MIDDLEMARCH (Completed)

Chapter 73

Pity the laden one; this wandering woe

May visit you and me.

When Lydgate had allayed Mrs. Bulstrode's anxiety by telling her

that her husband had been seized with faintness at the meeting,

but that he trusted soon to see him better and would call again

the next day, unless she-sent for him earlier, he went directly home,

got on his horse, and rode three miles out of the town for the sake

of being out of reach.

He felt himself becoming violent and unreasonable as if raging

under the pain of stings: he was ready to curse the day on

which he had come to Middlemarch. Everything that bad happened

to him there seemed a mere preparation for this hateful fatality,

which had come as a blight on his honorable ambition, and must make

even people who had only vulgar standards regard his reputation

as irrevocably damaged. In such moments a man can hardly escape

being unloving. Lydgate thought of himself as the sufferer,

and of others as the agents who had injured his lot. He had meant

everything to turn out differently; and others had thrust themselves

into his life and thwarted his purposes. His marriage seemed an

unmitigated calamity; and he was afraid of going to Rosamond before

he had vented himself in this solitary rage, lest the mere sight

of her should exasperate him and make him behave unwarrantably.

There are episodes in most men's lives in which their highest

qualities can only cast a deterring shadow over the objects that fill

their inward vision: Lydgate's tenderheartedness was present just

then only as a dread lest he should offend against it, not as an

emotion that swayed him to tenderness. For he was very miserable.

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life--

the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it--

can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity

into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

How was he to live on without vindicating himself among people

who suspected him of baseness? How could he go silently away from

Middlemarch as if he were retreating before a just condemnation?

And yet how was he to set about vindicating himself?

For that scene at the meeting, which he had just witnessed,

although it had told him no particulars, had been enough to make

his own situation thoroughly clear to him. Bulstrode had been

in dread of scandalous disclosures on the part of Raffles.