Middlemarch

CHAPTER LXI.

The evening that Mr. Bulstrode returned from Brassing, his wife Harriet met him in the entrance-hall with an anxious face. A red-faced, whiskered man had come to the house asking for him, she said, declaring himself an old friend and behaving with the most impudent assurance. She had put him off, mentioning that Mr. Bulstrode could be seen at the Bank the next morning, and only the lucky arrival of Blucher the mastiff on the gravel had hurried the unwelcome caller away. Bulstrode listened, dreadfully certain of who the man was. He had helped him too much in days gone by, he said, an unfortunate dissolute wretch. But in truth his heart was heavy with knowledge.

At the Bank the next day, the man, John Raffles, made himself odiously comfortable. He had come to Middlemarch, he said, just to see whether the neighborhood would suit him to live in. He was not quite out of money yet, but a cool five-and-twenty would suffice him to go away with for the present. Bulstrode felt helpless. Neither threats nor coaxing could avail, and he carried away with him a cold certainty at his heart that Raffles would come back before long. He was not 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.

That night and the days that followed, the scenes of his earlier life came between him and everything else, obstinately, as when we look through the window from a lighted room and the objects we turn our backs on are still before us. He saw himself again the young banker’s clerk at Highbury, eloquent in prayer meetings, marked for promotion, intimate at the fine villa of Mr. Dunkirk, the richest man in the congregation. Then came the moment of transition, the offer of a confidential accountant’s place in Dunkirk’s magnificent business, a pawnbroker’s of the most prosperous sort, with its sources of profit so easy and so unexamined. He remembered his first moments of shrinking, and how he had argued them away. The daughter of the house had run away and gone on the stage; the only son died; Dunkirk himself died, leaving the simple pious wife to adore the young man who managed her affairs. She had qualms about her daughter, wished her found, would have made provision for her if she could be traced. Bulstrode concurred in the search, but it happened that the daughter had been found, and only one other man besides himself knew it, and that man was paid for silence and absence. He had never said to himself beforehand, “The daughter shall not be found,” yet when the moment came he kept her existence hidden, soothed the mother with consolations, and after five years Death again came to widen his path by taking away his wife. He did gradually withdraw his capital, but he did not make the sacrifices requisite to put an end to the business, which carried on for thirteen years before it finally collapsed. And now, when this respectability had lasted undisturbed for nearly thirty years, that past had risen and immersed his thought as if with the terrible irruption of a new sense.

There might be, he thought, an opening towards spiritual, perhaps towards material rescue. That evening he wrote to Will Ladislaw, begging him to come to the Shrubs at nine o’clock for a private interview. When Will arrived and was shown into the private room, he was struck with the painfully worn look on the banker’s face. Bulstrode spoke in subdued, formal tones. He had a communication of a sacredly confidential nature to make. Will’s mother, he said, was Sarah Dunkirk, who had run away from her friends to go on the stage. That mother became his wife. “You have a claim on me, Mr. Ladislaw,” he continued, trembling: “not a legal claim, but one which my conscience recognizes. I was enriched by that marriage, a result which would probably not have taken place if your grandmother could have discovered her daughter. I wish to make amends by allowing you five hundred pounds yearly during my life, and to leave you a proportional capital at my death.”

But Will, who had been smarting under the clear hints of Raffles, and whose natural quickness was stimulated by the expectation of discoveries he would gladly have conjured back into darkness, looked stubborn, his lip pouting, his fingers in his side-pockets. “Were you connected with the business by which that fortune was originally made?” he asked. And when Bulstrode falteringly confessed he was, and Will demanded whether that business was not a thoroughly dishonorable one, Bulstrode’s intense pride and habit of supremacy overpowered penitence. He answered with quick defiantness, “The business was established before I became connected with it, sir; nor is it for you to institute an inquiry of that kind.”

Will started up with his hat in his hand. “It is eminently mine to ask such questions when I have to decide whether I will have transactions with you and accept your money. My unblemished honor is important to me. It is important to me to have no stain on my birth and connections. You shall keep your ill-gotten money.” He was out of the room in an instant, and in another the hall-door had closed behind him. As for Bulstrode, when Will was gone he suffered a violent reaction, and wept like a woman. It was the first time he had encountered open expression of scorn from any man higher than Raffles.