The Mill on the Floss
a deuced fine match for her. It’s all stuff about an accidental
deformity, when a girl’s really attached to a man.”
“But girls are not apt to get attached under those circumstances,” said
Philip.
“Well, then,” said Wakem, rather brutally, trying to recover his
previous position, “if she doesn’t care for you, you might have spared
yourself the trouble of talking to me about her, and you might have
spared me the trouble of refusing my consent to what was never likely
to happen.”
Wakem strode to the door, and without looking round again, banged it
after him.
Philip was not without confidence that his father would be ultimately
wrought upon as he had expected, by what had passed; but the scene had
jarred upon his nerves, which were as sensitive as a woman’s. He
determined not to go down to dinner; he couldn’t meet his father again
that day. It was Wakem’s habit, when he had no company at home, to go
out in the evening, often as early as half-past seven; and as it was
far on in the afternoon now, Philip locked up his room and went out for
a long ramble, thinking he would not return until his father was out of
the house again. He got into a boat, and went down the river to a
favourite village, where he dined, and lingered till it was late enough
for him to return. He had never had any sort of quarrel with his father
before, and had a sickening fear that this contest, just begun, might
go on for weeks; and what might not happen in that time? He would not
allow himself to define what that involuntary question meant. But if he
could once be in the position of Maggie’s accepted, acknowledged lover,
there would be less room for vague dread. He went up to his
painting-room again, and threw himself with a sense of fatigue into the
armchair, looking round absently at the views of water and rock that
were ranged around, till he fell into a doze, in which he fancied
Maggie was slipping down a glistening, green, slimy channel of a
waterfall, and he was looking on helpless, till he was awakened by what
seemed a sudden, awful crash.
It was the opening of the door, and he could hardly have dozed more
than a few moments, for there was no perceptible change in the evening
light. It was his father who entered; and when Philip moved to vacate
the chair for him, he said,—
“Sit still. I’d rather walk about.”
He stalked up and down the room once or twice, and then, standing
opposite Philip with his hands thrust in his side pockets, he said, as
if continuing a conversation that had not been broken off,—
“But this girl seems to have been fond of you, Phil, else she wouldn’t
have met you in that way.”
Philip’s heart was beating rapidly, and a transient flush passed over
his face like a gleam. It was not quite easy to speak at once.
“She liked me at King’s Lorton, when she was a little girl, because I
used to sit with her brother a great deal when he had hurt his foot.
She had kept that in her memory, and thought of me as a friend of a
long while ago. She didn’t think of me as a lover when she met me.”
“Well, but you made love to her at last. What did she say then?” said
Wakem, walking about again.
“She said she _did_ love me then.”
“Confound it, then; what else do you want? Is she a jilt?”
“She was very young then,” said Philip, hesitatingly. “I’m afraid she
hardly knew what she felt. I’m afraid our long separation, and the idea
that events must always divide us, may have made a difference.”
“But she’s in the town. I’ve seen her at church. Haven’t you spoken to
her since you came back?”
“Yes, at Mr Deane’s. But I couldn’t renew my proposals to her on
several grounds. One obstacle would be removed if you would give your
consent,—if you would be willing to think of her as a daughter-in-law.”
Wakem was silent a little while, pausing before Maggie’s picture.
“She’s not the sort of woman your mother was, though, Phil,” he said,
at last. “I saw her at church,—she’s handsomer than this,—deuced fine
eyes and fine figure, I saw; but rather dangerous and unmanageable,
eh?”
“She’s very tender and affectionate, and so simple,—without the airs
and petty contrivances other women have.”
“Ah?” said Wakem. Then looking round at his son, “But your mother
looked gentler; she had that brown wavy hair and gray eyes, like yours.
You can’t remember her very well. It was a thousand pities I’d no
likeness of her.”
“Then, shouldn’t you be glad for me to have the same sort of happiness,
father, to sweeten my life for me? There can never be another tie so
strong to you as that which began eight-and-twenty years ago, when you
married my mother, and you have been tightening it ever since.”
“Ah, Phil, you’re the only fellow that knows the best of me,” said
Wakem, giving his hand to his son. “We must keep together if we can.
And now, what am I to do? You must come downstairs and tell me. Am I to
go and call on this dark-eyed damsel?”
The barrier once thrown down in this way, Philip could talk freely to
his father of their entire relation with the Tullivers,—of the desire
to get the mill and land back into the family, and of its transfer to
Guest & Co. as an intermediate step. He could venture now to be
persuasive and urgent, and his father yielded with more readiness than
he had calculated on.
“_I_ don’t care about the mill,” he said at last, with a sort of angry
compliance. “I’ve had an infernal deal of bother lately about the mill.
Let them pay me for my improvements, that’s all. But there’s one thing
you needn’t ask me. I shall have no direct transactions with young
Tulliver. If you like to swallow him for his sister’s sake, you may;
but I’ve no sauce that will make him go down.”
I leave you to imagine the agreeable feelings with which Philip went to
Mr Deane the next day, to say that Mr Wakem was ready to open the
negotiations, and Lucy’s pretty triumph as she appealed to her father
whether she had not proved her great business abilities. Mr Deane was
rather puzzled, and suspected that there had been something “going on”
among the young people to which he wanted a clew. But to men of Mr
Deane’s stamp, what goes on among the young people is as extraneous to
the real business of life as what goes on among the birds and
butterflies, until it can be shown to have a malign bearing on monetary
affairs. And in this case the bearing appeared to be entirely
propitious.
Chapter IX.
Charity in Full-Dress
The culmination of Maggie’s career as an admired member of society in
St Ogg’s was certainly the day of the bazaar, when her simple noble
beauty, clad in a white muslin of some soft-floating kind, which I
suspect must have come from the stores of aunt Pullet’s wardrobe,
appeared with marked distinction among the more adorned and
conventional women around her. We perhaps never detect how much of our
social demeanour is made up of artificial airs until we see a person
who is at once beautiful and simple; without the beauty, we are apt to
call simplicity awkwardness. The Miss Guests were much too well-bred to
have any of the grimaces and affected tones that belong to pretentious
vulgarity; but their stall being next to the one where Maggie sat, it
seemed newly obvious to-day that Miss Guest held her chin too high, and
that Miss Laura spoke and moved continually with a view to effect.
All well-dressed St Ogg’s and its neighbourhood were there; and it
would have been worth while to come even from a distance, to see the
fine old hall, with its open roof and carved oaken rafters, and great
oaken folding-doors, and light shed down from a height on the
many-coloured show beneath; a very quaint place, with broad faded
stripes painted on the walls, and here and there a show of heraldic
animals of a bristly, long-snouted character, the cherished emblems of
a noble family once the seigniors of this now civic hall. A grand arch,
cut in the upper wall at one end, surmounted an oaken orchestra, with
an open room behind it, where hothouse plants and stalls for
refreshments were disposed; an agreeable resort for gentlemen disposed
to loiter, and yet to exchange the occasional crush down below for a
more commodious point of view. In fact, the perfect fitness of this
ancient building for an admirable modern purpose, that made charity
truly elegant, and led through vanity up to the supply of a deficit,
was so striking that hardly a person entered the room without
exchanging the remark more than once. Near the great arch over the
orchestra was the stone oriel with painted glass, which was one of the
venerable inconsistencies of the old hall; and it was close by this
that Lucy had her stall, for the convenience of certain large plain
articles which she had taken charge of for Mrs Kenn. Maggie had begged
to sit at the open end of the stall, and to have the sale of these
articles rather than of bead-mats and other elaborate products of which
she had but a dim understanding. But it soon appeared that the
gentlemen’s dressing-gowns, which were among her commodities, were
objects of such general attention and inquiry, and excited so
troublesome a curiosity as to their lining and comparative merits,
together with a determination to test them by trying on, as to make her
post a very conspicuous one. The ladies who had commodities of their
own to sell, and did not want dressing-gowns, saw at once the frivolity
and bad taste of this masculine preference for goods which any tailor
could furnish; and it is possible that the emphatic notice of various
kinds which was drawn toward Miss Tulliver on this public occasion,
threw a very strong and unmistakable light on her subsequent conduct in
many minds then present. Not that anger, on account of spurned beauty
can dwell in the celestial breasts of charitable ladies, but rather
that the errors of persons who have once been much admired necessarily
take a deeper tinge from the mere force of contrast; and also, that
to-day Maggie’s conspicuous position, for the first time, made evident
certain characteristics which were subsequently felt to have an
explanatory bearing. There was something rather bold in Miss Tulliver’s
direct gaze, and something undefinably coarse in the style of her
beauty, which placed her, in the opinion of all feminine judges, far
below her cousin Miss Deane; for the ladies of St Ogg’s had now
completely ceded to Lucy their hypothetic claims on the admiration of
Mr Stephen Guest.
As for dear little Lucy herself, her late benevolent triumph about the
Mill, and all the affectionate projects she was cherishing for Maggie
and Philip, helped to give her the highest spirits to-day, and she felt
nothing but pleasure in the evidence of Maggie’s attractiveness. It is
true, she was looking very charming herself, and Stephen was paying her
the utmost attention on this public occasion; jealously buying up the
articles he had seen under her fingers in the process of making, and
gayly helping her to cajole the male customers into the purchase of the
most effeminate futilities. He chose to lay aside his hat and wear a
scarlet fez of her embroidering; but by superficial observers this was
necessarily liable to be interpreted less as a compliment to Lucy than
as a mark of coxcombry. “Guest is a great coxcomb,” young Torry
observed; “but then he is a privileged person in St Ogg’s—he carries
all before him; if another fellow did such things, everybody would say
he made a fool of himself.”
And Stephen purchased absolutely nothing from Maggie, until Lucy said,
in rather a vexed undertone,—
“See, now; all the things of Maggie’s knitting will be gone, and you
will not have bought one. There are those deliciously soft warm things
for the wrists,—do buy them.”
“Oh no,” said Stephen, “they must be intended for imaginative persons,