The Mill on the Floss
colour. Prosperous men take a little vengeance now and then, as they
take a diversion, when it comes easily in their way, and is no
hindrance to business; and such small unimpassioned revenges have an
enormous effect in life, running through all degrees of pleasant
infliction, blocking the fit men out of places, and blackening
characters in unpremeditated talk. Still more, to see people who have
been only insignificantly offensive to us reduced in life and
humiliated, without any special effort of ours, is apt to have a
soothing, flattering influence. Providence or some other prince of this
world, it appears, has undertaken the task of retribution for us; and
really, by an agreeable constitution of things, our enemies somehow
_don’t_ prosper.
Wakem was not without this parenthetic vindictiveness toward the
uncomplimentary miller; and now Mrs Tulliver had put the notion into
his head, it presented itself to him as a pleasure to do the very thing
that would cause Mr Tulliver the most deadly mortification,—and a
pleasure of a complex kind, not made up of crude malice, but mingling
with it the relish of self-approbation. To see an enemy humiliated
gives a certain contentment, but this is jejune compared with the
highly blent satisfaction of seeing him humiliated by your benevolent
action or concession on his behalf. That is a sort of revenge which
falls into the scale of virtue, and Wakem was not without an intention
of keeping that scale respectably filled. He had once had the pleasure
of putting an old enemy of his into one of the St Ogg’s alms-houses, to
the rebuilding of which he had given a large subscription; and here was
an opportunity of providing for another by making him his own servant.
Such things give a completeness to prosperity, and contribute elements
of agreeable consciousness that are not dreamed of by that
short-sighted, overheated vindictiveness which goes out of its way to
wreak itself in direct injury. And Tulliver, with his rough tongue
filed by a sense of obligation, would make a better servant than any
chance-fellow who was cap-in-hand for a situation. Tulliver was known
to be a man of proud honesty, and Wakem was too acute not to believe in
the existence of honesty. He was given to observing individuals, not
to judging of them according to maxims, and no one knew better than he
that all men were not like himself. Besides, he intended to overlook
the whole business of land and mill pretty closely; he was fond of
these practical rural matters. But there were good reasons for
purchasing Dorlcote Mill, quite apart from any benevolent vengeance on
the miller. It was really a capital investment; besides, Guest & Co.
were going to bid for it. Mr Guest and Mr Wakem were on friendly dining
terms, and the attorney liked to predominate over a ship-owner and
mill-owner who was a little too loud in the town affairs as well as in
his table-talk. For Wakem was not a mere man of business; he was
considered a pleasant fellow in the upper circles of St Ogg’s—chatted
amusingly over his port-wine, did a little amateur farming, and had
certainly been an excellent husband and father; at church, when he went
there, he sat under the handsomest of mural monuments erected to the
memory of his wife. Most men would have married again under his
circumstances, but he was said to be more tender to his deformed son
than most men were to their best-shapen offspring. Not that Mr Wakem
had not other sons beside Philip; but toward them he held only a
chiaroscuro parentage, and provided for them in a grade of life duly
beneath his own. In this fact, indeed, there lay the clenching motive
to the purchase of Dorlcote Mill. While Mrs Tulliver was talking, it
had occurred to the rapid-minded lawyer, among all the other
circumstances of the case, that this purchase would, in a few years to
come, furnish a highly suitable position for a certain favourite lad
whom he meant to bring on in the world.
These were the mental conditions on which Mrs Tulliver had undertaken
to act persuasively, and had failed; a fact which may receive some
illustration from the remark of a great philosopher, that fly-fishers
fail in preparing their bait so as to make it alluring in the right
quarter, for want of a due acquaintance with the subjectivity of
fishes.
Chapter VIII.
Daylight on the Wreck
It was a clear frosty January day on which Mr Tulliver first came
downstairs. The bright sun on the chestnut boughs and the roofs
opposite his window had made him impatiently declare that he would be
caged up no longer; he thought everywhere would be more cheery under
this sunshine than his bedroom; for he knew nothing of the bareness
below, which made the flood of sunshine importunate, as if it had an
unfeeling pleasure in showing the empty places, and the marks where
well-known objects once had been. The impression on his mind that it
was but yesterday when he received the letter from Mr Gore was so
continually implied in his talk, and the attempts to convey to him the
idea that many weeks had passed and much had happened since then had
been so soon swept away by recurrent forgetfulness, that even Mr
Turnbull had begun to despair of preparing him to meet the facts by
previous knowledge. The full sense of the present could only be
imparted gradually by new experience,—not by mere words, which must
remain weaker than the impressions left by the _old_ experience. This
resolution to come downstairs was heard with trembling by the wife and
children. Mrs Tulliver said Tom must not go to St Ogg’s at the usual
hour, he must wait and see his father downstairs; and Tom complied,
though with an intense inward shrinking from the painful scene. The
hearts of all three had been more deeply dejected than ever during the
last few days. For Guest & Co. had not bought the mill; both mill and
land had been knocked down to Wakem, who had been over the premises,
and had laid before Mr Deane and Mr Glegg, in Mrs Tulliver’s presence,
his willingness to employ Mr Tulliver, in case of his recovery, as a
manager of the business. This proposition had occasioned much family
debating. Uncles and aunts were almost unanimously of opinion that such
an offer ought not to be rejected when there was nothing in the way but
a feeling in Mr Tulliver’s mind, which, as neither aunts nor uncles
shared it, was regarded as entirely unreasonable and childish,—indeed,
as a transferring toward Wakem of that indignation and hatred which Mr
Tulliver ought properly to have directed against himself for his
general quarrelsomeness, and his special exhibition of it in going to
law. Here was an opportunity for Mr Tulliver to provide for his wife
and daughter without any assistance from his wife’s relations, and
without that too evident descent into pauperism which makes it annoying
to respectable people to meet the degraded member of the family by the
wayside. Mr Tulliver, Mrs Glegg considered, must be made to feel, when
he came to his right mind, that he could never humble himself enough;
for _that_ had come which she had always foreseen would come of his
insolence in time past “to them as were the best friends he’d got to
look to.” Mr Glegg and Mr Deane were less stern in their views, but
they both of them thought Tulliver had done enough harm by his
hot-tempered crotchets and ought to put them out of the question when a
livelihood was offered him; Wakem showed a right feeling about the
matter,—_he_ had no grudge against Tulliver.
Tom had protested against entertaining the proposition. He shouldn’t
like his father to be under Wakem; he thought it would look
mean-spirited; but his mother’s main distress was the utter
impossibility of ever “turning Mr Tulliver round about Wakem,” or
getting him to hear reason; no, they would all have to go and live in a
pigsty on purpose to spite Wakem, who spoke “so as nobody could be
fairer.” Indeed, Mrs Tulliver’s mind was reduced to such confusion by
living in this strange medium of unaccountable sorrow, against which
she continually appealed by asking, “Oh dear, what _have_ I done to
deserve worse than other women?” that Maggie began to suspect her poor
mother’s wits were quite going.
“Tom,” she said, when they were out of their father’s room together,
“we _must_ try to make father understand a little of what has happened
before he goes downstairs. But we must get my mother away. She will say
something that will do harm. Ask Kezia to fetch her down, and keep her
engaged with something in the kitchen.”
Kezia was equal to the task. Having declared her intention of staying
till the master could get about again, “wage or no wage,” she had found
a certain recompense in keeping a strong hand over her mistress,
scolding her for “moithering” herself, and going about all day without
changing her cap, and looking as if she was “mushed.” Altogether, this
time of trouble was rather a Saturnalian time to Kezia; she could scold
her betters with unreproved freedom. On this particular occasion there
were drying clothes to be fetched in; she wished to know if one pair of
hands could do everything in-doors and out, and observed that _she_
should have thought it would be good for Mrs Tulliver to put on her
bonnet, and get a breath of fresh air by doing that needful piece of
work. Poor Mrs Tulliver went submissively downstairs; to be ordered
about by a servant was the last remnant of her household dignities,—she
would soon have no servant to scold her. Mr Tulliver was resting in his
chair a little after the fatigue of dressing, and Maggie and Tom were
seated near him, when Luke entered to ask if he should help master
downstairs.
“Ay, ay, Luke; stop a bit, sit down,” said Mr Tulliver pointing his
stick toward a chair, and looking at him with that pursuant gaze which
convalescent persons often have for those who have tended them,
reminding one of an infant gazing about after its nurse. For Luke had
been a constant night-watcher by his master’s bed.
“How’s the water now, eh, Luke?” said Mr Tulliver. “Dix hasn’t been
choking you up again, eh?”
“No, sir, it’s all right.”
“Ay, I thought not; he won’t be in a hurry at that again, now Riley’s
been to settle him. That was what I said to Riley yesterday—I said——”
Mr Tulliver leaned forward, resting his elbows on the armchair, and
looking on the ground as if in search of something, striving after
vanishing images like a man struggling against a doze. Maggie looked at
Tom in mute distress, their father’s mind was so far off the present,
which would by-and-by thrust itself on his wandering consciousness! Tom
was almost ready to rush away, with that impatience of painful emotion
which makes one of the differences between youth and maiden, man and
woman.
“Father,” said Maggie, laying her hand on his, “don’t you remember that
Mr Riley is dead?”
“Dead?” said Mr Tulliver, sharply, looking in her face with a strange,
examining glance.
“Yes, he died of apoplexy nearly a year ago. I remember hearing you say
you had to pay money for him; and he left his daughters badly off; one
of them is under-teacher at Miss Firniss’s, where I’ve been to school,
you know.”
“Ah?” said her father, doubtfully, still looking in her face. But as
soon as Tom began to speak he turned to look at _him_ with the same
inquiring glances, as if he were rather surprised at the presence of
these two young people. Whenever his mind was wandering in the far
past, he fell into this oblivion of their actual faces; they were not
those of the lad and the little wench who belonged to that past.
“It’s a long while since you had the dispute with Dix, father,” said
Tom. “I remember your talking about it three years ago, before I went
to school at Mr Stelling’s. I’ve been at school there three years;
don’t you remember?”