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.
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