I've got a complaint that makes me a little dilatory. I thought you were trading and praying away in London still, and didn't find you there.
But you see I was sent to you, Nick--perhaps for a blessing to both of us."Mr. Raffles ended with a jocose snuffle: no man felt his intellect more superior to religious cant. And if the cunning which calculates on the meanest feelings in men could be, called intellect, he had his share, for under the blurting rallying tone with which he spoke to Bulstrode, there was an evident selection of statements, as if they had been so many moves at chess. Meanwhile Bulstrode had determined on his move, and he said, with gathered resolution--"You will do well to reflect, Mr. Raffles, that it is possible for a man to overreach himself in the effort to secure undue advantage.
Although I am not in any way bound to you, I am willing to supply you with a regular annuity--in quarterly payments--so long as you fulfil a promise to remain at a distance from this neighborhood.
It is in your power to choose. If you insist on remaining here, even for a short time, you will get nothing from me. I shall decline to know you.""Ha, ha!" said Raffles, with an affected explosion, "that reminds me of a droll dog of a thief who declined to know the constable.""Your allusions are lost on me sir," said Bulstrode, with white heat;"the law has no hold on me either through your agency or any other.""You can't understand a joke, my good fellow. I only meant that I should never decline to know you. But let us be serious.
Your quarterly payment won't quite suit me. I like my *******."Here Raffles rose and stalked once or twice up and down the room, swinging his leg, and assuming an air of masterly meditation.
At last he stopped opposite Bulstrode, and said, "I'll tell you what! Give us a couple of hundreds--come, that's modest--and I'll go away--honor bright!--pick up my portmanteau and go away.
But I shall not give up my Liberty for a dirty annuity. I shall come and go where I like. Perhaps it may suit me to stay away, and correspond with a friend; perhaps not. Have you the money with you?""No, I have one hundred," said Bulstrode, feeling the immediate riddance too great a relief to be rejected on the ground of future uncertainties.
"I will forward you the other if you will mention an address.""No, I'll wait here till you bring it," said Raffles. "I'll take a stroll and have a snack, and you'll be back by that time."Mr. Bulstrode's sickly body, shattered by the agitations he had gone through since the last evening, made him feel abjectly in the power of this loud invulnerable man. At that moment he snatched at a temporary repose to be won on any terms.
He was rising to do what Raffles suggested, when the latter said, lifting up his finger as if with a sudden recollection--"I did have another look after Sarah again, though I didn't tell you; I'd a tender conscience about that pretty young woman.
I didn't find her, but I found out her husband's name, and I made a note of it. But hang it, I lost my pocketbook. However, if Iheard it, I should know it again. I've got my faculties as if Iwas in my prime, but names wear out, by Jove! Sometimes I'm no better than a confounded tax-paper before the names are filled in.
However, if I hear of her and her family, you shall know, Nick.
You'd like to do something for her, now she's your step-daughter.""Doubtless," said Mr. Bulstrode, with the usual steady look of his light-gray eyes; "though that might reduce my power of assisting you."As he walked out of the room, Raffles winked slowly at his back, and then turned towards the window to watch the banker riding away--virtually at his command. His lips first curled with a smile and then opened with a short triumphant laugh.
"But what the deuce was the name?" he presently said, half aloud, scratching his head, and wrinkling his brows horizontally. He had not really cared or thought about this point of forgetfulness until it occurred to him in his invention of annoyances for Bulstrode.
"It began with L; it was almost all l's I fancy," he went on, with a sense that he was getting hold of the slippery name.
But the hold was too slight, and he soon got tired of this mental chase;for few men were more impatient of private occupation or more in need of ****** themselves continually heard than Mr. Raffles.
He preferred using his time in pleasant conversation with the bailiff and the housekeeper, from whom he gathered as much as he wanted to know about Mr. Bulstrode's position in Middlemarch.
After all, however, there was a dull space of time which needed relieving with bread and cheese and ale, and when he was seated alone with these resources in the wainscoted parlor, he suddenly slapped his knee, and exclaimed, "Ladislaw!" That action of memory which he had tried to set going, and had abandoned in despair, had suddenly completed itself without conscious effort--a common experience, agreeable as a completed sneeze, even if the name remembered is of no value.
Raffles immediately took out his pocket-book, and wrote down the name, not because he expected to use it, but merely for the sake of not being at a loss if he ever did happen to want it. He was not going to tell Bulstrode: there was no actual good in telling, and to a mind like that of Mr. Raffles there is always probable good in a secret.
He was satisfied with his present success, and by three o'clock that day he had taken up his portmanteau at the turnpike and mounted the coach, relieving Mr. Bulstrode's eyes of an ugly black spot on the landscape at Stone Court, but not relieving him of the dread that the black spot might reappear and become inseparable even from the vision of his hearth.
