The Mill on the Floss (12 page)

"Oh,
I
say nothing," said Mrs. Glegg, sarcastically.
"My advice has never been asked, and I don't give it."

"It'll be the first time, then," said Mr. Tulliver. "It's the
only thing you're over-ready at giving."

"I've been over-ready at lending, then, if I haven't been
over-ready at giving," said Mrs. Glegg. "There's folks I've lent
money to, as perhaps I shall repent o' lending money to kin."

"Come, come, come," said Mr. Glegg, soothingly. But Mr. Tulliver
was not to be hindered of his retort.

"You've got a bond for it, I reckon," he said; "and you've had
your five per cent, kin or no kin."

"Sister," said Mrs. Tulliver, pleadingly, "drink your wine, and
let me give you some almonds and raisins."

"Bessy, I'm sorry for you," said Mrs. Glegg, very much with the
feeling of a cur that seizes the opportunity of diverting his bark
toward the man who carries no stick. "It's poor work talking o'
almonds and raisins."

"Lors, sister Glegg, don't be so quarrelsome," said Mrs. Pullet,
beginning to cry a little. "You may be struck with a fit, getting
so red in the face after dinner, and we are but just out o'
mourning, all of us,–and all wi' gowns craped alike and just put
by; it's very bad among sisters."

"I should think it
is
bad," said Mrs. Glegg. "Things
are come to a fine pass when one sister invites the other to her
house o' purpose to quarrel with her and abuse her."

"Softly, softly, Jane; be reasonable, be reasonable," said Mr.
Glegg.

But while he was speaking, Mr. Tulliver, who had by no means
said enough to satisfy his anger, burst out again.

"Who wants to quarrel with you?" he said. "It's you as can't let
people alone, but must be gnawing at 'em forever.
I
should
never want to quarrel with any woman if she kept her place."

"My place, indeed!" said Mrs. Glegg, getting rather more shrill.
"There's your betters, Mr. Tulliver, as are dead and in their
grave, treated me with a different sort o' respect to what you do;
though
I've got a husband as'll sit by and see me abused
by them as 'ud never ha' had the chance if there hadn't been them
in our family as married worse than they might ha' done."

"If you talk o' that," said Mr. Tulliver, "my family's as good
as yours, and better, for it hasn't got a damned ill-tempered woman
in it!"

"Well," said Mrs. Glegg, rising from her chair, "I don't know
whether you think it's a fine thing to sit by and hear me swore at,
Mr. Glegg; but I'm not going to stay a minute longer in this house.
You can stay behind, and come home with the gig, and I'll walk
home."

"Dear heart, dear heart!" said Mr. Glegg in a melancholy tone,
as he followed his wife out of the room.

"Mr. Tulliver, how could you talk so?" said Mrs. Tulliver, with
the tears in her eyes.

"Let her go," said Mr. Tulliver, too hot to be damped by any
amount of tears. "Let her go, and the sooner the better; she won't
be trying to domineer over
me
again in a hurry."

"Sister Pullet," said Mrs. Tulliver, helplessly, "do you think
it 'ud be any use for you to go after her and try to pacify
her?"

"Better not, better not," said Mr. Deane. "You'll make it up
another day."

"Then, sisters, shall we go and look at the children?" said Mrs.
Tulliver, drying her eyes.

No proposition could have been more seasonable. Mr. Tulliver
felt very much as if the air had been cleared of obtrusive flies
now the women were out of the room. There were few things he liked
better than a chat with Mr. Deane, whose close application to
business allowed the pleasure very rarely. Mr. Deane, he
considered, was the "knowingest" man of his acquaintance, and he
had besides a ready causticity of tongue that made an agreeable
supplement to Mr. Tulliver's own tendency that way, which had
remained in rather an inarticulate condition. And now the women
were gone, they could carry on their serious talk without frivolous
interruption. They could exchange their views concerning the Duke
of Wellington, whose conduct in the Catholic Question had thrown
such an entirely new light on his character; and speak slightingly
of his conduct at the battle of Waterloo, which he would never have
won if there hadn't been a great many Englishmen at his back, not
to speak of Blucher and the Prussians, who, as Mr. Tulliver had
heard from a person of particular knowledge in that matter, had
come up in the very nick of time; though here there was a slight
dissidence, Mr. Deane remarking that he was not disposed to give
much credit to the Prussians,–the build of their vessels, together
with the unsatisfactory character of transactions in Dantzic beer,
inclining him to form rather a low view of Prussian pluck
generally. Rather beaten on this ground, Mr. Tulliver proceeded to
express his fears that the country could never again be what it
used to be; but Mr. Deane, attached to a firm of which the returns
were on the increase, naturally took a more lively view of the
present, and had some details to give concerning the state of the
imports, especially in hides and spelter, which soothed Mr.
Tulliver's imagination by throwing into more distant perspective
the period when the country would become utterly the prey of
Papists and Radicals, and there would be no more chance for honest
men.

Uncle Pullet sat by and listened with twinkling eyes to these
high matters. He didn't understand politics himself,–thought they
were a natural gift,–but by what he could make out, this Duke of
Wellington was no better than he should be.

Chapter VIII
Mr. Tulliver Shows His Weaker Side

"Suppose sister Glegg should call her money in; it 'ud be very
awkward for you to have to raise five hundred pounds now," said
Mrs. Tulliver to her husband that evening, as she took a plaintive
review of the day.

Mrs. Tulliver had lived thirteen years with her husband, yet she
retained in all the freshness of her early married life a facility
of saying things which drove him in the opposite direction to the
one she desired. Some minds are wonderful for keeping their bloom
in this way, as a patriarchal goldfish apparently retains to the
last its youthful illusion that it can swim in a straight line
beyond the encircling glass. Mrs. Tulliver was an amiable fish of
this kind, and after running her head against the same resisting
medium for thirteen years would go at it again to-day with undulled
alacrity.

This observation of hers tended directly to convince Mr.
Tulliver that it would not be at all awkward for him to raise five
hundred pounds; and when Mrs. Tulliver became rather pressing to
know
how
he would raise it without mortgaging the mill and
the house which he had said he never
would
mortgage, since
nowadays people were none so ready to lend money without security,
Mr. Tulliver, getting warm, declared that Mrs. Glegg might do as
she liked about calling in her money, he should pay it in whether
or not. He was not going to be beholden to his wife's sisters. When
a man had married into a family where there was a whole litter of
women, he might have plenty to put up with if he chose. But Mr.
Tulliver did
not
choose.

Mrs. Tulliver cried a little in a trickling, quiet way as she
put on her nightcap; but presently sank into a comfortable sleep,
lulled by the thought that she would talk everything over with her
sister Pullet to-morrow, when she was to take the children to Garum
Firs to tea. Not that she looked forward to any distinct issue from
that talk; but it seemed impossible that past events should be so
obstinate as to remain unmodified when they were complained
against.

Her husband lay awake rather longer, for he too was thinking of
a visit he would pay on the morrow; and his ideas on the subject
were not of so vague and soothing a kind as those of his amiable
partner.

Mr. Tulliver, when under the influence of a strong feeling, had
a promptitude in action that may seem inconsistent with that
painful sense of the complicated, puzzling nature of human affairs
under which his more dispassionate deliberations were conducted;
but it is really not improbable that there was a direct relation
between these apparently contradictory phenomena, since I have
observed that for getting a strong impression that a skein is
tangled there is nothing like snatching hastily at a single thread.
It was owing to this promptitude that Mr. Tulliver was on horseback
soon after dinner the next day (he was not dyspeptic) on his way to
Basset to see his sister Moss and her husband. For having made up
his mind irrevocably that he would pay Mrs. Glegg her loan of five
hundred pounds, it naturally occurred to him that he had a
promissory note for three hundred pounds lent to his brother-in-law
Moss; and if the said brother-in-law could manage to pay in the
money within a given time, it would go far to lessen the fallacious
air of inconvenience which Mr. Tulliver's spirited step might have
worn in the eyes of weak people who require to know precisely
how
a thing is to be done before they are strongly
confident that it will be easy.

For Mr. Tulliver was in a position neither new nor striking,
but, like other every-day things, sure to have a cumulative effect
that will be felt in the long run: he was held to be a much more
substantial man than he really was. And as we are all apt to
believe what the world believes about us, it was his habit to think
of failure and ruin with the same sort of remote pity with which a
spare, long-necked man hears that his plethoric short-necked
neighbor is stricken with apoplexy. He had been always used to hear
pleasant jokes about his advantages as a man who worked his own
mill, and owned a pretty bit of land; and these jokes naturally
kept up his sense that he was a man of considerable substance. They
gave a pleasant flavor to his glass on a market-day, and if it had
not been for the recurrence of half-yearly payments, Mr. Tulliver
would really have forgotten that there was a mortgage of two
thousand pounds on his very desirable freehold. That was not
altogether his own fault, since one of the thousand pounds was his
sister's fortune, which he had to pay on her marriage; and a man
who has neighbors that
will
go to law with him is not
likely to pay off his mortgages, especially if he enjoys the good
opinion of acquaintances who want to borrow a hundred pounds on
security too lofty to be represented by parchment. Our friend Mr.
Tulliver had a good-natured fibre in him, and did not like to give
harsh refusals even to his sister, who had not only come in to the
world in that superfluous way characteristic of sisters, creating a
necessity for mortgages, but had quite thrown herself away in
marriage, and had crowned her mistakes by having an eighth baby. On
this point Mr. Tulliver was conscious of being a little weak; but
he apologized to himself by saying that poor Gritty had been a
good-looking wench before she married Moss; he would sometimes say
this even with a slight tremulousness in his voice. But this
morning he was in a mood more becoming a man of business, and in
the course of his ride along the Basset lanes, with their deep
ruts,–lying so far away from a market-town that the labor of
drawing produce and manure was enough to take away the best part of
the profits on such poor land as that parish was made of,–he got up
a due amount of irritation against Moss as a man without capital,
who, if murrain and blight were abroad, was sure to have his share
of them, and who, the more you tried to help him out of the mud,
would sink the further in. It would do him good rather than harm,
now, if he were obliged to raise this three hundred pounds; it
would make him look about him better, and not act so foolishly
about his wool this year as he did the last; in fact, Mr. Tulliver
had been too easy with his brother-in-law, and because he had let
the interest run on for two years, Moss was likely enough to think
that he should never be troubled about the principal. But Mr.
Tulliver was determined not to encourage such shuffling people any
longer; and a ride along the Basset lanes was not likely to
enervate a man's resolution by softening his temper. The
deep-trodden hoof-marks, made in the muddiest days of winter, gave
him a shake now and then which suggested a rash but stimulating
snarl at the father of lawyers, who, whether by means of his hoof
or otherwise, had doubtless something to do with this state of the
roads; and the abundance of foul land and neglected fences that met
his eye, though they made no part of his brother Moss's farm,
strongly contributed to his dissatisfaction with that unlucky
agriculturist. If this wasn't Moss's fallow, it might have been;
Basset was all alike; it was a beggarly parish, in Mr. Tulliver's
opinion, and his opinion was certainly not groundless. Basset had a
poor soil, poor roads, a poor non-resident landlord, a poor
non-resident vicar, and rather less than half a curate, also poor.
If any one strongly impressed with the power of the human mind to
triumph over circumstances will contend that the parishioners of
Basset might nevertheless have been a very superior class of
people, I have nothing to urge against that abstract proposition; I
only know that, in point of fact, the Basset mind was in strict
keeping with its circumstances. The muddy lanes, green or clayey,
that seemed to the unaccustomed eye to lead nowhere but into each
other, did really lead, with patience, to a distant high-road; but
there were many feet in Basset which they led more frequently to a
centre of dissipation, spoken of formerly as the "Markis o'
Granby," but among intimates as "Dickison's." A large low room with
a sanded floor; a cold scent of tobacco, modified by undetected
beer-dregs; Mr. Dickison leaning against the door-post with a
melancholy pimpled face, looking as irrelevant to the daylight as a
last night's guttered candle,–all this may not seem a very
seductive form of temptation; but the majority of men in Basset
found it fatally alluring when encountered on their road toward
four o'clock on a wintry afternoon; and if any wife in Basset
wished to indicate that her husband was not a pleasure-seeking man,
she could hardly do it more emphatically than by saying that he
didn't spend a shilling at Dickison's from one Whitsuntide to
another. Mrs. Moss had said so of
her
husband more than
once, when her brother was in a mood to find fault with him, as he
certainly was to-day. And nothing could be less pacifying to Mr.
Tulliver than the behavior of the farmyard gate, which he no sooner
attempted to push open with his riding-stick than it acted as gates
without the upper hinge are known to do, to the peril of shins,
whether equine or human. He was about to get down and lead his
horse through the damp dirt of the hollow farmyard, shadowed
drearily by the large half-timbered buildings, up to the long line
of tumble-down dwelling-houses standing on a raised causeway; but
the timely appearance of a cowboy saved him that frustration of a
plan he had determined on,–namely, not to get down from his horse
during this visit. If a man means to be hard, let him keep in his
saddle and speak from that height, above the level of pleading
eyes, and with the command of a distant horizon. Mrs. Moss heard
the sound of the horse's feet, and, when her brother rode up, was
already outside the kitchen door, with a half-weary smile on her
face, and a black-eyed baby in her arms. Mrs. Moss's face bore a
faded resemblance to her brother's; baby's little fat hand, pressed
against her cheek, seemed to show more strikingly that the cheek
was faded.