The Mill on the Floss

r Tulliver Further Entangles the Skein of Life

Owing to this new adjustment of Mrs Glegg’s thoughts, Mrs Pullet found
her task of mediation the next day surprisingly easy. Mrs Glegg, indeed
checked her rather sharply for thinking it would be necessary to tell
her elder sister what was the right mode of behaviour in family
matters. Mrs Pullet’s argument, that it would look ill in the
neighbourhood if people should have it in their power to say that there
was a quarrel in the family, was particularly offensive. If the family
name never suffered except through Mrs Glegg, Mrs Pullet might lay her
head on her pillow in perfect confidence.

“It’s not to be expected, I suppose,” observed Mrs Glegg, by way of
winding up the subject, “as I shall go to the mill again before Bessy
comes to see me, or as I shall go and fall down o’ my knees to Mr
Tulliver, and ask his pardon for showing him favours; but I shall bear
no malice, and when Mr Tulliver speaks civil to me, I’ll speak civil to
him. Nobody has any call to tell me what’s becoming.”

Finding it unnecessary to plead for the Tullivers, it was natural that
aunt Pullet should relax a little in her anxiety for them, and recur to
the annoyance she had suffered yesterday from the offspring of that
apparently ill-fated house. Mrs Glegg heard a circumstantial narrative,
to which Mr Pullet’s remarkable memory furnished some items; and while
aunt Pullet pitied poor Bessy’s bad luck with her children, and
expressed a half-formed project of paying for Maggie’s being sent to a
distant boarding-school, which would not prevent her being so brown,
but might tend to subdue some other vices in her, aunt Glegg blamed
Bessy for her weakness, and appealed to all witnesses who should be
living when the Tulliver children had turned out ill, that she, Mrs
Glegg, had always said how it would be from the very first, observing
that it was wonderful to herself how all her words came true.

“Then I may call and tell Bessy you’ll bear no malice, and everything
be as it was before?” Mrs Pullet said, just before parting.

“Yes, you may, Sophy,” said Mrs Glegg; “you may tell Mr Tulliver, and
Bessy too, as I’m not going to behave ill because folks behave ill to
me; I know it’s my place, as the eldest, to set an example in every
respect, and I do it. Nobody can say different of me, if they’ll keep
to the truth.”

Mrs Glegg being in this state of satisfaction in her own lofty
magnanimity, I leave you to judge what effect was produced on her by
the reception of a short letter from Mr Tulliver that very evening,
after Mrs Pullet’s departure, informing her that she needn’t trouble
her mind about her five hundred pounds, for it should be paid back to
her in the course of the next month at farthest, together with the
interest due thereon until the time of payment. And furthermore, that
Mr Tulliver had no wish to behave uncivilly to Mrs Glegg, and she was
welcome to his house whenever she liked to come, but he desired no
favours from her, either for himself or his children.

It was poor Mrs Tulliver who had hastened this catastrophe, entirely
through that irrepressible hopefulness of hers which led her to expect
that similar causes may at any time produce different results. It had
very often occurred in her experience that Mr Tulliver had done
something because other people had said he was not able to do it, or
had pitied him for his supposed inability, or in any other way piqued
his pride; still, she thought to-day, if she told him when he came in
to tea that sister Pullet was gone to try and make everything up with
sister Glegg, so that he needn’t think about paying in the money, it
would give a cheerful effect to the meal. Mr Tulliver had never
slackened in his resolve to raise the money, but now he at once
determined to write a letter to Mrs Glegg, which should cut off all
possibility of mistake. Mrs Pullet gone to beg and pray for him
indeed! Mr Tulliver did not willingly write a letter, and found the
relation between spoken and written language, briefly known as
spelling, one of the most puzzling things in this puzzling world.
Nevertheless, like all fervid writing, the task was done in less time
than usual, and if the spelling differed from Mrs Glegg’s,—why, she
belonged, like himself, to a generation with whom spelling was a matter
of private judgment.

Mrs Glegg did not alter her will in consequence of this letter, and cut
off the Tulliver children from their sixth and seventh share in her
thousand pounds; for she had her principles. No one must be able to say
of her when she was dead that she had not divided her money with
perfect fairness among her own kin. In the matter of wills, personal
qualities were subordinate to the great fundamental fact of blood; and
to be determined in the distribution of your property by caprice, and
not make your legacies bear a direct ratio to degrees of kinship, was a
prospective disgrace that would have embittered her life. This had
always been a principle in the Dodson family; it was one form of that
sense of honour and rectitude which was a proud tradition in such
families,—a tradition which has been the salt of our provincial
society.

But though the letter could not shake Mrs Glegg’s principles, it made
the family breach much more difficult to mend; and as to the effect it
produced on Mrs Glegg’s opinion of Mr Tulliver, she begged to be
understood from that time forth that she had nothing whatever to say
about him; his state of mind, apparently, was too corrupt for her to
contemplate it for a moment. It was not until the evening before Tom
went to school, at the beginning of August, that Mrs Glegg paid a visit
to her sister Tulliver, sitting in her gig all the while, and showing
her displeasure by markedly abstaining from all advice and criticism;
for, as she observed to her sister Deane, “Bessy must bear the
consequence o’ having such a husband, though I’m sorry for her,” and
Mrs Deane agreed that Bessy was pitiable.

That evening Tom observed to Maggie: “Oh my! Maggie, aunt Glegg’s
beginning to come again; I’m glad I’m going to school. You’ll catch
it all now!”

Maggie was already so full of sorrow at the thought of Tom’s going away
from her, that this playful exultation of his seemed very unkind, and
she cried herself to sleep that night.

Mr Tulliver’s prompt procedure entailed on him further promptitude in
finding the convenient person who was desirous of lending five hundred
pounds on bond. “It must be no client of Wakem’s,” he said to himself;
and yet at the end of a fortnight it turned out to the contrary; not
because Mr Tulliver’s will was feeble, but because external fact was
stronger. Wakem’s client was the only convenient person to be found. Mr
Tulliver had a destiny as well as Œdipus, and in this case he might
plead, like Œdipus, that his deed was inflicted on him rather than
committed by him.

BOOK SECOND.

SCHOOL-TIME.