Middlemarch
distance. Mr. Hawley gave a careless glance round at Bulstrode’s back,
but as Bambridge’s eyes followed it he made a sarcastic grimace.
“By jingo! that reminds me,” he began, lowering his voice a little, “I
picked up something else at Bilkley besides your gig-horse, Mr. Hawley.
I picked up a fine story about Bulstrode. Do you know how he came by
his fortune? Any gentleman wanting a bit of curious information, I can
give it him free of expense. If everybody got their deserts, Bulstrode
might have had to say his prayers at Botany Bay.”
“What do you mean?” said Mr. Hawley, thrusting his hands into his
pockets, and pushing a little forward under the archway. If Bulstrode
should turn out to be a rascal, Frank Hawley had a prophetic soul.
“I had it from a party who was an old chum of Bulstrode’s. I’ll tell
you where I first picked him up,” said Bambridge, with a sudden gesture
of his fore-finger. “He was at Larcher’s sale, but I knew nothing of
him then—he slipped through my fingers—was after Bulstrode, no doubt.
He tells me he can tap Bulstrode to any amount, knows all his secrets.
However, he blabbed to me at Bilkley: he takes a stiff glass. Damme if
I think he meant to turn king’s evidence; but he’s that sort of
bragging fellow, the bragging runs over hedge and ditch with him, till
he’d brag of a spavin as if it ’ud fetch money. A man should know when
to pull up.” Mr. Bambridge made this remark with an air of disgust,
satisfied that his own bragging showed a fine sense of the marketable.
“What’s the man’s name? Where can he be found?” said Mr. Hawley.
“As to where he is to be found, I left him to it at the Saracen’s Head;
but his name is Raffles.”
“Raffles!” exclaimed Mr. Hopkins. “I furnished his funeral yesterday.
He was buried at Lowick. Mr. Bulstrode followed him. A very decent
funeral.” There was a strong sensation among the listeners. Mr.
Bambridge gave an ejaculation in which “brimstone” was the mildest
word, and Mr. Hawley, knitting his brows and bending his head forward,
exclaimed, “What?—where did the man die?”
“At Stone Court,” said the draper. “The housekeeper said he was a
relation of the master’s. He came there ill on Friday.”
“Why, it was on Wednesday I took a glass with him,” interposed
Bambridge.
“Did any doctor attend him?” said Mr. Hawley
“Yes. Mr. Lydgate. Mr. Bulstrode sat up with him one night. He died the
third morning.”
“Go on, Bambridge,” said Mr. Hawley, insistently. “What did this fellow
say about Bulstrode?”
The group had already become larger, the town-clerk’s presence being a
guarantee that something worth listening to was going on there; and Mr.
Bambridge delivered his narrative in the hearing of seven. It was
mainly what we know, including the fact about Will Ladislaw, with some
local color and circumstance added: it was what Bulstrode had dreaded
the betrayal of—and hoped to have buried forever with the corpse of
Raffles—it was that haunting ghost of his earlier life which as he rode
past the archway of the Green Dragon he was trusting that Providence
had delivered him from. Yes, Providence. He had not confessed to
himself yet that he had done anything in the way of contrivance to this
end; he had accepted what seemed to have been offered. It was
impossible to prove that he had done anything which hastened the
departure of that man’s soul.
But this gossip about Bulstrode spread through Middlemarch like the
smell of fire. Mr. Frank Hawley followed up his information by sending
a clerk whom he could trust to Stone Court on a pretext of inquiring
about hay, but really to gather all that could be learned about Raffles
and his illness from Mrs. Abel. In this way it came to his knowledge
that Mr. Garth had carried the man to Stone Court in his gig; and Mr.
Hawley in consequence took an opportunity of seeing Caleb, calling at
his office to ask whether he had time to undertake an arbitration if it
were required, and then asking him incidentally about Raffles. Caleb
was betrayed into no word injurious to Bulstrode beyond the fact which
he was forced to admit, that he had given up acting for him within the
last week. Mr Hawley drew his inferences, and feeling convinced that
Raffles had told his story to Garth, and that Garth had given up
Bulstrode’s affairs in consequence, said so a few hours later to Mr.
Toller. The statement was passed on until it had quite lost the stamp
of an inference, and was taken as information coming straight from
Garth, so that even a diligent historian might have concluded Caleb to
be the chief publisher of Bulstrode’s misdemeanors.
Mr. Hawley was not slow to perceive that there was no handle for the
law either in the revelations made by Raffles or in the circumstances
of his death. He had himself ridden to Lowick village that he might
look at the register and talk over the whole matter with Mr.
Farebrother, who was not more surprised than the lawyer that an ugly
secret should have come to light about Bulstrode, though he had always
had justice enough in him to hinder his antipathy from turning into
conclusions. But while they were talking another combination was
silently going forward in Mr. Farebrother’s mind, which foreshadowed
what was soon to be loudly spoken of in Middlemarch as a necessary
“putting of two and two together.” With the reasons which kept
Bulstrode in dread of Raffles there flashed the thought that the dread
might have something to do with his munificence towards his medical
man; and though he resisted the suggestion that it had been consciously
accepted in any way as a bribe, he had a foreboding that this
complication of things might be of malignant effect on Lydgate’s
reputation. He perceived that Mr. Hawley knew nothing at present of the
sudden relief from debt, and he himself was careful to glide away from
all approaches towards the subject.
“Well,” he said, with a deep breath, wanting to wind up the illimitable
discussion of what might have been, though nothing could be legally
proven, “it is a strange story. So our mercurial Ladislaw has a queer
genealogy! A high-spirited young lady and a musical Polish patriot made
a likely enough stock for him to spring from, but I should never have
suspected a grafting of the Jew pawnbroker. However, there’s no knowing
what a mixture will turn out beforehand. Some sorts of dirt serve to
clarify.”
“It’s just what I should have expected,” said Mr. Hawley, mounting his
horse. “Any cursed alien blood, Jew, Corsican, or Gypsy.”
“I know he’s one of your black sheep, Hawley. But he is really a
disinterested, unworldly fellow,” said Mr. Farebrother, smiling.
“Ay, ay, that is your Whiggish twist,” said Mr. Hawley, who had been in
the habit of saying apologetically that Farebrother was such a damned
pleasant good-hearted fellow you would mistake him for a Tory.
Mr. Hawley rode home without thinking of Lydgate’s attendance on
Raffles in any other light than as a piece of evidence on the side of
Bulstrode. But the news that Lydgate had all at once become able not
only to get rid of the execution in his house but to pay all his debts
in Middlemarch was spreading fast, gathering round it conjectures and
comments which gave it new body and impetus, and soon filling the ears
of other persons besides Mr. Hawley, who were not slow to see a
significant relation between this sudden command of money and
Bulstrode’s desire to stifle the scandal of Raffles. That the money
came from Bulstrode would infallibly have been guessed even if there
had been no direct evidence of it; for it had beforehand entered into
the gossip about Lydgate’s affairs, that neither his father-in-law nor
his own family would do anything for him, and direct evidence was
furnished not only by a clerk at the Bank, but by innocent Mrs.
Bulstrode herself, who mentioned the loan to Mrs. Plymdale, who
mentioned it to her daughter-in-law of the house of Toller, who
mentioned it generally. The business was felt to be so public and
important that it required dinners to feed it, and many invitations
were just then issued and accepted on the strength of this scandal
concerning Bulstrode and Lydgate; wives, widows, and single ladies took
their work and went out to tea oftener than usual; and all public
conviviality, from the Green Dragon to Dollop’s, gathered a zest which
could not be won from the question whether the Lords would throw out
the Reform Bill.
For hardly anybody doubted that some scandalous reason or other was at
the bottom of Bulstrode’s liberality to Lydgate. Mr. Hawley indeed, in
the first instance, invited a select party, including the two
physicians, with Mr Toller and Mr. Wrench, expressly to hold a close
discussion as to the probabilities of Raffles’s illness, reciting to
them all the particulars which had been gathered from Mrs. Abel in
connection with Lydgate’s certificate, that the death was due to
delirium tremens; and the medical gentlemen, who all stood
undisturbedly on the old paths in relation to this disease, declared
that they could see nothing in these particulars which could be
transformed into a positive ground of suspicion. But the moral grounds
of suspicion remained: the strong motives Bulstrode clearly had for
wishing to be rid of Raffles, and the fact that at this critical moment
he had given Lydgate the help which he must for some time have known
the need for; the disposition, moreover, to believe that Bulstrode
would be unscrupulous, and the absence of any indisposition to believe
that Lydgate might be as easily bribed as other haughty-minded men when
they have found themselves in want of money. Even if the money had been
given merely to make him hold his tongue about the scandal of
Bulstrode’s earlier life, the fact threw an odious light on Lydgate,
who had long been sneered at as making himself subservient to the
banker for the sake of working himself into predominance, and
discrediting the elder members of his profession. Hence, in spite of
the negative as to any direct sign of guilt in relation to the death at
Stone Court, Mr. Hawley’s select party broke up with the sense that the
affair had “an ugly look.”
But this vague conviction of indeterminable guilt, which was enough to
keep up much head-shaking and biting innuendo even among substantial
professional seniors, had for the general mind all the superior power
of mystery over fact. Everybody liked better to conjecture how the
thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more
confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the
incompatible. Even the more definite scandal concerning Bulstrode’s
earlier life was, for some minds, melted into the mass of mystery, as
so much lively metal to be poured out in dialogue, and to take such
fantastic shapes as heaven pleased.
This was the tone of thought chiefly sanctioned by Mrs. Dollop, the
spirited landlady of the Tankard in Slaughter Lane, who had often to
resist the shallow pragmatism of customers disposed to think that their
reports from the outer world were of equal force with what had “come
up” in her mind. How it had been brought to her she didn’t know, but it
was there before her as if it had been “scored with the chalk on the
chimney-board—” as Bulstrode should say, “his inside was _that black_
as if the hairs of his head knowed the thoughts of his heart, he’d tear
’em up by the roots.”
“That’s odd,” said Mr. Limp, a meditative shoemaker, with weak eyes and
a piping voice. “Why, I read in the ‘Trumpet’ that was what the Duke of
Wellington said when he turned his coat and went over to the Romans.”
“Very like,” said Mrs. Dollop. “If one raskill said it, it’s more
reason why another should. But hypo_crite_ as he’s been, and holding
things with that high hand, as there was no parson i’ the country good