“I know, I know,” said Lydgate, deprecatingly.
“It was a fatal accident— a dreadful
stroke of calamity that bound me to you the more.”
Again Laure paused a little and then said, slowly,
“I meant to do it.”
Lydgate, strong man as he was, turned pale and trembled:
moments seemed to pass before he rose and stood at
a distance from her.
“There was a secret, then,” he said at
last, even vehemently. “He was brutal to
you: you hated him.”
“No! he wearied me; he was too fond: he
would live in Paris, and not in my country; that was
not agreeable to me.”
“Great God!” said Lydgate, in a groan
of horror. “And you planned to murder
him?”
“I did not plan: it came to me in the play—I
meant to do it.”
Lydgate stood mute, and unconsciously pressed his
hat on while he looked at her. He saw this woman—the
first to whom he had given his young adoration—amid
the throng of stupid criminals.
“You are a good young man,” she said.
“But I do not like husbands. I will never
have another.”
Three days afterwards Lydgate was at his galvanism
again in his Paris chambers, believing that illusions
were at an end for him. He was saved from hardening
effects by the abundant kindness of his heart and
his belief that human life might be made better.
But he had more reason than ever for trusting his judgment,
now that it was so experienced; and henceforth he would
take a strictly scientific view of woman, entertaining
no expectations but such as were justified beforehand.
No one in Middle march was likely to have such a notion
of Lydgate’s past as has here been faintly shadowed,
and indeed the respectable townsfolk there were not
more given than mortals generally to any eager attempt
at exactness in the representation to themselves of
what did not come under their own senses. Not
only young virgins of that town, but gray-bearded
men also, were often in haste to conjecture how a
new acquaintance might be wrought into their purposes,
contented with very vague knowledge as to the way in
which life had been shaping him for that instrumentality.
Middlemarch, in fact, counted on swallowing Lydgate
and assimilating him very comfortably.
“All that in woman is
adored
In thy fair
self I find—
For the whole sex can
but afford
The handsome
and the kind.”
—SIR
CHARLES SEDLEY.
The question whether Mr. Tyke should be appointed
as salaried chaplain to the hospital was an exciting
topic to the Middlemarchers; and Lydgate heard it
discussed in a way that threw much light on the power
exercised in the town by Mr. Bulstrode. The banker
was evidently a ruler, but there was an opposition
party, and even among his supporters there were some
who allowed it to be seen that their support was a
compromise, and who frankly stated their impression
that the general scheme of things, and especially
the casualties of trade, required you to hold a candle
to the devil.
