The Mill on the Floss

rs Tulliver’s Teraphim, or Household Gods

When the coach set down Tom and Maggie, it was five hours since she had
started from home, and she was thinking with some trembling that her
father had perhaps missed her, and asked for “the little wench” in
vain. She thought of no other change that might have happened.

She hurried along the gravel-walk and entered the house before Tom; but
in the entrance she was startled by a strong smell of tobacco. The
parlour door was ajar; that was where the smell came from. It was very
strange; could any visitor be smoking at a time like this? Was her
mother there? If so, she must be told that Tom was come. Maggie, after
this pause of surprise, was only in the act of opening the door when
Tom came up, and they both looked into the parlour together.

There was a coarse, dingy man, of whose face Tom had some vague
recollection, sitting in his father’s chair, smoking, with a jug and
glass beside him.

The truth flashed on Tom’s mind in an instant. To “have the bailiff in
the house,” and “to be sold up,” were phrases which he had been used
to, even as a little boy; they were part of the disgrace and misery of
“failing,” of losing all one’s money, and being ruined,—sinking into
the condition of poor working people. It seemed only natural this
should happen, since his father had lost all his property, and he
thought of no more special cause for this particular form of misfortune
than the loss of the lawsuit. But the immediate presence of this
disgrace was so much keener an experience to Tom than the worst form of
apprehension, that he felt at this moment as if his real trouble had
only just begun: it was a touch on the irritated nerve compared with
its spontaneous dull aching.

“How do you do, sir?” said the man, taking the pipe out of his mouth,
with rough, embarrassed civility. The two young startled faces made him
a little uncomfortable.

But Tom turned away hastily without speaking; the sight was too
hateful. Maggie had not understood the appearance of this stranger, as
Tom had. She followed him, whispering: “Who can it be, Tom? What is the
matter?” Then, with a sudden undefined dread lest this stranger might
have something to do with a change in her father, she rushed upstairs,
checking herself at the bedroom door to throw off her bonnet, and enter
on tiptoe. All was silent there; her father was lying, heedless of
everything around him, with his eyes closed as when she had left him. A
servant was there, but not her mother.

“Where’s my mother?” she whispered. The servant did not know.

Maggie hastened out, and said to Tom; “Father is lying quiet; let us go
and look for my mother. I wonder where she is.”

Mrs Tulliver was not downstairs, not in any of the bedrooms. There was
but one room below the attic which Maggie had left unsearched; it was
the storeroom, where her mother kept all her linen and all the precious
“best things” that were only unwrapped and brought out on special
occasions.

Tom, preceding Maggie, as they returned along the passage, opened the
door of this room, and immediately said, “Mother!”

Mrs Tulliver was seated there with all her laid-up treasures. One of
the linen chests was open; the silver teapot was unwrapped from its
many folds of paper, and the best china was laid out on the top of the
closed linen-chest; spoons and skewers and ladles were spread in rows
on the shelves; and the poor woman was shaking her head and weeping,
with a bitter tension of the mouth, over the mark, “Elizabeth Dodson,”
on the corner of some tablecloths she held in her lap.

She dropped them, and started up as Tom spoke.

“Oh, my boy, my boy!” she said, clasping him round the neck. “To think
as I should live to see this day! We’re ruined—everything’s going to be
sold up—to think as your father should ha’ married me to bring me to
this! We’ve got nothing—we shall be beggars—we must go to the
workhouse——”

She kissed him, then seated herself again, and took another tablecloth
on her lap, unfolding it a little way to look at the pattern, while the
children stood by in mute wretchedness, their minds quite filled for
the moment with the words “beggars” and “workhouse.”

“To think o’ these cloths as I spun myself,” she went on, lifting
things out and turning them over with an excitement all the more
strange and piteous because the stout blond woman was usually so
passive,—if she had been ruffled before, it was at the surface
merely,—“and Job Haxey wove ’em, and brought the piece home on his
back, as I remember standing at the door and seeing him come, before I
ever thought o’ marrying your father! And the pattern as I chose
myself, and bleached so beautiful, and I marked ’em so as nobody ever
saw such marking,—they must cut the cloth to get it out, for it’s a
particular stitch. And they’re all to be sold, and go into strange
people’s houses, and perhaps be cut with the knives, and wore out
before I’m dead. You’ll never have one of ’em, my boy,” she said,
looking up at Tom with her eyes full of tears, “and I meant ’em for
you. I wanted you to have all o’ this pattern. Maggie could have had
the large check—it never shows so well when the dishes are on it.”

Tom was touched to the quick, but there was an angry reaction
immediately. His face flushed as he said:

“But will my aunts let them be sold, mother? Do they know about it?
They’ll never let your linen go, will they? Haven’t you sent to them?”

“Yes, I sent Luke directly they’d put the bailies in, and your aunt
Pullet’s been—and, oh dear, oh dear, she cries so and says your
father’s disgraced my family and made it the talk o’ the country; and
she’ll buy the spotted cloths for herself, because she’s never had so
many as she wanted o’ that pattern, and they sha’n’t go to strangers,
but she’s got more checks a’ready nor she can do with.” (Here Mrs
Tulliver began to lay back the tablecloths in the chest, folding and
stroking them automatically.) “And your uncle Glegg’s been too, and he
says things must be bought in for us to lie down on, but he must talk
to your aunt; and they’re all coming to consult. But I know they’ll
none of ’em take my chany,” she added, turning toward the cups and
saucers, “for they all found fault with ’em when I bought ’em, ’cause
o’ the small gold sprig all over ’em, between the flowers. But there’s
none of ’em got better chany, not even your aunt Pullet herself; and I
bought it wi’ my own money as I’d saved ever since I was turned
fifteen; and the silver teapot, too,—your father never paid for ’em.
And to think as he should ha’ married me, and brought me to this.”

Mrs Tulliver burst out crying afresh, and she sobbed with her
handkerchief at her eyes a few moments, but then removing it, she said
in a deprecating way, still half sobbing, as if she were called upon to
speak before she could command her voice,—

“And I did say to him times and times, ‘Whativer you do, don’t go to
law,’ and what more could I do? I’ve had to sit by while my own
fortin’s been spent, and what should ha’ been my children’s, too.
You’ll have niver a penny, my boy—but it isn’t your poor mother’s
fault.”

She put out one arm toward Tom, looking up at him piteously with her
helpless, childish blue eyes. The poor lad went to her and kissed her,
and she clung to him. For the first time Tom thought of his father with
some reproach. His natural inclination to blame, hitherto kept entirely
in abeyance toward his father by the predisposition to think him always
right, simply on the ground that he was Tom Tulliver’s father, was
turned into this new channel by his mother’s plaints; and with his
indignation against Wakem there began to mingle some indignation of
another sort. Perhaps his father might have helped bringing them all
down in the world, and making people talk of them with contempt, but no
one should talk long of Tom Tulliver with contempt.

The natural strength and firmness of his nature was beginning to assert
itself, urged by the double stimulus of resentment against his aunts,
and the sense that he must behave like a man and take care of his
mother.

“Don’t fret, mother,” he said tenderly. “I shall soon be able to get
money; I’ll get a situation of some sort.”

“Bless you, my boy!” said Mrs Tulliver, a little soothed. Then, looking
round sadly, “But I shouldn’t ha’ minded so much if we could ha’ kept
the things wi’ my name on ’em.”

Maggie had witnessed this scene with gathering anger. The implied
reproaches against her father—her father, who was lying there in a sort
of living death—neutralised all her pity for griefs about tablecloths
and china; and her anger on her father’s account was heightened by some
egoistic resentment at Tom’s silent concurrence with her mother in
shutting her out from the common calamity. She had become almost
indifferent to her mother’s habitual depreciation of her, but she was
keenly alive to any sanction of it, however passive, that she might
suspect in Tom. Poor Maggie was by no means made up of unalloyed
devotedness, but put forth large claims for herself where she loved
strongly. She burst out at last in an agitated, almost violent tone:
“Mother, how can you talk so; as if you cared only for things with
your name on, and not for what has my father’s name too; and to care
about anything but dear father himself!—when he’s lying there, and may
never speak to us again. Tom, you ought to say so too; you ought not to
let any one find fault with my father.”

Maggie, almost choked with mingled grief and anger, left the room, and
took her old place on her father’s bed. Her heart went out to him with
a stronger movement than ever, at the thought that people would blame
him. Maggie hated blame; she had been blamed all her life, and nothing
had come of it but evil tempers.

Her father had always defended and excused her, and her loving
remembrance of his tenderness was a force within her that would enable
her to do or bear anything for his sake.

Tom was a little shocked at Maggie’s outburst,—telling him as well as
his mother what it was right to do! She ought to have learned better
than have those hectoring, assuming manners, by this time. But he
presently went into his father’s room, and the sight there touched him
in a way that effaced the slighter impressions of the previous hour.
When Maggie saw how he was moved, she went to him and put her arm round
his neck as he sat by the bed, and the two children forgot everything
else in the sense that they had one father and one sorrow.