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.
‘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 churchgoing; he would defend Mrs Strype the washerwoman against Stubb’s unjust exaction on the score of her drying-ground, and he would himself scrutinise 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 neighbours’ 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 cross 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 depreciated.
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 favour 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,