Books: The Mill on the Floss

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The down had come on Tom's lip, yet his thoughts and expectations had
been hitherto only the reproduction, in changed forms, of the boyish
dreams in which he had lived three years ago. He was awakened now with
a violent shock.

Maggie was frightened at Tom's pale, trembling silence. There was
something else to tell him,--something worse. She threw her arms round
him at last, and said, with a half sob:

"Oh, Tom--dear, dear Tom, don't fret too much; try and bear it well."

Tom turned his cheek passively to meet her entreating kisses, and
there gathered a moisture in his eyes, which he just rubbed away with
his hand. The action seemed to rouse him, for he shook himself and
said: "I shall go home, with you, Maggie. Didn't my father say I was
to go?"

"No, Tom, father didn't wish it," said Maggie, her anxiety about _his_
feeling helping her to master her agitation. What _would_ he do when
she told him all? "But mother wants you to come,--poor mother!--she
cries so. Oh, Tom, it's very dreadful at home."

Maggie's lips grew whiter, and she began to tremble almost as Tom had
done. The two poor things clung closer to each other, both
trembling,--the one at an unshapen fear, the other at the image of a
terrible certainty. When Maggie spoke, it was hardly above a whisper.

"And--and--poor father----"

Maggie could not utter it. But the suspense was intolerable to Tom. A
vague idea of going to prison, as a consequence of debt, was the shape
his fears had begun to take.

"Where's my father?" he said impatiently. "_Tell_ me, Maggie."

"He's at home," said Maggie, finding it easier to reply to that
question. "But," she added, after a pause, "not himself--he fell off
his horse. He has known nobody but me ever since--he seems to have
lost his senses. O father, father----"

With these last words, Maggie's sobs burst forth with the more
violence for the previous struggle against them. Tom felt that
pressure of the heart which forbids tears; he had no distinct vision
of their troubles as Maggie had, who had been at home; he only felt
the crushing weight of what seemed unmitigated misfortune. He
tightened his arm almost convulsively round Maggie as she sobbed, but
his face looked rigid and tearless, his eyes blank,--as if a black
curtain of cloud had suddenly fallen on his path.

But Maggie soon checked herself abruptly; a single thought had acted
on her like a startling sound.

"We must set out, Tom, we must not stay. Father will miss me; we must
be at the turnpike at ten to meet the coach." She said this with hasty
decision, rubbing her eyes, and rising to seize her bonnet.

Tom at once felt the same impulse, and rose too. "Wait a minute,
Maggie," he said. "I must speak to Mr. Stelling, and then we'll go."

He thought he must go to the study where the pupils were; but on his
way he met Mr. Stelling, who had heard from his wife that Maggie
appeared to be in trouble when she asked for her brother, and now that
he thought the brother and sister had been alone long enough, was
coming to inquire and offer his sympathy.

"Please, sir, I must go home," Tom said abruptly, as he met Mr.
Stelling in the passage. "I must go back with my sister directly. My
father's lost his lawsuit--he's lost all his property--and he's very
ill."

Mr. Stelling felt like a kind-hearted man; he foresaw a probable money
loss for himself, but this had no appreciable share in his feeling,
while he looked with grave pity at the brother and sister for whom
youth and sorrow had begun together. When he knew how Maggie had come,
and how eager she was to get home again, he hurried their departure,
only whispering something to Mrs. Stelling, who had followed him, and
who immediately left the room.

Tom and Maggie were standing on the door-step, ready to set out, when
Mrs. Stelling came with a little basket, which she hung on Maggie's
arm, saying: "Do remember to eat something on the way, dear." Maggie's
heart went out toward this woman whom she had never liked, and she
kissed her silently. It was the first sign within the poor child of
that new sense which is the gift of sorrow,--that susceptibility to
the bare offices of humanity which raises them into a bond of loving
fellowship, as to haggard men among the ice-bergs the mere presence of
an ordinary comrade stirs the deep fountains of affection.

Mr. Stelling put his hand on Tom's shoulder and said: "God bless you,
my boy; let me know how you get on." Then he pressed Maggie's hand;
but there were no audible good-byes. Tom had so often thought how
joyful he should be the day he left school "for good"! And now his
school years seemed like a holiday that had come to an end.

The two slight youthful figures soon grew indistinct on the distant
road,--were soon lost behind the projecting hedgerow.

They had gone forth together into their life of sorrow, and they would
never more see the sunshine undimmed by remembered cares. They had
entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood
had forever closed behind them.

Book III

_The Downfall_

Chapter I

What Had Happened at Home

When Mr. Tulliver first knew the fact that the law-suit was decided
against him, and that Pivart and Wakem were triumphant, every one who
happened to observe him at the time thought that, for so confident and
hot-tempered a man, he bore the blow remarkably well. He thought so
himself; he thought he was going to show that if Wakem or anybody else
considered him crushed, they would find themselves mistaken. He could
not refuse to see that the costs of this protracted suit would take
more than he possessed to pay them; but he appeared to himself to be
full of expedients by which he could ward off any results but such as
were tolerable, and could avoid the appearance of breaking down in the
world. All the obstinacy and defiance of his nature, driven out of
their old channel, found a vent for themselves in the immediate
formation of plans by which he would meet his difficulties, and remain
Mr. Tulliver of Dorlcote Mill in spite of them. There was such a rush
of projects in his brain, that it was no wonder his face was flushed
when he came away from his talk with his attorney, Mr. Gore, and
mounted his horse to ride home from Lindum. There was Furley, who held
the mortgage on the land,--a reasonable fellow, who would see his own
interest, Mr. Tulliver was convinced, and who would be glad not only
to purchase the whole estate, including the mill and homestead, but
would accept Mr. Tulliver as tenant, and be willing to advance money
to be repaid with high interest out of the profits of the business,
which would be made over to him, Mr. Tulliver only taking enough
barely to maintain himself and his family. Who would neglect such a
profitable investment? Certainly not Furley, for Mr. Tulliver had
determined that Furley should meet his plans with the utmost alacrity;
and there are men whoses brains have not yet been dangerously heated
by the loss of a lawsuit, who are apt to see in their own interest or
desires a motive for other men's actions. There was no doubt (in the
miller's mind) that Furley would do just what was desirable; and if he
did--why, things would not be so very much worse. Mr. Tulliver and his
family must live more meagrely and humbly, but it would only be till
the profits of the business had paid off Furley's advances, and that
might be while Mr. Tulliver had still a good many years of life before
him. It was clear that the costs of the suit could be paid without his
being obliged to turn out of his old place, and look like a ruined
man. It was certainly an awkward moment in his affairs. There was that
suretyship for poor Riley, who had died suddenly last April, and left
his friend saddled with a debt of two hundred and fifty pounds,--a
fact which had helped to make Mr. Tulliver's banking book less
pleasant reading than a man might desire toward Christmas. Well! he
had never been one of those poor-spirited sneaks who would refuse to
give a helping hand to a fellow-traveller in this puzzling world. The
really vexatious business was the fact that some months ago the
creditor who had lent him the five hundred pounds to repay Mrs. Glegg
had become uneasy about his money (set on by Wakem, of course), and
Mr. Tulliver, still confident that he should gain his suit, and
finding it eminently inconvenient to raise the said sum until that
desirable issue had taken place, had rashly acceded to the demand that
he should give a bill of sale on his household furniture and some
other effects, as security in lieu of the bond. It was all one, he had
said to himself; he should soon pay off the money, and there was no
harm in giving that security any more than another. But now the
consequences of this bill of sale occurred to him in a new light, and
he remembered that the time was close at hand when it would be
enforced unless the money were repaid. Two months ago he would have
declared stoutly that he would never be beholden to his wife's
friends; but now he told himself as stoutly that it was nothing but
right and natural that Bessy should go to the Pullets and explain the
thing to them; they would hardly let Bessy's furniture be sold, and it
might be security to Pullet if he advanced the money,--there would,
after all, be no gift or favor in the matter. Mr. Tulliver would never
have asked for anything from so poor-spirited a fellow for himself,
but Bessy might do so if she liked.

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.

"Oh, my boy, my boy!" she said, clasping him round the neck. "To think
as I should live to see this day! We're ruined--everything's going to
be sold up--to think as your father should ha' married me to bring me
to this! We've got nothing--we shall be beggars--we must go to the
workhouse----"

She kissed him, then seated herself again, and took another tablecloth
on her lap, unfolding it a little way to look at the pattern, while
the children stood by in mute wretchedness, their minds quite filled
for the moment with the words "beggars" and "workhouse."

"To think o' these cloths as I spun myself," she went on, lifting
things out and turning them over with an excitement all the more
strange and piteous because the stout blond woman was usually so
passive,--if she had been ruffled before, it was at the surface
merely,--"and Job Haxey wove 'em, and brought the piece home on his
back, as I remember standing at the door and seeing him come, before I
ever thought o' marrying your father! And the pattern as I chose
myself, and bleached so beautiful, and I marked 'em so as nobody ever
saw such marking,--they must cut the cloth to get it out, for it's a
particular stitch. And they're all to be sold, and go into strange
people's houses, and perhaps be cut with the knives, and wore out
before I'm dead. You'll never have one of 'em, my boy," she said,
looking up at Tom with her eyes full of tears, "and I meant 'em for
you. I wanted you to have all o' this pattern. Maggie could have had
the large check--it never shows so well when the dishes are on it."

Tom was touched to the quick, but there was an angry reaction
immediately. His face flushed as he said:

"But will my aunts let them be sold, mother? Do they know about it?
They'll never let your linen go, will they? Haven't you sent to them?"