The Mill on the Floss
Dr Kenn waited for her to get calm again before he went on.
“That letter, as I said, ought to suffice to prevent false impressions
concerning you. But I am bound to tell you, Miss Tulliver, that not
only the experience of my whole life, but my observation within the
last three days, makes me fear that there is hardly any evidence which
will save you from the painful effect of false imputations. The persons
who are the most incapable of a conscientious struggle such as yours
are precisely those who will be likely to shrink from you, because they
will not believe in your struggle. I fear your life here will be
attended not only with much pain, but with many obstructions. For this
reason—and for this only—I ask you to consider whether it will not
perhaps be better for you to take a situation at a distance, according
to your former intention. I will exert myself at once to obtain one for
you.”
“Oh, if I could but stop here!” said Maggie. “I have no heart to begin
a strange life again. I should have no stay. I should feel like a
lonely wanderer, cut off from the past. I have written to the lady who
offered me a situation to excuse myself. If I remained here, I could
perhaps atone in some way to Lucy—to others; I could convince them that
I’m sorry. And,” she added, with some of the old proud fire flashing
out, “I will not go away because people say false things of me. They
shall learn to retract them. If I must go away at last, because—because
others wish it, I will not go now.”
“Well,” said Dr Kenn, after some consideration, “if you determine on
that, Miss Tulliver, you may rely on all the influence my position
gives me. I am bound to aid and countenance you by the very duties of
my office as a parish priest. I will add, that personally I have a deep
interest in your peace of mind and welfare.”
“The only thing I want is some occupation that will enable me to get my
bread and be independent,” said Maggie. “I shall not want much. I can
go on lodging where I am.”
“I must think over the subject maturely,” said Dr Kenn, “and in a few
days I shall be better able to ascertain the general feeling. I shall
come to see you; I shall bear you constantly in mind.”
When Maggie had left him, Dr Kenn stood ruminating with his hands
behind him, and his eyes fixed on the carpet, under a painful sense of
doubt and difficulty. The tone of Stephen’s letter, which he had read,
and the actual relations of all the persons concerned, forced upon him
powerfully the idea of an ultimate marriage between Stephen and Maggie
as the least evil; and the impossibility of their proximity in St Ogg’s
on any other supposition, until after years of separation, threw an
insurmountable prospective difficulty over Maggie’s stay there. On the
other hand, he entered with all the comprehension of a man who had
known spiritual conflict, and lived through years of devoted service to
his fellow-men, into that state of Maggie’s heart and conscience which
made the consent to the marriage a desecration to her; her conscience
must not be tampered with; the principle on which she had acted was a
safer guide than any balancing of consequences. His experience told him
that intervention was too dubious a responsibility to be lightly
incurred; the possible issue either of an endeavor to restore the
former relations with Lucy and Philip, or of counselling submission to
this irruption of a new feeling, was hidden in a darkness all the more
impenetrable because each immediate step was clogged with evil.
The great problem of the shifting relation between passion and duty is
clear to no man who is capable of apprehending it; the question whether
the moment has come in which a man has fallen below the possibility of
a renunciation that will carry any efficacy, and must accept the sway
of a passion against which he had struggled as a trespass, is one for
which we have no master-key that will fit all cases. The casuists have
become a byword of reproach; but their perverted spirit of minute
discrimination was the shadow of a truth to which eyes and hearts are
too often fatally sealed,—the truth, that moral judgments must remain
false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened by a
perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the
individual lot.
All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the
men of maxims; because such people early discern that the mysterious
complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to
lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine
promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and
sympathy. And the man of maxims is the popular representative of the
minds that are guided in their moral judgment solely by general rules,
thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent
method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination,
impartiality,—without any care to assure themselves whether they have
the insight that comes from a hardly earned estimate of temptation, or
from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide
fellow-feeling with all that is human.
Chapter III.
Showing That Old Acquaintances Are Capable of Surprising Us
When Maggie was at home again, her mother brought her news of an
unexpected line of conduct in aunt Glegg. As long as Maggie had not
been heard of, Mrs Glegg had half closed her shutters and drawn down
her blinds. She felt assured that Maggie was drowned; that was far more
probable than that her niece and legatee should have done anything to
wound the family honour in the tenderest point. When at last she
learned from Tom that Maggie had come home, and gathered from him what
was her explanation of her absence, she burst forth in severe reproof
of Tom for admitting the worst of his sister until he was compelled. If
you were not to stand by your “kin” as long as there was a shred of
honour attributable to them, pray what were you to stand by? Lightly to
admit conduct in one of your own family that would force you to alter
your will, had never been the way of the Dodsons; and though Mrs Glegg
had always augured ill of Maggie’s future at a time when other people
were perhaps less clear-sighted, yet fair play was a jewel, and it was
not for her own friends to help to rob the girl of her fair fame, and
to cast her out from family shelter to the scorn of the outer world,
until she had become unequivocally a family disgrace. The circumstances
were unprecedented in Mrs Glegg’s experience; nothing of that kind had
happened among the Dodsons before; but it was a case in which her
hereditary rectitude and personal strength of character found a common
channel along with her fundamental ideas of clanship, as they did in
her lifelong regard to equity in money matters. She quarrelled with Mr
Glegg, whose kindness, flowing entirely into compassion for Lucy, made
him as hard in his judgment of Maggie as Mr Deane himself was; and
fuming against her sister Tulliver because she did not at once come to
her for advice and help, shut herself up in her own room with Baxter’s
“Saints’ Rest” from morning till night, denying herself to all
visitors, till Mr Glegg brought from Mr Deane the news of Stephen’s
letter. Then Mrs Glegg felt that she had adequate fighting-ground; then
she laid aside Baxter, and was ready to meet all comers. While Mrs
Pullet could do nothing but shake her head and cry, and wish that
cousin Abbot had died, or any number of funerals had happened rather
than this, which had never happened before, so that there was no
knowing how to act, and Mrs Pullet could never enter St Ogg’s again,
because “acquaintances” knew of it all, Mrs Glegg only hoped that Mrs
Wooll, or any one else, would come to her with their false tales about
her own niece, and she would know what to say to that ill-advised
person!
Again she had a scene of remonstrance with Tom, all the more severe in
proportion to the greater strength of her present position. But Tom,
like other immovable things, seemed only the more rigidly fixed under
that attempt to shake him. Poor Tom! he judged by what he had been able
to see; and the judgment was painful enough to himself. He thought he
had the demonstration of facts observed through years by his own eyes,
which gave no warning of their imperfection, that Maggie’s nature was
utterly untrustworthy, and too strongly marked with evil tendencies to
be safely treated with leniency. He would act on that demonstration at
any cost; but the thought of it made his days bitter to him. Tom, like
every one of us, was imprisoned within the limits of his own nature,
and his education had simply glided over him, leaving a slight deposit
of polish; if you are inclined to be severe on his severity, remember
that the responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider
vision. There had arisen in Tom a repulsion toward Maggie that derived
its very intensity from their early childish love in the time when they
had clasped tiny fingers together, and their later sense of nearness in
a common duty and a common sorrow; the sight of her, as he had told
her, was hateful to him. In this branch of the Dodson family aunt Glegg
found a stronger nature than her own; a nature in which family feeling
had lost the character of clanship by taking on a doubly deep dye of
personal pride.
Mrs Glegg allowed that Maggie ought to be punished,—she was not a woman
to deny that; she knew what conduct was,—but punished in proportion to
the misdeeds proved against her, not to those which were cast upon her
by people outside her own family who might wish to show that their own
kin were better.
“Your aunt Glegg scolded me so as niver was, my dear,” said poor Mrs
Tulliver, when she came back to Maggie, “as I didn’t go to her before;
she said it wasn’t for her to come to me first. But she spoke like a
sister, too; _having_ she allays was, and hard to please,—oh dear!—but
she’s said the kindest word as has ever been spoke by you yet, my
child. For she says, for all she’s been so set again’ having one extry
in the house, and making extry spoons and things, and putting her about
in her ways, you shall have a shelter in her house, if you’ll go to her
dutiful, and she’ll uphold you against folks as say harm of you when
they’ve no call. And I told her I thought you couldn’t bear to see
anybody but me, you were so beat down with trouble; but she said, ‘_I_
won’t throw ill words at her; there’s them out o’ th’ family ’ull be
ready enough to do that. But I’ll give her good advice; an’ she must be
humble.’ It’s wonderful o’ Jane; for I’m sure she used to throw
everything I did wrong at me,—if it was the raisin-wine as turned out
bad, or the pies too hot, or whativer it was.”
“Oh, mother,” said poor Maggie, shrinking from the thought of all the
contact her bruised mind would have to bear, “tell her I’m very
grateful; I’ll go to see her as soon as I can; but I can’t see any one
just yet, except Dr Kenn. I’ve been to him,—he will advise me, and help
me to get some occupation. I can’t live with any one, or be dependent
on them, tell aunt Glegg; I must get my own bread. But did you hear
nothing of Philip—Philip Wakem? Have you never seen any one that has
mentioned him?”
“No, my dear; but I’ve been to Lucy’s, and I saw your uncle, and he
says they got her to listen to the letter, and she took notice o’ Miss
Guest, and asked questions, and the doctor thinks she’s on the turn to
be better. What a world this is,—what trouble, oh dear! The law was the
first beginning, and it’s gone from bad to worse, all of a sudden, just
when the luck seemed on the turn.” This was the first lamentation that
Mrs Tulliver had let slip to Maggie, but old habit had been revived by
the interview with sister Glegg.