The Mill on the Floss (77 page)

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.