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

But she was not without practical intentions; the love of independence
was too strong an inheritance and a habit for her not to remember that
she must get her bread; and when other projects looked vague, she fell
back on that of returning to her plain sewing, and so getting enough
to pay for her lodging at Bob's. She meant to persuade her mother to
return to the Mill by and by, and live with Tom again; and somehow or
other she would maintain herself at St. Ogg's. Dr. Kenn would perhaps
help her and advise her. She remembered his parting words at the
bazaar. She remembered the momentary feeling of reliance that had
sprung in her when he was talking with her, and she waited with
yearning expectation for the opportunity of confiding everything to
him. Her mother called every day at Mr. Deane's to learn how Lucy was;
the report was always sad,--nothing had yet roused her from the feeble
passivity which had come on with the first shock. But of Philip, Mrs.
Tulliver had learned nothing; naturally, no one whom she met would
speak to her about what related to her daughter. But at last she
summoned courage to go and see sister Glegg, who of course would know
everything, and had been even to see Tom at the Mill in Mrs.
Tulliver's absence, though he had said nothing of what had passed on
the occasion.

As soon as her mother was gone, Maggie put on her bonnet. She had
resolved on walking to the Rectory and asking to see Dr. Kenn; he was
in deep grief, but the grief of another does not jar upon us in such
circumstances. It was the first time she had been beyond the door
since her return; nevertheless her mind was so bent on the purpose of
her walk, that the unpleasantness of meeting people on the way, and
being stared at, did not occur to her. But she had no sooner passed
beyond the narrower streets which she had to thread from Bob's
dwelling, than she became aware of unusual glances cast at her; and
this consciousness made her hurry along nervously, afraid to look to
right or left. Presently, however, she came full on Mrs. and Miss
Turnbull, old acquaintances of her family; they both looked at her
strangely, and turned a little aside without speaking. All hard looks
were pain to Maggie, but her self-reproach was too strong for
resentment. No wonder they will not speak to me, she thought; they are
very fond of Lucy. But now she knew that she was about to pass a group
of gentlemen, who were standing at the door of the billiard-rooms, and
she could not help seeing young Torry step out a little with his glass
at his eye, and bow to her with that air of _nonchalance_ which he
might have bestowed on a friendly barmaid.

Maggie's pride was too intense for her not to feel that sting, even in
the midst of her sorrow; and for the first time the thought took
strong hold of her that she would have other obloquy cast on her
besides that which was felt to be due to her breach of faith toward
Lucy. But she was at the Rectory now; there, perhaps, she would find
something else than retribution. Retribution may come from any voice;
the hardest, cruelest, most imbruted urchin at the street-corner can
inflict it; surely help and pity are rarer things, more needful for
the righteous to bestow.

She was shown up at once, after being announced, into Dr. Kenn's
study, where he sat amongst piled-up books, for which he had little
appetite, leaning his cheek against the head of his youngest child, a
girl of three. The child was sent away with the servant, and when the
door was closed, Dr. Kenn said, placing a chair for Maggie,--

"I was coming to see you, Miss Tulliver; you have anticipated me; I am
glad you did."

Maggie looked at him with her childlike directness as she had done at
the bazaar, and said, "I want to tell you everything." But her eyes
filled fast with tears as she said it, and all the pent-up excitement
of her humiliating walk would have its vent before she could say more.

"Do tell me everything," Dr. Kenn said, with quiet kindness in his
grave, firm voice. "Think of me as one to whom a long experience has
been granted, which may enable him to help you."

In rather broken sentences, and with some effort at first, but soon
with the greater ease that came from a sense of relief in the
confidence, Maggie told the brief story of a struggle that must be the
beginning of a long sorrow. Only the day before, Dr. Kenn had been
made acquainted with the contents of Stephen's letter, and he had
believed them at once, without the confirmation of Maggie's statement.
That involuntary plaint of hers, "_Oh, I must go_," had remained with
him as the sign that she was undergoing some inward conflict.

Maggie dwelt the longest on the feeling which had made her come back
to her mother and brother, which made her cling to all the memories of
the past. When she had ended, Dr. Kenn was silent for some minutes;
there was a difficulty on his mind. He rose, and walked up and down
the hearth with his hands behind him. At last he seated himself again,
and said, looking at Maggie,--

"Your prompting to go to your nearest friends,--to remain where all
the ties of your life have been formed,--is a true prompting, to which
the Church in its original constitution and discipline responds,
opening its arms to the penitent, watching over its children to the
last; never abandoning them until they are hopelessly reprobate. And
the Church ought to represent the feeling of the community, so that
every parish should be a family knit together by Christian brotherhood
under a spiritual father. But the ideas of discipline and Christian
fraternity are entirely relaxed,--they can hardly be said to exist in
the public mind; they hardly survive except in the partial,
contradictory form they have taken in the narrow communities of
schismatics; and if I were not supported by the firm faith that the
Church must ultimately recover the full force of that constitution
which is alone fitted to human needs, I should often lose heart at
observing the want of fellowship and sense of mutual responsibility
among my own flock. At present everything seems tending toward the
relaxation of ties,--toward the substitution of wayward choice for the
adherence to obligation, which has its roots in the past. Your
conscience and your heart have given you true light on this point,
Miss Tulliver; and I have said all this that you may know what my wish
about you--what my advice to you--would be, if they sprang from my own
feeling and opinion unmodified by counteracting circumstances."

Dr. Kenn paused a little while. There was an entire absence of
effusive benevolence in his manner; there was something almost cold in
the gravity of his look and voice. If Maggie had not known that his
benevolence was persevering in proportion to its reserve, she might
have been chilled and frightened. As it was, she listened expectantly,
quite sure that there would be some effective help in his words. He
went on.

"Your inexperience of the world, Miss Tulliver, prevents you from
anticipating fully the very unjust conceptions that will probably be
formed concerning your conduct,--conceptions which will have a baneful
effect, even in spite of known evidence to disprove them."

"Oh, I do,--I begin to see," said Maggie, unable to repress this
utterance of her recent pain. "I know I shall be insulted. I shall be
thought worse than I am."

"You perhaps do not yet know," said Dr. Kenn, with a touch of more
personal pity, "that a letter is come which ought to satisfy every one
who has known anything of you, that you chose the steep and difficult
path of a return to the right, at the moment when that return was most
of all difficult."

"Oh, where is he?" said poor Maggie, with a flush and tremor that no
presence could have hindered.

"He is gone abroad; he has written of all that passed to his father.
He has vindicated you to the utmost; and I hope the communication of
that letter to your cousin will have a beneficial effect on her."

Dr. Kenn waited for her to get calm again before he went on.

"That letter, as I said, ought to suffice to prevent false impressions
concerning you. But I am bound to tell you, Miss Tulliver, that not
only the experience of my whole life, but my observation within the
last three days, makes me fear that there is hardly any evidence which
will save you from the painful effect of false imputations. The
persons who are the most incapable of a conscientious struggle such as
yours are precisely those who will be likely to shrink from you,
because they will not believe in your struggle. I fear your life here
will be attended not only with much pain, but with many obstructions.
For this reason--and for this only--I ask you to consider whether it
will not perhaps be better for you to take a situation at a distance,
according to your former intention. I will exert myself at once to
obtain one for you."

"Oh, if I could but stop here!" said Maggie. "I have no heart to begin
a strange life again. I should have no stay. I should feel like a
lonely wanderer, cut off from the past. I have written to the lady who
offered me a situation to excuse myself. If I remained here, I could
perhaps atone in some way to Lucy--to others; I could convince them
that I'm sorry. And," she added, with some of the old proud fire
flashing out, "I will not go away because people say false things of
me. They shall learn to retract them. If I must go away at last,
because--because others wish it, I will not go now."

"Well," said Dr. Kenn, after some consideration, "if you determine on
that, Miss Tulliver, you may rely on all the influence my position
gives me. I am bound to aid and countenance you by the very duties of
my office as a parish priest. I will add, that personally I have a
deep interest in your peace of mind and welfare."

"The only thing I want is some occupation that will enable me to get
my bread and be independent," said Maggie. "I shall not want much. I
can go on lodging where I am."

"I must think over the subject maturely," said Dr. Kenn, "and in a few
days I shall be better able to ascertain the general feeling. I shall
come to see you; I shall bear you constantly in mind."

When Maggie had left him, Dr. Kenn stood ruminating with his hands
behind him, and his eyes fixed on the carpet, under a painful sense of
doubt and difficulty. The tone of Stephen's letter, which he had read,
and the actual relations of all the persons concerned, forced upon him
powerfully the idea of an ultimate marriage between Stephen and Maggie
as the least evil; and the impossibility of their proximity in St.
Ogg's on any other supposition, until after years of separation, threw
an insurmountable prospective difficulty over Maggie's stay there. On
the other hand, he entered with all the comprehension of a man who had
known spiritual conflict, and lived through years of devoted service
to his fellow-men, into that state of Maggie's heart and conscience
which made the consent to the marriage a desecration to her; her
conscience must not be tampered with; the principle on which she had
acted was a safer guide than any balancing of consequences. His
experience told him that intervention was too dubious a responsibility
to be lightly incurred; the possible issue either of an endeavor to
restore the former relations with Lucy and Philip, or of counselling
submission to this irruption of a new feeling, was hidden in a
darkness all the more impenetrable because each immediate step was
clogged with evil.

The great problem of the shifting relation between passion and duty is
clear to no man who is capable of apprehending it; the question
whether the moment has come in which a man has fallen below the
possibility of a renunciation that will carry any efficacy, and must
accept the sway of a passion against which he had struggled as a
trespass, is one for which we have no master-key that will fit all
cases. The casuists have become a byword of reproach; but their
perverted spirit of minute discrimination was the shadow of a truth to
which eyes and hearts are too often fatally sealed,--the truth, that
moral judgments must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked
and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances
that mark the individual lot.

All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to
the men of maxims; because such people early discern that the
mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and
that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all
the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing
insight and sympathy. And the man of maxims is the popular
representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgment
solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice
by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting
patience, discrimination, impartiality,--without any care to assure
themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a hardly
earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough
to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human.

Chapter III

Showing That Old Acquaintances Are Capable of Surprising Us

When Maggie was at home again, her mother brought her news of an
unexpected line of conduct in aunt Glegg. As long as Maggie had not
been heard of, Mrs. Glegg had half closed her shutters and drawn down
her blinds. She felt assured that Maggie was drowned; that was far
more probable than that her niece and legatee should have done
anything to wound the family honor in the tenderest point. When at
last she learned from Tom that Maggie had come home, and gathered from
him what was her explanation of her absence, she burst forth in severe
reproof of Tom for admitting the worst of his sister until he was
compelled. If you were not to stand by your "kin" as long as there was
a shred of honor attributable to them, pray what were you to stand by?
Lightly to admit conduct in one of your own family that would force
you to alter your will, had never been the way of the Dodsons; and
though Mrs. Glegg had always augured ill of Maggie's future at a time
when other people were perhaps less clear-sighted, yet fair play was a
jewel, and it was not for her own friends to help to rob the girl of
her fair fame, and to cast her out from family shelter to the scorn of
the outer world, until she had become unequivocally a family disgrace.
The circumstances were unprecedented in Mrs. Glegg's experience;
nothing of that kind had happened among the Dodsons before; but it was
a case in which her hereditary rectitude and personal strength of
character found a common channel along with her fundamental ideas of
clanship, as they did in her lifelong regard to equity in money
matters. She quarrelled with Mr. Glegg, whose kindness, flowing
entirely into compassion for Lucy, made him as hard in his judgment of
Maggie as Mr. Deane himself was; and fuming against her sister
Tulliver because she did not at once come to her for advice and help,
shut herself up in her own room with Baxter's "Saints' Rest" from
morning till night, denying herself to all visitors, till Mr. Glegg
brought from Mr. Deane the news of Stephen's letter. Then Mrs. Glegg
felt that she had adequate fighting-ground; then she laid aside
Baxter, and was ready to meet all comers. While Mrs. Pullet could do
nothing but shake her head and cry, and wish that cousin Abbot had
died, or any number of funerals had happened rather than this, which
had never happened before, so that there was no knowing how to act,
and Mrs. Pullet could never enter St. Ogg's again, because
"acquaintances" knew of it all, Mrs. Glegg only hoped that Mrs. Wooll,
or any one else, would come to her with their false tales about her
own niece, and she would know what to say to that ill-advised person!

Again she had a scene of remonstrance with Tom, all the more severe in
proportion to the greater strength of her present position. But Tom,
like other immovable things, seemed only the more rigidly fixed under
that attempt to shake him. Poor Tom! he judged by what he had been
able to see; and the judgment was painful enough to himself. He
thought he had the demonstration of facts observed through years by
his own eyes, which gave no warning of their imperfection, that
Maggie's nature was utterly untrustworthy, and too strongly marked
with evil tendencies to be safely treated with leniency. He would act
on that demonstration at any cost; but the thought of it made his days
bitter to him. Tom, like every one of us, was imprisoned within the
limits of his own nature, and his education had simply glided over
him, leaving a slight deposit of polish; if you are inclined to be
severe on his severity, remember that the responsibility of tolerance
lies with those who have the wider vision. There had arisen in Tom a
repulsion toward Maggie that derived its very intensity from their
early childish love in the time when they had clasped tiny fingers
together, and their later sense of nearness in a common duty and a
common sorrow; the sight of her, as he had told her, was hateful to
him. In this branch of the Dodson family aunt Glegg found a stronger
nature than her own; a nature in which family feeling had lost the
character of clanship by taking on a doubly deep dye of personal
pride.

Mrs. Glegg allowed that Maggie ought to be punished,--she was not a
woman to deny that; she knew what conduct was,--but punished in
proportion to the misdeeds proved against her, not to those which were
cast upon her by people outside her own family who might wish to show
that their own kin were better.

"Your aunt Glegg scolded me so as niver was, my dear," said poor Mrs.
Tulliver, when she came back to Maggie, "as I didn't go to her before;
she said it wasn't for her to come to me first. But she spoke like a
sister, too; _having_ she allays was, and hard to please,--oh
dear!--but she's said the kindest word as has ever been spoke by you
yet, my child. For she says, for all she's been so set again' having
one extry in the house, and making extry spoons and things, and
putting her about in her ways, you shall have a shelter in her house,
if you'll go to her dutiful, and she'll uphold you against folks as
say harm of you when they've no call. And I told her I thought you
couldn't bear to see anybody but me, you were so beat down with
trouble; but she said, '_I_ won't throw ill words at her; there's them
out o' th' family 'ull be ready enough to do that. But I'll give her
good advice; an' she must be humble.' It's wonderful o' Jane; for I'm
sure she used to throw everything I did wrong at me,--if it was the
raisin-wine as turned out bad, or the pies too hot, or whativer it
was."

"Oh, mother," said poor Maggie, shrinking from the thought of all the
contact her bruised mind would have to bear, "tell her I'm very
grateful; I'll go to see her as soon as I can; but I can't see any one
just yet, except Dr. Kenn. I've been to him,--he will advise me, and
help me to get some occupation. I can't live with any one, or be
dependent on them, tell aunt Glegg; I must get my own bread. But did
you hear nothing of Philip--Philip Wakem? Have you never seen any one
that has mentioned him?"

"No, my dear; but I've been to Lucy's, and I saw your uncle, and he
says they got her to listen to the letter, and she took notice o' Miss
Guest, and asked questions, and the doctor thinks she's on the turn to
be better. What a world this is,--what trouble, oh dear! The law was
the first beginning, and it's gone from bad to worse, all of a sudden,
just when the luck seemed on the turn?" This was the first lamentation
that Mrs. Tulliver had let slip to Maggie, but old habit had been
revived by the interview with sister Glegg.

"My poor, poor mother!" Maggie burst out, cut to the heart with pity
and compunction, and throwing her arms round her mother's neck; "I was
always naughty and troublesome to you. And now you might have been
happy if it hadn't been for me."

"Eh, my dear," said Mrs. Tulliver, leaning toward the warm young
cheek; "I must put up wi' my children,--I shall never have no more;
and if they bring me bad luck, I must be fond on it. There's nothing
else much to be fond on, for my furnitur' went long ago. And you'd got
to be very good once; I can't think how it's turned out the wrong way
so!"

Still two or three more days passed, and Maggie heard nothing of
Philip; anxiety about him was becoming her predominant trouble, and
she summoned courage at last to inquire about him of Dr. Kenn, on his
next visit to her. He did not even know if Philip was at home. The
elder Wakem was made moody by an accumulation of annoyance; the
disappointment in this young Jetsome, to whom, apparently, he was a
good deal attached, had been followed close by the catastrophe to his
son's hopes after he had done violence to his own strong feeling by
conceding to them, and had incautiously mentioned this concession in
St. Ogg's; and he was almost fierce in his brusqueness when any one
asked him a question about his son.

But Philip could hardly have been ill, or it would have been known
through the calling in of the medical man; it was probable that he was
gone out of the town for a little while. Maggie sickened under this
suspense, and her imagination began to live more and more persistently
in what Philip was enduring. What did he believe about her?

At last Bob brought her a letter, without a postmark, directed in a
hand which she knew familiarly in the letters of her own name,--a hand
in which her name had been written long ago, in a pocket Shakespeare
which she possessed. Her mother was in the room, and Maggie, in
violent agitation, hurried upstairs that she might read the letter in
solitude. She read it with a throbbing brow.

"Maggie,--I believe in you; I know you never meant to deceive me; I
know you tried to keep faith to me and to all. I believed this
before I had any other evidence of it than your own nature. The
night after I last parted from you I suffered torments. I had seen
what convinced me that you were not free; that there was another
whose presence had a power over you which mine never possessed; but
through all the suggestions--almost murderous suggestions--of rage
and jealousy, my mind made its way to believe in your truthfulness.
I was sure that you meant to cleave to me, as you had said; that
you had rejected him; that you struggled to renounce him, for
Lucy's sake and for mine. But I could see no issue that was not
fatal for _you;_ and that dread shut out the very thought of
resignation. I foresaw that he would not relinquish you, and I
believed then, as I believe now, that the strong attraction which
drew you together proceeded only from one side of your characters,
and belonged to that partial, divided action of our nature which
makes half the tragedy of the human lot. I have felt the vibration
of chords in your nature that I have continually felt the want of
in his. But perhaps I am wrong; perhaps I feel about you as the
artist does about the scene over which his soul has brooded with
love; he would tremble to see it confided to other hands; he would
never believe that it could bear for another all the meaning and
the beauty it bears for him.

"I dared not trust myself to see you that morning; I was filled
with selfish passion; I was shattered by a night of conscious
delirium. I told you long ago that I had never been resigned even
to the mediocrity of my powers; how could I be resigned to the loss
of the one thing which had ever come to me on earth with the
promise of such deep joy as would give a new and blessed meaning to
the foregoing pain,--the promise of another self that would lift my
aching affection into the divine rapture of an ever-springing,
ever-satisfied want?

"But the miseries of that night had prepared me for what came
before the next. It was no surprise to me. I was certain that he
had prevailed on you to sacrifice everything to him, and I waited
with equal certainty to hear of your marriage. I measured your love
and his by my own. But I was wrong, Maggie. There is something
stronger in you than your love for him.

"I will not tell you what I went through in that interval. But even
in its utmost agony--even in those terrible throes that love must
suffer before it can be disembodied of selfish desire--my love for
you sufficed to withhold me from suicide, without the aid of any
other motive. In the midst of my egoism, I yet could not bear to
come like a death-shadow across the feast of your joy. I could not
bear to forsake the world in which you still lived and might need
me; it was part of the faith I had vowed to you,--to wait and
endure. Maggie, that is a proof of what I write now to assure you
of,--that no anguish I have had to bear on your account has been
too heavy a price to pay for the new life into which I have entered
in loving you. I want you to put aside all grief because of the
grief you have caused me. I was nurtured in the sense of privation;
I never expected happiness; and in knowing you, in loving you, I
have had, and still have, what reconciles me to life. You have been
to my affections what light, what color is to my eyes, what music
is to the inward ear, you have raised a dim unrest into a vivid
consciousness. The new life I have found in caring for your joy and
sorrow more than for what is directly my own, has transformed the
spirit of rebellious murmuring into that willing endurance which is
the birth of strong sympathy. I think nothing but such complete and
intense love could have initiated me into that enlarged life which
grows and grows by appropriating the life of others; for before, I
was always dragged back from it by ever-present painful
self-consciousness. I even think sometimes that this gift of
transferred life which has come to me in loving you, may be a new
power to me.