Middlemarch
with unmistakable directness. Mr. Bulstrode replied without haste, but
also without hesitation.
“I am grieved, though, I confess, not surprised by this information,
Mr. Lydgate. For my own part, I regretted your alliance with my
brother-in-law’s family, which has always been of prodigal habits, and
which has already been much indebted to me for sustainment in its
present position. My advice to you, Mr. Lydgate, would be, that instead
of involving yourself in further obligations, and continuing a doubtful
struggle, you should simply become a bankrupt.”
“That would not improve my prospect,” said Lydgate, rising and speaking
bitterly, “even if it were a more agreeable thing in itself.”
“It is always a trial,” said Mr. Bulstrode; “but trial, my dear sir, is
our portion here, and is a needed corrective. I recommend you to weigh
the advice I have given.”
“Thank you,” said Lydgate, not quite knowing what he said. “I have
occupied you too long. Good-day.”
CHAPTER LXVIII.
What suit of grace hath Virtue to put on
If Vice shall wear as good, and do as well?
If Wrong, if Craft, if Indiscretion
Act as fair parts with ends as laudable?
Which all this mighty volume of events
The world, the universal map of deeds,
Strongly controls, and proves from all descents,
That the directest course still best succeeds.
For should not grave and learn’d Experience
That looks with the eyes of all the world beside,
And with all ages holds intelligence,
Go safer than Deceit without a guide!
—DANIEL: _Musophilus_.
That change of plan and shifting of interest which Bulstrode stated or
betrayed in his conversation with Lydgate, had been determined in him
by some severe experience which he had gone through since the epoch of
Mr. Larcher’s sale, when Raffles had recognized Will Ladislaw, and when
the banker had in vain attempted an act of restitution which might move
Divine Providence to arrest painful consequences.
His certainty that Raffles, unless he were dead, would return to
Middlemarch before long, had been justified. On Christmas Eve he had
reappeared at The Shrubs. Bulstrode was at home to receive him, and
hinder his communication with the rest of the family, but he could not
altogether hinder the circumstances of the visit from compromising
himself and alarming his wife. Raffles proved more unmanageable than he
had shown himself to be in his former appearances, his chronic state of
mental restlessness, the growing effect of habitual intemperance,
quickly shaking off every impression from what was said to him. He
insisted on staying in the house, and Bulstrode, weighing two sets of
evils, felt that this was at least not a worse alternative than his
going into the town. He kept him in his own room for the evening and
saw him to bed, Raffles all the while amusing himself with the
annoyance he was causing this decent and highly prosperous
fellow-sinner, an amusement which he facetiously expressed as sympathy
with his friend’s pleasure in entertaining a man who had been
serviceable to him, and who had not had all his earnings. There was a
cunning calculation under this noisy joking—a cool resolve to extract
something the handsomer from Bulstrode as payment for release from this
new application of torture. But his cunning had a little overcast its
mark.
Bulstrode was indeed more tortured than the coarse fibre of Raffles
could enable him to imagine. He had told his wife that he was simply
taking care of this wretched creature, the victim of vice, who might
otherwise injure himself; he implied, without the direct form of
falsehood, that there was a family tie which bound him to this care,
and that there were signs of mental alienation in Raffles which urged
caution. He would himself drive the unfortunate being away the next
morning. In these hints he felt that he was supplying Mrs. Bulstrode
with precautionary information for his daughters and servants, and
accounting for his allowing no one but himself to enter the room even
with food and drink. But he sat in an agony of fear lest Raffles should
be overheard in his loud and plain references to past facts—lest Mrs.
Bulstrode should be even tempted to listen at the door. How could he
hinder her, how betray his terror by opening the door to detect her?
She was a woman of honest direct habits, and little likely to take so
low a course in order to arrive at painful knowledge; but fear was
stronger than the calculation of probabilities.
In this way Raffles had pushed the torture too far, and produced an
effect which had not been in his plan. By showing himself hopelessly
unmanageable he had made Bulstrode feel that a strong defiance was the
only resource left. After taking Raffles to bed that night the banker
ordered his closed carriage to be ready at half-past seven the next
morning. At six o’clock he had already been long dressed, and had spent
some of his wretchedness in prayer, pleading his motives for averting
the worst evil if in anything he had used falsity and spoken what was
not true before God. For Bulstrode shrank from a direct lie with an
intensity disproportionate to the number of his more indirect misdeeds.
But many of these misdeeds were like the subtle muscular movements
which are not taken account of in the consciousness, though they bring
about the end that we fix our mind on and desire. And it is only what
we are vividly conscious of that we can vividly imagine to be seen by
Omniscience.
Bulstrode carried his candle to the bedside of Raffles, who was
apparently in a painful dream. He stood silent, hoping that the
presence of the light would serve to waken the sleeper gradually and
gently, for he feared some noise as the consequence of a too sudden
awakening. He had watched for a couple of minutes or more the
shudderings and pantings which seemed likely to end in waking, when
Raffles, with a long half-stifled moan, started up and stared round him
in terror, trembling and gasping. But he made no further noise, and
Bulstrode, setting down the candle, awaited his recovery.
It was a quarter of an hour later before Bulstrode, with a cold
peremptoriness of manner which he had not before shown, said, “I came
to call you thus early, Mr. Raffles, because I have ordered the
carriage to be ready at half-past seven, and intend myself to conduct
you as far as Ilsely, where you can either take the railway or await a
coach.” Raffles was about to speak, but Bulstrode anticipated him
imperiously with the words, “Be silent, sir, and hear what I have to
say. I shall supply you with money now, and I will furnish you with a
reasonable sum from time to time, on your application to me by letter;
but if you choose to present yourself here again, if you return to
Middlemarch, if you use your tongue in a manner injurious to me, you
will have to live on such fruits as your malice can bring you, without
help from me. Nobody will pay you well for blasting my name: I know the
worst you can do against me, and I shall brave it if you dare to thrust
yourself upon me again. Get up, sir, and do as I order you, without
noise, or I will send for a policeman to take you off my premises, and
you may carry your stories into every pothouse in the town, but you
shall have no sixpence from me to pay your expenses there.”
Bulstrode had rarely in his life spoken with such nervous energy: he
had been deliberating on this speech and its probable effects through a
large part of the night; and though he did not trust to its ultimately
saving him from any return of Raffles, he had concluded that it was the
best throw he could make. It succeeded in enforcing submission from the
jaded man this morning: his empoisoned system at this moment quailed
before Bulstrode’s cold, resolute bearing, and he was taken off quietly
in the carriage before the family breakfast time. The servants imagined
him to be a poor relation, and were not surprised that a strict man
like their master, who held his head high in the world, should be
ashamed of such a cousin and want to get rid of him. The banker’s drive
of ten miles with his hated companion was a dreary beginning of the
Christmas day; but at the end of the drive, Raffles had recovered his
spirits, and parted in a contentment for which there was the good
reason that the banker had given him a hundred pounds. Various motives
urged Bulstrode to this open-handedness, but he did not himself inquire
closely into all of them. As he had stood watching Raffles in his
uneasy sleep, it had certainly entered his mind that the man had been
much shattered since the first gift of two hundred pounds.
He had taken care to repeat the incisive statement of his resolve not
to be played on any more; and had tried to penetrate Raffles with the
fact that he had shown the risks of bribing him to be quite equal to
the risks of defying him. But when, freed from his repulsive presence,
Bulstrode returned to his quiet home, he brought with him no confidence
that he had secured more than a respite. It was as if he had had a
loathsome dream, and could not shake off its images with their hateful
kindred of sensations—as if on all the pleasant surroundings of his
life a dangerous reptile had left his slimy traces.
Who can know how much of his most inward life is made up of the
thoughts he believes other men to have about him, until that fabric of
opinion is threatened with ruin?
Bulstrode was only the more conscious that there was a deposit of
uneasy presentiment in his wife’s mind, because she carefully avoided
any allusion to it. He had been used every day to taste the flavor of
supremacy and the tribute of complete deference: and the certainty that
he was watched or measured with a hidden suspicion of his having some
discreditable secret, made his voice totter when he was speaking to
edification. Foreseeing, to men of Bulstrode’s anxious temperament, is
often worse than seeing; and his imagination continually heightened the
anguish of an imminent disgrace. Yes, imminent; for if his defiance of
Raffles did not keep the man away—and though he prayed for this result
he hardly hoped for it—the disgrace was certain. In vain he said to
himself that, if permitted, it would be a divine visitation, a
chastisement, a preparation; he recoiled from the imagined burning; and
he judged that it must be more for the Divine glory that he should
escape dishonor. That recoil had at last urged him to make preparations
for quitting Middlemarch. If evil truth must be reported of him, he
would then be at a less scorching distance from the contempt of his old
neighbors; and in a new scene, where his life would not have gathered
the same wide sensibility, the tormentor, if he pursued him, would be
less formidable. To leave the place finally would, he knew, be
extremely painful to his wife, and on other grounds he would have
preferred to stay where he had struck root. Hence he made his
preparations at first in a conditional way, wishing to leave on all
sides an opening for his return after brief absence, if any favorable
intervention of Providence should dissipate his fears. He was preparing
to transfer his management of the Bank, and to give up any active
control of other commercial affairs in the neighborhood, on the ground
of his failing health, but without excluding his future resumption of
such work. The measure would cause him some added expense and some
diminution of income beyond what he had already undergone from the
general depression of trade; and the Hospital presented itself as a
principal object of outlay on which he could fairly economize.
This was the experience which had determined his conversation with
Lydgate. But at this time his arrangements had most of them gone no
farther than a stage at which he could recall them if they proved to be