 Court was anything less than the chief
good in his estimation, and he had certainly wished to call it his own. But as
Warren Hastings looked at gold and thought of buying Daylesford, so Joshua Rigg
looked at Stone Court and thought of buying gold. He had a very distinct and
intense vision of his chief good, the vigorous greed which he had inherited
having taken a special form by dint of circumstance: and his chief good was to
be a money-changer. From his earliest employment as an errand-boy in a seaport,
he had looked through the windows of the money-changers as other boys look
through the windows of the pastry-cooks; the fascination had wrought itself
gradually into a deep special passion; he meant, when he had property, to do
many things, one of them being to marry a genteel young person; but these were
all accidents and joys that imagination could dispense with. The one joy after
which his soul thirsted was to have a money-changer's shop on a much-frequented
quay, to have locks all round him of which he held the keys, and to look
sublimely cool as he handled the breeding coins of all nations, while helpless
Cupidity looked at him enviously from the other side of an iron lattice. The
strength of that passion had been a power enabling him to master all the
knowledge necessary to gratify it. And when others were thinking that he had
settled at Stone Court for life, Joshua himself was thinking that the moment now
was not far off when he should settle on the North Quay with the best
appointments in safes and locks.
    Enough. We are concerned with looking at Joshua Rigg's sale of his land from
Mr. Bulstrode's point of view, and he interpreted it as a cheering dispensation
conveying perhaps a sanction to a purpose which he had for some time entertained
without external encouragement; he interpreted it thus, but not too confidently,
offering up his thanksgiving in guarded phraseology. His doubts did not arise
from the possible relations of the event to Joshua Rigg's destiny, which
belonged to the unmapped regions not taken under the providential government,
except perhaps in an imperfect colonial way; but they arose from reflecting that
this dispensation too might be a chastisement for himself, as Mr. Farebrother's
induction to the living clearly was.
    This was not what Mr. Bulstrode said to any man for the sake of deceiving
him: it was what he said to himself - it was as genuinely his mode of explaining
events as any theory of yours may be, if you happen to disagree with him
