The Mill on the Floss
murdered by a larger party.
“Ah, you’re fondest o’ _me_, aren’t you?” said the woman. “But I can’t
go; you’ll go too fast for me.”
It now appeared that the man also was to be seated on the donkey,
holding Maggie before him, and she was as incapable of remonstrating
against this arrangement as the donkey himself, though no nightmare had
ever seemed to her more horrible. When the woman had patted her on the
back, and said “Good-by,” the donkey, at a strong hint from the man’s
stick, set off at a rapid walk along the lane toward the point Maggie
had come from an hour ago, while the tall girl and the rough urchin,
also furnished with sticks, obligingly escorted them for the first
hundred yards, with much screaming and thwacking.
Not Leonore, in that preternatural midnight excursion with her phantom
lover, was more terrified than poor Maggie in this entirely natural
ride on a short-paced donkey, with a gypsy behind her, who considered
that he was earning half a crown. The red light of the setting sun
seemed to have a portentous meaning, with which the alarming bray of
the second donkey with the log on its foot must surely have some
connection. Two low thatched cottages—the only houses they passed in
this lane—seemed to add to its dreariness; they had no windows to speak
of, and the doors were closed; it was probable that they were
inhabitated by witches, and it was a relief to find that the donkey did
not stop there.
At last—oh, sight of joy!—this lane, the longest in the world, was
coming to an end, was opening on a broad highroad, where there was
actually a coach passing! And there was a finger-post at the
corner,—she had surely seen that finger-post before,—“To St Ogg’s, 2
miles.” The gypsy really meant to take her home, then; he was probably
a good man, after all, and might have been rather hurt at the thought
that she didn’t like coming with him alone. This idea became stronger
as she felt more and more certain that she knew the road quite well,
and she was considering how she might open a conversation with the
injured gypsy, and not only gratify his feelings but efface the
impression of her cowardice, when, as they reached a cross-road, Maggie
caught sight of some one coming on a white-faced horse.
“Oh, stop, stop!” she cried out. “There’s my father! Oh, father,
father!”
The sudden joy was almost painful, and before her father reached her,
she was sobbing. Great was Mr Tulliver’s wonder, for he had made a
round from Basset, and had not yet been home.
“Why, what’s the meaning o’ this?” he said, checking his horse, while
Maggie slipped from the donkey and ran to her father’s stirrup.
“The little miss lost herself, I reckon,” said the gypsy. “She’d come
to our tent at the far end o’ Dunlow Lane, and I was bringing her where
she said her home was. It’s a good way to come after being on the tramp
all day.”
“Oh yes, father, he’s been very good to bring me home,” said Maggie,—“a
very kind, good man!”
“Here, then, my man,” said Mr Tulliver, taking out five shillings.
“It’s the best day’s work _you_ ever did. I couldn’t afford to lose the
little wench; here, lift her up before me.”
“Why, Maggie, how’s this, how’s this?” he said, as they rode along,
while she laid her head against her father and sobbed. “How came you to
be rambling about and lose yourself?”
“Oh, father,” sobbed Maggie, “I ran away because I was so unhappy; Tom
was so angry with me. I couldn’t bear it.”
“Pooh, pooh,” said Mr Tulliver, soothingly, “you mustn’t think o’
running away from father. What ’ud father do without his little wench?”
“Oh no, I never will again, father—never.”
Mr Tulliver spoke his mind very strongly when he reached home that
evening; and the effect was seen in the remarkable fact that Maggie
never heard one reproach from her mother, or one taunt from Tom, about
this foolish business of her running away to the gypsies. Maggie was
rather awe-stricken by this unusual treatment, and sometimes thought
that her conduct had been too wicked to be alluded to.
Chapter XII.
Mr and Mrs Glegg at Home
In order to see Mr and Mrs Glegg at home, we must enter the town of St
Ogg’s,—that venerable town with the red fluted roofs and the broad
warehouse gables, where the black ships unlade themselves of their
burthens from the far north, and carry away, in exchange, the precious
inland products, the well-crushed cheese and the soft fleeces which my
refined readers have doubtless become acquainted with through the
medium of the best classic pastorals.
It is one of those old, old towns which impress one as a continuation
and outgrowth of nature, as much as the nests of the bower-birds or the
winding galleries of the white ants; a town which carries the traces of
its long growth and history like a millennial tree, and has sprung up
and developed in the same spot between the river and the low hill from
the time when the Roman legions turned their backs on it from the camp
on the hillside, and the long-haired sea-kings came up the river and
looked with fierce, eager eyes at the fatness of the land. It is a town
“familiar with forgotten years.” The shadow of the Saxon hero-king
still walks there fitfully, reviewing the scenes of his youth and
love-time, and is met by the gloomier shadow of the dreadful heathen
Dane, who was stabbed in the midst of his warriors by the sword of an
invisible avenger, and who rises on autumn evenings like a white mist
from his tumulus on the hill, and hovers in the court of the old hall
by the river-side, the spot where he was thus miraculously slain in the
days before the old hall was built. It was the Normans who began to
build that fine old hall, which is, like the town, telling of the
thoughts and hands of widely sundered generations; but it is all so old
that we look with loving pardon at its inconsistencies, and are well
content that they who built the stone oriel, and they who built the
Gothic façade and towers of finest small brickwork with the trefoil
ornament, and the windows and battlements defined with stone, did not
sacrilegiously pull down the ancient half-timbered body with its
oak-roofed banqueting-hall.
But older even than this old hall is perhaps the bit of wall now built
into the belfry of the parish church, and said to be a remnant of the
original chapel dedicated to St Ogg, the patron saint of this ancient
town, of whose history I possess several manuscript versions. I incline
to the briefest, since, if it should not be wholly true, it is at least
likely to contain the least falsehood. “Ogg the son of Beorl,” says my
private hagiographer, “was a boatman who gained a scanty living by
ferrying passengers across the river Floss. And it came to pass, one
evening when the winds were high, that there sat moaning by the brink
of the river a woman with a child in her arms; and she was clad in
rags, and had a worn and withered look, and she craved to be rowed
across the river. And the men thereabout questioned her, and said,
‘Wherefore dost thou desire to cross the river? Tarry till the morning,
and take shelter here for the night; so shalt thou be wise and not
foolish.’ Still she went on to mourn and crave. But Ogg the son of
Beorl came up and said, ‘I will ferry thee across; it is enough that
thy heart needs it.’ And he ferried her across. And it came to pass,
when she stepped ashore, that her rags were turned into robes of
flowing white, and her face became bright with exceeding beauty, and
there was a glory around it, so that she shed a light on the water like
the moon in its brightness. And she said, ‘Ogg, the son of Beorl, thou
art blessed in that thou didst not question and wrangle with the
heart’s need, but wast smitten with pity, and didst straightway relieve
the same. And from henceforth whoso steps into thy boat shall be in no
peril from the storm; and whenever it puts forth to the rescue, it
shall save the lives both of men and beasts.’ And when the floods came,
many were saved by reason of that blessing on the boat. But when Ogg
the son of Beorl died, behold, in the parting of his soul, the boat
loosed itself from its moorings, and was floated with the ebbing tide
in great swiftness to the ocean, and was seen no more. Yet it was
witnessed in the floods of aftertime, that at the coming on of
eventide, Ogg the son of Beorl was always seen with his boat upon the
wide-spreading waters, and the Blessed Virgin sat in the prow, shedding
a light around as of the moon in its brightness, so that the rowers in
the gathering darkness took heart and pulled anew.”
This legend, one sees, reflects from a far-off time the visitation of
the floods, which, even when they left human life untouched, were
widely fatal to the helpless cattle, and swept as sudden death over all
smaller living things. But the town knew worse troubles even than the
floods,—troubles of the civil wars, when it was a continual
fighting-place, where first Puritans thanked God for the blood of the
Loyalists, and then Loyalists thanked God for the blood of the
Puritans. Many honest citizens lost all their possessions for
conscience’ sake in those times, and went forth beggared from their
native town. Doubtless there are many houses standing now on which
those honest citizens turned their backs in sorrow,—quaint-gabled
houses looking on the river, jammed between newer warehouses, and
penetrated by surprising passages, which turn and turn at sharp angles
till they lead you out on a muddy strand overflowed continually by the
rushing tide. Everywhere the brick houses have a mellow look, and in
Mrs Glegg’s day there was no incongruous new-fashioned smartness, no
plate-glass in shop-windows, no fresh stucco-facing or other fallacious
attempt to make fine old red St Ogg’s wear the air of a town that
sprang up yesterday. The shop-windows were small and unpretending; for
the farmers’ wives and daughters who came to do their shopping on
market-days were not to be withdrawn from their regular well-known
shops; and the tradesmen had no wares intended for customers who would
go on their way and be seen no more. Ah! even Mrs Glegg’s day seems far
back in the past now, separated from us by changes that widen the
years. War and the rumor of war had then died out from the minds of
men, and if they were ever thought of by the farmers in drab
greatcoats, who shook the grain out of their sample-bags and buzzed
over it in the full market-place, it was as a state of things that
belonged to a past golden age when prices were high. Surely the time
was gone forever when the broad river could bring up unwelcome ships;
Russia was only the place where the linseed came from,—the more the
better,—making grist for the great vertical millstones with their
scythe-like arms, roaring and grinding and carefully sweeping as if an
informing soul were in them. The Catholics, bad harvests, and the
mysterious fluctuations of trade were the three evils mankind had to
fear; even the floods had not been great of late years. The mind of St
Ogg’s did not look extensively before or after. It inherited a long
past without thinking of it, and had no eyes for the spirits that walk
the streets. Since the centuries when St Ogg with his boat and the
Virgin Mother at the prow had been seen on the wide water, so many
memories had been left behind, and had gradually vanished like the
receding hilltops! And the present time was like the level plain where
men lose their belief in volcanoes and earthquakes, thinking to-morrow
will be as yesterday, and the giant forces that used to shake the earth
are forever laid to sleep. The days were gone when people could be
greatly wrought upon by their faith, still less change it; the
Catholics were formidable because they would lay hold of government and