The Mill on the Floss (62 page)

"But there's one thing I should like to mention to you uncle.
I've never spoken to you of it before. If you remember, at the time
my father's property was sold, there was some thought of your firm
buying the Mill; I know you thought it would be a very good
investment, especially if steam were applied."

"To be sure, to be sure. But Wakem outbid us; he'd made up his
mind to that. He's rather fond of carrying everything over other
people's heads."

"Perhaps it's of no use my mentioning it at present," Tom went
on, "but I wish you to know what I have in my mind about the Mill.
I've a strong feeling about it. It was my father's dying wish that
I should try and get it back again whenever I could; it was in his
family for five generations. I promised my father; and besides
that, I'm attached to the place. I shall never like any other so
well. And if it should ever suit your views to buy it for the firm,
I should have a better chance of fulfilling my father's wish. I
shouldn't have liked to mention the thing to you, only you've been
kind enough to say my services have been of some value. And I'd
give up a much greater chance in life for the sake of having the
Mill again,–I mean having it in my own hands, and gradually working
off the price."

Mr. Deane had listened attentively, and now looked
thoughtful.

"I see, I see," he said, after a while; "the thing would be
possible if there were any chance of Wakem's parting with the
property. But that I
don't
see. He's put that young
Jetsome in the place; and he had his reasons when he bought it,
I'll be bound."

"He's a loose fish, that young Jetsome," said Tom. "He's taking
to drinking, and they say he's letting the business go down. Luke
told me about it,–our old miller. He says he sha'n't stay unless
there's an alteration. I was thinking, if things went on that way,
Wakem might be more willing to part with the Mill. Luke says he's
getting very sour about the way things are going on."

"Well, I'll turn it over, Tom. I must inquire into the matter,
and go into it with Mr. Guest. But, you see, it's rather striking
out a new branch, and putting you to that, instead of keeping you
where you are, which was what we'd wanted."

"I should be able to manage more than the Mill when things were
once set properly going, sir. I want to have plenty of work.
There's nothing else I care about much."

There was something rather sad in that speech from a young man
of three-and-twenty, even in uncle Deane's business-loving
ears.

"Pooh, pooh! you'll be having a wife to care about one of these
days, if you get on at this pace in the world. But as to this Mill,
we mustn't reckon on our chickens too early. However, I promise you
to bear it in mind, and when you come back we'll talk of it again.
I am going to dinner now. Come and breakfast with us to-morrow
morning, and say good-bye to your mother and sister before you
start."

Chapter VI
Illustrating the Laws of Attraction

It is evident to you now that Maggie had arrived at a moment in
her life which must be considered by all prudent persons as a great
opportunity for a young woman. Launched into the higher society of
St. Ogg's, with a striking person, which had the advantage of being
quite unfamiliar to the majority of beholders, and with such
moderate assistance of costume as you have seen foreshadowed in
Lucy's anxious colloquy with aunt Pullet, Maggie was certainly at a
new starting-point in life. At Lucy's first evening party, young
Torry fatigued his facial muscles more than usual in order that
"the dark-eyed girl there in the corner" might see him in all the
additional style conferred by his eyeglass; and several young
ladies went home intending to have short sleeves with black lace,
and to plait their hair in a broad coronet at the back of their
head,–"That cousin of Miss Deane's looked so very well." In fact,
poor Maggie, with all her inward consciousness of a painful past
and her presentiment of a troublous future, was on the way to
become an object of some envy,–a topic of discussion in the newly
established billiard-room, and between fair friends who had no
secrets from each other on the subject of trimmings. The Miss
Guests, who associated chiefly on terms of condescension with the
families of St. Ogg's, and were the glass of fashion there, took
some exception to Maggie's manners. She had a way of not assenting
at once to the observations current in good society, and of saying
that she didn't know whether those observations were true or not,
which gave her an air of
gaucherie
, and impeded the even
flow of conversation; but it is a fact capable of an amiable
interpretation that ladies are not the worst disposed toward a new
acquaintance of their own sex because she has points of
inferiority. And Maggie was so entirely without those pretty airs
of coquetry which have the traditional reputation of driving
gentlemen to despair that she won some feminine pity for being so
ineffective in spite of her beauty. She had not had many
advantages, poor thing! and it must be admitted there was no
pretension about her; her abruptness and unevenness of manner were
plainly the result of her secluded and lowly circumstances. It was
only a wonder that there was no tinge of vulgarity about her,
considering what the rest of poor Lucy's relations were–an allusion
which always made the Miss Guests shudder a little. It was not
agreeable to think of any connection by marriage with such people
as the Gleggs and the Pullets; but it was of no use to contradict
Stephen when once he had set his mind on anything, and certainly
there was no possible objection to Lucy in herself,–no one could
help liking her. She would naturally desire that the Miss Guests
should behave kindly to this cousin of whom she was so fond, and
Stephen would make a great fuss if they were deficient in civility.
Under these circumstances the invitations to Park House were not
wanting; and elsewhere, also, Miss Deane was too popular and too
distinguished a member of society in St. Ogg's for any attention
toward her to be neglected.

Thus Maggie was introduced for the first time to the young
lady's life, and knew what it was to get up in the morning without
any imperative reason for doing one thing more than another. This
new sense of leisure and unchecked enjoyment amidst the
soft-breathing airs and garden-scents of advancing spring–amidst
the new abundance of music, and lingering strolls in the sunshine,
and the delicious dreaminess of gliding on the river–could hardly
be without some intoxicating effect on her, after her years of
privation; and even in the first week Maggie began to be less
haunted by her sad memories and anticipations. Life was certainly
very pleasant just now; it was becoming very pleasant to dress in
the evening, and to feel that she was one of the beautiful things
of this spring-time. And there were admiring eyes always awaiting
her now; she was no longer an unheeded person, liable to be chid,
from whom attention was continually claimed, and on whom no one
felt bound to confer any. It was pleasant, too, when Stephen and
Lucy were gone out riding, to sit down at the piano alone, and find
that the old fitness between her fingers and the keys remained, and
revived, like a sympathetic kinship not to be worn out by
separation; to get the tunes she had heard the evening before, and
repeat them again and again until she had found out a way of
producing them so as to make them a more pregnant, passionate
language to her. The mere concord of octaves was a delight to
Maggie, and she would often take up a book of studies rather than
any melody, that she might taste more keenly by abstraction the
more primitive sensation of intervals. Not that her enjoyment of
music was of the kind that indicates a great specific talent; it
was rather that her sensibility to the supreme excitement of music
was only one form of that passionate sensibility which belonged to
her whole nature, and made her faults and virtues all merge in each
other; made her affections sometimes an impatient demand, but also
prevented her vanity from taking the form of mere feminine coquetry
and device, and gave it the poetry of ambition. But you have known
Maggie a long while, and need to be told, not her characteristics,
but her history, which is a thing hardly to be predicted even from
the completest knowledge of characteristics. For the tragedy of our
lives is not created entirely from within. "Character," says
Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms,–"character is
destiny." But not the whole of our destiny. Hamlet, Prince of
Denmark, was speculative and irresolute, and we have a great
tragedy in consequence. But if his father had lived to a good old
age, and his uncle had died an early death, we can conceive
Hamlet's having married Ophelia, and got through life with a
reputation of sanity, notwithstanding many soliloquies, and some
moody sarcasms toward the fair daughter of Polonius, to say nothing
of the frankest incivility to his father-in-law.

Maggie's destiny, then, is at present hidden, and we must wait
for it to reveal itself like the course of an unmapped river; we
only know that the river is full and rapid, and that for all rivers
there is the same final home. Under the charm of her new pleasures,
Maggie herself was ceasing to think, with her eager prefiguring
imagination, of her future lot; and her anxiety about her first
interview with Philip was losing its predominance; perhaps,
unconsciously to herself, she was not sorry that the interview had
been deferred.

For Philip had not come the evening he was expected, and Mr.
Stephen Guest brought word that he was gone to the coast,–probably,
he thought, on a sketching expedition; but it was not certain when
he would return. It was just like Philip, to go off in that way
without telling any one. It was not until the twelfth day that he
returned, to find both Lucy's notes awaiting him; he had left
before he knew of Maggie's arrival.

Perhaps one had need be nineteen again to be quite convinced of
the feelings that were crowded for Maggie into those twelve days;
of the length to which they were stretched for her by the novelty
of her experience in them, and the varying attitudes of her mind.
The early days of an acquaintance almost always have this
importance for us, and fill up a larger space in our memory than
longer subsequent periods, which have been less filled with
discovery and new impressions. There were not many hours in those
ten days in which Mr. Stephen Guest was not seated by Lucy's side,
or standing near her at the piano, or accompanying her on some
outdoor excursion; his attentions were clearly becoming more
assiduous, and that was what every one had expected. Lucy was very
happy, all the happier because Stephen's society seemed to have
become much more interesting and amusing since Maggie had been
there. Playful discussions–sometimes serious ones–were going
forward, in which both Stephen and Maggie revealed themselves, to
the admiration of the gentle, unobtrusive Lucy; and it more than
once crossed her mind what a charming quartet they should have
through life when Maggie married Philip. Is it an inexplicable
thing that a girl should enjoy her lover's society the more for the
presence of a third person, and be without the slightest spasm of
jealousy that the third person had the conversation habitually
directed to her? Not when that girl is as tranquil-hearted as Lucy,
thoroughly possessed with a belief that she knows the state of her
companions' affections, and not prone to the feelings which shake
such a belief in the absence of positive evidence against it.
Besides, it was Lucy by whom Stephen sat, to whom he gave his arm,
to whom he appealed as the person sure to agree with him; and every
day there was the same tender politeness toward her, the same
consciousness of her wants and care to supply them. Was there
really the same? It seemed to Lucy that there was more; and it was
no wonder that the real significance of the change escaped her. It
was a subtle act of conscience in Stephen that even he himself was
not aware of. His personal attentions to Maggie were comparatively
slight, and there had even sprung up an apparent distance between
them, that prevented the renewal of that faint resemblance to
gallantry into which he had fallen the first day in the boat. If
Stephen came in when Lucy was out of the room, if Lucy left them
together, they never spoke to each other; Stephen, perhaps, seemed
to be examining books or music, and Maggie bent her head
assiduously over her work. Each was oppressively conscious of the
other's presence, even to the finger-ends. Yet each looked and
longed for the same thing to happen the next day. Neither of them
had begun to reflect on the matter, or silently to ask, "To what
does all this tend?" Maggie only felt that life was revealing
something quite new to her; and she was absorbed in the direct,
immediate experience, without any energy left for taking account of
it and reasoning about it. Stephen wilfully abstained from
self-questioning, and would not admit to himself that he felt an
influence which was to have any determining effect on his conduct.
And when Lucy came into the room again, they were once more
unconstrained; Maggie could contradict Stephen, and laugh at him,
and he could recommend to her consideration the example of that
most charming heroine, Miss Sophia Western, who had a great
"respect for the understandings of men." Maggie could look at
Stephen, which, for some reason or other she always avoided when
they were alone; and he could even ask her to play his
accompaniment for him, since Lucy's fingers were so busy with that
bazaar-work, and lecture her on hurrying the tempo, which was
certainly Maggie's weak point.

One day–it was the day of Philip's return–Lucy had formed a
sudden engagement to spend the evening with Mrs. Kenn, whose
delicate state of health, threatening to become confirmed illness
through an attack of bronchitis, obliged her to resign her
functions at the coming bazaar into the hands of other ladies, of
whom she wished Lucy to be one. The engagement had been formed in
Stephen's presence, and he had heard Lucy promise to dine early and
call at six o'clock for Miss Torry, who brought Mrs. Kenn's
request.