode’s alarmed expectation, he took little
notice of Lydgate’s presence, and continued to talk or murmur
incoherently.
“What do you think of him?” said Bulstrode, in private.
“The symptoms are worse.”
“You are less hopeful?”
“No; I still think he may come round. Are you going to stay here
yourself?” said Lydgate, looking at Bulstrode with an abrupt question,
which made him uneasy, though in reality it was not due to any
suspicious conjecture.
“Yes, I think so,” said Bulstrode, governing himself and speaking with