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

may know what my wish about you⁠—what my advice to you⁠—would be, if they sprang from my own feeling and opinion unmodified by counteracting circumstances.”

Dr. Kenn paused a little while. There was an entire absence of effusive benevolence in his manner; there was something almost cold in the gravity of his look and voice. If Maggie had not known that his benevolence was persevering in proportion to its reserve, she might have been chilled and frightened. As it was, she listened expectantly, quite sure that there would be some effective help in his words. He went on.

“Your inexperience of the world, Miss Tulliver, prevents you from anticipating fully the very unjust conceptions that will probably be formed concerning your conduct⁠—conceptions which will have a baneful effect, even in spite of known evidence to disprove them.”

“Oh, I do⁠—I begin to see,” said Maggie, unable to repress this utterance of her recent pain. “I know I shall be insulted. I shall be thought worse than I am.”

“You perhaps do not yet know,” said Dr. Kenn, with a touch of more personal pity, “that a letter is come which ought to satisfy everyone who has known anything of you, that you chose the steep and difficult path of a return to the right, at the moment when that return was most of all difficult.”

“Oh, where is he?” said poor Maggie, with a flush and tremor that no presence could have hindered.

“He is gone abroad; he has written of all that passed to his father. He has vindicated you to the utmost; and I hope the communication of that letter to your cousin will have a beneficial effect on her.”

Dr. Kenn waited for her to get calm again before he went on.

“That letter, as I said, ought to suffice to prevent false impressions concerning you. But I am bound to tell you, Miss Tulliver, that not only the experience of my whole life, but my observation within the last three days, makes me fear that there is hardly any evidence which will save you from the painful effect of false imputations. The persons who are the most incapable of a conscientious struggle such as yours are precisely those who will be likely to shrink from you, because they will not believe in your struggle. I fear your life here will be attended not only with much pain, but with many obstructions. For this reason⁠—and for this only⁠—I ask you to consider whether it will not perhaps be better for you to take a situation at a distance, according to your former intention. I will exert myself at once to obtain one for you.”

“Oh, if I could but stop here!” said Maggie. “I have no heart to begin a strange life again. I should have no stay. I should feel like a lonely wanderer, cut off from the past. I have written to the lady who offered me a situation to excuse myself. If I remained here, I could perhaps atone in some way to Lucy⁠—to others; I could convince them that I’m sorry. And,” she added, with some of the old proud fire flashing out, “I will not go away because people say false things of me. They shall learn to retract them. If I must go away at last, because⁠—because others wish it, I will not go now.”

“Well,” said Dr. Kenn, after some consideration, “if you determine on that, Miss Tulliver, you may rely on all the influence my position gives me. I am bound to aid and countenance you by the very duties of my office as a parish priest. I will add, that personally I have a deep interest in your peace of mind and welfare.”

“The only thing I want is some occupation that will enable me to get my bread and be independent,” said Maggie. “I shall not want much. I can go on lodging where I am.”

“I must think over the subject maturely,” said Dr. Kenn, “and in a few days I shall be better able to ascertain the general feeling. I shall come to see you; I shall bear you constantly in mind.”

When Maggie had left him, Dr. Kenn stood ruminating with his hands behind him, and his eyes fixed on the carpet, under a painful sense of doubt and difficulty. The tone of Stephen’s letter, which he had read, and the actual relations of all the persons concerned, forced upon him powerfully the idea of an ultimate marriage between Stephen and Maggie as the least evil; and the impossibility of their proximity in St. Ogg’s on any other supposition, until after years of separation, threw an insurmountable prospective difficulty over Maggie’s stay there. On the other hand, he entered with all the comprehension of a man who had known spiritual conflict, and lived through years of devoted service to his fellow-men, into that state of Maggie’s heart and conscience which made the consent to the marriage a desecration to her; her conscience must not be tampered with; the principle on which she had acted was a safer guide than any balancing of consequences. His experience told him that intervention was too dubious a responsibility to be lightly incurred; the possible issue either of an endeavor to restore the former relations with Lucy and Philip, or of counselling submission to this irruption of a new feeling, was hidden in a darkness all the more impenetrable because each immediate step was clogged with evil.

The great problem of the shifting relation between passion and duty is clear to no man who is capable of apprehending it; the question whether the moment has come in which a man has fallen below the possibility of a renunciation that will carry any efficacy, and must accept the sway of a passion against which he had struggled as a trespass, is one for which we have no master-key that will fit all cases. The casuists have become a byword of reproach; but their perverted spirit of minute discrimination was the shadow of a truth to which eyes and hearts are too