Middlemarch

CHAPTER LXI. – CHAPTER LXV.

The evening Nicholas Bulstrode returned from Brassing, his wife Harriet met him in the entrance-hall with troubled eyes. A red-faced man with large whiskers had come asking for him—an impudent creature who called himself his old friend, spoke of “Nick” with offensive familiarity, and would have waited indoors had not Blucher the dog broken loose on the gravel. Bulstrode, that pattern of provincial respectability, told her it was only an unfortunate wretch he had helped too much in days gone by. But all night his conscience burned. The visitor was John Raffles, and with his reappearance the whole buried past clawed its way back into the light.

Bulstrode remembered his youth—the clever young banker’s clerk at Highbury, fluent in figures and theological definition, distinguished among his Calvinistic brethren, invited to the fine villa of Mr. Dunkirk, the richest man in the congregation. There he had been drawn into Dunkirk’s magnificent pawnbroking business and had reasoned himself out of his first moments of shrinking: was it not one thing to set up a new gin-palace, another to accept an investment in an old one? When Dunkirk’s only daughter Sarah ran away to the stage and was lost to her parents, Bulstrode alone had found her again. He had been paid to keep silence, and had married the widowed mother. Through that marriage a hundred thousand pounds had become his, the fortune that should have passed to Sarah and her heirs. For thirty years he had lived as banker, Churchman, public benefactor in Middlemarch, his earlier connections a London stain Harriet preferred not to examine too closely. Now the terror of disclosure sharpened memory into a living wound. He was not, he told himself, a coarse hypocrite—only a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs, who had explained the gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs. But the religion of personal fear, Eliot reminds us, remains nearly at the level of the savage. Bulstrode felt he must bring restitution in his hand.

He summoned Will Ladislaw to The Shrubs that very evening. Will, who had felt Raffles’s leering hints the night before and arrived already smarting, listened as Bulstrode revealed that Will’s mother Sarah had been Dunkirk’s daughter, that the fortune ought in justice to have been hers, and that he proposed to settle five hundred pounds a year on Will for life, with proportional capital at his death. Will’s face hardened. Before he would accept a farthing, he asked whether the original business had not been a thoroughly dishonorable one. Bulstrode reddened and replied with quick defiantness that the business had been established before he joined it, and that it was not for Will to institute such an inquiry. Will sprang up, his hat in his hand. “My unblemished honor is important to me,” he said. “I have a stain on my birth and connections which I cannot help. My mother felt it, and tried to keep as clear of it as she could, and so will I. You shall keep your ill-gotten money.” He was gone before Bulstrode could answer. The banker, alone in his lamp-lit room, wept like a woman—the first open scorn he had ever received from any man higher than Raffles—and could find in his humiliation only the thin comfort that Will at least was not the sort to publish what had passed.

The next morning Will wrote to Dorothea Casaubon at Lowick, asking leave to call once more before quitting Middlemarch for good. He had been ignorant, when he said farewell weeks earlier, of facts that now made any future meeting between them impossible: the revelation of his mother’s family, the certainty that Dorothea’s friends would look down upon him as utterly below her, the fresh smart that any tie to Bulstrode’s money would put upon his pride. Dorothea, however, was not at Lowick to receive his note. She had driven first to Freshitt to carry news of her uncle Brooke’s return, and there Sir James Chettam, who had been watching Ladislaw’s lingering through his informant Standish, seized his chance. Unable to speak unpleasantness himself, he sent a pencilled note across the park to Mrs. Cadwallader, begging her to repeat certain gossip: that young Ladislaw was making a sad dark-blue scandal by warbling continually at the Lydgates’ piano. Mrs. Cadwallader, nothing loth, dropped the tale into Dorothea’s ear as they walked the gravel. Dorothea’s face flushed, her lip trembled. “I will not hear any evil spoken of Mr. Ladislaw; he has already suffered too much injustice,” she said, and drove on to Tipton with tears she did not know she was shedding.

At the Grange she found Will in the library, gathering his portfolio of sketches. They met at the door, and consciousness was overflowed by something that suppressed utterance. Dorothea crossed the room to her uncle’s chair; Will drew it out a little for her and stood opposite. He told her that he was going away immediately and could not go without speaking again. He had been grossly insulted, he said; under no circumstances would he have given men the chance of saying he sought money under the pretext of seeking something else. “There was no need of other safeguard against me—the safeguard of wealth was enough.” Dorothea moved to the old place in the window and asked him, “Do you suppose that I ever disbelieved in you?” He would not answer. He spoke at last of a thing absolutely forbidden him by his own pride and honor, “even if it were within my reach,” and Dorothea, with her mind running rapidly over the past, doubted whether he referred to herself or to Mrs. Lydgate. Neither of them knew how long they stood so. Then the footman came to say the horses were ready. Will said, “The day after to-morrow I shall leave Middlemarch.” She answered, low and pressed at the heart, “You have acted in every way rightly,” and put out her hand. He took it for an instant without speaking. “Please remember me,” she said. He answered with irritation, “Why should you say that? As if I were not in danger of forgetting everything else.” He was gone. Dorothea sank into the chair, and joy came first, in spite of the threatening train behind it—joy in the impression that it was really herself whom Will loved and was renouncing. She wrote her memoranda for the housekeeper in cheerful tones, and when she seated herself in the carriage her eyes were bright and her cheeks blooming under the dismal bonnet. She overtook Will on the road; he raised his hat as she passed, and she felt a pang at being seated there in a sort of exaltation, leaving him behind. That evening he spent with the Lydgates; the next evening he was gone.