“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 daresay,” 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
