MIDDLEMARCH (Completed)

Chapter 68

"What suit of grace hath Virtue to put on

If Vice shall wear as good, and do as well?

If Wrong, if Craft, if Indiscretion

Act as fair parts with ends as laudable?

Which all this mighty volume of events

The world, the universal map of deeds,

Strongly controls, and proves from all descents,

That the directest course still best succeeds.

For should not grave and learn'd Experience

That looks with the eyes of all the world beside,

And with all ages holds intelligence,

Go safer than Deceit without a guide!

--DANIEL: Musophilus.

That change of plan and shifting of interest which Bulstrode stated

or betrayed in his conversation with Lydgate, had been determined in him

by some severe experience which he had gone through since the epoch

of Mr. Larcher's sale, when Raffles had recognized Will Ladislaw,

and when the banker had in vain attempted an act of restitution

which might move Divine Providence to arrest painful consequences.

His certainty that Raffles, unless he were dead, would return to

Middlemarch before long, had been justified. On Christmas Eve he

had 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 hinder the circumstances of the visit from

compromising himself and alarming his wife. Raffles proved more

unmanageable than he had shown himself to be in his former appearances,

his chronic state of mental restlessness, the growing effect

of habitual intemperance, quickly shaking off every impression

from what was said to him. He insisted on staying in the house,

and Bulstrode, weighing two sets of evils, felt that this was

at least not a worse alternative than his going into the town.

He kept him in his own room for the evening and saw him to bed,

Raffles all the while amusing himself with the annoyance he was

causing this decent and highly prosperous fellow-sinner, an amusement

which he facetiously expressed 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 under this

noisy joking--a cool resolve to extract something the 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