Middlemarch
to learn beyond the glimpses which Mr. Bulstrode’s narrative
occasionally gave of his early bent towards religion, his inclination
to be a preacher, and his association with missionary and philanthropic
efforts. She believed in him as an excellent man whose piety carried a
peculiar eminence in belonging to a layman, whose influence had turned
her own mind toward seriousness, and whose share of perishable good had
been the means of raising her own position. But she also liked to think
that it was well in every sense for Mr. Bulstrode to have won the hand
of Harriet Vincy; whose family was undeniable in a Middlemarch light—a
better light surely than any thrown in London thoroughfares or
dissenting chapel-yards. The unreformed provincial mind distrusted
London; and while true religion was everywhere saving, honest Mrs.
Bulstrode was convinced that to be saved in the Church was more
respectable. She so much wished to ignore towards others that her
husband had ever been a London Dissenter, that she liked to keep it out
of sight even in talking to him. He was quite aware of this; indeed in
some respects he was rather afraid of this ingenuous wife, whose
imitative piety and native worldliness were equally sincere, who had
nothing to be ashamed of, and whom he had married out of a thorough
inclination still subsisting. But his fears were such as belong to a
man who cares to maintain his recognized supremacy: the loss of high
consideration from his wife, as from every one else who did not clearly
hate him out of enmity to the truth, would be as the beginning of death
to him. When she said—
“Is he quite gone away?”
“Oh, I trust so,” he answered, with an effort to throw as much sober
unconcern into his tone as possible!
But in truth Mr. Bulstrode was very far from a state of quiet trust. In
the interview at the Bank, Raffles had made it evident that his
eagerness to torment was almost as strong in him as any other greed. He
had frankly said that he had turned out of the way to come to
Middlemarch, just to look about him and see whether the neighborhood
would suit him to live in. He had certainly had a few debts to pay more
than he expected, but the two hundred pounds were not gone yet: a cool
five-and-twenty would suffice him to go away with for the present. What
he had wanted chiefly was to see his friend Nick and family, and know
all about the prosperity of a man to whom he was so much attached.
By-and-by he might come back for a longer stay. This time Raffles
declined to be “seen off the premises,” as he expressed it—declined to
quit Middlemarch under Bulstrode’s eyes. He meant to go by coach the
next day—if he chose.
Bulstrode felt himself helpless. Neither threats nor coaxing could
avail: he could not count on any persistent fear nor on any promise. On
the contrary, he felt a cold certainty at his heart that Raffles—unless
providence sent death to hinder him—would come back to Middlemarch
before long. And that certainty was a terror.
It was not that he was in danger of legal punishment or of beggary: he
was in danger only of seeing disclosed to the judgment of his neighbors
and the mournful perception of his wife certain facts of his past life
which would render him an object of scorn and an opprobrium of the
religion with which he had diligently associated himself. The terror of
being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over
that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in
general phrases. Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a
zone of dependence in growth and decay; but intense memory forces a man
to own his blameworthy past. With memory set smarting like a reopened
wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn
preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose
from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing
shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.
Into this second life Bulstrode’s past had now risen, only the
pleasures of it seeming to have lost their quality. Night and day,
without interruption save of brief sleep which only wove retrospect and
fear into a fantastic present, he felt the scenes of his earlier life
coming between him and everything else, as obstinately as when we look
through the window from a lighted room, the objects we turn our backs
on are still before us, instead of the grass and the trees. The
successive events inward and outward were there in one view: though
each might be dwelt on in turn, the rest still kept their hold in the
consciousness.
Once more he saw himself the young banker’s clerk, with an agreeable
person, as clever in figures as he was fluent in speech and fond of
theological definition: an eminent though young member of a Calvinistic
dissenting church at Highbury, having had striking experience in
conviction of sin and sense of pardon. Again he heard himself called
for as Brother Bulstrode in prayer meetings, speaking on religious
platforms, preaching in private houses. Again he felt himself thinking
of the ministry as possibly his vocation, and inclined towards
missionary labor. That was the happiest time of his life: that was the
spot he would have chosen now to awake in and find the rest a dream.
The people among whom Brother Bulstrode was distinguished were very
few, but they were very near to him, and stirred his satisfaction the
more; his power stretched through a narrow space, but he felt its
effect the more intensely. He believed without effort in the peculiar
work of grace within him, and in the signs that God intended him for
special instrumentality.
Then came the moment of transition; it was with the sense of promotion
he had when he, an orphan educated at a commercial charity-school, was
invited to a fine villa belonging to Mr. Dunkirk, the richest man in
the congregation. Soon he became an intimate there, honored for his
piety by the wife, marked out for his ability by the husband, whose
wealth was due to a flourishing city and west-end trade. That was the
setting-in of a new current for his ambition, directing his prospects
of “instrumentality” towards the uniting of distinguished religious
gifts with successful business.
By-and-by came a decided external leading: a confidential subordinate
partner died, and nobody seemed to the principal so well fitted to fill
the severely felt vacancy as his young friend Bulstrode, if he would
become confidential accountant. The offer was accepted. The business
was a pawnbroker’s, of the most magnificent sort both in extent and
profits; and on a short acquaintance with it Bulstrode became aware
that one source of magnificent profit was the easy reception of any
goods offered, without strict inquiry as to where they came from. But
there was a branch house at the west end, and no pettiness or dinginess
to give suggestions of shame.
He remembered his first moments of shrinking. They were private, and
were filled with arguments; some of these taking the form of prayer.
The business was established and had old roots; is it not one thing to
set up a new gin-palace and another to accept an investment in an old
one? The profits made out of lost souls—where can the line be drawn at
which they begin in human transactions? Was it not even God’s way of
saving His chosen? “Thou knowest,”—the young Bulstrode had said then,
as the older Bulstrode was saying now—“Thou knowest how loose my soul
sits from these things—how I view them all as implements for tilling
Thy garden rescued here and there from the wilderness.”
Metaphors and precedents were not wanting; peculiar spiritual
experiences were not wanting which at last made the retention of his
position seem a service demanded of him: the vista of a fortune had
already opened itself, and Bulstrode’s shrinking remained private. Mr.
Dunkirk had never expected that there would be any shrinking at all: he
had never conceived that trade had anything to do with the scheme of
salvation. And it was true that Bulstrode found himself carrying on two
distinct lives; his religious activity could not be incompatible with
his business as soon as he had argued himself into not feeling it
incompatible.
Mentally surrounded with that past again, Bulstrode had the same
pleas—indeed, the years had been perpetually spinning them into
intricate thickness, like masses of spider-web, padding the moral
sensibility; nay, as age made egoism more eager but less enjoying, his
soul had become more saturated with the belief that he did everything
for God’s sake, being indifferent to it for his own. And yet—if he
could be back in that far-off spot with his youthful poverty—why, then
he would choose to be a missionary.
But the train of causes in which he had locked himself went on. There
was trouble in the fine villa at Highbury. Years before, the only
daughter had run away, defied her parents, and gone on the stage; and
now the only boy died, and after a short time Mr. Dunkirk died also.
The wife, a simple pious woman, left with all the wealth in and out of
the magnificent trade, of which she never knew the precise nature, had
come to believe in Bulstrode, and innocently adore him as women often
adore their priest or “man-made” minister. It was natural that after a
time marriage should have been thought of between them. But Mrs.
Dunkirk had qualms and yearnings about her daughter, who had long been
regarded as lost both to God and her parents. It was known that the
daughter had married, but she was utterly gone out of sight. The
mother, having lost her boy, imagined a grandson, and wished in a
double sense to reclaim her daughter. If she were found, there would be
a channel for property—perhaps a wide one—in the provision for several
grandchildren. Efforts to find her must be made before Mrs. Dunkirk
would marry again. Bulstrode concurred; but after advertisement as well
as other modes of inquiry had been tried, the mother believed that her
daughter was not to be found, and consented to marry without
reservation of property.
The daughter had been found; but only one man besides Bulstrode knew
it, and he was paid for keeping silence and carrying himself away.
That was the bare fact which Bulstrode was now forced to see in the
rigid outline with which acts present themselves to onlookers. But for
himself at that distant time, and even now in burning memory, the fact
was broken into little sequences, each justified as it came by
reasonings which seemed to prove it righteous. Bulstrode’s course up to
that time had, he thought, been sanctioned by remarkable providences,
appearing to point the way for him to be the agent in making the best
use of a large property and withdrawing it from perversion. Death and
other striking dispositions, such as feminine trustfulness, had come;
and Bulstrode would have adopted Cromwell’s words—“Do you call these
bare events? The Lord pity you!” The events were comparatively small,
but the essential condition was there—namely, that they were in favor
of his own ends. It was easy for him to settle what was due from him to
others by inquiring what were God’s intentions with regard to himself.
Could it be for God’s service that this fortune should in any
considerable proportion go to a young woman and her husband who were
given up to the lightest pursuits, and might scatter it abroad in
triviality—people who seemed to lie outside the path of remarkable
providences? Bulstrode had never said to himself beforehand, “The
daughter shall not be found”—nevertheless when the moment came he kept
her existence hidden; and when other moments followed, he soothed the
mother with consolation in the probability that the unhappy young woman
might be no more.
There were hours in which Bulstrode felt that his action was