Middlemarch

CHAPTER LXXI.

The chapter opens with the exchange from Measure for Measure about the Bunch of Grapes and the hope that here be truths. Five days after the death of Raffles, Mr. Bambridge was standing at his leisure under the large archway leading into the yard of the Green Dragon. Mr. Hopkins, the meek-mannered draper opposite, was the first to act on this inward vision of mental sustenance in the shape of gossip. Soon there was a small cluster of more important listeners. When the discourse was at this point of animation, came up Mr. Frank Hawley. He took some of his long strides across to ask the horsedealer whether he had found the first-rate gig-horse. A horseman passed slowly by: Bulstrode! said two or three voices at once. Mr. Hawley gave a careless glance round at Bulstrode’s back, but as Bambridge’s eyes followed it he made a sarcastic grimace. By jingo! he began, lowering his voice a little, I picked up a fine story about Bulstrode at Bilkley. I had it from a party who was an old chum of Bulstrode’s. He can tap Bulstrode to any amount, knows all his secrets. He blabbed to me at Bilkley; he takes a stiff glass. What’s the man’s name? said Mr. Hawley. His name is Raffles. Raffles! exclaimed Mr. Hopkins. I furnished his funeral yesterday. He was buried at Lowick. Mr. Bulstrode followed him. There was a strong sensation among the listeners. Mr. Bambridge delivered his narrative in the hearing of seven: it was mainly what we know, including the fact about Will Ladislaw, with some local color and circumstance added.

But this gossip about Bulstrode spread through Middlemarch like the smell of fire. Mr. Frank Hawley followed up his information by sending a clerk whom he could trust to Stone Court on a pretext of inquiring about hay. Mr. Hawley in consequence took an opportunity of seeing Caleb, calling at his office to ask whether he had time to undertake an arbitration, and then asking him incidentally about Raffles. Caleb was betrayed into no word injurious to Bulstrode beyond the fact that he had given up acting for him within the last week. Mr. Hawley drew his inferences. With the reasons which kept Bulstrode in dread of Raffles there flashed the thought that the dread might have something to do with his munificence towards his medical man; and though he resisted the suggestion, he had a foreboding that this complication of things might be of malignant effect on Lydgate’s reputation. He perceived that Mr. Hawley knew nothing at present of the sudden relief from debt, and he himself was careful to glide away from all approaches towards the subject.

For hardly anybody doubted that some scandalous reason or other was at the bottom of Bulstrode’s liberality to Lydgate. Mr. Hawley indeed invited a select party including the two physicians, Mr. Toller and Mr. Wrench, expressly to hold a close discussion as to the probabilities of Raffles’s illness. The medical gentlemen declared that they could see nothing in the 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. 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. 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. This was the tone of thought chiefly sanctioned by Mrs. Dollop, the spirited landlady of the Tankard in Slaughter Lane. 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 to Bulstrode’s religion, said Mr. Dill the barber, Fletcher says Bulstrode might have done what he has and worse and yet have been a man of no religion. I don’t say that there has not been a little too much of that, said Mrs. Plymdale, but truth is truth.

Meanwhile, on the part of the principal townsmen a strong determination was growing against Bulstrode. A meeting was to be held in the Town-Hall on a sanitary question which had risen into pressing importance by the occurrence of a cholera case in the town. Mr. Bulstrode was a member of the Board, and just before twelve o’clock he started from the Bank with the intention of urging the plan of private subscription. Under the hesitation of his projects he had for some time kept himself in the background, and he felt that he should this morning resume his old position as a man of action and influence. They joined and entered together.

After the business had been fully opened by the chairman, Mr. Bulstrode rose and asked leave to deliver his opinion. Lydgate could see a peculiar interchange of glances before Mr. Hawley started up and said in his firm resonant voice that he was speaking with the concurrence and at the express request of no fewer than eight of his fellow-townsmen. It was their united sentiment that Mr. Bulstrode should be called upon to resign public positions. Honest men and gentlemen, if they don’t want the company of people who perpetrate such acts, have got to defend themselves as they best can. I call upon him either publicly to deny and confute the scandalous statements made against him by a man now dead, and who died in his house, the statement that he was for many years engaged in nefarious practices, and that he won his fortune by dishonest procedures, or else to withdraw from positions which could only have been allowed him as a gentleman among gentlemen.