The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot [rocket ebook reader txt] 📗

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, Bessy⁠—and I’ll serve him as honest as if he was no raskill; 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 ha’ gone to law, they say. But who made it so as there was no arbitratin’, and no justice to be got? It signifies nothing to him, I know that; he’s one o’ them fine gentlemen as get money by doing business for poorer folks, and when he’s made beggars of ’em he’ll give ’em charity. I won’t forgive him! I wish he might be punished with shame till his own son ’ud like to forget him. I wish he may do summat as they’d make him work at the treadmill! But he won’t⁠—he’s too big a raskill 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 maybe come a time when you may make him feel; it’ll never come to me; I’n got my head under the yoke. Now write⁠—write it i’ 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 raskills should prosper; it’s the Devil’s 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 Wakem, the man as had helped to ruin him, because I’d promised my wife to make her what amends I could for her trouble, and because I wanted to die in th’ old place where I was born and my father was born. Put that i’ the right words⁠—you know how⁠—and then write, as I don’t forgive Wakem 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 Wakem’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. “You shouldn’t make Tom write that.”

“Be quiet, Maggie!” said Tom. “I shall write it.”

Book IV The Valley of Humiliation I A Variation of Protestantism Unknown to Bossuet

Journeying down the Rhone on a summer’s day, you have perhaps felt the sunshine made dreary by those ruined 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 a sordid 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 seem 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 earthborn race, who had inherited from their mighty parent 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 boars with tusks, 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 minstrel, the soft-lipped princess, the pious recluse, and the timid Israelite. That was a time of colour, 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 Rhine 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 oppress me with the feeling that human life⁠—very much of it⁠—is a narrow, ugly, grovelling 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 will 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 tragicomic. It is a sordid life, you say, this of the Tullivers and Dodsons, irradiated