This was the consciousness that Bulstrode was withering under while he
made his preparations for departing from Middlemarch, and going to end
his stricken life in that sad refuge, the indifference of new faces.
The duteous merciful constancy of his wife had delivered him from
one dread, but it could not hinder her presence from being still a
tribunal before which he shrank from confession and desired advocacy.
His equivocations with himself about the death of Raffles had
sustained the conception of an Omniscience whom he prayed to,
yet he had a terror upon him which would not let him expose them
to judgment by a full confession to his wife: the acts which he had
washed and diluted with inward argument and motive, and for which it
seemed comparatively easy to win invisible pardon--what name would
she call them by? That she should ever silently call his acts
Murder was what he could not bear. He felt shrouded by her doubt:
he got strength to face her from the sense that she could not yet
feel warranted in pronouncing that worst condemnation on him.
Some time, perhaps--when he was dying--he would tell her all:
in the deep shadow of that time, when she held his hand in the
gathering darkness, she might listen without recoiling from
his touch. Perhaps: but concealment had been the habit of his life,
and the impulse to confession had no power against the dread
of a deeper humiliation.
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