Books: The Mill on the Floss

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"Father, will you come up into my sanctum, and look at my new
sketches? I've arranged them now."

"I'm getting terrible stiff in the joints, Phil, for climbing those
stairs of yours," said Wakem, looking kindly at his son as he laid
down his paper. "But come along, then."

"This is a nice place for you, isn't it, Phil?--a capital light that
from the roof, eh?" was, as usual, the first thing he said on entering
the painting-room. He liked to remind himself and his son too that his
fatherly indulgence had provided the accommodation. He had been a good
father. Emily would have nothing to reproach him with there, if she
came back again from her grave.

"Come, come," he said, putting his double eye-glass over his nose, and
seating himself to take a general view while he rested, "you've got a
famous show here. Upon my word, I don't see that your things aren't as
good as that London artist's--what's his name--that Leyburn gave so
much money for."

Philip shook his head and smiled. He had seated himself on his
painting-stool, and had taken a lead pencil in his hand, with which he
was making strong marks to counteract the sense of tremulousness. He
watched his father get up, and walk slowly round, good-naturedly
dwelling on the pictures much longer than his amount of genuine taste
for landscape would have prompted, till he stopped before a stand on
which two pictures were placed,--one much larger than the other, the
smaller one in a leather case.

"Bless me! what have you here?" said Wakem, startled by a sudden
transition from landscape to portrait. "I thought you'd left off
figures. Who are these?"

"They are the same person," said Philip, with calm promptness, "at
different ages."

"And what person?" said Wakem, sharply fixing his eyes with a growing
look of suspicion on the larger picture.

"Miss Tulliver. The small one is something like what she was when I
was at school with her brother at King's Lorton; the larger one is not
quite so good a likeness of what she was when I came from abroad."

Wakem turned round fiercely, with a flushed face, letting his
eye-glass fall, and looking at his son with a savage expression for a
moment, as if he was ready to strike that daring feebleness from the
stool. But he threw himself into the armchair again, and thrust his
hands into his trouser-pockets, still looking angrily at his son,
however. Philip did not return the look, but sat quietly watching the
point of his pencil.

"And do you mean to say, then, that you have had any acquaintance with
her since you came from abroad?" said Wakem, at last, with that vain
effort which rage always makes to throw as much punishment as it
desires to inflict into words and tones, since blows are forbidden.

"Yes; I saw a great deal of her for a whole year before her father's
death. We met often in that thicket--the Red Deeps--near Dorlcote
Mill. I love her dearly; I shall never love any other woman. I have
thought of her ever since she was a little girl."

"Go on, sir! And you have corresponded with her all this while?"

"No. I never told her I loved her till just before we parted, and she
promised her brother not to see me again or to correspond with me. I
am not sure that she loves me or would consent to marry me. But if she
would consent,--if she _did_ love me well enough,--I should marry
her."

"And this is the return you make me for all the indulgences I've
heaped on you?" said Wakem, getting white, and beginning to tremble
under an enraged sense of impotence before Philip's calm defiance and
concentration of purpose.

"No, father," said Philip, looking up at him for the first time; "I
don't regard it as a return. You have been an indulgent father to me;
but I have always felt that it was because you had an affectionate
wish to give me as much happiness as my unfortunate lot would admit,
not that it was a debt you expected me to pay by sacrificing all my
chances of happiness to satisfy feelings of yours which I can never
share."

"I think most sons would share their father's feelings in this case,"
said Wakem, bitterly. "The girl's father was an ignorant mad brute,
who was within an inch of murdering me. The whole town knows it. And
the brother is just as insolent, only in a cooler way. He forbade her
seeing you, you say; he'll break every bone in your body, for your
greater happiness, if you don't take care. But you seem to have made
up your mind; you have counted the consequences, I suppose. Of course
you are independent of me; you can marry this girl to-morrow, if you
like; you are a man of five-and-twenty,--you can go your way, and I
can go mine. We need have no more to do with each other."

Wakem rose and walked toward the door, but something held him back,
and instead of leaving the room, he walked up and down it. Philip was
slow to reply, and when he spoke, his tone had a more incisive
quietness and clearness than ever.

"No; I can't marry Miss Tulliver, even if she would have me, if I have
only my own resources to maintain her with. I have been brought up to
no profession. I can't offer her poverty as well as deformity."

"Ah, _there_ is a reason for your clinging to me, doubtless," said
Wakem, still bitterly, though Philip's last words had given him a
pang; they had stirred a feeling which had been a habit for a quarter
of a century. He threw himself into the chair again.

"I expected all this," said Philip. "I know these scenes are often
happening between father and son. If I were like other men of my age,
I might answer your angry words by still angrier; we might part; I
should marry the woman I love, and have a chance of being as happy as
the rest. But if it will be a satisfaction to you to annihilate the
very object of everything you've done for me, you have an advantage
over most fathers; you can completely deprive me of the only thing
that would make my life worth having."

Philip paused, but his father was silent.

"You know best what satisfaction you would have, beyond that of
gratifying a ridiculous rancor worthy only of wandering savages."

"Ridiculous rancor!" Wakem burst out. "What do you mean? Damn it! is a
man to be horsewhipped by a boor and love him for it? Besides, there's
that cold, proud devil of a son, who said a word to me I shall not
forget when we had the settling. He would be as pleasant a mark for a
bullet as I know, if he were worth the expense."

"I don't mean your resentment toward them," said Philip, who had his
reasons for some sympathy with this view of Tom, "though a feeling of
revenge is not worth much, that you should care to keep it. I mean
your extending the enmity to a helpless girl, who has too much sense
and goodness to share their narrow prejudices. _She_ has never entered
into the family quarrels."

"What does that signify? We don't ask what a woman does; we ask whom
she belongs to. It's altogether a degrading thing to you, to think of
marrying old Tulliver's daughter."

For the first time in the dialogue, Philip lost some of his
self-control, and colored with anger.

"Miss Tulliver," he said, with bitter incisiveness, "has the only
grounds of rank that anything but vulgar folly can suppose to belong
to the middle class; she is thoroughly refined, and her friends,
whatever else they may be, are respected for irreproachable honor and
integrity. All St. Ogg's, I fancy, would pronounce her to be more than
my equal."

Wakem darted a glance of fierce question at his son; but Philip was
not looking at him, and with a certain penitent consciousness went on,
in a few moments, as if in amplification of his last words,--

"Find a single person in St. Ogg's who will not tell you that a
beautiful creature like her would be throwing herself away on a
pitiable object like me."

"Not she!" said Wakem, rising again, and forgetting everything else in
a burst of resentful pride, half fatherly, half personal. "It would be
a deuced fine match for her. It's all stuff about an accidental
deformity, when a girl's really attached to a man."

"But girls are not apt to get attached under those circumstances,"
said Philip.

"Well, then," said Wakem, rather brutally, trying to recover his
previous position, "if she doesn't care for you, you might have spared
yourself the trouble of talking to me about her, and you might have
spared me the trouble of refusing my consent to what was never likely
to happen."

Wakem strode to the door, and without looking round again, banged it
after him.

Philip was not without confidence that his father would be ultimately
wrought upon as he had expected, by what had passed; but the scene had
jarred upon his nerves, which were as sensitive as a woman's. He
determined not to go down to dinner; he couldn't meet his father again
that day. It was Wakem's habit, when he had no company at home, to go
out in the evening, often as early as half-past seven; and as it was
far on in the afternoon now, Philip locked up his room and went out
for a long ramble, thinking he would not return until his father was
out of the house again. He got into a boat, and went down the river to
a favorite village, where he dined, and lingered till it was late
enough for him to return. He had never had any sort of quarrel with
his father before, and had a sickening fear that this contest, just
begun, might go on for weeks; and what might not happen in that time?
He would not allow himself to define what that involuntary question
meant. But if he could once be in the position of Maggie's accepted,
acknowledged lover, there would be less room for vague dread. He went
up to his painting-room again, and threw himself with a sense of
fatigue into the armchair, looking round absently at the views of
water and rock that were ranged around, till he fell into a doze, in
which he fancied Maggie was slipping down a glistening, green, slimy
channel of a waterfall, and he was looking on helpless, till he was
awakened by what seemed a sudden, awful crash.

It was the opening of the door, and he could hardly have dozen more
than a few moments, for there was no perceptible change in the evening
light. It was his father who entered; and when Philip moved to vacate
the chair for him, he said,--

"Sit still. I'd rather walk about."

He stalked up and down the room once or twice, and then, standing
opposite Philip with his hands thrust in his side pockets, he said, as
if continuing a conversation that had not been broken off,--

"But this girl seems to have been fond of you, Phil, else she wouldn't
have met you in that way."

Philip's heart was beating rapidly, and a transient flush passed over
his face like a gleam. It was not quite easy to speak at once.

"She liked me at King's Lorton, when she was a little girl, because I
used to sit with her brother a great deal when he had hurt his foot.
She had kept that in her memory, and thought of me as a friend of a
long while ago. She didn't think of me as a lover when she met me."

"Well, but you made love to her at last. What did she say then?" said
Wakem, walking about again.

"She said she _did_ love me then."

"Confound it, then; what else do you want? Is she a jilt?"

"She was very young then," said Philip, hesitatingly. "I'm afraid she
hardly knew what she felt. I'm afraid our long separation, and the
idea that events must always divide us, may have made a difference."

"But she's in the town. I've seen her at church. Haven't you spoken to
her since you came back?"

"Yes, at Mr. Deane's. But I couldn't renew my proposals to her on
several grounds. One obstacle would be removed if you would give your
consent,--if you would be willing to think of her as a daughter-in-law."

Wakem was silent a little while, pausing before Maggie's picture.

"She's not the sort of woman your mother was, though, Phil," he said,
at last. "I saw her at church,--she's handsomer than this,--deuced
fine eyes and fine figure, I saw; but rather dangerous and
unmanageable, eh?"

"She's very tender and affectionate, and so simple,--without the airs
and petty contrivances other women have."

"Ah?" said Wakem. Then looking round at his son, "But your mother
looked gentler; she had that brown wavy hair and gray eyes, like
yours. You can't remember her very well. It was a thousand pities I'd
no likeness of her."

"Then, shouldn't you be glad for me to have the same sort of
happiness, father, to sweeten my life for me? There can never be
another tie so strong to you as that which began eight-and-twenty
years ago, when you married my mother, and you have been tightening it
ever since."

"Ah, Phil, you're the only fellow that knows the best of me," said
Wakem, giving his hand to his son. "We must keep together if we can.
And now, what am I to do? You must come downstairs and tell me. Am I
to go and call on this dark-eyed damsel?"

The barrier once thrown down in this way, Philip could talk freely to
his father of their entire relation with the Tullivers,--of the desire
to get the mill and land back into the family, and of its transfer to
Guest & Co. as an intermediate step. He could venture now to be
persuasive and urgent, and his father yielded with more readiness than
he had calculated on.

"_I_ don't care about the mill," he said at last, with a sort of angry
compliance. "I've had an infernal deal of bother lately about the
mill. Let them pay me for my improvements, that's all. But there's one
thing you needn't ask me. I shall have no direct transactions with
young Tulliver. If you like to swallow him for his sister's sake, you
may; but I've no sauce that will make him go down."

I leave you to imagine the agreeable feelings with which Philip went
to Mr. Deane the next day, to say that Mr. Wakem was ready to open the
negotiations, and Lucy's pretty triumph as she appealed to her father
whether she had not proved her great business abilities. Mr. Deane was
rather puzzled, and suspected that there had been something "going on"
among the young people to which he wanted a clew. But to men of Mr.
Deane's stamp, what goes on among the young people is as extraneous to
the real business of life as what goes on among the birds and
butterflies, until it can be shown to have a malign bearing on
monetary affairs. And in this case the bearing appeared to be entirely
propitious.

Chapter IX

Charity in Full-Dress

The culmination of Maggie's career as an admired member of society in
St. Ogg's was certainly the day of the bazaar, when her simple noble
beauty, clad in a white muslin of some soft-floating kind, which I
suspect must have come from the stores of aunt Pullet's wardrobe,
appeared with marked distinction among the more adorned and
conventional women around her. We perhaps never detect how much of our
social demeanor is made up of artificial airs until we see a person
who is at once beautiful and simple; without the beauty, we are apt to
call simplicity awkwardness. The Miss Guests were much too well-bred
to have any of the grimaces and affected tones that belong to
pretentious vulgarity; but their stall being next to the one where
Maggie sat, it seemed newly obvious to-day that Miss Guest held her
chin too high, and that Miss Laura spoke and moved continually with a
view to effect.

All well-dressed St. Ogg's and its neighborhood were there; and it
would have been worth while to come even from a distance, to see the
fine old hall, with its open roof and carved oaken rafters, and great
oaken folding-doors, and light shed down from a height on the
many-colored show beneath; a very quaint place, with broad faded
stripes painted on the walls, and here and there a show of heraldic
animals of a bristly, long-snouted character, the cherished emblems of
a noble family once the seigniors of this now civic hall. A grand
arch, cut in the upper wall at one end, surmounted an oaken orchestra,
with an open room behind it, where hothouse plants and stalls for
refreshments were disposed; an agreeable resort for gentlemen disposed
to loiter, and yet to exchange the occasional crush down below for a
more commodious point of view. In fact, the perfect fitness of this
ancient building for an admirable modern purpose, that made charity
truly elegant, and led through vanity up to the supply of a deficit,
was so striking that hardly a person entered the room without
exchanging the remark more than once. Near the great arch over the
orchestra was the stone oriel with painted glass, which was one of the
venerable inconsistencies of the old hall; and it was close by this
that Lucy had her stall, for the convenience of certain large plain
articles which she had taken charge of for Mrs. Kenn. Maggie had
begged to sit at the open end of the stall, and to have the sale of
these articles rather than of bead-mats and other elaborate products
of which she had but a dim understanding. But it soon appeared that
the gentlemen's dressing-gowns, which were among her commodities, were
objects of such general attention and inquiry, and excited so
troublesome a curiosity as to their lining and comparative merits,
together with a determination to test them by trying on, as to make
her post a very conspicuous one. The ladies who had commodities of
their own to sell, and did not want dressing-gowns, saw at once the
frivolity and bad taste of this masculine preference for goods which
any tailor could furnish; and it is possible that the emphatic notice
of various kinds which was drawn toward Miss Tulliver on this public
occasion, threw a very strong and unmistakable light on her subsequent
conduct in many minds then present. Not that anger, on account of
spurned beauty can dwell in the celestial breasts of charitable
ladies, but rather that the errors of persons who have once been much
admired necessarily take a deeper tinge from the mere force of
contrast; and also, that to-day Maggie's conspicuous position, for the
first time, made evident certain characteristics which were
subsequently felt to have an explanatory bearing. There was something
rather bold in Miss Tulliver's direct gaze, and something undefinably
coarse in the style of her beauty, which placed her, in the opinion of
all feminine judges, far below her cousin Miss Deane; for the ladies
of St. Ogg's had now completely ceded to Lucy their hypothetic claims
on the admiration of Mr. Stephen Guest.

As for dear little Lucy herself, her late benevolent triumph about the
Mill, and all the affectionate projects she was cherishing for Maggie
and Philip, helped to give her the highest spirits to-day, and she
felt nothing but pleasure in the evidence of Maggie's attractiveness.
It is true, she was looking very charming herself, and Stephen was
paying her the utmost attention on this public occasion; jealously
buying up the articles he had seen under her fingers in the process of
making, and gayly helping her to cajole the male customers into the
purchase of the most effeminate futilities. He chose to lay aside his
hat and wear a scarlet fez of her embroidering; but by superficial
observers this was necessarily liable to be interpreted less as a
compliment to Lucy than as a mark of coxcombry. "Guest is a great
coxcomb," young Torry observed; "but then he is a privileged person in
St. Ogg's--he carries all before him; if another fellow did such
things, everybody would say he made a fool of himself."

And Stephen purchased absolutely nothing from Maggie, until Lucy said,
in rather a vexed undertone,--

"See, now; all the things of Maggie's knitting will be gone, and you
will not have bought one. There are those deliciously soft warm things
for the wrists,--do buy them."

"Oh no," said Stephen, "they must be intended for imaginative persons,
who can chill themselves on this warm day by thinking of the frosty
Caucasus. Stern reason is my forte, you know. You must get Philip to
buy those. By the way, why doesn't he come?"

"He never likes going where there are many people, though I enjoined
him to come. He said he would buy up any of my goods that the rest of
the world rejected. But now, do go and buy something of Maggie."

"No, no; see, she has got a customer; there is old Wakem himself just
coming up."

Lucy's eyes turned with anxious interest toward Maggie to see how she
went through this first interview, since a sadly memorable time, with
a man toward whom she must have so strange a mixture of feelings; but
she was pleased to notice that Wakem had tact enough to enter at once
into talk about the bazaar wares, and appear interested in purchasing,
smiling now and then kindly at Maggie, and not calling on her to speak
much, as if he observed that she was rather pale and tremulous.

"Why, Wakem is making himself particularly amiable to your cousin,"
said Stephen, in an undertone to Lucy; "is it pure magnanimity? You
talked of a family quarrel."

"Oh, that will soon be quite healed, I hope," said Lucy, becoming a
little indiscreet in her satisfaction, and speaking with an air of
significance. But Stephen did not appear to notice this, and as some
lady-purchasers came up, he lounged on toward Maggie's end, handling
trifles and standing aloof until Wakem, who had taken out his purse,
had finished his t transactions.

"My son came with me," he overheard Wakem saying, "but he has vanished
into some other part of the building, and has left all these
charitable gallantries to me. I hope you'll reproach him for his
shabby conduct."

She returned his smile and bow without speaking, and he turned away,
only then observing Stephen and nodding to him. Maggie, conscious that
Stephen was still there, busied herself with counting money, and
avoided looking up. She had been well pleased that he had devoted
himself to Lucy to-day, and had not come near her. They had begun the
morning with an indifferent salutation, and both had rejoiced in being
aloof from each other, like a patient who has actually done without
his opium, in spite of former failures in resolution. And during the
last few days they had even been making up their minds to failures,
looking to the outward events that must soon come to separate them, as
a reason for dispensing with self-conquest in detail.

Stephen moved step by step as if he were being unwillingly dragged,
until he had got round the open end of the stall, and was half hidden
by a screen of draperies. Maggie went on counting her money till she
suddenly heard a deep gentle voice saying, "Aren't you very tried? Do
let me bring you something,--some fruit or jelly, mayn't I?"

The unexpected tones shook her like a sudden accidental vibration of a
harp close by her.

"Oh no, thank you," she said faintly, and only half looking up for an
instant.

"You look so pale," Stephen insisted, in a more entreating tone. "I'm
sure you're exhausted. I must disobey you, and bring something."

"No, indeed, I couldn't take it."

"Are you angry with me? What have I done? _Do_ look at me."

"Pray, go away," said Maggie, looking at him helplessly, her eyes
glancing immediately from him to the opposite corner of the orchestra,
which was half hidden by the folds of the old faded green curtain.
Maggie had no sooner uttered this entreaty than she was wretched at
the admission it implied; but Stephen turned away at once, and
following her upward glance, he saw Philip Wakem sealed in the
half-hidden corner, so that he could command little more than that
angle of the hall in which Maggie sat. An entirely new though occurred
to Stephen, and linking itself with what he had observed of Wakem's
manner, and with Lucy's reply to his observation, it convinced him
that there had been some former relation between Philip and Maggie
beyond that childish one of which he had heard. More than one impulse
made him immediately leave the hall and go upstairs to the
refreshment-room, where, walking up to Philip, he sat down behind him,
and put his hand on his shoulder.

"Are you studying for a portrait, Phil," he said, "or for a sketch of
that oriel window? By George, it makes a capital bit from this dark
corner, with the curtain just marking it off."

"I have been studying expression," said Philip, curtly.

"What! Miss Tulliver's? It's rather of the savage-moody order to-day,
I think,--something of the fallen princess serving behind a counter.
Her cousin sent me to her with a civil offer to get her some
refreshment, but I have been snubbed, as usual. There's natural
antipathy between us, I suppose; I have seldom the honor to please
her."

"What a hypocrite you are!" said Philip, flushing angrily.

"What! because experience must have told me that I'm universally
pleasing? I admit the law, but there's some disturbing force here."

"I am going," said Philip, rising abruptly.

"So am I--to get a breath of fresh air; this place gets oppressive. I
think I have done suit and service long enough."

The two friends walked downstairs together without speaking. Philip
turned through the outer door into the court-yard; but Stephen,
saying, "Oh, by the by, I must call in here," went on along the
passage to one of the rooms at the other end of the building, which
were appropriated to the town library. He had the room all to himself,
and a man requires nothing less than this when he wants to dash his
cap on the table, throw himself astride a chair, and stare at a high
brick wall with a frown which would not have been beneath the occasion
if he had been slaying "the giant Python." The conduct that issues
from a moral conflict has often so close a resemblance to vice that
the distinction escapes all outward judgments founded on a mere
comparison of actions. It is clear to you, I hope, that Stephen was
not a hypocrite,--capable of deliberate doubleness for a selfish end;
and yet his fluctuations between the indulgence of a feeling and the
systematic concealment of it might have made a good case in support of
Philip's accusation.