"Inconsistencies," answered Imlac, "cannot both be right, but imputed to man they may both be true."--Rasselas.
The same night, when Mr. Bulstrode returned from a journey to Brassing on business, his good wife met him in the entrance-hall and drew him into his private sitting-room.
"Nicholas," she said, fixing her honest eyes upon him anxiously, "there has been such a disagreeable man here asking for you--it has made me quite uncomfortable.""What kind of man, my dear," said Mr. Bulstrode, dreadfully certain of the answer.
"A red-faced man with large whiskers, and most impudent in his manner.
He declared he was an old friend of yours, and said you would be sorry not to see him. He wanted to wait for you here, but I told him he could see you at the Bank to-morrow morning. Most impudent he was!--stared at me, and said his friend Nick had luck in wives.
I don't believe he would have gone away, if Blucher had not happened to break his chain and come running round on the gravel--for I was in the garden; so I said, `You'd better go away--the dog is very fierce, and I can't hold him.' Do you really know anything of such a man?""I believe I know who he is, my dear," said Mr. Bulstrode, in his usual subdued voice, "an unfortunate dissolute wretch, whom I helped too much in days gone by. However, I presume you will not be troubled by him again. He will probably come to the Bank--to beg, doubtless."
No more was said on the subject until the next day, when Mr. Bulstrode had returned from the town and was dressing for dinner. His wife, not sure that he was come home, looked into his dressing-room and saw him with his coat and cravat off, leaning one arm on a chest of drawers and staring absently at the ground.
He started nervously and looked up as she entered.
"You look very ill, Nicholas. Is there anything the matter?""I have a good deal of pain in my head," said Mr. Bulstrode, who was so frequently ailing that his wife was always ready to believe in this cause of depression.
"Sit down and let me sponge it with vinegar."Physically Mr. Bulstrode did not want the vinegar, but morally the affectionate attention soothed him. Though always polite, it was his habit to receive such services with marital coolness, as his wife's duty. But to-day, while she was bending over him, he said, "You are very good, Harriet," in a tone which had something new in it to her ear; she did not know exactly what the novelty was, but her woman's solicitude shaped itself into a darting thought that he might be going to have an illness.
"Has anything worried you?" she said. "Did that man come to you at the Bank?""Yes; it was as I had supposed. He is a man who at one time might have done better. But he has sunk into a drunken debauched creature.""Is he quite gone away?" said Mrs. Bulstrode, anxiously but for certain reasons she refrained from adding, "It was very disagreeable to hear him calling himself a friend of yours." At that moment she would not have liked to say anything which implied her habitual consciousness that her husband's earlier connections were not quite on a level with her own. Not that she knew much about them.
That her husband had at first been employed in a bank, that he had afterwards entered into what he called city business and gained a fortune before he was three-and-thirty, that he had married a widow who was much older than himself--a Dissenter, and in other ways probably of that disadvantageous quality usually perceptible in a first wife if inquired into with the dispassionate judgment of a second--was almost as much as she had cared to learn beyond the glimpses which Mr. Bulstrode's narrative occasionally gave of his early bent towards religion, his inclination to be a preacher, and his association with missionary and philanthropic efforts.
She believed in him as an excellent man whose piety carried a peculiar eminence in belonging to a layman, whose influence had turned her own mind toward seriousness, and whose share of perishable good had been the means of raising her own position.
But she also liked to think that it was well in every sense for Mr. Bulstrode to have won the hand of Harriet Vincy;whose family was undeniable in a Middlemarch light--a better light surely than any thrown in London thoroughfares or dissenting chapel-yards. The unreformed provincial mind distrusted London;and while true religion was everywhere saving, honest Mrs. Bulstrode was convinced that to be saved in the Church was more respectable.
She so much wished to ignore towards others that her husband had ever been a London Dissenter, that she liked to keep it out of sight even in talking to him. He was quite aware of this;indeed in some respects he was rather afraid of this ingenuous wife, whose imitative piety and native worldliness were equally sincere, who had nothing to be ashamed of, and whom he had married out of a thorough inclination still subsisting. But his fears were such as belong to a man who cares to maintain his recognized supremacy:
the loss of high consideration from his wife, as from every one else who did not clearly hate him out of enmity to the truth, would be as the beginning of death to him. When she said--"Is he quite gone away?"
"Oh, I trust so," he answered, with an effort to throw as much sober unconcern into his tone as possible!
But in truth Mr. Bulstrode was very far from a state of quiet trust.
In the interview at the Bank, Raffles had made it evident that his eagerness to torment was almost as strong in him as any other greed.
He had frankly said that he had turned out of the way to come to Middlemarch, just to look about him and see whether the neighborhood would suit him to live in. He had certainly had a few debts to pay more than he expected, but the two hundred pounds were not gone yet:
a cool five-and-twenty would suffice him to go away with for the present.
What he had wanted chiefly was to see his friend Nick and family, and know all about the prosperity of a man to whom he was so much attached. By-and-by he might come back for a longer stay.
