 CHAPTER VIII. It was a clear frosty January day on which Mr. Tulliver first came downstairs. The bright sun on the chestnut boughs and the roofs opposite his window had made him impatiently declare that he would be caged up no longer. He thought everywhere would be more cheery under this sunshine than his bedroom, for he knew nothing of the bareness below, which made the flood of sunshine in porch unit, as if it had an unfeeling pleasure in showing the empty places and the marks where well-known objects had once been. The impression on his mind that it was but yesterday when he received a letter from Mr. Gore was so continually implied in his talk, and the attempts to convey to him the idea that many weeks had passed, and much had happened since then, had been so soon swept away by recurrent forgetfulness, that even Mr. Turnbull had begun to despair of preparing him to meet the facts by previous knowledge. The full sense of the present could only be imparted gradually by new experience, not by mere words, which must remain weaker than the impressions left by the old experiences. This resolution to come downstairs was heard with trembling by the wife and children. Mrs. Tulliver said Tom must not go to St. Augs at the usual hour, he must wait and see his father downstairs, and Tom complied, though with an intense inward shrinking from the painful scene. The hearts of all three had been more deeply dejected than ever during the last few days, for Guest and Co. had not bought the mill. Both mill and land had been knocked down to wake him, who had been over the premises and had laid before Mr. Dean and Mr. Gleig in Mrs. Tulliver's presence his willingness to employ Mr. Tulliver, in case of his recovery, as the manager of the business. This proposition had occasioned much family debating. Uncles and aunts were almost unanimously of the opinion that such an offer ought not to be rejected when there was nothing in the way but a feeling in Mr. Tulliver's mind, which, as neither aunts nor uncles shared it, was regarded as entirely unreasonable and childish. Indeed, as a transferring towards wake him of that indignation and hatred which Mr. Tulliver ought properly to have directed against himself for his general quarrelsonness and his special exhibition of it in going to law. Here was an opportunity for Mr. Tulliver to provide for his wife and daughter without any assistance from his wife's relations, and without that too evident dissent into pulporism which makes it annoying to respectable people to meet the degraded member of the family by the wayside. Mr. Tulliver, Mrs. Gleig considered, must be made to feel when he came to his right mind that he could never humble himself enough, for that had come which he had always foreseen would come of his insolence in time past to them as were the best friends he had got to look to. Mr. Gleig and Mr. Dean were less stern in their views, but they both of them thought Tulliver had done enough harm by his hot-tempered crochets and ought to put them out of the question when a livelihood was offered him. Wakeham showed a right feeling about the matter. He had no grudge against Tulliver. Tom had protested against entertaining the proposition. He shouldn't like his father to be under wake him. He thought it would look mean-spirited. But his mother's main distress was the utter impossibility of ever turning Mr. Tulliver round about wake him, or getting him to hear reason. No, they would all have to go and live in a pig-style on purpose despite wake him, who spoke so as nobody could be fairer. Indeed Mrs. Tulliver's mind was reduced to such confusion by living in this strange medium of unaccountable sorrow, against which she continually appealed by asking, O dear, what have I done to deserve worse than other women, that Maggie began to suspect her poor mother's wits were quite going? Tom, she said, when they were out of their father's room together, we must try to make father understand a little of what has happened before he goes downstairs. But we must get my mother away. She will say something that will do harm. Ask Kezia to fetch her down and keep her engaged with something in the kitchen. Kezia was equal to the task. Having declared her intention of staying till the master could get about again, wage or no wage, she had found a certain recompense in keeping a strong hand over her mistress, scolding her for moitering herself, and going about all day without changing her cap and looking as if she was mushed. Altogether this time of trouble was rather a Saturnalian time to Kezia. She could scold her betters with unreproved freedom. On this particular occasion there were drying clothes to be fetched in. She wished to know if one pair of hands could do everything indoors and out, and observed that she should have thought it would be good for Mrs. Tulliver to put on her bonnet, and get a breath of fresh air by doing that needful piece of work. Poor Mrs. Tulliver went submissively downstairs. To be ordered about by a servant was the last remnant of her household dignities. She would soon have no servant to scold her. Mr. Tulliver was resting in his chair a little after the fatigue of dressing, and Maggie and Tom were seated near him when Luke entered to ask if he should help Master downstairs. I, I, Luke, stop a bit, sit down, said Mr. Tulliver, pointing his stick toward a chair, and looking at him with that pursuant gaze which convalescent persons often have for those who have tended them, reminding one of an infant gazing about after its nurse. For Luke had been a constant night-watcher by his master's bed. How's the water now, eh, Luke? said Mr. Tulliver. Dix hasn't been choking you up again, eh? No, sir, it's all right. I, I thought not. He won't be in a hurry at that again. Now Riley's been to settle him. That was what I said to Riley yesterday. I said— Mr. Tulliver leaned forward, resting his elbows on the armchair, and looking on the ground as if in search of something, striving after vanishing images like a man struggling against a dose. Maggie looked at Tom in mute distress. Their father's mind was so far off the present, which would, by and by, thrust itself on his wandering consciousness. Tom was almost ready to rush away, with that impatience of painful emotion which makes one of the differences between youth and maiden, man and woman. Father, said Maggie, laying her hand on his, don't you remember that Mr. Riley is dead? Dead, said Mr. Tulliver sharply, looking in her face with a strange, examining glance. Yes, he died of apoplexy nearly a year ago. I remember hearing you say you had to pay money for him, and he left his daughters badly off. One of them is underteacher at Miss Furnaces, where I have been to school, you know. Ah! said her father doubtfully, still looking in her face. But as soon as Tom began to speak he turned to look at him with the same inquiring glances, as if he were rather surprised at the presence of these two young people. Whenever his mind was wandering in the far past he fell into this oblivion of their actual faces. They were not those of the lad and the little wench who belonged to that past. It's a long while since you had the dispute with Dick's brother, said Tom. I remember you're talking about it three years ago before I went to school at Mr. Stellings. I've been at school there three years, don't you remember? Mr. Tulliver threw himself backward again, losing the childlike outward glance under a rush of new ideas which diverted him from external impressions. Aye, aye, he said, after a minute or two. I've paid a good deal of money. I was determined my son should have a good education. I'd known myself, and I felt the miss of it. And he'll want no other fortune, that's what I say, if Waken was to get the better of me again. The thought of Waken roused new vibrations, and after a moment's pause he began to look at the coat he had on and to feel in his side-pocket. Then he turned to Tom and said in his old, sharp way, Where have they put God's letter? It was close at hand in a draw, for he had often asked for it before. You know what there is in the letter, Father, said Tom, as he gave it to him. To be sure I do, said Mr. Tulliver rather angrily. After that, if Furley can't take to the property somebody else can. There's plenty of people in the world besides Furley, but it's hindering, my not being well. Go and tell him to get the horse in the gig, Luke, for I can get down to St. Og's well enough, Gors expecting me. No, dear Father, Maggie burst out intreatingly. It's a very long while since all that. You've been ill a great many weeks, more than two months. Everything has changed. Mr. Tulliver looked at them all three alternately with a new startled gaze. The idea that much had happened of which he knew nothing had often transiently arrested him before, but it came upon him now with entire novelty. Yes, Father, said Tom, in answer to the gaze. You needn't trouble your mind about business until you are quite well. Everything is settled about that for the present, about the mill, and the land, and the debts. What settled, then? said his father angrily. Don't you take on too much about it, sir? said Luke. You'd have paid everybody if you could. That's what I said to Master Tom. I said you'd have paid everybody if you could. But Luke felt, after the manner of contented, hardworking men whose lives have been spent in servitude, that sense of natural fitness in rank which made his Master's downfall a tragedy to him. He was urged, in his slow way, to say something that would express his share in the family's sorrow, and these words which he had used over and over again to Tom when he wanted to decline the full payment of his fifty pounds out of the children's money, were the most ready to his tongue. They were just the words to lay the most painful hold on his Master's bewildered mind. Paid everybody, he said, with vehement agitation, his face flushing and his eye lighting up. Why, what, have they made me a bankrupt? Oh, Father, dear Father, said Maggie, who thought that terrible word really represented the fact. Bear it well, because we love you, your children will always love you. Tom will pay them all. He says he will when he's a man. She felt her father beginning to tremble. His voice trembled too, as he said, after a few moments. Aye, my little wench, but I shall never live twice or. But perhaps you will live to see me pay everybody, Father, said Tom, speaking with a great affet. Ah, my lad, said Mr. Tolliver, shaking his head slowly, but what's broke can never be whole again. It'd be your doing, not mine. Then looking up at him, you're only sixteen. It's an uphill fight for you, but you mustn't throw it at your father. The rascals have been too many for him. I've given you a good education. That'll start you. Something in his throat half choked the last words. The flush which had alarmed his children because it had so often preceded a recurrence of paralysis had subsided, and his face looked pale and tremulous. Tom said nothing. He was still struggling against his inclination to rush away. His father remained quiet a minute or two, but his mind did not seem to be wandering again. Have they sold me up, then? he said, more calmly, as if he were possessed simply by the desire to know what had happened. Everything is sold, Father, but we don't know all about the mill and the land yet, said Tom, anxious to ward off any question leading to the fact that Wacom was the purchaser. You must not be surprised to see the room look very bare downstairs, Father, said Maggie, but there's your chair in the bureau. They are not gone. Let us go. Help me down, Luke. I'll go and see everything, said Mr. Tolliver, leaning on his stick and stretching out his other hand toward Luke. Aye, sir, said Luke, as he gave his arm to his master. You'll make up your mind a bit better when you've seen everything. You'll get used to it. That's what my mother says about her shortness of breath. She says she's made friends with it now, though she bought again its soul when it just come on. Maggie ran on before to see that all was right in the dreary parlour where the fire, dulled by the frosty sunshine, seemed part of the general shabbiness. She turned her father's chair and pushed aside the table to make an easy way for him, and then stood with a beating heart to see him enter and look around for the first time. Tom advanced before him, carrying the leg rest, and stood beside Maggie on the hearth. Of those two young hearts Tom suffered the most unmixed pain, for Maggie, with all her keen susceptibility, yet felt as if the sorrow made larger room for her love to flow in and gave breathing space to her passionate nature. No true boy feels that. He would rather go and slay the neemian lion or perform any round of heroic labours than endure perpetual appeals to his pity for evils over which he can make no conquest. Mr. Tolliver paused, just inside the door, resting on Luke, and looking round him at all the bare places, which for him were filled with the shadows of departed objects, the daily companions of his life. His faculties seemed to be renewing their strength from getting a footing on this demonstration of the senses. Ah! he said slowly, moving toward his chair. They've sold me up. They've sold me up. Then seating himself and laying down his stick, while Luke left the room, he looked round again. They've left the big Bible, he said, it's got everything in, when I was born and married. Bring it me, Tom. The quarto Bible was laid open before him at the fly-leaf, and while he was reading with slowly travelling eyes, Mrs. Tolliver entered the room, but stood in mute surprise to find her husband down already and with the great Bible before him. Ah! he said, looking at a spot where his finger rested. My mother was Margaret Beton. She died when she was forty-seven. Hers wasn't a long-lived family. We are our mother's children, Gritty and Mia. We shall go to our last bed before long. He seemed to be pausing over the record of his sister's birth and marriage, as if it were suggesting new thoughts to him. Then he suddenly looked up at Tom and said in a sharp tone of alarm, They haven't come upon us for the money as I lent him, have they? No, father, said Tom. The note was burnt. Mr. Tolliver turned his eyes on the page again and presently said, Ah! Elizabeth Dodson, it's eighteen years since I married her. The next lady-day, said Mrs. Tolliver, going up to his side and looking at the page. Her husband fixed his eyes earnestly on her face. Poor Bessie, he said, you was a pretty last then, everybody said so, and I used to think you kept your good looks rarely, but you're sorely aged. Don't you bear me ill-well? I meant to do well by you. We promised one another for better or for worse. But I never thought it would be so far worse as this, said poor Mrs. Tolliver, with a strange, scared look that had come over her of late, and my poor father gave me away, and said, Come on, so all at once. Oh, mother, said Maggie, don't talk in that way. No, I know you won't let your poor mother speak. That's been the way all my life. Your father never minded what I said. It had been of no use for me to beg and to pray. It had been no use now, not if I was to go down on my hands and knees. Don't say so, Bessie, said Mr. Tolliver, whose pride in these first moments of humiliation was in abeyance to the sense of some justice in his wife's reproach. If there's anything left as I could do to make you amends, I wouldn't say you nay. Then we might stay here and get a living, and I might keep you among my own sisters, and me being such a good wife to you and never crossed you from week's end to week's end, and they'll all say so. They say it had been nothing but right, only you're so turned against Wakeham. Mother, said Tom Severely, this is not the time to talk about that. Let her be, said Mr. Tolliver. Say what you mean, Bessie. Why now the mill in the land's all Wakeham's, and he's got everything in his hands? What's the use of setting your face against him, when he says you may stay here and speaks as fair as can be, and says you may manage the business and have thirty shillings a week, and a horse to ride about to market? And where have we got to put our heads? We must go into one of the cottages in the village. Me and my children brought down to that, and all because you must set your mind against folks till there's no turning you. Mr. Tolliver had sunk back in his chair, trembling. You may do as you like with me, Bessie, he said in a low voice. I've been the bringing of you to poverty. This world's too many for me. I'm not but a bankrupt. It's no use standing up for anything now. Father, said Tom, I don't agree with my mother or my uncles, and I don't think you ought to submit to be under Wakeham. I get a pound a week now, and you can find something else to do when you get well. Say no more, Tom. Say no more. I've had enough for this day. Give me a kiss, Bessie, and let us bear one another no ill will. We shall never be young again. This world's been too many for me. CHAPTER IX. AN ITEM ADDED TO THE FAMILY REGISTER That first moment of renunciation and submission was followed by days of violent struggle in the miller's mind, as the gradual access of bodily strength brought with it increasing ability to embrace in one view all the conflicting conditions under which he found himself. Feeble limbs easily resigned themselves to be tethered, and when we are subdued by sickness it seems possible to us to fulfill pledges which the old vigor comes back and breaks. There were times when poor Tulliver thought the fulfillment of his promise to Bessie was something quite too hard for human nature. He had promised her without knowing what she was going to say. She might as well have asked him to carry a ton weight on his back. But again there were many feelings arguing on her side, besides the sense that life had been made hard to her by having married him. He saw a possibility, by much pinching, of saving money out of his salary toward paying a second dividend to his creditors, and it would not be easy elsewhere to get a situation such as he could fill. He had led an easy life, ordering much and working little, and had no aptitude for any new business. He must perhaps take today labor, and his wife must have help from her sisters. A prospect doubly bitter to him. Now they had let all Bessie's precious things be sold, probably because they liked to set her against him by making her feel that he had brought her to that path. He listened to their admonitory talk, when they came to urge on him what he was bound to do for poor Bessie's sake, with averted eyes, that every now and then flashed on them furtively when their backs were turned. Nothing but the dread of needing their help could have made it an easier alternative to take their advice. But the strongest influence of all was the love of the old premises where he had run about when he was a boy just as Tom had done after him. The Tullivers had lived on this spot for generations, and he had sat listening on a low stool on winter evenings, while his father talked of the old half-timbered mill that had been there before the last great floods which damaged it so that his grandfather pulled it down and built the new one. It was when he got able to walk about and look at all the old objects that he felt the strain in his clinging affection for the old home as part of his life, part of himself. He couldn't bear to think of himself living on any other spot than this, where he knew the sound of every gate door and felt that the shape and color of every roof and weather stain and broken hillock was good, because his growing senses had been fed on them. Our instructed vagrancy, which was hardly time to linger by the hedge-rows, but runs away early to the tropics and is at home with palms and banyons, which is nourished on books of travel and stretches the theater of its imagination to the Zambezi, can hardly get a dim notion of what an old-fashioned man like Tulliver felt for this spot, where all his memories centered and where life seemed like a familiar smooth-handled tool that the fingers clutch with loving ease, and just now he was living in that freshened memory of the far-off time which comes to us in the passive hours of recovery from sickness. I, Luke, he said one afternoon as he stood looking over the orchard gate. I remembered the day they planted those apple trees. My father was a huge man for planting. It was like a merry-making to him to get a cart full of young trees, and I used to stand in the cold with him and follow him about like a dog. Then he turned round and, leaning against the gatepost, looked at the opposite buildings. The old mill had missed me, I think, Luke. There's a story as when the mill changes hands, the river's angry. I've heard my father say it many a time. There's no telling whether there may be some at end the story, for this is a puzzling world, and old Harry's got a finger in it. It's been too many for me, I know. I, sir, said Luke, with soothing sympathy. What would the rust on the wheat and the fire on the ricks in that, as I've seen in my time, things often looks comical. There's the bacon fat with our last pig run away like butter. It leaves not but a scratchin'. It's just as if it was yesterday now, Mr. Tulliver went on, when my father began the malting. I remember, the day they finished the malt house, I thought some at great was to come of it, for we'd a plumb pudding that day in a bit of a feast, and I said to my mother—she was a fine, dark-eyed woman, my mother was—the little wench'll be as like her as two peas. Here Mr. Tulliver put his stick between his legs and took out his snuff-box, for the greater enjoyment of this anecdote, which dropped from him in fragments, as if he every other moment lost narration and vision. I was a little chap no higher much than my mother's knee. She was sore fond of us children, gritty in me, and so I said to her, Mother, I said, shall we have plumb pudding every day because of the malt house? She used to tell me of that till her dying day. She was but a young woman when she died, my mother was. But it's forty good years since they finished the malt house, and it isn't many days out of them all as I haven't looked out into the yard there, the first thing in the morning. All weathers, from year's end to year's end, I should go off my head in a new place. I should be like as if I'd lost my way. It's all hard whichever way I look at it. The harness'll gall me, but it'd be someut to draw along the old road instead of a new one. I, sir, said Luke. You'd be a deal better here nor in some new place. I can't abide new places, my son. Things is always awkward. Narrow-wheeled wagons, belike, and the styles all another sort, and oat-cake of some places, toward the head of the floss there. It's poor work changing your countryside. But I doubt, Luke, they'll be forgetting what I've been and making you do with a lad, and I must help a bit with the mill. You'll have a worse place. Narrow-mind, sir, said Luke. I shan't plague, my son. I've been with you twenty year, and you can't get twenty year with Wilson for him. No more nor you can make the trees grow. You mun-wait till God Almighty sends him. I can't abide new victuals nor new faces. I can't. You never know but what they'll gripe you. The walk was finished in silence after this, for Luke had disburdened himself of thoughts to an extent that left his conversational resources quite barren, and Mr. Tulliver had relapsed from his recollections into a painful meditation on the choice of hardships before him. Maggie noticed that he was unusually absent that evening at tea, and afterward he sat leaning forward in his chair, looking at the ground, moving his lips, and shaking his head from time to time. Then he looked hard at Mrs. Tulliver, who was knitting opposite him, then at Maggie, who, as she bent over her sewing, was intensely conscious of some drama going forward in her father's mind. Suddenly he took up the poker and broke the large coal fiercely. Dear heart, Mr. Tulliver, what can you be thinking of? said his wife, looking up an alarm. It's very wasteful breaking the coal, and we've got hardly any large coal left, and I don't know where the rest is to come from. I don't think you're quite so well tonight, are you, father? said Maggie. You seem uneasy. Why, how is it Tom doesn't come? said Mr. Tulliver impatiently. Dear heart, is it time? I must go and get his supper, said Mrs. Tulliver, laying down her knitting and leaving the room. It's nigh upon half past eight, said Mr. Tulliver. He'll be here soon. Go, go, and get the big Bible and open it at the beginning where everything's set down and get the pen and ink. Maggie obeyed, wondering, but her father gave no further orders and only sat listening for Tom's footfall on the gravel, apparently irritated by the wind which had risen and was roaring so as to drown all other sounds. There was a strange light in his eyes that rather frightened Maggie. She began to wish that Tom would come too. There he is then, said Mr. Tulliver in an excited way when the knot came at last. Maggie went to open the door, but her mother came out of the kitchen hurriedly saying, Stop a bit, Maggie, I'll open it. Mrs. Tulliver had begun to be a little frightened at her boy, but she was jealous of every office others did for him. Your supper is ready by the kitchen fire, my boy. She said, as he took off his hat and coat, You shall have it by yourself just as you like it, I won't speak to you. I think my father wants Tom, mother, said Maggie. He must come into the parlor first. Tom entered with his usual sat and evening face, but his eyes fell immediately on the open Bible and the ink stand, and he glanced with a look of anxious surprise at his father, who was saying, Come, come, you're late, I want you. Is there anything the matter, Father? said Tom. You sit down, all of you, said Mr. Tulliver, peremptorily. And Tom, sit down here. I've got something for you to write in the Bible. They all three sat down, looking at him. He began to speak slowly, looking first at his wife. I've made up my mind, Bessie, and I'll be as good as my word to you. There will be the same grave made for us to lie down in, and we mustn't be bearing one another ill will. I'll stop in the old place, and I'll serve under Wacom, and I'll serve him like an honest man. There is no Tulliver, but what's honest. Mind that, Tom. Hear his voice rose. They'll have it to throw up against me as I paid a dividend, but it wasn't my fault. It was because there's rascals in the world. They've been too many for me, and I must give in. I'll put my neck in harness, for you've a right to say as I've brought you into trouble, Bessie, and I'll serve him as honest as if he was no rascal. I'm an honest man, though I shall never hold my head up no more. I'm a tree as is broke. A tree as is broke. He paused and looked on the ground. Then suddenly, raising his head, he said in a louder yet deeper tone. But I won't forgive him. I know what they say. He never meant me any harm. That's the way old Harry props up the rascals. He's been at the bottom of everything. But he's a fine gentleman. I know, I know. I shouldn't have gone to law, they say. But who made it so as there was no arbitrate and no justice to be got? It signifies nothing to him. I know that. He's one of them fine gentlemen as get money by doing business for poorer folks, and when he's made beggars of them he'll give him charity. I won't forgive him. I wish he might be punished with shame till his own son would like to forget him. I wish he may do summit as they'd make him work at the treadmill. But he won't. He's too big a rascal to let the law lay hold on him. And you mind this, Tom. You never forgive him, neither, if you mean to be my son. There'll may become a time when you may make him feel it'll never come to me. I've got my head under the yoke. Now, write. Write it in the Bible. Oh, Father, what? said Maggie, sinking down by his knee, pale and trembling. It's wicked to curse and bear malice. It isn't wicked, I tell you, said her father fiercely. It's wicked as the rascals should prosper. It's the devils doing. Do as I tell you, Tom. Write. What am I to write? said Tom with gloomy submission. Write as your father, Edward Tulliver, took service under John Wakeham. The man has had helped to ruin him, because I promised my wife to make her what amends I could for her trouble, and because I wanted to die in the old place where I was born and my father was born. Put that in the right words, you know how, and then write, as I don't forgive Wakeham for all that, and for all I'll serve him honest, I wish evil may befall him. Write that. There was a dead silence as Tom's pen moved along the paper. Mrs. Tulliver looked scared, and Maggie trembled like a leaf. Now let me hear what you've wrote, said Mr. Tulliver. Tom read aloud slowly. Now write. Write as you'll remember what Wakeham's done to your father, and you'll make him and his feel it if ever the day comes, and sign your name, Thomas Tulliver. Oh no, Father. Dear Father, said Maggie, almost choked with fear. He shouldn't make Tom write that. Be quiet, Maggie, said Tom. I shall write it. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Leanne Howlett. The Mill on the Floss by George Elliott. Book 4. The Valley of Humiliation. Chapter 1. A Variation of Protestantism Unknown to Basway. Journeying down the Rhone on a summer's day, you have perhaps felt the sunshine made dreary by those roined villages which stud the banks in certain parts of its course, telling how the swift river once rose, like an angry, destroying god, sweeping down the feeble generations whose breath is in their nostrils, and making their dwellings a desolation. Strange contrast you may have thought between the effect produced on us by these dismal remnants of commonplace houses, which in their best days were but the sign of assorted life, belonging in all its details to our own vulgar era, and the effect produced by those ruins on the castled Rhine, which have crumbled and mellowed into such harmony with the green and rocky steeps that they seemed to have a natural fitness, like the mountain pine. Nay, even in the day when they were built they must have had this fitness, as if they had been raised by an earth-born race who had inherited from their mighty parents a sublime instinct of form. And that was a day of romance. If those robber barons were somewhat grim and drunken ogres, they had a certain grandeur of the wild beast in them. They were forest-bores with tusk, tearing and rending, not the ordinary domestic grunter. They represented the demon forces forever in collision with beauty, virtue, and the gentle uses of life. They made a fine contrast in the picture with the wandering menstrual, the soft-lipped princess, the pious recluse, and the timid Israelite. That was a time of color when the sunlight fell on glancing steel and floating banners, a time of adventure and fierce struggle. Nay, of living, religious art and religious enthusiasm, for were not cathedrals built in those days and did not great emperors leave their western palaces to die before the infidel strongholds in the sacred east. Therefore it is that these wrying castles thrill me with a sense of poetry. They belong to the grand historic life of humanity and raise up for me the vision of an echo. But these dead-tinted, hollow-eyed, angular skeletons of villages on the Rhone oppressed me with the feeling that human life, very much of it, is a narrow, ugly, groveling existence, which even calamity does not elevate, but rather tends to exhibit in all its bare vulgarity of conception. And I have a cruel conviction that the lives these ruins are the traces of were part of a gross sum of obscure vitality that would be swept into the same oblivion with the generations of ants and beavers. Perhaps something akin to this oppressive feeling may have weighed upon you in watching this old-fashioned family life on the banks of the Floss, which even sorrow hardly suffices to lift above the level of the tragic comic. It is a sordid life, you say, this of the Tullivers and Dodson's, irradiated by no sublime principles, no romantic visions, no active self-renouncing faith, moved by none of those wild uncontrollable passions which create the dark shadows of misery and crime, without that primitive, rough simplicity of wants, that hard, submissive, ill-paid toil, that childlike spelling out of what nature has written, which gives its poetry to peasant life. Here one has conventional worldly notions and habits without instruction and without polish, surely the most prosaic form of human life, proud respectability in a gig of unfashionable build, worldliness without side dishes. Observing these people narrowly, even when the iron hand of misfortune has shaken them from their unquestioning hold on the world, one sees little trace of religion, still less of a distinctively Christian creed. Their belief in the unseen, so far as it manifests itself at all, seems to be rather a pagan kind. Their moral notions, though held with strong tenacity, seem to have no standard beyond her hereditary custom. You could not live among such people. You were stifled for want of an outlet towards something beautiful, great or noble. You were irritated with these dull men and women as a kind of population out of keeping with the earth on which they live, with this rich plain where the great river flows forever onward, and links the small pulse of the old English town with the beatings of the world's mighty heart. A vigorous superstition that lashes its gods or lashes its own back seems to be more congruous with the mystery of the human lot than the mental condition of these Emmett-like Dodson's and Tulliver's. I share with you this sense of oppressive narrowness, but it is necessary that we should feel it, if we care to understand how it acted on the lives of Tom and Maggie, how it has acted on young natures in many generations, that in the onward tendency of human things have risen above the mental level of the generation before them, to which they have been nevertheless tied by the strongest fibers of their hearts. The suffering, whether of martyr or victim, which belongs to every historical advance of mankind, is represented in this way in every town and by hundreds of obscure hearths, and we need not shrink from this comparison of small things with great, for does not science tell us that its highest striving is after the ascertainment of a unity which shall bind the smallest things with the greatest? In natural science I have understood there is nothing petty to the mind that has a large vision of relations, and to which every single object suggests a vast sum of conditions. It is surely the same with the observation of human life. Certainly the religious and moral ideas of the Dodson's and Tulliver's were of too specific a kind to be arrived at deductively, from the statement that they were part of the Protestant population of Great Britain. Their theory of life had its core of soundness as all theories must have on which decent and prosperous families have been reared and have flourished, but it had the very slightest tincture of theology. If in the maiden days of the Dodson sisters, their bibles opened more easily at some parts than others, it was because of dried tulip petals, which had been distributed quite impartially without preference for the historical, devotional, or doctrinal. Their religion was of a simple semi-pagan kind, but there was no heresy in it, if heresy properly means choice, for they didn't know there was any other religion except that of chapel-goers which appeared to run in families like asthma. How should they know? The vicar of their pleasant rural parish was not a controversialist, but a good hand at wist, and one who had a joke always ready for a blooming female parishioner. The religion of the Dodson's consisted in revering whatever was customary and respectable. It was necessary to be baptized, else one could not be buried in the churchyard, and to take the sacrament before death as a security against more dimly understood perils, but it was of equal necessity to have the proper pallbearers and well cured hams at one's funeral and to leave an unimpeachable will. A Dodson would not be taxed with the omission of anything that was becoming or that belonged to that eternal fitness of things, which was plainly indicated in the practice of the most substantial parishioners and in the family traditions, such as obedience to parents, faithfulness to kindred, industry, rigid honesty, thrift, the thorough scouring of wooden and copper utensils, the hoarding of coins likely to disappear from the currency, the production of first-rate commodities for the market, and the general preference of whatever was homemade. The Dodson's were a very proud race and their pride lay in the utter frustration of all desire to tax them with the breach of traditional duty or propriety. A wholesome pride in many respects since it identified honor with perfect integrity, thoroughness of work, and faithfulness to admitted rules, and society owes some worthy qualities in many of her members to mothers of the Dodson class, who made their butter and their fromity well and would have felt disgraced to make it otherwise. To be honest and poor was never a Dodson motto, still less to seem rich though being poor. Rather, the family badge was to be honest and rich, and not only rich, but richer than was supposed. To live respected and have the proper bearers at your funeral was an achievement of the ends of existence that would be entirely nullified if, on the reading of your will, you sank in the opinion of your fellow men, either by turning out to be poorer than they expected, or by leaving your money in a capricious manner without strict regard to degrees of kin. The right thing must always be done toward kindred. The right thing was to correct them severely, if they were other than a credit to the family, but still not to alienate from them the smallest rightful share in the family's shoebuckles and other property. A conspicuous quality in the Dodson character was its genuineness. Its vices and virtues alike were phases of a proud, honest egoism, which had a hearty dislike to whatever made against its own credit and interest, and would be frankly hard of speech to inconvenient kin, but would never forsake or ignore them, would not let them want bread, but only require them to eat it with bitter herbs. The same sort of traditional belief ran in the Tulliver veins, but it was carried in richer blood, having elements of generous imprudence, warm affection, and hot-tempered rashness. Mr. Tulliver's grandfather had been heard to say that he was ascended from one Ralph Tulliver, a wonderfully clever fellow who had ruined himself. It is likely enough that the clever Ralph was a high liver, road-spirited horses, and was very decidedly of his own opinion. On the other hand, nobody had ever heard of a Dodson who had ruined himself. It was not the way of that family. If such were the views of life on which the Dodson's and Tulliver's had been reared in the praiseworthy past of pit and high prices, you would infer from what you already know concerning the state of society in St. Augs that there had been no highly modifying influence to act on them in their mature life. It was still possible, even in that later time of anti-Catholic preaching, for people to hold many pagan ideas and believe themselves good church people, not withstanding. So we need hardly feel any surprise at the fact that Mr. Tulliver, though a regular churchgoer, recorded his vindictiveness on the fly-leaf of his Bible. It was not that any harm could be said concerning the vicar of that charming rural parish to which Doracult Mill belonged. He was a man of excellent family, an irreproachable bachelor of elegant pursuits, had taken honors and held a fellowship. Mr. Tulliver regarded him with dutiful respect as he did everything else belonging to the church service. But he considered that church was one thing in common sense another, and he wanted nobody to tell him what common sense was. Certain seeds which were required to find anitis for themselves under unfavorable circumstances had been supplied by nature with an apparatus of hooks, so that they would get a hold on very unreceptive surfaces. The spiritual seed which had been scattered over Mr. Tulliver had apparently been destitute of any corresponding provision, and it slipped off to the winds again from a total absence of hooks. End of Book 4, Chapter 1, Recording by Leanne Howlett. Book 4, Chapter 2 of The Mill on the Floss. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Leanne Howlett. The Mill on the Floss by George Elliott. Book 4, The Valley of Humiliation. Chapter 2. The torn nest is pierced by the thorns. There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus and produces an excitement, which is transient strength. It is in the slow, changed life that follows, in the time when sorrow has become stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteracts its pain, in the time when day follows day and dull, unexpected sameness, and trial is a dreary routine. It is then that despair threatens. It is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt, and eye and ear are strained after some unlearned secret of our existence, which shall give to endurance the nature of satisfaction. This time of utmost need was come to Maggie, with her short span of thirteen years. To the usual percosity of the girl, she added that early experience of struggle, of conflict between the inward impulse and outward fact, which is the lot of every imaginative and passionate nature, and the years since she hammered the nails into her wooden fetish among the worm-eaten shelves of the attic had been filled with so eager a life in the triple world of reality, books, and waking dreams, that Maggie was strangely old for her years, and everything except in her entire want of that prudence and self-command, which were the qualities that made Tom manly in the midst of his intellectual boyishness. And now her lot was beginning to have a still, sad monotony, which threw her more than ever on her inward self. Her father was able to attend to business again, his affairs were settled, and he was acting as Wakeham's manager on the old spot. Tom went to and fro every morning and evening, and became more and more silent in the short intervals at home. What was there to say? One day was like another, and Tom's interest in life, driven back and crushed on every other side, was concentrating itself into the one channel of ambitious resistance to misfortune. The peculiarities of his father and mother were very irksome to him, now they were laid bare of all the softening accompaniments of an easy, prosperous home. For Tom had very clear prosaic eyes, not apt to be dimmed by mists of feeling or imagination. Poor Mrs. Tullibrit seemed would never recover her old self, her placid household activity. How could she? The objects among which her mind had moved complacently were all gone. All the little hopes and schemes and speculations, all the pleasant little cares about her treasures, which had made the world quite comprehensible to her for a quarter of a century, since she had made her first purchase of the sugar tongs, had been suddenly snatched away from her, and she remained bewildered in this empty life. Why that should have happened to her, which had not happened to other women, remained an insoluble question by which she expressed her perpetual, ruminating comparison of the past with the present. It was piteous to see the comely woman getting thinner and more worn under a bodily as well as mental restlessness, which made her often wander about the empty house after her work was done, until Maggie, becoming alarmed about her, would seek her, and bring her down by telling her how it vexed Tom that she was injuring her help by never sitting down and resting herself. Yet amidst this helpless imbecility, there was a touching trait of humble, self-devoting maternity, which made Maggie feel tenderly toward her poor mother amidst all the little wearing griefs caused by her mental feebleness. She would let Maggie do none of the work that was heaviest and most soiling to the hands, and was quite peevish when Maggie attempted to relieve her from her great brushing and scouring. Let it along, my dear. Your hands will get as hard as hard, she would say. It's your mother's place to do that. I can't do the sewing. My eyes fail me. And she would still brush and carefully tend Maggie's hair, which she had become reconciled to in spite of its refusal to curl, now it was so long and massy. Maggie was not her pet child, and in general would have been much better if she had been quite different. Yet the womanly heart, so bruised in its small personal desires, found a future to rest on in the life of this young thing, and the mother pleased herself with wearing out her own hands to save the hands that had so much more life in them. But the constant presence of her mother's regretful bewilderment was less painful to Maggie than that of her father's sullen, incommunicative depression. As long as the paralysis was upon him, and it seemed as if he might always be in a childlike condition of dependence, as long as he was still only half awakened to his trouble, Maggie had felt the strong tide of pitying love almost as an inspiration, a new power that would make the most difficult life easy for his sake. But now, instead of childlike dependence, there had come a taciturn, hard concentration of purpose, in strange contrast with his old vehement communicativeness and high spirit, and this lasted from day to day, and from week to week, the dull eye never brightening with any eagerness or any joy. It is something cruelly incomprehensible to youthful natures, this somber sameness in middle-aged and elderly people whose life has resulted in disappointment and discontent. To whose face as a smile becomes so strange that the sad lines all about the lips and brow seem to take no notice of it, and it hurries away again for want of a welcome. Why will they not kindle up and be glad sometimes, thinks young elasticity? It would be so easy if they only like to do it. And these leaden clouds that never part are apt to create impatience, even in the filial affection that streams forth in nothing but tenderness and pity in the time of more obvious affliction. Mr. Tulliver lingered nowhere away from home. He hurried away from market. He refused all invitations to stay and chat as in old times, and the houses where he called on business. He could not be reconciled with his lot. There was no attitude in which his pride did not feel its bruises, and that all behavior toward him, whether kind or cold, he detected an illusion to the change in his circumstances. Even the days on which Wakeham came to ride round the land and inquire into the business were not so black to him as those market days on which he had met several creditors who had accepted a composition from him. To save something toward the repayment of those creditors was the object toward which he was now bending all his thoughts and efforts, and under the influence of this all-compelling demand of his nature, the somewhat profuse man, who hated to be stinted or to stint anyone else in his own house, was gradually metamorphosed into the keen-eyed grudger of morsels. Mrs. Tulliver could not economize enough to satisfy him, in their food and firing, and he would eat nothing himself but what was of the coarsest quality. Tom, though depressed and strongly repelled by his father's sullenness and the juriness of home, entered thoroughly into his father's feelings about paying the creditors, and the poor lad brought his first quarter's money with a delicious sense of achievement and gave it to his father to put into the tin box which held the savings. The little store of sovereigns in the tin box seemed to be the only sight that brought a faint beam of pleasure into the miller's eyes, faint and transient for it was soon dispelled by the thought that the time would be long, perhaps longer than his life, before the narrow savings could remove the hateful incubus of debt. A deficit of more than five hundred pounds with the accumulating interest seemed a deep pit to fill with the savings from thirty shillings a week, even when Tom's probable savings were to be added. On this one point there was entire community of feeling in the four widely differing beings who sat round the dying fire of sticks which made a cheap warmth for them on the verge of bedtime. Mrs. Tulliver carried the proud integrity of the Dodson's in her blood, and had been brought up to think that to wrong people of their money, which was another phrase for debt, was a sort of moral pillory. It would have been wickedness to her mind to have run counter to her husband's desire to do the right thing and retrieve his name. She had a confused, dreamy notion that if the creditors were all paid, her plate and linen ought to come back to her. But she had an inbred perception that while people owed money they were unable to pay, they couldn't rightly call anything their own. She murmured a little that Mr. Tulliver so peremptorily refused to receive anything in repayment from Mr. and Mrs. Moss. But to all his requirements of household economy she was submissive to the point of denying herself the cheapest indulgences of mere flavor. Her only rebellion was to smuggle into the kitchen something that would make rather a better supper than usual for Tom. These narrow notions about debt held by the old-fashioned Tullivers may perhaps excite a smile on the faces of many readers in these days of wide commercial views and wide philosophy, according to which everything writes itself without any trouble of ours. The fact that my tradesman is out of pocket by me is to be looked at through the serene certainty that somebody else's tradesman is in pocket by somebody else. And since there must be bad debts in the world, why it is mere egoism not to like that we in particular should make them instead of our fellow citizens, I am telling the history of very simple people who had never had any illuminating doubts as to personal integrity and honor. Under all this grim melancholy and narrowing concentration of desire Mr. Tulliver retained the feeling toward his little winch which made her presence a need to him though it would not suffice to cheer him. She was still the desire of his eyes but the sweet spring of fatherly love was now mingled with bitterness like everything else. When Maggie laid down her work at night it was her habit to get a low stool and sit by her father's knee leaning her cheek against it. How she wished he would stroke her head or give some sign that he was soothed by the sense that he had a daughter who loved him. But now she got no answer to her little caresses either from her father or from Tom the two idols of her life. Tom was weary and abstracted in the short intervals when he was at home and her father was bitterly preoccupied with the thought that the girl was growing up was shooting up into a woman and how was she to do well in life. She had a poor chance for marrying down in the world as they were and he hated the thought of her marrying poorly as her Aunt Gritty had done. That would be a thing to make him turn in his grave the little winch so pulled down by children in toil as her Aunt Moss was. When uncultured minds confined to a narrow range of personal experience are under the pressure of continued misfortune their inward life is apt to become a perpetually repeated round of sad and bitter thoughts. The same words, the same scenes are evolved over and over again. The same mood accompanies them. The end of the year finds them as much what they were at the beginning as if they were machines set to a recurrent series of movements. The sameness of the days was broken by few visitors. Uncles and aunts paid only short visits now. Of course they could not stay to meals and the constraint caused by Mr. Tulliver's savage silence which seemed to add to the hollow resonance of the bare uncarpeted rooms when the aunts were talking heightened the unpleasantness of these family visits on all sides and tended to make them rare. As for other acquaintances there is a chill air surrounding those who are down in the world and people are glad to get away from them as from a cold room. Human beings, mere men and women without furniture without anything to offer you who have ceased to count as anybody present an embarrassing negation of reasons for wishing to see them or of subjects on which to converse with them. At that distant day there was a dreary isolation in the civilized Christian society of these realms for families that had dropped below their original level unless they belonged to a sectarian church which gets some warmth of brotherhood by walling in the sacred fire. End of Book 4, Chapter 2 Recording by Leanne Howlett Chapter 3 of The Mill in the Floss This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Janna in Washington D.C. The Mill in the Floss by George Elliott Book 4, The Valley of Humiliation Chapter 3, A Voice from the Past One afternoon when the chestnuts were coming into flower Maggie had brought her chair outside the front door and was seated there with a book on her knees. Her dark eyes had wandered from the book but they did not seem to be enjoying the sunshine which pierced the screen of Jasmine on the projecting porch at her right and threw leafy shadows on her pale round cheek. They seemed rather to be searching for something that was not disclosed by the sunshine. It had been a more miserable day than usual. Her father, after a visit of Wacom's, had a paroxysm of rage in which for some trifling fault he had beaten the boy who served in the Mill. Once before, since his illness, he had a similar paroxysm in which he had beaten his horse and the scene had left a lasting terror in Maggie's mind. The thought had risen that some time or other he might beat her mother if she happened to speak in her feeble way at the wrong moment. The keenest of all dread with her was lest her father should add to his present misfortune, the wretchedness of doing something irretrievably disgraceful. The battered schoolbook of Thoms, which she held on her knees, could give her no fortitude under the pressure of that dread and again and again her eyes had filled with tears as they wandered vaguely seeing neither the chestnut trees nor the distant horizon, but only future scenes of home sorrow. Suddenly she was roused by the sound of the opening gate and the footsteps on the gravel. He was not Tom who was entering, but a man in a seal-skin cap and a blue-plush waistcoat carrying a pack on his back and followed closely by a bull terrier of brindled coat and defiant aspect. Oh, Bob, it's you, said Maggie, starting up with a smile of pleasal recognition, for there had been no abundance of kind acts to efface the recollection of Bob's generosity. I'm so glad to see you. Thank you, Miss, said Bob, lifting his cap, showing a delighted face, but immediately relieving himself of some accompanying embarrassment by looking down on his dog and saying in a tone of disgust, Get out with you, you thundering sonning. My brother is not at home yet, Bob, said Maggie. He is always at St. Augs in the daytime. Well, Miss, said Bob, I should be glad to see Mr. Tom, but that isn't just what I've come for. Look here. Bob was in the act of depositing his pack on the doorstep and, with it, a row of small books fastened together with a string. Apparently, however, they were not the object to which he wished to call Maggie's attention, but rather something which he had carried under his arm, wrapped in a red handkerchief. See here, he said again, laying the red parcel on the others and unfolding it. You won't think how I'm making too free, Miss, I hope, but I light it on these books, and I thought they might make up to you a bit for them as you've lost, for I hear you speak up pictures, and as for pictures, look here. The opening of the red handkerchief had disclosed a superannuated keepsake and six or seven numbers of a portrait gallery in Royal Octavo. In the emphatic request to look, referred to a portrait of George IV and all the majesty of his depressed cranium and voluminous necklace. There's all sorts of gentlemen here, Bob went on, turning over the leaves with some excitement, with all sorts of nuns and some bald and some with wigs, Parliament gentlemen, I reckon, and here he added, opening the keepsake. Here's ladies for you, some with curly hair and some with smooth, and some with smiling with their heads of one side and some as if they're going to cry. Look here, as sitting on the ground out the door, dressed like the ladies, I ain't seen God out of the carriages at the balls in the old hall there. My eyes, I wonder what the chaps wear as to go according them. I sought up till the clock was gone twelve last night and looking at them, I did, till they stared at me out of those pictures as if they'd known when I spoke to them. But lords, I shouldn't know what to say to them. They'll be more fit in company for you, Miss. And the man at the bookstore, he said they banged everything for pictures. He said they were the first rate article. And you've brought them for me, Bob, said Maggie, deeply touched by the simple kindness. How very, very good of you. But I'm afraid you gave a great deal of money for them. Not me, said Bob. I had to give three times the money they'll make you up to you a bit for them as was sold away from you, Miss. For I never forgot how you look when you've read about the books being gone. It stuck by me as if it was a picture hanging before me. And when I see the books open up or stool with the lady looking out of with the eyes a bit like you and when you was threatened, you'll excuse my taking liberty, Miss. I thought I'd make free to buy it for you. And then I bought the small books full of gentlemen to match. And then, here, Bob, took up the small stringed packets of books. I thought you might like a bit more print as well as the pictures. And I got these for a say so. They're crammed full of print and I thought they do no harm coming along with these bettermost books. And I hope you won't say me nay and tell me as you won't have them like Mr. Dom did with them sovereigns. No indeed, Bob, said Maggie. I'm very thankful to you for thinking of me and being so good to me and Tom. I don't think anyone ever did such a kind thing for me before. I haven't many friends who care for me. I have a dog, Miss. They're better friends nor any Christian, said Bob, laying down his back again, which he had taken up with the intention of hurrying away. For he felt considerable shyness in talking to a young lass like Maggie, though, as he usually said of himself, his tongue overrung him when he began to speak. I can't give you, Mumps, cause he'd break his heart to go away from me or... Mumps, what do you say, you riff-riff? Mumps declined to express himself more disusely than by a single affirmative movement of his tail. But I get you a pop, Miss, and welcome. No, thank you, Bob. We have a yard dog, and I may keep a dog of my own. Oh, that's a pity. Else there's a pop. If you don't mind about it not being thoroughbred, it's mother acts in the punch show, an uncommon sensible bitch. She means more sense with her bark nor half the chaps can put into their talk from breakfast to sundown. There's one chap carries pots, a poor low trade as any of the road. He says, Why Toby's not but a mongrel. There's not to look at in her. But I says to him, Why aren't you a nursing but a mongrel? There wasn't much picking on your father and your mother to look at you. Not but I like a bit of breed myself, but I can't abide to see one cur grinning at another. I wish you good evening, Miss, said Bob, abruptly taking up his pack again, under the consciousness that his tongue was acting in an undisciplined manner. Will you come in the evening sometime and see my brother, Bob, said Maggie? Yes, Miss, thank you. Another time. You'll give my duty to him, if you please. Hey, he's a fine-grown chap, Mr. Thomas. He took to groaning in the legs, and I didn't. The pack was down again now, the hook of the stick having somehow gone wrong. You don't call mumps a cur, I suppose, said Maggie, dividing that any interest you showed on mumps would be gratifying to his master. No, Miss, a fine way of that, said Bob with pitying smile. Mumps is a fine across as you'll see anywhere along the floss, and in bin of leaf barge times now. Why, the gentry stops to look at him, but you won't catch mumps while looking at the gentry much. He minds his own business, he does. The expression of jumped mumps' face, which seemed to be tolerating the superfluous existence of objects in general, was strongly confirmatory of this wise praise. He looked dressably surly, said Maggie, would he let me pat him? Aye, that he would, and thank you. He knows his company, mumps does. He isn't a dog as old be caught with his gingerbread. He'd smell it, thief, a good deal stronger, nor the gingerbread he would. Loers, I talk to him by the hour together, when I'm walking alone places, and if I ain't done a bit of mischief, I always tell him. And God knows secrets, but what mumps knows him. He knows about my big thumb, he does. Your big thumb? What's that, Bob, said Maggie? That's what it is, Miss, said Bob quickly, exhibiting a singularly broad specimen of that difference between the man and the monkey. It tells it measuring off a flannel, you see. I carry flannel because it's light from my pack, and it's dear stuff, you see, so a big thumb tells. I clap my thumb at the end of the yard and cuddle hither side of it, and the old women aren't up to it. But Bob, said Maggie, looking serious, that's cheating. I don't like to hear you say that. Don't you miss, said Bob regretfully, that I'm sorry I said it, but I'm so used to talking to mumps, and he doesn't mind a bit of cheating, when it's them skin-flint women as haggle and haggle and would like to get their flannel for nothing, and would never ask themselves how I got my dinner and out. I never cheat anybody as doesn't want to cheat me, Miss. Loers, I'm an honest chap, I am. Only I mustn't have a bit of sport, and now I don't go with the ferrets, and got no warmant to come over but to haggling women. I wish you good evening, Miss. Goodbye, Bob. Thank you very much for bringing me the books, and come again to see Tom. Yes, Miss, said Bob, moving on a few steps. Then turning half-round, he said, I'll leave off that trick with my big thumb if you don't think well on me for it, Miss. But it would be a pity it would. I couldn't find another trick so good, and what would be the use of having a big thumb? It might as well have been narrow. Maggie, thus exalted into Bob's exulting Madonna, laughed in spite of herself, at which her worshipper's blue eyes twinkled, too, and under these favoring auspices, he touched his cap and walked away. The days of chivalry are not gone, notwithstanding Burke's grand dirge over them. They live still and not far off worship, paid by many a youth, and man to the woman of whom he never dreams that he shall touch so much as her little finger or the hem of her robe. Bob, with the peck on his back, had as respectful an adoration for this dark-eyed maiden as if he had been a knight and armour calling aloud on her name as he pricked on to the flight. That gleam of merriment soon died away from Maggie's face, and perhaps only made the returning gloom deeper by contrast. She was too dispirited even to like answering questions about Bob's dis-present of books, and she carried them away to her bedroom, laying them down there, and seeing herself on her one stool without caring to look at them just yet. She leaned her cheek against the window frame, and thought the delight-hearted Bob had a lot much happier than hers. Maggie's sense of loneliness and utter privation of joy had deepened with the brightness of advancing spring. All the favorite outdoor nooks about home, which seemed to have done their part with her parents in nurturing and cherishing her, were now mixed up with the home sadness and gathered no smile from the sunshine. Every affection, every delight the poor child had had was like an aching nerve to her. There was no music for her anymore, no piano, no harmonized voices, no delicious strange instruments, with their passionate cries of imprisoned spirits sending a strange vibration through her frame. And of all her school life, there was nothing left for her now, but her little collection of school books, which she turned over with the sickening sense that she knew them all, and they were all barren of comfort. Even at school, she had often wished for books with more in them. Everything she learned there seemed like the ends of the long strides that snapped immediately. And now, without the indirect charm of school emulation, Telemach was mere bran, so were the hard-dry questions on Christian doctrine. There was no flavor in them, no strength. Sometimes Maggie thought she could have been contented with absorbing fancies. If she could have had all Scott's novels and all Byron's poems, then perhaps she might have found happiness enough to dull her sensibility to her actual daily life. And yet they were hardly what she wanted. She could make dream worlds of her own, but no dream world would satisfy her now. She wanted some explanation of this hard, real life, the unhappy-looking father seated at the dull breakfast table, the childish, bewildered mother, the little-sorted tasks that filled the hours, or the more oppressively emptiness of weary, joyous leisure, the need of some tender, demonstrative love, the cruel sense that Tom didn't mind what she thought or felt, and that they were no longer play-fellows together. The privation of all pleasant things that had come to her, more than to others, she wanted some key that would enable her to understand, and an understanding to endure, the heavy weight that had fallen on her young heart. If she had been taught real learning and wisdom, such as great men knew, she thought she should have held the secrets of life. If she had only books, that she might learn for herself what wise men knew. Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets. She knew little of Saints and martyrs, and had gathered as a general result of her teaching, that they were a temporary provision against the spread of Catholicism, and had all died at Smithfield. In one of these meditation it occurred to her that she had forgotten Tom's school books, which had been sent home in his trunk, but she found the stock unaccountably shrunk down to the a few old ones which had been well-thumbed, the Latin dictionary and grammar, the dialectis, a torn utropias, the well-worn Virgil, Atriarch's logic, and the exasperating Euclid. Still, Latin, Euclid and logic would surely be a considerable step in masculine wisdom, and that knowledge would made men contented and even glad to live. Not that the yearning for effectual wisdom was quite unmixed, a certain mirage would now and then rise in the desert of the future, in which she seemed to see herself honored for her surprising attainments, and so the poor child with her soul's hunger and her illusions of self-flattery began to nimble at this thick-ranged fruit of the tree of knowledge, filling her vacant hours with Latin geometry and the forms of the syllogism, and feeling a gleam of triumph now and then, that her understanding was quite equal to these particularly masculine studies. For a week or two she went on resolutely enough, though with an occasional sinking of heart, as if she had set out towards the promised land alone, and found it a thirsty, trackless, uncertain journey. In the severity of her early resolution, she would take Aldrich out into the fields, and then look off her book towards the sky, where the lark was twinkling, or to the reeds and bushes by the river, from which the waterfowl wrestled forth on its anxious, awkward flight, with a startled sense that the relations between Aldrich and this living world was extremely remote for her. The discouragement deepened as the days went on, and the eager heart gained faster and faster on the patient mind. Somehow, when she sat at the window with her book, her eyes would fix themselves blankly on the outdoor sunshine, then they would fill with tears, and sometimes, if her mother was not in the room, the studies would all end in sobbing. She rebelled against her lot, she fainted under slowniness, and fit, even of anger and hatred, towards her father and mother, who were so unlike what she would have them to be, toward Tom, who checked her, and meant her daughter feeling always by some wording different, who'd flow out over her affections unconscious, like a lava stream, and frightened her with a sense that it was not difficult for her to become a demon. Then her brain would be busy with wild romances of a flight from home in search of something less sordid and dreary. She would go to some great man, Walter Scott, perhaps, and tell him how wretched and how clever she was, and he would surely do something for her. But in the middle of her vision, her father would perhaps enter the room for the evening, and, surprised that she sat still without noticing him, would say, complainingly, come and might to fetch my slippers myself. The voice pierced through Maggie like a sword. There was another sadness beside her own, and she had been thinking of turning her back on it and forsaking it. This afternoon, the sight of Bob's cheerful, freckled face had given her discontent a new direction. She thought it was part of the hardship of her life that there was laid upon her the burden of larger wants than others seem to feel. But she had to endure this wide, hopeless yearning for that something whatever it was that was greatest and best on this earth. She wished she could have been like Bob, with his easily satisfied ignorance, or like Tom, who had something to do on which she could fix his mind with a steady purpose and disregard everything else. Poor child. As she leaned at her head against the window frame with her hands clasped tighter and tighter, and her foot beating the ground, she was as lonely in her trouble as if she had been the only girl in a civilized world of that day who had come out of her school life with a soul untrained for inevitable struggles. With no other part of her inherited chair and the hard-won treasures of thought, which generations of painful toil have laid up for the race of men, then shreds and patches of feeble literature and false history. With much futile information about Saxon and other kings of doubtful example, but unhappily quite without that knowledge of the reversible laws within and without her, which governing the habits becomes morality, and developing the feelings of submission and dependence becomes religion. As lonely as her in her trouble as if every other girl besides herself had been cherished and watched over by elder minds, not forgetful of their own early time when need was keen and impulse strong. At last Maggie's eyes glanced down in the books that lay on the window-shelf, and she had first soaked her reverie to turn over listlessly the leaves of the portrait gallery. But she soon pushed this aside to examine the little row of books tied together with strength. Yudis of the Spectator, Brasilus, Economy of Human Life, Gregory's Letters. She knew the sort of matter that was inside of all these, the Christian year, the Christian year. That seemed to be a hymn book, and she laid it down again. But Thomas A. Kempis, the name had come across her in her reading, and she felt a satisfaction, which everyone knows, of getting some ideas to attach to a name that strayed solitary in the memory. She took up the little old clumsy book with some curiosity. It had the corners turned down in many places, and some hand, now however quiet, had made at certain passages strong pen and ink marks, long sinned brown by time. Maggie turned from leaf to leaf, and read where the quiet hand pointed. Know that the love of thyself does hurt thee more than anything in the world. If thou seekest this or that, and wouldst be here or there to enjoy their own will and pleasure, thou shalt never be quiet nor free from care, for in everything somewhat will be wanting, and in every place there will be some that will cross thee, both above and below, which way, however, thou dost turn thee, everywhere thou shalt find the cross, and everywhere the necessity thou must have patience, if thou wilt have inward peace and enjoy an everlasting crown. If thou desirest to mount unto this height, thou must set out courageously, and lay the axe to the root, that thou mayest pluck up and destroy that hidden inordinate inclination to thyself, and unto all private and earthly good. On this sin, that a man inordinately love of himself, almost all dependeth, so whatsoever is thoroughly to be overcome, which evil being once overcome and subdued, that will presently ensue a great peace and tranquility. It is but little thou sufferst in comparison of them that have suffered so much, were so strongly tempted, so grievously afflicted, so many ways tried and exercised. Thou oughtest therefore to call to mind the more heavy sufferings of others, that thou mayest the easier bear thy little adversities. And if they seem not little unto thee, beware lest thy impatience be the cause thereof. Blessed are those ears that receive the whispers of the divine voice, and listen not to the whispers of the world. Blessed are those ears which harken not unto the voice which soundeth outwardly, but unto the truth which teaches inwardly. A strange thrill of awe passed to Maggie while she read, as if she had been wakened in the night by a strain of solemn music, telling of whose beings whose souls had been astir with hers was in stupor. She went on from one brown mark to another, where the quiet hand seemed to point, hardly conscious that she was reading, seeming rather to listen while a low voice said, Why dost thou here gaze about, since this is not the place of thy rest? In heaven ought to be thy dwelling, and all earthly things are to be looked on as they forward thy journey thither. All things pass away, and thou together with them. Beware thou cleverest not to unto them, lest thou be entangled in perish. If a man should give all his substance, yet it as is nothing. And if he should do great penances, yet are they but little. And if he should attain to all knowledge, he is yet far off. And if he should be of great virtue and very fervent devotion, yet is there much wanting, to wit one thing which is most necessary for him. What is that? That having left all, he leave himself, and go wholly out of himself, and retain nothing but of self-love. I have often said unto thee, and now again I say the same, forsake thyself, resign thyself, and now shall enjoy much inward peace. Then shall all vain imaginations, evil perturbations, and superfluous cares fly away. Then shall immoderate fear leave thee, and in ordinate love shall die. Maggie drew a long breath, and pushed her heavy hair back, as if to see a sudden vision more clearly. Here, then, was a secret of life that would enable her to renounce all other secrets. Here was a sublime height to be reached without the help of outward things. Here was insight, and strength, and conquest, to be won by means entirely within her own soul, where a supreme teacher was waiting to be heard. It flashed through her, like the suddenly apprehended solution of a problem. That all the miseries of her young life had come from fixing her heart on her own pleasure, as if that were the central necessity of the universe. And for the first time she saw the possibility of shifting the position from which she looked at the gratification of her own desires, of taking her stand out of herself, and looking at her own life as an insignificant part of a divinely guided whole. She read on and on in the old book, devouring eagerly the dialogues with the invisible teacher, the pattern of sorrow, the sorrows of all strength, returning to it after she had been called away, and reading till the sun went down behind the willows. With all the hurry of an imagination that could never rest in the present, she sat in the deepening twilight, forming plans of self-humiliation and entire devotedness. And in the order of first discovery, renunciation seemed to her the entrance into that satisfaction, which she had so long been craving in vain. She had not perceived, how could she, until she had lived longer, the innermost truth of the old Hmong South Warrings, that renunciation remained sorrow, though a sorrow was born willingly. Maggie was still panting for happiness. It was an ecstasy because she had found the key to it. She knew nothing of doctrines and systems, of mysticism or quietism, but this voice out of the far-off middle ages was the direct communication of a human soul's belief and experience, and came to Maggie as an unquestioned message. I suppose that is the reason why the small old-fashioned book, for which you need only pay six pence at a bookstall, works miracles to this day, turning bitter waters into sweetness. While expensive sermons and treatises nearly issued, leave all things as they were before. It was written down by a hand that waited for the heart's prompting. It is the chronicle of a solitary hidden anguish, struggle, trust and triumph, not written on velvet cushions to teach endurance to those who are treading with bleeding feet on the stones. And so it remains till all time a lasting record of human needs and human consolations. The voice of a brother, who ages ago, felt and suffered and renounced, in the cloister perhaps, with surged gown and tauntured head, with much chanting and long fasts, and with a fashion of speech different from ours, but under the same silent far-off heaven, and with the same passionate desires, the same strivings, the same failures, the same weariness. In writing the history of unfashionable families, one is apt to fall into a tone of emphasis, which is very far from being the tone of good society, where principles and beliefs are not only of an extremely moderate kind, but are always presupposed, no subject being eligible, but such as can be touched with a light and graceful irony. But then good society has its claret and its velvet carpets, its dinner engagement six weeks deep, its opera and its fairy ballrooms, rides off its ennui on thoroughbred horses, lounges at the club, has to keep clear of crinoline vortices, gets a science done by Faraday, and its religion by the superior clergy who are to be met in the best houses. How should it have time or need for belief and emphasis? But good society, floated on gossamer rings of light irony, is a very expensive production, requiring nothing less than a wide and arduous national life condensed in unfragan deafening factories, cramping itself in mines, sweating at furnaces, grinding, hammering, weaving under more or less oppression of carbonic acid, a rail spread over sheep walks, and scattered in lonely houses and huts on the clay or chalky corn lands, where the rainy days look dreary. This wide national life is based entirely on emphasis, the emphasis of want, which urges it into all the activities necessary for the maintenance of good society and light irony. It spends its heavy years often in a chill, uncarpeted fashion, amidst family discord unsoftened by long quarters. Under such circumstances, there are many among its myriads of souls who have absolutely needed an emphatic belief, life in this unpleasurable shape, demanding some solution even to unspeculative minds, just as you inquire into the stuffing of your couch when anything galls you there, whereas either down and perfect French springs excite no question. Some have an emphatic belief in alcohol and seeks their ecstasies or outside standing ground in gin, but the rest requires something that good society calls enthusiasm, something that will present motives in an entire absence of high prizes, something that will give patience and feed human love with the limb's ache with wariness and human looks are hard upon us, something clearly that lies outside personal desires that includes resignation for ourselves and active love for what is not ourselves. Now and then that sort of enthusiasm finds a far echoing voice that comes from an experience springing out of the deepest need, and it was by being brought within the long lingering vibrations of such a voice that Maggie, with her girl's face and unnoted sorrows, had found an effort and a hope that helped her through years of loneliness, making out of faith for herself without the aid of established authorities and appointed guides, for they were not at hand and her needless pressing. From which you know of her, you will not be surprised that she's through some exhilaration and willfulness, some pride and impetuosity, even into her self renunciation. Her own life was still a drama for her, in which she demanded of herself that her parts should be played with intensity. And so it came to pass that she often lost the spirit of humility by being excessive in the outward act. She often strove up to too high a flight and came down with her poor little half-legged wings dabbled in the mud. For example, she not only determined to work at plain sewing that she might contribute something toward the fund of the tin box, but she went, in the first instance, in her zeal of self-mortification to ask for it at a little shop in St. Augs, instead of getting it in a more quiet and indirect way. She could see nothing but what was entirely wrong and unkind, nay, persecuting, in Tom's reproof of her for the unnecessary act. I don't like my sister to do such things, said Tom. I'll take care that the debts are paid without your lowering yourself in that way. Surely there was some tenderness and bravery mingled with the warbliness and self-assertion of that little speech, but Maggie held it as dross, overlooking the grains of gold, and took Tom's rebuke as one of her outward crosses. Tom was very hard to her, she used to think, and her long night-watchings. To her who had always loved him so, and then she strove to be contented with that hardness, and to require nothing. That is the path we all like when we set out in our manorment of egoism, the path of martyrdom and endurance, where the palm branches grow rather than the steep highway of tolerance, such allowance and self-blame, where there are no leafy honors to be gathered and worn. The old books, Virgil, Euclid, and Aldrich, that wrinkled fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, had been all laid by. For Maggie had turned her back on the vain ambition to share the thoughts of the wise. In her first ardor, she flung away the books with a sort of triumph that she had risen above the need of them, and if they had been her own, she would have burned them, believing that she would never repent. She read so eagerly and constantly in her three books, The Bible, Thomas A. C. P. in the Christian Year, no longer rejected as a hymn book, that they filled her mind with a continual stream of rhythmic memories. And she was too ardently learning to see all nature and life in the light of her new faith, to need any other material for her mind to work on. As she sat with her well-plied needle, making shirts and other complicated stitchings, falsely called plain, by no means plain to Maggie, since the wristband and sleeve and the like had a capability of being sewed in the wrong side outward in moments of mental wandering. Hanging diligently over her sewing, Maggie was a sight any one might have been pleased to look at. That new inward life of hers, notwithstanding some volcanic upheavings of imprisoned passions, yet shown out in the face with a tender, soft light that mingled itself as added loveliness with the gradually enriched color and outline of her blossoming youth. Her mother felt the change in her with a sort of puzzled wonder that Maggie should be growing up so good. It was amazing that this once contrary child was becoming so submissive, so backward to assert her own will. Maggie used to look up from her work and find her mother's eyes fixed upon her. They were watching and waiting for the large young glance as if her elder frame got some needful warmth from it. The mother was getting fond of her tall brown girl, the only bit of furniture now in which she could bestow her anxiety and pride, and Maggie, in spite of her own ascetic wish to have no personal adornment, was obliged to give way to her mother about her hair and submit to have the abundant black locks plated into a coronet on the summit of her head. After the pitiable fashion of those antiquated times. Let your mother have that bit of pleasure, my dear, said Mrs. Tulliver. I trouble enough with your hair once. So Maggie, glad of anything that would soothe her mother and cheer their long day together, consented to the vain decoration and showed a cleanly head above her old frocks, steadily refusing, however, to look at herself in the glass. Mrs. Tulliver liked to call the father's attention to Maggie's hair and other unexpected virtues, but he had a breast reply to give. I knew well enough what she'd be before now. It's nothing new to me. But it's a pity she isn't made to come in her stuff. She'll be thrown away, I doubt. There'll be nobody to marry her as this fit for her. And Maggie's graces of mind and body fed his gloom. He sat patiently enough while she read him a chapter or said something timidly when they were alone together about trouble being turned into a blessing. He took it all as part of his daughter's goodness, which made his misfortunes the sadder to him because they damaged her chance in life. In a mind charged with an eager purpose and an unsatisfied vindictiveness, there was no room for new feelings. Mr. Tulliver did not want spiritual consolation. He wanted to shake off the degradation of death and to have his revenge. End of Book 4, Chapter 3, Recording by Janna in Washington, D.C. Book 5, Chapter 1 of The Mill in the Floss This is a LibriVox recording, all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Janna in Washington, D.C. The Mill in the Floss by George Elliott Book 5, Wheat and Tears, Chapter 1 in the Red Deeps The family's sitting room was a long room with a window at each end, one looking toward the craft and along the ripple to the bangs of the floss and the other into the mill yard. Maggie was sitting with her work against the ladder window when she saw Mr. Wacom entering the yard as usual and his fine black horse, but not alone as usual. Someone was with him, a figure in a cloak on a handsome pony. Maggie had hardly time to feel that it was Philip come back before they were in front of the window and he was raising his hat to her, while his father, catching the movement by a side glance, looked sharply round at them both. Maggie hurried away from the window and carried her work upstairs, for Mr. Wacom sometimes came in and inspected the books and Maggie felt that the meeting with Philip would be robbed of all pleasure in the presence of the two fathers. Some day perhaps she could see him when they could just shake hands and she could tell him that she remembered his goodness to Tom and the things he had said to her in the old days, though they could never be friends anymore. It was not at all agitating to Maggie to see Philip again. She retained her childish gratitude and pity toward him and remembered his cleverness. And in the early weeks of her loneliness she had continually recalled the image of him among the people who had been kind to her in life, often wishing she had him for a brother and a teacher. As they had fancied it might have been in their talk together. But that sort of wishing had been banished along with other dreams that savored of staking her own will. And she thought besides that Philip might be altered by his life abroad. He might have become worldly and really not care about her saying anything to him now. And yet his face was wonderfully little altered. It was only a larger, more manly copy of the pale small featured boy's face with the gray eyes and the boyish, waving brown hair. There was the old deformity to awaken the old pity. And after all her meditations, Maggie felt that she really should like to say a few words to him. He might still be melancholy as he always used to be and like her to look at him kindly. She wondered if he remembered how he used to like her eyes. With that thought Maggie glanced toward the square-looking glass which was condemned to hang with its face toward the wall and she have started to from her seat to reach it down. But she checked herself and snatched up her work, trying to repress the rising wishes by forcing her memory to recall snatches of hymns until she saw Philip and his father returning along the road and she could go down again. It was far on in June now and Maggie was inclined to lengthen the daily walk which was her own indulgence. But this day and the following she was so busy with work which must be finished that she never went beyond the gate and satisfied her need of the open air by sitting out of doors. One of her frequent walks when she was not obliged to go to St. Augs was to a spot that lay beyond what was called the hill. An insignificant rise of grounds crowned by trees lying along the side of the road which ran by the gates of Dole Coral Mill. Insignificant I call it because in height it was hardly more than a bank but there may come moments when nature makes a mere bank a means toward a fateful result. And that is why I ask you to imagine this high bank crowned with trees making an uneven wall for some quarter of a mile along the left side of Dole Coral Mill and the pleasant fields behind it bounded by the murmuring ripple. Just where this line of banks sloped down again to the level a by-road turned off and led to the other side of the rise where it was broken into very capricious hollows and mounds by the working of an exhausted stone quarry so long exhausted that both mounds and hollows were now clothed with brambles and trees and here and there by a stretch of grass which a few sheep kept close nibbled. In her childish days Maggie held this place cold the red deeps in a very great awe and needed all her confidence and time's bravery to reconcile her to an excursion thither. Visions of robbers and fierce animals haunted every hollow but now it had the charm for her which any broken ground any mimic rock and ravine have for the eyes that rest habitually on the level especially in summer when she could sit on the grassy hollow under the shadow of a branching ash stooping a slant from the steep above her and listen to the hum of insects like tiniest bells on the garment of silence or see the sunlight piercing the distant bows as if to chase and drive home the true and heavenly blue of the wild hyacinths. In this June time too the dog roses were in their glory and that was then additional reason why Maggie should direct her walk to the red deeps rather than to any other spot on the first day she was free to wander at her will a pleasure she loved so well that sometimes in her orders of renunciation she thought she ought to deny herself the frequent indulgence in it. You may see her now as she walks down the favorite turning and enters the deeps by a narrow path through a group of scotch furs her tall figure and old lavender gown visible through an hereditary black silk shawl of some wide meshed net like material and now she's sure of being unseen she takes off her bonnet and ties it over her arm one would certainly suppose her to be farther around in her life than her 17th year perhaps because of the slow resigned sadness of a glance from which all search and unrest seem to have departed perhaps because her broad chested figure has the mold of early womanhood youth and health have bestowed well there in voluntary and voluntary hardships of her lot and the nights in which she was laying in the hard floor for a penance have left no obvious trace the eyes are liquid the brown cheek is firm and round the full ribs are red with her dark coloring and jet crowns her mounting her tall figure she seems to have a sort of kinship with the grand scotch furs at which she is looking up as if she loved them well yet one has a sense of uneasiness and looking at her a sense of opposing elements of which a fierce collision is imminent surely there is a hushed expression such as one of often seasoned older faces under borderless caps out of keeping with the resistant youth which one expects to flash out in a sudden passionate glance that will dissipate all the quietude like a damn fire leaping out again when all seemed safe but Maggie herself was not uneasy at this moment she was calmly enjoying the fresh air while she looked up at the old fir trees and thought that those broken ends of branches were the records of past storms which had only made the red stems soar higher but while her eyes were still turned upward she became conscious of a moving shadow cast by the evening sun on the grassy path before her and looked down with a startled gesture to see Philip Wacom who first raised his head and then blushing deeply came forward to her and put out his hand Maggie too colored with surprise which soon gave way to pleasure she put out her hand and looked down at the deformed figure before her with frank eyes filled for the moment with nothing but the memory of her child's feelings a memory that was always strong at her she was the first to speak you startled me she said smiling faintly i never meet anyone here how came you to be walking here did you come to meet me it was impossible not to perceive that Maggie felt herself a child again yes i did said Philip still embarrassed i wish to see you very much i watched a long while yesterday in the bank near your house to see if you would come out but you never came then i watched again today and when i saw the way you took i kept you in sight and came down the bank behind there i hope you will not be displeased with me now said Maggie with simple seriousness walking on as if she meant Philip to accompany her i'm very glad you came for i wished very much to have an opportunity of speaking to you i've never forgotten how good you were long ago to tom and me too but i was not sure that you would remember us so well tom and i have had a great deal of trouble since then and i think that makes one think more of what happened before the trouble came i can't believe that you have thought of me so much as i have thought of you said Philip timidly do you know when i was away i made a picture of you as you looked that morning in the study when you said you would not forget me Philip drew a large miniature case from his pocket and opened it Maggie saw her old self leaning on a table with her black locks hanging down behind her ears looking into space with a strange dreamy eyes it was a watercolor sketch of real merit as a portrait oh dear said Maggie smiling and flushed with pleasure what a queer little girl i was i remember myself with my hair in that way and that pink frog i really was like a gypsy i dare say i am now she added after a little pause and might like what you expected me to be the words might have been those of a coquette but the full bright glance Maggie turned on Philip was not that of a coquette she really did hope he liked her face as it was now but it was simply the rising again of her innate delight and admiration and love Philip met her eyes and looked at her in silence for a long moment before he said quietly no Maggie the light died out a little from Maggie's face there was a slight trembling of the lip her eyelids fell lower but she did not turn away her head and Philip continued to look at her then he said slowly you are very much more beautiful than i thought you would be am i said Maggie the pleasure returning in a deeper flush she turned her face away from him and took some steps looking straight before her in silence as if she were adjusting her consciousness to this new idea girls are so accustomed to think of dress as the main ground of vanity that in abstaining from the looking glass Maggie had thought more of abandoning all care for adornment than of renouncing the contemplation of her face comparing herself with elegant wealthy young ladies it had not occurred to her that she could produce any effect with her person Philip seemed to like the silence well he walked by her side watching her face as if that sight left no room for any other wish they had passed from among the fir trees and had now come to a green hollow almost surrounded by an amphitheater of pale pink dog roses but after light above them had brightened Maggie's face had lost its glow she stood still when they were in the hollows and looking at Philip again she said in a serious sad voice i wish we could have been friends i mean if it would have been good and right for us but that is the trial i have to bear in everything i may not keep anything i used to love when i was little the old books went and tom is different and my father it is like death i must part with everything i cared for when i was a child and i must part with you you must never take any notice of each other again that was what i wanted to speak to you for i wanted to let you know that tom and i can't do what we like about such things and that if i behave as if i had forgotten all about you it is not out of envy or pride or or any bad feeling Maggie spoke with more and more sorrowful gentleness as she went on and her eyes began to fill with tears the deepening expression of pain on Philip's face gave him a stronger resemblance to his boyish self and made the deformity appeal more strongly to her pity i know i see all that you mean he said in a voice that had become feebler from discouragement i know what there is to keep us apart on both sides but it is not right Maggie don't you be angry with me i am so used to calling Maggie and my thoughts it is not right to sacrifice everything to other people's unreasonable feelings i would give up a great deal for my father but i would not give up a friendship or or an attachment of any sort in obedience to any wish of his that i didn't recognize is right i don't know said Maggie musingly often when i have been angry and discontented it has seemed to me that i was not bound to give up anything and i have gone on thinking till it has seemed to me that i could think away all my duty but no good has ever come of that it was an evil state of mind i'm quite sure that whatever i might do i should wish in the end that i had gone without anything for myself rather than have made my father's life harder to him but would it make his life harder if we were to see each other sometimes said Philip he was going to say something else but checked himself oh i'm sure he wouldn't like it don't ask me why or anything about it said Maggie in a distressed tone my father feels so strongly about some things he is not at all happy no more am i said Philip impetuously i am not happy why said Maggie gently at least i ought not to ask but i'm very very sorry Philip turned to walk on as if he had not patience to stand still any longer and they went out of the hollow winding amongst the trees and bushes and silence after that last word of Phillips Maggie could not bear to insist immediately on their parting i've been a great deal happier she said at last timidly since i have given up thinking about what is easy and pleasant and being discontented because i couldn't have my own will our life is determined for us and it makes the mind very free when we give up wishing and only think of bearing what is laid upon us and doing what has given us to do but i can't give up wishing said Philip impatiently it seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive there are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good and we must hunger after them how can we ever be satisfied without them until our feelings are dead end i delight in fine pictures i long to be able to paint such i strive and strive and can't produce what i want that is pain to me and always will be pain until my faculties lose their kindness like aged eyes then there are many other things that long for here philip hesitated a little and said things that other men have and that will always be denied me my life will have nothing great or beautiful in it i would rather not have lived oh philip said Maggie i wish you didn't feel so but her heart began to beat with something at philip's discontent well then said he turning quickly round and fixing his gray's eyes and treating me on her face i should be contented to live if you would let me see you sometimes then checked by a fear which her face suggested he looked away again and said more calmly i have no friend to whom i can tell everything no one who cares enough about me and if i could only see you now and then and you would let me talk to you a little and show me that you cared for me and that we may always be friends and heart and help each other then i might come to be glad of life but how can i see you philip said Maggie falteringly could she really do him good it would be very hard to say goodbye this day and not speak to him again here was a new interest to vary the days it was so much easier to renounce the interest before it came if you would let me see you here sometimes walk with you here i would be contented if it were only once or twice in a month that could injure no one's happiness and it would sweeten my life besides philip went on with all the inventive astuteness of love at one and twenty if there is any enmity between those who belong to us we ought all the more to try and quench it by our friendship i mean that by our influence on both sides we might bring about a healing of the wounds that have made it in the past if i could know everything about them and i don't believe there is any enmity in my own father's mind i think he has proved the contrary Maggie shook her head slowly and was silent under conflicting thoughts it seemed to her inclination that to see philip now and then and keep up the bond of friendship with him was something not only innocent but good perhaps you might really help him to find contentment as she had found it the voice that said this made sweet music to Maggie that a thwart it there came an urgent monotonous warning from another voice which he had been learning to obey the warning that such interviews implied secrecy implied doing something she would dread to be discovered in something that it discovered must cause anger and pain and that the admission of anything so near doubleness would act as a spiritual blight yet the music would swell out again like chimes born outward by recurrent breeze persuading her that the wrong lay all in the faults and weaknesses of others and that there was such a thing as futile sacrifice for one to the injury of another it was very cruel for philip that he should be shrunk from because of an unjustifiable vindictiveness towards his father poor philip whom some people would shrink from only because he was deformed the idea that he might become her lover or that her meeting him could cause disapproval in that life had not occurred to her and philip saw the absence of this idea clearly enough saw it with a certain paying although it made her consent to his request the less likely there was bitterness to him and the perception that maggie was almost as frank and unconstrained toward him as when she was a child i can't say either yes or no she said at last turning round and walking toward the way she came i must wait lest i should decide wrongly i must seek for guidance may i come again then tomorrow or the next day or next week i think i had better write said maggie faltering again i have to go to saint aug sometimes and i can put the letter in the post oh no said philip eagerly that would not be so well my father might see the letter and he has not an enmity i believe but he views things differently from me he thinks a great deal about wealth and position pray let me come here once more tell me when it shall be or if you can't tell me i will come as often as i can till i do see you i think it must be so then said maggie for i can't be quite certain of coming here any particular evening maggie felt a great relief in adjourning the decision she was free now to enjoy the minutes of companionship she almost thought she might linger a little the next time they met she should have to pay philip by telling him her determination i can't help thinking she said looking smilingly at him after a few moments of silence how strange it is that we should have met and talked to each other just as if it had been only yesterday when we parted at lorton and yet we must both be very much altered in those five years i think it is five years how was it you seem to have a sort of feeling that i was the same maggie i was not quite so sure that you would be the same i know you are so clever and you must have seen and learned so much to fill your mind i was not quite sure you would care about me now i have never had any doubt that you would be the same whenever i might see you said philip i mean the same and everything that made me like you better than anyone else i don't want to explain that i don't think any of the strongest effects our nature or susceptible of can ever be explained we can either detect the process by which they are arrived at nor the mode in which they act on us the greatest of painters only once painted a mysteriously divine child he couldn't have told how he did it and we can't tell why we feel it to be divine i think there are stories laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of certain strains of music affect me so strangely i can never hear them without their changing my whole attitude of mind for a time and if the effect would last i might be capable of heroisms ah i know what you mean about music i feel so said maggie clasping her hands with her old impetuosity at least she added in a sadden tone i used to feel so when i had any music i never have any now except the organ of church and you long for it maggie said philip looking at her with affectionate pity uh you can have very little that is beautiful in your life have you many books you were so fond of them when you were a little girl they were come back to the hollow around which the dog versus grew and they both paused under the charm of the very evening light reflected from the pale pink clusters no i have given up books said maggie quietly accept the very very few philip had already taken from his pocket a small volume and was looking at the bag as he said ah this is the second volume i see else you might have liked a trick at home with you i put it in my pocket because i'm studying a scene for a picture maggie had looked at the back too and saw the title it revived an old impression with over mastering force the pirate she said taking the book from philip's hands oh i began that once i read to where mina was walking with cleveland and i could never get to read the rest i went on with it in my own head and made several endings but they were all unhappy i could never make a happy ending out of that beginning poor mina i wonder what is the real end for a long while i couldn't get my mind away from the shatland aisles i used to feel the wind blowing on me from the rough sea maggie spoke rapidly with glistening eyes take that volume home with you maggie said philip watching her with delight i don't want it now i shall make a picture of you instead you among the scotch furs in the slanting shadows maggie had not heard a word he had said she was absorbed in a page at which she had opened but suddenly she closed the book and gave it back to philip shaking her head with a backward movement as if to say avante to floating visions do keep it maggie said philip and treatingly it will give you pleasure no thank you said maggie putting it aside with her hand on walking on it would make me in love with this world again as i used to be you'd make me long to see and know many things it would make me long for a full life but you will not always be shut up in your present lot why shouldn't you starve your mind in that way it is a narrow asceticism i don't like to see you persisting in it maggie poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure but not for me not for me said maggie walking more hurriedly because i should want too much i must wait this life will not last long don't hurry away from me without saying goodbye maggie said philip as they reached the group of scotch furs and she continued still to walk along without speaking i must not go any farther i think must i oh no i forgot goodbye said maggie pausing and putting out her hand to him the action brought her feeling back in a strong current to philip and after they had stood looking at each other in silence for a few moments with their hands clasped she said was drawing her hand i'm very grateful to you for thinking of me all those years it is very sweet to have people love us what a wonderful beautiful thing it seems that god should have made your heart so that you could care about a queer little girl whom you only knew for a few weeks i remember saying to you that i thought you cared for me more than tom did uh maggie said philip almost fretfully you would never love me so well as you love your brother perhaps not said maggie simply but then you know the first thing i ever remember in my life is standing with tom by the side of the floss while he held my hand everything before that is dark to me but i shall never forget you though we must keep apart don't say so maggie said philip if i kept that little girl in my mind for five years didn't i earn some part of her she ought not to take herself quite away from me not if i were free said maggie but i am not i must submit she hesitated a moment and then added and i wanted to say to you that you had better not take more notice of my brother than just bowing to him he once told me not to speak to you again and he doesn't change his mind oh dear the son has said i am too long away goodbye she gave him her hand once more i shall come here as often as i can till i see you again maggie have some feeling for me as well as for others yes yes i have said maggie hurrying away and quickly disappearing behind the last fir tree though philip's gaze after her remained immovable for minutes as if he saw her still maggie went home with an inward conflict already begun philip went home to do nothing but remember and hope you can hardly help blaming him severely he was four or five years older than maggie and had a full consciousness of his feelings toward her to aid him and foreseeing the character his contemplated interviews with her would bear in the opinion of a third person but you must not suppose that he was capable of a gross selfishness or that he could have been satisfied without persuading himself that he was seeking to infuse some happiness into maggie's life seeking this even more than any direct ends for himself he could give her sympathy he could give her help there was not the slightest promise of love toward him in her manner it was nothing more than the sweet girlish tenderness she had shown him when she was 12 perhaps she would never love him perhaps no woman ever could love him well then he wouldn't do that he should at least have the happiness of seeing her of feeling some nearness to her and he clutched passionately the passability that she might love him perhaps the feeling would grow if she could come to associate him with that watchful tenderness which her nature would be so keenly alive to if any woman could love him surely maggie was that woman there was such wealth of love in her there was no one to claim it all then the pity of it that a mind like hers should be withering in its very youth that like a young forestry for warmth of the light and space it was formed to flourish in could he not hinder that but persuading her out of her system of privation he would be her guardian angel he would do anything bear anything for her sake except not seeing her end of book five chapter one