Bulstrode felt himself helpless.  Neither threats nor coaxing could avail:  he could not count on any persistent fear nor on any promise.  On the contrary, he felt a cold certainty at his heart that Raffles—­unless providence sent death to hinder him—­ would come back to Middlemarch before long.  And that certainty was a terror.

It was not that he was in danger of legal punishment or of beggary:  he was in danger only of seeing disclosed to the judgment of his neighbors and the mournful perception of his wife certain facts of his past life which would render him an object of scorn and an opprobrium of the religion with which he had diligently associated himself.  The terror of being judged sharpens the memory:  it sends an inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in general phrases.  Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay; but intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past.  With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present:  it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life:  it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

Into this second life Bulstrode’s past had now risen, only the pleasures of it seeming to have lost their quality.  Night and day, without interruption save of brief sleep which only wove retrospect and fear into a fantastic present, he felt the scenes of his earlier life coming between him and everything else, as obstinately as when we look through the window from a lighted room, the objects we turn our backs on are still before us, instead of the grass and the trees The successive events inward and outward were there in one view:  though each might be dwelt on in turn, the rest still kept their hold in the consciousness.

Once more he saw himself the young banker’s clerk, with an agreeable person, as clever in figures as he was fluent in speech and fond of theological definition:  an eminent though young member of a Calvinistic dissenting church at Highbury, having had striking experience in conviction of sin and sense of pardon.  Again he heard himself called for as Brother Bulstrode in prayer meetings, speaking on religious platforms, preaching in private houses.  Again he felt himself thinking of the ministry as possibly his vocation, and inclined towards missionary labor.  That was the happiest time of his life:  that was the spot he would have chosen now to awake in and find the rest a dream.  The people among whom Brother Bulstrode was distinguished were very few, but they were very near to him, and stirred his satisfaction the more; his power stretched through a narrow space, but he felt its effect the more intensely.  He believed without effort in the peculiar work of grace within him, and in the signs that God intended him for special instrumentality.