"Yes, I think myself it is an encouragement to crime if such men are to be taken care of and waited on by good wives," said Mrs. Tom Toller.
"And a good wife poor Harriet has been," said Mrs. Plymdale.
"She thinks her husband the first of men. It's true he has never denied her anything.""Well, we shall see what she will do," said Mrs. Hackbutt.
"I suppose she knows nothing yet, poor creature. I do hope and trust I shall not see her, for I should be frightened to death lest Ishould say anything about her husband. Do you think any hint has reached her?""I should hardly think so," said Mrs. Tom Toller. "We hear that he is ill, and has never stirred out of the house since the meeting on Thursday; but she was with her girls at church yesterday, and they had new Tuscan bonnets. Her own had a feather in it.
I have never seen that her religion made any difference in her dress.""She wears very neat patterns always," said Mrs. Plymdale, a little stung. "And that feather I know she got dyed a pale lavender on purpose to be consistent. I must say it of Harriet that she wishes to do right.""As to her knowing what has happened, it can't be kept from her long,"said Mrs. Hackbutt. "The Vincys know, for Mr. Vincy was at the meeting.
It will he a great blow to him. There is his daughter as well as his sister.""Yes, indeed," said Mrs. Sprague. "Nobody supposes that Mr. Lydgate can go on holding up his head in Middlemarch, things look so black about the thousand pounds he took just at that man's death.
It really makes one shudder."
"Pride must have a fall," said Mrs. Hackbutt.
"I am not so sorry for Rosamond Vincy that was as I am for her aunt,"said Mrs. Plymdale. "She needed a lesson.""I suppose the Bulstrodes will go and live abroad somewhere,"said Mrs. Sprague. "That is what is generally done when there is anything disgraceful in a family.""And a most deadly blow it will be to Harriet," said Mrs. Plymdale.
"If ever a woman was crushed, she will be. I pity her from my heart.
And with all her faults, few women are better. From a girl she had the neatest ways, and was always good-hearted, and as open as the day.
You might look into her drawers when you would--always the same.
And so she has brought up Kate and Ellen. You may think how hard it will be for her to go among foreigners.""The doctor says that is what he should recommend the Lydgates to do,"said Mrs. Sprague. "He says Lydgate ought to have kept among the French.""That would suit HER well enough, I dare say," said Mrs. Plymdale;"there is that kind of lightness about her. But she got that from her mother; she never got it from her aunt Bulstrode, who always gave her good advice, and to my knowledge would rather have had her marry elsewhere."Mrs. Plymdale was in a situation which caused her some complication of feeling. There had been not only her intimacy with Mrs. Bulstrode, but also a profitable business relation of the great Plymdale dyeing house with Mr. Bulstrode, which on the one hand would have inclined her to desire that the mildest view of his character should be the true one, but on the other, made her the more afraid of seeming to palliate his culpability. Again, the late alliance of her family with the Tollers had brought her in connection with the best circle, which gratified her in every direction except in the inclination to those serious views which she believed to be the best in another sense.
The sharp little woman's conscience was somewhat troubled in the adjustment of these opposing "bests," and of her griefs and satisfactions under late events, which were likely to humble those who needed humbling, but also to fall heavily on her old friend whose faults she would have preferred seeing on a background of prosperity.
Poor Mrs. 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 her since the last visit of Raffles to The Shrubs. That the hateful man had come ill to Stone Court, and that her husband had chosen to remain there and watch over him, she 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 him in his degraded helplessness;and she had been since then innocently cheered by her husband's more hopeful speech about his own health and ability to continue his attention to business. The calm was disturbed when Lydgate had brought him home ill from the meeting, and in spite of comforting assurances during the next few days, she cried in private from the conviction that her husband was not suffering from bodily illness merely, but from something that afflicted his mind.
He would not allow her to read to him, and scarcely to sit with him, alleging nervous susceptibility to sounds and movements; yet she suspected that in shutting himself up in his private room he wanted to be busy with his papers. Something, she felt sure, had happened.
Perhaps it was some great loss of money; and she was kept in the dark.
Not daring to question her husband, she said to Lydgate, on the fifth day after the meeting, when she had not left home except to go to church--"Mr. Lydgate, pray be open with me: I like to know the truth.
Has anything happened to Mr. Bulstrode?"
"Some little nervous shock," said Lydgate, evasively. He felt that it was not for him to make the painful revelation.
"But what brought it on?" said Mrs. Bulstrode, looking directly at him with her large dark eyes.