The Mill on the Floss
eagerly at this vessel, as if a new thought had come into his mind
along with it, and then he looked at Maggie hesitatingly.
“Maggie, dearest,” he said at last, “if this vessel should be going to
Mudport, or to any convenient place on the coast northward, it would be
our best plan to get them to take us on board. You are fatigued, and it
may soon rain; it may be a wretched business, getting to Torby in this
boat. It’s only a trading vessel, but I dare say you can be made
tolerably comfortable. We’ll take the cushions out of the boat. It is
really our best plan. They’ll be glad enough to take us. I’ve got
plenty of money about me. I can pay them well.”
Maggie’s heart began to beat with reawakened alarm at this new
proposition; but she was silent,—one course seemed as difficult as
another.
Stephen hailed the vessel. It was a Dutch vessel going to Mudport, the
English mate informed him, and, if this wind held, would be there in
less than two days.
“We had got out too far with our boat,” said Stephen. “I was trying to
make for Torby. But I’m afraid of the weather; and this lady—my
wife—will be exhausted with fatigue and hunger. Take us on board—will
you?—and haul up the boat. I’ll pay you well.”
Maggie, now really faint and trembling with fear, was taken on board,
making an interesting object of contemplation to admiring Dutchmen. The
mate feared the lady would have a poor time of it on board, for they
had no accommodation for such entirely unlooked-for passengers,—no
private cabin larger than an old-fashioned church-pew. But at least
they had Dutch cleanliness, which makes all other inconveniences
tolerable; and the boat cushions were spread into a couch for Maggie on
the poop with all alacrity. But to pace up and down the deck leaning on
Stephen—being upheld by his strength—was the first change that she
needed; then came food, and then quiet reclining on the cushions, with
the sense that no new resolution _could_ be taken that day. Everything
must wait till to-morrow. Stephen sat beside her with her hand in his;
they could only speak to each other in low tones; only look at each
other now and then, for it would take a long while to dull the
curiosity of the five men on board, and reduce these handsome young
strangers to that minor degree of interest which belongs, in a sailor’s
regard, to all objects nearer than the horizon. But Stephen was
triumphantly happy. Every other thought or care was thrown into
unmarked perspective by the certainty that Maggie must be his. The leap
had been taken now; he had been tortured by scruples, he had fought
fiercely with overmastering inclination, he had hesitated; but
repentance was impossible. He murmured forth in fragmentary sentences
his happiness, his adoration, his tenderness, his belief that their
life together must be heaven, that her presence with him would give
rapture to every common day; that to satisfy her lightest wish was
dearer to him than all other bliss; that everything was easy for her
sake, except to part with her; and now they never _would_ part; he
would belong to her forever, and all that was his was hers,—had no
value for him except as it was hers. Such things, uttered in low,
broken tones by the one voice that has first stirred the fibre of young
passion, have only a feeble effect—on experienced minds at a distance
from them. To poor Maggie they were very near; they were like nectar
held close to thirsty lips; there was, there _must_ be, then, a life
for mortals here below which was not hard and chill,—in which affection
would no longer be self-sacrifice. Stephen’s passionate words made the
vision of such a life more fully present to her than it had ever been
before; and the vision for the time excluded all realities,—all except
the returning sun-gleams which broke out on the waters as the evening
approached, and mingled with the visionary sunlight of promised
happiness; all except the hand that pressed hers, and the voice that
spoke to her, and the eyes that looked at her with grave, unspeakable
love.
There was to be no rain, after all; the clouds rolled off to the
horizon again, making the great purple rampart and long purple isles of
that wondrous land which reveals itself to us when the sun goes
down,—the land that the evening star watches over. Maggie was to sleep
all night on the poop; it was better than going below; and she was
covered with the warmest wrappings the ship could furnish. It was still
early, when the fatigues of the day brought on a drowsy longing for
perfect rest, and she laid down her head, looking at the faint, dying
flush in the west, where the one golden lamp was getting brighter and
brighter. Then she looked up at Stephen, who was still seated by her,
hanging over her as he leaned his arm against the vessel’s side. Behind
all the delicious visions of these last hours, which had flowed over
her like a soft stream, and made her entirely passive, there was the
dim consciousness that the condition was a transient one, and that the
morrow must bring back the old life of struggle; that there were
thoughts which would presently avenge themselves for this oblivion. But
now nothing was distinct to her; she was being lulled to sleep with
that soft stream still flowing over her, with those delicious visions
melting and fading like the wondrous aerial land of the west.
Chapter XIV.
Waking
When Maggie was gone to sleep, Stephen, weary too with his unaccustomed
amount of rowing, and with the intense inward life of the last twelve
hours, but too restless to sleep, walked and lounged about the deck
with his cigar far on into midnight, not seeing the dark water, hardly
conscious there were stars, living only in the near and distant future.
At last fatigue conquered restlessness, and he rolled himself up in a
piece of tarpaulin on the deck near Maggie’s feet.
She had fallen asleep before nine, and had been sleeping for six hours
before the faintest hint of a midsummer daybreak was discernible. She
awoke from that vivid dreaming which makes the margin of our deeper
rest. She was in a boat on the wide water with Stephen, and in the
gathering darkness something like a star appeared, that grew and grew
till they saw it was the Virgin seated in St Ogg’s boat, and it came
nearer and nearer, till they saw the Virgin was Lucy and the boatman
was Philip,—no, not Philip, but her brother, who rowed past without
looking at her; and she rose to stretch out her arms and call to him,
and their own boat turned over with the movement, and they began to
sink, till with one spasm of dread she seemed to awake, and find she
was a child again in the parlour at evening twilight, and Tom was not
really angry. From the soothed sense of that false waking she passed to
the real waking,—to the plash of water against the vessel, and the
sound of a footstep on the deck, and the awful starlit sky. There was a
moment of utter bewilderment before her mind could get disentangled
from the confused web of dreams; but soon the whole terrible truth
urged itself upon her. Stephen was not by her now; she was alone with
her own memory and her own dread. The irrevocable wrong that must blot
her life had been committed; she had brought sorrow into the lives of
others,—into the lives that were knit up with hers by trust and love.
The feeling of a few short weeks had hurried her into the sins her
nature had most recoiled from,—breach of faith and cruel selfishness;
she had rent the ties that had given meaning to duty, and had made
herself an outlawed soul, with no guide but the wayward choice of her
own passion. And where would that lead her? Where had it led her now?
She had said she would rather die than fall into that temptation. She
felt it now,—now that the consequences of such a fall had come before
the outward act was completed. There was at least this fruit from all
her years of striving after the highest and best,—that her soul though
betrayed, beguiled, ensnared, could never deliberately consent to a
choice of the lower. And a choice of what? O God! not a choice of joy,
but of conscious cruelty and hardness; for could she ever cease to see
before her Lucy and Philip, with their murdered trust and hopes? Her
life with Stephen could have no sacredness; she must forever sink and
wander vaguely, driven by uncertain impulse; for she had let go the
clue of life,—that clue which once in the far-off years her young need
had clutched so strongly. She had renounced all delights then, before
she knew them, before they had come within her reach. Philip had been
right when he told her that she knew nothing of renunciation; she had
thought it was quiet ecstasy; she saw it face to face now,—that sad,
patient, loving strength which holds the clue of life,—and saw that the
thorns were forever pressing on its brow. The yesterday, which could
never be revoked,—if she could have changed it now for any length of
inward silent endurance, she would have bowed beneath that cross with a
sense of rest.
Day break came and the reddening eastern light, while her past life was
grasping her in this way, with that tightening clutch which comes in
the last moments of possible rescue. She could see Stephen now lying on
the deck still fast asleep, and with the sight of him there came a wave
of anguish that found its way in a long-suppressed sob. The worst
bitterness of parting—the thought that urged the sharpest inward cry
for help—was the pain it must give to _him_. But surmounting everything
was the horror at her own possible failure, the dread lest her
conscience should be benumbed again, and not rise to energy till it was
too late. Too late! it was too late already not to have caused misery;
too late for everything, perhaps, but to rush away from the last act of
baseness,—the tasting of joys that were wrung from crushed hearts.
The sun was rising now, and Maggie started up with the sense that a day
of resistance was beginning for her. Her eyelashes were still wet with
tears, as, with her shawl over her head, she sat looking at the slowly
rounding sun. Something roused Stephen too, and getting up from his
hard bed, he came to sit beside her. The sharp instinct of anxious love
saw something to give him alarm in the very first glance. He had a
hovering dread of some resistance in Maggie’s nature that he would be
unable to overcome. He had the uneasy consciousness that he had robbed
her of perfect freedom yesterday; there was too much native honour in
him, for him not to feel that, if her will should recoil, his conduct
would have been odious, and she would have a right to reproach him.
But Maggie did not feel that right; she was too conscious of fatal
weakness in herself, too full of the tenderness that comes with the
foreseen need for inflicting a wound. She let him take her hand when he
came to sit down beside her, and smiled at him, only with rather a sad
glance; she could say nothing to pain him till the moment of possible
parting was nearer. And so they drank their cup of coffee together, and
walked about the deck, and heard the captain’s assurance that they
should be in at Mudport by five o’clock, each with an inward burthen;
but in him it was an undefined fear, which he trusted to the coming
hours to dissipate; in her it was a definite resolve on which she was
trying silently to tighten her hold. Stephen was continually, through
the morning, expressing his anxiety at the fatigue and discomfort she
was suffering, and alluded to landing and to the change of motion and
repose she would have in a carriage, wanting to assure himself more
completely by presupposing that everything would be as he had arranged
it. For a long while Maggie contented herself with assuring him that
she had had a good night’s rest, and that she didn’t mind about being