Books: The Mill on the Floss

G >> George Eliot >> The Mill on the Floss

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45

"Oh no, I won't stay," said Maggie, starting up. "It will only haunt
me. Let us walk, Philip. I must go home."

She moved away, so that he was obliged to rise and follow her.

"Maggie," he said, in a tone of remonstrance, "don't persist in this
wilful, senseless privation. It makes me wretched to see you benumbing
and cramping your nature in this way. You were so full of life when
you were a child; I thought you would be a brilliant woman,--all wit
and bright imagination. And it flashes out in your face still, until
you draw that veil of dull quiescence over it."

"Why do you speak so bitterly to me, Philip?" said Maggie.

"Because I foresee it will not end well; you can never carry on this
self-torture."

"I shall have strength given me," said Maggie, tremulously.

"No, you will not, Maggie; no one has strength given to do what is
unnatural. It is mere cowardice to seek safety in negations. No
character becomes strong in that way. You will be thrown into the
world some day, and then every rational satisfaction of your nature
that you deny now will assault you like a savage appetite."

Maggie started and paused, looking at Philip with alarm in her face.

"Philip, how dare you shake me in this way? You are a tempter."

"No, I am not; but love gives insight, Maggie, and insight often gives
foreboding. _Listen_ to me,--let _me_ supply you with books; do let me
see you sometimes,--be your brother and teacher, as you said at
Lorton. It is less wrong that you should see me than that you should
be committing this long suicide."

Maggie felt unable to speak. She shook her head and walked on in
silence, till they came to the end of the Scotch firs, and she put out
her hand in sign of parting.

"Do you banish me from this place forever, then, Maggie? Surely I may
come and walk in it sometimes? If I meet you by chance, there is no
concealment in that?"

It is the moment when our resolution seems about to become
irrevocable--when the fatal iron gates are about to close upon
us--that tests our strength. Then, after hours of clear reasoning and
firm conviction, we snatch at any sophistry that will nullify our long
struggles, and bring us the defeat that we love better than victory.

Maggie felt her heart leap at this subterfuge of Philip's, and there
passed over her face that almost imperceptible shock which accompanies
any relief. He saw it, and they parted in silence.

Philip's sense of the situation was too complete for him not to be
visited with glancing fears lest he had been intervening too
presumptuously in the action of Maggie's conscience, perhaps for a
selfish end. But no!--he persuaded himself his end was not selfish. He
had little hope that Maggie would ever return the strong feeling he
had for her; and it must be better for Maggie's future life, when
these petty family obstacles to her freedom had disappeared, that the
present should not be entirely sacrificed, and that she should have
some opportunity of culture,--some interchange with a mind above the
vulgar level of those she was now condemned to live with. If we only
look far enough off for the consequence of our actions, we can always
find some point in the combination of results by which those actions
can be justified; by adopting the point of view of a Providence who
arranges results, or of a philosopher who traces them, we shall find
it possible to obtain perfect complacency in choosing to do what is
most agreeable to us in the present moment. And it was in this way
that Philip justified his subtle efforts to overcome Maggie's true
prompting against a concealment that would introduce doubleness into
her own mind, and might cause new misery to those who had the primary
natural claim on her. But there was a surplus of passion in him that
made him half independent of justifying motives. His longing to see
Maggie, and make an element in her life, had in it some of that savage
impulse to snatch an offered joy which springs from a life in which
the mental and bodily constitution have made pain predominate. He had
not his full share in the common good of men; he could not even pass
muster with the insignificant, but must be singled out for pity, and
excepted from what was a matter of course with others. Even to Maggie
he was an exception; it was clear that the thought of his being her
lover had never entered her mind.

Do not think too hardly of Philip. Ugly and deformed people have great
need of unusual virtues, because they are likely to be extremely
uncomfortable without them; but the theory that unusual virtues spring
by a direct consequence out of personal disadvantages, as animals get
thicker wool in severe climates, is perhaps a little overstrained. The
temptations of beauty are much dwelt upon, but I fancy they only bear
the same relation to those of ugliness, as the temptation to excess at
a feast, where the delights are varied for eye and ear as well as
palate, bears to the temptations that assail the desperation of
hunger. Does not the Hunger Tower stand as the type of the utmost
trial to what is human in us?

Philip had never been soothed by that mother's love which flows out to
us in the greater abundance because our need is greater, which clings
to us the more tenderly because we are the less likely to be winners
in the game of life; and the sense of his father's affection and
indulgence toward him was marred by the keener perception of his
father's faults. Kept aloof from all practical life as Philip had
been, and by nature half feminine in sensitiveness, he had some of the
woman's intolerant repulsion toward worldliness and the deliberate
pursuit of sensual enjoyment; and this one strong natural tie in his
life,--his relation as a son,--was like an aching limb to him. Perhaps
there is inevitably something morbid in a human being who is in any
way unfavorably excepted from ordinary conditions, until the good
force has had time to triumph; and it has rarely had time for that at
two-and-twenty. That force was present in Philip in much strength, but
the sun himself looks feeble through the morning mists.

Chapter IV

Another Love-Scene

Early in the following April, nearly a year after that dubious parting
you have just witnessed, you may, if you like, again see Maggie
entering the Red Deeps through the group of Scotch firs. But it is
early afternoon and not evening, and the edge of sharpness in the
spring air makes her draw her large shawl close about her and trip
along rather quickly; though she looks round, as usual, that she may
take in the sight of her beloved trees. There is a more eager,
inquiring look in her eyes than there was last June, and a smile is
hovering about her lips, as if some playful speech were awaiting the
right hearer. The hearer was not long in appearing.

"Take back your _Corinne_," said Maggie, drawing a book from under her
shawl. "You were right in telling me she would do me no good; but you
were wrong in thinking I should wish to be like her."

"Wouldn't you really like to be a tenth Muse, then, Maggie?" said
Philip looking up in her face as we look at a first parting in the
clouds that promises us a bright heaven once more.

"Not at all," said Maggie, laughing. "The Muses were uncomfortable
goddesses, I think,--obliged always to carry rolls and musical
instruments about with them. If I carried a harp in this climate, you
know, I must have a green baize cover for it; and I should be sure to
leave it behind me by mistake."

"You agree with me in not liking Corinne, then?"

"I didn't finish the book," said Maggie. "As soon as I came to the
blond-haired young lady reading in the park, I shut it up, and
determined to read no further. I foresaw that that light-complexioned
girl would win away all the love from Corinne and make her miserable.
I'm determined to read no more books where the blond-haired women
carry away all the happiness. I should begin to have a prejudice
against them. If you could give me some story, now, where the dark
woman triumphs, it would restore the balance. I want to avenge Rebecca
and Flora MacIvor and Minna, and all the rest of the dark unhappy
ones. Since you are my tutor, you ought to preserve my mind from
prejudices; you are always arguing against prejudices."

"Well, perhaps you will avenge the dark women in your own person, and
carry away all the love from your cousin Lucy. She is sure to have
some handsome young man of St. Ogg's at her feet now; and you have
only to shine upon him--your fair little cousin will be quite quenched
in your beams."

"Philip, that is not pretty of you, to apply my nonsense to anything
real," said Maggie, looking hurt. "As if I, with my old gowns and want
of all accomplishments, could be a rival of dear little Lucy,--who
knows and does all sorts of charming things, and is ten times prettier
than I am,--even if I were odious and base enough to wish to be her
rival. Besides, I never go to aunt Deane's when any one is there; it
is only because dear Lucy is good, and loves me, that she comes to see
me, and will have me go to see her sometimes."

"Maggie," said Philip, with surprise, "it is not like you to take
playfulness literally. You must have been in St. Ogg's this morning,
and brought away a slight infection of dulness."

"Well," said Maggie, smiling, "if you meant that for a joke, it was a
poor one; but I thought it was a very good reproof. I thought you
wanted to remind me that I am vain, and wish every one to admire me
most. But it isn't for that that I'm jealous for the dark women,--not
because I'm dark myself; it's because I always care the most about the
unhappy people. If the blond girl were forsaken, I should like _her_
best. I always take the side of the rejected lover in the stories."

"Then you would never have the heart to reject one yourself, should
you, Maggie?" said Philip, flushing a little.

"I don't know," said Maggie, hesitatingly. Then with a bright smile,
"I think perhaps I could if he were very conceited; and yet, if he got
extremely humiliated afterward, I should relent."

"I've often wondered, Maggie," Philip said, with some effort, "whether
you wouldn't really be more likely to love a man that other women were
not likely to love."

"That would depend on what they didn't like him for," said Maggie,
laughing. "He might be very disagreeable. He might look at me through
an eye-glass stuck in his eye, making a hideous face, as young Torry
does. I should think other women are not fond of that; but I never
felt any pity for young Torry. I've never any pity for conceited
people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them."

"But suppose, Maggie,--suppose it was a man who was not conceited, who
felt he had nothing to be conceited about; who had been marked from
childhood for a peculiar kind of suffering, and to whom you were the
day-star of his life; who loved you, worshipped you, so entirely that
he felt it happiness enough for him if you would let him see you at
rare moments----"

Philip paused with a pang of dread lest his confession should cut
short this very happiness,--a pang of the same dread that had kept his
love mute through long months. A rush of self-consciousness told him
that he was besotted to have said all this. Maggie's manner this
morning had been as unconstrained and indifferent as ever.

But she was not looking indifferent now. Struck with the unusual
emotion in Philip's tone, she had turned quickly to look at him; and
as he went on speaking, a great change came over her face,--a flush
and slight spasm of the features, such as we see in people who hear
some news that will require them to readjust their conceptions of the
past. She was quite silent, and walking on toward the trunk of a
fallen tree, she sat down, as if she had no strength to spare for her
muscles. She was trembling.

"Maggie," said Philip, getting more and more alarmed in every fresh
moment of silence, "I was a fool to say it; forget that I've said it.
I shall be contented if things can be as they were."

The distress with which he spoke urged Maggie to say something. "I am
so surprised, Philip; I had not thought of it." And the effort to say
this brought the tears down too.

"Has it made you hate me, Maggie?" said Philip, impetuously. "Do you
think I'm a presumptuous fool?"

"Oh, Philip!" said Maggie, "how can you think I have such feelings? As
if I were not grateful for _any_ love. But--but I had never thought of
your being my lover. It seemed so far off--like a dream--only like one
of the stories one imagines--that I should ever have a lover."

"Then can you bear to think of me as your lover, Maggie?" said Philip,
seating himself by her, and taking her hand, in the elation of a
sudden hope. "_Do_ you love me?"

Maggie turned rather pale; this direct question seemed not easy to
answer. But her eyes met Philip's, which were in this moment liquid
and beautiful with beseeching love. She spoke with hesitation, yet
with sweet, simple, girlish tenderness.

"I think I could hardly love any one better; there is nothing but what
I love you for." She paused a little while, and then added: "But it
will be better for us not to say any more about it, won't it, dear
Philip? You know we couldn't even be friends, if our friendship were
discovered. I have never felt that I was right in giving way about
seeing you, though it has been so precious to me in some ways; and now
the fear comes upon me strongly again, that it will lead to evil."

"But no evil has come, Maggie; and if you had been guided by that fear
before, you would only have lived through another dreary, benumbing
year, instead of reviving into your real self."

Maggie shook her head. "It has been very sweet, I know,--all the
talking together, and the books, and the feeling that I had the walk
to look forward to, when I could tell you the thoughts that had come
into my head while I was away from you. But it has made me restless;
it has made me think a great deal about the world; and I have
impatient thoughts again,--I get weary of my home; and then it cuts me
to the heart afterward, that I should ever have felt weary of my
father and mother. I think what you call being benumbed was
better--better for me--for then my selfish desires were benumbed."

Philip had risen again, and was walking backward and forward
impatiently.

"No, Maggie, you have wrong ideas of self-conquest, as I've often told
you. What you call self-conquest--binding and deafening yourself to
all but one train of impressions--is only the culture of monomania in
a nature like yours."

He had spoken with some irritation, but now he sat down by her again
and took her hand.

"Don't think of the past now, Maggie; think only of our love. If you
can really cling to me with all your heart, every obstacle will be
overcome in time; we need only wait. I can live on hope. Look at me,
Maggie; tell me again it is possible for you to love me. Don't look
away from me to that cloven tree; it is a bad omen."

She turned her large dark glance upon him with a sad smile.

"Come, Maggie, say one kind word, or else you were better to me at
Lorton. You asked me if I should like you to kiss me,--don't you
remember?--and you promised to kiss me when you met me again. You
never kept the promise."

The recollection of that childish time came as a sweet relief to
Maggie. It made the present moment less strange to her. She kissed him
almost as simply and quietly as she had done when she was twelve years
old. Philip's eyes flashed with delight, but his next words were words
of discontent.

"You don't seem happy enough, Maggie; you are forcing yourself to say
you love me, out of pity."

"No, Philip," said Maggie, shaking her head, in her old childish way;
"I'm telling you the truth. It is all new and strange to me; but I
don't think I could love any one better than I love you. I should like
always to live with you--to make you happy. I have always been happy
when I have been with you. There is only one thing I will not do for
your sake; I will never do anything to wound my father. You must never
ask that from me."

"No, Maggie, I will ask nothing; I will bear everything; I'll wait
another year only for a kiss, if you will only give me the first place
in your heart."

"No," said Maggie, smiling, "I won't make you wait so long as that."
But then, looking serious again, she added, as she rose from her
seat,--

"But what would your own father say, Philip? Oh, it is quite
impossible we can ever be more than friends,--brother and sister in
secret, as we have been. Let us give up thinking of everything else."

"No, Maggie, I can't give you up,--unless you are deceiving me; unless
you really only care for me as if I were your brother. Tell me the
truth."

"Indeed I do, Philip. What happiness have I ever had so great as being
with you,--since I was a little girl,--the days Tom was good to me?
And your mind is a sort of world to me; you can tell me all I want to
know. I think I should never be tired of being with you."

They were walking hand in hand, looking at each other; Maggie, indeed,
was hurrying along, for she felt it time to be gone. But the sense
that their parting was near made her more anxious lest she should have
unintentionally left some painful impression on Philip's mind. It was
one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and
deceptive; when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves
floodmarks which are never reached again.

They stopped to part among the Scotch firs.

"Then my life will be filled with hope, Maggie, and I shall be happier
than other men, in spite of all? We _do_ belong to each other--for
always--whether we are apart or together?"

"Yes, Philip; I should like never to part; I should like to make your
life very happy."

"I am waiting for something else. I wonder whether it will come."

Maggie smiled, with glistening tears, and then stooped her tall head
to kiss the pale face that was full of pleading, timid love,--like a
woman's.

She had a moment of real happiness then,--a moment of belief that, if
there were sacrifice in this love, it was all the richer and more
satisfying.

She turned away and hurried home, feeling that in the hour since she
had trodden this road before, a new era had begun for her. The tissue
of vague dreams must now get narrower and narrower, and all the
threads of thought and emotion be gradually absorbed in the woof of
her actual daily life.

Chapter V

The Cloven Tree

Secrets are rarely betrayed or discovered according to any programme
our fear has sketched out. Fear is almost always haunted by terrible
dramatic scenes, which recur in spite of the best-argued probabilities
against them; and during a year that Maggie had had the burthen of
concealment on her mind, the possibility of discovery had continually
presented itself under the form of a sudden meeting with her father or
Tom when she was walking with Philip in the Red Deeps. She was aware
that this was not one of the most likely events; but it was the scene
that most completely symbolized her inward dread. Those slight
indirect suggestions which are dependent on apparently trivial
coincidences and incalculable states of mind, are the favorite
machinery of Fact, but are not the stuff in which Imagination is apt
to work.

Certainly one of the persons about whom Maggie's fears were furthest
from troubling themselves was her aunt Pullet, on whom, seeing that
she did not live in St. Ogg's, and was neither sharp-eyed nor
sharp-tempered, it would surely have been quite whimsical of them to
fix rather than on aunt Glegg. And yet the channel of fatality--the
pathway of the lightning--was no other than aunt Pullet. She did not
live at St. Ogg's, but the road from Garum Firs lay by the Red Deeps,
at the end opposite that by which Maggie entered.

The day after Maggie's last meeting with Philip, being a Sunday on
which Mr. Pullet was bound to appear in funeral hatband and scarf at
St. Ogg's church, Mrs. Pullet made this the occasion of dining with
sister Glegg, and taking tea with poor sister Tulliver. Sunday was the
one day in the week on which Tom was at home in the afternoon; and
today the brighter spirits he had been in of late had flowed over in
unusually cheerful open chat with his father, and in the invitation,
"Come, Magsie, you come too!" when he strolled out with his mother in
the garden to see the advancing cherry-blossoms. He had been better
pleased with Maggie since she had been less odd and ascetic; he was
even getting rather proud of her; several persons had remarked in his
hearing that his sister was a very fine girl. To-day there was a
peculiar brightness in her face, due in reality to an undercurrent of
excitement, which had as much doubt and pain as pleasure in it; but it
might pass for a sign of happiness.

"You look very well, my dear," said aunt Pullet, shaking her head
sadly, as they sat round the tea-table. "I niver thought your girl 'ud
be so good-looking, Bessy. But you must wear pink, my dear; that blue
thing as your aunt Glegg gave you turns you into a crowflower. Jane
never _was_ tasty. Why don't you wear that gown o' mine?"

"It is so pretty and so smart, aunt. I think it's too showy for
me,--at least for my other clothes, that I must wear with it.

"To be sure, it 'ud be unbecoming if it wasn't well known you've got
them belonging to you as can afford to give you such things when
they've done with 'em themselves. It stands to reason I must give my
own niece clothes now and then,--such things as _I_ buy every year,
and never wear anything out. And as for Lucy, there's no giving to
her, for she's got everything o' the choicest; sister Deane may well
hold her head up,--though she looks dreadful yallow, poor thing--I
doubt this liver complaint 'ull carry her off. That's what this new
vicar, this Dr. Kenn, said in the funeral sermon to-day."

"Ah, he's a wonderful preacher, by all account,--isn't he, Sophy?"
said Mrs. Tulliver.

"Why, Lucy had got a collar on this blessed day," continued Mrs.
Pullet, with her eyes fixed in a ruminating manner, "as I don't say I
haven't got as good, but I must look out my best to match it."

"Miss Lucy's called the bell o' St. Ogg's, they say; that's a cur'ous
word," observed Mr. Pullet, on whom the mysteries of etymology
sometimes fell with an oppressive weight.

"Pooh!" said Mr. Tulliver, jealous for Maggie, "she's a small thing,
not much of a figure. But fine feathers make fine birds. I see nothing
to admire so much in those diminutive women; they look silly by the
side o' the men,--out o' proportion. When I chose my wife, I chose her
the right size,--neither too little nor too big."

The poor wife, with her withered beauty, smiled complacently.

"But the men aren't _all_ big," said uncle Pullet, not without some
self-reference; "a young fellow may be good-looking and yet not be a
six-foot, like Master Tom here.

"Ah, it's poor talking about littleness and bigness,--anybody may
think it's a mercy they're straight," said aunt Pullet. "There's that
mismade son o' Lawyer Wakem's, I saw him at church to-day. Dear, dear!
to think o' the property he's like to have; and they say he's very
queer and lonely, doesn't like much company. I shouldn't wonder if he
goes out of his mind; for we never come along the road but he's
a-scrambling out o' the trees and brambles at the Red Deeps."

This wide statement, by which Mrs. Pullet represented the fact that
she had twice seen Philip at the spot indicated, produced an effect on
Maggie which was all the stronger because Tom sate opposite her, and
she was intensely anxious to look indifferent. At Philip's name she
had blushed, and the blush deepened every instant from consciousness,
until the mention of the Red Deeps made her feel as if the whole
secret were betrayed, and she dared not even hold her tea-spoon lest
she should show how she trembled. She sat with her hands clasped under
the table, not daring to look round. Happily, her father was seated on
the same side with herself, beyond her uncle Pullet, and could not see
her face without stooping forward. Her mother's voice brought the
first relief, turning the conversation; for Mrs. Tulliver was always
alarmed when the name of Wakem was mentioned in her husband's
presence. Gradually Maggie recovered composure enough to look up; her
eyes met Tom's, but he turned away his head immediately; and she went
to bed that night wondering if he had gathered any suspicion from her
confusion. Perhaps not; perhaps he would think it was only her alarm
at her aunt's mention of Wakem before her father; that was the
interpretation her mother had put in it. To her father, Wakem was like
a disfiguring disease, of which he was obliged to endure the
consciousness, but was exasperated to have the existence recognized by
others; and no amount of sensitiveness in her about her father could
be surprising, Maggie thought.

But Tom was too keen-sighted to rest satisfied with such an
interpretation; he had seen clearly enough that there was something
distinct from anxiety about her father in Maggie's excessive
confusion. In trying to recall all the details that could give shape
to his suspicions, he remembered only lately hearing his mother scold
Maggie for walking in the Red Deeps when the ground was wet, and
bringing home shoes clogged with red soil; still Tom, retaining all
his old repulsion for Philip's deformity, shrank from attributing to
his sister the probability of feeling more than a friendly interest in
such an unfortunate exception to the common run of men. Tom's was a
nature which had a sort of superstitious repugnance to everything
exceptional. A love for a deformed man would be odious in any woman,
in a sister intolerable. But if she had been carrying on any kind of
intercourse whatever with Philip, a stop must be put to it at once;
she was disobeying her father's strongest feelings and her brother's
express commands, besides compromising herself by secret meetings. He
left home the next morning in that watchful state of mind which turns
the most ordinary course of things into pregnant coincidences.