Chapter: What Had Happened at Home


When Mr. Tulliver first knew the fact that the lawsuit was decided
against him, and that Pivart and Wakem were triumphant, every one who
happened to observe him at the time thought that, for so confident and
hot-tempered a man, he bore the blow remarkably well. He thought so
himself; he thought he was going to show that if Wakem or anybody else
considered him crushed, they would find themselves mistaken. He could
not refuse to see that the costs of this protracted suit would take
more than he possessed to pay them; but he appeared to himself to be
full of expedients by which he could ward off any results but such as
were tolerable, and could avoid the appearance of breaking down in the
world. All the obstinacy and defiance of his nature, driven out of
their old channel, found a vent for themselves in the immediate
formation of plans by which he would meet his difficulties, and remain
Mr. Tulliver of Dorlcote Mill in spite of them. There was such a rush
of projects in his brain, that it was no wonder his face was flushed
when he came away from his talk with his attorney, Mr. Gore, and
mounted his horse to ride home from Lindum. There was Furley, who held
the mortgage on the land,--a reasonable fellow, who would see his own
interest, Mr. Tulliver was convinced, and who would be glad not only
to purchase the whole estate, including the mill and homestead, but
would accept Mr. Tulliver as tenant, and be willing to advance money
to be repaid with high interest out of the profits of the business,
which would be made over to him, Mr. Tulliver only taking enough
barely to maintain himself and his family. Who would neglect such a
profitable investment? Certainly not Furley, for Mr. Tulliver had
determined that Furley should meet his plans with the utmost alacrity;
and there are men whoses brains have not yet been dangerously heated
by the loss of a lawsuit, who are apt to see in their own interest or
desires a motive for other men's actions. There was no doubt (in the
miller's mind) that Furley would do just what was desirable; and if he
did--why, things would not be so very much worse. Mr. Tulliver and his
family must live more meagrely and humbly, but it would only be till
the profits of the business had paid off Furley's advances, and that
might be while Mr. Tulliver had still a good many years of life before
him. It was clear that the costs of the suit could be paid without his
being obliged to turn out of his old place, and look like a ruined
man. It was certainly an awkward moment in his affairs. There was that
suretyship for poor Riley, who had died suddenly last April, and left
his friend saddled with a debt of two hundred and fifty pounds,--a
fact which had helped to make Mr. Tulliver's banking book less
pleasant reading than a man might desire toward Christmas. Well! he
had never been one of those poor-spirited sneaks who would refuse to
give a helping hand to a fellow-traveller in this puzzling world. The
really vexatious business was the fact that some months ago the
creditor who had lent him the five hundred pounds to repay Mrs. Glegg
had become uneasy about his money (set on by Wakem, of course), and
Mr. Tulliver, still confident that he should gain his suit, and
finding it eminently inconvenient to raise the said sum until that
desirable issue had taken place, had rashly acceded to the demand that
he should give a bill of sale on his household furniture and some
other effects, as security in lieu of the bond. It was all one, he had
said to himself; he should soon pay off the money, and there was no
harm in giving that security any more than another. But now the
consequences of this bill of sale occurred to him in a new light, and
he remembered that the time was close at hand when it would be
enforced unless the money were repaid. Two months ago he would have
declared stoutly that he would never be beholden to his wife's
friends; but now he told himself as stoutly that it was nothing but
right and natural that Bessy should go to the Pullets and explain the
thing to them; they would hardly let Bessy's furniture be sold, and it
might be security to Pullet if he advanced the money,--there would,
after all, be no gift or favor in the matter. Mr. Tulliver would never
have asked for anything from so poor-spirited a fellow for himself,
but Bessy might do so if she liked.

It is precisely the proudest and most obstinate men who are the most
liable to shift their position and contradict themselves in this
sudden manner; everything is easier to them than to face the simple
fact that they have been thoroughly defeated, and must begin life
anew. And Mr. Tulliver, you perceive, though nothing more than a
superior miller and maltster, was as proud and obstinate as if he had
been a very lofty personage, in whom such dispositions might be a
source of that conspicuous, far-echoing tragedy, which sweeps the
stage in regal robes, and makes the dullest chronicler sublime. The
pride and obstinacy of millers and other insignificant people, whom
you pass unnoticingly on the road every day, have their tragedy too;
but it is of that unwept, hidden sort that goes on from generation to
generation, and leaves no record,--such tragedy, perhaps, as lies in
the conflicts of young souls, hungry for joy, under a lot made
suddenly hard to them, under the dreariness of a home where the
morning brings no promise with it, and where the unexpectant
discontent of worn and disappointed parents weighs on the children
like a damp, thick air, in which all the functions of life are
depressed; or such tragedy as lies in the slow or sudden death that
follows on a bruised passion, though it may be a death that finds only
a parish funeral. There are certain animals to which tenacity of
position is a law of life,--they can never flourish again, after a
single wrench: and there are certain human beings to whom predominance
is a law of life,--they can only sustain humiliation so long as they
can refuse to believe in it, and, in their own conception, predominate
still.

Mr. Tulliver was still predominating, in his own imagination, as he
approached St. Ogg's, through which he had to pass on his way
homeward. But what was it that suggested to him, as he saw the Laceham
coach entering the town, to follow it to the coach-office, and get the
clerk there to write a letter, requiring Maggie to come home the very
next day? Mr. Tulliver's own hand shook too much under his excitement
for him to write himself, and he wanted the letter to be given to the
coachman to deliver at Miss Firniss's school in the morning. There was
a craving which he would not account for to himself, to have Maggie
near him, without delay,--she must come back by the coach to-morrow.

To Mrs. Tulliver, when he got home, he would admit no difficulties,
and scolded down her burst of grief on hearing that the lawsuit was
lost, by angry assertions that there was nothing to grieve about. He
said nothing to her that night about the bill of sale and the
application to Mrs. Pullet, for he had kept her in ignorance of the
nature of that transaction, and had explained the necessity for taking
an inventory of the goods as a matter connected with his will. The
possession of a wife conspicuously one's inferior in intellect is,
like other high privileges, attended with a few inconveniences, and,
among the rest, with the occasional necessity for using a little
deception.

The next day Mr. Tulliver was again on horseback in the afternoon, on
his way to Mr. Gore's office at St. Ogg's. Gore was to have seen
Furley in the morning, and to have sounded him in relation to Mr.
Tulliver's affairs. But he had not gone half-way when he met a clerk
from Mr. Gore's office, who was bringing a letter to Mr. Tulliver. Mr.
Gore had been prevented by a sudden call of business from waiting at
his office to see Mr. Tulliver, according to appointment, but would be
at his office at eleven to-morrow morning, and meanwhile had sent some
important information by letter.

"Oh!" said Mr. Tulliver, taking the letter, but not opening it. "Then
tell Gore I'll see him to-morrow at eleven"; and he turned his horse.

The clerk, struck with Mr. Tulliver's glistening, excited glance,
looked after him for a few moments, and then rode away. The reading of
a letter was not the affair of an instant to Mr. Tulliver; he took in
the sense of a statement very slowly through the medium of written or
even printed characters; so he had put the letter in his pocket,
thinking he would open it in his armchair at home. But by-and-by it
occurred to him that there might be something in the letter Mrs.
Tulliver must not know about, and if so, it would be better to keep it
out of her sight altogether. He stopped his horse, took out the
letter, and read it. It was only a short letter; the substance was,
that Mr. Gore had ascertained, on secret, but sure authority, that
Furley had been lately much straitened for money, and had parted with
his securities,--among the rest, the mortgage on Mr. Tulliver's
property, which he had transferred to----Wakem.

In half an hour after this Mr. Tulliver's own wagoner found him lying
by the roadside insensible, with an open letter near him, and his gray
horse snuffing uneasily about him.

When Maggie reached home that evening, in obedience to her father's
call, he was no longer insensible. About an hour before he had become
conscious, and after vague, vacant looks around him, had muttered
something about "a letter," which he presently repeated impatiently.
At the instance of Mr. Turnbull, the medical man, Gore's letter was
brought and laid on the bed, and the previous impatience seemed to be
allayed. The stricken man lay for some time with his eyes fixed on the
letter, as if he were trying to knit up his thoughts by its help. But
presently a new wave of memory seemed to have come and swept the other
away; he turned his eyes from the letter to the door, and after
looking uneasily, as if striving to see something his eyes were too
dim for, he said, "The little wench."

He repeated the words impatiently from time to time, appearing
entirely unconscious of everything except this one importunate want,
and giving no sign of knowing his wife or any one else; and poor Mrs.
Tulliver, her feeble faculties almost paralyzed by this sudden
accumulation of troubles, went backward and forward to the gate to see
if the Laceham coach were coming, though it was not yet time.

But it came at last, and set down the poor anxious girl, no longer the
"little wench," except to her father's fond memory.

"Oh, mother, what is the matter?" Maggie said, with pale lips, as her
mother came toward her crying. She didn't think her father was ill,
because the letter had come at his dictation from the office at St.
Ogg's.

But Mr. Turnbull came now to meet her; a medical man is the good angel
of the troubled house, and Maggie ran toward the kind old friend, whom
she remembered as long as she could remember anything, with a
trembling, questioning look.

"Don't alarm yourself too much, my dear," he said, taking her hand.
"Your father has had a sudden attack, and has not quite recovered his
memory. But he has been asking for you, and it will do him good to see
you. Keep as quiet as you can; take off your things, and come upstairs
with me."

Maggie obeyed, with that terrible beating of the heart which makes
existence seem simply a painful pulsation. The very quietness with
which Mr. Turnbull spoke had frightened her susceptible imagination.
Her father's eyes were still turned uneasily toward the door when she
entered and met the strange, yearning, helpless look that had been
seeking her in vain. With a sudden flash and movement, he raised
himself in the bed; she rushed toward him, and clasped him with
agonized kisses.

Poor child! it was very early for her to know one of those supreme
moments in life when all we have hoped or delighted in, all we can
dread or endure, falls away from our regard as insignificant; is lost,
like a trivial memory, in that simple, primitive love which knits us
to the beings who have been nearest to us, in their times of
helplessness or of anguish.

But that flash of recognition had been too great a strain on the
father's bruised, enfeebled powers. He sank back again in renewed
insensibility and rigidity, which lasted for many hours, and was only
broken by a flickering return of consciousness, in which he took
passively everything that was given to him, and seemed to have a sort
of infantine satisfaction in Maggie's near presence,--such
satisfaction as a baby has when it is returned to the nurse's lap.

Mrs. Tulliver sent for her sisters, and there was much wailing and
lifting up of hands below stairs. Both uncles and aunts saw that the
ruin of Bessy and her family was as complete as they had ever
foreboded it, and there was a general family sense that a judgment had
fallen on Mr. Tulliver, which it would be an impiety to counteract by
too much kindness. But Maggie heard little of this, scarcely ever
leaving her father's bedside, where she sat opposite him with her hand
on his. Mrs. Tulliver wanted to have Tom fetched home, and seemed to
be thinking more of her boy even than of her husband; but the aunts
and uncles opposed this. Tom was better at school, since Mr. Turnbull
said there was no immediate danger, he believed. But at the end of the
second day, when Maggie had become more accustomed to her father's
fits of insensibility, and to the expectation that he would revive
from them, the thought of Tom had become urgent with _her_ too; and
when her mother sate crying at night and saying, "My poor lad--it's
nothing but right he should come home," Maggie said, "Let me go for
him, and tell him, mother; I'll go to-morrow morning if father doesn't
know me and want me. It would be so hard for Tom to come home and not
know anything about it beforehand."

And the next morning Maggie went, as we have seen. Sitting on the
coach on their way home, the brother and sister talked to each other
in sad, interrupted whispers.

"They say Mr. Wakem has got a mortgage or something on the land, Tom,"
said Maggie. "It was the letter with that news in it that made father
ill, they think."

"I believe that scoundrel's been planning all along to ruin my
father," said Tom, leaping from the vaguest impressions to a definite
conclusion. "I'll make him feel for it when I'm a man. Mind you never
speak to Philip again."

"Oh, Tom!" said Maggie, in a tone of sad remonstrance; but she had no
spirit to dispute anything then, still less to vex Tom by opposing
him.

 When he learns that the suit is lost, Tulliver casts about for some way to avoid looking like a ruined man. He hopes to find someone to buy the mill and take him on as a tenant. "The really vexatious business" is that he has given a bill of sale on his household goods in order to raise the money to pay Mrs. Glegg. He thinks now that it might be best for his wife to go to the Pullets and ask them to advance him that much money. Tulliver rides to St. Ogg's to see his lawyer about selling the mill. The lawyer is out, but Tulliver finds a note waiting for him. On the way home he reads it and finds that the mortgage on his property has been transferred. A half-hour later he is found lying insensible by the roadside. Maggie is the first person Mr. Tulliver asks for when he becomes partly conscious. When she comes to him he recognizes her but falls unconscious again, except for moments when he "seemed to have a sort of infantine satisfaction in Maggie's near presence -- such satisfaction as a baby has when it is returned to the nurse's lap." Mrs. Tulliver sends for her sisters, who see the case as "a judgment . . . fallen on Mr. Tulliver, which it would be an impiety to counteract by too much kindness." Mrs. Tulliver wants Tom to come and seems to think more of him than of her husband. Maggie sets out to bring him home. On the way home Tom ventures that Wakem is responsible, and vows to make him "feel for it."

