Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (76 page)

“Why, because the parsons are the best schoolmasters, by what I can make out,” said poor Mr. Tulliver, who, in the maze of this puzzling world, laid hold of any clue with great readiness and tenacity. “Jacobs at th’ academy’s no parson, and he’s done very bad by the boy; and I made up my mind, if I send him to school again, it should be to somebody different to Jacobs. And this Mr. Stelling, by what I can make out, is the sort o’ man I want. And I mean my boy to go to him at Midsummer,” he concluded, in a tone of decision, tapping his snuff-box and taking a pinch.

“You’ll have to pay a swinging half-yearly bill, then, eh, Tulliver? The clergymen have highish notions, in general,” said Mr. Deane, taking snuff vigorously, as he always did when wishing to maintain a neutral position.

“What! do you think the parson’ll teach him to know a good sample o’ wheat when he sees it, neighbor Tulliver?” said Mr. Glegg, who was fond of his jest, and having retired from business, felt that it was not only allowable but becoming in him to take a playful view of things.

“Why, you see, I’ve got a plan i’ my head about Tom,” said Mr. Tulliver, pausing after that statement and lifting up his glass.

“Well, if I may be allowed to speak, and it’s seldom as I am,” said Mrs. Glegg, with a tone of bitter meaning, “I should like to know what good is to come to the boy by bringin’ him up above his fortin.”

“Why,” said Mr. Tulliver, not looking at Mrs. Glegg, but at the male part of his audience, “you see, I’ve made up my mind not to bring Tom up to my own business. I’ve had my thoughts about it all along, and I made up my mind by what I saw with Garnett and his son. I mean to put him to some business as he can go into without capital, and I want to give him an eddication as he’ll be even wi’ the lawyers and folks, and put me up to a notion now an’ then.”

Mrs. Glegg emitted a long sort of guttural sound with closed lips, that smiled in mingled pity and scorn.

“It ‘ud be a fine deal better for some people,” she said, after that introductory note, “if they’d let the lawyers alone.”

“Is he at the head of a grammar school, then, this clergyman, such as that at Market Bewley?” said Mr. Deane.

“No, nothing of that,” said Mr. Tulliver. “He won’t take more than two or three pupils, and so he’ll have the more time to attend to ‘em, you know.”

“Ah, and get his eddication done the sooner; they can’t learn much at a time when there’s so many of ‘em,” said uncle Pullet, feeling that he was getting quite an insight into this difficult matter.

“But he’ll want the more pay, I doubt,” said Mr. Glegg.

“Ay, ay, a cool hundred a year, that’s all,” said Mr. Tulliver, with some pride at his own spirited course. “But then, you know, it’s an investment; Tom’s eddication ‘ull be so much capital to him.”

“Ay, there’s something in that,” said Mr. Glegg. “Well well, neighbor Tulliver, you may be right, you may be right:

‘When land is gone and money’s spent,

Then learning is most excellent.’

“I remember seeing those two lines wrote on a window at Buxton. But us that have got no learning had better keep our money, eh, neighbor Pullet?” Mr. Glegg rubbed his knees, and looked very pleasant.

“Mr. Glegg, I wonder at you,” said his wife. “It’s very unbecoming in a man o’ your age and belongings.”

“What’s unbecoming, Mrs. G.?” said Mr. Glegg, winking pleasantly at the company. “My new blue coat as I’ve got on?”

“I pity your weakness, Mr. Glegg. I say it’s unbecoming to be making a joke when you see your own kin going headlongs to ruin.”

“If you mean me by that,” said Mr. Tulliver, considerably nettled, “you needn’t trouble yourself to fret about me. I can manage my own affairs without troubling other folks.”

“Bless me!” said Mr. Deane, judiciously introducing a new idea, “why, now I come to think of it, somebody said Wakem was going to send his son–the deformed lad–to a clergyman, didn’t they, Susan?” (appealing to his wife).

“I can give no account of it, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Deane, closing her lips very tightly again. Mrs. Deane was not a woman to take part in a scene where missiles were flying.

“Well,” said Mr. Tulliver, speaking all the more cheerfully, that Mrs. Glegg might see he didn’t mind her, “if Wakem thinks o’ sending his son to a clergyman, depend on it I shall make no mistake i’ sending Tom to one. Wakem’s as big a scoundrel as Old Harry ever made, but he knows the length of every man’s foot he’s got to deal with. Ay, ay, tell me who’s Wakem’s butcher, and I’ll tell you where to get your meat.”

“But lawyer Wakem’s son’s got a hump-back,” said Mrs. Pullet, who felt as if the whole business had a funereal aspect; “it’s more nat’ral to send him to a clergyman.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Glegg, interpreting Mrs. Pullet’s observation with erroneous plausibility, “you must consider that, neighbor Tulliver; Wakem’s son isn’t likely to follow any business. Wakem ‘ull make a gentleman of him, poor fellow.”

“Mr. Glegg,” said Mrs. G., in a tone which implied that her indignation would fizz and ooze a little, though she was determined to keep it corked up, “you’d far better hold your tongue. Mr. Tulliver doesn’t want to know your opinion nor mine either. There’s folks in the world as know better than everybody else.”

“Why, I should think that’s you, if we’re to trust your own tale,” said Mr. Tulliver, beginning to boil up again.

“Oh, I say nothing,” said Mrs. Glegg, sarcastically. “My advice has never been asked, and I don’t give it.”

“It’ll be the first time, then,” said Mr. Tulliver. “It’s the only thing you’re over-ready at giving.”

“I’ve been over-ready at lending, then, if I haven’t been over-ready at giving,” said Mrs. Glegg. “There’s folks I’ve lent money to, as perhaps I shall repent o’ lending money to kin.”

“Come, come, come,” said Mr. Glegg, soothingly. But Mr. Tulliver was not to be hindered of his retort.

“You’ve got a bond for it, I reckon,” he said; “and you’ve had your five per cent, kin or no kin.”

“Sister,” said Mrs. Tulliver, pleadingly, “drink your wine, and let me give you some almonds and raisins.”

“Bessy, I’m sorry for you,” said Mrs. Glegg, very much with the feeling of a cur that seizes the opportunity of diverting his bark toward the man who carries no stick. “It’s poor work talking o’ almonds and raisins.”

“Lors, sister Glegg, don’t be so quarrelsome,” said Mrs. Pullet, beginning to cry a little. “You may be struck with a fit, getting so red in the face after dinner, and we are but just out o’ mourning, all of us,–and all wi’ gowns craped alike and just put by; it’s very bad among sisters.”

“I should think it is bad,” said Mrs. Glegg. “Things are come to a fine pass when one sister invites the other to her house o’ purpose to quarrel with her and abuse her.”

“Softly, softly, Jane; be reasonable, be reasonable,” said Mr. Glegg.

But while he was speaking, Mr. Tulliver, who had by no means said enough to satisfy his anger, burst out again.

“Who wants to quarrel with you?” he said. “It’s you as can’t let people alone, but must be gnawing at ‘em forever. I should never want to quarrel with any woman if she kept her place.”

“My place, indeed!” said Mrs. Glegg, getting rather more shrill. “There’s your betters, Mr. Tulliver, as are dead and in their grave, treated me with a different sort o’ respect to what you do; though I’ve got a husband as’ll sit by and see me abused by them as ‘ud never ha’ had the chance if there hadn’t been them in our family as married worse than they might ha’ done.”

“If you talk o’ that,” said Mr. Tulliver, “my family’s as good as yours, and better, for it hasn’t got a damned ill-tempered woman in it!”

“Well,” said Mrs. Glegg, rising from her chair, “I don’t know whether you think it’s a fine thing to sit by and hear me swore at, Mr. Glegg; but I’m not going to stay a minute longer in this house. You can stay behind, and come home with the gig, and I’ll walk home.”

“Dear heart, dear heart!” said Mr. Glegg in a melancholy tone, as he followed his wife out of the room.

“Mr. Tulliver, how could you talk so?” said Mrs. Tulliver, with the tears in her eyes.

“Let her go,” said Mr. Tulliver, too hot to be damped by any amount of tears. “Let her go, and the sooner the better; she won’t be trying to domineer over me again in a hurry.”

“Sister Pullet,” said Mrs. Tulliver, helplessly, “do you think it ‘ud be any use for you to go after her and try to pacify her?”

“Better not, better not,” said Mr. Deane. “You’ll make it up another day.”

“Then, sisters, shall we go and look at the children?” said Mrs. Tulliver, drying her eyes.

No proposition could have been more seasonable. Mr. Tulliver felt very much as if the air had been cleared of obtrusive flies now the women were out of the room. There were few things he liked better than a chat with Mr. Deane, whose close application to business allowed the pleasure very rarely. Mr. Deane, he considered, was the “knowingest” man of his acquaintance, and he had besides a ready causticity of tongue that made an agreeable supplement to Mr. Tulliver’s own tendency that way, which had remained in rather an inarticulate condition. And now the women were gone, they could carry on their serious talk without frivolous interruption. They could exchange their views concerning the Duke of Wellington, whose conduct in the Catholic Question had thrown such an entirely new light on his character; and speak slightingly of his conduct at the battle of Waterloo, which he would never have won if there hadn’t been a great many Englishmen at his back, not to speak of Blucher and the Prussians, who, as Mr. Tulliver had heard from a person of particular knowledge in that matter, had come up in the very nick of time; though here there was a slight dissidence, Mr. Deane remarking that he was not disposed to give much credit to the Prussians,–the build of their vessels, together with the unsatisfactory character of transactions in Dantzic beer, inclining him to form rather a low view of Prussian pluck generally. Rather beaten on this ground, Mr. Tulliver proceeded to express his fears that the country could never again be what it used to be; but Mr. Deane, attached to a firm of which the returns were on the increase, naturally took a more lively view of the present, and had some details to give concerning the state of the imports, especially in hides and spelter, which soothed Mr. Tulliver’s imagination by throwing into more distant perspective the period when the country would become utterly the prey of Papists and Radicals, and there would be no more chance for honest men.

Uncle Pullet sat by and listened with twinkling eyes to these high matters. He didn’t understand politics himself,–thought they were a natural gift,–but by what he could make out, this Duke of Wellington was no better than he should be.

CHAPTER VIII

Mr. Tulliver Shows His Weaker Side

“Suppose sister Glegg should call her money in; it ‘ud be very awkward for you to have to raise five hundred pounds now,” said Mrs. Tulliver to her husband that evening, as she took a plaintive review of the day.

Mrs. Tulliver had lived thirteen years with her husband, yet she retained in all the freshness of her early married life a facility of saying things which drove him in the opposite direction to the one she desired. Some minds are wonderful for keeping their bloom in this way, as a patriarchal goldfish apparently retains to the last its youthful illusion that it can swim in a straight line beyond the encircling glass. Mrs. Tulliver was an amiable fish of this kind, and after running her head against the same resisting medium for thirteen years would go at it again to-day with undulled alacrity.

This observation of hers tended directly to convince Mr. Tulliver that it would not be at all awkward for him to raise five hundred pounds; and when Mrs. Tulliver became rather pressing to know how he would raise it without mortgaging the mill and the house which he had said he never would mortgage, since nowadays people were none so ready to lend money without security, Mr. Tulliver, getting warm, declared that Mrs. Glegg might do as she liked about calling in her money, he should pay it in whether or not. He was not going to be beholden to his wife’s sisters. When a man had married into a family where there was a whole litter of women, he might have plenty to put up with if he chose. But Mr. Tulliver did not choose.

Mrs. Tulliver cried a little in a trickling, quiet way as she put on her nightcap; but presently sank into a comfortable sleep, lulled by the thought that she would talk everything over with her sister Pullet to-morrow, when she was to take the children to Garum Firs to tea. Not that she looked forward to any distinct issue from that talk; but it seemed impossible that past events should be so obstinate as to remain unmodified when they were complained against.

Her husband lay awake rather longer, for he too was thinking of a visit he would pay on the morrow; and his ideas on the subject were not of so vague and soothing a kind as those of his amiable partner.

Mr. Tulliver, when under the influence of a strong feeling, had a promptitude in action that may seem inconsistent with that painful sense of the complicated, puzzling nature of human affairs under which his more dispassionate deliberations were conducted; but it is really not improbable that there was a direct relation between these apparently contradictory phenomena, since I have observed that for getting a strong impression that a skein is tangled there is nothing like snatching hastily at a single thread. It was owing to this promptitude that Mr. Tulliver was on horseback soon after dinner the next day (he was not dyspeptic) on his way to Basset to see his sister Moss and her husband. For having made up his mind irrevocably that he would pay Mrs. Glegg her loan of five hundred pounds, it naturally occurred to him that he had a promissory note for three hundred pounds lent to his brother-in-law Moss; and if the said brother-in-law could manage to pay in the money within a given time, it would go far to lessen the fallacious air of inconvenience which Mr. Tulliver’s spirited step might have worn in the eyes of weak people who require to know precisely how a thing is to be done before they are strongly confident that it will be easy.

For Mr. Tulliver was in a position neither new nor striking, but, like other every-day things, sure to have a cumulative effect that will be felt in the long run: he was held to be a much more substantial man than he really was. And as we are all apt to believe what the world believes about us, it was his habit to think of failure and ruin with the same sort of remote pity with which a spare, long-necked man hears that his plethoric short-necked neighbor is stricken with apoplexy. He had been always used to hear pleasant jokes about his advantages as a man who worked his own mill, and owned a pretty bit of land; and these jokes naturally kept up his sense that he was a man of considerable substance. They gave a pleasant flavor to his glass on a market-day, and if it had not been for the recurrence of half-yearly payments, Mr. Tulliver would really have forgotten that there was a mortgage of two thousand pounds on his very desirable freehold. That was not altogether his own fault, since one of the thousand pounds was his sister’s fortune, which he had to pay on her marriage; and a man who has neighbors that will go to law with him is not likely to pay off his mortgages, especially if he enjoys the good opinion of acquaintances who want to borrow a hundred pounds on security too lofty to be represented by parchment. Our friend Mr. Tulliver had a good-natured fibre in him, and did not like to give harsh refusals even to his sister, who had not only come in to the world in that superfluous way characteristic 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 high-road; 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 tumble-down 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.”