Mr. Bulstrode, hoping that the peculiar mixture of joviality and

sneering in Raffles' manner was a good deal the effect of drink, had

determined to wait till he was quite sober before he spent more words

upon him. But he rode home with a terribly lucid vision of the

difficulty there would be in arranging any result that could be

permanently counted on with this man. It was inevitable that he should

wish to get rid of John Raffles, though his reappearance could not be

regarded as lying outside the divine plan. The spirit of evil might

have sent him to threaten Mr. Bulstrode's subversion as an instrument

of good; but the threat must have been permitted, and was a

chastisement of a new kind. It was an hour of anguish for him very

different from the hours in which his struggle had been securely

private, and which had ended with a sense that his secret misdeeds were

pardoned and his services accepted. Those misdeeds even when

committed--had they not been half sanctified by the singleness of his

desire to devote himself and all he possessed to the furtherance of the

divine scheme? And was he after all to become a mere stone of

stumbling and a rock of offence? For who would understand the work

within him? Who would not, when there was the pretext of casting

disgrace upon him, confound his whole life and the truths he had

espoused, in one heap of obloquy?

In his closest meditations the life-long habit of Mr. Bulstrode's mind

clad his most egoistic terrors in doctrinal references to superhuman

ends. But even while we are talking and meditating about the earth's

orbit and the solar system, what we feel and adjust our movements to is

the stable earth and the changing day. And now within all the

automatic succession of theoretic phrases--distinct and inmost as the

shiver and the ache of oncoming fever when we are discussing abstract

pain, was the forecast of disgrace in the presence of his neighbors and

of his own wife. For the pain, as well as the public estimate of

disgrace, depends on the amount of previous profession. To men who

only aim at escaping felony, nothing short of the prisoner's dock is

disgrace. But Mr. Bulstrode had aimed at being an eminent Christian.

It was not more than half-past seven in the morning when he again

reached Stone Court. The fine old place never looked more like a

delightful home than at that moment; the great white lilies were in

flower, the nasturtiums, their pretty leaves all silvered with dew,

were running away over the low stone wall; the very noises all around

had a heart of peace within them. But everything was spoiled for the

owner as he walked on the gravel in front and awaited the descent of

Mr. Raffles, with whom he was condemned to breakfast.




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