The Mill on the Floss
this very happiness,—a pang of the same dread that had kept his love
mute through long months. A rush of self-consciousness told him that he
was besotted to have said all this. Maggie’s manner this morning had
been as unconstrained and indifferent as ever.
But she was not looking indifferent now. Struck with the unusual
emotion in Philip’s tone, she had turned quickly to look at him; and as
he went on speaking, a great change came over her face,—a flush and
slight spasm of the features, such as we see in people who hear some
news that will require them to readjust their conceptions of the past.
She was quite silent, and walking on toward the trunk of a fallen tree,
she sat down, as if she had no strength to spare for her muscles. She
was trembling.
“Maggie,” said Philip, getting more and more alarmed in every fresh
moment of silence, “I was a fool to say it; forget that I’ve said it. I
shall be contented if things can be as they were.”
The distress with which he spoke urged Maggie to say something. “I am
so surprised, Philip; I had not thought of it.” And the effort to say
this brought the tears down too.
“Has it made you hate me, Maggie?” said Philip, impetuously. “Do you
think I’m a presumptuous fool?”
“Oh, Philip!” said Maggie, “how can you think I have such feelings? As
if I were not grateful for _any_ love. But—but I had never thought of
your being my lover. It seemed so far off—like a dream—only like one of
the stories one imagines—that I should ever have a lover.”
“Then can you bear to think of me as your lover, Maggie?” said Philip,
seating himself by her, and taking her hand, in the elation of a sudden
hope. “_Do_ you love me?”
Maggie turned rather pale; this direct question seemed not easy to
answer. But her eyes met Philip’s, which were in this moment liquid and
beautiful with beseeching love. She spoke with hesitation, yet with
sweet, simple, girlish tenderness.
“I think I could hardly love any one better; there is nothing but what
I love you for.” She paused a little while, and then added: “But it
will be better for us not to say any more about it, won’t it, dear
Philip? You know we couldn’t even be friends, if our friendship were
discovered. I have never felt that I was right in giving way about
seeing you, though it has been so precious to me in some ways; and now
the fear comes upon me strongly again, that it will lead to evil.”
“But no evil has come, Maggie; and if you had been guided by that fear
before, you would only have lived through another dreary, benumbing
year, instead of reviving into your real self.”
Maggie shook her head. “It has been very sweet, I know,—all the talking
together, and the books, and the feeling that I had the walk to look
forward to, when I could tell you the thoughts that had come into my
head while I was away from you. But it has made me restless; it has
made me think a great deal about the world; and I have impatient
thoughts again,—I get weary of my home; and then it cuts me to the
heart afterward, that I should ever have felt weary of my father and
mother. I think what you call being benumbed was better—better for
me—for then my selfish desires were benumbed.”
Philip had risen again, and was walking backward and forward
impatiently.
“No, Maggie, you have wrong ideas of self-conquest, as I’ve often told
you. What you call self-conquest—blinding and deafening yourself to all
but one train of impressions—is only the culture of monomania in a
nature like yours.”
He had spoken with some irritation, but now he sat down by her again
and took her hand.
“Don’t think of the past now, Maggie; think only of our love. If you
can really cling to me with all your heart, every obstacle will be
overcome in time; we need only wait. I can live on hope. Look at me,
Maggie; tell me again it is possible for you to love me. Don’t look
away from me to that cloven tree; it is a bad omen.”
She turned her large dark glance upon him with a sad smile.
“Come, Maggie, say one kind word, or else you were better to me at
Lorton. You asked me if I should like you to kiss me,—don’t you
remember?—and you promised to kiss me when you met me again. You never
kept the promise.”
The recollection of that childish time came as a sweet relief to
Maggie. It made the present moment less strange to her. She kissed him
almost as simply and quietly as she had done when she was twelve years
old. Philip’s eyes flashed with delight, but his next words were words
of discontent.
“You don’t seem happy enough, Maggie; you are forcing yourself to say
you love me, out of pity.”
“No, Philip,” said Maggie, shaking her head, in her old childish way;
“I’m telling you the truth. It is all new and strange to me; but I
don’t think I could love any one better than I love you. I should like
always to live with you—to make you happy. I have always been happy
when I have been with you. There is only one thing I will not do for
your sake; I will never do anything to wound my father. You must never
ask that from me.”
“No, Maggie, I will ask nothing; I will bear everything; I’ll wait
another year only for a kiss, if you will only give me the first place
in your heart.”
“No,” said Maggie, smiling, “I won’t make you wait so long as that.”
But then, looking serious again, she added, as she rose from her seat,—
“But what would your own father say, Philip? Oh, it is quite impossible
we can ever be more than friends,—brother and sister in secret, as we
have been. Let us give up thinking of everything else.”
“No, Maggie, I can’t give you up,—unless you are deceiving me; unless
you really only care for me as if I were your brother. Tell me the
truth.”
“Indeed I do, Philip. What happiness have I ever had so great as being
with you,—since I was a little girl,—the days Tom was good to me? And
your mind is a sort of world to me; you can tell me all I want to know.
I think I should never be tired of being with you.”
They were walking hand in hand, looking at each other; Maggie, indeed,
was hurrying along, for she felt it time to be gone. But the sense that
their parting was near made her more anxious lest she should have
unintentionally left some painful impression on Philip’s mind. It was
one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and
deceptive; when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves
floodmarks which are never reached again.
They stopped to part among the Scotch firs.
“Then my life will be filled with hope, Maggie, and I shall be happier
than other men, in spite of all? We _do_ belong to each other—for
always—whether we are apart or together?”
“Yes, Philip; I should like never to part; I should like to make your
life very happy.”
“I am waiting for something else. I wonder whether it will come.”
Maggie smiled, with glistening tears, and then stooped her tall head to
kiss the pale face that was full of pleading, timid love,—like a
woman’s.
She had a moment of real happiness then,—a moment of belief that, if
there were sacrifice in this love, it was all the richer and more
satisfying.
She turned away and hurried home, feeling that in the hour since she
had trodden this road before, a new era had begun for her. The tissue
of vague dreams must now get narrower and narrower, and all the threads
of thought and emotion be gradually absorbed in the woof of her actual
daily life.
Chapter V.
The Cloven Tree
Secrets are rarely betrayed or discovered according to any programme
our fear has sketched out. Fear is almost always haunted by terrible
dramatic scenes, which recur in spite of the best-argued probabilities
against them; and during a year that Maggie had had the burthen of
concealment on her mind, the possibility of discovery had continually
presented itself under the form of a sudden meeting with her father or
Tom when she was walking with Philip in the Red Deeps. She was aware
that this was not one of the most likely events; but it was the scene
that most completely symbolised her inward dread. Those slight indirect
suggestions which are dependent on apparently trivial coincidences and
incalculable states of mind, are the favourite machinery of Fact, but
are not the stuff in which Imagination is apt to work.
Certainly one of the persons about whom Maggie’s fears were furthest
from troubling themselves was her aunt Pullet, on whom, seeing that she
did not live in St Ogg’s, and was neither sharp-eyed nor
sharp-tempered, it would surely have been quite whimsical of them to
fix rather than on aunt Glegg. And yet the channel of fatality—the
pathway of the lightning—was no other than aunt Pullet. She did not
live at St Ogg’s, but the road from Garum Firs lay by the Red Deeps, at
the end opposite that by which Maggie entered.
The day after Maggie’s last meeting with Philip, being a Sunday on
which Mr Pullet was bound to appear in funeral hatband and scarf at St
Ogg’s church, Mrs Pullet made this the occasion of dining with sister
Glegg, and taking tea with poor sister Tulliver. Sunday was the one day
in the week on which Tom was at home in the afternoon; and today the
brighter spirits he had been in of late had flowed over in unusually
cheerful open chat with his father, and in the invitation, “Come,
Magsie, you come too!” when he strolled out with his mother in the
garden to see the advancing cherry-blossoms. He had been better pleased
with Maggie since she had been less odd and ascetic; he was even
getting rather proud of her; several persons had remarked in his
hearing that his sister was a very fine girl. To-day there was a
peculiar brightness in her face, due in reality to an undercurrent of
excitement, which had as much doubt and pain as pleasure in it; but it
might pass for a sign of happiness.
“You look very well, my dear,” said aunt Pullet, shaking her head
sadly, as they sat round the tea-table. “I niver thought your girl ’ud
be so good-looking, Bessy. But you must wear pink, my dear; that blue
thing as your aunt Glegg gave you turns you into a crowflower. Jane
never _was_ tasty. Why don’t you wear that gown o’ mine?”
“It is so pretty and so smart, aunt. I think it’s too showy for me,—at
least for my other clothes, that I must wear with it.
“To be sure, it ’ud be unbecoming if it wasn’t well known you’ve got
them belonging to you as can afford to give you such things when
they’ve done with ’em themselves. It stands to reason I must give my
own niece clothes now and then,—such things as _I_ buy every year, and
never wear anything out. And as for Lucy, there’s no giving to her, for
she’s got everything o’ the choicest; sister Deane may well hold her
head up,—though she looks dreadful yallow, poor thing—I doubt this
liver complaint ’ull carry her off. That’s what this new vicar, this Dr
Kenn, said in the funeral sermon to-day.”
“Ah, he’s a wonderful preacher, by all account,—isn’t he, Sophy?” said
Mrs Tulliver.
“Why, Lucy had got a collar on this blessed day,” continued Mrs Pullet,
with her eyes fixed in a ruminating manner, “as I don’t say I haven’t
got as good, but I must look out my best to match it.”
“Miss Lucy’s called the bell o’ St Ogg’s, they say; that’s a cur’ous
word,” observed Mr Pullet, on whom the mysteries of etymology sometimes
fell with an oppressive weight.
“Pooh!” said Mr Tulliver, jealous for Maggie, “she’s a small thing, not
much of a figure. But fine feathers make fine birds. I see nothing to
admire so much in those diminutive women; they look silly by the side
o’ the men,—out o’ proportion. When I chose my wife, I chose her the
right size,—neither too little nor too big.”
The poor wife, with her withered beauty, smiled complacently.
“But the men aren’t _all_ big,” said uncle Pullet, not without some
self-reference; “a young fellow may be good-looking and yet not be a