The Mill on the Floss
lest, to so delicate an article as a lady’s temper, the slightest touch
should do mischief. People who seem to enjoy their ill temper have a
way of keeping it in fine condition by inflicting privations on
themselves. That was Mrs Glegg’s way. She made her tea weaker than
usual this morning, and declined butter. It was a hard case that a
vigorous mood for quarrelling, so highly capable of using an
opportunity, should not meet with a single remark from Mr Glegg on
which to exercise itself. But by and by it appeared that his silence
would answer the purpose, for he heard himself apostrophised at last in
that tone peculiar to the wife of one’s bosom.
“Well, Mr Glegg! it’s a poor return I get for making you the wife I’ve
made you all these years. If this is the way I’m to be treated, I’d
better ha’ known it before my poor father died, and then, when I’d
wanted a home, I should ha’ gone elsewhere, as the choice was offered
me.”
Mr Glegg paused from his porridge and looked up, not with any new
amazement, but simply with that quiet, habitual wonder with which we
regard constant mysteries.
“Why, Mrs G., what have I done now?”
“Done now, Mr Glegg? _done now?_—I’m sorry for you.”
Not seeing his way to any pertinent answer, Mr Glegg reverted to his
porridge.
“There’s husbands in the world,” continued Mrs Glegg, after a pause,
“as ’ud have known how to do something different to siding with
everybody else against their own wives. Perhaps I’m wrong and you can
teach me better. But I’ve allays heard as it’s the husband’s place to
stand by the wife, instead o’ rejoicing and triumphing when folks
insult her.”
“Now, what call have you to say that?” said Mr Glegg, rather warmly,
for though a kind man, he was not as meek as Moses. “When did I rejoice
or triumph over you?”
“There’s ways o’ doing things worse than speaking out plain, Mr Glegg.
I’d sooner you’d tell me to my face as you make light of me, than try
to make out as everybody’s in the right but me, and come to your
breakfast in the morning, as I’ve hardly slept an hour this night, and
sulk at me as if I was the dirt under your feet.”
“Sulk at you?” said Mr Glegg, in a tone of angry facetiousness. “You’re
like a tipsy man as thinks everybody’s had too much but himself.”
“Don’t lower yourself with using coarse language to _me_, Mr Glegg! It
makes you look very small, though you can’t see yourself,” said Mrs
Glegg, in a tone of energetic compassion. “A man in your place should
set an example, and talk more sensible.”
“Yes; but will you listen to sense?” retorted Mr Glegg, sharply. “The
best sense I can talk to you is what I said last night,—as you’re i’
the wrong to think o’ calling in your money, when it’s safe enough if
you’d let it alone, all because of a bit of a tiff, and I was in hopes
you’d ha’ altered your mind this morning. But if you’d like to call it
in, don’t do it in a hurry now, and breed more enmity in the family,
but wait till there’s a pretty mortgage to be had without any trouble.
You’d have to set the lawyer to work now to find an investment, and
make no end o’ expense.”
Mrs Glegg felt there was really something in this, but she tossed her
head and emitted a guttural interjection to indicate that her silence
was only an armistice, not a peace. And, in fact hostilities soon broke
out again.
“I’ll thank you for my cup o’ tea, now, Mrs G.,” said Mr Glegg, seeing
that she did not proceed to give it him as usual, when he had finished
his porridge. She lifted the teapot with a slight toss of the head, and
said,—
“I’m glad to hear you’ll _thank_ me, Mr Glegg. It’s little thanks _I_
get for what I do for folks i’ this world. Though there’s never a woman
o’ _your_ side o’ the family, Mr Glegg, as is fit to stand up with me,
and I’d say it if I was on my dying bed. Not but what I’ve allays
conducted myself civil to your kin, and there isn’t one of ’em can say
the contrary, though my equils they aren’t, and nobody shall make me
say it.”
“You’d better leave finding fault wi’ my kin till you’ve left off
quarrelling with your own, Mrs G.,” said Mr Glegg, with angry sarcasm.
“I’ll trouble you for the milk-jug.”
“That’s as false a word as ever you spoke, Mr Glegg,” said the lady,
pouring out the milk with unusual profuseness, as much as to say, if he
wanted milk he should have it with a vengeance. “And you know it’s
false. I’m not the woman to quarrel with my own kin; _you_ may, for
I’ve known you to do it.”
“Why, what did you call it yesterday, then, leaving your sister’s house
in a tantrum?”
“I’d no quarrel wi’ my sister, Mr Glegg, and it’s false to say it. Mr
Tulliver’s none o’ my blood, and it was him quarrelled with me, and
drove me out o’ the house. But perhaps you’d have had me stay and be
swore at, Mr Glegg; perhaps you was vexed not to hear more abuse and
foul language poured out upo’ your own wife. But, let me tell you, it’s
_your_ disgrace.”
“Did ever anybody hear the like i’ this parish?” said Mr Glegg, getting
hot. “A woman, with everything provided for her, and allowed to keep
her own money the same as if it was settled on her, and with a gig new
stuffed and lined at no end o’ expense, and provided for when I die
beyond anything she could expect—to go on i’ this way, biting and
snapping like a mad dog! It’s beyond everything, as God A ’mighty
should ha’ made women _so_.” (These last words were uttered in a tone
of sorrowful agitation. Mr Glegg pushed his tea from him, and tapped
the table with both his hands.)
“Well, Mr Glegg, if those are your feelings, it’s best they should be
known,” said Mrs Glegg, taking off her napkin, and folding it in an
excited manner. “But if you talk o’ my being provided for beyond what I
could expect, I beg leave to tell you as I’d a right to expect a many
things as I don’t find. And as to my being like a mad dog, it’s well if
you’re not cried shame on by the county for your treatment of me, for
it’s what I can’t bear, and I won’t bear——”
Here Mrs Glegg’s voice intimated that she was going to cry, and
breaking off from speech, she rang the bell violently.
“Sally,” she said, rising from her chair, and speaking in rather a
choked voice, “light a fire up-stairs, and put the blinds down. Mr
Glegg, you’ll please to order what you’d like for dinner. I shall have
gruel.”
Mrs Glegg walked across the room to the small book-case, and took down
Baxter’s “Saints’ Everlasting Rest,” which she carried with her
up-stairs. It was the book she was accustomed to lay open before her on
special occasions,—on wet Sunday mornings, or when she heard of a death
in the family, or when, as in this case, her quarrel with Mr Glegg had
been set an octave higher than usual.
But Mrs Glegg carried something else up-stairs with her, which,
together with the “Saints’ Rest” and the gruel, may have had some
influence in gradually calming her feelings, and making it possible for
her to endure existence on the ground-floor, shortly before tea-time.
This was, partly, Mr Glegg’s suggestion that she would do well to let
her five hundred lie still until a good investment turned up; and,
further, his parenthetic hint at his handsome provision for her in case
of his death. Mr Glegg, like all men of his stamp, was extremely
reticent about his will; and Mrs Glegg, in her gloomier moments, had
forebodings that, like other husbands of whom she had heard, he might
cherish the mean project of heightening her grief at his death by
leaving her poorly off, in which case she was firmly resolved that she
would have scarcely any weeper on her bonnet, and would cry no more
than if he had been a second husband. But if he had really shown her
any testamentary tenderness, it would be affecting to think of him,
poor man, when he was gone; and even his foolish fuss about the flowers
and garden-stuff, and his insistence on the subject of snails, would be
touching when it was once fairly at an end. To survive Mr Glegg, and
talk eulogistically of him as a man who might have his weaknesses, but
who had done the right thing by her, not-withstanding his numerous poor
relations; to have sums of interest coming in more frequently, and
secrete it in various corners, baffling to the most ingenious of
thieves (for, to Mrs Glegg’s mind, banks and strong-boxes would have
nullified the pleasure of property; she might as well have taken her
food in capsules); finally, to be looked up to by her own family and
the neighbourhood, so as no woman can ever hope to be who has not the
præterite and present dignity comprised in being a “widow well
left,”—all this made a flattering and conciliatory view of the future.
So that when good Mr Glegg, restored to good humour by much hoeing, and
moved by the sight of his wife’s empty chair, with her knitting rolled
up in the corner, went up-stairs to her, and observed that the bell had
been tolling for poor Mr Morton, Mrs Glegg answered magnanimously,
quite as if she had been an uninjured woman: “Ah! then, there’ll be a
good business for somebody to take to.”
Baxter had been open at least eight hours by this time, for it was
nearly five o’clock; and if people are to quarrel often, it follows as
a corollary that their quarrels cannot be protracted beyond certain
limits.
Mr and Mrs Glegg talked quite amicably about the Tullivers that
evening. Mr Glegg went the length of admitting that Tulliver was a sad
man for getting into hot water, and was like enough to run through his
property; and Mrs Glegg, meeting this acknowledgment half-way, declared
that it was beneath her to take notice of such a man’s conduct, and
that, for her sister’s sake, she would let him keep the five hundred a
while longer, for when she put it out on a mortgage she should only get
four per cent.
Chapter XIII.
Mr Tulliver Further Entangles the Skein of Life
Owing to this new adjustment of Mrs Glegg’s thoughts, Mrs Pullet found
her task of mediation the next day surprisingly easy. Mrs Glegg, indeed
checked her rather sharply for thinking it would be necessary to tell
her elder sister what was the right mode of behaviour in family
matters. Mrs Pullet’s argument, that it would look ill in the
neighbourhood if people should have it in their power to say that there
was a quarrel in the family, was particularly offensive. If the family
name never suffered except through Mrs Glegg, Mrs Pullet might lay her
head on her pillow in perfect confidence.
“It’s not to be expected, I suppose,” observed Mrs Glegg, by way of
winding up the subject, “as I shall go to the mill again before Bessy
comes to see me, or as I shall go and fall down o’ my knees to Mr
Tulliver, and ask his pardon for showing him favours; but I shall bear
no malice, and when Mr Tulliver speaks civil to me, I’ll speak civil to
him. Nobody has any call to tell me what’s becoming.”
Finding it unnecessary to plead for the Tullivers, it was natural that
aunt Pullet should relax a little in her anxiety for them, and recur to
the annoyance she had suffered yesterday from the offspring of that
apparently ill-fated house. Mrs Glegg heard a circumstantial narrative,
to which Mr Pullet’s remarkable memory furnished some items; and while
aunt Pullet pitied poor Bessy’s bad luck with her children, and
expressed a half-formed project of paying for Maggie’s being sent to a
distant boarding-school, which would not prevent her being so brown,
but might tend to subdue some other vices in her, aunt Glegg blamed
Bessy for her weakness, and appealed to all witnesses who should be
living when the Tulliver children had turned out ill, that she, Mrs
Glegg, had always said how it would be from the very first, observing
that it was wonderful to herself how all her words came true.
“Then I may call and tell Bessy you’ll bear no malice, and everything