Middlemarch George Eliot (essential reading txt) 📖

“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 hypocrite as he’s been, and holding things with that high hand, as there was no parson i’ the country good enough for him, he was forced to take Old Harry into his counsel, and Old Harry’s been too many for him.”

“Ay, ay, he’s a ’complice you can’t send out o’ the country,” said Mr. Crabbe, the glazier, who gathered much news and groped among it dimly. “But by what I can make out, there’s them says Bulstrode was for running away, for fear o’ being found out, before now.”

“He’ll be drove away, whether or no,” said Mr. Dill, the barber, who had just dropped in. “I shaved Fletcher, Hawley’s clerk, this morning⁠—he’s got a bad finger⁠—and he says they’re