The Mill on the Floss

he 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.

“Come in, my child,” Mrs Tulliver whispered. “He’ll let you stay and
sleep in my bed. He won’t deny that if I ask him.”

“No, mother,” said Maggie, in a low tone, like a moan. “I will never go
in.”

“Then wait for me outside. I’ll get ready and come with you.”

When his mother appeared with her bonnet on, Tom came out to her in the
passage, and put money into her hands.

“My house is yours, mother, always,” he said. “You will come and let me
know everything you want; you will come back to me.”

Poor Mrs Tulliver took the money, too frightened to say anything. The
only thing clear to her was the mother’s instinct that she would go
with her unhappy child.

Maggie was waiting outside the gate; she took her mother’s hand and
they walked a little way in silence.

“Mother,” said Maggie, at last, “we will go to Luke’s cottage. Luke
will take me in. He was very good to me when I was a little girl.”

“He’s got no room for us, my dear, now; his wife’s got so many
children. I don’t know where to go, if it isn’t to one o’ your aunts;
and I hardly durst,” said poor Mrs Tulliver, quite destitute of mental
resources in this extremity.

Maggie was silent a little while, and then said,—

“Let us go to Bob Jakin’s, mother; his wife will have room for us, if
they have no other lodger.”

So they went on their way to St Ogg’s, to the old house by the
river-side.

Bob himself was at home, with a heaviness at heart which resisted even
the new joy and pride of possessing a two-months’-old baby, quite the
liveliest of its age that had ever been born to prince or packman. He
would perhaps not so thoroughly have understood all the dubiousness of
Maggie’s appearance with Mr Stephen Guest on the quay at Mudport if he
had not witnessed the effect it produced on Tom when he went to report
it; and since then, the circumstances which in any case gave a
disastrous character to her elopement had passed beyond the more polite
circles of St Ogg’s, and had become matter of common talk, accessible
to the grooms and errand-boys. So that when he opened the door and saw
Maggie standing before him in her sorrow and weariness, he had no
questions to ask except one which he dared only ask himself,—where was
Mr Stephen Guest? Bob, for his part, hoped he might be in the warmest
department of an asylum understood to exist in the other world for
gentlemen who are likely to be in fallen circumstances there.

The lodgings were vacant, and both Mrs Jakin the larger and Mrs Jakin
the less were commanded to make all things comfortable for “the old
Missis and the young Miss”; alas that she was still “Miss!” The
ingenious Bob was sorely perplexed as to how this result could have
come about; how Mr Stephen Guest could have gone away from her, or
could have let her go away from him, when he had the chance of keeping
her with him. But he was silent, and would not allow his wife to ask
him a question; would not present himself in the room, lest it should
appear like intrusion and a wish to pry; having the same chivalry
toward dark-eyed Maggie as in the days when he had bought her the
memorable present of books.

But after a day or two Mrs Tulliver was gone to the Mill again for a
few hours to see to Tom’s household matters. Maggie had wished this;
after the first violent outburst of feeling which came as soon as she
had no longer any active purpose to fulfil, she was less in need of her
mother’s presence; she even desired to be alone with her grief. But she
had been solitary only a little while in the old sitting-room that
looked on the river, when there came a tap at the door, and turning
round her sad face as she said “Come in,” she saw Bob enter, with the
baby in his arms and Mumps at his heels.

“We’ll go back, if it disturbs you, Miss,” said Bob.

“No,” said Maggie, in a low voice, wishing she could smile.

Bob, closing the door behind him, came and stood before her.

“You see, we’ve got a little un, Miss, and I want’d you to look at it,
and take it in your arms, if you’d be so good. For we made free to name
it after you, and it ’ud be better for your takin’ a bit o’ notice on
it.”

Maggie could not speak, but she put out her arms to receive the tiny
baby, while Mumps snuffed at it anxiously, to ascertain that this
transference was all right. Maggie’s heart had swelled at this action
and speech of Bob’s; she knew well enough that it was a way he had
chosen to show his sympathy and respect.

“Sit down, Bob,” she said presently, and he sat down in silence,
finding his tongue unmanageable in quite a new fashion, refusing to say
what he wanted it to say.

“Bob,” she said, after a few moments, looking down at the baby, and
holding it anxiously, as if she feared it might slip from her mind and
her fingers, “I have a favour to ask of you.”

“Don’t you speak so, Miss,” said Bob, grasping the skin of Mumps’s
neck; “if there’s anything I can do for you, I should look upon it as a
day’s earnings.”

“I want you to go to Dr Kenn’s, and ask to speak to him, and tell him
that I am here, and should be very grateful if he would come to me
while my mother is away. She will not come back till evening.”

“Eh, Miss, I’d do it in a minute,—it is but a step,—but Dr Kenn’s wife
lies dead; she’s to be buried to-morrow; died the day I come from
Mudport. It’s all the more pity she should ha’ died just now, if you
want him. I hardly like to go a-nigh him yet.”

“Oh no, Bob,” said Maggie, “we must let it be,—till after a few days,
perhaps, when you hear that he is going about again. But perhaps he may
be going out of town—to a distance,” she added, with a new sense of
despondency at this idea.

“Not he, Miss,” said Bob. “He’ll none go away. He isn’t one o’ them
gentlefolks as go to cry at waterin’-places when their wives die; he’s
got summat else to do. He looks fine and sharp after the parish, he
does. He christened the little un; an’ he was at me to know what I
did of a Sunday, as I didn’t come to church. But I told him I was upo’
the travel three parts o’ the Sundays,—an’ then I’m so used to bein’ on
my legs, I can’t sit so long on end,—‘an’ lors, sir,’ says I, ‘a
packman can do wi’ a small ’lowance o’ church; it tastes strong,’ says
I; ‘there’s no call to lay it on thick.’ Eh, Miss, how good the little
un is wi’ you! It’s like as if it knowed you; it partly does, I’ll be
bound,—like the birds know the mornin’.”

Bob’s tongue was now evidently loosed from its unwonted bondage, and
might even be in danger of doing more work than was required of it. But
the subjects on which he longed to be informed were so steep and
difficult of approach, that his tongue was likely to run on along the
level rather than to carry him on that unbeaten road. He felt this, and
was silent again for a little while, ruminating much on the possible
forms in which he might put a question. At last he said, in a more
timid voice than usual,—

“Will you give me leave to ask you only one thing, Miss?”

Maggie was rather startled, but she answered, “Yes, Bob, if it is about
myself—not about any one else.”

“Well, Miss, it’s this. Do you owe anybody a grudge?”

“No, not any one,” said Maggie, looking up at him inquiringly. “Why?”

“Oh, lors, Miss,” said Bob, pinching Mumps’s neck harder than ever. “I
wish you did, an’ tell me; I’d leather him till I couldn’t see—I
would—an’ the Justice might do what he liked to me arter.”

“Oh, Bob,” said Maggie, smiling faintly, “you’re a very good friend to
me. But I shouldn’t like to punish any one, even if they’d done me
wrong; I’ve done wrong myself too often.”

This view of things was puzzling to Bob, and threw more obscurity than
ever over what could possibly have happened between Stephen and Maggie.
But further questions would have been too intrusive, even if he could
have framed them suitably, and he was obliged to carry baby away again
to an expectant mother.

“Happen you’d like Mumps for company, Miss,” he said when he had taken
the baby again. “He’s rare company, Mumps is; he knows iverything, an’
makes no bother about it. If I tell him, he’ll lie before you an’ watch
you, as still,—just as he watches my pack. You’d better let me leave
him a bit; he’ll get fond on you. Lors, it’s a fine thing to hev a dumb
brute fond on you; it’ll stick to you, an’ make no jaw.”

“Yes, do leave him, please,” said Maggie. “I think I should like to
have Mumps for a friend.”

“Mumps, lie down there,” said Bob, pointing to a place in front of
Maggie, “and niver do you stir till you’re spoke to.”

Mumps lay down at once, and made no sign of restlessness when his
master left the room.