The Mill on the Floss
difference to ourselves,” Stephen added bitterly, “that you might have
acknowledged then that your tie to me was stronger than to others.”
Again a deep flush came over Maggie’s face, and she was silent. Stephen
thought again that he was beginning to prevail,—he had never yet
believed that he should _not_ prevail; there are possibilities which
our minds shrink from too completely for us to fear them.
“Dearest,” he said, in his deepest, tenderest tone, leaning toward her,
and putting his arm round her, “you _are_ mine now,—the world believes
it; duty must spring out of that now.
“In a few hours you will be legally mine, and those who had claims on
us will submit,—they will see that there was a force which declared
against their claims.”
Maggie’s eyes opened wide in one terrified look at the face that was
close to hers, and she started up, pale again.
“Oh, I can’t do it,” she said, in a voice almost of agony; “Stephen,
don’t ask me—don’t urge me. I can’t argue any longer,—I don’t know what
is wise; but my heart will not let me do it. I see,—I feel their
trouble now; it is as if it were branded on my mind. _I_ have suffered,
and had no one to pity me; and now I have made others suffer. It would
never leave me; it would embitter your love to me. I _do_ care for
Philip—in a different way; I remember all we said to each other; I know
how he thought of me as the one promise of his life. He was given to me
that I might make his lot less hard; and I have forsaken him. And
Lucy—she has been deceived; she who trusted me more than any one. I
cannot marry you; I cannot take a good for myself that has been wrung
out of their misery. It is not the force that ought to rule us,—this
that we feel for each other; it would rend me away from all that my
past life has made dear and holy to me. I can’t set out on a fresh
life, and forget that; I must go back to it, and cling to it, else I
shall feel as if there were nothing firm beneath my feet.”
“Good God, Maggie!” said Stephen, rising too and grasping her arm, “you
rave. How can you go back without marrying me? You don’t know what will
be said, dearest. You see nothing as it really is.”
“Yes, I do. But they will believe me. I will confess everything. Lucy
will believe me—she will forgive you, and—and—oh, _some_ good will come
by clinging to the right. Dear, dear Stephen, let me go!—don’t drag me
into deeper remorse. My whole soul has never consented; it does not
consent now.”
Stephen let go her arm, and sank back on his chair, half-stunned by
despairing rage. He was silent a few moments, not looking at her; while
her eyes were turned toward him yearningly, in alarm at this sudden
change. At last he said, still without looking at her,—
“Go, then,—leave me; don’t torture me any longer,—I can’t bear it.”
Involuntarily she leaned toward him and put out her hand to touch his.
But he shrank from it as if it had been burning iron, and said again,—
“Leave me.”
Maggie was not conscious of a decision as she turned away from that
gloomy averted face, and walked out of the room; it was like an
automatic action that fulfils a forgotten intention. What came after? A
sense of stairs descended as if in a dream, of flagstones, of a chaise
and horses standing, then a street, and a turning into another street
where a stage-coach was standing, taking in passengers, and the darting
thought that that coach would take her away, perhaps toward home. But
she could ask nothing yet; she only got into the coach.
Home—where her mother and brother were, Philip, Lucy, the scene of her
very cares and trials—was the haven toward which her mind tended; the
sanctuary where sacred relics lay, where she would be rescued from more
falling. The thought of Stephen was like a horrible throbbing pain,
which yet, as such pains do, seemed to urge all other thoughts into
activity. But among her thoughts, what others would say and think of
her conduct was hardly present. Love and deep pity and remorseful
anguish left no room for that.
The coach was taking her to York, farther away from home; but she did
not learn that until she was set down in the old city at midnight. It
was no matter; she could sleep there, and start home the next day. She
had her purse in her pocket, with all her money in it,—a bank-note and
a sovereign; she had kept it in her pocket from forgetfulness, after
going out to make purchases the day before yesterday.
Did she lie down in the gloomy bedroom of the old inn that night with
her will bent unwaveringly on the path of penitent sacrifice? The great
struggles of life are not so easy as that; the great problems of life
are not so clear. In the darkness of that night she saw Stephen’s face
turned toward her in passionate, reproachful misery; she lived through
again all the tremulous delights of his presence with her that made
existence an easy floating in a stream of joy, instead of a quiet
resolved endurance and effort. The love she had renounced came back
upon her with a cruel charm; she felt herself opening her arms to
receive it once more; and then it seemed to slip away and fade and
vanish, leaving only the dying sound of a deep, thrilling voice that
said, “Gone, forever gone.”
BOOK SEVENTH
THE FINAL RESCUE.
Chapter I.
The Return to the Mill
Between four and five o’clock on the afternoon of the fifth day from
that on which Stephen and Maggie had left St Ogg’s, Tom Tulliver was
standing on the gravel walk outside the old house at Dorlcote Mill. He
was master there now; he had half fulfilled his father’s dying wish,
and by years of steady self-government and energetic work he had
brought himself near to the attainment of more than the old
respectability which had been the proud inheritance of the Dodsons and
Tullivers.
But Tom’s face, as he stood in the hot, still sunshine of that summer
afternoon, had no gladness, no triumph in it. His mouth wore its
bitterest expression, his severe brow its hardest and deepest fold, as
he drew down his hat farther over his eyes to shelter them from the
sun, and thrusting his hands deep into his pockets, began to walk up
and down the gravel. No news of his sister had been heard since Bob
Jakin had come back in the steamer from Mudport, and put an end to all
improbable suppositions of an accident on the water by stating that he
had seen her land from a vessel with Mr Stephen Guest. Would the next
news be that she was married,—or what? Probably that she was not
married; Tom’s mind was set to the expectation of the worst that could
happen,—not death, but disgrace.
As he was walking with his back toward the entrance gate, and his face
toward the rushing mill-stream, a tall, dark-eyed figure, that we know
well, approached the gate, and paused to look at him with a
fast-beating heart. Her brother was the human being of whom she had
been most afraid from her childhood upward; afraid with that fear which
springs in us when we love one who is inexorable, unbending,
unmodifiable, with a mind that we can never mould ourselves upon, and
yet that we cannot endure to alienate from us.
That deep-rooted fear was shaking Maggie now; but her mind was
unswervingly bent on returning to her brother, as the natural refuge
that had been given her. In her deep humiliation under the retrospect
of her own weakness,—in her anguish at the injury she had
inflicted,—she almost desired to endure the severity of Tom’s reproof,
to submit in patient silence to that harsh, disapproving judgment
against which she had so often rebelled; it seemed no more than just to
her now,—who was weaker than she was? She craved that outward help to
her better purpose which would come from complete, submissive
confession; from being in the presence of those whose looks and words
would be a reflection of her own conscience.
Maggie had been kept on her bed at York for a day with that prostrating
headache which was likely to follow on the terrible strain of the
previous day and night. There was an expression of physical pain still
about her brow and eyes, and her whole appearance, with her dress so
long unchanged, was worn and distressed. She lifted the latch of the
gate and walked in slowly. Tom did not hear the gate; he was just then
close upon the roaring dam; but he presently turned, and lifting up his
eyes, saw the figure whose worn look and loneliness seemed to him a
confirmation of his worst conjectures. He paused, trembling and white
with disgust and indignation.
Maggie paused too, three yards before him. She felt the hatred in his
face, felt it rushing through her fibres; but she must speak.
“Tom,” she began faintly, “I am come back to you,—I am come back
home—for refuge—to tell you everything.”
“You will find no home with me,” he answered, with tremulous rage. “You
have disgraced us all. You have disgraced my father’s name. You have
been a curse to your best friends. You have been base, deceitful; no
motives are strong enough to restrain you. I wash my hands of you
forever. You don’t belong to me.”
Their mother had come to the door now. She stood paralyzed by the
double shock of seeing Maggie and hearing Tom’s words.
“Tom,” said Maggie, with more courage, “I am perhaps not so guilty as
you believe me to be. I never meant to give way to my feelings. I
struggled against them. I was carried too far in the boat to come back
on Tuesday. I came back as soon as I could.”
“I can’t believe in you any more,” said Tom, gradually passing from the
tremulous excitement of the first moment to cold inflexibility. “You
have been carrying on a clandestine relation with Stephen Guest,—as you
did before with another. He went to see you at my aunt Moss’s; you
walked alone with him in the lanes; you must have behaved as no modest
girl would have done to her cousin’s lover, else that could never have
happened. The people at Luckreth saw you pass; you passed all the other
places; you knew what you were doing. You have been using Philip Wakem
as a screen to deceive Lucy,—the kindest friend you ever had. Go and
see the return you have made her. She’s ill; unable to speak. My mother
can’t go near her, lest she should remind her of you.”
Maggie was half stunned,—too heavily pressed upon by her anguish even
to discern any difference between her actual guilt and her brother’s
accusations, still less to vindicate herself.
“Tom,” she said, crushing her hands together under her cloak, in the
effort to speak again, “whatever I have done, I repent it bitterly. I
want to make amends. I will endure anything. I want to be kept from
doing wrong again.”
“What _will_ keep you?” said Tom, with cruel bitterness. “Not religion;
not your natural feelings of gratitude and honour. And he—he would
deserve to be shot, if it were not——But you are ten times worse than he
is. I loathe your character and your conduct. You struggled with your
feelings, you say. Yes! _I_ have had feelings to struggle with; but I
conquered them. I have had a harder life than you have had; but I have
found _my_ comfort in doing my duty. But I will sanction no such
character as yours; the world shall know that _I_ feel the difference
between right and wrong. If you are in want, I will provide for you;
let my mother know. But you shall not come under my roof. It is enough
that I have to bear the thought of your disgrace; the sight of you is
hateful to me.”
Slowly Maggie was turning away with despair in her heart. But the poor
frightened mother’s love leaped out now, stronger than all dread.
“My child! I’ll go with you. You’ve got a mother.”
Oh, the sweet rest of that embrace to the heart-stricken Maggie! More
helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will
not forsake us.
Tom turned and walked into the house.