The Mill on the Floss
lest she should overstep the limit of intercourse with him that Tom
would sanction; and she put out her hand to him, and felt the tears in
her eyes without any consciousness of an inward check. The scene was
just what Lucy expected, and her kind heart delighted in bringing
Philip and Maggie together again; though, even with all _her_ regard
for Philip, she could not resist the impression that her cousin Tom had
some excuse for feeling shocked at the physical incongruity between the
two,—a prosaic person like cousin Tom, who didn’t like poetry and fairy
tales. But she began to speak as soon as possible, to set them at ease.
“This was very good and virtuous of you,” she said, in her pretty
treble, like the low conversational notes of little birds, “to come so
soon after your arrival. And as it is, I think I will pardon you for
running away in an inopportune manner, and giving your friends no
notice. Come and sit down here,” she went on, placing the chair that
would suit him best, “and you shall find yourself treated mercifully.”
“You will never govern well, Miss Deane,” said Philip, as he seated
himself, “because no one will ever believe in your severity. People
will always encourage themselves in misdemeanours by the certainty that
you will be indulgent.”
Lucy gave some playful contradiction, but Philip did not hear what it
was, for he had naturally turned toward Maggie, and she was looking at
him with that open, affectionate scrutiny which we give to a friend
from whom we have been long separated. What a moment their parting had
been! And Philip felt as if he were only in the morrow of it. He felt
this so keenly,—with such intense, detailed remembrance, with such
passionate revival of all that had been said and looked in their last
conversation,—that with that jealousy and distrust which in diffident
natures is almost inevitably linked with a strong feeling, he thought
he read in Maggie’s glance and manner the evidence of a change. The
very fact that he feared and half expected it would be sure to make
this thought rush in, in the absence of positive proof to the contrary.
“I am having a great holiday, am I not?” said Maggie. “Lucy is like a
fairy godmother; she has turned me from a drudge into a princess in no
time. I do nothing but indulge myself all day long, and she always
finds out what I want before I know it myself.”
“I am sure she is the happier for having you, then,” said Philip. “You
must be better than a whole menagerie of pets to her. And you look
well. You are benefiting by the change.”
Artificial conversation of this sort went on a little while, till Lucy,
determined to put an end to it, exclaimed, with a good imitation of
annoyance, that she had forgotten something, and was quickly out of the
room.
In a moment Maggie and Philip leaned forward, and the hands were
clasped again, with a look of sad contentment, like that of friends who
meet in the memory of recent sorrow.
“I told my brother I wished to see you, Philip; I asked him to release
me from my promise, and he consented.”
Maggie, in her impulsiveness, wanted Philip to know at once the
position they must hold toward each other; but she checked herself. The
things that had happened since he had spoken of his love for her were
so painful that she shrank from being the first to allude to them. It
seemed almost like an injury toward Philip even to mention her
brother,—her brother, who had insulted him. But he was thinking too
entirely of her to be sensitive on any other point at that moment.
“Then we can at least be friends, Maggie? There is nothing to hinder
that now?”
“Will not your father object?” said Maggie, withdrawing her hand.
“I should not give you up on any ground but your own wish, Maggie,”
said Philip, colouring. “There are points on which I should always
resist my father, as I used to tell you. _That_ is one.”
“Then there is nothing to hinder our being friends, Philip,—seeing each
other and talking to each other while I am here; I shall soon go away
again. I mean to go very soon, to a new situation.”
“Is that inevitable, Maggie?”
“Yes; I must not stay here long. It would unfit me for the life I must
begin again at last. I can’t live in dependence,—I can’t live with my
brother, though he is very good to me. He would like to provide for me;
but that would be intolerable to me.”
Philip was silent a few moments, and then said, in that high, feeble
voice which with him indicated the resolute suppression of emotion,—
“Is there no other alternative, Maggie? Is that life, away from those
who love you, the only one you will allow yourself to look forward to?”
“Yes, Philip,” she said, looking at him pleadingly, as if she entreated
him to believe that she was compelled to this course. “At least, as
things are; I don’t know what may be in years to come. But I begin to
think there can never come much happiness to me from loving; I have
always had so much pain mingled with it. I wish I could make myself a
world outside it, as men do.”
“Now you are returning to your old thought in a new form, Maggie,—the
thought I used to combat,” said Philip, with a slight tinge of
bitterness. “You want to find out a mode of renunciation that will be
an escape from pain. I tell you again, there is no such escape possible
except by perverting or mutilating one’s nature. What would become of
me, if I tried to escape from pain? Scorn and cynicism would be my only
opium; unless I could fall into some kind of conceited madness, and
fancy myself a favourite of Heaven because I am not a favourite with
men.”
The bitterness had taken on some impetuosity as Philip went on
speaking; the words were evidently an outlet for some immediate feeling
of his own, as well as an answer to Maggie. There was a pain pressing
on him at that moment. He shrank with proud delicacy from the faintest
allusion to the words of love, of plighted love that had passed between
them. It would have seemed to him like reminding Maggie of a promise;
it would have had for him something of the baseness of compulsion. He
could not dwell on the fact that he himself had not changed; for that
too would have had the air of an appeal. His love for Maggie was
stamped, even more than the rest of his experience, with the
exaggerated sense that he was an exception,—that she, that every one,
saw him in the light of an exception.
But Maggie was conscience-stricken.
“Yes, Philip,” she said, with her childish contrition when he used to
chide her, “you are right, I know. I do always think too much of my own
feelings, and not enough of others’,—not enough of yours. I had need
have you always to find fault with me and teach me; so many things have
come true that you used to tell me.”
Maggie was resting her elbow on the table, leaning her head on her hand
and looking at Philip with half-penitent dependent affection, as she
said this; while he was returning her gaze with an expression that, to
her consciousness, gradually became less vague,—became charged with a
specific recollection. Had his mind flown back to something that _she_
now remembered,—something about a lover of Lucy’s? It was a thought
that made her shudder; it gave new definiteness to her present
position, and to the tendency of what had happened the evening before.
She moved her arm from the table, urged to change her position by that
positive physical oppression at the heart that sometimes accompanies a
sudden mental pang.
“What is the matter, Maggie? Has something happened?” Philip said, in
inexpressible anxiety, his imagination being only too ready to weave
everything that was fatal to them both.
“No, nothing,” said Maggie, rousing her latent will. Philip must not
have that odious thought in his mind; she would banish it from her own.
“Nothing,” she repeated, “except in my own mind. You used to say I
should feel the effect of my starved life, as you called it; and I do.
I am too eager in my enjoyment of music and all luxuries, now they are
come to me.”
She took up her work and occupied herself resolutely, while Philip
watched her, really in doubt whether she had anything more than this
general allusion in her mind. It was quite in Maggie’s character to be
agitated by vague self-reproach. But soon there came a violent
well-known ring at the door-bell resounding through the house.
“Oh, what a startling announcement!” said Maggie, quite mistress of
herself, though not without some inward flutter. “I wonder where Lucy
is.”
Lucy had not been deaf to the signal, and after an interval long enough
for a few solicitous but not hurried inquiries, she herself ushered
Stephen in.
“Well, old fellow,” he said, going straight up to Philip and shaking
him heartily by the hand, bowing to Maggie in passing, “it’s glorious
to have you back again; only I wish you’d conduct yourself a little
less like a sparrow with a residence on the house-top, and not go in
and out constantly without letting the servants know. This is about the
twentieth time I’ve had to scamper up those countless stairs to that
painting-room of yours, all to no purpose, because your people thought
you were at home. Such incidents embitter friendship.”
“I’ve so few visitors, it seems hardly worth while to leave notice of
my exit and entrances,” said Philip, feeling rather oppressed just then
by Stephen’s bright strong presence and strong voice.
“Are you quite well this morning, Miss Tulliver?” said Stephen, turning
to Maggie with stiff politeness, and putting out his hand with the air
of fulfilling a social duty.
Maggie gave the tips of her fingers, and said, “Quite well, thank you,”
in a tone of proud indifference. Philip’s eyes were watching them
keenly; but Lucy was used to seeing variations in their manner to each
other, and only thought with regret that there was some natural
antipathy which every now and then surmounted their mutual good-will.
“Maggie is not the sort of woman Stephen admires, and she is irritated
by something in him which she interprets as conceit,” was the silent
observation that accounted for everything to guileless Lucy. Stephen
and Maggie had no sooner completed this studied greeting than each felt
hurt by the other’s coldness. And Stephen, while rattling on in
questions to Philip about his recent sketching expedition, was thinking
all the more about Maggie because he was not drawing her into the
conversation as he had invariably done before. “Maggie and Philip are
not looking happy,” thought Lucy; “this first interview has been
saddening to them.”
“I think we people who have not been galloping,” she said to Stephen,
“are all a little damped by the rain. Let us have some music. We ought
to take advantage of having Philip and you together. Give us the duet
in ‘Masaniello’; Maggie has not heard that, and I know it will suit
her.”
“Come, then,” said Stephen, going toward the piano, and giving a
foretaste of the tune in his deep “brum-brum,” very pleasant to hear.
“You, please, Philip,—you play the accompaniment,” said Lucy, “and then
I can go on with my work. You _will_ like to play, sha’n’t you?” she
added, with a pretty, inquiring look, anxious, as usual, lest she
should have proposed what was not pleasant to another; but with
yearnings toward her unfinished embroidery.
Philip had brightened at the proposition, for there is no feeling,
perhaps, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find
relief in music,—that does not make a man sing or play the better; and
Philip had an abundance of pent-up feeling at this moment, as complex
as any trio or quartet that was ever meant to express love and jealousy
and resignation and fierce suspicion, all at the same time.
“Oh, yes,” he said, seating himself at the piano, “it is a way of eking