The Mill on the Floss
property, and burn men alive; not because any sane and honest
parishioner of St Ogg’s could be brought to believe in the Pope. One
aged person remembered how a rude multitude had been swayed when John
Wesley preached in the cattle-market; but for a long while it had not
been expected of preachers that they should shake the souls of men. An
occasional burst of fervor in Dissenting pulpits on the subject of
infant baptism was the only symptom of a zeal unsuited to sober times
when men had done with change. Protestantism sat at ease, unmindful of
schisms, careless of proselytism: Dissent was an inheritance along with
a superior pew and a business connection; and Churchmanship only
wondered contemptuously at Dissent as a foolish habit that clung
greatly to families in the grocery and chandlering lines, though not
incompatible with prosperous wholesale dealing. But with the Catholic
Question had come a slight wind of controversy to break the calm: the
elderly rector had become occasionally historical and argumentative;
and Mr Spray, the Independent minister, had begun to preach political
sermons, in which he distinguished with much subtlety between his
fervent belief in the right of the Catholics to the franchise and his
fervent belief in their eternal perdition. Most of Mr Spray’s hearers,
however, were incapable of following his subtleties, and many
old-fashioned Dissenters were much pained by his “siding with the
Catholics”; while others thought he had better let politics alone.
Public spirit was not held in high esteem at St Ogg’s, and men who
busied themselves with political questions were regarded with some
suspicion, as dangerous characters; they were usually persons who had
little or no business of their own to manage, or, if they had, were
likely enough to become insolvent.
This was the general aspect of things at St Ogg’s in Mrs Glegg’s day,
and at that particular period in her family history when she had had
her quarrel with Mr Tulliver. It was a time when ignorance was much
more comfortable than at present, and was received with all the honours
in very good society, without being obliged to dress itself in an
elaborate costume of knowledge; a time when cheap periodicals were not,
and when country surgeons never thought of asking their female patients
if they were fond of reading, but simply took it for granted that they
preferred gossip; a time when ladies in rich silk gowns wore large
pockets, in which they carried a mutton-bone to secure them against
cramp. Mrs Glegg carried such a bone, which she had inherited from her
grandmother with a brocaded gown that would stand up empty, like a suit
of armor, and a silver-headed walking-stick; for the Dodson family had
been respectable for many generations.
Mrs Glegg had both a front and a back parlour in her excellent house at
St Ogg’s, so that she had two points of view from which she could
observe the weakness of her fellow-beings, and reinforce her
thankfulness for her own exceptional strength of mind. From her front
window she could look down the Tofton Road, leading out of St Ogg’s,
and note the growing tendency to “gadding about” in the wives of men
not retired from business, together with a practice of wearing woven
cotton stockings, which opened a dreary prospect for the coming
generation; and from her back windows she could look down the pleasant
garden and orchard which stretched to the river, and observe the folly
of Mr Glegg in spending his time among “them flowers and vegetables.”
For Mr Glegg, having retired from active business as a wool-stapler for
the purpose of enjoying himself through the rest of his life, had found
this last occupation so much more severe than his business, that he had
been driven into amateur hard labour as a dissipation, and habitually
relaxed by doing the work of two ordinary gardeners. The economizing of
a gardener’s wages might perhaps have induced Mrs Glegg to wink at this
folly, if it were possible for a healthy female mind even to simulate
respect for a husband’s hobby. But it is well known that this conjugal
complacency belongs only to the weaker portion of the sex, who are
scarcely alive to the responsibilities of a wife as a constituted check
on her husband’s pleasures, which are hardly ever of a rational or
commendable kind.
Mr Glegg on his side, too, had a double source of mental occupation,
which gave every promise of being inexhaustible. On the one hand, he
surprised himself by his discoveries in natural history, finding that
his piece of garden-ground contained wonderful caterpillars, slugs, and
insects, which, so far as he had heard, had never before attracted
human observation; and he noticed remarkable coincidences between these
zoological phenomena and the great events of that time,—as, for
example, that before the burning of York Minster there had been
mysterious serpentine marks on the leaves of the rose-trees, together
with an unusual prevalence of slugs, which he had been puzzled to know
the meaning of, until it flashed upon him with this melancholy
conflagration. (Mr Glegg had an unusual amount of mental activity,
which, when disengaged from the wool business, naturally made itself a
pathway in other directions.) And his second subject of meditation was
the “contrairiness” of the female mind, as typically exhibited in Mrs
Glegg. That a creature made—in a genealogical sense—out of a man’s rib,
and in this particular case maintained in the highest respectability
without any trouble of her own, should be normally in a state of
contradiction to the blandest propositions and even to the most
accommodating concessions, was a mystery in the scheme of things to
which he had often in vain sought a clew in the early chapters of
Genesis. Mr Glegg had chosen the eldest Miss Dodson as a handsome
embodiment of female prudence and thrift, and being himself of a
money-getting, money-keeping turn, had calculated on much conjugal
harmony. But in that curious compound, the feminine character, it may
easily happen that the flavour is unpleasant in spite of excellent
ingredients; and a fine systematic stinginess may be accompanied with a
seasoning that quite spoils its relish. Now, good Mr Glegg himself was
stingy in the most amiable manner; his neighbours called him “near,”
which always means that the person in question is a lovable skinflint.
If you expressed a preference for cheese-parings, Mr Glegg would
remember to save them for you, with a good-natured delight in
gratifying your palate, and he was given to pet all animals which
required no appreciable keep. There was no humbug or hypocrisy about Mr
Glegg; his eyes would have watered with true feeling over the sale of a
widow’s furniture, which a five-pound note from his side pocket would
have prevented; but a donation of five pounds to a person “in a small
way of life” would have seemed to him a mad kind of lavishness rather
than “charity,” which had always presented itself to him as a
contribution of small aids, not a neutralizing of misfortune. And Mr
Glegg was just as fond of saving other people’s money as his own; he
would have ridden as far round to avoid a turnpike when his expenses
were to be paid for him, as when they were to come out of his own
pocket, and was quite zealous in trying to induce indifferent
acquaintances to adopt a cheap substitute for blacking. This
inalienable habit of saving, as an end in itself, belonged to the
industrious men of business of a former generation, who made their
fortunes slowly, almost as the tracking of the fox belongs to the
harrier,—it constituted them a “race,” which is nearly lost in these
days of rapid money-getting, when lavishness comes close on the back of
want. In old-fashioned times an “independence” was hardly ever made
without a little miserliness as a condition, and you would have found
that quality in every provincial district, combined with characters as
various as the fruits from which we can extract acid. The true
Harpagons were always marked and exceptional characters; not so the
worthy tax-payers, who, having once pinched from real necessity,
retained even in the midst of their comfortable retirement, with their
wallfruit and wine-bins, the habit of regarding life as an ingenious
process of nibbling out one’s livelihood without leaving any
perceptible deficit, and who would have been as immediately prompted to
give up a newly taxed luxury when they had had their clear five hundred
a year, as when they had only five hundred pounds of capital. Mr Glegg
was one of these men, found so impracticable by chancellors of the
exchequer; and knowing this, you will be the better able to understand
why he had not swerved from the conviction that he had made an eligible
marriage, in spite of the too pungent seasoning that nature had given
to the eldest Miss Dodson’s virtues. A man with an affectionate
disposition, who finds a wife to concur with his fundamental idea of
life, easily comes to persuade himself that no other woman would have
suited him so well, and does a little daily snapping and quarrelling
without any sense of alienation. Mr Glegg, being of a reflective turn,
and no longer occupied with wool, had much wondering meditation on the
peculiar constitution of the female mind as unfolded to him in his
domestic life; and yet he thought Mrs Glegg’s household ways a model
for her sex. It struck him as a pitiable irregularity in other women if
they did not roll up their table-napkins with the same tightness and
emphasis as Mrs Glegg did, if their pastry had a less leathery
consistence, and their damson cheese a less venerable hardness than
hers; nay, even the peculiar combination of grocery and druglike odors
in Mrs Glegg’s private cupboard impressed him as the only right thing
in the way of cupboard smells. I am not sure that he would not have
longed for the quarrelling again, if it had ceased for an entire week;
and it is certain that an acquiescent, mild wife would have left his
meditations comparatively jejune and barren of mystery.
Mr Glegg’s unmistakable kind-heartedness was shown in this, that it
pained him more to see his wife at variance with others,—even with
Dolly, the servant,—than to be in a state of cavil with her himself;
and the quarrel between her and Mr Tulliver vexed him so much that it
quite nullified the pleasure he would otherwise have had in the state
of his early cabbages, as he walked in his garden before breakfast the
next morning. Still, he went in to breakfast with some slight hope
that, now Mrs Glegg had “slept upon it,” her anger might be subdued
enough to give way to her usually strong sense of family decorum. She
had been used to boast that there had never been any of those deadly
quarrels among the Dodsons which had disgraced other families; that no
Dodson had ever been “cut off with a shilling,” and no cousin of the
Dodsons disowned; as, indeed, why should they be? For they had no
cousins who had not money out at use, or some houses of their own, at
the very least.
There was one evening-cloud which had always disappeared from Mrs
Glegg’s brow when she sat at the breakfast-table. It was her fuzzy
front of curls; for as she occupied herself in household matters in the
morning it would have been a mere extravagance to put on anything so
superfluous to the making of leathery pastry as a fuzzy curled front.
By half-past ten decorum demanded the front; until then Mrs Glegg could
economise it, and society would never be any the wiser. But the absence
of that cloud only left it more apparent that the cloud of severity
remained; and Mr Glegg, perceiving this, as he sat down to his
milkporridge, which it was his old frugal habit to stem his morning
hunger with, prudently resolved to leave the first remark to Mrs Glegg,