Middlemarch
have been all the more popular for the fatal episode, she left Paris
without warning, forsaking her little court of admirers. Perhaps no one
carried inquiry far except Lydgate, who felt that all science had come
to a stand-still while he imagined the unhappy Laure, stricken by
ever-wandering sorrow, herself wandering, and finding no faithful
comforter. Hidden actresses, however, are not so difficult to find as
some other hidden facts, and it was not long before Lydgate gathered
indications that Laure had taken the route to Lyons. He found her at
last acting with great success at Avignon under the same name, looking
more majestic than ever as a forsaken wife carrying her child in her
arms. He spoke to her after the play, was received with the usual
quietude which seemed to him beautiful as clear depths of water, and
obtained leave to visit her the next day; when he was bent on telling
her that he adored her, and on asking her to marry him. He knew that
this was like the sudden impulse of a madman—incongruous even with his
habitual foibles. No matter! It was the one thing which he was resolved
to do. He had two selves within him apparently, and they must learn to
accommodate each other and bear reciprocal impediments. Strange, that
some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations,
and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our
persistent self pauses and awaits us.
To have approached Laure with any suit that was not reverentially
tender would have been simply a contradiction of his whole feeling
towards her.
“You have come all the way from Paris to find me?” she said to him the
next day, sitting before him with folded arms, and looking at him with
eyes that seemed to wonder as an untamed ruminating animal wonders.
“Are all Englishmen like that?”
“I came because I could not live without trying to see you. You are
lonely; I love you; I want you to consent to be my wife; I will wait,
but I want you to promise that you will marry me—no one else.”
Laure looked at him in silence with a melancholy radiance from under
her grand eyelids, until he was full of rapturous certainty, and knelt
close to her knees.
“I will tell you something,” she said, in her cooing way, keeping her
arms folded. “My foot really slipped.”
“I know, I know,” said Lydgate, deprecatingly. “It was a fatal
accident—a dreadful stroke of calamity that bound me to you the more.”
Again Laure paused a little and then said, slowly, “_I meant to do
it._”
Lydgate, strong man as he was, turned pale and trembled: moments seemed
to pass before he rose and stood at a distance from her.
“There was a secret, then,” he said at last, even vehemently. “He was
brutal to you: you hated him.”
“No! he wearied me; he was too fond: he would live in Paris, and not in
my country; that was not agreeable to me.”
“Great God!” said Lydgate, in a groan of horror. “And you planned to
murder him?”
“I did not plan: it came to me in the play—_I meant to do it._”
Lydgate stood mute, and unconsciously pressed his hat on while he
looked at her. He saw this woman—the first to whom he had given his
young adoration—amid the throng of stupid criminals.
“You are a good young man,” she said. “But I do not like husbands. I
will never have another.”
Three days afterwards Lydgate was at his galvanism again in his Paris
chambers, believing that illusions were at an end for him. He was saved
from hardening effects by the abundant kindness of his heart and his
belief that human life might be made better. But he had more reason
than ever for trusting his judgment, now that it was so experienced;
and henceforth he would take a strictly scientific view of woman,
entertaining no expectations but such as were justified beforehand.
No one in Middlemarch was likely to have such a notion of Lydgate’s
past as has here been faintly shadowed, and indeed the respectable
townsfolk there were not more given than mortals generally to any eager
attempt at exactness in the representation to themselves of what did
not come under their own senses. Not only young virgins of that town,
but gray-bearded men also, were often in haste to conjecture how a new
acquaintance might be wrought into their purposes, contented with very
vague knowledge as to the way in which life had been shaping him for
that instrumentality. Middlemarch, in fact, counted on swallowing
Lydgate and assimilating him very comfortably.
CHAPTER XVI.
“All that in woman is adored
In thy fair self I find—
For the whole sex can but afford
The handsome and the kind.”
—SIR CHARLES SEDLEY.
The question whether Mr. Tyke should be appointed as salaried chaplain
to the hospital was an exciting topic to the Middlemarchers; and
Lydgate heard it discussed in a way that threw much light on the power
exercised in the town by Mr. Bulstrode. The banker was evidently a
ruler, but there was an opposition party, and even among his supporters
there were some who allowed it to be seen that their support was a
compromise, and who frankly stated their impression that the general
scheme of things, and especially the casualties of trade, required you
to hold a candle to the devil.
Mr. Bulstrode’s power was not due simply to his being a country banker,
who knew the financial secrets of most traders in the town and could
touch the springs of their credit; it was fortified by a beneficence
that was at once ready and severe—ready to confer obligations, and
severe in watching the result. He had gathered, as an industrious man
always at his post, a chief share in administering the town charities,
and his private charities were both minute and abundant. He would take
a great deal of pains about apprenticing Tegg the shoemaker’s son, and
he would watch over Tegg’s church-going; he would defend Mrs. Strype
the washerwoman against Stubbs’s unjust exaction on the score of her
drying-ground, and he would himself scrutinize a calumny against Mrs.
Strype. His private minor loans were numerous, but he would inquire
strictly into the circumstances both before and after. In this way a
man gathers a domain in his neighbors’ hope and fear as well as
gratitude; and power, when once it has got into that subtle region,
propagates itself, spreading out of all proportion to its external
means. It was a principle with Mr. Bulstrode to gain as much power as
possible, that he might use it for the glory of God. He went through a
great deal of spiritual conflict and inward argument in order to adjust
his motives, and make clear to himself what God’s glory required. But,
as we have seen, his motives were not always rightly appreciated. There
were many crass minds in Middlemarch whose reflective scales could only
weigh things in the lump; and they had a strong suspicion that since
Mr. Bulstrode could not enjoy life in their fashion, eating and
drinking so little as he did, and worreting himself about everything,
he must have a sort of vampire’s feast in the sense of mastery.
The subject of the chaplaincy came up at Mr. Vincy’s table when Lydgate
was dining there, and the family connection with Mr. Bulstrode did not,
he observed, prevent some freedom of remark even on the part of the
host himself, though his reasons against the proposed arrangement
turned entirely on his objection to Mr. Tyke’s sermons, which were all
doctrine, and his preference for Mr. Farebrother, whose sermons were
free from that taint. Mr. Vincy liked well enough the notion of the
chaplain’s having a salary, supposing it were given to Farebrother, who
was as good a little fellow as ever breathed, and the best preacher
anywhere, and companionable too.
“What line shall you take, then?” said Mr. Chichely, the coroner, a
great coursing comrade of Mr. Vincy’s.
“Oh, I’m precious glad I’m not one of the Directors now. I shall vote
for referring the matter to the Directors and the Medical Board
together. I shall roll some of my responsibility on your shoulders,
Doctor,” said Mr. Vincy, glancing first at Dr. Sprague, the senior
physician of the town, and then at Lydgate who sat opposite. “You
medical gentlemen must consult which sort of black draught you will
prescribe, eh, Mr. Lydgate?”
“I know little of either,” said Lydgate; “but in general, appointments
are apt to be made too much a question of personal liking. The fittest
man for a particular post is not always the best fellow or the most
agreeable. Sometimes, if you wanted to get a reform, your only way
would be to pension off the good fellows whom everybody is fond of, and
put them out of the question.”
Dr. Sprague, who was considered the physician of most “weight,” though
Dr. Minchin was usually said to have more “penetration,” divested his
large heavy face of all expression, and looked at his wine-glass while
Lydgate was speaking. Whatever was not problematical and suspected
about this young man—for example, a certain showiness as to foreign
ideas, and a disposition to unsettle what had been settled and
forgotten by his elders—was positively unwelcome to a physician whose
standing had been fixed thirty years before by a treatise on
Meningitis, of which at least one copy marked “own” was bound in calf.
For my part I have some fellow-feeling with Dr. Sprague: one’s
self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very
unpleasant to find deprecated.
Lydgate’s remark, however, did not meet the sense of the company. Mr.
Vincy said, that if he could have _his_ way, he would not put
disagreeable fellows anywhere.
“Hang your reforms!” said Mr. Chichely. “There’s no greater humbug in
the world. You never hear of a reform, but it means some trick to put
in new men. I hope you are not one of the ‘Lancet’s’ men, Mr.
Lydgate—wanting to take the coronership out of the hands of the legal
profession: your words appear to point that way.”
“I disapprove of Wakley,” interposed Dr. Sprague, “no man more: he is
an ill-intentioned fellow, who would sacrifice the respectability of
the profession, which everybody knows depends on the London Colleges,
for the sake of getting some notoriety for himself. There are men who
don’t mind about being kicked blue if they can only get talked about.
But Wakley is right sometimes,” the Doctor added, judicially. “I could
mention one or two points in which Wakley is in the right.”
“Oh, well,” said Mr. Chichely, “I blame no man for standing up in favor
of his own cloth; but, coming to argument, I should like to know how a
coroner is to judge of evidence if he has not had a legal training?”
“In my opinion,” said Lydgate, “legal training only makes a man more
incompetent in questions that require knowledge of another kind. People
talk about evidence as if it could really be weighed in scales by a
blind Justice. No man can judge what is good evidence on any particular
subject, unless he knows that subject well. A lawyer is no better than
an old woman at a post-mortem examination. How is he to know the action
of a poison? You might as well say that scanning verse will teach you
to scan the potato crops.”
“You are aware, I suppose, that it is not the coroner’s business to
conduct the _post-mortem_, but only to take the evidence of the medical
witness?” said Mr. Chichely, with some scorn.
“Who is often almost as ignorant as the coroner himself,” said Lydgate.
“Questions of medical jurisprudence ought not to be left to the chance
of decent knowledge in a medical witness, and the coroner ought not to
be a man who will believe that strychnine will destroy the coats of the
stomach if an ignorant practitioner happens to tell him so.”
Lydgate had really lost sight of the fact that Mr. Chichely was his
Majesty’s coroner, and ended innocently with the question, “Don’t you
agree with me, Dr. Sprague?”