Chapter: "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.

Having made this rather lofty comparison I am less uneasy in calling
attention to the existence of low people by whose interference, however
little we may like it, the course of the world is very much determined.
It would be well, certainly, if we could help to reduce their number,
and something might perhaps be done by not lightly giving occasion to
their existence.  Socially speaking, Joshua Rigg would have been
generally pronounced a superfluity.  But those who like Peter
Featherstone never had a copy of themselves demanded, are the very last
to wait for such a request either in prose or verse.  The copy in this
case bore more of outside resemblance to the mother, in whose sex
frog-features, accompanied with fresh-colored cheeks and a well-rounded
figure, are compatible with much charm for a certain order of admirers.
The result is sometimes a frog-faced male, desirable, surely, to no
order of intelligent beings.  Especially when he is suddenly brought
into evidence to frustrate other people's expectations--the very
lowest aspect in which a social superfluity can present himself.

But Mr. Rigg Featherstone's low characteristics were all of the sober,
water-drinking kind.  From the earliest to the latest hour of the day
he was always as sleek, neat, and cool as the frog he resembled, and
old Peter had secretly chuckled over an offshoot almost more
calculating, and far more imperturbable, than himself.  I will add that
his finger-nails were scrupulously attended to, and that he meant to
marry a well-educated young lady (as yet unspecified) whose person was
good, and whose connections, in a solid middle-class way, were
undeniable.  Thus his nails and modesty were comparable to those of
most gentlemen; though his ambition had been educated only by the
opportunities of a clerk and accountant in the smaller commercial
houses of a seaport.  He thought the rural Featherstones very simple
absurd people, and they in their turn regarded his "bringing up" in a
seaport town as an exaggeration of the monstrosity that their brother
Peter, and still more Peter's property, should have had such belongings.

The garden and gravel approach, as seen from the two windows of the
wainscoted parlor at Stone Court, were never in better trim than now,
when Mr. Rigg Featherstone stood, with his hands behind him, looking
out on these grounds as their master.  But it seemed doubtful whether
he looked out for the sake of contemplation or of turning his back to a
person who stood in the middle of the room, with his legs considerably
apart and his hands in his trouser-pockets: a person in all respects a
contrast to the sleek and cool Rigg.  He was a man obviously on the way
towards sixty, very florid and hairy, with much gray in his bushy
whiskers and thick curly hair, a stoutish body which showed to
disadvantage the somewhat worn joinings of his clothes, and the air of
a swaggerer, who would aim at being noticeable even at a show of
fireworks, regarding his own remarks on any other person's performance
as likely to be more interesting than the performance itself.

His name was John Raffles, and he sometimes wrote jocosely W.A.G.
after his signature, observing when he did so, that he was once taught
by Leonard Lamb of Finsbury who wrote B.A. after his name, and that he,
Raffles, originated the witticism of calling that celebrated principal
Ba-Lamb. Such were the appearance and mental flavor of Mr. Raffles,
both of which seemed to have a stale odor of travellers' rooms in the
commercial hotels of that period.

"Come, now, Josh," he was saying, in a full rumbling tone, "look at it
in this light: here is your poor mother going into the vale of years,
and you could afford something handsome now to make her comfortable."

"Not while you live.  Nothing would make her comfortable while you
live," returned Rigg, in his cool high voice.  "What I give her, you'll
take."

"You bear me a grudge, Josh, that I know.  But come, now--as between
man and man--without humbug--a little capital might enable me to make a
first-rate thing of the shop.  The tobacco trade is growing.  I should
cut my own nose off in not doing the best I could at it.  I should
stick to it like a flea to a fleece for my own sake.  I should always
be on the spot.  And nothing would make your poor mother so happy.
I've pretty well done with my wild oats--turned fifty-five. I want to
settle down in my chimney-corner. And if I once buckled to the tobacco
trade, I could bring an amount of brains and experience to bear on it
that would not be found elsewhere in a hurry.  I don't want to be
bothering you one time after another, but to get things once for all
into the right channel.  Consider that, Josh--as between man and
man--and with your poor mother to be made easy for her life.  I was
always fond of the old woman, by Jove!"

"Have you done?" said Mr. Rigg, quietly, without looking away from the
window.

"Yes, I've done," said Raffles, taking hold of his hat which stood
before him on the table, and giving it a sort of oratorical push.

"Then just listen to me.  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.  Do you think I mean to forget your
kicking me when I was a lad, and eating all the best victual away from
me and my mother?  Do you think I forget your always coming home to
sell and pocket everything, and going off again leaving us in the
lurch?  I should be glad to see you whipped at the cart-tail.  My
mother was a fool to you: she'd no right to give me a father-in-law,
and she's been punished for it.  She shall have her weekly allowance
paid and no more: and that shall be stopped if you dare to come on to
these premises again, or to come into this country after me again.  The
next time you show yourself inside the gates here, you shall be driven
off with the dogs and the wagoner's whip."

As Rigg pronounced the last words he turned round and looked at Raffles
with his prominent frozen eyes.  The contrast was as striking as it
could have been eighteen years before, when Rigg was a most unengaging
kickable boy, and Raffles was the rather thick-set Adonis of bar-rooms
and back-parlors. But the advantage now was on the side of Rigg, and
auditors of this conversation might probably have expected that Raffles
would retire with the air of a defeated dog.  Not at all.  He made a
grimace which was habitual with him whenever he was "out" in a game;
then subsided into a laugh, and drew a brandy-flask from his pocket.

"Come, Josh," he said, in a cajoling tone, "give us a spoonful of
brandy, and a sovereign to pay the way back, and I'll go.  Honor
bright!  I'll go like a bullet, _by_ Jove!"

"Mind," said Rigg, drawing out a bunch of keys, "if I ever see you
again, I shan't speak to you.  I don't own you any more than if I saw a
crow; and if you want to own me you'll get nothing by it but a
character for being what you are--a spiteful, brassy, bullying rogue."

"That's a pity, now, Josh," said Raffles, affecting to scratch his head
and wrinkle his brows upward as if he were nonplussed.  "I'm very fond
of you; _by_ Jove, I am!  There's nothing I like better than plaguing
you--you're so like your mother, and I must do without it.  But the
brandy and the sovereign's a bargain."

He jerked forward the flask and Rigg went to a fine old oaken bureau
with his keys.  But Raffles had reminded himself by his movement with
the flask that it had become dangerously loose from its leather
covering, and catching sight of a folded paper which had fallen within
the fender, he took it up and shoved it under the leather so as to make
the glass firm.

By that time Rigg came forward with a brandy-bottle, filled the flask,
and handed Raffles a sovereign, neither looking at him nor speaking to
him.  After locking up the bureau again, he walked to the window and
gazed out as impassibly as he had done at the beginning of the
interview, while Raffles took a small allowance from the flask, screwed
it up, and deposited it in his side-pocket, with provoking slowness,
making a grimace at his stepson's back.

"Farewell, Josh--and if forever!" said Raffles, turning back his head
as he opened the door.

Rigg saw him leave the grounds and enter the lane.  The gray day had
turned to a light drizzling rain, which freshened the hedgerows and the
grassy borders of the by-roads, and hastened the laborers who were
loading the last shocks of corn.  Raffles, walking with the uneasy gait
of a town loiterer obliged to do a bit of country journeying on foot,
looked as incongruous amid this moist rural quiet and industry as if he
had been a baboon escaped from a menagerie.  But there were none to
stare at him except the long-weaned calves, and none to show dislike of
his appearance except the little water-rats which rustled away at his
approach.

He was fortunate enough when he got on to the highroad to be overtaken
by the stage-coach, which carried him to Brassing; and there he took
the new-made railway, observing to his fellow-passengers that he
considered it pretty well seasoned now it had done for Huskisson.  Mr.
Raffles on most occasions kept up the sense of having been educated at
an academy, and being able, if he chose, to pass well everywhere;
indeed, there was not one of his fellow-men whom he did not feel
himself in a position to ridicule and torment, confident of the
entertainment which he thus gave to all the rest of the company.

He played this part now with as much spirit as if his journey had been
entirely successful, resorting 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.

 Both Bulstrode and Rigg have asked Caleb to value the land attached to stone court. Some letters have passed between the first two on the same subject. Rigg is an unattractive looking man, a quality stressed by the disappointed heirs of Old Featherstone. Yet he was a sober, calm person with no known vices. Being from the city, he looked on the Middlemarchers as "simple, absurd people" and they in turn viewed him as sinister. The scene described in this chapter takes place in Riggs parlor at Stone Court. He stands with his back towards an elderly, seedy-looking, whiskered man. The seedy man, called John Raffles, is Rigg's despised stepfather. He has come to Middlemarch to try and cadge some money off Rigg, in the name of his elderly mother. Rigg is unmoved, refuses to pay him anything and says his mother will get only a weekly allowance from him. Finally, he gets rid of Raffles by giving him a bottle of brandy and one gold sovereign. While leaving, Raffles picks up a paper lying on the floor and uses it to fix the loose cover of his brandy-flask. The paper bears Bulstrodes signature.

