The Mill on the Floss (78 page)

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.

"Then, dear one, in spite of all, you have been the blessing of
my life. Let no self-reproach weigh on you because of me. It is I
who should rather reproach myself for having urged my feelings upon
you, and hurried you into words that you have felt as fetters. You
meant to be true to those words; you
have
been true. I can
measure your sacrifice by what I have known in only one half-hour
of your presence with me, when I dreamed that you might love me
best. But, Maggie, I have no just claim on you for more than
affectionate remembrance.

"For some time I have shrunk from writing to you, because I have
shrunk even from the appearance of wishing to thrust myself before
you, and so repeating my original error. But you will not
misconstrue me. I know that we must keep apart for a long while;
cruel tongues would force us apart, if nothing else did. But I
shall not go away. The place where you are is the one where my mind
must live, wherever I might travel. And remember that I am
unchangeably yours,–yours not with selfish wishes, but with a
devotion that excludes such wishes.

"God comfort you, my loving, large-souled Maggie. If every one
else has misconceived you, remember that you have never been
doubted by him whose heart recognized you ten years ago.

"Do not believe any one who says I am ill, because I am not seen
out of doors. I have only had nervous headaches,–no worse than I
have sometimes had them before. But the overpowering heat inclines
me to be perfectly quiescent in the daytime. I am strong enough to
obey any word which shall tell me that I can serve you by word or
deed.

"Yours to the last,
"
Philip Wakem
."

As Maggie knelt by the bed sobbing, with that letter pressed
under her, her feelings again and again gathered themselves in a
whispered cry, always in the same words,–

"O God, is there any happiness in love that could make me forget
their
pain?"

Chapter IV
Maggie and Lucy

By the end of the week Dr. Kenn had made up his mind that there
was only one way in which he could secure to Maggie a suitable
living at St. Ogg's. Even with his twenty years' experience as a
parish priest, he was aghast at the obstinate continuance of
imputations against her in the face of evidence. Hitherto he had
been rather more adored and appealed to than was quite agreeable to
him; but now, in attempting to open the ears of women to reason,
and their consciences to justice, on behalf of Maggie Tulliver, he
suddenly found himself as powerless as he was aware he would have
been if he had attempted to influence the shape of bonnets. Dr.
Kenn could not be contradicted; he was listened to in silence; but
when he left the room, a comparison of opinions among his hearers
yielded much the same result as before. Miss Tulliver had
undeniably acted in a blamable manner, even Dr. Kenn did not deny
that; how, then, could he think so lightly of her as to put that
favorable interpretation on everything she had done? Even on the
supposition that required the utmost stretch of belief,–namely,
that none of the things said about Miss Tulliver were true,–still,
since they
had
been said about her, they had cast an odor
round her which must cause her to be shrunk from by every woman who
had to take care of her own reputation–and of Society. To have
taken Maggie by the hand and said, "I will not believe unproved
evil of you; my lips shall not utter it; my ears shall be closed
against it; I, too, am an erring mortal, liable to stumble, apt to
come short of my most earnest efforts; your lot has been harder
than mine, your temptation greater; let us help each other to stand
and walk without more falling,"–to have done this would have
demanded courage, deep pity, self-knowledge, generous trust; would
have demanded a mind that tasted no piquancy in evil-speaking, that
felt no self-exaltation in condemning, that cheated itself with no
large words into the belief that life can have any moral end, any
high religion, which excludes the striving after perfect truth,
justice, and love toward the individual men and women who come
across our own path. The ladies of St. Ogg's were not beguiled by
any wide speculative conceptions; but they had their favorite
abstraction, called Society, which served to make their consciences
perfectly easy in doing what satisfied their own egoism,–thinking
and speaking the worst of Maggie Tulliver, and turning their backs
upon her. It was naturally disappointing to Dr. Kenn, after two
years of superfluous incense from his feminine parishioners, to
find them suddenly maintaining their views in opposition to his;
but then they maintained them in opposition to a higher Authority,
which they had venerated longer. That Authority had furnished a
very explicit answer to persons who might inquire where their
social duties began, and might be inclined to take wide views as to
the starting-point. The answer had not turned on the ultimate good
of Society, but on "a certain man" who was found in trouble by the
wayside.

Not that St. Ogg's was empty of women with some tenderness of
heart and conscience; probably it had as fair a proportion of human
goodness in it as any other small trading town of that day. But
until every good man is brave, we must expect to find many good
women timid,–too timid even to believe in the correctness of their
own best promptings, when these would place them in a minority. And
the men at St. Ogg's were not all brave, by any means; some of them
were even fond of scandal, and to an extent that might have given
their conversation an effeminate character, if it had not been
distinguished by masculine jokes, and by an occasional shrug of the
shoulders at the mutual hatred of women. It was the general feeling
of the masculine mind at St. Ogg's that women were not to be
interfered with in their treatment of each other.