The Mill on the Floss - George Eliot (rom com books to read .txt) 📗
- Author: George Eliot
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“Here’s fifteen shilling, then, for the two,” said Mrs. Glegg. “But it’s a shameful price.”
“Nay, mum, you’ll niver say that when you’re upo’ your knees i’ church i’ five years’ time. I’m makin’ you a present o’ th’ articles; I am, indeed. That eightpence shaves off my profits as clean as a razor. Now then, sir,” continued Bob, shouldering his pack, “if you please, I’ll be glad to go and see about makin’ Mr. Tom’s fortin. Eh, I wish I’d got another twenty pound to lay out mysen; I shouldn’t stay to say my Catechism afore I knowed what to do wi’t.”
“Stop a bit, Mr. Glegg,” said the lady, as her husband took his hat, “you never will give me the chance o’ speaking. You’ll go away now, and finish everything about this business, and come back and tell me it’s too late for me to speak. As if I wasn’t my nephey’s own aunt, and the head o’ the family on his mother’s side! and laid by guineas, all full weight, for him, as he’ll know who to respect when I’m laid in my coffin.”
“Well, Mrs. G., say what you mean,” said Mr. G., hastily.
“Well, then, I desire as nothing may be done without my knowing. I don’t say as I sha’n’t venture twenty pounds, if you make out as everything’s right and safe. And if I do, Tom,” concluded Mrs. Glegg, turning impressively to her nephew, “I hope you’ll allays bear it in mind and be grateful for such an aunt. I mean you to pay me interest, you know; I don’t approve o’ giving; we niver looked for that in my family.”
“Thank you, aunt,” said Tom, rather proudly. “I prefer having the money only lent to me.”
“Very well; that’s the Dodson sperrit,” said Mrs. Glegg, rising to get her knitting with the sense that any further remark after this would be bathos.
Salt—that eminently “briny chap”—having been discovered in a cloud of tobacco-smoke at the Anchor Tavern, Mr. Glegg commenced inquiries which turned out satisfactorily enough to warrant the advance of the “nest-egg,” to which aunt Glegg contributed twenty pounds; and in this modest beginning you see the ground of a fact which might otherwise surprise you; namely, Tom’s accumulation of a fund, unknown to his father, that promised in no very long time to meet the more tardy process of saving, and quite cover the deficit. When once his attention had been turned to this source of gain, Tom determined to make the most of it, and lost on opportunity of obtaining information and extending his small enterprises. In not telling his father, he was influenced by that strange mixture of opposite feelings which often gives equal truth to those who blame an action and those who admire it,—partly, it was that disinclination to confidence which is seen between near kindred, that family repulsion which spoils the most sacred relations of our lives; partly, it was the desire to surprise his father with a great joy. He did not see that it would have been better to soothe the interval with a new hope, and prevent the delirium of a too sudden elation.
At the time of Maggie’s first meeting with Philip, Tom had already nearly a hundred and fifty pounds of his own capital; and while they were walking by the evening light in the Red Deeps, he, by the same evening light, was riding into Laceham, proud of being on his first journey on behalf of Guest & Co., and revolving in his mind all the chances that by the end of another year he should have doubled his gains, lifted off the obloquy of debt from his father’s name, and perhaps—for he should be twenty-one—have got a new start for himself, on a higher platform of employment. Did he not desire it? He was quite sure that he did.
I said that Maggie went home that evening from the Red Deeps with a mental conflict already begun. You have seen clearly enough, in her interview with Philip, what that conflict was. Here suddenly was an opening in the rocky wall which shut in the narrow valley of humiliation, where all her prospect was the remote, unfathomed sky; and some of the memory-haunting earthly delights were no longer out of her reach. She might have books, converse, affection; she might hear tidings of the world from which her mind had not yet lost its sense of exile; and it would be a kindness to Philip too, who was pitiable,—clearly not happy. And perhaps here was an opportunity indicated for making her mind more worthy of its highest service; perhaps the noblest, completest devoutness could hardly exist without some width of knowledge; must she always live in this resigned imprisonment? It was so blameless, so good a thing that there should be friendship between her and Philip; the motives that forbade it were so unreasonable, so unchristian! But the severe monotonous warning came again and again,—that she was losing the simplicity and clearness of her life by admitting a ground of concealment; and that, by forsaking the simple rule of renunciation, she was throwing herself under the seductive guidance of illimitable wants. She thought she had won strength to obey the warning before she allowed herself the next week to turn her steps in the evening to the Red Deeps. But while she was resolved to say an affectionate farewell to Philip, how she looked forward to that evening walk in the still, fleckered shade of the hollows, away from all that was harsh and unlovely; to the affectionate, admiring looks that would meet her; to the sense of comradeship that childish memories would give to wiser, older talk; to the certainty that Philip would care to hear everything she said, which no one else cared for! It was a half-hour that it would be very hard to turn her back upon, with the sense that there would be no other like it. Yet she said what she meant to say; she looked firm as well as sad.
“Philip, I have made up my mind; it is right that we should give each other up, in everything but memory. I could not see you without concealment—stay, I know what you are going to say,—it is other people’s wrong feelings that make concealment necessary; but concealment is bad, however it may be caused. I feel that it would be bad for me, for us both. And then, if our secret were discovered, there would be nothing but misery,—dreadful anger; and then we must part after all, and it would be harder, when we were used to seeing each other.”
Philip’s face had flushed, and there was a momentary eagerness of expression, as if he had been about to resist this decision with all his might.
But he controlled himself, and said, with assumed calmness: “Well, Maggie, if we must part, let us try and forget it for one half hour; let us talk together a little while, for the last time.”
He took her hand, and Maggie felt no reason to withdraw it; his quietness made her all the more sure she had given him great pain, and she wanted to show him how unwillingly she had given it. They walked together hand in hand in silence.
“Let us sit down in the hollow,” said Philip, “where we stood the last time. See how the dog-roses have strewed the ground, and spread their opal petals over it.”
They sat down at the roots of the slanting ash.
“I’ve begun my picture of you among the Scotch firs, Maggie,” said Philip, “so you must let me study your face a little, while you stay,—since I am not to see it again. Please turn your head this way.”
This was said in an entreating voice, and it would have been very hard of Maggie to refuse. The full, lustrous face, with the bright black coronet, looked down like that of a divinity well pleased to be worshipped, on the pale-hued, small-featured face that was turned up to it.
“I shall be sitting for my second portrait then,” she said, smiling. “Will it be larger than the other?”
“Oh yes, much larger. It is an oil-painting. You will look like a tall Hamadryad, dark and strong and noble, just issued from one of the fir-trees, when the stems are casting their afternoon shadows on the grass.”
“You seem to think more of painting than of anything now, Philip?”
“Perhaps I do,” said Philip, rather sadly; “but I think of too many things,—sow all sorts of seeds, and get no great harvest from any one of them. I’m cursed with susceptibility in every direction, and effective faculty in none. I care for painting and music; I care for classic literature, and mediaeval literature, and modern literature; I flutter all ways, and fly in none.”
“But surely that is a happiness to have so many tastes,—to enjoy so many beautiful things, when they are within your reach,” said Maggie, musingly. “It always seemed to me a sort of clever stupidity only to have one sort of talent,—almost like a carrier-pigeon.”
“It might be a happiness to have many tastes if I were like other men,” said Philip, bitterly. “I might get some power and distinction by mere mediocrity, as they do; at least I should get those middling satisfactions which make men contented to do without great ones. I might think society at St. Ogg’s agreeable then. But nothing could make life worth the purchase-money of pain to me, but some faculty that would lift me above the dead level of provincial existence. Yes, there is one thing,—a passion answers as well as a faculty.”
Maggie did not hear the last words; she was struggling against the consciousness that Philip’s words had set her own discontent vibrating again as it used to do.
“I understand what you mean,” she said, “though I know so much less than you do. I used to think I could never bear life if it kept on being the same every day, and I must always be doing things of no consequence, and never know anything greater. But, dear Philip, I think we are only like children that some one who is wiser is taking care of. Is it not right to resign ourselves entirely, whatever may be denied us? I have found great peace in that for the last two or three years, even joy in subduing my own will.”
“Yes, Maggie,” said Philip, vehemently; “and you are shutting yourself up in a narrow, self-delusive fanaticism, which is only a way of escaping pain by starving into dulness all the highest powers of your nature. Joy and peace are not resignation; resignation is the willing endurance of a pain that is not allayed, that you don’t expect to be allayed. Stupefaction is not resignation; and it is stupefaction to remain in ignorance,—to shut up all the avenues by which the life of your fellowmen
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