The Mill on the Floss

Chapter 12

In order to see Mr. and Mrs. Glegg at home, we must enter the town of

St. Ogg's,--that venerable town with the red fluted roofs and the

broad warehouse gables, where the black ships unlade themselves of

their burthens from the far north, and carry away, in exchange, the

precious inland products, the well-crushed cheese and the soft fleeces

which my refined readers have doubtless become acquainted with through

the medium of the best classic pastorals.

It is one of those old, old towns which impress one as a continuation

and outgrowth of nature, as much as the nests of the bower-birds or

the winding galleries of the white ants; a town which carries the

traces of its long growth and history like a millennial tree, and has

sprung up and developed in the same spot between the river and the low

hill from the time when the Roman legions turned their backs on it

from the camp on the hillside, and the long-haired sea-kings came up

the river and looked with fierce, eager eyes at the fatness of the

land. It is a town "familiar with forgotten years." The shadow of the

Saxon hero-king still walks there fitfully, reviewing the scenes of

his youth and love-time, and is met by the gloomier shadow of the

dreadful heathen Dane, who was stabbed in the midst of his warriors by

the sword of an invisible avenger, and who rises on autumn evenings

like a white mist from his tumulus on the hill, and hovers in the

court of the old hall by the river-side, the spot where he was thus

miraculously slain in the days before the old hall was built. It was

the Normans who began to build that fine old hall, which is, like the

town, telling of the thoughts and hands of widely sundered

generations; but it is all so old that we look with loving pardon at

its inconsistencies, and are well content that they who built the

stone oriel, and they who built the Gothic fa**** and towers of finest

small brickwork with the trefoil ornament, and the windows and

battlements defined with stone, did not sacreligiously pull down the

ancient half-timbered body with its oak-roofed banqueting-hall.

But older even than this old hall is perhaps the bit of wall now built

into the belfry of the parish church, and said to be a remnant of the

original chapel dedicated to St. Ogg, the patron saint of this ancient

town, of whose history I possess several manuscript versions. I

incline to the briefest, since, if it should not be wholly true, it is

at least likely to contain the least falsehood. "Ogg the son of

Beorl," says my private hagiographer, "was a boatman who gained a

scanty living by ferrying passengers across the river Floss. And it

came to pass, one evening when the winds were high, that there sat

moaning by the brink of the river a woman with a child in her arms;

and she was clad in rags, and had a worn and withered look, and she

craved to be rowed across the river. And the men thereabout questioned

her, and said, 'Wherefore dost thou desire to cross the river? Tarry

till the morning, and take shelter here for the night; so shalt thou

be wise and not foolish.' Still she went on to mourn and crave. But

Ogg the son of Beorl came up and said, 'I will ferry thee across; it

is enough that thy heart needs it.' And he ferried her across. And it

came to pass, when she stepped ashore, that her rags were turned into

robes of flowing white, and her face became bright with exceeding

beauty, and there was a glory around it, so that she shed a light on

the water like the moon in its brightness. And she said, 'Ogg, the son

of Beorl, thou art blessed in that thou didst not question and wrangle

with the heart's need, but wast smitten with pity, and didst

straightway relieve the same. And from henceforth whoso steps into thy

boat shall be in no peril from the storm; and whenever it puts forth

to the rescue, it shall save the lives both of men and beasts.' And

when the floods came, many were saved by reason of that blessing on

the boat. But when Ogg the son of Beorl died, behold, in the parting

of his soul, the boat loosed itself from its moorings, and was floated

with the ebbing tide in great swiftness to the ocean, and was seen no

more. Yet it was witnessed in the floods of aftertime, that at the

coming on of eventide, Ogg the son of Beorl was always seen with his

boat upon the wide-spreading waters, and the Blessed Virgin sat in the

prow, shedding a light around as of the moon in its brightness, so

that the rowers in the gathering darkness took heart and pulled anew."

This legend, one sees, reflects from a far-off time the visitation of

the floods, which, even when they left human life untouched, were

widely fatal to the helpless cattle, and swept as sudden death over

all smaller living things. But the town knew worse troubles even than

the floods,--troubles of the civil wars, when it was a continual

fighting-place, where first Puritans thanked God for the blood of the

Loyalists, and then Loyalists thanked God for the blood of the

Puritans. Many honest citizens lost all their possessions for

conscience' sake in those times, and went forth beggared from their

native town. Doubtless there are many houses standing now on which

those honest citizens turned their backs in sorrow,--quaint-gabled

houses looking on the river, jammed between newer warehouses, and

penetrated by surprising passages, which turn and turn at sharp angles

till they lead you out on a muddy strand overflowed continually by the

rushing tide. Everywhere the brick houses have a mellow look, and in

Mrs. Glegg's day there was no incongruous new-fashioned smartness, no

plate-glass in shop-windows, no fresh stucco-facing or other

fallacious attempt to make fine old red St. Ogg's wear the air of a

town that sprang up yesterday. The shop-windows were small and

unpretending; for the farmers' wives and daughters who came to do

their shopping on market-days were not to be withdrawn from their

regular well-known shops; and the tradesmen had no wares intended for

customers who would go on their way and be seen no more. Ah! even Mrs.

Glegg's day seems far back in the past now, separated from us by

changes that widen the years. War and the rumor of war had then died

out from the minds of men, and if they were ever thought of by the

farmers in drab greatcoats, who shook the grain out of their

sample-bags and buzzed over it in the full market-place, it was as a

state of things that belonged to a past golden age when prices were

high. Surely the time was gone forever when the broad river could

bring up unwelcome ships; Russia was only the place where the linseed

came from,--the more the better,--making grist for the great vertical

millstones with their scythe-like arms, roaring and grinding and

carefully sweeping as if an informing soul were in them. The

Catholics, bad harvests, and the mysterious fluctuations of trade were

the three evils mankind had to fear; even the floods had not been

great of late years. The mind of St. Ogg's did not look extensively

before or after. It inherited a long past without thinking of it, and

had no eyes for the spirits that walk the streets. Since the centuries

when St. Ogg with his boat and the Virgin Mother at the prow had been

seen on the wide water, so many memories had been left behind, and had

gradually vanished like the receding hilltops! And the present time

was like the level plain where men lose their belief in volcanoes and

earthquakes, thinking to-morrow will be as yesterday, and the giant

forces that used to shake the earth are forever laid to sleep. The

days were gone when people could be greatly wrought upon by their

faith, still less change it; the Catholics were formidable because

they would lay hold of government and property, and burn men alive;

not because any sane and honest parishioner of St. Ogg's could be

brought to believe in the Pope. One aged person remembered how a rude

multitude had been swayed when John Wesley preached in the

cattle-market; but for a long while it had not been expected of

preachers that they should shake the souls of men. An occasional burst

of fervor in Dissenting pulpits on the subject of infant baptism was

the only symptom of a zeal unsuited to sober times when men had done

with change. Protestantism sat at ease, unmindful of schisms, careless

of proselytism: Dissent was an inheritance along with a superior pew

and a business connection; and Churchmanship only wondered

contemptuously at Dissent as a foolish habit that clung greatly to

families in the grocery and chandlering lines, though not incompatible

with prosperous wholesale dealing. But with the Catholic Question had

come a slight wind of controversy to break the calm: the elderly

rector had become occasionally historical and argumentative; and Mr.

Spray, the Independent minister, had begun to preach political

sermons, in which he distinguished with much subtlety between his

fervent belief in the right of the Catholics to the franchise and his

fervent belief in their eternal perdition. Most of Mr. Spray's

hearers, however, were incapable of following his subtleties, and many

old-fashioned Dissenters were much pained by his "siding with the

Catholics"; while others thought he had better let politics alone.

Public spirit was not held in high esteem at St. Ogg's, and men who

busied themselves with political questions were regarded with some

suspicion, as dangerous characters; they were usually persons who had

little or no business of their own to manage, or, if they had, were

likely enough to become insolvent.

This was the general aspect of things at St. Ogg's in Mrs. Glegg's

day, and at that particular period in her family history when she had

had her quarrel with Mr. Tulliver. It was a time when ignorance was

much more comfortable than at present, and was received with all the

honors in very good society, without being obliged to dress itself in

an elaborate costume of knowledge; a time when cheap periodicals were

not, and when country surgeons never thought of asking their female

patients if they were fond of reading, but simply took it for granted

that they preferred gossip; a time when ladies in rich silk gowns wore

large pockets, in which they carried a mutton-bone to secure them

against cramp. Mrs. Glegg carried such a bone, which she had inherited

from her grandmother with a brocaded gown that would stand up empty,

like a suit of armor, and a silver-headed walking-stick; for the

Dodson family had been respectable for many generations.

Mrs. Glegg had both a front and a back parlor in her excellent house

at St. Ogg's, so that she had two points of view from which she could

observe the weakness of her fellow-beings, and reinforce her

thankfulness for her own exceptional strength of mind. From her front

window she could look down the Tofton Road, leading out of St. Ogg's,

and note the growing tendency to "gadding about" in the wives of men

not retired from business, together with a practice of wearing woven

cotton stockings, which opened a dreary prospect for the coming

generation; and from her back windows she could look down the pleasant

garden and orchard which stretched to the river, and observe the folly

of Mr. Glegg in spending his time among "them flowers and vegetables."

For Mr. Glegg, having retired from active business as a wool-stapler

for the purpose of enjoying himself through the rest of his life, had

found this last occupation so much more severe than his business, that

he had been driven into amateur hard labor as a dissipation, and

habitually relaxed by doing the work of two ordinary gardeners. The

economizing of a gardener's wages might perhaps have induced Mrs.

Glegg to wink at this folly, if it were possible for a healthy female

mind even to simulate respect for a husband's hobby. But it is well

known that this conjugal complacency belongs only to the weaker

portion of the s*x, who are scarcely alive to the responsibilities of

a wife as a constituted check on her husband's pleasures, which are

hardly ever of a rational or commendable kind.

Mr. Glegg on his side, too, had a double source of mental occupation,

which gave every promise of being inexhaustible. On the one hand, he

surprised himself by his discoveries in natural history, finding that

his piece of garden-ground contained wonderful caterpillars, slugs,

and insects, which, so far as he had heard, had never before attracted

human observation; and he noticed remarkable coincidences between

these zoological phenomena and the great events of that time,--as, for

example, that before the burning of York Minster there had been

mysterious serpentine marks on the leaves of the rose-trees, together

with an unusual prevalence of slugs, which he had been puzzled to know

the meaning of, until it flashed upon him with this melancholy

conflagration. (Mr. Glegg had an unusual amount of mental activity,

which, when disengaged from the wool business, naturally made itself a

pathway in other directions.) And his second subject of meditation was

the "contrairiness" of the female mind, as typically exhibited in Mrs.

Glegg. That a creature made--in a genealogical sense--out of a man's

rib, and in this particular case maintained in the highest

respectability without any trouble of her own, should be normally in a

state of contradiction to the blandest propositions and even to the

most accommodating concessions, was a mystery in the scheme of things

to which he had often in vain sought a clew in the early chapters of

Genesis. Mr. Glegg had chosen the eldest Miss Dodson as a handsome

embodiment of female prudence and thrift, and being himself of a

money-getting, money-keeping turn, had calculated on much conjugal

harmony. But in that curious compound, the feminine character, it may

easily happen that the flavor is unpleasant in spite of excellent

ingredients; and a fine systematic stinginess may be accompanied with

a seasoning that quite spoils its relish. Now, good Mr. Glegg himself

was stingy in the most amiable manner; his neighbors called him

"near," which always means that the person in question is a lovable

skinflint. If you expressed a preference for cheese-parings, Mr. Glegg

would remember to save them for you, with a good-natured delight in

gratifying your palate, and he was given to pet all animals which

required no appreciable keep. There was no humbug or hypocrisy about

Mr. Glegg; his eyes would have watered with true feeling over the sale

of a widow's furniture, which a five-pound note from his side pocket

would have prevented; but a donation of five pounds to a person "in a

small way of life" would have seemed to him a mad kind of lavishness

rather than "charity," which had always presented itself to him as a

contribution of small aids, not a neutralizing of misfortune. And Mr.

Glegg was just as fond of saving other people's money as his own; he

would have ridden as far round to avoid a turnpike when his expenses

were to be paid for him, as when they were to come out of his own

pocket, and was quite zealous in trying to induce indifferent

acquaintances to adopt a cheap substitute for blacking. This

inalienable habit of saving, as an end in itself, belonged to the

industrious men of business of a former generation, who made their

fortunes slowly, almost as the tracking of the fox belongs to the

harrier,--it constituted them a "race," which is nearly lost in these

days of rapid money-getting, when lavishness comes close on the back

of want. In old-fashioned times an "independence" was hardly ever made

without a little miserliness as a condition, and you would have found

that quality in every provincial district, combined with characters as

various as the fruits from which we can extract acid. The true

Harpagons were always marked and exceptional characters; not so the

worthy tax-payers, who, having once pinched from real necessity,

retained even in the midst of their comfortable retirement, with their

wallfruit and wine-bins, the habit of regarding life as an ingenious

process of nibbling out one's livelihood without leaving any

perceptible deficit, and who would have been as immediately prompted

to give up a newly taxed luxury when they had had their clear five

hundred a year, as when they had only five hundred pounds of capital.

Mr. Glegg was one of these men, found so impracticable by chancellors

of the exchequer; and knowing this, you will be the better able to

understand why he had not swerved from the conviction that he had made

an eligible marriage, in spite of the too-pungent seasoning that

nature had given to the eldest Miss Dodson's virtues. A man with an

affectionate disposition, who finds a wife to concur with his

fundamental idea of life, easily comes to persuade himself that no

other woman would have suited him so well, and does a little daily

snapping and quarrelling without any sense of alienation. Mr. Glegg,

being of a reflective turn, and no longer occupied with wool, had much

wondering meditation on the peculiar constitution of the female mind

as unfolded to him in his domestic life; and yet he thought Mrs.

Glegg's household ways a model for her s*x. It struck him as a

pitiable irregularity in other women if they did not roll up their

table-napkins with the same tightness and emphasis as Mrs. Glegg did,

if their pastry had a less leathery consistence, and their damson

cheese a less venerable hardness than hers; nay, even the peculiar

combination of grocery and druglike odors in Mrs. Glegg's private

cupboard impressed him as the only right thing in the way of cupboard

smells. I am not sure that he would not have longed for the

quarrelling again, if it had ceased for an entire week; and it is

certain that an acquiescent, mild wife would have left his meditations

comparatively jejune and barren of mystery.

Mr. Glegg's unmistakable kind-heartedness was shown in this, that it

pained him more to see his wife at variance with others,--even with

Dolly, the servant,--than to be in a state of cavil with her himself;

and the quarrel between her and Mr. Tulliver vexed him so much that it

quite nullified the pleasure he would otherwise have had in the state

of his early cabbages, as he walked in his garden before breakfast the

next morning. Still, he went in to breakfast with some slight hope

that, now Mrs. Glegg had "slept upon it," her anger might be subdued

enough to give way to her usually strong sense of family decorum. She

had been used to boast that there had never been any of those deadly

quarrels among the Dodsons which had disgraced other families; that no

Dodson had ever been "cut off with a shilling," and no cousin of the

Dodsons disowned; as, indeed, why should they be? For they had no

cousins who had not money out at use, or some houses of their own, at

the very least.

There was one evening-cloud which had always disappeared from Mrs.

Glegg's brow when she sat at the breakfast-table. It was her fuzzy

front of curls; for as she occupied herself in household matters in

the morning it would have been a mere extravagance to put on anything

so superfluous to the making of leathery pastry as a fuzzy curled

front. By half-past ten decorum demanded the front; until then Mrs.

Glegg could economize it, and society would never be any the wiser.

But the absence of that cloud only left it more apparent that the

cloud of severity remained; and Mr. Glegg, perceiving this, as he sat

down to his milkporridge, which it was his old frugal habit to stem

his morning hunger with, prudently resolved to leave the first remark

to Mrs. Glegg, lest, to so delicate an article as a lady's temper, the

slightest touch should do mischief. People who seem to enjoy their ill

temper have a way of keeping it in fine condition by inflicting

privations on themselves. That was Mrs. Glegg's way. She made her tea

weaker than usual this morning, and declined butter. It was a hard

case that a vigorous mood for quarrelling, so highly capable of using

an opportunity, should not meet with a single remark from Mr. Glegg on

which to exercise itself. But by and by it appeared that his silence

would answer the purpose, for he heard himself apostrophized at last

in that tone peculiar to the wife of one's bosom.

"Well, Mr. Glegg! it's a poor return I get for making you the wife

I've made you all these years. If this is the way I'm to be treated,

I'd better ha' known it before my poor father died, and then, when I'd

wanted a home, I should ha' gone elsewhere, as the choice was offered

me."

Mr. Glegg paused from his porridge and looked up, not with any new

amazement, but simply with that quiet, habitual wonder with which we

regard constant mysteries.

"Why, Mrs. G., what have I done now?"

"Done now, Mr. Glegg? _done now?_--I'm sorry for you."

Not seeing his way to any pertinent answer, Mr. Glegg reverted to his

porridge.

"There's husbands in the world," continued Mrs. Glegg, after a pause,

"as 'ud have known how to do something different to siding with

everybody else against their own wives. Perhaps I'm wrong and you can

teach me better. But I've allays heard as it's the husband's place to

stand by the wife, instead o' rejoicing and triumphing when folks

insult her."

"Now, what call have you to say that?" said Mr. Glegg, rather warmly,

for though a kind man, he was not as meek as Moses. "When did I

rejoice or triumph over you?"

"There's ways o' doing things worse than speaking out plain, Mr.

Glegg. I'd sooner you'd tell me to my face as you make light of me,

than try to make out as everybody's in the right but me, and come to

your breakfast in the morning, as I've hardly slept an hour this

night, and sulk at me as if I was the dirt under your feet."

"Sulk at you?" said Mr. Glegg, in a tone of angry facetiousness.

"You're like a tipsy man as thinks everybody's had too much but

himself."

"Don't lower yourself with using coarse language to _me_, Mr. Glegg!

It makes you look very small, though you can't see yourself," said

Mrs. Glegg, in a tone of energetic compassion. "A man in your place

should set an example, and talk more sensible."

"Yes; but will you listen to sense?" retorted Mr. Glegg, sharply. "The

best sense I can talk to you is what I said last night,--as you're i'

the wrong to think o' calling in your money, when it's safe enough if

you'd let it alone, all because of a bit of a tiff, and I was in hopes

you'd ha' altered your mind this morning. But if you'd like to call it

in, don't do it in a hurry now, and breed more enmity in the family,

but wait till there's a pretty mortgage to be had without any trouble.

You'd have to set the lawyer to work now to find an investment, and

make no end o' expense."

Mrs. Glegg felt there was really something in this, but she tossed her

head and emitted a guttural interjection to indicate that her silence

was only an armistice, not a peace. And, in fact hostilities soon

broke out again.

"I'll thank you for my cup o' tea, now, Mrs. G.," said Mr. Glegg,

seeing that she did not proceed to give it him as usual, when he had

finished his porridge. She lifted the teapot with a slight toss of the

head, and said,--

"I'm glad to hear you'll _thank_ me, Mr. Glegg. It's little thanks _I_

get for what I do for folks i' this world. Though there's never a

woman o' _your_ side o' the family, Mr. Glegg, as is fit to stand up

with me, and I'd say it if I was on my dying bed. Not but what I've

allays conducted myself civil to your kin, and there isn't one of 'em

can say the contrary, though my equils they aren't, and nobody shall

make me say it."

"You'd better leave finding fault wi' my kin till you've left off

quarrelling with you own, Mrs. G.," said Mr. Glegg, with angry

sarcasm. "I'll trouble you for the milk-jug."

"That's as false a word as ever you spoke, Mr. Glegg," said the lady,

pouring out the milk with unusual profuseness, as much as to say, if

he wanted milk he should have it with a vengeance. "And you know it's

false. I'm not the woman to quarrel with my own kin; _you_ may, for

I've known you to do it."

"Why, what did you call it yesterday, then, leaving your sister's

house in a tantrum?"

"I'd no quarrel wi' my sister, Mr. Glegg, and it's false to say it.

Mr. Tulliver's none o' my blood, and it was him quarrelled with me,

and drove me out o' the house. But perhaps you'd have had me stay and

be swore at, Mr. Glegg; perhaps you was vexed not to hear more abuse

and foul language poured out upo' your own wife. But, let me tell you,

it's _your_ disgrace."

"Did ever anybody hear the like i' this parish?" said Mr. Glegg,

getting hot. "A woman, with everything provided for her, and allowed

to keep her own money the same as if it was settled on her, and with a

gig new stuffed and lined at no end o' expense, and provided for when

I die beyond anything she could expect--to go on i' this way, biting

and snapping like a mad dog! It's beyond everything, as God A 'mighty

should ha' made women _so_." (These last words were uttered in a tone

of sorrowful agitation. Mr. Glegg pushed his tea from him, and tapped

the table with both his hands.)

"Well, Mr. Glegg, if those are your feelings, it's best they should be

known," said Mrs. Glegg, taking off her napkin, and folding it in an

excited manner. "But if you talk o' my being provided for beyond what

I could expect, I beg leave to tell you as I'd a right to expect a

many things as I don't find. And as to my being like a mad dog, it's

well if you're not cried shame on by the county for your treatment of

me, for it's what I can't bear, and I won't bear----"

Here Mrs. Glegg's voice intimated that she was going to cry, and

breaking off from speech, she rang the bell violently.

"Sally," she said, rising from her chair, and speaking in rather a

choked voice, "light a fire up-stairs, and put the blinds down. Mr.

Glegg, you'll please to order what you'd like for dinner. I shall have

gruel."

Mrs. Glegg walked across the room to the small book-case, and took

down Baxter's "Saints' Everlasting Rest," which she carried with her

up-stairs. It was the book she was accustomed to lay open before her

on special occasions,--on wet Sunday mornings, or when she heard of a

death in the family, or when, as in this case, her quarrel with Mr.

Glegg had been set an octave higher than usual.

But Mrs. Glegg carried something else up-stairs with her, which,

together with the "Saints' Rest" and the gruel, may have had some

influence in gradually calming her feelings, and making it possible

for her to endure existence on the ground-floor, shortly before

tea-time. This was, partly, Mr. Glegg's suggestion that she would do

well to let her five hundred lie still until a good investment turned

up; and, further, his parenthetic hint at his handsome provision for

her in case of his death. Mr. Glegg, like all men of his stamp, was

extremely reticent about his will; and Mrs. Glegg, in her gloomier

moments, had forebodings that, like other husbands of whom she had

heard, he might cherish the mean project of heightening her grief at

his death by leaving her poorly off, in which case she was firmly

resolved that she would have scarcely any weeper on her bonnet, and

would cry no more than if he had been a second husband. But if he had

really shown her any testamentary tenderness, it would be affecting to

think of him, poor man, when he was gone; and even his foolish fuss

about the flowers and garden-stuff, and his insistence on the subject

of snails, would be touching when it was once fairly at an end. To

survive Mr. Glegg, and talk eulogistically of him as a man who might

have his weaknesses, but who had done the right thing by her,

not-withstanding his numerous poor relations; to have sums of interest

coming in more frequently, and secrete it in various corners, baffling

to the most ingenious of thieves (for, to Mrs. Glegg's mind, banks and

strong-boxes would have nullified the pleasure of property; she might

as well have taken her food in capsules); finally, to be looked up to

by her own family and the neighborhood, so as no woman can ever hope

to be who has not the pr******* and present dignity comprised in being

a "widow well left,"--all this made a flattering and conciliatory view

of the future. So that when good Mr. Glegg, restored to good humor by

much hoeing, and moved by the sight of his wife's empty chair, with

her knitting rolled up in the corner, went up-stairs to her, and

observed that the bell had been tolling for poor Mr. Morton, Mrs.

Glegg answered magnanimously, quite as if she had been an uninjured

woman: "Ah! then, there'll be a good business for somebody to take

to."

Baxter had been open at least eight hours by this time, for it was

nearly five o'clock; and if people are to quarrel often, it follows as

a corollary that their quarrels cannot be protracted beyond certain

limits.

Mr. and Mrs. Glegg talked quite amicably about the Tullivers that

evening. Mr. Glegg went the length of admitting that Tulliver was a

sad man for getting into hot water, and was like enough to run through

his property; and Mrs. Glegg, meeting this acknowledgment half-way,

declared that it was beneath her to take notice of such a man's

conduct, and that, for her sister's sake, she would let him keep the

five hundred a while longer, for when she put it out on a mortgage she

should only get four per cent.