, and his anxiety to
carry out the doctor's orders. He did carry them out faithfully,
although Raffles was incessantly asking for brandy, and declaring that
he was sinking away--that the earth was sinking away from under him.
He was restless and sleepless, but still quailing and manageable. On
the offer of the food ordered by Lydgate, which he refused, and the
denial of other things which he demanded, he seemed to concentrate all
his terror on Bulstrode, imploringly deprecating his anger, his revenge
on him by starvation, and declaring with strong oaths that he had never
told any mortal a word against him. Even this Bulstrode felt that he
would not have liked Lydgate to hear; but a more alarming sign of
fitful alternation in his delirium was, that in-the morning twilight
Raffles suddenly seemed to imagine a doctor present, addressing him and
declaring that Bulstrode wanted to starve him to death out of revenge
for telling, when he never had told.

Bulstrode's native imperiousness and strength of determination served
him well. This delicate-looking man, himself nervously perturbed,
found the needed stimulus in his strenuous circumstances, and through
that difficult night and morning, while he had the air of an animated
corpse returned to movement without warmth, holding the mastery by its
chill impassibility his mind was intensely at work thinking of what he
had to guard against and what would win him security. Whatever prayers
he might lift up, whatever statements he might inwardly make of this
man's wretched spiritual condition, and the duty he himself was under
to submit to the punishment divinely appointed for him rather than to
wish for evil to another--through all this effort to condense words
into a solid mental state, there pierced and spread with irresistible
vividness the images of the events he desired. And in the train of
those images came their apology. He could not but see the death of
Raffles, and see in it his own deliverance. What was the removal of
this wretched creature? He was impenitent--but were not public
criminals impenitent?--yet the law decided on their fate. Should
Providence in this case award death, there was no sin in contemplating
death as the desirable issue--if he kept his hands from hastening
it--if he scrupulously did what was prescribed. Even here there might
be a mistake: human prescriptions were fallible things: Lydgate had
said that treatment had hastened death,--why not