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

how Wakem had had his comb cut for once in his life, now the business of the dam had been settled by arbitration, and how there never would have been any dispute at all about the height of water if everybody was what they should be, and Old Harry hadn’t made the lawyers. Mr. Tulliver was, on the whole, a man of safe traditional opinions; but on one or two points he had trusted to his unassisted intellect, and had arrived at several questionable conclusions; amongst the rest, that rats, weevils, and lawyers were created by Old Harry. Unhappily he had no one to tell him that this was rampant Manichaeism, else he might have seen his error. But today it was clear that the good principle was triumphant: this affair of the waterpower had been a tangled business somehow, for all it seemed⁠—look at it one way⁠—as plain as water’s water; but, big a puzzle as it was, it hadn’t got the better of Riley. Mr. Tulliver took his brandy-and-water a little stronger than usual, and, for a man who might be supposed to have a few hundreds lying idle at his banker’s, was rather incautiously open in expressing his high estimate of his friend’s business talents.

But the dam was a subject of conversation that would keep; it could always be taken up again at the same point, and exactly in the same condition; and there was another subject, as you know, on which Mr. Tulliver was in pressing want of Mr. Riley’s advice. This was his particular reason for remaining silent for a short space after his last draught, and rubbing his knees in a meditative manner. He was not a man to make an abrupt transition. This was a puzzling world, as he often said, and if you drive your wagon in a hurry, you may light on an awkward corner. Mr. Riley, meanwhile, was not impatient. Why should he be? Even Hotspur, one would think, must have been patient in his slippers on a warm hearth, taking copious snuff, and sipping gratuitous brandy-and-water.

“There’s a thing I’ve got i’ my head,” said Mr. Tulliver at last, in rather a lower tone than usual, as he turned his head and looked steadfastly at his companion.

“Ah!” said Mr. Riley, in a tone of mild interest. He was a man with heavy waxen eyelids and high-arched eyebrows, looking exactly the same under all circumstances. This immovability of face, and the habit of taking a pinch of snuff before he gave an answer, made him trebly oracular to Mr. Tulliver.

“It’s a very particular thing,” he went on; “it’s about my boy Tom.”

At the sound of this name, Maggie, who was seated on a low stool close by the fire, with a large book open on her lap, shook her heavy hair back and looked up eagerly. There were few sounds that roused Maggie when she was dreaming over her book, but Tom’s name served as well as the shrillest whistle; in an instant she was on the watch, with gleaming eyes, like a Skye terrier suspecting mischief, or at all events determined to fly at anyone who threatened it toward Tom.

“You see, I want to put him to a new school at Midsummer,” said Mr. Tulliver; “he’s comin’ away from the ’cademy at Lady-day, an’ I shall let him run loose for a quarter; but after that I want to send him to a downright good school, where they’ll make a scholard of him.”

“Well,” said Mr. Riley, “there’s no greater advantage you can give him than a good education. Not,” he added, with polite significance⁠—“not that a man can’t be an excellent miller and farmer, and a shrewd, sensible fellow into the bargain, without much help from the schoolmaster.”

“I believe you,” said Mr. Tulliver, winking, and turning his head on one side; “but that’s where it is. I don’t mean Tom to be a miller and farmer. I see no fun i’ that. Why, if I made him a miller an’ farmer, he’d be expectin’ to take to the mill an’ the land, an’ a-hinting at me as it was time for me to lay by an’ think o’ my latter end. Nay, nay, I’ve seen enough o’ that wi’ sons. I’ll never pull my coat off before I go to bed. I shall give Tom an eddication an’ put him to a business, as he may make a nest for himself, an’ not want to push me out o’ mine. Pretty well if he gets it when I’m dead an’ gone. I shan’t be put off wi’ spoon-meat afore I’ve lost my teeth.”

This was evidently a point on which Mr. Tulliver felt strongly; and the impetus which had given unusual rapidity and emphasis to his speech showed itself still unexhausted for some minutes afterward in a defiant motion of the head from side to side, and an occasional “Nay, nay,” like a subsiding growl.

These angry symptoms were keenly observed by Maggie, and cut her to the quick. Tom, it appeared, was supposed capable of turning his father out of doors, and of making the future in some way tragic by his wickedness. This was not to be borne; and Maggie jumped up from her stool, forgetting all about her heavy book, which fell with a bang within the fender, and going up between her father’s knees, said, in a half-crying, half-indignant voice⁠—

“Father, Tom wouldn’t be naughty to you ever; I know he wouldn’t.”

Mrs. Tulliver was out of the room superintending a choice supper-dish, and Mr. Tulliver’s heart was touched; so Maggie was not scolded about the book. Mr. Riley quietly picked it up and looked at it, while the father laughed, with a certain tenderness in his hard-lined face, and patted his little girl on the back, and then held her hands and kept her between his knees.

“What! they mustn’t say any harm o’ Tom, eh?” said Mr. Tulliver, looking at Maggie with a twinkling eye. Then, in a lower voice, turning to Mr. Riley, as though Maggie couldn’t hear, “She understands what one’s talking about so