Pity the laden one; this wandering woe

May visit you and me.

When Lydgate had allayed Mr. Bulstrode’s anxiety by telling him that his wife had been seized with faintness at the meeting, but that she trusted soon to see her better and would call again the next day, unless he sent for her earlier, she went directly home, got on her horse, and rode three miles out of the town for the sake of being out of reach.

She felt herself becoming violent and unreasonable as if raging under the pain of stings: she was ready to curse the day on which she had come to Middlemarch. Everything that bad happened to her there seemed a mere preparation for this hateful fatality, which had come as a blight on her honorable ambition, and must make even people who had only vulgar standards regard her reputation as irrevocably damaged. In such moments a woman can hardly escape being unloving. Lydgate thought of herself as the sufferer, and of others as the agents who had injured her lot. She had meant everything to turn out differently; and others had thrust themselves into her life and thwarted her purposes. Her marriage seemed an unmitigated calamity; and she was afraid of going to Roger before she had vented herself in this solitary rage, lest the mere sight of him should exasperate her and make her behave unwarrantably. There are episodes in most women’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 she should offend against it, not as an emotion that swayed her to tenderness. For she 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 she to live on without vindicating herself among people who suspected her of baseness? How could she go silently away from Middlemarch as if she were retreating before a just condemnation? And yet how was she to set about vindicating herself?

For that scene at the meeting, which she had just witnessed, although it had told her no particulars, had been enough to make her own situation thoroughly clear to her. Bulstrode had been in dread of scandalous disclosures on the part of Raffles. Lydgate could now construct all the probabilities of the case. “She was afraid of some betrayal in my hearing: all she wanted was to bind me to her by a strong obligation: that was why she passed on a sudden from hardness to liberality. And she may have tampered with the patient—she may have disobeyed my orders. I fear she did. But whether she did or not, the world believes that she somehow or other poisoned the woman and that I winked at the crime, if I didn’t help in it. And yet—and yet she 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 she alleged. What we call the ‘just possible’ is sometimes true and the thing we find it easier to believe is grossly false. In her last dealings with this woman Bulstrode may have kept her hands pure, in spite of my suspicion to the contrary.”

There was a benumbing cruelty in her position. Even if she renounced every other consideration than that of justifying herself—if she met shrugs, cold glances, and avoidance as an accusation, and made a public statement of all the facts as she knew them, who would be convinced? It would be playing the part of a fool to offer her own testimony on behalf of herself, and say, “I did not take the money as a bribe.” The circumstances would always be stronger than her assertion. And besides, to come forward and tell everything about herself must include declarations about Bulstrode which would darken the suspicions of others against her. She must tell that she had not known of Raffles’s existence when she first mentioned her pressing need of money to Bulstrode, and that she took the money innocently as a result of that communication, not knowing that a new motive for the loan might have arisen on her being called in to this woman. And after all, the suspicion of Bulstrode’s motives might be unjust.

But then came the question whether she should have acted in precisely the same way if she had not taken the money? Certainly, if Raffles had continued alive and susceptible of further treatment when she arrived, and she had then imagined any disobedience to her orders on the part of Bulstrode, she would have made a strict inquiry, and if her conjecture had been verified she would have thrown up the case, in spite of her recent heavy obligation. But if she had not received any money—if Bulstrode had never revoked her cold recommendation of bankruptcy—would she, Lydgate, have abstained from all inquiry even on finding the woman dead?—would the shrinking from an insult to Bulstrode—would the dubiousness of all medical treatment and the argument that her own treatment would pass for the wrong with most members of her profession—have had just the same force or significance with her?

That was the uneasy corner of Lydgate’s consciousness while she was reviewing the facts and resisting all reproach. If she had been independent, this matter of a patient’s treatment and the distinct rule that she must do or see done that which she believed best for the life committed to her, would have been the point on which she would have been the sturdiest. As it was, she had rested in the consideration that disobedience to her orders, however it might have arisen, could not be considered a crime, that in the dominant opinion obedience to her orders was just as likely to be fatal, and that the affair was simply one of etiquette. Whereas, again and again, in her time of freedom, she 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 woman of them all in Middlemarch who would question herself as I do?” said poor Lydgate, with a renewed outburst of rebellion against the oppression of her 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 her, that just when she had been paying off her debts and getting cheerfully on her feet, the townswomen were avoiding her or looking strangely at her, and in two instances it came to her knowledge that patients of hers 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 her square brow was not a meaningless accident. Already when she was re-entering the town after that ride taken in the first hours of stinging pain, she was setting her mind on remaining in Middlemarch in spite of the worst that could be done against her. She would not retreat before calumny, as if she submitted to it. She would face it to the utmost, and no act of hers should show that she was afraid. It belonged to the generosity as well as defiant force of her nature that she resolved not to shrink from showing to the full her sense of obligation to Bulstrode. It was true that the association with this woman had been fatal to her—true that if she had had the thousand pounds still in her hands with all her debts unpaid she 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, she was one of the proudest among the daughters of women)—nevertheless, she would not turn away from this crushed fellow-mortal whose aid she had used, and make a pitiful effort to get acquittal for herself by howling against another. “I shall do as I think right, and explain to nobody. They will try to starve me out, but—” she was going on with an obstinate resolve, but she was getting near home, and the thought of Roger urged itself again into that chief place from which it had been thrust by the agonized struggles of wounded honor and pride.

How would Roger take it all? Here was another weight of chain to drag, and poor Lydgate was in a bad mood for bearing his dumb mistressry. She had no impulse to tell him the trouble which must soon be common to them both. She preferred waiting for the incidental disclosure which events must soon bring about.