Middlemarch

Eliot opens the chapter with a philosophical meditation on the power of writing — "Who shall tell what may be the effect of writing? If it happens to have been cut in stone..." — preparing us for the apparently trivial detail of a fallen letter that will become catastrophic. She then apologizes for introducing "low people by whose interference, however little we may like it, the course of the world is very much determined." Stone Court, now Rigg Featherstone's property. He stands at the window of the wainscoted parlor with his hands behind him, looking out with cool possession. The contrast in the room is striking: Rigg is sleek, frog-faced, water-drinking, scrupulously groomed — old Peter secretly chuckled that his offshoot was almost more calculating, and far more imperturbable, than himself. Rigg has plans to marry a well-educated young lady (as yet unspecified) and considers the rural Featherstones very simple absurd people. Behind him stands John Raffles — florid, bushy gray whiskers, thick curly hair, an air of a swaggerer "who would aim at being noticeable even at a show of fireworks." Raffles signs himself W.A.G., recalls with relish that he was taught by Leonard Lamb of Finsbury who wrote B.A., and that he originated the witticism of calling him Ba-Lamb. He has "a stale odor of travellers' rooms in the commercial hotels of that period." Raffles tries every lever: he appeals to Rigg's concern for his poor mother, proposes investing in a tobacco shop where he would "stick to it like a flea to a fleece," invokes his experience and brains, claims he has "pretty well done with my wild oats — turned fifty-five." Rigg listens without turning from the window, then delivers his reply: "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." He recites Raffles's record with surgical precision: kicking him as a boy, eating all the best victual, coming home to sell and pocket everything and going off again, leaving them in the lurch. "I should be glad to see you whipped at the cart-tail." Raffles is not defeated in spirit. He makes his habitual grimace when "out" in a game, then subsides into a laugh and draws a brandy-flask. He asks only for a spoonful of brandy and a sovereign. Rigg fetches both from the fine old oaken bureau without looking at him or speaking. Here is the novel's planted detail: Raffles, reaching for his flask, notices it is dangerously loose from its leather covering. Catching sight of a folded paper which has fallen within the fender, he takes it up and shoves it under the leather to make the glass firm. He pockets the flask. Rigg does not see this. Raffles departs, "Farewell, Josh — and if forever!" Rigg watches him leave. Raffles, walking "with the uneasy gait of a town loiterer obliged to do a bit of country journeying on foot," looks "as incongruous amid this moist rural quiet and industry as if he had been a baboon escaped from a menagerie." He reaches the highroad, takes the new-made railway to Brassing, and plays his usual part of well-educated man among his fellow-passengers, remarking that the railway was "pretty well seasoned now it had done for Huskisson." He resorts 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."