Mentally surrounded with that past again, Bulstrode had the same pleas--indeed, the years had been perpetually spinning them into intricate thickness, like masses of spider-web, padding the moral sensibility; nay, as age made egoism more eager but less enjoying, his soul had become more saturated with the belief that he did everything for God's sake, being indifferent to it for his own. And yet--if he could be back in that far-off spot with his youthful poverty--why, then he would choose to be a missionary.
But the train of causes in which he had locked himself went on.
There was trouble in the fine villa at Highbury. Years before, the only daughter had run away, defied her parents, and gone on the stage;and now the only boy died, and after a short time Mr. Dunkirk died also.
The wife, a simple pious woman, left with all the wealth in and out of the magnificent trade, of which she never knew the precise nature, had come to believe in Bulstrode, and innocently adore him as women often adore their priest or "man-made" minister. It was natural that after a time marriage should have been thought of between them.
But Mrs. Dunkirk had qualms and yearnings about her daughter, who had long been regarded as lost both to God and her parents.
It was known that the daughter had married, but she was utterly gone out of sight. The mother, having lost her boy, imagined a grandson, and wished in a double sense to reclaim her daughter.
If she were found, there would be a channel for property--perhaps a wide one--in the provision for several grandchildren.
Efforts to find her must be made before Mrs. Dunkirk would marry again.
Bulstrode concurred; but after advertisement as well as other modes of inquiry had been tried, the mother believed that her daughter was not to be found, and consented to marry without reservation of property.
The daughter had been found; but only one man besides Bulstrode knew it, and he was paid for keeping silence and carrying himself away.
That was the bare fact which Bulstrode was now forced to see in the rigid outline with which acts present themselves onlookers.
But for himself at that distant time, and even now in burning memory, the fact was broken into little sequences, each justified as it came by reasonings which seemed to prove it righteous. Bulstrode's course up to that time had, he thought, been sanctioned by remarkable providences, appearing to point the way for him to be the agent in making the best use of a large property and withdrawing it from perversion.
Death and other striking dispositions, such as feminine trustfulness, had come; and Bulstrode would have adopted Cromwell's words--"Do you call these bare events? The Lord pity you!" The events were comparatively small, but the essential condition was there--namely, that they were in favor of his own ends. It was easy for him to settle what was due from him to others by inquiring what were God's intentions with regard to himself. Could it be for God's service that this fortune should in any considerable proportion go to a young woman and her husband who were given up to the lightest pursuits, and might scatter it abroad in triviality--people who seemed to lie outside the path of remarkable providences?
Bulstrode had never said to himself beforehand, "The daughter shall not be found"--nevertheless when the moment came he kept her existence hidden; and when other moments followed, he soothed the mother with consolation in the probability that the unhappy young woman might be no more.
There were hours in which Bulstrode felt that his action was unrighteous; but how could he go back? He had mental exercises, called himself nought laid hold on redemption, and went on in his course of instrumentality. And after five years Death again came to widen his path, by taking away his wife. He did gradually withdraw his capital, but he did not make the sacrifices requisite to put an end to the business, which was carried on for thirteen years afterwards before it finally collapsed. Meanwhile Nicholas Bulstrode had used his hundred thousand discreetly, and was become provincially, solidly important--a banker, a Churchman, a public benefactor; also a sleeping partner in trading concerns, in which his ability was directed to economy in the raw material, as in the case of the dyes which rotted Mr. Vincy's silk. And now, when this respectability had lasted undisturbed for nearly thirty years--when all that preceded it had long lain benumbed in the consciousness--that past had risen and immersed his thought as if with the terrible irruption of a new sense overburthening the feeble being.
Meanwhile, in his conversation with Raffles, he had learned something momentous, something which entered actively into the struggle of his longings and terrors. There, he thought, lay an opening towards spiritual, perhaps towards material rescue.
The spiritual kind of rescue was a genuine need with him. There may be coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and emotions for the sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode was not one of them.
He was simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs, and who had gradually explained the gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs.
If this be hypocrisy, it is a process which shows itself occasionally in us all, to whatever confession we belong, and whether we believe in the future perfection of our race or in the nearest date fixed for the end of the world; whether we regard the earth as a putrefying nidus for a saved remnant, including ourselves, or have a passionate belief in the solidarity of mankind.
The service he could do to the cause of religion had been through life the ground he alleged to himself for his choice of action:
it had been the motive which he had poured out in his prayers.
Who would use money and position better than he meant to use them?
Who could surpass him in self-abhorrence and exaltation of God's cause?
