The Mill on the Floss

Chapter 13

Owing to this new adjustment of Mrs. Glegg's thoughts, Mrs. Pullet

found her task of mediation the next day surprisingly easy. Mrs.

Glegg, indeed checked her rather sharply for thinking it would be

necessary to tell her elder sister what was the right mode of behavior

in family matters. Mrs. Pullet's argument, that it would look ill in

the neighborhood if people should have it in their power to say that

there was a quarrel in the family, was particularly offensive. If the

family name never suffered except through Mrs. Glegg, Mrs. Pullet

might lay her head on her pillow in perfect confidence.

"It's not to be expected, I suppose," observed Mrs. Glegg, by way of

winding up the subject, "as I shall go to the mill again before Bessy

comes to see me, or as I shall go and fall down o' my knees to Mr.

Tulliver, and ask his pardon for showing him favors; but I shall bear

no malice, and when Mr. Tulliver speaks civil to me, I'll speak civil

to him. Nobody has any call to tell me what's becoming."

Finding it unnecessary to plead for the Tullivers, it was natural that

aunt Pullet should relax a little in her anxiety for them, and recur

to the annoyance she had suffered yesterday from the offspring of that

apparently ill-fated house. Mrs. Glegg heard a circumstantial

narrative, to which Mr. Pullet's remarkable memory furnished some

items; and while aunt Pullet pitied poor Bessy's bad luck with her

children, and expressed a half-formed project of paying for Maggie's

being sent to a distant boarding-school, which would not prevent her

being so brown, but might tend to subdue some other vices in her, aunt

Glegg blamed Bessy for her weakness, and appealed to all witnesses who

should be living when the Tulliver children had turned out ill, that

she, Mrs. Glegg, had always said how it would be from the very first,

observing that it was wonderful to herself how all her words came

true.

"Then I may call and tell Bessy you'll bear no malice, and everything

be as it was before?" Mrs. Pullet said, just before parting.

"Yes, you may, Sophy," said Mrs. Glegg; "you may tell Mr. Tulliver,

and Bessy too, as I'm not going to behave ill because folks behave ill

to me; I know it's my place, as the eldest, to set an example in every

respect, and I do it. Nobody can say different of me, if they'll keep

to the truth."

Mrs. Glegg being in this state of satisfaction in her own lofty

magnanimity, I leave you to judge what effect was produced on her by

the reception of a short letter from Mr. Tulliver that very evening,

after Mrs. Pullet's departure, informing her that she needn't trouble

her mind about her five hundred pounds, for it should be paid back to

her in the course of the next month at farthest, together with the

interest due thereon until the time of p*****t. And furthermore, that

Mr. Tulliver had no wish to behave uncivilly to Mrs. Glegg, and she

was welcome to his house whenever she liked to come, but he desired no

favors from her, either for himself or his children.

It was poor Mrs. Tulliver who had hastened this catastrophe, entirely

through that irrepressible hopefulness of hers which led her to expect

that similar causes may at any time produce different results. It had

very often occurred in her experience that Mr. Tulliver had done

something because other people had said he was not able to do it, or

had pitied him for his supposed inability, or in any other way piqued

his pride; still, she thought to-day, if she told him when he came in

to tea that sister Pullet was gone to try and make everything up with

sister Glegg, so that he needn't think about paying in the money, it

would give a cheerful effect to the meal. Mr. Tulliver had never

slackened in his resolve to raise the money, but now he at once

determined to write a letter to Mrs. Glegg, which should cut off all

possibility of mistake. Mrs. Pullet gone to beg and pray for _him_

indeed! Mr. Tulliver did not willingly write a letter, and found the

relation between spoken and written language, briefly known as

spelling, one of the most puzzling things in this puzzling world.

Nevertheless, like all fervid writing, the task was done in less time

than usual, and if the spelling differed from Mrs. Glegg's,--why, she

belonged, like himself, to a generation with whom spelling was a

matter of private judgment.

Mrs. Glegg did not alter her will in consequence of this letter, and

cut off the Tulliver children from their sixth and seventh share in

her thousand pounds; for she had her principles. No one must be able

to say of her when she was dead that she had not divided her money

with perfect fairness among her own kin. In the matter of wills,

personal qualities were subordinate to the great fundamental fact of

blood; and to be determined in the distribution of your property by

caprice, and not make your legacies bear a direct ratio to degrees of

kinship, was a prospective disgrace that would have embittered her

life. This had always been a principle in the Dodson family; it was

one form if that sense of honor and rectitude which was a proud

tradition in such families,--a tradition which has been the salt of

our provincial society.

But though the letter could not shake Mrs. Glegg's principles, it made

the family breach much more difficult to mend; and as to the effect it

produced on Mrs. Glegg's opinion of Mr. Tulliver, she begged to be

understood from that time forth that she had nothing whatever to say

about him; his state of mind, apparently, was too corrupt for her to

contemplate it for a moment. It was not until the evening before Tom

went to school, at the beginning of August, that Mrs. Glegg paid a

visit to her sister Tulliver, sitting in her gig all the while, and

showing her displeasure by markedly abstaining from all advice and

criticism; for, as she observed to her sister Deane, "Bessy must bear

the consequence o' having such a husband, though I'm sorry for her,"

and Mrs. Deane agreed that Bessy was pitiable.

That evening Tom observed to Maggie: "Oh my! Maggie, aunt Glegg's

beginning to come again; I'm glad I'm going to school. _You'll_ catch

it all now!"

Maggie was already so full of sorrow at the thought of Tom's going

away from her, that this playful exultation of his seemed very unkind,

and she cried herself to sleep that night.

Mr. Tulliver's prompt procedure entailed on him further promptitude in

finding the convenient person who was desirous of lending five hundred

pounds on bond. "It must be no client of Wakem's," he said to himself;

and yet at the end of a fortnight it turned out to the contrary; not

because Mr. Tulliver's will was feeble, but because external fact was

stronger. Wakem's client was the only convenient person to be found.

Mr. Tulliver had a destiny as well as Oedipus, and in this case

he might plead, like Oedipus, that his deed was inflicted on him

rather than committed by him.