The Mill on the Floss (24 page)

"What a very odd little girl that must be!" said Mrs. Stelling,
meaning to be playful; but a playfulness that turned on her
supposed oddity was not at all to Maggie's taste. She feared that
Mr. Stelling, after all, did not think much of her, and went to bed
in rather low spirits. Mrs. Stelling, she felt, looked at her as if
she thought her hair was very ugly because it hung down straight
behind.

Nevertheless it was a very happy fortnight to Maggie, this visit
to Tom. She was allowed to be in the study while he had his
lessons, and in her various readings got very deep into the
examples in the Latin Grammar. The astronomer who hated women
generally caused her so much puzzling speculation that she one day
asked Mr. Stelling if all astronomers hated women, or whether it
was only this particular astronomer. But forestalling his answer,
she said,–

"I suppose it's all astronomers; because, you know, they live up
in high towers, and if the women came there they might talk and
hinder them from looking at the stars."

Mr. Stelling liked her prattle immensely, and they were on the
best terms. She told Tom she should like to go to school to Mr.
Stelling, as he did, and learn just the same things. She knew she
could do Euclid, for she had looked into it again, and she saw what
A B C meant; they were the names of the lines.

"I'm sure you couldn't do it, now," said Tom; "and I'll just ask
Mr. Stelling if you could."

"I don't mind," said the little conceited minx, "I'll ask him
myself."

"Mr. Stelling," she said, that same evening when they were in
the drawing-room, "couldn't I do Euclid, and all Tom's lessons, if
you were to teach me instead of him?"

"No, you couldn't," said Tom, indignantly. "Girls can't do
Euclid; can they, sir?"

"They can pick up a little of everything, I dare say," said Mr.
Stelling. "They've a great deal of superficial cleverness; but they
couldn't go far into anything. They're quick and shallow."

Tom, delighted with this verdict, telegraphed his triumph by
wagging his head at Maggie, behind Mr. Stelling's chair. As for
Maggie, she had hardly ever been so mortified. She had been so
proud to be called "quick" all her little life, and now it appeared
that this quickness was the brand of inferiority. It would have
been better to be slow, like Tom.

"Ha, ha! Miss Maggie!" said Tom, when they were alone; "you see
it's not such a fine thing to be quick. You'll never go far into
anything, you know."

And Maggie was so oppressed by this dreadful destiny that she
had no spirit for a retort.

But when this small apparatus of shallow quickness was fetched
away in the gig by Luke, and the study was once more quite lonely
for Tom, he missed her grievously. He had really been brighter, and
had got through his lessons better, since she had been there; and
she had asked Mr. Stelling so many questions about the Roman
Empire, and whether there really ever was a man who said, in Latin,
"I would not buy it for a farthing or a rotten nut," or whether
that had only been turned into Latin, that Tom had actually come to
a dim understanding of the fact that there had once been people
upon the earth who were so fortunate as to know Latin without
learning it through the medium of the Eton Grammar. This luminous
idea was a great addition to his historical acquirements during
this half-year, which were otherwise confined to an epitomized
history of the Jews.

But the dreary half-year
did
come to an end. How glad
Tom was to see the last yellow leaves fluttering before the cold
wind! The dark afternoons and the first December snow seemed to him
far livelier than the August sunshine; and that he might make
himself the surer about the flight of the days that were carrying
him homeward, he stuck twenty-one sticks deep in a corner of the
garden, when he was three weeks from the holidays, and pulled one
up every day with a great wrench, throwing it to a distance with a
vigor of will which would have carried it to limbo, if it had been
in the nature of sticks to travel so far.

But it was worth purchasing, even at the heavy price of the
Latin Grammar, the happiness of seeing the bright light in the
parlor at home, as the gig passed noiselessly over the snow-covered
bridge; the happiness of passing from the cold air to the warmth
and the kisses and the smiles of that familiar hearth, where the
pattern of the rug and the grate and the fire-irons were "first
ideas" that it was no more possible to criticise than the solidity
and extension of matter. There is no sense of ease like the ease we
felt in those scenes where we were born, where objects became dear
to us before we had known the labor of choice, and where the outer
world seemed only an extension of our own personality; we accepted
and loved it as we accepted our own sense of existence and our own
limbs. Very commonplace, even ugly, that furniture of our early
home might look if it were put up to auction; an improved taste in
upholstery scorns it; and is not the striving after something
better and better in our surroundings the grand characteristic that
distinguishes man from the brute, or, to satisfy a scrupulous
accuracy of definition, that distinguishes the British man from the
foreign brute? But heaven knows where that striving might lead us,
if our affections had not a trick of twining round those old
inferior things; if the loves and sanctities of our life had no
deep immovable roots in memory. One's delight in an elderberry bush
overhanging the confused leafage of a hedgerow bank, as a more
gladdening sight than the finest cistus or fuchsia spreading itself
on the softest undulating turf, is an entirely unjustifiable
preference to a nursery-gardener, or to any of those regulated
minds who are free from the weakness of any attachment that does
not rest on a demonstrable superiority of qualities. And there is
no better reason for preferring this elderberry bush than that it
stirs an early memory; that it is no novelty in my life, speaking
to me merely through my present sensibilities to form and color,
but the long companion of my existence, that wove itself into my
joys when joys were vivid.

Chapter II
The Christmas Holidays

Fine old Christmas, with the snowy hair and ruddy face, had done
his duty that year in the noblest fashion, and had set off his rich
gifts of warmth and color with all the heightening contrast of
frost and snow.

Snow lay on the croft and river-bank in undulations softer than
the limbs of infancy; it lay with the neatliest finished border on
every sloping roof, making the dark-red gables stand out with a new
depth of color; it weighed heavily on the laurels and fir-trees,
till it fell from them with a shuddering sound; it clothed the
rough turnip-field with whiteness, and made the sheep look like
dark blotches; the gates were all blocked up with the sloping
drifts, and here and there a disregarded four-footed beast stood as
if petrified "in unrecumbent sadness"; there was no gleam, no
shadow, for the heavens, too, were one still, pale cloud; no sound
or motion in anything but the dark river that flowed and moaned
like an unresting sorrow. But old Christmas smiled as he laid this
cruel-seeming spell on the outdoor world, for he meant to light up
home with new brightness, to deepen all the richness of indoor
color, and give a keener edge of delight to the warm fragrance of
food; he meant to prepare a sweet imprisonment that would
strengthen the primitive fellowship of kindred, and make the
sunshine of familiar human faces as welcome as the hidden day-star.
His kindness fell but hardly on the homeless,–fell but hardly on
the homes where the hearth was not very warm, and where the food
had little fragrance; where the human faces had had no sunshine in
them, but rather the leaden, blank-eyed gaze of unexpectant want.
But the fine old season meant well; and if he has not learned the
secret how to bless men impartially, it is because his father Time,
with ever-unrelenting unrelenting purpose, still hides that secret
in his own mighty, slow-beating heart.

And yet this Christmas day, in spite of Tom's fresh delight in
home, was not, he thought, somehow or other, quite so happy as it
had always been before. The red berries were just as abundant on
the holly, and he and Maggie had dressed all the windows and
mantlepieces and picture-frames on Christmas eve with as much taste
as ever, wedding the thick-set scarlet clusters with branches of
the black-berried ivy. There had been singing under the windows
after midnight,–supernatural singing, Maggie always felt, in spite
of Tom's contemptuous insistence that the singers were old Patch,
the parish clerk, and the rest of the church choir; she trembled
with awe when their carolling broke in upon her dreams, and the
image of men in fustian clothes was always thrust away by the
vision of angels resting on the parted cloud. The midnight chant
had helped as usual to lift the morning above the level of common
days; and then there were the smell of hot toast and ale from the
kitchen, at the breakfast hour; the favorite anthem, the green
boughs, and the short sermon gave the appropriate festal character
to the church-going; and aunt and uncle Moss, with all their seven
children, were looking like so many reflectors of the bright
parlor-fire, when the church-goers came back, stamping the snow
from their feet. The plum-pudding was of the same handsome
roundness as ever, and came in with the symbolic blue flames around
it, as if it had been heroically snatched from the nether fires,
into which it had been thrown by dyspeptic Puritans; the dessert
was as splendid as ever, with its golden oranges, brown nuts, and
the crystalline light and dark of apple-jelly and damson cheese; in
all these things Christmas was as it had always been since Tom
could remember; it was only distinguished, it by anything, by
superior sliding and snowballs.

Christmas was cheery, but not so Mr. Tulliver. He was irate and
defiant; and Tom, though he espoused his father's quarrels and
shared his father's sense of injury, was not without some of the
feeling that oppressed Maggie when Mr. Tulliver got louder and more
angry in narration and assertion with the increased leisure of
dessert. The attention that Tom might have concentrated on his nuts
and wine was distracted by a sense that there were rascally enemies
in the world, and that the business of grown-up life could hardly
be conducted without a good deal of quarrelling. Now, Tom was not
fond of quarrelling, unless it could soon be put an end to by a
fair stand-up fight with an adversary whom he had every chance of
thrashing; and his father's irritable talk made him uncomfortable,
though he never accounted to himself for the feeling, or conceived
the notion that his father was faulty in this respect.

The particular embodiment of the evil principle now exciting Mr.
Tulliver's determined resistance was Mr. Pivart, who, having lands
higher up the Ripple, was taking measures for their irrigation,
which either were, or would be, or were bound to be (on the
principle that water was water), an infringement on Mr. Tulliver's
legitimate share of water-power. Dix, who had a mill on the stream,
was a feeble auxiliary of Old Harry compared with Pivart. Dix had
been brought to his senses by arbitration, and Wakem's advice had
not carried
him
far. No; Dix, Mr. Tulliver considered, had
been as good as nowhere in point of law; and in the intensity of
his indignation against Pivart, his contempt for a baffled
adversary like Dix began to wear the air of a friendly attachment.
He had no male audience to-day except Mr. Moss, who knew nothing,
as he said, of the "natur' o' mills," and could only assent to Mr.
Tulliver's arguments on the
a priori
ground of family
relationship and monetary obligation; but Mr. Tulliver did not talk
with the futile intention of convincing his audience, he talked to
relieve himself; while good Mr. Moss made strong efforts to keep
his eyes wide open, in spite of the sleepiness which an unusually
good dinner produced in his hard-worked frame. Mrs. Moss, more
alive to the subject, and interested in everything that affected
her brother, listened and put in a word as often as maternal
preoccupations allowed.

"Why, Pivart's a new name hereabout, brother, isn't it?" she
said; "he didn't own the land in father's time, nor yours either,
before I was married."

"New name? Yes, I should think it
is
a new name," said
Mr. Tulliver, with angry emphasis. "Dorlcote Mill's been in our
family a hundred year and better, and nobody ever heard of a Pivart
meddling with the river, till this fellow came and bought Bincome's
farm out of hand, before anybody else could so much as say 'snap.'
But I'll
Pivart
him!" added Mr. Tulliver, lifting his
glass with a sense that he had defined his resolution in an
unmistakable manner.

"You won't be forced to go to law with him, I hope, brother?"
said Mrs. Moss, with some anxiety.

"I don't know what I shall be forced to; but I know what I shall
force
him
to, with his dikes and erigations, if there's
any law to be brought to bear o' the right side. I know well enough
who's at the bottom of it; he's got Wakem to back him and egg him
on. I know Wakem tells him the law can't touch him for it, but
there's folks can handle the law besides Wakem. It takes a big
raskil to beat him; but there's bigger to be found, as know more o'
th' ins and outs o' the law, else how came Wakem to lose Brumley's
suit for him?"

Mr. Tulliver was a strictly honest man, and proud of being
honest, but he considered that in law the ends of justice could
only be achieved by employing a stronger knave to frustrate a
weaker. Law was a sort of cock-fight, in which it was the business
of injured honesty to get a game bird with the best pluck and the
strongest spurs.