The Mill on the Floss
gentleman of him, poor fellow.”
“Mr Glegg,” said Mrs G., in a tone which implied that her indignation
would fizz and ooze a little, though she was determined to keep it
corked up, “you’d far better hold your tongue. Mr Tulliver doesn’t want
to know your opinion nor mine either. There’s folks in the world as
know better than everybody else.”
“Why, I should think that’s you, if we’re to trust your own tale,” said
Mr Tulliver, beginning to boil up again.
“Oh, _I_ say nothing,” said Mrs Glegg, sarcastically. “My advice has
never been asked, and I don’t give it.”
“It’ll be the first time, then,” said Mr Tulliver. “It’s the only thing
you’re over-ready at giving.”
“I’ve been over-ready at lending, then, if I haven’t been over-ready at
giving,” said Mrs Glegg. “There’s folks I’ve lent money to, as perhaps
I shall repent o’ lending money to kin.”
“Come, come, come,” said Mr Glegg, soothingly. But Mr Tulliver was not
to be hindered of his retort.
“You’ve got a bond for it, I reckon,” he said; “and you’ve had your
five per cent, kin or no kin.”
“Sister,” said Mrs Tulliver, pleadingly, “drink your wine, and let me
give you some almonds and raisins.”
“Bessy, I’m sorry for you,” said Mrs Glegg, very much with the feeling
of a cur that seizes the opportunity of diverting his bark toward the
man who carries no stick. “It’s poor work talking o’ almonds and
raisins.”
“Lors, sister Glegg, don’t be so quarrelsome,” said Mrs Pullet,
beginning to cry a little. “You may be struck with a fit, getting so
red in the face after dinner, and we are but just out o’ mourning, all
of us,—and all wi’ gowns craped alike and just put by; it’s very bad
among sisters.”
“I should think it _is_ bad,” said Mrs Glegg. “Things are come to a
fine pass when one sister invites the other to her house o’ purpose to
quarrel with her and abuse her.”
“Softly, softly, Jane; be reasonable, be reasonable,” said Mr Glegg.
But while he was speaking, Mr Tulliver, who had by no means said enough
to satisfy his anger, burst out again.
“Who wants to quarrel with you?” he said. “It’s you as can’t let people
alone, but must be gnawing at ’em forever. _I_ should never want to
quarrel with any woman if she kept her place.”
“My place, indeed!” said Mrs Glegg, getting rather more shrill.
“There’s your betters, Mr Tulliver, as are dead and in their grave,
treated me with a different sort o’ respect to what you do; _though_
I’ve got a husband as’ll sit by and see me abused by them as ’ud never
ha’ had the chance if there hadn’t been them in our family as married
worse than they might ha’ done.”
“If you talk o’ that,” said Mr Tulliver, “my family’s as good as yours,
and better, for it hasn’t got a damned ill-tempered woman in it!”
“Well,” said Mrs Glegg, rising from her chair, “I don’t know whether
you think it’s a fine thing to sit by and hear me swore at, Mr Glegg;
but I’m not going to stay a minute longer in this house. You can stay
behind, and come home with the gig, and I’ll walk home.”
“Dear heart, dear heart!” said Mr Glegg in a melancholy tone, as he
followed his wife out of the room.
“Mr Tulliver, how could you talk so?” said Mrs Tulliver, with the tears
in her eyes.
“Let her go,” said Mr Tulliver, too hot to be damped by any amount of
tears. “Let her go, and the sooner the better; she won’t be trying to
domineer over _me_ again in a hurry.”
“Sister Pullet,” said Mrs Tulliver, helplessly, “do you think it ’ud be
any use for you to go after her and try to pacify her?”
“Better not, better not,” said Mr Deane. “You’ll make it up another
day.”
“Then, sisters, shall we go and look at the children?” said Mrs
Tulliver, drying her eyes.
No proposition could have been more seasonable. Mr Tulliver felt very
much as if the air had been cleared of obtrusive flies now the women
were out of the room. There were few things he liked better than a chat
with Mr Deane, whose close application to business allowed the pleasure
very rarely. Mr Deane, he considered, was the “knowingest” man of his
acquaintance, and he had besides a ready causticity of tongue that made
an agreeable supplement to Mr Tulliver’s own tendency that way, which
had remained in rather an inarticulate condition. And now the women
were gone, they could carry on their serious talk without frivolous
interruption. They could exchange their views concerning the Duke of
Wellington, whose conduct in the Catholic Question had thrown such an
entirely new light on his character; and speak slightingly of his
conduct at the battle of Waterloo, which he would never have won if
there hadn’t been a great many Englishmen at his back, not to speak of
Blucher and the Prussians, who, as Mr Tulliver had heard from a person
of particular knowledge in that matter, had come up in the very nick of
time; though here there was a slight dissidence, Mr Deane remarking
that he was not disposed to give much credit to the Prussians,—the
build of their vessels, together with the unsatisfactory character of
transactions in Dantzic beer, inclining him to form rather a low view
of Prussian pluck generally. Rather beaten on this ground, Mr Tulliver
proceeded to express his fears that the country could never again be
what it used to be; but Mr Deane, attached to a firm of which the
returns were on the increase, naturally took a more lively view of the
present, and had some details to give concerning the state of the
imports, especially in hides and spelter, which soothed Mr Tulliver’s
imagination by throwing into more distant perspective the period when
the country would become utterly the prey of Papists and Radicals, and
there would be no more chance for honest men.
Uncle Pullet sat by and listened with twinkling eyes to these high
matters. He didn’t understand politics himself,—thought they were a
natural gift,—but by what he could make out, this Duke of Wellington
was no better than he should be.
Chapter VIII.
Mr Tulliver Shows His Weaker Side
“Suppose sister Glegg should call her money in; it ’ud be very awkward
for you to have to raise five hundred pounds now,” said Mrs Tulliver to
her husband that evening, as she took a plaintive review of the day.
Mrs Tulliver had lived thirteen years with her husband, yet she
retained in all the freshness of her early married life a facility of
saying things which drove him in the opposite direction to the one she
desired. Some minds are wonderful for keeping their bloom in this way,
as a patriarchal goldfish apparently retains to the last its youthful
illusion that it can swim in a straight line beyond the encircling
glass. Mrs Tulliver was an amiable fish of this kind, and after running
her head against the same resisting medium for thirteen years would go
at it again to-day with undulled alacrity.
This observation of hers tended directly to convince Mr Tulliver that
it would not be at all awkward for him to raise five hundred pounds;
and when Mrs Tulliver became rather pressing to know _how_ he would
raise it without mortgaging the mill and the house which he had said he
never _would_ mortgage, since nowadays people were none so ready to
lend money without security, Mr Tulliver, getting warm, declared that
Mrs Glegg might do as she liked about calling in her money, he should
pay it in whether or not. He was not going to be beholden to his wife’s
sisters. When a man had married into a family where there was a whole
litter of women, he might have plenty to put up with if he chose. But
Mr Tulliver did _not_ choose.
Mrs Tulliver cried a little in a trickling, quiet way as she put on her
nightcap; but presently sank into a comfortable sleep, lulled by the
thought that she would talk everything over with her sister Pullet
to-morrow, when she was to take the children to Garum Firs to tea. Not
that she looked forward to any distinct issue from that talk; but it
seemed impossible that past events should be so obstinate as to remain
unmodified when they were complained against.
Her husband lay awake rather longer, for he too was thinking of a visit
he would pay on the morrow; and his ideas on the subject were not of so
vague and soothing a kind as those of his amiable partner.
Mr Tulliver, when under the influence of a strong feeling, had a
promptitude in action that may seem inconsistent with that painful
sense of the complicated, puzzling nature of human affairs under which
his more dispassionate deliberations were conducted; but it is really
not improbable that there was a direct relation between these
apparently contradictory phenomena, since I have observed that for
getting a strong impression that a skein is tangled there is nothing
like snatching hastily at a single thread. It was owing to this
promptitude that Mr Tulliver was on horseback soon after dinner the
next day (he was not dyspeptic) on his way to Basset to see his sister
Moss and her husband. For having made up his mind irrevocably that he
would pay Mrs Glegg her loan of five hundred pounds, it naturally
occurred to him that he had a promissory note for three hundred pounds
lent to his brother-in-law Moss; and if the said brother-in-law could
manage to pay in the money within a given time, it would go far to
lessen the fallacious air of inconvenience which Mr Tulliver’s spirited
step might have worn in the eyes of weak people who require to know
precisely _how_ a thing is to be done before they are strongly
confident that it will be easy.
For Mr Tulliver was in a position neither new nor striking, but, like
other everyday things, sure to have a cumulative effect that will be
felt in the long run: he was held to be a much more substantial man
than he really was. And as we are all apt to believe what the world
believes about us, it was his habit to think of failure and ruin with
the same sort of remote pity with which a spare, long-necked man hears
that his plethoric short-necked neighbour is stricken with apoplexy. He
had been always used to hear pleasant jokes about his advantages as a
man who worked his own mill, and owned a pretty bit of land; and these
jokes naturally kept up his sense that he was a man of considerable
substance. They gave a pleasant flavour to his glass on a market-day,
and if it had not been for the recurrence of half-yearly payments, Mr
Tulliver would really have forgotten that there was a mortgage of two
thousand pounds on his very desirable freehold. That was not altogether
his own fault, since one of the thousand pounds was his sister’s
fortune, which he had to pay on her marriage; and a man who has
neighbours that _will_ go to law with him is not likely to pay off his
mortgages, especially if he enjoys the good opinion of acquaintances
who want to borrow a hundred pounds on security too lofty to be
represented by parchment. Our friend Mr Tulliver had a good-natured
fibre in him, and did not like to give harsh refusals even to his
sister, who had not only come in to the world in that superfluous way
characteristic of sisters, creating a necessity for mortgages, but had
quite thrown herself away in marriage, and had crowned her mistakes by
having an eighth baby. On this point Mr Tulliver was conscious of being
a little weak; but he apologised to himself by saying that poor Gritty
had been a good-looking wench before she married Moss; he would
sometimes say this even with a slight tremulousness in his voice. But
this morning he was in a mood more becoming a man of business, and in
the course of his ride along the Basset lanes, with their deep
ruts,—lying so far away from a market-town that the labour of drawing
produce and manure was enough to take away the best part of the profits
on such poor land as that parish was made of,—he got up a due amount of
irritation against Moss as a man without capital, who, if murrain and