“Can that man be going to sell the land just left him—which he has taken the name for?” said Mrs. Garth.
“Deuce knows,” said Caleb, who never referred the knowledge of discreditable doings to any higher power than the deuce. “But Bulstrode has long been wanting to get a handsome bit of land under his fingers—that I know. And it’s a difficult matter to get, in this part of the country.”
Caleb scattered his snuff carefully instead of taking it, and then added, “The ins and outs of things are curious. Here is the land they’ve been all along expecting for Fred, which it seems the old man never meant to leave him a foot of, but left it to this side-slip of a son that he kept in the dark, and thought of his sticking there and vexing everybody as well as he could have vexed ’em himself if he could have kept alive. I say, it would be curious if it got into Bulstrode’s hands after all. The old man hated him, and never would bank with him.”
“What reason could the miserable creature have for hating a man whom he had nothing to do with?” said Mrs. Garth.
“Pooh! where’s the use of asking for such fellows’ reasons? The soul of man,” said Caleb, with the deep tone and grave shake of the head which always came when he used this phrase—“The soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof.”
It was one of Caleb’s quaintnesses, that in his difficulty of finding speech for his thought, he caught, as it were, snatches of diction which he associated with various points of view or states of mind; and whenever he had a feeling of awe, he was haunted by a sense of Biblical phraseology, though he could hardly have given a strict quotation.
CHAPTER XLI.
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.