Middlemarch

CHAPTER LXVIII.

The volume opens with Daniel’s question from Musophilus, asking what suit of grace Virtue can put on if Vice shall wear as good and do as well, and affirming that the directest course still best succeeds in the world’s grand volume of deeds. This epigraph shadows the reckoning now overtaking Nicholas Bulstrode. The banker’s recent shifting of plans has been determined by severe experience since the epoch of Mr. Larcher’s sale, when Raffles had recognized Will Ladislaw and Bulstrode had in vain attempted an act of restitution that might move Divine Providence to arrest painful consequences. His certainty that Raffles, unless dead, would return to Middlemarch before long had been justified. On Christmas Eve, the man 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 prevent the visit from compromising himself and alarming his wife. Raffles proved more unmanageable than ever, his chronic restlessness and the growing effect of habitual intemperance quickly shaking off every impression of what was said. He insisted on staying in the house, and Bulstrode, weighing two sets of evils, felt this was at least not worse than his going into town. He kept him in his own room for the evening and saw him to bed, Raffles amusing himself with the annoyance he was causing this decent and highly prosperous fellow-sinner, expressing his amusement 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 beneath this noisy joking—a cool resolve to extract something 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 told his wife he was simply taking care of this wretched creature, the victim of vice, who might otherwise injure himself, implying without direct 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 he was supplying Mrs. Bulstrode with precautionary information and accounting for 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.

In this way Raffles had pushed the torture too far. By showing himself hopelessly unmanageable he had made Bulstrode feel that a strong defiance was the only resource left. After taking Raffles to bed, 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. Bulstrode carried his candle to the bedside of Raffles, who was apparently in a painful dream. He stood silent, hoping the presence of the light would serve to waken the sleeper gradually. 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. A quarter of an hour later Bulstrode, with a cold peremptoriness he had not before shown, said he had ordered the carriage to conduct Raffles to Ilsely, where he could take the railway or await a coach. Raffles was about to speak, but Bulstrode anticipated him imperiously: he would supply money now and from time to time on application by letter, but if Raffles chose to present himself again, to return to Middlemarch, to use his tongue injuriously, he would have to live on whatever his malice could bring him, without help. Nobody would pay him well for blasting Bulstrode’s name; the banker knew the worst that could be done and would brave it. He thrust the door open and told Raffles to get up without noise, or he would send for a policeman. The speech had been deliberated through much of the night, and it succeeded in enforcing submission from the jaded man that morning. His empoisoned system quailed before Bulstrode’s cold, resolute bearing, and he was taken off quietly before the family breakfast time. The servants imagined him a poor relation, not surprised that a strict man like their master should be ashamed of such a cousin. The banker’s drive of ten miles with his hated companion was a dreary beginning of Christmas day, but at the end Raffles had recovered his spirits and parted in contentment, for Bulstrode had given him a hundred pounds. Various motives urged this open-handedness, but Bulstrode did not inquire too closely into all of them.

When he returned to his quiet home, Bulstrode 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. He was only the more conscious of the deposit of uneasy presentiment in his wife’s mind, because she carefully avoided any allusion to it. The certainty that he was watched or measured with hidden suspicion made his voice totter when he was speaking to edification. Foreseeing, to men of his anxious temperament, is often worse than seeing, and his imagination continually heightened the anguish of an imminent disgrace. That recoil had at last urged him to make preparations for quitting Middlemarch. He would then be at a less scorching distance from the contempt of his old neighbors, and in a new scene the tormentor would be less formidable. He made his preparations conditionally, wishing to leave an opening for 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 give up active control of commercial affairs on the ground of his failing health. 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 unnecessary.