Middlemarch

I.

By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.
—Twelfth Night.

The transactions referred to by Caleb Garth as having gone forward
between Mr. Bulstrode and Mr. Joshua Rigg Featherstone concerning the
land attached to Stone Court, had occasioned the interchange of a
letter or two between these personages.

Who shall tell what may be the effect of writing? If it happens to have
been cut in stone, though it lie face down-most for ages on a forsaken
beach, or “rest quietly under the drums and tramplings of many
conquests,” it may end by letting us into the secret of usurpations and
other scandals gossiped about long empires ago:—this world being
apparently a huge whispering-gallery. Such conditions are often
minutely represented in our petty lifetimes. As the stone which has
been kicked by generations of clowns may come by curious little links
of effect under the eyes of a scholar, through whose labors it may at
last fix the date of invasions and unlock religions, so a bit of ink
and paper which has long been an innocent wrapping or stop-gap may at
last be laid open under the one pair of eyes which have knowledge
enough to turn it into the opening of a catastrophe. To Uriel watching
the progress of planetary history from the sun, the one result would be
just as much of a coincidence as the other.

Having made this rather lofty comparison I am less uneasy in calling
attention to the existence of low people by whose interference, however
little we may like it, the course of the world is very much determined.
It would be well, certainly, if we could help to reduce their number,
and something might perhaps be done by not lightly giving occasion to
their existence. Socially speaking, Joshua Rigg would have been
generally pronounced a superfluity. But those who like Peter
Featherstone never had a copy of themselves demanded, are the very last
to wait for such a request either in prose or verse. The copy in this
case bore more of outside resemblance to the mother, in whose sex
frog-features, accompanied with fresh-colored cheeks and a well-rounded
figure, are compatible with much charm for a certain order of admirers.
The result is sometimes a frog-faced male, desirable, surely, to no
order of intelligent beings. Especially when he is suddenly brought
into evidence to frustrate other people’s expectations—the very lowest
aspect in which a social superfluity can present himself.

But Mr. Rigg Featherstone’s low characteristics were all of the sober,
water-drinking kind. From the earliest to the latest hour of the day he
was always as sleek, neat, and cool as the frog he resembled, and old
Peter had secretly chuckled over an offshoot almost more calculating,
and far more imperturbable, than himself. I will add that his
finger-nails were scrupulously attended to, and that he meant to marry
a well-educated young lady (as yet unspecified) whose person was good,
and whose connections, in a solid middle-class way, were undeniable.
Thus his nails and modesty were comparable to those of most gentlemen;
though his ambition had been educated only by the opportunities of a
clerk and accountant in the smaller commercial houses of a seaport. He
thought the rural Featherstones very simple absurd people, and they in
their turn regarded his “bringing up” in a seaport town as an
exaggeration of the monstrosity that their brother Peter, and still
more Peter’s property, should have had such belongings.

The garden and gravel approach, as seen from the two windows of the
wainscoted parlor at Stone Court, were never in better trim than now,
when Mr. Rigg Featherstone stood, with his hands behind him, looking
out on these grounds as their master. But it seemed doubtful whether he
looked out for the sake of contemplation or of turning his back to a
person who stood in the middle of the room, with his legs considerably
apart and his hands in his trouser-pockets: a person in all respects a
contrast to the sleek and cool Rigg. He was a man obviously on the way
towards sixty, very florid and hairy, with much gray in his bushy
whiskers and thick curly hair, a stoutish body which showed to
disadvantage the somewhat worn joinings of his clothes, and the air of
a swaggerer, who would aim at being noticeable even at a show of
fireworks, regarding his own remarks on any other person’s performance
as likely to be more interesting than the performance itself.

His name was John Raffles, and he sometimes wrote jocosely W.A.G. after
his signature, observing when he did so, that he was once taught by
Leonard Lamb of Finsbury who wrote B.A. after his name, and that he,
Raffles, originated the witticism of calling that celebrated principal
Ba-Lamb. Such were the appearance and mental flavor of Mr. Raffles,
both of which seemed to have a stale odor of travellers’ rooms in the
commercial hotels of that period.

“Come, now, Josh,” he was saying, in a full rumbling tone, “look at it
in this light: here is your poor mother going into the vale of years,
and you could afford something handsome now to make her comfortable.”

“Not while you live. Nothing would make her comfortable while you
live,” returned Rigg, in his cool high voice. “What I give her, you’ll
take.”

“You bear me a grudge, Josh, that I know. But come, now—as between man
and man—without humbug—a little capital might enable me to make a
first-rate thing of the shop. The tobacco trade is growing. I should
cut my own nose off in not doing the best I could at it. I should stick
to it like a flea to a fleece for my own sake. I should always be on
the spot. And nothing would make your poor mother so happy. I’ve pretty
well done with my wild oats—turned fifty-five. I want to settle down in
my chimney-corner. And if I once buckled to the tobacco trade, I could
bring an amount of brains and experience to bear on it that would not
be found elsewhere in a hurry. I don’t want to be bothering you one
time after another, but to get things once for all into the right
channel. Consider that, Josh—as between man and man—and with your poor
mother to be made easy for her life. I was always fond of the old
woman, by Jove!”

“Have you done?” said Mr. Rigg, quietly, without looking away from the
window.

“Yes, I’ve done,” said Raffles, taking hold of his hat which stood
before him on the table, and giving it a sort of oratorical push.

“Then just listen to me. The more you say anything, the less I shall
believe it. The more you want me to do a thing, the more reason I shall
have for never doing it. Do you think I mean to forget your kicking me
when I was a lad, and eating all the best victual away from me and my
mother? Do you think I forget your always coming home to sell and
pocket everything, and going off again leaving us in the lurch? I
should be glad to see you whipped at the cart-tail. My mother was a
fool to you: she’d no right to give me a father-in-law, and she’s been
punished for it. She shall have her weekly allowance paid and no more:
and that shall be stopped if you dare to come on to these premises
again, or to come into this country after me again. The next time you
show yourself inside the gates here, you shall be driven off with the
dogs and the wagoner’s whip.”

As Rigg pronounced the last words he turned round and looked at Raffles
with his prominent frozen eyes. The contrast was as striking as it
could have been eighteen years before, when Rigg was a most unengaging
kickable boy, and Raffles was the rather thick-set Adonis of bar-rooms
and back-parlors. But the advantage now was on the side of Rigg, and
auditors of this conversation might probably have expected that Raffles
would retire with the air of a defeated dog. Not at all. He made a
grimace which was habitual with him whenever he was “out” in a game;
then subsided into a laugh, and drew a brandy-flask from his pocket.

“Come, Josh,” he said, in a cajoling tone, “give us a spoonful of
brandy, and a sovereign to pay the way back, and I’ll go. Honor bright!
I’ll go like a bullet, by Jove!”

“Mind,” said Rigg, drawing out a bunch of keys, “if I ever see you
again, I shan’t speak to you. I don’t own you any more than if I saw a
crow; and if you want to own me you’ll get nothing by it but a
character for being what you are—a spiteful, brassy, bullying rogue.”

“That’s a pity, now, Josh,” said Raffles, affecting to scratch his head
and wrinkle his brows upward as if he were nonplussed. “I’m very fond
of you; by Jove, I am! There’s nothing I like better than plaguing
you—you’re so like your mother, and I must do without it. But the
brandy and the sovereign’s a bargain.”

He jerked forward the flask and Rigg went to a fine old oaken bureau
with his keys. But Raffles had reminded himself by his movement with
the flask that it had become dangerously loose from its leather
covering, and catching sight of a folded paper which had fallen within
the fender, he took it up and shoved it under the leather so as to make
the glass firm.

By that time Rigg came forward with a brandy-bottle, filled the flask,
and handed Raffles a sovereign, neither looking at him nor speaking to
him. After locking up the bureau again, he walked to the window and
gazed out as impassibly as he had done at the beginning of the
interview, while Raffles took a small allowance from the flask, screwed
it up, and deposited it in his side-pocket, with provoking slowness,
making a grimace at his stepson’s back.

“Farewell, Josh—and if forever!” said Raffles, turning back his head as
he opened the door.

Rigg saw him leave the grounds and enter the lane. The gray day had
turned to a light drizzling rain, which freshened the hedgerows and the
grassy borders of the by-roads, and hastened the laborers who were
loading the last shocks of corn. Raffles, walking with the uneasy gait
of a town loiterer obliged to do a bit of country journeying on foot,
looked as incongruous amid this moist rural quiet and industry as if he
had been a baboon escaped from a menagerie. But there were none to
stare at him except the long-weaned calves, and none to show dislike of
his appearance except the little water-rats which rustled away at his
approach.

He was fortunate enough when he got on to the highroad to be overtaken
by the stage-coach, which carried him to Brassing; and there he took
the new-made railway, observing to his fellow-passengers that he
considered it pretty well seasoned now it had done for Huskisson. Mr.
Raffles on most occasions kept up the sense of having been educated at
an academy, and being able, if he chose, to pass well everywhere;
indeed, there was not one of his fellow-men whom he did not feel
himself in a position to ridicule and torment, confident of the
entertainment which he thus gave to all the rest of the company.

He played this part now with as much spirit as if his journey had been
entirely successful, resorting at frequent intervals to his flask. The
paper with which he had wedged it was a letter signed Nicholas
Bulstrode, but Raffles was not likely to disturb it from its present
useful position.