The Mill on the Floss
“My poor, poor mother!” Maggie burst out, cut to the heart with pity
and compunction, and throwing her arms round her mother’s neck; “I was
always naughty and troublesome to you. And now you might have been
happy if it hadn’t been for me.”
“Eh, my dear,” said Mrs Tulliver, leaning toward the warm young cheek;
“I must put up wi’ my children,—I shall never have no more; and if they
bring me bad luck, I must be fond on it. There’s nothing else much to
be fond on, for my furnitur’ went long ago. And you’d got to be very
good once; I can’t think how it’s turned out the wrong way so!”
Still two or three more days passed, and Maggie heard nothing of
Philip; anxiety about him was becoming her predominant trouble, and she
summoned courage at last to inquire about him of Dr Kenn, on his next
visit to her. He did not even know if Philip was at home. The elder
Wakem was made moody by an accumulation of annoyance; the
disappointment in this young Jetsome, to whom, apparently, he was a
good deal attached, had been followed close by the catastrophe to his
son’s hopes after he had done violence to his own strong feeling by
conceding to them, and had incautiously mentioned this concession in St
Ogg’s; and he was almost fierce in his brusqueness when any one asked
him a question about his son.
But Philip could hardly have been ill, or it would have been known
through the calling in of the medical man; it was probable that he was
gone out of the town for a little while. Maggie sickened under this
suspense, and her imagination began to live more and more persistently
in what Philip was enduring. What did he believe about her?
At last Bob brought her a letter, without a postmark, directed in a
hand which she knew familiarly in the letters of her own name,—a hand
in which her name had been written long ago, in a pocket Shakespeare
which she possessed. Her mother was in the room, and Maggie, in violent
agitation, hurried upstairs that she might read the letter in solitude.
She read it with a throbbing brow.
“Maggie,—I believe in you; I know you never meant to deceive me; I know
you tried to keep faith to me and to all. I believed this before I had
any other evidence of it than your own nature. The night after I last
parted from you I suffered torments. I had seen what convinced me that
you were not free; that there was another whose presence had a power
over you which mine never possessed; but through all the
suggestions—almost murderous suggestions—of rage and jealousy, my mind
made its way to believe in your truthfulness. I was sure that you meant
to cleave to me, as you had said; that you had rejected him; that you
struggled to renounce him, for Lucy’s sake and for mine. But I could
see no issue that was not fatal for _you;_ and that dread shut out the
very thought of resignation. I foresaw that he would not relinquish
you, and I believed then, as I believe now, that the strong attraction
which drew you together proceeded only from one side of your
characters, and belonged to that partial, divided action of our nature
which makes half the tragedy of the human lot. I have felt the
vibration of chords in your nature that I have continually felt the
want of in his. But perhaps I am wrong; perhaps I feel about you as the
artist does about the scene over which his soul has brooded with love;
he would tremble to see it confided to other hands; he would never
believe that it could bear for another all the meaning and the beauty
it bears for him.
“I dared not trust myself to see you that morning; I was filled
with selfish passion; I was shattered by a night of conscious
delirium. I told you long ago that I had never been resigned even
to the mediocrity of my powers; how could I be resigned to the loss
of the one thing which had ever come to me on earth with the
promise of such deep joy as would give a new and blessed meaning to
the foregoing pain,—the promise of another self that would lift my
aching affection into the divine rapture of an ever-springing,
ever-satisfied want?
“But the miseries of that night had prepared me for what came
before the next. It was no surprise to me. I was certain that he
had prevailed on you to sacrifice everything to him, and I waited
with equal certainty to hear of your marriage. I measured your love
and his by my own. But I was wrong, Maggie. There is something
stronger in you than your love for him.
“I will not tell you what I went through in that interval. But even
in its utmost agony—even in those terrible throes that love must
suffer before it can be disembodied of selfish desire—my love for
you sufficed to withhold me from suicide, without the aid of any
other motive. In the midst of my egoism, I yet could not bear to
come like a death-shadow across the feast of your joy. I could not
bear to forsake the world in which you still lived and might need
me; it was part of the faith I had vowed to you,—to wait and
endure. Maggie, that is a proof of what I write now to assure you
of,—that no anguish I have had to bear on your account has been too
heavy a price to pay for the new life into which I have entered in
loving you. I want you to put aside all grief because of the grief
you have caused me. I was nurtured in the sense of privation; I
never expected happiness; and in knowing you, in loving you, I have
had, and still have, what reconciles me to life. You have been to
my affections what light, what colour is to my eyes, what music is
to the inward ear, you have raised a dim unrest into a vivid
consciousness. The new life I have found in caring for your joy and
sorrow more than for what is directly my own, has transformed the
spirit of rebellious murmuring into that willing endurance which is
the birth of strong sympathy. I think nothing but such complete and
intense love could have initiated me into that enlarged life which
grows and grows by appropriating the life of others; for before, I
was always dragged back from it by ever-present painful
self-consciousness. I even think sometimes that this gift of
transferred life which has come to me in loving you, may be a new
power to me.
“Then, dear one, in spite of all, you have been the blessing of my
life. Let no self-reproach weigh on you because of me. It is I who
should rather reproach myself for having urged my feelings upon
you, and hurried you into words that you have felt as fetters. You
meant to be true to those words; you _have_ been true. I can
measure your sacrifice by what I have known in only one half-hour
of your presence with me, when I dreamed that you might love me
best. But, Maggie, I have no just claim on you for more than
affectionate remembrance.
“For some time I have shrunk from writing to you, because I have
shrunk even from the appearance of wishing to thrust myself before
you, and so repeating my original error. But you will not
misconstrue me. I know that we must keep apart for a long while;
cruel tongues would force us apart, if nothing else did. But I
shall not go away. The place where you are is the one where my mind
must live, wherever I might travel. And remember that I am
unchangeably yours,—yours not with selfish wishes, but with a
devotion that excludes such wishes.
“God comfort you, my loving, large-souled Maggie. If every one else
has misconceived you, remember that you have never been doubted by
him whose heart recognised you ten years ago.
“Do not believe any one who says I am ill, because I am not seen
out of doors. I have only had nervous headaches,—no worse than I
have sometimes had them before. But the overpowering heat inclines
me to be perfectly quiescent in the daytime. I am strong enough to
obey any word which shall tell me that I can serve you by word or
deed.
“Yours to the last,
“_Philip Wakem_.”
As Maggie knelt by the bed sobbing, with that letter pressed under her,
her feelings again and again gathered themselves in a whispered cry,
always in the same words,—
“O God, is there any happiness in love that could make me forget
_their_ pain?”
Chapter IV.
Maggie and Lucy
By the end of the week Dr Kenn had made up his mind that there was only
one way in which he could secure to Maggie a suitable living at St
Ogg’s. Even with his twenty years’ experience as a parish priest, he
was aghast at the obstinate continuance of imputations against her in
the face of evidence. Hitherto he had been rather more adored and
appealed to than was quite agreeable to him; but now, in attempting to
open the ears of women to reason, and their consciences to justice, on
behalf of Maggie Tulliver, he suddenly found himself as powerless as he
was aware he would have been if he had attempted to influence the shape
of bonnets. Dr Kenn could not be contradicted; he was listened to in
silence; but when he left the room, a comparison of opinions among his
hearers yielded much the same result as before. Miss Tulliver had
undeniably acted in a blamable manner, even Dr Kenn did not deny that;
how, then, could he think so lightly of her as to put that favourable
interpretation on everything she had done? Even on the supposition that
required the utmost stretch of belief,—namely, that none of the things
said about Miss Tulliver were true,—still, since they _had_ been said
about her, they had cast an odor round her which must cause her to be
shrunk from by every woman who had to take care of her own
reputation—and of Society. To have taken Maggie by the hand and said,
“I will not believe unproved evil of you; my lips shall not utter it;
my ears shall be closed against it; I, too, am an erring mortal, liable
to stumble, apt to come short of my most earnest efforts; your lot has
been harder than mine, your temptation greater; let us help each other
to stand and walk without more falling,”—to have done this would have
demanded courage, deep pity, self-knowledge, generous trust; would have
demanded a mind that tasted no piquancy in evil-speaking, that felt no
self-exaltation in condemning, that cheated itself with no large words
into the belief that life can have any moral end, any high religion,
which excludes the striving after perfect truth, justice, and love
toward the individual men and women who come across our own path. The
ladies of St Ogg’s were not beguiled by any wide speculative
conceptions; but they had their favourite abstraction, called Society,
which served to make their consciences perfectly easy in doing what
satisfied their own egoism,—thinking and speaking the worst of Maggie
Tulliver, and turning their backs upon her. It was naturally
disappointing to Dr Kenn, after two years of superfluous incense from
his feminine parishioners, to find them suddenly maintaining their
views in opposition to his; but then they maintained them in opposition
to a higher Authority, which they had venerated longer. That Authority
had furnished a very explicit answer to persons who might inquire where
their social duties began, and might be inclined to take wide views as
to the starting-point. The answer had not turned on the ultimate good
of Society, but on “a certain man” who was found in trouble by the
wayside.
Not that St Ogg’s was empty of women with some tenderness of heart and
conscience; probably it had as fair a proportion of human goodness in
it as any other small trading town of that day. But until every good
man is brave, we must expect to find many good women timid,—too timid
even to believe in the correctness of their own best promptings, when