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 unnecessary. He continually deferred the final steps;
in the midst of his fears, like many a man who is in danger of
shipwreck or of being dashed from his carriage by runaway horses,
he had a clinging impression that something would happen to hinder
the worst, and that to spoil his life by a late transplantation
might be over-hasty--especially since it was difficult to account
satisfactorily to his wife for the project of their indefinite exile
from the only place where she would like to live.
Among the affairs Bulstrode had to care for, was the management
of the farm at Stone Court in case of his absence; and on this
as well as on all other matters connected with any houses and land
he possessed in or about Middlemarch, he had consulted Caleb Garth.
Like every one else who had business of that sort, he wanted to get the
agent who was more anxious for his employer's interests than his own.
With regard to Stone Court, since Bulstrode wished to retain his hold
on the stock, and to have an arrangement by which he himself could,
if he chose, resume his favorite recreation of superintendence,
Caleb had advised him not to trust to a mere bailiff, but to let
the land, stock, and implements yearly, and take a proportionate
share of the proceeds.
"May I trust to you to find me a tenant on these terms, Mr. Garth?"
said Bulstrode. "And will you mention to me the yearly sum
which would repay you for managing these affairs which we have
discussed together?"
"I'll think about it," said Caleb, in his blunt way. "I'll see
how I can make it out."
If it had not been that he had to consider Fred Vincy's future,
Mr. Garth would not probably have been glad of any addition to his work,
of which his wife was always fearing an excess for him as he grew older.
But on quitting Bulstrode after that conversation, a very alluring
idea occurred to him about this said letting of Stone Court.
What if Bulstrode would agree to his placing Fred Vincy there
on the understanding that he, Caleb Garth, should be responsible
for the management? It would be an excellent schooling for Fred;
he might make a modest income there, and still have time left to get
knowledge by helping in other business. He mentioned his notion
to Mrs. Garth with such evident delight that she could not bear
to chill his pleasure by expressing her constant fear of his
undertaking too much.
"The lad would be as happy as two," he said, throwing himself
back in his chair, and looking radiant, "if I could tell him it
was all settled. Think; Susan! His mind had been running on
that place for years before old Featherstone died. And it would
be as pretty a turn of things as could be that he should hold
the place in a good industrious way after all--by his taking
to business. For it's likely enough Bulstrode might let him go on,
and gradually buy the stock. He hasn't made up his mind, I can see,
whether or not he shall settle somewhere else as a lasting thing.
I never was better pleased with a notion in my life. And then
the children might be married by-and-by, Susan."
"You will not give any hint of the plan to Fred, until you are
sure that Bulstrode would agree to the plan?" said Mrs. Garth,
in a tone of gentle caution. "And as to marriage, Caleb, we old
people need not help to hasten it."
"Oh, I don't know," said Caleb, swinging his head aside.
"Marriage is a taming thing. Fred would want less of my bit
and bridle. However, I shall say nothing till I know the ground
I'm treading on. I shall speak to Bulstrode again."
He took his earliest opportunity of doing so. Bulstrode had anything
but a warm interest in his nephew Fred Vincy, but he had a strong
wish to secure Mr. Garth's services on many scattered points of
business at which he was sure to be a considerable loser, if they
were under less conscientious management. On that ground he made
no objection to Mr. Garth's proposal; and there was also another
reason why he was not sorry to give a consent which was to benefit
one of the Vincy family. It was that Mrs. Bulstrode, having heard
of Lydgate's debts, had been anxious to know whether her husband could
not do something for poor Rosamond, and had been much troubled on
learning from him that Lydgate's affairs were not easily remediable,
and that the wisest plan was to let them "take their course."
Mrs. Bulstrode had then said for the first time, "I think you are
always a little hard towards my family, Nicholas. And I am sure I
have no reason to deny any of my relatives. Too worldly they may be,
but no one ever had to say that they were not respectable."
"My dear Harriet," said Mr. Bulstrode, wincing under his wife's eyes,
which were filling with tears, "I have supplied your brother
with a great deal of capital. I cannot be expected to take care
of his married children."
That seemed to be true, and Mrs. Bulstrode's remonstrance subsided
into pity for poor Rosamond, whose extravagant education she had
always foreseen the fruits of.
But remembering that dialogue, Mr. Bulstrode felt that when he had
to talk to his wife fully about his plan of quitting Middlemarch,
he should be glad to tell her that he had made an arrangement
which might be for the good of her nephew Fred. At present he had
merely mentioned to her that he thought of shutting up The Shrubs
for a few months, and taking a house on the Southern Coast.
Hence Mr. Garth got the assurance he desired, namely, that in case
of Bulstrode's departure from Middlemarch for an indefinite time,
Fred Vincy should be allowed to have the tenancy of Stone Court on
the terms proposed.
Caleb was so elated with his hope of this "neat turn" being given
to things, that if his self-control had not been braced by a little
affectionate wifely scolding, he would have betrayed everything to Mary,
wanting "to give the child comfort." However, he restrained himself,
and kept in strict privacy from Fred certain visits which he
was making to Stone Court, in order to look more thoroughly into
the state of the land and stock, and take a preliminary estimate.
He was certainly more eager in these visits than the probable speed
of events required him to be; but he was stimulated by a fatherly
delight in occupying his mind with this bit of probable happiness
which he held in store like a hidden birthday gift for Fred and Mary.
"But suppose the whole scheme should turn out to be a castle
in the air?" said Mrs. Garth.
"Well, well," replied Caleb; "the castle will tumble about nobody's head."
