Middlemarch

Among the affairs Bulstrode had to care for was the management of the farm at Stone Court. He had consulted Caleb Garth, who advised him not to trust to a mere bailiff but to let the land, stock, and implements yearly. Bulstrode asked whether he might trust Caleb to find a tenant on these terms. After quitting Bulstrode, a very alluring idea occurred to Caleb about this letting of Stone Court. What if Bulstrode would agree to his placing Fred Vincy there on the understanding that Caleb should be responsible for the management? It would be excellent schooling for Fred; he might make a modest income there and still have time left to help in other business. He mentioned the 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. Bulstrode made no objection to Mr. Garth’s proposal, partly to secure his conscientious services, and partly because Mrs. Bulstrode, having heard of Lydgate’s debts, had been anxious to know whether her husband could not do something for poor Rosamond. Mr. Bulstrode felt that when he had to talk to his wife fully about quitting Middlemarch, he should be glad to tell her he had made an arrangement which might be for the good of her nephew Fred.

CHAPTER LXIX.

The chapter opens with a maxim from Ecclesiasticus: if thou hast heard a word, let it die with thee. Mr. Bulstrode was still seated in his manager’s room at the Bank, about three o’clock of the same day on which he had received Lydgate there, when the clerk entered to say his horse was waiting and Mr. Garth was outside begging to speak with him. Caleb entered with his slow swing of head, looking at the ground, letting his long fingers droop between his legs. Bulstrode expected him to recur to buying houses in Blindman’s Court for the sake of pulling them down. Instead, Caleb spoke in a subdued voice: he had just come away from Stone Court. There was something wrong—a stranger very ill. His name was Raffles. Bulstrode’s whole frame received the shock. The certainty he had thought too constantly on the watch to be taken by surprise had been mistaken. “Poor wretch!” he said in a compassionate tone, though his lips trembled a little. Caleb had taken the man himself in his gig; he had come down from the coach and was walking beyond the turning from the toll-house, and Caleb overtook him. He remembered seeing Caleb with Bulstrode once before at Stone Court. Caleb thought Bulstrode should lose no time in getting advice for him. Bulstrode wrote a note and sent his man on the horse to the Hospital with a note for Lydgate, then said he would himself ride to Stone Court. He longed for some confirmation that Garth might wonder at this disreputable fellow’s claiming intimacy with him, but he would know nothing. And Garth was friendly to him—Bulstrode could be of use to him.

Caleb, however, said he must request Bulstrode to put his business into some other hands than his own. He wished to say that he must give it up. A sharp certainty entered like a stab into Bulstrode’s soul. This was sudden; but it was quite fixed. Bulstrode asked if he had been led to this by slanders uttered by that unhappy creature. Caleb said that was true; he could not deny that he acted upon what he heard from him. He was a conscientious man, accountable to God, who would not wish to injure Bulstrode by being too ready to believe a slander. That was a poor reason for giving up a connection mutually beneficial. Caleb said he would injure no man if he could help it, but he was obliged to believe that Raffles had told him the truth, and he could not be happy in working with him or profiting by him. It hurt his mind. Bulstrode, casting about for pleas, said Caleb must at least claim to know the worst that had been told him. Caleb waved his hand: what he had said would never pass from his lips unless something now unknown forced it from him. Bulstrode cried out that Caleb made his life harder by turning his back. Caleb, lifting his hand, said he was forced to do it; he was sorry; he did not judge Bulstrode. A man might do wrong, and his will might rise clear out of it, though he could not get his life clear. That was a bad punishment. But he had that feeling inside him that he could not go on working with him. Everything else was buried, so far as his will went.

Some hours later at home, Caleb said to his wife incidentally that he had had some little differences with Bulstrode, and in consequence had given up all notion of taking Stone Court and indeed had resigned doing further business for him. Mrs. Garth imagined her husband had been touched on his sensitive point and not been allowed to do what he thought right as to materials and modes. Caleb bowed his head and waved his hand gravely, and Mrs. Garth knew this was a sign of his not intending to speak further.

Bulstrode almost immediately mounted his horse and set off for Stone Court, being anxious to arrive before Lydgate. His mind was crowded with images and conjectures. The deep humiliation with which he had winced under Caleb’s knowledge of his past alternated with the sense of safety in the fact that Garth, and no other, had been the man to whom Raffles had spoken. Providence seemed to intend his rescue. If it should turn out he was freed from all danger of disgrace, his life should be more consecrated than before. He mentally lifted up this vow as if it would urge the result he longed for. He knew that he ought to say, “Thy will be done,” and he said it often. But the intense desire remained that the will of God might be the death of that hated man. Yet when he arrived at Stone Court he could not see the change in Raffles without a shock. But for his pallor and feebleness, Bulstrode would have called the change in him entirely mental. Instead of his loud tormenting mood, Raffles showed an intense, vague terror, deprecating Bulstrode’s anger because the money was all gone—he had been robbed. Bulstrode, not knowing the significance of these symptoms, interpreted this new nervous susceptibility into a means of alarming Raffles into true confessions, and taxed him with falsehood in saying he had not told anything, since he had just told the man who took him up in his gig. Raffles denied this with solemn adjurations; the fact being that the links of consciousness were interrupted in him, and his narrative to Caleb had been delivered under visionary impulses which had dropped back into darkness. Bulstrode’s heart sank again at this sign that he could get no grasp over the wretched man’s mind.