الفصل الفصل 73 · Chapter 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.