The Mill on the Floss - George Eliot (100 books to read .txt) 📗

“She’s gone,” unconsciously using an impressive figure of rhetoric.

“It isn’t the glass this time, then,” thought Mrs. Tulliver.

“Died the day before yesterday,” continued Mrs. Pullet; “an’ her legs was as thick as my body,” she added, with deep sadness, after a pause. “They’d tapped her no end o’ times, and the water⁠—they say you might ha’ swum in it, if you’d liked.”

“Well, Sophy, it’s a mercy she’s gone, then, whoever she may be,” said Mrs. Glegg, with the promptitude and emphasis of a mind naturally clear and decided; “but I can’t think who you’re talking of, for my part.”

“But I know,” said Mrs. Pullet, sighing and shaking her head; “and there isn’t another such a dropsy in the parish. I know as it’s old Mrs. Sutton o’ the Twentylands.”

“Well, she’s no kin o’ yours, nor much acquaintance as I’ve ever heared of,” said Mrs. Glegg, who always cried just as much as was proper when anything happened to her own “kin,” but not on other occasions.

“She’s so much acquaintance as I’ve seen her legs when they was like bladders. And an old lady as had doubled her money over and over again, and kept it all in her own management to the last, and had her pocket with her keys in under her pillow constant. There isn’t many old parish’ners like her, I doubt.”

“And they say she’d took as much physic as ’ud fill a wagon,” observed Mr. Pullet.

“Ah!” sighed Mrs. Pullet, “she’d another complaint ever so many years before she had the dropsy, and the doctors couldn’t make out what it was. And she said to me, when I went to see her last Christmas, she said, ‘Mrs. Pullet, if ever you have the dropsy, you’ll think o’ me.’ She did say so,” added Mrs. Pullet, beginning to cry bitterly again; “those were her very words. And she’s to be buried o’ Saturday, and Pullet’s bid to the funeral.”

“Sophy,” said Mrs. Glegg, unable any longer to contain her spirit of rational remonstrance⁠—“Sophy, I wonder at you, fretting and injuring your health about people as don’t belong to you. Your poor father never did so, nor your aunt Frances neither, nor any o’ the family as I ever heard of. You couldn’t fret no more than this, if we’d heared as our cousin Abbott had died sudden without making his will.”

Mrs. Pullet was silent, having to finish her crying, and rather flattered than indignant at being upbraided for crying too much. It was not everybody who could afford to cry so much about their neighbours who had left them nothing; but Mrs. Pullet had married a gentleman farmer, and had leisure and money to carry her crying and everything else to the highest pitch of respectability.

“Mrs. Sutton didn’t die without making her will, though,” said Mr. Pullet, with a confused sense that he was saying something to sanction his wife’s tears; “ours is a rich parish, but they say there’s nobody else to leave as many thousands behind ’em as Mrs. Sutton. And she’s left no leggicies to speak on⁠—left it all in a lump to her husband’s nevvy.”

“There wasn’t much good i’ being so rich, then,” said Mrs. Glegg, “if she’d got none but husband’s kin to leave it to. It’s poor work when that’s all you’ve got to pinch yourself for. Not as I’m one o’ those as ’ud like to die without leaving more money out at interest than other folks had reckoned; but it’s a poor tale when it must go out o’ your own family.”

“I’m sure, sister,” said Mrs. Pullet, who had recovered sufficiently to take off her veil and fold it carefully, “it’s a nice sort o’ man as Mrs. Sutton has left her money to, for he’s troubled with the asthmy, and goes to bed every night at eight o’clock. He told me about it himself⁠—as free as could be⁠—one Sunday when he came to our church. He wears a hareskin on his chest, and has a trembling in his talk⁠—quite a gentleman sort o’ man. I told him there wasn’t many months in the year as I wasn’t under the doctor’s hands. And he said, ‘Mrs. Pullet, I can feel for you.’ That was what he said⁠—the very words. Ah!” sighed Mrs. Pullet, shaking her head at the idea that there were but few who could enter fully into her experiences in pink mixture and white mixture, strong stuff in small bottles, and weak stuff in large bottles, damp boluses at a shilling, and draughts at eighteenpence. “Sister, I may as well go and take my bonnet off now. Did you see as the cap-box was put out?” she added, turning to her husband.

Mr. Pullet, by an unaccountable lapse of memory, had forgotten it, and hastened out, with a stricken conscience, to remedy the omission.

“They’ll bring it upstairs, sister,” said Mrs. Tulliver, wishing to go at once, lest Mrs. Glegg should begin to explain her feelings about Sophy’s being the first Dodson who ever ruined her constitution with doctor’s stuff.

Mrs. Tulliver was fond of going upstairs with her sister Pullet, and looking thoroughly at her cap before she put it on her head, and discussing millinery in general. This was part of Bessy’s weakness that stirred Mrs. Glegg’s sisterly compassion: Bessy went far too well dressed, considering; and she was too proud to dress her child in the good clothing her sister Glegg gave her from the primeval strata of her wardrobe; it was a sin and a shame to buy anything to dress that child, if it wasn’t a pair of shoes. In this particular, however, Mrs. Glegg did her sister Bessy some injustice, for Mrs. Tulliver had really made great efforts to induce Maggie to wear a leghorn bonnet and a dyed silk frock made out of her aunt Glegg’s, but the results had been such that Mrs. Tulliver was obliged to bury them in her maternal bosom; for Maggie, declaring that the frock smelt of nasty dye, had taken an opportunity of basting it together with the roast beef the first Sunday she wore it, and finding this scheme answer, she had subsequently pumped on the bonnet with