The Mill on the Floss (31 page)

It is precisely the proudest and most obstinate men who are the
most liable to shift their position and contradict themselves in
this sudden manner; everything is easier to them than to face the
simple fact that they have been thoroughly defeated, and must begin
life anew. And Mr. Tulliver, you perceive, though nothing more than
a superior miller and maltster, was as proud and obstinate as if he
had been a very lofty personage, in whom such dispositions might be
a source of that conspicuous, far-echoing tragedy, which sweeps the
stage in regal robes, and makes the dullest chronicler sublime. The
pride and obstinacy of millers and other insignificant people, whom
you pass unnoticingly on the road every day, have their tragedy
too; but it is of that unwept, hidden sort that goes on from
generation to generation, and leaves no record,–such tragedy,
perhaps, as lies in the conflicts of young souls, hungry for joy,
under a lot made suddenly hard to them, under the dreariness of a
home where the morning brings no promise with it, and where the
unexpectant discontent of worn and disappointed parents weighs on
the children like a damp, thick air, in which all the functions of
life are depressed; or such tragedy as lies in the slow or sudden
death that follows on a bruised passion, though it may be a death
that finds only a parish funeral. There are certain animals to
which tenacity of position is a law of life,–they can never
flourish again, after a single wrench: and there are certain human
beings to whom predominance is a law of life,–they can only sustain
humiliation so long as they can refuse to believe in it, and, in
their own conception, predominate still.

Mr. Tulliver was still predominating, in his own imagination, as
he approached St. Ogg's, through which he had to pass on his way
homeward. But what was it that suggested to him, as he saw the
Laceham coach entering the town, to follow it to the coach-office,
and get the clerk there to write a letter, requiring Maggie to come
home the very next day? Mr. Tulliver's own hand shook too much
under his excitement for him to write himself, and he wanted the
letter to be given to the coachman to deliver at Miss Firniss's
school in the morning. There was a craving which he would not
account for to himself, to have Maggie near him, without delay,–she
must come back by the coach to-morrow.

To Mrs. Tulliver, when he got home, he would admit no
difficulties, and scolded down her burst of grief on hearing that
the lawsuit was lost, by angry assertions that there was nothing to
grieve about. He said nothing to her that night about the bill of
sale and the application to Mrs. Pullet, for he had kept her in
ignorance of the nature of that transaction, and had explained the
necessity for taking an inventory of the goods as a matter
connected with his will. The possession of a wife conspicuously
one's inferior in intellect is, like other high privileges,
attended with a few inconveniences, and, among the rest, with the
occasional necessity for using a little deception.

The next day Mr. Tulliver was again on horseback in the
afternoon, on his way to Mr. Gore's office at St. Ogg's. Gore was
to have seen Furley in the morning, and to have sounded him in
relation to Mr. Tulliver's affairs. But he had not gone half-way
when he met a clerk from Mr. Gore's office, who was bringing a
letter to Mr. Tulliver. Mr. Gore had been prevented by a sudden
call of business from waiting at his office to see Mr. Tulliver,
according to appointment, but would be at his office at eleven
to-morrow morning, and meanwhile had sent some important
information by letter.

"Oh!" said Mr. Tulliver, taking the letter, but not opening it.
"Then tell Gore I'll see him to-morrow at eleven"; and he turned
his horse.

The clerk, struck with Mr. Tulliver's glistening, excited
glance, looked after him for a few moments, and then rode away. The
reading of a letter was not the affair of an instant to Mr.
Tulliver; he took in the sense of a statement very slowly through
the medium of written or even printed characters; so he had put the
letter in his pocket, thinking he would open it in his armchair at
home. But by-and-by it occurred to him that there might be
something in the letter Mrs. Tulliver must not know about, and if
so, it would be better to keep it out of her sight altogether. He
stopped his horse, took out the letter, and read it. It was only a
short letter; the substance was, that Mr. Gore had ascertained, on
secret, but sure authority, that Furley had been lately much
straitened for money, and had parted with his securities,–among the
rest, the mortgage on Mr. Tulliver's property, which he had
transferred to––Wakem.

In half an hour after this Mr. Tulliver's own wagoner found him
lying by the roadside insensible, with an open letter near him, and
his gray horse snuffing uneasily about him.

When Maggie reached home that evening, in obedience to her
father's call, he was no longer insensible. About an hour before he
had become conscious, and after vague, vacant looks around him, had
muttered something about "a letter," which he presently repeated
impatiently. At the instance of Mr. Turnbull, the medical man,
Gore's letter was brought and laid on the bed, and the previous
impatience seemed to be allayed. The stricken man lay for some time
with his eyes fixed on the letter, as if he were trying to knit up
his thoughts by its help. But presently a new wave of memory seemed
to have come and swept the other away; he turned his eyes from the
letter to the door, and after looking uneasily, as if striving to
see something his eyes were too dim for, he said, "The little
wench."

He repeated the words impatiently from time to time, appearing
entirely unconscious of everything except this one importunate
want, and giving no sign of knowing his wife or any one else; and
poor Mrs. Tulliver, her feeble faculties almost paralyzed by this
sudden accumulation of troubles, went backward and forward to the
gate to see if the Laceham coach were coming, though it was not yet
time.

But it came at last, and set down the poor anxious girl, no
longer the "little wench," except to her father's fond memory.

"Oh, mother, what is the matter?" Maggie said, with pale lips,
as her mother came toward her crying. She didn't think her father
was ill, because the letter had come at his dictation from the
office at St. Ogg's.

But Mr. Turnbull came now to meet her; a medical man is the good
angel of the troubled house, and Maggie ran toward the kind old
friend, whom she remembered as long as she could remember anything,
with a trembling, questioning look.

"Don't alarm yourself too much, my dear," he said, taking her
hand. "Your father has had a sudden attack, and has not quite
recovered his memory. But he has been asking for you, and it will
do him good to see you. Keep as quiet as you can; take off your
things, and come upstairs with me."

Maggie obeyed, with that terrible beating of the heart which
makes existence seem simply a painful pulsation. The very quietness
with which Mr. Turnbull spoke had frightened her susceptible
imagination. Her father's eyes were still turned uneasily toward
the door when she entered and met the strange, yearning, helpless
look that had been seeking her in vain. With a sudden flash and
movement, he raised himself in the bed; she rushed toward him, and
clasped him with agonized kisses.

Poor child! it was very early for her to know one of those
supreme moments in life when all we have hoped or delighted in, all
we can dread or endure, falls away from our regard as
insignificant; is lost, like a trivial memory, in that simple,
primitive love which knits us to the beings who have been nearest
to us, in their times of helplessness or of anguish.

But that flash of recognition had been too great a strain on the
father's bruised, enfeebled powers. He sank back again in renewed
insensibility and rigidity, which lasted for many hours, and was
only broken by a flickering return of consciousness, in which he
took passively everything that was given to him, and seemed to have
a sort of infantine satisfaction in Maggie's near presence,–such
satisfaction as a baby has when it is returned to the nurse's
lap.

Mrs. Tulliver sent for her sisters, and there was much wailing
and lifting up of hands below stairs. Both uncles and aunts saw
that the ruin of Bessy and her family was as complete as they had
ever foreboded it, and there was a general family sense that a
judgment had fallen on Mr. Tulliver, which it would be an impiety
to counteract by too much kindness. But Maggie heard little of
this, scarcely ever leaving her father's bedside, where she sat
opposite him with her hand on his. Mrs. Tulliver wanted to have Tom
fetched home, and seemed to be thinking more of her boy even than
of her husband; but the aunts and uncles opposed this. Tom was
better at school, since Mr. Turnbull said there was no immediate
danger, he believed. But at the end of the second day, when Maggie
had become more accustomed to her father's fits of insensibility,
and to the expectation that he would revive from them, the thought
of Tom had become urgent with
her
too; and when her mother
sate crying at night and saying, "My poor lad–it's nothing but
right he should come home," Maggie said, "Let me go for him, and
tell him, mother; I'll go to-morrow morning if father doesn't know
me and want me. It would be so hard for Tom to come home and not
know anything about it beforehand."

And the next morning Maggie went, as we have seen. Sitting on
the coach on their way home, the brother and sister talked to each
other in sad, interrupted whispers.

"They say Mr. Wakem has got a mortgage or something on the land,
Tom," said Maggie. "It was the letter with that news in it that
made father ill, they think."

"I believe that scoundrel's been planning all along to ruin my
father," said Tom, leaping from the vaguest impressions to a
definite conclusion. "I'll make him feel for it when I'm a man.
Mind you never speak to Philip again."

"Oh, Tom!" said Maggie, in a tone of sad remonstrance; but she
had no spirit to dispute anything then, still less to vex Tom by
opposing him.

Chapter II
Mrs. Tulliver's Teraphim, or Household Gods

When the coach set down Tom and Maggie, it was five hours since
she had started from home, and she was thinking with some trembling
that her father had perhaps missed her, and asked for "the little
wench" in vain. She thought of no other change that might have
happened.

She hurried along the gravel-walk and entered the house before
Tom; but in the entrance she was startled by a strong smell of
tobacco. The parlor door was ajar; that was where the smell came
from. It was very strange; could any visitor be smoking at a time
like this? Was her mother there? If so, she must be told that Tom
was come. Maggie, after this pause of surprise, was only in the act
of opening the door when Tom came up, and they both looked into the
parlor together.

There was a coarse, dingy man, of whose face Tom had some vague
recollection, sitting in his father's chair, smoking, with a jug
and glass beside him.

The truth flashed on Tom's mind in an instant. To "have the
bailiff in the house," and "to be sold up," were phrases which he
had been used to, even as a little boy; they were part of the
disgrace and misery of "failing," of losing all one's money, and
being ruined,–sinking into the condition of poor working people. It
seemed only natural this should happen, since his father had lost
all his property, and he thought of no more special cause for this
particular form of misfortune than the loss of the lawsuit. But the
immediate presence of this disgrace was so much keener an
experience to Tom than the worst form of apprehension, that he felt
at this moment as if his real trouble had only just begin; it was a
touch on the irritated nerve compared with its spontaneous dull
aching.

"How do you do, sir?" said the man, taking the pipe out of his
mouth, with rough, embarrassed civility. The two young startled
faces made him a little uncomfortable.

But Tom turned away hastily without speaking; the sight was too
hateful. Maggie had not understood the appearance of this stranger,
as Tom had. She followed him, whispering: "Who can it be, Tom? What
is the matter?" Then, with a sudden undefined dread lest this
stranger might have something to do with a change in her father,
she rushed upstairs, checking herself at the bedroom door to throw
off her bonnet, and enter on tiptoe. All was silent there; her
father was lying, heedless of everything around him, with his eyes
closed as when she had left him. A servant was there, but not her
mother.

"Where's my mother?" she whispered. The servant did not
know.

Maggie hastened out, and said to Tom; "Father is lying quiet;
let us go and look for my mother. I wonder where she is."

Mrs. Tulliver was not downstairs, not in any of the bedrooms.
There was but one room below the attic which Maggie had left
unsearched; it was the storeroom, where her mother kept all her
linen and all the precious "best things" that were only unwrapped
and brought out on special occasions.

Tom, preceding Maggie, as they returned along the passage,
opened the door of this room, and immediately said, "Mother!"

Mrs. Tulliver was seated there with all her laid-up treasures.
One of the linen chests was open; the silver teapot was unwrapped
from its many folds of paper, and the best china was laid out on
the top of the closed linen-chest; spoons and skewers and ladles
were spread in rows on the shelves; and the poor woman was shaking
her head and weeping, with a bitter tension of the mouth, over the
mark, "Elizabeth Dodson," on the corner of some tablecloths she
held in her lap.

She dropped them, and started up as Tom spoke.