The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot [books to read to increase intelligence .txt] 📗

of sisters, creating a necessity for mortgages, but had quite thrown herself away in marriage, and had crowned her mistakes by having an eighth baby. On this point Mr. Tulliver was conscious of being a little weak; but he apologized to himself by saying that poor Gritty had been a good-looking wench before she married Moss; he would sometimes say this even with a slight tremulousness in his voice. But this morning he was in a mood more becoming a man of business, and in the course of his ride along the Basset lanes, with their deep ruts,—lying so far away from a market-town that the labor of drawing produce and manure was enough to take away the best part of the profits on such poor land as that parish was made of,—he got up a due amount of irritation against Moss as a man without capital, who, if murrain and blight were abroad, was sure to have his share of them, and who, the more you tried to help him out of the mud, would sink the further in. It would do him good rather than harm, now, if he were obliged to raise this three hundred pounds; it would make him look about him better, and not act so foolishly about his wool this year as he did the last; in fact, Mr. Tulliver had been too easy with his brother-in-law, and because he had let the interest run on for two years, Moss was likely enough to think that he should never be troubled about the principal. But Mr. Tulliver was determined not to encourage such shuffling people any longer; and a ride along the Basset lanes was not likely to enervate a man’s resolution by softening his temper. The deep-trodden hoof-marks, made in the muddiest days of winter, gave him a shake now and then which suggested a rash but stimulating snarl at the father of lawyers, who, whether by means of his hoof or otherwise, had doubtless something to do with this state of the roads; and the abundance of foul land and neglected fences that met his eye, though they made no part of his brother Moss’s farm, strongly contributed to his dissatisfaction with that unlucky agriculturist. If this wasn’t Moss’s fallow, it might have been; Basset was all alike; it was a beggarly parish, in Mr. Tulliver’s opinion, and his opinion was certainly not groundless. Basset had a poor soil, poor roads, a poor non-resident landlord, a poor non-resident vicar, and rather less than half a curate, also poor. If any one strongly impressed with the power of the human mind to triumph over circumstances will contend that the parishioners of Basset might nevertheless have been a very superior class of people, I have nothing to urge against that abstract proposition; I only know that, in point of fact, the Basset mind was in strict keeping with its circumstances. The muddy lanes, green or clayey, that seemed to the unaccustomed eye to lead nowhere but into each other, did really lead, with patience, to a distant highroad; but there were many feet in Basset which they led more frequently to a centre of dissipation, spoken of formerly as the “Markis o’ Granby,” but among intimates as “Dickison’s.” A large low room with a sanded floor; a cold scent of tobacco, modified by undetected beer-dregs; Mr. Dickison leaning against the door-post with a melancholy pimpled face, looking as irrelevant to the daylight as a last night’s guttered candle,—all this may not seem a very seductive form of temptation; but the majority of men in Basset found it fatally alluring when encountered on their road toward four o’clock on a wintry afternoon; and if any wife in Basset wished to indicate that her husband was not a pleasure-seeking man, she could hardly do it more emphatically than by saying that he didn’t spend a shilling at Dickison’s from one Whitsuntide to another. Mrs. Moss had said so of her husband more than once, when her brother was in a mood to find fault with him, as he certainly was to-day. And nothing could be less pacifying to Mr. Tulliver than the behavior of the farmyard gate, which he no sooner attempted to push open with his riding-stick than it acted as gates without the upper hinge are known to do, to the peril of shins, whether equine or human. He was about to get down and lead his horse through the damp dirt of the hollow farmyard, shadowed drearily by the large half-timbered buildings, up to the long line of tumbledown dwelling-houses standing on a raised causeway; but the timely appearance of a cowboy saved him that frustration of a plan he had determined on,—namely, not to get down from his horse during this visit. If a man means to be hard, let him keep in his saddle and speak from that height, above the level of pleading eyes, and with the command of a distant horizon. Mrs. Moss heard the sound of the horse’s feet, and, when her brother rode up, was already outside the kitchen door, with a half-weary smile on her face, and a black-eyed baby in her arms. Mrs. Moss’s face bore a faded resemblance to her brother’s; baby’s little fat hand, pressed against her cheek, seemed to show more strikingly that the cheek was faded.

“Brother, I’m glad to see you,” she said, in an affectionate tone. “I didn’t look for you to-day. How do you do?”

“Oh, pretty well, Mrs. Moss, pretty well,” answered the brother, with cool deliberation, as if it were rather too forward of her to ask that question. She knew at once that her brother was not in a good humor; he never called her Mrs. Moss except when he was angry, and when they were in company. But she thought it was in the order of nature that people who were poorly off should be snubbed. Mrs. Moss did not take her stand on the equality of the human race; she was a patient, prolific, loving-hearted woman.

“Your husband isn’t in the house, I suppose?” added Mr. Tulliver after a grave pause, during which four children had run out, like chickens whose mother has been suddenly in eclipse behind the hen-coop.

“No,” said Mrs. Moss, “but he’s only in the potato-field yonders. Georgy, run to the Far Close in a minute, and tell father your uncle’s come. You’ll get down, brother, won’t you, and take something?”

“No, no; I can’t get down. I must be going home again directly,” said Mr. Tulliver, looking at the distance.

“And how’s Mrs. Tulliver and the children?” said Mrs. Moss, humbly, not daring to press her invitation.

“Oh, pretty well. Tom’s going to a new school at Midsummer,—a deal of expense to me. It’s bad work for me, lying out o’ my money.”

“I wish you’d be so good as let the children come and see their cousins some day. My little uns want to see their cousin Maggie so as never was. And me her godmother, and so fond of her; there’s nobody ‘ud make a bigger fuss with her, according to what they’ve got. And I know she likes to come, for she’s a loving child, and how quick and clever she is, to be sure!”

If Mrs. Moss had been one of the most astute women in the world, instead of being one of the simplest, she could have thought of nothing more likely to propitiate her brother than this praise of Maggie. He seldom found any one volunteering praise of “the little wench”; it was usually left entirely to himself to insist on her merits. But Maggie always appeared in the most amiable light at her aunt Moss’s; it was her Alsatia, where she was out of the reach of law,—if she upset anything, dirtied her shoes, or tore her frock, these things were matters of course at her aunt Moss’s. In spite of himself, Mr. Tulliver’s eyes got milder, and he did not look away from his sister as he said,—

“Ay; she’s fonder o’ you than o’ the other aunts, I think. She takes after our family: not a bit of her mother’s in her.”

“Moss says she’s just like what I used to be,” said Mrs. Moss, “though I was never so quick and fond o’ the books. But I think my Lizzy’s like her; she’s sharp. Come here, Lizzy, my dear, and let your uncle see you; he hardly knows you, you grow so fast.”

Lizzy, a black-eyed child of seven, looked very shy when her mother drew her forward, for the small Mosses were much in awe of their uncle from Dorlcote Mill. She was inferior enough to Maggie in fire and strength of expression to make the resemblance between the two entirely flattering to Mr. Tulliver’s fatherly love.

“Ay, they’re a bit alike,” he said, looking kindly at the little figure in the soiled pinafore. “They both take after our mother. You’ve got enough o’ gells, Gritty,” he added, in a tone half compassionate, half reproachful.

“Four of ‘em, bless ‘em!” said Mrs. Moss, with a sigh, stroking Lizzy’s hair on each side of her forehead; “as many as there’s boys. They’ve got a brother apiece.”

“Ah, but they must turn out and fend for themselves,” said Mr. Tulliver, feeling that his severity was relaxing and trying to brace it by throwing out a wholesome hint “They mustn’t look to hanging on their brothers.”

“No; but I hope their brothers ‘ull love the poor things, and remember they came o’ one father and mother; the lads ‘ull never be the poorer for that,” said Mrs. Moss, flashing out with hurried timidity, like a half-smothered fire.

Mr. Tulliver gave his horse a little stroke on the flank, then checked it, and said angrily, “Stand still with you!” much to the astonishment of that innocent animal.

“And the more there is of ‘em, the more they must love one another,” Mrs. Moss went on, looking at her children with a didactic purpose. But she turned toward her brother again to say, “Not but what I hope your boy ‘ull allays be good to his sister, though there’s but two of ‘em, like you and me, brother.”

The arrow went straight to Mr. Tulliver’s heart. He had not a rapid imagination, but the thought of Maggie was very near to him, and he was not long in seeing his relation to his own sister side by side with Tom’s relation to Maggie. Would the little wench ever be poorly off, and Tom rather hard upon her?

“Ay, ay, Gritty,” said the miller, with a new softness in his tone; “but I’ve allays done what I could for you,” he added, as if vindicating himself from a reproach.

“I’m not denying that, brother, and I’m noways ungrateful,” said poor Mrs. Moss, too fagged by toil and children to have strength left for any pride. “But here’s the father. What a while you’ve been, Moss!”

“While, do you call it?” said Mr. Moss, feeling out of breath and injured. “I’ve been running all the way. Won’t you ‘light, Mr. Tulliver?”

“Well, I’ll just get down and have a bit o’ talk with you in the garden,” said Mr. Tulliver, thinking that he should be more likely to show a due spirit of resolve if his sister were not present.

He got down, and passed with Mr. Moss into the garden, toward an old yew-tree arbor, while his sister stood tapping her baby on the back and looking wistfully after them.

Their entrance into the yew-tree arbor surprised several fowls that were recreating themselves by scratching deep holes in the dusty ground, and at once took flight with much pother and cackling. Mr. Tulliver sat down on the bench, and tapping the ground curiously here and there with his stick, as if he suspected some hollowness, opened the conversation by observing, with