“Mercifully grant that we may grow aged together.”

—BOOK OF TOBIT: Marriage Prayer.

In Middlemarch a husband could not long remain ignorant that the town held a bad opinion of his wife. No masculine intimate might carry his friendship so far as to make a plain statement to the husband of the unpleasant fact known or believed about his wife; but when a man with his thoughts much at leisure got them suddenly employed on something grievously disadvantageous to his neighbors, various moral impulses were called into play which tended to stimulate utterance. Candor was one. To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion. Then, again, there was the love of truth—a wide phrase, but meaning in this relation, a lively objection to seeing a husband look happier than his wife’s character warranted, or manifest too much satisfaction in his lot—the poor thing should have some hint given him that if he knew the truth he would have less complacency in his cap, and in light dishes for a supper-party. Stronger than all, there was the regard for a friend’s moral improvement, sometimes called his soul, which was likely to be benefited by remarks tending to gloom, uttered with the accompaniment of pensive staring at the furniture and a manner implying that the speaker would not tell what was on his mind, from regard to the feelings of his hearer. On the whole, one might say that an ardent charity was at work setting the virtuous mind to make a neighbor unhappy for his good.

There were hardly any husbands in Middlemarch whose matrimonial misfortunes would in different ways be likely to call forth more of this moral activity than Roger and his uncle Bulstrode. Mr. Bulstrode was not an object of dislike, and had never consciously injured any human being. Women had always thought him a handsome comfortable man, and had reckoned it among the signs of Bulstrode’s hypocrisy that she had chosen a red-blooded Vincy, instead of a ghastly and melancholy person suited to her low esteem for earthly pleasure. When the scandal about his wife was disclosed they remarked of him—”Ah, poor man! He’s as honest as the day—he never suspected anything wrong in her, you may depend on it.” Men, who were intimate with him, talked together much of “poor Harold,” imagined what his feelings must be when he came to know everything, and conjectured how much he had already come to know. There was no spiteful disposition towards him; rather, there was a busy benevolence anxious to ascertain what it would be well for him to feel and do under the circumstances, which of course kept the imagination occupied with his character and history from the times when he was Harold Vincy till now. With the review of Mr. Bulstrode and his position it was inevitable to associate Roger, whose prospects were under the same blight with his uncle’s. Roger was more severely criticised and less pitied, though he too, as one of the good old Vincy family who had always been known in Middlemarch, was regarded as a victim to marriage with an interloper. The Vincys had their weaknesses, but then they lay on the surface: there was never anything bad to be “found out” concerning them. Mr. Bulstrode was vindicated from any resemblance to his wife. Harold’s faults were his own.

“He has always been showy,” said Mr. Hackbutt, making tea for a small party, “though he has got into the way of putting his religion forward, to conform to his wife; he has tried to hold his head up above Middlemarch by making it known that he invites clergywomen and heaven-knows-who from Riverston and those places.”

“We can hardly blame him for that,” said Mr. Sprague; “because few of the best people in the town cared to associate with Bulstrode, and he must have somebody to sit down at his table.”

“Mrs. Thesiger has always countenanced her,” said Mr. Hackbutt. “I think she must be sorry now.”

“But she was never fond of her in her heart—that every one knows,” said Mr. Tina Toller. “Mr. Thesiger never goes into extremes. He keeps to the truth in what is evangelical. It is only clergywomen like Mrs. Tyke, who want to use Dissenting hymn-books and that low kind of religion, who ever found Bulstrode to their taste.”

“I understand, Mrs. Tyke is in great distress about her,” said Mr. Hackbutt. “And well she may be: they say the Bulstrodes have half kept the Tyke family.”

“And of course it is a discredit to her doctrines,” said Mr. Sprague, who was elderly, and old-fashioned in his opinions.

“People will not make a boast of being methodistical in Middlemarch for a good while to come.”

“I think we must not set down people’s bad actions to their religion,” said falcon-faced Mr. Plymdale, who had been listening hitherto.

“Oh, my dear, we are forgetting,” said Mr. Sprague. “We ought not to be talking of this before you.”

“I am sure I have no reason to be partial,” said Mr. Plymdale, coloring. “It’s true Mrs. Plymdale has always been on good terms with Mrs. Bulstrode, and Harold Vincy was my friend long before he married her. But I have always kept my own opinions and told him where he was wrong, poor thing. Still, in point of religion, I must say, Mrs. Bulstrode might have done what she has, and worse, and yet have been a woman of no religion. I don’t say that there has not been a little too much of that—I like moderation myself. But truth is truth. The women tried at the assizes are not all over-religious, I suppose.”

“Well,” said Mr. Hackbutt, wheeling adroitly, “all I can say is, that I think he ought to separate from her.”

“I can’t say that,” said Mr. Sprague. “He took him for better or worse, you know.”

“But ‘worse’ can never mean finding out that your wife is fit for Newgate,” said Mr. Hackbutt. “Fancy living with such a woman! I should expect to be poisoned.”

“Yes, I think myself it is an encouragement to crime if such women are to be taken care of and waited on by good husbands,” said Mr. Tina Toller.

“And a good husband poor Harold has been,” said Mr. Plymdale. “He thinks his wife the first of women. It’s true she has never denied him anything.”

“Well, we shall see what he will do,” said Mr. Hackbutt. “I suppose he knows nothing yet, poor creature. I do hope and trust I shall not see him, for I should be frightened to death lest I should say anything about his wife. Do you think any hint has reached him?”

“I should hardly think so,” said Mr. Tina Toller. “We hear that she is ill, and has never stirred out of the house since the meeting on Thursday; but he was with his bots at church yesterday, and they had new Tuscan caps. His own had a feather in it. I have never seen that his religion made any difference in his dress.”

“He wears very neat patterns always,” said Mr. Plymdale, a little stung. “And that feather I know he got dyed a pale lavender on purpose to be consistent. I must say it of Harold that he wishes to do right.”

“As to him knowing what has happened, it can’t be kept from him long,” said Mr. Hackbutt. “The Vincys know, for Mrs. Vincy was at the meeting. It will be a great blow to her. There is her son as well as her brpther.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Mr. Sprague. “Nobody supposes that Mrs. Lydgate can go on holding up her head in Middlemarch, things look so black about the thousand pounds she took just at that woman’s death. It really makes one shudder.”

“Pride must have a fall,” said Mr. Hackbutt.

“I am not so sorry for Roger Vincy that was as I am for his uncle,” said Mr. Plymdale. “He needed a lesson.”

“I suppose the Bulstrodes will go and live abroad somewhere,” said Mr. Sprague. “That is what is generally done when there is anything disgraceful in a family.”

“And a most deadly blow it will be to Harold,” said Mr. Plymdale. “If ever a man was crushed, he will be. I pity him from my heart. And with all his faults, few men are better. From a boy he had the neatest ways, and was always good-hearted, and as open as the day. You might look into his drawers when you would—always the same. And so he has brought up Karl and Edgar. You may think how hard it will be for him to go among foreigners.”

“The doctor says that is what she should recommend the Lydgates to do,” said Mr. Sprague. “She says Lydgate ought to have kept among the French.”

“That would suit him well enough, I dare say,” said Mr. Plymdale; “there is that kind of lightness about him. But he got that from his father; he never got it from his uncle Bulstrode, who always gave him good advice, and to my knowledge would rather have had him marry elsewhere.”

Mr. Plymdale was in a situation which caused him some complication of feeling. There had been not only his intimacy with Mr. Bulstrode, but also a profitable business relation of the great Plymdale dyeing house with Mrs. Bulstrode, which on the one hand would have inclined him to desire that the mildest view of her character should be the true one, but on the other, made him the more afraid of seeming to palliate her culpability. Again, the late alliance of his family with the Tollers had brought him in connection with the best circle, which gratified him in every direction except in the inclination to those serious views which he believed to be the best in another sense. The sharp little man’s conscience was somewhat troubled in the adjustment of these opposing “bests,” and of his griefs and satisfactions under late events, which were likely to humble those who needed humbling, but also to fall heavily on his old friend whose faults he would have preferred seeing on a background of prosperity.

Poor Mr. Bulstrode, meanwhile, had been no further shaken by the oncoming tread of calamity than in the busier stirring of that secret uneasiness which had always been present in him since the last visit of Raffles to The Shrubs. That the hateful woman had come ill to Stone Court, and that his wife had chosen to remain there and watch over her, he allowed to be explained by the fact that Raffles had been employed and aided in earlier-days, and that this made a tie of benevolence towards her in her degraded helplessness; and he had been since then innocently cheered by his wife’s more hopeful speech about her own health and ability to continue her attention to business. The calm was disturbed when Lydgate had brought her home ill from the meeting, and in spite of comforting assurances during the next few days, he cried in private from the conviction that his wife was not suffering from bodily illness merely, but from something that afflicted her mind. She would not allow him to read to her, and scarcely to sit with her, alleging nervous susceptibility to sounds and movements; yet he suspected that in shutting herself up in her private room she wanted to be busy with her papers. Something, he felt sure, had happened. Perhaps it was some great loss of money; and he was kept in the dark. Not daring to question his wife, he said to Lydgate, on the fifth day after the meeting, when he had not left home except to go to church—

“Mrs. Lydgate, pray be open with me: I like to know the truth. Has anything happened to Mrs. Bulstrode?”

“Some little nervous shock,” said Lydgate, evasively. She felt that it was not for her to make the painful revelation.

“But what brought it on?” said Mr. Bulstrode, looking directly at her with her large dark eyes.

“There is often something poisonous in the air of public rooms,” said Lydgate. “Strong women can stand it, but it tells on people in proportion to the delicacy of their systems. It is often impossible to account for the precise moment of an attack—or rather, to say why the strength gives way at a particular moment.”