Chapter: A Duet in Paradise


The well-furnished drawing-room, with the open grand piano, and the
pleasant outlook down a sloping garden to a boat-house by the side of
the Floss, is Mr. Deane's. The neat little lady in mourning, whose
light-brown ringlets are falling over the colored embroidery with
which her fingers are busy, is of course Lucy Deane; and the fine
young man who is leaning down from his chair to snap the scissors in
the extremely abbreviated face of the "King Charles" lying on the
young lady's feet is no other than Mr. Stephen Guest, whose diamond
ring, attar of roses, and air of _nonchalant_ leisure, at twelve
o'clock in the day, are the graceful and odoriferous result of the
largest oil-mill and the most extensive wharf in St. Ogg's. There is
an apparent triviality in the action with the scissors, but your
discernment perceives at once that there is a design in it which makes
it eminently worthy of a large-headed, long-limbed young man; for you
see that Lucy wants the scissors, and is compelled, reluctant as she
may be, to shake her ringlets back, raise her soft hazel eyes, smile
playfully down on the face that is so very nearly on a level with her
knee, and holding out her little shell-pink palm, to say,--

"My scissors, please, if you can renounce the great pleasure of
persecuting my poor Minny."

The foolish scissors have slipped too far over the knuckles, it seems,
and Hercules holds out his entrapped fingers hopelessly.

"Confound the scissors! The oval lies the wrong way. Please draw them
off for me."

"Draw them off with your other hand," says Miss Lucy, roguishly.

"Oh, but that's my left hand; I'm not left-handed."

Lucy laughs, and the scissors are drawn off with gentle touches from
tiny tips, which naturally dispose Mr. Stephen for a repetition _da
capo_. Accordingly, he watches for the release of the scissors, that
he may get them into his possession again.

"No, no," said Lucy, sticking them in her band, "you shall not have my
scissors again,--you have strained them already. Now don't set Minny
growling again. Sit up and behave properly, and then I will tell you
some news."

"What is that?" said Stephen, throwing himself back and hanging his
right arm over the corner of his chair. He might have been sitting for
his portrait, which would have represented a rather striking young man
of five-and-twenty, with a square forehead, short dark-brown hair,
standing erect, with a slight wave at the end, like a thick crop of
corn, and a half-ardent, half-sarcastic glance from under his
well-marked horizontal eyebrows. "Is it very important news?"

"Yes, very. Guess."

"You are going to change Minny's diet, and give him three ratafias
soaked in a dessert-spoonful of cream daily?"

"Quite wrong."

"Well, then, Dr. Kenn has been preaching against buckram, and you
ladies have all been sending him a roundrobin, saying, 'This is a hard
doctrine; who can bear it?'"

"For shame!" said Lucy, adjusting her little mouth gravely. "It is
rather dull of you not to guess my news, because it is about something
I mentioned to you not very long ago."

"But you have mentioned many things to me not long ago. Does your
feminine tyranny require that when you say the thing you mean is one
of several things, I should know it immediately by that mark?"

"Yes, I know you think I am silly."

"I think you are perfectly charming."

"And my silliness is part of my charm?"

"I didn't say _that_."

"But I know you like women to be rather insipid. Philip Wakem betrayed
you; he said so one day when you were not here."

"Oh, I know Phil is fierce on that point; he makes it quite a personal
matter. I think he must be love-sick for some unknown lady,--some
exalted Beatrice whom he met abroad."

"By the by," said Lucy, pausing in her work, "it has just occurred to
me that I never found out whether my cousin Maggie will object to see
Philip, as her brother does. Tom will not enter a room where Philip
is, if he knows it; perhaps Maggie may be the same, and then we
sha'n't be able to sing our glees, shall we?"

"What! is your cousin coming to stay with you?" said Stephen, with a
look of slight annoyance.

"Yes; that was my news, which you have forgotten. She's going to leave
her situation, where she has been nearly two years, poor thing,--ever
since her father's death; and she will stay with me a month or
two,--many months, I hope."

"And am I bound to be pleased at that news?"

"Oh no, not at all," said Lucy, with a little air of pique. "_I_ am
pleased, but that, of course, is no reason why _you_ should be
pleased. There is no girl in the world I love so well as my cousin
Maggie."

"And you will be inseparable I suppose, when she comes. There will be
no possibility of a _tete-a-tete_ with you any more, unless you can
find an admirer for her, who will pair off with her occasionally. What
is the ground of dislike to Philip? He might have been a resource."

"It is a family quarrel with Philip's father. There were very painful
circumstances, I believe. I never quite understood them, or knew them
all. My uncle Tulliver was unfortunate and lost all his property, and
I think he considered Mr. Wakem was somehow the cause of it. Mr. Wakem
bought Dorlcote Mill, my uncle's old place, where he always lived. You
must remember my uncle Tulliver, don't you?"

"No," said Stephen, with rather supercilious indifference. "I've
always known the name, and I dare say I knew the man by sight, apart
from his name. I know half the names and faces in the neighborhood in
that detached, disjointed way."

"He was a very hot-tempered man. I remember, when I was a little girl
and used to go to see my cousins, he often frightened me by talking as
if he were angry. Papa told me there was a dreadful quarrel, the very
day before my uncle's death, between him and Mr. Wakem, but it was
hushed up. That was when you were in London. Papa says my uncle was
quite mistaken in many ways; his mind had become embittered. But Tom
and Maggie must naturally feel it very painful to be reminded of these
things. They have had so much, so very much trouble. Maggie was at
school with me six years ago, when she was fetched away because of her
father's misfortunes, and she has hardly had any pleasure since, I
think. She has been in a dreary situation in a school since uncle's
death, because she is determined to be independent, and not live with
aunt Pullet; and I could hardly wish her to come to me then, because
dear mamma was ill, and everything was so sad. That is why I want her
to come to me now, and have a long, long holiday."

"Very sweet and angelic of you," said Stephen, looking at her with an
admiring smile; "and all the more so if she has the conversational
qualities of her mother."

"Poor aunty! You are cruel to ridicule her. She is very valuable to
_me_, I know. She manages the house beautifully,--much better than any
stranger would,--and she was a great comfort to me in mamma's
illness."

"Yes, but in point of companionship one would prefer that she should
be represented by her brandy-cherries and cream-cakes. I think with a
shudder that her daughter will always be present in person, and have
no agreeable proxies of that kind,--a fat, blond girl, with round blue
eyes, who will stare at us silently."

"Oh yes!" exclaimed Lucy, laughing wickedly, and clapping her hands,
"that is just my cousin Maggie. You must have seen her!"

"No, indeed; I'm only guessing what Mrs. Tulliver's daughter must be;
and then if she is to banish Philip, our only apology for a tenor,
that will be an additional bore."

"But I hope that may not be. I think I will ask you to call on Philip
and tell him Maggie is coming to-morrow. He is quite aware of Tom's
feeling, and always keeps out of his way; so he will understand, if
you tell him, that I asked you to warn him not to come until I write
to ask him."

"I think you had better write a pretty note for me to take; Phil is so
sensitive, you know, the least thing might frighten him off coming at
all, and we had hard work to get him. I can never induce him to come
to the park; he doesn't like my sisters, I think. It is only your
faery touch that can lay his ruffled feathers."

Stephen mastered the little hand that was straying toward the table,
and touched it lightly with his lips. Little Lucy felt very proud and
happy. She and Stephen were in that stage of courtship which makes the
most exquisite moment of youth, the freshest blossom-time of
passion,--when each is sure of the other's love, but no formal
declaration has been made, and all is mutual divination, exalting the
most trivial word, the lightest gesture, into thrills delicate and
delicious as wafted jasmine scent. The explicitness of an engagement
wears off this finest edge of susceptibility; it is jasmine gathered
and presented in a large bouquet.

"But it is really odd that you should have hit so exactly on Maggie's
appearance and manners," said the cunning Lucy, moving to reach her
desk, "because she might have been like her brother, you know; and Tom
has not round eyes; and he is as far as possible from staring at
people."

"Oh, I suppose he is like the father; he seems to be as proud as
Lucifer. Not a brilliant companion, though, I should think."

"I like Tom. He gave me my Minny when I lost Lolo; and papa is very
fond of him: he says Tom has excellent principles. It was through him
that his father was able to pay all his debts before he died."

"Oh, ah; I've heard about that. I heard your father and mine talking
about it a little while ago, after dinner, in one of their
interminable discussions about business. They think of doing something
for young Tulliver; he saved them from a considerable loss by riding
home in some marvellous way, like Turpin, to bring them news about the
stoppage of a bank, or something of that sort. But I was rather drowsy
at the time."

Stephen rose from his seat, and sauntered to the piano, humming in
falsetto, "Graceful Consort," as he turned over the volume of "The
Creation," which stood open on the desk.

"Come and sing this," he said, when he saw Lucy rising.

"What, 'Graceful Consort'? I don't think it suits your voice."

"Never mind; it exactly suits my feeling, which, Philip will have it,
is the grand element of good singing. I notice men with indifferent
voices are usually of that opinion."

"Philip burst into one of his invectives against 'The Creation' the
other day," said Lucy, seating herself at the piano. "He says it has a
sort of sugared complacency and flattering make-believe in it, as if
it were written for the birthday _fete_ of a German Grand-Duke."

"Oh, pooh! He is the fallen Adam with a soured temper. We are Adam and
Eve unfallen, in Paradise. Now, then,--the recitative, for the sake of
the moral. You will sing the whole duty of woman,--'And from obedience
grows my pride and happiness.'"

"Oh no, I shall not respect an Adam who drags the _tempo_, as you
will," said Lucy, beginning to play the duet.

Surely the only courtship unshaken by doubts and fears must be that in
which the lovers can sing together. The sense of mutual fitness that
springs from the two deep notes fulfilling expectation just at the
right moment between the notes of the silvery soprano, from the
perfect accord of descending thirds and fifths, from the preconcerted
loving chase of a fugue, is likely enough to supersede any immediate
demand for less impassioned forms of agreement. The contralto will not
care to catechise the bass; the tenor will foresee no embarrassing
dearth of remark in evenings spent with the lovely soprano. In the
provinces, too, where music was so scarce in that remote time, how
could the musical people avoid falling in love with each other? Even
political principle must have been in danger of relaxation under such
circumstances; and the violin, faithful to rotten boroughs, must have
been tempted to fraternize in a demoralizing way with a reforming
violoncello. In that case, the linnet-throated soprano and the
full-toned bass singing,--

  "With thee delight is ever new,
  With thee is life incessant bliss,"

believed what they sang all the more _because_ they sang it.

"Now for Raphael's great song," said Lucy, when they had finished the
duet. "You do the 'heavy beasts' to perfection."

"That sounds complimentary," said Stephen, looking at his watch. "By
Jove, it's nearly half-past one! Well, I can just sing this."

Stephen delivered with admirable ease the deep notes representing the
tread of the heavy beasts; but when a singer has an audience of two,
there is room for divided sentiments. Minny's mistress was charmed;
but Minny, who had intrenched himself, trembling, in his basket as
soon as the music began, found this thunder so little to his taste
that he leaped out and scampered under the remotest _chiffonnier_, as
the most eligible place in which a small dog could await the crack of
doom.

"Adieu, 'graceful consort,'" said Stephen, buttoning his coat across
when he had done singing, and smiling down from his tall height, with
the air of rather a patronizing lover, at the little lady on the
music-stool. "My bliss is not incessant, for I must gallop home. I
promised to be there at lunch."

"You will not be able to call on Philip, then? It is of no
consequence; I have said everything in my note."

"You will be engaged with your cousin to-morrow, I suppose?"

"Yes, we are going to have a little family-party. My cousin Tom will
dine with us; and poor aunty will have her two children together for
the first time. It will be very pretty; I think a great deal about
it."

"But I may come the next day?"

"Oh yes! Come and be introduced to my cousin Maggie; though you can
hardly be said not to have seen her, you have described her so well."

"Good-bye, then." And there was that slight pressure of the hands, and
momentary meeting of the eyes, which will often leave a little lady
with a slight flush and smile on her face that do not subside
immediately when the door is closed, and with an inclination to walk
up and down the room rather than to seat herself quietly at her
embroidery, or other rational and improving occupation. At least this
was the effect on Lucy; and you will not, I hope, consider it an
indication of vanity predominating over more tender impulses, that she
just glanced in the chimney-glass as her walk brought her near it. The
desire to know that one has not looked an absolute fright during a few
hours of conversation may be construed as lying within the bounds of a
laudable benevolent consideration for others. And Lucy had so much of
this benevolence in her nature that I am inclined to think her small
egoisms were impregnated with it, just as there are people not
altogether unknown to you whose small benevolences have a predominant
and somewhat rank odor of egoism. Even now, that she is walking up and
down with a little triumphant flutter of her girlish heart at the
sense that she is loved by the person of chief consequence in her
small world, you may see in her hazel eyes an ever-present sunny
benignity, in which the momentary harmless flashes of personal vanity
are quite lost; and if she is happy in thinking of her lover, it is
because the thought of him mingles readily with all the gentle
affections and good-natured offices with which she fills her peaceful
days. Even now, her mind, with that instantaneous alternation which
makes two currents of feeling or imagination seem simultaneous, is
glancing continually from Stephen to the preparations she has only
half finished in Maggie's room. Cousin Maggie should be treated as
well as the grandest lady-visitor,--nay, better, for she should have
Lucy's best prints and drawings in her bedroom, and the very finest
bouquet of spring flowers on her table. Maggie would enjoy all that,
she was so found of pretty things! And there was poor aunt Tulliver,
that no one made any account of, she was to be surprised with the
present of a cap of superlative quality, and to have her health drunk
in a gratifying manner, for which Lucy was going to lay a plot with
her father this evening. Clearly, she had not time to indulge in long
reveries about her own happy love-affairs. With this thought she
walked toward the door, but paused there.

"What's the matter, then, Minny?" she said, stooping in answer to some
whimpering of that small quadruped, and lifting his glossy head
against her pink cheek. "Did you think I was going without you? Come,
then, let us go and see Sinbad."

Sinbad was Lucy's chestnut horse, that she always fed with her own
hand when he was turned out in the paddock. She was fond of feeding
dependent creatures, and knew the private tastes of all the animals
about the house, delighting in the little rippling sounds of her
canaries when their beaks were busy with fresh seed, and in the small
nibbling pleasures of certain animals which, lest she should appear
too trivial, I will here call "the more familiar rodents."

Was not Stephen Guest right in his decided opinion that this slim
maiden of eighteen was quite the sort of wife a man would not be
likely to repent of marrying,--a woman who was loving and thoughtful
for other women, not giving them Judas-kisses with eyes askance on
their welcome defects, but with real care and vision for their
half-hidden pains and mortifications, with long ruminating enjoyment
of little pleasures prepared for them? Perhaps the emphasis of his
admiration did not fall precisely on this rarest quality in her;
perhaps he approved his own choice of her chiefly because she did not
strike him as a remarkable rarity. A man likes his wife to be pretty;
well, Lucy was pretty, but not to a maddening extent. A man likes his
wife to be accomplished, gentle, affectionate, and not stupid; and
Lucy had all these qualifications. Stephen was not surprised to find
himself in love with her, and was conscious of excellent judgment in
preferring her to Miss Leyburn, the daughter of the county member,
although Lucy was only the daughter of his father's subordinate
partner; besides, he had had to defy and overcome a slight
unwillingness and disappointment in his father and sisters,--a
circumstance which gives a young man an agreeable consciousness of his
own dignity. Stephen was aware that he had sense and independence
enough to choose the wife who was likely to make him happy, unbiassed
by any indirect considerations. He meant to choose Lucy; she was a
little darling, and exactly the sort of woman he had always admired.



First Impressions


"He is very clever, Maggie," said Lucy. She was kneeling on a
footstool at Maggie's feet, after placing that dark lady in the large
crimson-velvet chair. "I feel sure you will like him. I hope you
will."

"I shall be very difficult to please," said Maggie, smiling, and
holding up one of Lucy's long curls, that the sunlight might shine
through it. "A gentleman who thinks he is good enough for Lucy must
expect to be sharply criticised."

"Indeed, he's a great deal too good for me. And sometimes, when he is
away, I almost think it can't really be that he loves me. But I can
never doubt it when he is with me, though I couldn't bear any one but
you to know that I feel in that way, Maggie."

"Oh, then, if I disapprove of him you can give him up, since you are
not engaged," said Maggie, with playful gravity.

"I would rather not be engaged. When people are engaged, they begin to
think of being married soon," said Lucy, too thoroughly preoccupied to
notice Maggie's joke; "and I should like everything to go on for a
long while just as it is. Sometimes I am quite frightened lest Stephen
should say that he has spoken to papa; and from something that fell
from papa the other day, I feel sure he and Mr. Guest are expecting
that. And Stephen's sisters are very civil to me now. At first, I
think they didn't like his paying me attention; and that was natural.
It _does_ seem out of keeping that I should ever live in a great place
like the Park House, such a little insignificant thing as I am."

"But people are not expected to be large in proportion to the houses
they live in, like snails," said Maggie, laughing. "Pray, are Mr.
Guest's sisters giantesses?"

"Oh no; and not handsome,--that is, not very," said Lucy,
half-penitent at this uncharitable remark. "But _he_ is--at least he
is generally considered very handsome."

"Though you are unable to share that opinion?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Lucy, blushing pink over brow and neck. "It
is a bad plan to raise expectation; you will perhaps be disappointed.
But I have prepared a charming surprise for _him;_ I shall have a
glorious laugh against him. I shall not tell you what it is, though."

Lucy rose from her knees and went to a little distance, holding her
pretty head on one side, as if she had been arranging Maggie for a
portrait, and wished to judge of the general effect.

"Stand up a moment, Maggie."

"What is your pleasure now?" said Maggie, smiling languidly as she
rose from her chair and looked down on her slight, aerial cousin,
whose figure was quite subordinate to her faultless drapery of silk
and crape.

Lucy kept her contemplative attitude a moment or two in silence, and
then said,--

"I can't think what witchery it is in you, Maggie, that makes you look
best in shabby clothes; though you really must have a new dress now.
But do you know, last night I was trying to fancy you in a handsome,
fashionable dress, and do what I would, that old limp merino would
come back as the only right thing for you. I wonder if Marie
Antoinette looked all the grander when her gown was darned at the
elbows. Now, if _I_ were to put anything shabby on, I should be quite
unnoticeable. I should be a mere rag."

"Oh, quite," said Maggie, with mock gravity. "You would be liable to
be swept out of the room with the cobwebs and carpet-dust, and to find
yourself under the grate, like Cinderella. Mayn't I sit down now?"

"Yes, now you may," said Lucy, laughing. Then, with an air of serious
reflection, unfastening her large jet brooch, "But you must change
brooches, Maggie; that little butterfly looks silly on you."

"But won't that mar the charming effect of my consistent shabbiness?"
said Maggie, seating herself submissively, while Lucy knelt again and
unfastened the contemptible butterfly. "I wish my mother were of your
opinion, for she was fretting last night because this is my best
frock. I've been saving my money to pay for some lessons; I shall
never get a better situation without more accomplishments."

Maggie gave a little sigh.

"Now, don't put on that sad look again," said Lucy, pinning the large
brooch below Maggie's fine throat. "You're forgetting that you've left
that dreary schoolroom behind you, and have no little girls' clothes
to mend."

"Yes," said Maggie. "It is with me as I used to think it would be with
the poor uneasy white bear I saw at the show. I thought he must have
got so stupid with the habit of turning backward and forward in that
narrow space that he would keep doing it if they set him free. One
gets a bad habit of being unhappy."

"But I shall put you under a discipline of pleasure that will make you
lose that bad habit," said Lucy, sticking the black butterfly absently
in her own collar, while her eyes met Maggie's affectionately.

"You dear, tiny thing," said Maggie, in one of her bursts of loving
admiration, "you enjoy other people's happiness so much, I believe you
would do without any of your own. I wish I were like you."

"I've never been tried in that way," said Lucy. "I've always been so
happy. I don't know whether I could bear much trouble; I never had any
but poor mamma's death. You _have_ been tried, Maggie; and I'm sure
you feel for other people quite as much as I do."

"No, Lucy," said Maggie, shaking her head slowly, "I don't enjoy their
happiness as you do, else I should be more contented. I do feel for
them when they are in trouble; I don't think I could ever bear to make
any one _un_happy; and yet I often hate myself, because I get angry
sometimes at the sight of happy people. I think I get worse as I get
older, more selfish. That seems very dreadful."

"Now, Maggie!" said Lucy, in a tone of remonstrance, "I don't believe
a word of that. It is all a gloomy fancy, just because you are
depressed by a dull, wearisome life."

"Well, perhaps it is," said Maggie, resolutely clearing away the
clouds from her face with a bright smile, and throwing herself
backward in her chair. "Perhaps it comes from the school diet,--watery
rice-pudding spiced with Pinnock. Let us hope it will give way before
my mother's custards and this charming Geoffrey Crayon."

Maggie took up the "Sketch Book," which lay by her on the table.

"Do I look fit to be seen with this little brooch?" said Lucy, going
to survey the effect in the chimney-glass.

"Oh no, Mr. Guest will be obliged to go out of the room again if he
sees you in it. Pray make haste and put another on."

Lucy hurried out of the room, but Maggie did not take the opportunity
of opening her book; she let it fall on her knees, while her eyes
wandered to the window, where she could see the sunshine falling on
the rich clumps of spring flowers and on the long hedge of laurels,
and beyond, the silvery breadth of the dear old Floss, that at this
distance seemed to be sleeping in a morning holiday. The sweet fresh
garden-scent came through the open window, and the birds were busy
flitting and alighting, gurgling and singing. Yet Maggie's eyes began
to fill with tears. The sight of the old scenes had made the rush of
memories so painful that even yesterday she had only been able to
rejoice in her mother's restored comfort and Tom's brotherly
friendliness as we rejoice in good news of friends at a distance,
rather than in the presence of a happiness which we share. Memory and
imagination urged upon her a sense of privation too keen to let her
taste what was offered in the transient present. Her future, she
thought, was likely to be worse than her past, for after her years of
contented renunciation, she had slipped back into desire and longing;
she found joyless days of distasteful occupation harder and harder;
she found the image of the intense and varied life she yearned for,
and despaired of, becoming more and more importunate. The sound of the
opening door roused her, and hastily wiping away her tears, she began
to turn over the leaves of her book.

"There is one pleasure, I know, Maggie, that your deepest dismalness
will never resist," said Lucy, beginning to speak as soon as she
entered the room. "That is music, and I mean you to have quite a
riotous feast of it. I mean you to get up your playing again, which
used to be so much better than mine, when we were at Laceham."

"You would have laughed to see me playing the little girls' tunes over
and over to them, when I took them to practise," said Maggie, "just
for the sake of fingering the dear keys again. But I don't know
whether I could play anything more difficult now than 'Begone, dull
care!'"

"I know what a wild state of joy you used to be in when the glee-men
came round," said Lucy, taking up her embroidery; "and we might have
all those old glees that you used to love so, if I were certain that
you don't feel exactly as Tom does about some things."

"I should have thought there was nothing you might be more certain
of," said Maggie, smiling.

"I ought rather to have said, one particular thing. Because if you
feel just as he does about that, we shall want our third voice. St.
Ogg's is so miserably provided with musical gentlemen. There are
really only Stephen and Philip Wakem who have any knowledge of music,
so as to be able to sing a part."

Lucy had looked up from her work as she uttered the last sentence, and
saw that there was a change in Maggie's face.

"Does it hurt you to hear the name mentioned, Maggie? If it does, I
will not speak of him again. I know Tom will not see him if he can
avoid it."

"I don't feel at all as Tom does on that subject," said Maggie, rising
and going to the window as if she wanted to see more of the landscape.
"I've always liked Philip Wakem ever since I was a little girl, and
saw him at Lorton. He was so good when Tom hurt his foot."

"Oh, I'm so glad!" said Lucy. "Then you won't mind his coming
sometimes, and we can have much more music than we could without him.
I'm very fond of poor Philip, only I wish he were not so morbid about
his deformity. I suppose it _is_ his deformity that makes him so sad,
and sometimes bitter. It is certainly very piteous to see his poor
little crooked body and pale face among great, strong people."

"But, Lucy----" said Maggie, trying to arrest the prattling stream.

"Ah, there is the door-bell. That must be Stephen," Lucy went on, not
noticing Maggie's faint effort to speak. "One of the things I most
admire in Stephen is that he makes a greater friend of Philip than any
one."

It was too late for Maggie to speak now; the drawingroom door was
opening, and Minny was already growling in a small way at the entrance
of a tall gentleman, who went up to Lucy and took her hand with a
half-polite, half-tender glance and tone of inquiry, which seemed to
indicate that he was unconscious of any other presence.

"Let me introduce you to my cousin, Miss Tulliver," said Lucy, turning
with wicked enjoyment toward Maggie, who now approached from the
farther window. "This is Mr. Stephen Guest."

For one instant Stephen could not conceal his astonishment at the
sight of this tall, dark-eyed nymph with her jet-black coronet of
hair; the next, Maggie felt herself, for the first time in her life,
receiving the tribute of a very deep blush and a very deep bow from a
person toward whom she herself was conscious of timidity.

This new experience was very agreeable to her, so agreeable that it
almost effaced her previous emotion about Philip. There was a new
brightness in her eyes, and a very becoming flush on her cheek, as she
seated herself.

"I hope you perceive what a striking likeness you drew the day before
yesterday," said Lucy, with a pretty laugh of triumph. She enjoyed her
lover's confusion; the advantage was usually on his side.

"This designing cousin of yours quite deceived me, Miss Tulliver,"
said Stephen, seating himself by Lucy, and stooping to play with
Minny, only looking at Maggie furtively. "She said you had light hair
and blue eyes."

"Nay, it was you who said so," remonstrated Lucy. "I only refrained
from destroying your confidence in your own second-sight."

"I wish I could always err in the same way," said Stephen, "and find
reality so much more beautiful than my preconceptions."

"Now you have proved yourself equal to the occasion," said Maggie,
"and said what it was incumbent on you to say under the
circumstances."

She flashed a slightly defiant look at him; it was clear to her that
he had been drawing a satirical portrait of her beforehand. Lucy had
said he was inclined to be satirical, and Maggie had mentally supplied
the addition, "and rather conceited."

"An alarming amount of devil there," was Stephen's first thought. The
second, when she had bent over her work, was, "I wish she would look
at me again." The next was to answer,--

"I suppose all phrases of mere compliment have their turn to be true.
A man is occasionally grateful when he says 'Thank you.' It's rather
hard upon him that he must use the same words with which all the world
declines a disagreeable invitation, don't you think so, Miss
Tulliver?"

"No," said Maggie, looking at him with her direct glance; "if we use
common words on a great occasion, they are the more striking, because
they are felt at once to have a particular meaning, like old banners,
or every-day clothes, hung up in a sacred place."

"Then my compliment ought to be eloquent," said Stephen, really not
quite knowing what he said while Maggie looked at him, "seeing that
the words were so far beneath the occasion."

"No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of
indifference," said Maggie, flushing a little.

Lucy was rather alarmed; she thought Stephen and Maggie were not going
to like each other. She had always feared lest Maggie should appear
too old and clever to please that critical gentleman. "Why, dear
Maggie," she interposed, "you have always pretended that you are too
fond of being admired; and now, I think, you are angry because some
one ventures to admire you."

"Not at all," said Maggie; "I like too well to feel that I am admired,
but compliments never make me feel that."

"I will never pay you a compliment again, Miss Tulliver," said
Stephen.

"Thank you; that will be a proof of respect."

Poor Maggie! She was so unused to society that she could take nothing
as a matter of course, and had never in her life spoken from the lips
merely, so that she must necessarily appear absurd to more experienced
ladies, from the excessive feeling she was apt to throw into very
trivial incidents. But she was even conscious herself of a little
absurdity in this instance. It was true she had a theoretic objection
to compliments, and had once said impatiently to Philip that she
didn't see why women were to be told with a simper that they were
beautiful, any more than old men were to be told that they were
venerable; still, to be so irritated by a common practice in the case
of a stranger like Mr. Stephen Guest, and to care about his having
spoken slightingly of her before he had seen her, was certainly
unreasonable, and as soon as she was silent she began to be ashamed of
herself. It did not occur to her that her irritation was due to the
pleasanter emotion which preceded it, just as when we are satisfied
with a sense of glowing warmth an innocent drop of cold water may fall
upon us as a sudden smart.

Stephen was too well bred not to seem unaware that the previous
conversation could have been felt embarrassing, and at once began to
talk of impersonal matters, asking Lucy if she knew when the bazaar
was at length to take place, so that there might be some hope of
seeing her rain the influence of her eyes on objects more grateful
than those worsted flowers that were growing under her fingers.

"Some day next month, I believe," said Lucy. "But your sisters are
doing more for it than I am; they are to have the largest stall."

"Ah yes; but they carry on their manufactures in their own
sitting-room, where I don't intrude on them. I see you are not
addicted to the fashionable vice of fancy-work, Miss Tulliver," said
Stephen, looking at Maggie's plain hemming.

"No," said Maggie, "I can do nothing more difficult or more elegant
than shirt-making."

"And your plain sewing is so beautiful, Maggie," said Lucy, "that I
think I shall beg a few specimens of you to show as fancy-work. Your
exquisite sewing is quite a mystery to me, you used to dislike that
sort of work so much in old days."

"It is a mystery easily explained, dear," said Maggie, looking up
quietly. "Plain sewing was the only thing I could get money by, so I
was obliged to try and do it well."

Lucy, good and simple as she was, could not help blushing a little.
She did not quite like that Stephen should know that; Maggie need not
have mentioned it. Perhaps there was some pride in the confession,--
the pride of poverty that will not be ashamed of itself. But if Maggie
had been the queen of coquettes she could hardly have invented a means
of giving greater piquancy to her beauty in Stephen's eyes; I am not
sure that the quiet admission of plain sewing and poverty would have
done alone, but assisted by the beauty, they made Maggie more unlike
other women even than she had seemed at first.

"But I can knit, Lucy," Maggie went on, "if that will be of any use
for your bazaar."

"Oh yes, of infinite use. I shall set you to work with scarlet wool
to-morrow. But your sister is the most enviable person," continued
Lucy, turning to Stephen, "to have the talent of modelling. She is
doing a wonderful bust of Dr. Kenn entirely from memory."

"Why, if she can remember to put the eyes very near together, and the
corners of the mouth very far apart, the likeness can hardly fail to
be striking in St. Ogg's."

"Now that is very wicked of you," said Lucy, looking rather hurt. "I
didn't think you would speak disrespectfully of Dr. Kenn."

"I say anything disrespectful of Dr. Kenn? Heaven forbid! But I am not
bound to respect a libellous bust of him. I think Kenn one of the
finest fellows in the world. I don't care much about the tall
candlesticks he has put on the communion-table, and I shouldn't like
to spoil my temper by getting up to early prayers every morning. But
he's the only man I ever knew personally who seems to me to have
anything of the real apostle in him,--a man who has eight hundred
a-year and is contented with deal furniture and boiled beef because he
gives away two-thirds of his income. That was a very fine thing of
him,--taking into his house that poor lad Grattan, who shot his mother
by accident. He sacrifices more time than a less busy man could spare,
to save the poor fellow from getting into a morbid state of mind about
it. He takes the lad out with him constantly, I see."

"That is beautiful," said Maggie, who had let her work fall, and was
listening with keen interest. "I never knew any one who did such things."

"And one admires that sort of action in Kenn all the more," said
Stephen, "because his manners in general are rather cold and severe.
There's nothing sugary and maudlin about him."

"Oh, I think he's a perfect character!" said Lucy, with pretty
enthusiasm.

"No; there I can't agree with you," said Stephen, shaking his head
with sarcastic gravity.

"Now, what fault can you point out in him?"

"He's an Anglican."

"Well, those are the right views, I think," said Lucy, gravely.

"That settles the question in the abstract," said Stephen, "but not
from a parliamentary point of view. He has set the Dissenters and the
Church people by the ears; and a rising senator like myself, of whose
services the country is very much in need, will find it inconvenient
when he puts up for the honor of representing St. Ogg's in
Parliament."

"Do you really think of that?" said Lucy, her eyes brightening with a
proud pleasure that made her neglect the argumentative interests of
Anglicanism.

"Decidedly, whenever old Mr. Leyburn's public spirit and gout induce
him to give way. My father's heart is set on it; and gifts like mine,
you know"--here Stephen drew himself up, and rubbed his large white
hands over his hair with playful self-admiration--"gifts like mine
involve great responsibilities. Don't you think so, Miss Tulliver?"

"Yes," said Maggie, smiling, but not looking up; "so much fluency and
self-possession should not be wasted entirely on private occasions."

"Ah, I see how much penetration you have," said Stephen. "You have
discovered already that I am talkative and impudent. Now superficial
people never discern that, owing to my manner, I suppose."

"She doesn't look at me when I talk of myself," he thought, while his
listeners were laughing. "I must try other subjects."

Did Lucy intend to be present at the meeting of the Book Club next
week? was the next question. Then followed the recommendation to
choose Southey's "Life of Cowper," unless she were inclined to be
philosophical, and startle the ladies of St. Ogg's by voting for one
of the Bridgewater Treatises. Of course Lucy wished to know what these
alarmingly learned books were; and as it is always pleasant to improve
the minds of ladies by talking to them at ease on subjects of which
they know nothing, Stephen became quite brilliant in an account of
Buckland's Treatise, which he had just been reading. He was rewarded
by seeing Maggie let her work fall, and gradually get so absorbed in
his wonderful geological story that she sat looking at him, leaning
forward with crossed arms, and with an entire absence of
self-consciousness, as if he had been the snuffiest of old professors,
and she a downy-lipped alumna. He was so fascinated by the clear,
large gaze that at last he forgot to look away from it occasionally
toward Lucy; but she, sweet child, was only rejoicing that Stephen was
proving to Maggie how clever he was, and that they would certainly be
good friends after all.

"I will bring you the book, shall I, Miss Tulliver?" said Stephen,
when he found the stream of his recollections running rather shallow.
"There are many illustrations in it that you will like to see."

"Oh, thank you," said Maggie, blushing with returning
self-consciousness at this direct address, and taking up her work
again.

"No, no," Lucy interposed. "I must forbid your plunging Maggie in
books. I shall never get her away from them; and I want her to have
delicious do-nothing days, filled with boating and chatting and riding
and driving; that is the holiday she needs."

"Apropos!" said Stephen, looking at his watch. "Shall we go out for a
row on the river now? The tide will suit for us to the Tofton way, and
we can walk back."

That was a delightful proposition to Maggie, for it was years since
she had been on the river. When she was gone to put on her bonnet,
Lucy lingered to give an order to the servant, and took the
opportunity of telling Stephen that Maggie had no objection to seeing
Philip, so that it was a pity she had sent that note the day before
yesterday. But she would write another to-morrow and invite him.

"I'll call and beat him up to-morrow," said Stephen, "and bring him
with me in the evening, shall I? My sisters will want to call on you
when I tell them your cousin is with you. I must leave the field clear
for them in the morning."

"Oh yes, pray bring him," said Lucy. "And you _will_ like Maggie,
sha'n't you?" she added, in a beseeching tone. "Isn't she a dear,
noble-looking creature?"

"Too tall," said Stephen, smiling down upon her, "and a little too
fiery. She is not my type of woman, you know."

Gentlemen, you are aware, are apt to impart these imprudent
confidences to ladies concerning their unfavorable opinion of sister
fair ones. That is why so many women have the advantage of knowing
that they are secretly repulsive to men who have self-denyingly made
ardent love to them. And hardly anything could be more distinctively
characteristic of Lucy than that she both implicitly believed what
Stephen said, and was determined that Maggie should not know it. But
you, who have a higher logic than the verbal to guide you, have
already foreseen, as the direct sequence to that unfavorable opinion
of Stephen's, that he walked down to the boathouse calculating, by the
aid of a vivid imagination, that Maggie must give him her hand at
least twice in consequence of this pleasant boating plan, and that a
gentleman who wishes ladies to look at him is advantageously situated
when he is rowing them in a boat. What then? Had he fallen in love
with this surprising daughter of Mrs. Tulliver at first sight?
Certainly not. Such passions are never heard of in real life. Besides,
he was in love already, and half-engaged to the dearest little
creature in the world; and he was not a man to make a fool of himself
in any way. But when one is five-and-twenty, one has not chalk-stones
at one's finger-ends that the touch of a handsome girl should be
entirely indifferent. It was perfectly natural and safe to admire
beauty and enjoy looking at it,--at least under such circumstances as
the present. And there was really something very interesting about
this girl, with her poverty and troubles; it was gratifying to see the
friendship between the two cousins. Generally, Stephen admitted, he
was not fond of women who had any peculiarity of character, but here
the peculiarity seemed really of a superior kind, and provided one is
not obliged to marry such women, why, they certainly make a variety in
social intercourse.

Maggie did not fulfil Stephen's hope by looking at him during the
first quarter of an hour; her eyes were too full of the old banks that
she knew so well. She felt lonely, cut off from Philip,--the only
person who had ever seemed to love her devotedly, as she had always
longed to be loved. But presently the rhythmic movement of the oars
attracted her, and she thought she should like to learn how to row.
This roused her from her reverie, and she asked if she might take an
oar. It appeared that she required much teaching, and she became
ambitious. The exercise brought the warm blood into her cheeks, and
made her inclined to take her lesson merrily.

"I shall not be satisfied until I can manage both oars, and row you
and Lucy," she said, looking very bright as she stepped out of the
boat. Maggie, we know, was apt to forget the thing she was doing, and
she had chosen an inopportune moment for her remark; her foot slipped,
but happily Mr. Stephen Guest held her hand, and kept her up with a
firm grasp.

"You have not hurt yourself at all, I hope?" he said, bending to look
in her face with anxiety. It was very charming to be taken care of in
that kind, graceful manner by some one taller and stronger than one's
self. Maggie had never felt just in the same way before.

When they reached home again, they found uncle and aunt Pullet seated
with Mrs. Tulliver in the drawing-room, and Stephen hurried away,
asking leave to come again in the evening.

"And pray bring with you the volume of Purcell that you took away,"
said Lucy. "I want Maggie to hear your best songs."

Aunt Pullet, under the certainty that Maggie would be invited to go
out with Lucy, probably to Park House, was much shocked at the
shabbiness of her clothes, which when witnessed by the higher society
of St. Ogg's, would be a discredit to the family, that demanded a
strong and prompt remedy; and the consultation as to what would be
most suitable to this end from among the superfluities of Mrs.
Pullet's wardrobe was one that Lucy as well as Mrs. Tulliver entered
into with some zeal. Maggie must really have an evening dress as soon
as possible, and she was about the same height as aunt Pullet.

"But she's so much broader across the shoulders than I am, it's very
ill-convenient," said Mrs. Pullet, "else she might wear that beautiful
black brocade o' mine without any alteration; and her arms are beyond
everything," added Mrs. Pullet, sorrowfully, as she lifted Maggie's
large round arm, "She'd never get my sleeves on."

"Oh, never mind that, aunt; send us the dress," said Lucy. "I don't
mean Maggie to have long sleeves, and I have abundance of black lace
for trimming. Her arms will look beautiful."

"Maggie's arms _are_ a pretty shape," said Mrs. Tulliver. "They're
like mine used to be, only mine was never brown; I wish she'd had
_our_ family skin."

"Nonsense, aunty!" said Lucy, patting her aunt Tulliver's shoulder,
"you don't understand those things. A painter would think Maggie's
complexion beautiful."

"Maybe, my dear," said Mrs. Tulliver, submissively. "You know better
than I do. Only when I was young a brown skin wasn't thought well on
among respectable folks."

"No," said uncle Pullet, who took intense interest in the ladies'
conversation as he sucked his lozenges. "Though there was a song about
the 'Nut-brown Maid' too; I think she was crazy,--crazy Kate,--but I
can't justly remember."

"Oh dear, dear!" said Maggie, laughing, but impatient; "I think that
will be the end of _my_ brown skin, if it is always to be talked about
so much."



Confidential Moments


When Maggie went up to her bedroom that night, it appeared that she
was not at all inclined to undress. She set down her candle on the
first table that presented itself, and began to walk up and down her
room, which was a large one, with a firm, regular, and rather rapid
step, which showed that the exercise was the instinctive vent of
strong excitement. Her eyes and cheeks had an almost feverish
brilliancy; her head was thrown backward, and her hands were clasped
with the palms outward, and with that tension of the arms which is apt
to accompany mental absorption.

Had anything remarkable happened?

Nothing that you are not likely to consider in the highest degree
unimportant. She had been hearing some fine music sung by a fine bass
voice,--but then it was sung in a provincial, amateur fashion, such as
would have left a critical ear much to desire. And she was conscious
of having been looked at a great deal, in rather a furtive manner,
from beneath a pair of well-marked horizontal eyebrows, with a glance
that seemed somehow to have caught the vibratory influence of the
voice. Such things could have had no perceptible effect on a
thoroughly well-educated young lady, with a perfectly balanced mind,
who had had all the advantages of fortune, training, and refined
society. But if Maggie had been that young lady, you would probably
have known nothing about her: her life would have had so few
vicissitudes that it could hardly have been written; for the happiest
women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

In poor Maggie's highly-strung, hungry nature,--just come away from a
third-rate schoolroom, with all its jarring sounds and petty round of
tasks,--these apparently trivial causes had the effect of rousing and
exalting her imagination in a way that was mysterious to herself. It
was not that she thought distinctly of Mr. Stephen Guest, or dwelt on
the indications that he looked at her with admiration; it was rather
that she felt the half-remote presence of a world of love and beauty
and delight, made up of vague, mingled images from all the poetry and
romance she had ever read, or had ever woven in her dreamy reveries.
Her mind glanced back once or twice to the time when she had courted
privation, when she had thought all longing, all impatience was
subdued; but that condition seemed irrecoverably gone, and she
recoiled from the remembrance of it. No prayer, no striving now, would
bring back that negative peace; the battle of her life, it seemed, was
not to be decided in that short and easy way,--by perfect renunciation
at the very threshold of her youth.

The music was vibrating in her still,--Purcell's music, with its wild
passion and fancy,--and she could not stay in the recollection of that
bare, lonely past. She was in her brighter aerial world again, when a
little tap came at the door; of course it was her cousin, who entered
in ample white dressing-gown.

"Why, Maggie, you naughty child, haven't you begun to undress?" said
Lucy, in astonishment. "I promised not to come and talk to you,
because I thought you must be tired. But here you are, looking as if
you were ready to dress for a ball. Come, come, get on your
dressing-gown and unplait your hair."

"Well, _you_ are not very forward," retorted Maggie, hastily reaching
her own pink cotton gown, and looking at Lucy's light-brown hair
brushed back in curly disorder.

"Oh, I have not much to do. I shall sit down and talk to you till I
see you are really on the way to bed."

While Maggie stood and unplaited her long black hair over her pink
drapery, Lucy sat down near the toilette-table, watching her with
affectionate eyes, and head a little aside, like a pretty spaniel. If
it appears to you at all incredible that young ladies should be led on
to talk confidentially in a situation of this kind, I will beg you to
remember that human life furnishes many exceptional cases.

"You really _have_ enjoyed the music to-night, haven't you Maggie?"

"Oh yes, that is what prevented me from feeling sleepy. I think I
should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of
music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs, and ideas into my
brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with
music. At other times one is conscious of carrying a weight."

"And Stephen has a splendid voice, hasn't he?"

"Well, perhaps we are neither of us judges of that," said Maggie,
laughing, as she seated herself and tossed her long hair back. "You
are not impartial, and _I_ think any barrel-organ splendid."

"But tell me what you think of him, now. Tell me exactly; good and bad
too."

"Oh, I think you should humiliate him a little. A lover should not be
so much at ease, and so self-confident. He ought to tremble more."

"Nonsense, Maggie! As if any one could tremble at me! You think he is
conceited, I see that. But you don't dislike him, do you?"

"Dislike him! No. Am I in the habit of seeing such charming people,
that I should be very difficult to please? Besides, how could I
dislike any one that promised to make you happy, my dear thing!"
Maggie pinched Lucy's dimpled chin.

"We shall have more music to-morrow evening," said Lucy, looking happy
already, "for Stephen will bring Philip Wakem with him."

"Oh, Lucy, I can't see him," said Maggie, turning pale. "At least, I
could not see him without Tom's leave."

"Is Tom such a tyrant as that?" said Lucy, surprised. "I'll take the
responsibility, then,--tell him it was my fault."

"But, dear," said Maggie, falteringly, "I promised Tom very solemnly,
before my father's death,--I promised him I would not speak to Philip
without his knowledge and consent. And I have a great dread of opening
the subject with Tom,--of getting into a quarrel with him again."

"But I never heard of anything so strange and unreasonable. What harm
can poor Philip have done? May I speak to Tom about it?"

"Oh no, pray don't, dear," said Maggie. "I'll go to him myself
to-morrow, and tell him that you wish Philip to come. I've thought
before of asking him to absolve me from my promise, but I've not had
the courage to determine on it."

They were both silent for some moments, and then Lucy said,--

"Maggie, you have secrets from me, and I have none from you."

Maggie looked meditatively away from Lucy. Then she turned to her and
said, "I _should_ like to tell you about Philip. But, Lucy, you must
not betray that you know it to any one--least of all to Philip
himself, or to Mr. Stephen Guest."

The narrative lasted long, for Maggie had never before known the
relief of such an outpouring; she had never before told Lucy anything
of her inmost life; and the sweet face bent toward her with
sympathetic interest, and the little hand pressing hers, encouraged
her to speak on. On two points only she was not expansive. She did not
betray fully what still rankled in her mind as Tom's great
offence,--the insults he had heaped on Philip. Angry as the
remembrance still made her, she could not bear that any one else
should know it at all, both for Tom's sake and Philip's. And she could
not bear to tell Lucy of the last scene between her father and Wakem,
though it was this scene which she had ever since felt to be a new
barrier between herself and Philip. She merely said, she saw now that
Tom was, on the whole, right in regarding any prospect of love and
marriage between her and Philip as put out of the question by the
relation of the two families. Of course Philip's father would never
consent.

"There, Lucy, you have had my story," said Maggie, smiling, with the
tears in her eyes. "You see I am like Sir Andrew Aguecheek. _I_ was
adored once."

"Ah, now I see how it is you know Shakespeare and everything, and have
learned so much since you left school; which always seemed to me
witchcraft before,--part of your general uncanniness," said Lucy.

She mused a little with her eyes downward, and then added, looking at
Maggie, "It is very beautiful that you should love Philip; I never
thought such a happiness would befall him. And in my opinion, you
ought not to give him up. There are obstacles now; but they may be
done away with in time."

Maggie shook her head.

"Yes, yes," persisted Lucy; "I can't help being hopeful about it.
There is something romantic in it,--out of the common way,--just what
everything that happens to you ought to be. And Philip will adore you
like a husband in a fairy tale. Oh, I shall puzzle my small brain to
contrive some plot that will bring everybody into the right mind, so
that you may marry Philip when I marry--somebody else. Wouldn't that
be a pretty ending to all my poor, poor Maggie's troubles?"

Maggie tried to smile, but shivered, as if she felt a sudden chill.

"Ah, dear, you are cold," said Lucy. "You must go to bed; and so must
I. I dare not think what time it is."

They kissed each other, and Lucy went away, possessed of a confidence
which had a strong influence over her subsequent impressions. Maggie
had been thoroughly sincere; her nature had never found it easy to be
otherwise. But confidences are sometimes blinding, even when they are
sincere.



Brother and Sister


Maggie was obliged to go to Tom's lodgings in the middle of the day,
when he would be coming in to dinner, else she would not have found
him at home. He was not lodging with entire strangers. Our friend Bob
Jakin had, with Mumps's tacit consent, taken not only a wife about
eight months ago, but also one of those queer old houses, pierced with
surprising passages, by the water-side, where, as he observed, his
wife and mother could keep themselves out of mischief by letting out
two "pleasure-boats," in which he had invested some of his savings,
and by taking in a lodger for the parlor and spare bedroom. Under
these circumstances, what could be better for the interests of all
parties, sanitary considerations apart, than that the lodger should be
Mr. Tom?

It was Bob's wife who opened the door to Maggie. She was a tiny woman,
with the general physiognomy of a Dutch doll, looking, in comparison
with Bob's mother, who filled up the passage in the rear, very much
like one of those human figures which the artist finds conveniently
standing near a colossal statue to show the proportions. The tiny
woman curtsied and looked up at Maggie with some awe as soon as she
had opened the door; but the words, "Is my brother at home?" which
Maggie uttered smilingly, made her turn round with sudden excitement,
and say,--

"Eh, mother, mother--tell Bob!--it's Miss Maggie! Come in, Miss, for
goodness do," she went on, opening a side door, and endeavoring to
flatten her person against the wall to make the utmost space for the
visitor.

Sad recollections crowded on Maggie as she entered the small parlor,
which was now all that poor Tom had to call by the name of
"home,"--that name which had once, so many years ago, meant for both
of them the same sum of dear familiar objects. But everything was not
strange to her in this new room; the first thing her eyes dwelt on was
the large old Bible, and the sight was not likely to disperse the old
memories. She stood without speaking.

"If you please to take the privilege o' sitting down, Miss," said Mrs.
Jakin, rubbing her apron over a perfectly clean chair, and then
lifting up the corner of that garment and holding it to her face with
an air of embarrassment, as she looked wonderingly at Maggie.

"Bob is at home, then?" said Maggie, recovering herself, and smiling
at the bashful Dutch doll.

"Yes, Miss; but I think he must be washing and dressing himself; I'll
go and see," said Mrs. Jakin, disappearing.

But she presently came back walking with new courage a little way
behind her husband, who showed the brilliancy of his blue eyes and
regular white teeth in the doorway, bowing respectfully.

"How do you do, Bob?" said Maggie, coming forward and putting out her
hand to him; "I always meant to pay your wife a visit, and I shall
come another day on purpose for that, if she will let me. But I was
obliged to come to-day to speak to my brother."

"He'll be in before long, Miss. He's doin' finely, Mr. Tom is; he'll
be one o' the first men hereabouts,--you'll see that."

"Well, Bob, I'm sure he'll be indebted to you, whatever he becomes; he
said so himself only the other night, when he was talking of you."

"Eh, Miss, that's his way o' takin' it. But I think the more on't when
he says a thing, because his tongue doesn't overshoot him as mine
does. Lors! I'm no better nor a tilted bottle, I ar'n't,--I can't stop
mysen when once I begin. But you look rarely, Miss; it does me good to
see you. What do you say now, Prissy?"--here Bob turned to his
wife,--"Isn't it all come true as I said? Though there isn't many
sorts o' goods as I can't over-praise when I set my tongue to't."

Mrs. Bob's small nose seemed to be following the example of her eyes
in turning up reverentially toward Maggie, but she was able now to
smile and curtsey, and say, "I'd looked forrard like aenything to
seein' you, Miss, for my husband's tongue's been runnin' on you, like
as if he was light-headed, iver since first he come a-courtin' on me."

"Well, well," said Bob, looking rather silly. "Go an' see after the
taters, else Mr. Tom 'ull have to wait for 'em."

"I hope Mumps is friendly with Mrs. Jakin, Bob," said Maggie, smiling.
"I remember you used to say he wouldn't like your marrying."

"Eh, Miss," said Bob, "he made up his mind to't when he see'd what a
little un she was. He pretends not to see her mostly, or else to think
as she isn't full-growed. But about Mr. Tom, Miss," said Bob, speaking
lower and looking serious, "he's as close as a iron biler, he is; but
I'm a 'cutish chap, an' when I've left off carrying my pack, an' am at
a loose end, I've got more brains nor I know what to do wi', an' I'm
forced to busy myself wi' other folks's insides. An' it worrets me as
Mr. Tom'll sit by himself so glumpish, a-knittin' his brow, an'
a-lookin' at the fire of a night. He should be a bit livelier now, a
fine young fellow like him. My wife says, when she goes in sometimes,
an' he takes no notice of her, he sits lookin' into the fire, and
frownin' as if he was watchin' folks at work in it."

"He thinks so much about business," said Maggie.

"Ay," said Bob, speaking lower; "but do you think it's nothin' else,
Miss? He's close, Mr. Tom is; but I'm a 'cute chap, I am, an' I
thought tow'rt last Christmas as I'd found out a soft place in him. It
was about a little black spaniel--a rare bit o' breed--as he made a
fuss to get. But since then summat's come over him, as he's set his
teeth again' things more nor iver, for all he's had such good luck.
An' I wanted to tell _you_, Miss, 'cause I thought you might work it
out of him a bit, now you're come. He's a deal too lonely, and doesn't
go into company enough."

"I'm afraid I have very little power over him, Bob," said Maggie, a
good deal moved by Bob's suggestion. It was a totally new idea to her
mind that Tom could have his love troubles. Poor fellow!--and in love
with Lucy too! But it was perhaps a mere fancy of Bob's too officious
brain. The present of the dog meant nothing more than cousinship and
gratitude. But Bob had already said, "Here's Mr. Tom," and the outer
door was opening.

"There is no time to spare, Tom," said Maggie, as soon as Bob left the
room. "I must tell you at once what I came about, else I shall be
hindering you from taking your dinner."

Tom stood with his back against the chimney-piece, and Maggie was
seated opposite the light. He noticed that she was tremulous, and he
had a presentiment of the subject she was going to speak about. The
presentiment made his voice colder and harder as he said, "What is
it?"

This tone roused a spirit of resistance in Maggie, and she put her
request in quite a different form from the one she had predetermined
on. She rose from her seat, and looking straight at Tom, said,--

"I want you to absolve me from my promise about Philip Wakem. Or
rather, I promised you not to see him without telling you. I am come
to tell you that I wish to see him."

"Very well," said Tom, still more coldly.

But Maggie had hardly finished speaking in that chill, defiant manner,
before she repented, and felt the dread of alienation from her
brother.

"Not for myself, dear Tom. Don't be angry. I shouldn't have asked it,
only that Philip, you know, is a friend of Lucy's and she wishes him
to come, has invited him to come this evening; and I told her I
couldn't see him without telling you. I shall only see him in the
presence of other people. There will never be anything secret between
us again."

Tom looked away from Maggie, knitting his brow more strongly for a
little while. Then he turned to her and said, slowly and
emphatically,--

"You know what is my feeling on that subject, Maggie. There is no need
for my repeating anything I said a year ago. While my father was
living, I felt bound to use the utmost power over you, to prevent you
from disgracing him as well as yourself, and all of us. But now I must
leave you to your own choice. You wish to be independent; you told me
so after my father's death. My opinion is not changed. If you think of
Philip Wakem as a lover again, you must give up me."

"I don't wish it, dear Tom, at least as things are; I see that it
would lead to misery. But I shall soon go away to another situation,
and I should like to be friends with him again while I am here. Lucy
wishes it."

The severity of Tom's face relaxed a little.

"I shouldn't mind your seeing him occasionally at my uncle's--I don't
want you to make a fuss on the subject. But I have no confidence in
you, Maggie. You would be led away to do anything."

That was a cruel word. Maggie's lip began to tremble.

"Why will you say that, Tom? It is very hard of you. Have I not done
and borne everything as well as I could? And I kept my word to
you--when--when----My life has not been a happy one, any more than
yours."

She was obliged to be childish; the tears would come. When Maggie was
not angry, she was as dependent on kind or cold words as a daisy on
the sunshine or the cloud; the need of being loved would always subdue
her, as, in old days, it subdued her in the worm-eaten attic. The
brother's goodness came uppermost at this appeal, but it could only
show itself in Tom's fashion. He put his hand gently on her arm, and
said, in the tone of a kind pedagogue,--

"Now listen to me, Maggie. I'll tell you what I mean. You're always in
extremes; you have no judgment and self-command; and yet you think you
know best, and will not submit to be guided. You know I didn't wish
you to take a situation. My aunt Pullet was willing to give you a good
home, and you might have lived respectably amongst your relations,
until I could have provided a home for you with my mother. And that is
what I should like to do. I wished my sister to be a lady, and I
always have taken care of you, as my father desired, until you were
well married. But your ideas and mine never accord, and you will not
give way. Yet you might have sense enough to see that a brother, who
goes out into the world and mixes with men, necessarily knows better
what is right and respectable for his sister than she can know
herself. You think I am not kind; but my kindness can only be directed
by what I believe to be good for you."

"Yes, I know, dear Tom," said Maggie, still half-sobbing, but trying
to control her tears. "I know you would do a great deal for me; I know
how you work, and don't spare yourself. I am grateful to you. But,
indeed, you can't quite judge for me; our natures are very different.
You don't know how differently things affect me from what they do
you."

"Yes, I _do_ know; I know it too well. I know how differently you must
feel about all that affects our family, and your own dignity as a
young woman, before you could think of receiving secret addresses from
Philip Wakem. If it was not disgusting to me in every other way, I
should object to my sister's name being associated for a moment with
that of a young man whose father must hate the very thought of us all,
and would spurn you. With any one but you, I should think it quite
certain that what you witnessed just before my father's death would
secure you from ever thinking again of Philip Wakem as a lover. But I
don't feel certain of it with you; I never feel certain about anything
with _you_. At one time you take pleasure in a sort of perverse
self-denial, and at another you have not resolution to resist a thing
that you know to be wrong."

There was a terrible cutting truth in Tom's words,--that hard rind of
truth which is discerned by unimaginative, unsympathetic minds. Maggie
always writhed under this judgment of Tom's; she rebelled and was
humiliated in the same moment; it seemed as if he held a glass before
her to show her her own folly and weakness, as if he were a prophetic
voice predicting her future fallings; and yet, all the while, she
judged him in return; she said inwardly that he was narrow and unjust,
that he was below feeling those mental needs which were often the
source of the wrong-doing or absurdity that made her life a planless
riddle to him.

She did not answer directly; her heart was too full, and she sat down,
leaning her arm on the table. It was no use trying to make Tom feel
that she was near to him. He always repelled her. Her feeling under
his words was complicated by the allusion to the last scene between
her father and Wakem; and at length that painful, solemn memory
surmounted the immediate grievance. No! She did not think of such
things with frivolous indifference, and Tom must not accuse her of
that. She looked up at him with a grave, earnest gaze and said,--

"I can't make you think better of me, Tom, by anything I can say. But
I am not so shut out from all your feelings as you believe me to be. I
see as well as you do that from our position with regard to Philip's
father--not on other grounds--it would be unreasonable, it would be
wrong, for us to entertain the idea of marriage; and I have given up
thinking of him as a lover. I am telling you the truth, and you have
no right to disbelieve me; I have kept my word to you, and you have
never detected me in a falsehood. I should not only not encourage, I
should carefully avoid, any intercourse with Philip on any other
footing than of quiet friendship. You may think that I am unable to
keep my resolutions; but at least you ought not to treat me with hard
contempt on the ground of faults that I have not committed yet."

"Well, Maggie," said Tom, softening under this appeal, "I don't want
to overstrain matters. I think, all things considered, it will be best
for you to see Philip Wakem, if Lucy wishes him to come to the house.
I believe what you say,--at least you believe it yourself, I know; I
can only warn you. I wish to be as good a brother to you as you will
let me."

There was a little tremor in Tom's voice as he uttered the last words,
and Maggie's ready affection came back with as sudden a glow as when
they were children, and bit their cake together as a sacrament of
conciliation. She rose and laid her hand on Tom's shoulder.

"Dear Tom, I know you mean to be good. I know you have had a great
deal to bear, and have done a great deal. I should like to be a
comfort to you, not to vex you. You don't think I'm altogether
naughty, now, do you?"

Tom smiled at the eager face; his smiles were very pleasant to see
when they did come, for the gray eyes could be tender underneath the
frown.

"No, Maggie."

"I may turn out better than you expect."

"I hope you will."

"And may I come some day and make tea for you, and see this extremely
small wife of Bob's again?"

"Yes; but trot away now, for I've no more time to spare," said Tom,
looking at his watch.

"Not to give me a kiss?"

Tom bent to kiss her cheek, and then said,--

"There! Be a good girl. I've got a great deal to think of to-day. I'm
going to have a long consultation with my uncle Deane this afternoon."

"You'll come to aunt Glegg's to-morrow? We're going all to dine early,
that we may go there to tea. You _must_ come; Lucy told me to say so."

"Oh, pooh! I've plenty else to do," said Tom, pulling his bell
violently, and bringing down the small bell-rope.

"I'm frightened; I shall run away," said Maggie, making a laughing
retreat; while Tom, with masculine philosophy, flung the bell-rope to
the farther end of the room; not very far either,--a touch of human
experience which I flatter myself will come home to the bosoms of not
a few substantial or distinguished men who were once at an early stage
of their rise in the world, and were cherishing very large hopes in
very small lodgings.



Showing That Tom Had Opened the Oyster


"And now we've settled this Newcastle business, Tom," said Mr. Deane,
that same afternoon, as they were seated in the private room at the
Bank together, "there's another matter I want to talk to you about.
Since you're likely to have rather a smoky, unpleasant time of it at
Newcastle for the next few weeks, you'll want a good prospect of some
sort to keep up your spirits."

Tom waited less nervously than he had done on a former occasion in
this apartment, while his uncle took out his snuff-box and gratified
each nostril with deliberate impartiality.

"You see, Tom," said Mr. Deane at last, throwing himself backward,
"the world goes on at a smarter pace now than it did when I was a
young fellow. Why, sir, forty years ago, when I was much such a
strapping youngster as you, a man expected to pull between the shafts
the best part of his life, before he got the whip in his hand. The
looms went slowish, and fashions didn't alter quite so fast; I'd a
best suit that lasted me six years. Everything was on a lower scale,
sir,--in point of expenditure, I mean. It's this steam, you see, that
has made the difference; it drives on every wheel double pace, and the
wheel of fortune along with 'em, as our Mr. Stephen Guest said at the
anniversary dinner (he hits these things off wonderfully, considering
he's seen nothing of business). I don't find fault with the change, as
some people do. Trade, sir, opens a man's eyes; and if the population
is to get thicker upon the ground, as it's doing, the world must use
its wits at inventions of one sort or other. I know I've done my share
as an ordinary man of business. Somebody has said it's a fine thing to
make two ears of corn grow where only one grew before; but, sir, it's
a fine thing, too, to further the exchange of commodities, and bring
the grains of corn to the mouths that are hungry. And that's our line
of business; and I consider it as honorable a position as a man can
hold, to be connected with it."

Tom knew that the affair his uncle had to speak of was not urgent; Mr.
Deane was too shrewd and practical a man to allow either his
reminiscences or his snuff to impede the progress of trade. Indeed,
for the last month or two, there had been hints thrown out to Tom
which enabled him to guess that he was going to hear some proposition
for his own benefit. With the beginning of the last speech he had
stretched out his legs, thrust his hands in his pockets, and prepared
himself for some introductory diffuseness, tending to show that Mr.
Deane had succeeded by his own merit, and that what he had to say to
young men in general was, that if they didn't succeed too it was
because of their own demerit. He was rather surprised, then, when his
uncle put a direct question to him.

"Let me see,--it's going on for seven years now since you applied to
me for a situation, eh, Tom?"

"Yes, sir; I'm three-and-twenty now," said Tom.

"Ah, it's as well not to say that, though; for you'd pass for a good
deal older, and age tells well in business. I remember your coming
very well; I remember I saw there was some pluck in you, and that was
what made me give you encouragement. And I'm happy to say I was right;
I'm not often deceived. I was naturally a little shy at pushing my
nephew, but I'm happy to say you've done me credit, sir; and if I'd
had a son o' my own, I shouldn't have been sorry to see him like you."

Mr. Deane tapped his box and opened it again, repeating in a tone of
some feeling, "No, I shouldn't have been sorry to see him like you."

"I'm very glad I've given you satisfaction, sir; I've done my best,"
said Tom, in his proud, independent way.

"Yes, Tom, you've given me satisfaction. I don't speak of your conduct
as a son; though that weighs with me in my opinion of you. But what I
have to do with, as a partner in our firm, is the qualities you've
shown as a man o' business. Ours is a fine business,--a splendid
concern, sir,--and there's no reason why it shouldn't go on growing;
there's a growing capital, and growing outlets for it; but there's
another thing that's wanted for the prosperity of every concern, large
or small, and that's men to conduct it,--men of the right habits; none
o' your flashy fellows, but such as are to be depended on. Now this is
what Mr. Guest and I see clear enough. Three years ago we took Gell
into the concern; we gave him a share in the oil-mill. And why? Why,
because Gell was a fellow whose services were worth a premium. So it
will always be, sir. So it was with me. And though Gell is pretty near
ten years older than you, there are other points in your favor."

Tom was getting a little nervous as Mr. Deane went on speaking; he was
conscious of something he had in his mind to say, which might not be
agreeable to his uncle, simply because it was a new suggestion rather
than an acceptance of the proposition he foresaw.

"It stands to reason," Mr. Deane went on, when he had finished his new
pinch, "that your being my nephew weighs in your favor; but I don't
deny that if you'd been no relation of mine at all, your conduct in
that affair of Pelley's bank would have led Mr. Guest and myself to
make some acknowledgment of the service you've been to us; and, backed
by your general conduct and business ability, it has made us determine
on giving you a share in the business,--a share which we shall be glad
to increase as the years go on. We think that'll be better, on all
grounds, than raising your salary. It'll give you more importance, and
prepare you better for taking some of the anxiety off my shoulders by
and by. I'm equal to a good deal o' work at present, thank God; but
I'm getting older,--there's no denying that. I told Mr. Guest I would
open the subject to you; and when you come back from this northern
business, we can go into particulars. This is a great stride for a
young fellow of three-and-twenty, but I'm bound to say you've deserved
it."

"I'm very grateful to Mr. Guest and you, sir; of course I feel the
most indebted to _you_, who first took me into the business, and have
taken a good deal of pains with me since."

Tom spoke with a slight tremor, and paused after he had said this.

"Yes, yes," said Mr. Deane. "I don't spare pains when I see they'll be
of any use. I gave myself some trouble with Gell, else he wouldn't
have been what he is."

"But there's one thing I should like to mention to you uncle. I've
never spoken to you of it before. If you remember, at the time my
father's property was sold, there was some thought of your firm buying
the Mill; I know you thought it would be a very good investment,
especially if steam were applied."

"To be sure, to be sure. But Wakem outbid us; he'd made up his mind to
that. He's rather fond of carrying everything over other people's
heads."

"Perhaps it's of no use my mentioning it at present," Tom went on,
"but I wish you to know what I have in my mind about the Mill. I've a
strong feeling about it. It was my father's dying wish that I should
try and get it back again whenever I could; it was in his family for
five generations. I promised my father; and besides that, I'm attached
to the place. I shall never like any other so well. And if it should
ever suit your views to buy it for the firm, I should have a better
chance of fulfilling my father's wish. I shouldn't have liked to
mention the thing to you, only you've been kind enough to say my
services have been of some value. And I'd give up a much greater
chance in life for the sake of having the Mill again,--I mean having
it in my own hands, and gradually working off the price."

Mr. Deane had listened attentively, and now looked thoughtful.

"I see, I see," he said, after a while; "the thing would be possible
if there were any chance of Wakem's parting with the property. But
that I _don't_ see. He's put that young Jetsome in the place; and he
had his reasons when he bought it, I'll be bound."

"He's a loose fish, that young Jetsome," said Tom. "He's taking to
drinking, and they say he's letting the business go down. Luke told me
about it,--our old miller. He says he sha'n't stay unless there's an
alteration. I was thinking, if things went on that way, Wakem might be
more willing to part with the Mill. Luke says he's getting very sour
about the way things are going on."

"Well, I'll turn it over, Tom. I must inquire into the matter, and go
into it with Mr. Guest. But, you see, it's rather striking out a new
branch, and putting you to that, instead of keeping you where you are,
which was what we'd wanted."

"I should be able to manage more than the Mill when things were once
set properly going, sir. I want to have plenty of work. There's
nothing else I care about much."

There was something rather sad in that speech from a young man of
three-and-twenty, even in uncle Deane's business-loving ears.

"Pooh, pooh! you'll be having a wife to care about one of these days,
if you get on at this pace in the world. But as to this Mill, we
mustn't reckon on our chickens too early. However, I promise you to
bear it in mind, and when you come back we'll talk of it again. I am
going to dinner now. Come and breakfast with us to-morrow morning, and
say good-bye to your mother and sister before you start."



Illustrating the Laws of Attraction

It is evident to you now that Maggie had arrived at a moment in her
life which must be considered by all prudent persons as a great
opportunity for a young woman. Launched into the higher society of St.
Ogg's, with a striking person, which had the advantage of being quite
unfamiliar to the majority of beholders, and with such moderate
assistance of costume as you have seen foreshadowed in Lucy's anxious
colloquy with aunt Pullet, Maggie was certainly at a new
starting-point in life. At Lucy's first evening party, young Torry
fatigued his facial muscles more than usual in order that "the
dark-eyed girl there in the corner" might see him in all the
additional style conferred by his eyeglass; and several young ladies
went home intending to have short sleeves with black lace, and to
plait their hair in a broad coronet at the back of their head,--"That
cousin of Miss Deane's looked so very well." In fact, poor Maggie,
with all her inward consciousness of a painful past and her
presentiment of a troublous future, was on the way to become an object
of some envy,--a topic of discussion in the newly established
billiard-room, and between fair friends who had no secrets from each
other on the subject of trimmings. The Miss Guests, who associated
chiefly on terms of condescension with the families of St. Ogg's, and
were the glass of fashion there, took some exception to Maggie's
manners. She had a way of not assenting at once to the observations
current in good society, and of saying that she didn't know whether
those observations were true or not, which gave her an air of
_gaucherie_, and impeded the even flow of conversation; but it is a
fact capable of an amiable interpretation that ladies are not the
worst disposed toward a new acquaintance of their own sex because she
has points of inferiority. And Maggie was so entirely without those
pretty airs of coquetry which have the traditional reputation of
driving gentlemen to despair that she won some feminine pity for being
so ineffective in spite of her beauty. She had not had many
advantages, poor thing! and it must be admitted there was no
pretension about her; her abruptness and unevenness of manner were
plainly the result of her secluded and lowly circumstances. It was
only a wonder that there was no tinge of vulgarity about her,
considering what the rest of poor Lucy's relations were--an allusion
which always made the Miss Guests shudder a little. It was not
agreeable to think of any connection by marriage with such people as
the Gleggs and the Pullets; but it was of no use to contradict Stephen
when once he had set his mind on anything, and certainly there was no
possible objection to Lucy in herself,--no one could help liking her.
She would naturally desire that the Miss Guests should behave kindly
to this cousin of whom she was so fond, and Stephen would make a great
fuss if they were deficient in civility. Under these circumstances the
invitations to Park House were not wanting; and elsewhere, also, Miss
Deane was too popular and too distinguished a member of society in St.
Ogg's for any attention toward her to be neglected.

Thus Maggie was introduced for the first time to the young lady's
life, and knew what it was to get up in the morning without any
imperative reason for doing one thing more than another. This new
sense of leisure and unchecked enjoyment amidst the soft-breathing
airs and garden-scents of advancing spring--amidst the new abundance
of music, and lingering strolls in the sunshine, and the delicious
dreaminess of gliding on the river--could hardly be without some
intoxicating effect on her, after her years of privation; and even in
the first week Maggie began to be less haunted by her sad memories and
anticipations. Life was certainly very pleasant just now; it was
becoming very pleasant to dress in the evening, and to feel that she
was one of the beautiful things of this spring-time. And there were
admiring eyes always awaiting her now; she was no longer an unheeded
person, liable to be chid, from whom attention was continually
claimed, and on whom no one felt bound to confer any. It was pleasant,
too, when Stephen and Lucy were gone out riding, to sit down at the
piano alone, and find that the old fitness between her fingers and the
keys remained, and revived, like a sympathetic kinship not to be worn
out by separation; to get the tunes she had heard the evening before,
and repeat them again and again until she had found out a way of
producing them so as to make them a more pregnant, passionate language
to her. The mere concord of octaves was a delight to Maggie, and she
would often take up a book of studies rather than any melody, that she
might taste more keenly by abstraction the more primitive sensation of
intervals. Not that her enjoyment of music was of the kind that
indicates a great specific talent; it was rather that her sensibility
to the supreme excitement of music was only one form of that
passionate sensibility which belonged to her whole nature, and made
her faults and virtues all merge in each other; made her affections
sometimes an impatient demand, but also prevented her vanity from
taking the form of mere feminine coquetry and device, and gave it the
poetry of ambition. But you have known Maggie a long while, and need
to be told, not her characteristics, but her history, which is a thing
hardly to be predicted even from the completest knowledge of
characteristics. For the tragedy of our lives is not created entirely
from within. "Character," says Novalis, in one of his questionable
aphorisms,--"character is destiny." But not the whole of our destiny.
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was speculative and irresolute, and we have
a great tragedy in consequence. But if his father had lived to a good
old age, and his uncle had died an early death, we can conceive
Hamlet's having married Ophelia, and got through life with a
reputation of sanity, notwithstanding many soliloquies, and some moody
sarcasms toward the fair daughter of Polonius, to say nothing of the
frankest incivility to his father-in-law.

Maggie's destiny, then, is at present hidden, and we must wait for it
to reveal itself like the course of an unmapped river; we only know
that the river is full and rapid, and that for all rivers there is the
same final home. Under the charm of her new pleasures, Maggie herself
was ceasing to think, with her eager prefiguring imagination, of her
future lot; and her anxiety about her first interview with Philip was
losing its predominance; perhaps, unconsciously to herself, she was
not sorry that the interview had been deferred.

For Philip had not come the evening he was expected, and Mr. Stephen
Guest brought word that he was gone to the coast,--probably, he
thought, on a sketching expedition; but it was not certain when he
would return. It was just like Philip, to go off in that way without
telling any one. It was not until the twelfth day that he returned, to
find both Lucy's notes awaiting him; he had left before he knew of
Maggie's arrival.

Perhaps one had need be nineteen again to be quite convinced of the
feelings that were crowded for Maggie into those twelve days; of the
length to which they were stretched for her by the novelty of her
experience in them, and the varying attitudes of her mind. The early
days of an acquaintance almost always have this importance for us, and
fill up a larger space in our memory than longer subsequent periods,
which have been less filled with discovery and new impressions. There
were not many hours in those ten days in which Mr. Stephen Guest was
not seated by Lucy's side, or standing near her at the piano, or
accompanying her on some outdoor excursion; his attentions were
clearly becoming more assiduous, and that was what every one had
expected. Lucy was very happy, all the happier because Stephen's
society seemed to have become much more interesting and amusing since
Maggie had been there. Playful discussions--sometimes serious
ones--were going forward, in which both Stephen and Maggie revealed
themselves, to the admiration of the gentle, unobtrusive Lucy; and it
more than once crossed her mind what a charming quartet they should
have through life when Maggie married Philip. Is it an inexplicable
thing that a girl should enjoy her lover's society the more for the
presence of a third person, and be without the slightest spasm of
jealousy that the third person had the conversation habitually
directed to her? Not when that girl is as tranquil-hearted as Lucy,
thoroughly possessed with a belief that she knows the state of her
companions' affections, and not prone to the feelings which shake such
a belief in the absence of positive evidence against it. Besides, it
was Lucy by whom Stephen sat, to whom he gave his arm, to whom he
appealed as the person sure to agree with him; and every day there was
the same tender politeness toward her, the same consciousness of her
wants and care to supply them. Was there really the same? It seemed to
Lucy that there was more; and it was no wonder that the real
significance of the change escaped her. It was a subtle act of
conscience in Stephen that even he himself was not aware of. His
personal attentions to Maggie were comparatively slight, and there had
even sprung up an apparent distance between them, that prevented the
renewal of that faint resemblance to gallantry into which he had
fallen the first day in the boat. If Stephen came in when Lucy was out
of the room, if Lucy left them together, they never spoke to each
other; Stephen, perhaps, seemed to be examining books or music, and
Maggie bent her head assiduously over her work. Each was oppressively
conscious of the other's presence, even to the finger-ends. Yet each
looked and longed for the same thing to happen the next day. Neither
of them had begun to reflect on the matter, or silently to ask, "To
what does all this tend?" Maggie only felt that life was revealing
something quite new to her; and she was absorbed in the direct,
immediate experience, without any energy left for taking account of it
and reasoning about it. Stephen wilfully abstained from
self-questioning, and would not admit to himself that he felt an
influence which was to have any determining effect on his conduct. And
when Lucy came into the room again, they were once more unconstrained;
Maggie could contradict Stephen, and laugh at him, and he could
recommend to her consideration the example of that most charming
heroine, Miss Sophia Western, who had a great "respect for the
understandings of men." Maggie could look at Stephen, which, for some
reason or other she always avoided when they were alone; and he could
even ask her to play his accompaniment for him, since Lucy's fingers
were so busy with that bazaar-work, and lecture her on hurrying the
tempo, which was certainly Maggie's weak point.

One day--it was the day of Philip's return--Lucy had formed a sudden
engagement to spend the evening with Mrs. Kenn, whose delicate state
of health, threatening to become confirmed illness through an attack
of bronchitis, obliged her to resign her functions at the coming
bazaar into the hands of other ladies, of whom she wished Lucy to be
one. The engagement had been formed in Stephen's presence, and he had
heard Lucy promise to dine early and call at six o'clock for Miss
Torry, who brought Mrs. Kenn's request.

"Here is another of the moral results of this idiotic bazaar," Stephen
burst forth, as soon as Miss Torry had left the room,--"taking young
ladies from the duties of the domestic hearth into scenes of
dissipation among urn-rugs and embroidered reticules! I should like to
know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make
reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for
bachelors to go out. If this goes on much longer, the bonds of society
will be dissolved."

"Well, it will not go on much longer," said Lucy, laughing, "for the
bazaar is to take place on Monday week."

"Thank Heaven!" said Stephen. "Kenn himself said the other day that he
didn't like this plan of making vanity do the work of charity; but
just as the British public is not reasonable enough to bear direct
taxation, so St. Ogg's has not got force of motive enough to build and
endow schools without calling in the force of folly."

"Did he say so?" said little Lucy, her hazel eyes opening wide with
anxiety. "I never heard him say anything of that kind; I thought he
approved of what we were doing."

"I'm sure he approves _you_," said Stephen, smiling at her
affectionately; "your conduct in going out to-night looks vicious, I
own, but I know there is benevolence at the bottom of it."

"Oh, you think too well of me," said Lucy, shaking her head, with a
pretty blush, and there the subject ended. But it was tacitly
understood that Stephen would not come in the evening; and on the
strength of that tacit understanding he made his morning visit the
longer, not saying good-bye until after four.

Maggie was seated in the drawing-room, alone, shortly after dinner,
with Minny on her lap, having left her uncle to his wine and his nap,
and her mother to the compromise between knitting and nodding, which,
when there was no company, she always carried on in the dining-room
till tea-time. Maggie was stooping to caress the tiny silken pet, and
comforting him for his mistress's absence, when the sound of a
footstep on the gravel made her look up, and she saw Mr. Stephen Guest
walking up the garden, as if he had come straight from the river. It
was very unusual to see him so soon after dinner! He often complained
that their dinner-hour was late at Park House. Nevertheless, there he
was, in his black dress; he had evidently been home, and must have
come again by the river. Maggie felt her cheeks glowing and her heart
beating; it was natural she should be nervous, for she was not
accustomed to receive visitors alone. He had seen her look up through
the open window, and raised his hat as he walked toward it, to enter
that way instead of by the door. He blushed too, and certainly looked
as foolish as a young man of some wit and self-possession can be
expected to look, as he walked in with a roll of music in his hand,
and said, with an air of hesitating improvisation,--

"You are surprised to see me again, Miss Tulliver; I ought to
apologize for coming upon you by surprise, but I wanted to come into
the town, and I got our man to row me; so I thought I would bring
these things from the 'Maid of Artois' for your cousin; I forgot them
this morning. Will you give them to her?"

"Yes," said Maggie, who had risen confusedly with Minny in her arms,
and now, not quite knowing what else to do, sat down again.

Stephen laid down his hat, with the music, which rolled on the floor,
and sat down in the chair close by her. He had never done so before,
and both he and Maggie were quite aware that it was an entirely new
position.

"Well, you pampered minion!" said Stephen, leaning to pull the long
curly ears that drooped over Maggie's arm. It was not a suggestive
remark, and as the speaker did not follow it up by further
development, it naturally left the conversation at a standstill. It
seemed to Stephen like some action in a dream that he was obliged to
do, and wonder at himself all the while,--to go on stroking Minny's
head. Yet it was very pleasant; he only wished he dared look at
Maggie, and that she would look at him,--let him have one long look
into those deep, strange eyes of hers, and then he would be satisfied
and quite reasonable after that. He thought it was becoming a sort of
monomania with him, to want that long look from Maggie; and he was
racking his invention continually to find out some means by which he
could have it without its appearing singular and entailing subsequent
embarrassment. As for Maggie, she had no distinct thought, only the
sense of a presence like that of a closely hovering broad-winged bird
in the darkness, for she was unable to look up, and saw nothing but
Minny's black wavy coat.

But this must end some time, perhaps it ended very soon, and only
_seemed_ long, as a minute's dream does. Stephen at last sat upright
sideways in his chair, leaning one hand and arm over the back and
looking at Maggie. What should he say?

"We shall have a splendid sunset, I think; sha'n't you go out and see
it?"

"I don't know," said Maggie. Then courageously raising her eyes and
looking out of the window, "if I'm not playing cribbage with my
uncle."

A pause; during which Minny is stroked again, but has sufficient
insight not to be grateful for it, to growl rather.

"Do you like sitting alone?"

A rather arch look came over Maggie's face, and, just glancing at
Stephen, she said, "Would it be quite civil to say 'yes'?"

"It _was_ rather a dangerous question for an intruder to ask," said
Stephen, delighted with that glance, and getting determined to stay
for another. "But you will have more than half an hour to yourself
after I am gone," he added, taking out his watch. "I know Mr. Deane
never comes in till half-past seven."

Another pause, during which Maggie looked steadily out of the window,
till by a great effort she moved her head to look down at Minny's back
again, and said,--

"I wish Lucy had not been obliged to go out. We lose our music."

"We shall have a new voice to-morrow night," said Stephen. "Will you
tell your cousin that our friend Philip Wakem is come back? I saw him
as I went home."

Maggie gave a little start,--it seemed hardly more than a vibration
that passed from head to foot in an instant. But the new images
summoned by Philip's name dispersed half the oppressive spell she had
been under. She rose from her chair with a sudden resolution, and
laying Minny on his cushion, went to reach Lucy's large work-basket
from its corner. Stephen was vexed and disappointed; he thought
perhaps Maggie didn't like the name of Wakem to be mentioned to her in
that abrupt way, for he now recalled what Lucy had told him of the
family quarrel. It was of no use to stay any longer. Maggie was
seating herself at the table with her work, and looking chill and
proud; and he--he looked like a simpleton for having come. A
gratuitous, entirely superfluous visit of that sort was sure to make a
man disagreeable and ridiculous. Of course it was palpable to Maggie's
thinking that he had dined hastily in his own room for the sake of
setting off again and finding her alone.

A boyish state of mind for an accomplished young gentleman of
five-and-twenty, not without legal knowledge! But a reference to
history, perhaps, may make it not incredible.

At this moment Maggie's ball of knitting-wool rolled along the ground,
and she started up to reach it. Stephen rose too, and picking up the
ball, met her with a vexed, complaining look that gave his eyes quite
a new expression to Maggie, whose own eyes met them as he presented
the ball to her.

"Good-bye," said Stephen, in a tone that had the same beseeching
discontent as his eyes. He dared not put out his hand; he thrust both
hands into his tail-pockets as he spoke. Maggie thought she had
perhaps been rude.

"Won't you stay?" she said timidly, not looking away, for that would
have seemed rude again.

"No, thank you," said Stephen, looking still into the half-unwilling,
half-fascinated eyes, as a thirsty man looks toward the track of the
distant brook. "The boat is waiting for me. You'll tell your cousin?"

"Yes."

"That I brought the music, I mean?"

"Yes."

"And that Philip is come back?"

"Yes." (Maggie did not notice Philip's name this time.)

"Won't you come out a little way into the garden?" said Stephen, in a
still gentler tone; but the next moment he was vexed that she did not
say "No," for she moved away now toward the open window, and he was
obliged to take his hat and walk by her side. But he thought of
something to make him amends.

"Do take my arm," he said, in a low tone, as if it were a secret.

There is something strangely winning to most women in that offer of
the firm arm; the help is not wanted physically at that moment, but
the sense of help, the presence of strength that is outside them and
yet theirs, meets a continual want of the imagination. Either on that
ground or some other, Maggie took the arm. And they walked together
round the grassplot and under the drooping green of the laburnums, in
the same dim, dreamy state as they had been in a quarter of an hour
before; only that Stephen had had the look he longed for, without yet
perceiving in himself the symptoms of returning reasonableness, and
Maggie had darting thoughts across the dimness,--how came he to be
there? Why had she come out? Not a word was spoken. If it had been,
each would have been less intensely conscious of the other.

"Take care of this step," said Stephen at last.

"Oh, I will go in now," said Maggie, feeling that the step had come
like a rescue. "Good-evening."

In an instant she had withdrawn her arm, and was running back to the
house. She did not reflect that this sudden action would only add to
the embarrassing recollections of the last half-hour. She had no
thought left for that. She only threw herself into the low arm-chair,
and burst into tears.

"Oh, Philip, Philip, I wish we were together again--so quietly--in the
Red Deeps."

Stephen looked after her a moment, then went on to the boat, and was
soon landed at the wharf. He spent the evening in the billiard-room,
smoking one cigar after another, and losing "lives" at pool. But he
would not leave off. He was determined not to think,--not to admit any
more distinct remembrance than was urged upon him by the perpetual
presence of Maggie. He was looking at her, and she was on his arm.

But there came the necessity of walking home in the cool starlight,
and with it the necessity of cursing his own folly, and bitterly
determining that he would never trust himself alone with Maggie again.
It was all madness; he was in love, thoroughly attached to Lucy, and
engaged,--engaged as strongly as an honorable man need be. He wished
he had never seen this Maggie Tulliver, to be thrown into a fever by
her in this way; she would make a sweet, strange, troublesome,
adorable wife to some man or other, but he would never have chosen her
himself. Did she feel as he did? He hoped she did--not. He ought not
to have gone. He would master himself in future. He would make himself
disagreeable to her, quarrel with her perhaps. Quarrel with her? Was
it possible to quarrel with a creature who had such eyes,--defying and
deprecating, contradicting and clinging, imperious and beseeching,--
full of delicious opposites? To see such a creature subdued by love
for one would be a lot worth having--to another man.

There was a muttered exclamation which ended this inward soliloquy, as
Stephen threw away the end of his last cigar, and thrusting his hands
into his pockets, stalked along at a quieter pace through the
shrubbery. It was not of a benedictory kind.



Philip Re-enters


The next morning was very wet,--the sort of morning on which male
neighbors who have no imperative occupation at home are likely to pay
their fair friends an illimitable visit. The rain, which has been
endurable enough for the walk or ride one way, is sure to become so
heavy, and at the same time so certain to clear up by and by, that
nothing but an open quarrel can abbreviate the visit; latent
detestation will not do at all. And if people happen to be lovers,
what can be so delightful, in England, as a rainy morning? English
sunshine is dubious; bonnets are never quite secure; and if you sit
down on the grass, it may lead to catarrhs. But the rain is to be
depended on. You gallop through it in a mackintosh, and presently find
yourself in the seat you like best,--a little above or a little below
the one on which your goddess sits (it is the same thing to the
metaphysical mind, and that is the reason why women are at once
worshipped and looked down upon), with a satisfactory confidence that
there will be no lady-callers.

"Stephen will come earlier this morning, I know," said Lucy; "he
always does when it's rainy."

Maggie made no answer. She was angry with Stephen; she began to think
she should dislike him; and if it had not been for the rain, she would
have gone to her aunt Glegg's this morning, and so have avoided him
altogether. As it was, she must find some reason for remaining out of
the room with her mother.

But Stephen did not come earlier, and there was another visitor--a
nearer neighbor--who preceded him. When Philip entered the room, he
was going merely to bow to Maggie, feeling that their acquaintance was
a secret which he was bound not to betray; but when she advanced
toward him and put out her hand, he guessed at once that Lucy had been
taken into her confidence. It was a moment of some agitation to both,
though Philip had spent many hours in preparing for it; but like all
persons who have passed through life with little expectation of
sympathy, he seldom lost his self-control, and shrank with the most
sensitive pride from any noticeable betrayal of emotion. A little
extra paleness, a little tension of the nostril when he spoke, and the
voice pitched in rather a higher key, that to strangers would seem
expressive of cold indifference, were all the signs Philip usually
gave of an inward drama that was not without its fierceness. But
Maggie, who had little more power of concealing the impressions made
upon her than if she had been constructed of musical strings, felt her
eyes getting larger with tears as they took each other's hands in
silence. They were not painful tears; they had rather something of the
same origin as the tears women and children shed when they have found
some protection to cling to and look back on the threatened danger.
For Philip, who a little while ago was associated continually in
Maggie's mind with the sense that Tom might reproach her with some
justice, had now, in this short space, become a sort of outward
conscience to her, that she might fly to for rescue and strength. Her
tranquil, tender affection for Philip, with its root deep down in her
childhood, and its memories of long quiet talk confirming by distinct
successive impressions the first instinctive bias,--the fact that in
him the appeal was more strongly to her pity and womanly devotedness
than to her vanity or other egoistic excitability of her
nature,--seemed now to make a sort of sacred place, a sanctuary where
she could find refuge from an alluring influence which the best part
of herself must resist; which must bring horrible tumult within,
wretchedness without. This new sense of her relation to Philip
nullified the anxious scruples she would otherwise have felt, lest she
should overstep the limit of intercourse with him that Tom would
sanction; and she put out her hand to him, and felt the tears in her
eyes without any consciousness of an inward check. The scene was just
what Lucy expected, and her kind heart delighted in bringing Philip
and Maggie together again; though, even with all _her_ regard for
Philip, she could not resist the impression that her cousin Tom had
some excuse for feeling shocked at the physical incongruity between
the two,--a prosaic person like cousin Tom, who didn't like poetry and
fairy tales. But she began to speak as soon as possible, to set them
at ease.

"This was very good and virtuous of you," she said, in her pretty
treble, like the low conversational notes of little birds, "to come so
soon after your arrival. And as it is, I think I will pardon you for
running away in an inopportune manner, and giving your friends no
notice. Come and sit down here," she went on, placing the chair that
would suit him best, "and you shall find yourself treated mercifully."

"You will never govern well, Miss Deane," said Philip, as he seated
himself, "because no one will ever believe in your severity. People
will always encourage themselves in misdemeanors by the certainty that
you will be indulgent."

Lucy gave some playful contradiction, but Philip did not hear what it
was, for he had naturally turned toward Maggie, and she was looking at
him with that open, affectionate scrutiny which we give to a friend
from whom we have been long separated. What a moment their parting had
been! And Philip felt as if he were only in the morrow of it. He felt
this so keenly,--with such intense, detailed remembrance, with such
passionate revival of all that had been said and looked in their last
conversation,--that with that jealousy and distrust which in diffident
natures is almost inevitably linked with a strong feeling, he thought
he read in Maggie's glance and manner the evidence of a change. The
very fact that he feared and half expected it would be sure to make
this thought rush in, in the absence of positive proof to the
contrary.

"I am having a great holiday, am I not?" said Maggie. "Lucy is like a
fairy godmother; she has turned me from a drudge into a princess in no
time. I do nothing but indulge myself all day long, and she always
finds out what I want before I know it myself."

"I am sure she is the happier for having you, then," said Philip. "You
must be better than a whole menagerie of pets to her. And you look
well. You are benefiting by the change."

Artificial conversation of this sort went on a little while, till
Lucy, determined to put an end to it, exclaimed, with a good imitation
of annoyance, that she had forgotten something, and was quickly out of
the room.

In a moment Maggie and Philip leaned forward, and the hands were
clasped again, with a look of sad contentment, like that of friends
who meet in the memory of recent sorrow.

"I told my brother I wished to see you, Philip; I asked him to release
me from my promise, and he consented."

Maggie, in her impulsiveness, wanted Philip to know at once the
position they must hold toward each other; but she checked herself.
The things that had happened since he had spoken of his love for her
were so painful that she shrank from being the first to allude to them.
It seemed almost like an injury toward Philip even to mention her
brother,--her brother, who had insulted him. But he was thinking too
entirely of her to be sensitive on any other point at that moment.

"Then we can at least be friends, Maggie? There is nothing to hinder
that now?"

"Will not your father object?" said Maggie, withdrawing her hand.

"I should not give you up on any ground but your own wish, Maggie,"
said Philip, coloring. "There are points on which I should always
resist my father, as I used to tell you. _That_ is one."

"Then there is nothing to hinder our being friends, Philip,--seeing
each other and talking to each other while I am here; I shall soon go
away again. I mean to go very soon, to a new situation."

"Is that inevitable, Maggie?"

"Yes; I must not stay here long. It would unfit me for the life I must
begin again at last. I can't live in dependence,--I can't live with my
brother, though he is very good to me. He would like to provide for
me; but that would be intolerable to me."

Philip was silent a few moments, and then said, in that high, feeble
voice which with him indicated the resolute suppression of emotion,--

"Is there no other alternative, Maggie? Is that life, away from those
who love you, the only one you will allow yourself to look forward
to?"

"Yes, Philip," she said, looking at him pleadingly, as if she
entreated him to believe that she was compelled to this course. "At
least, as things are; I don't know what may be in years to come. But I
begin to think there can never come much happiness to me from loving;
I have always had so much pain mingled with it. I wish I could make
myself a world outside it, as men do."

"Now you are returning to your old thought in a new form, Maggie,--the
thought I used to combat," said Philip, with a slight tinge of
bitterness. "You want to find out a mode of renunciation that will be
an escape from pain. I tell you again, there is no such escape
possible except by perverting or mutilating one's nature. What would
become of me, if I tried to escape from pain? Scorn and cynicism would
be my only opium; unless I could fall into some kind of conceited
madness, and fancy myself a favorite of Heaven because I am not a
favorite with men."

The bitterness had taken on some impetuosity as Philip went on
speaking; the words were evidently an outlet for some immediate
feeling of his own, as well as an answer to Maggie. There was a pain
pressing on him at that moment. He shrank with proud delicacy from the
faintest allusion to the words of love, of plighted love that had
passed between them. It would have seemed to him like reminding Maggie
of a promise; it would have had for him something of the baseness of
compulsion. He could not dwell on the fact that he himself had not
changed; for that too would have had the air of an appeal. His love
for Maggie was stamped, even more than the rest of his experience,
with the exaggerated sense that he was an exception,--that she, that
every one, saw him in the light of an exception.

But Maggie was conscience-stricken.

"Yes, Philip," she said, with her childish contrition when he used to
chide her, "you are right, I know. I do always think too much of my
own feelings, and not enough of others',--not enough of yours. I had
need have you always to find fault with me and teach me; so many
things have come true that you used to tell me."

Maggie was resting her elbow on the table, leaning her head on her
hand and looking at Philip with half-penitent dependent affection, as
she said this; while he was returning her gaze with an expression
that, to her consciousness, gradually became less vague,--became
charged with a specific recollection. Had his mind flown back to
something that _she_ now remembered,--something about a lover of
Lucy's? It was a thought that made her shudder; it gave new
definiteness to her present position, and to the tendency of what had
happened the evening before. She moved her arm from the table, urged
to change her position by that positive physical oppression at the
heart that sometimes accompanies a sudden mental pang.

"What is the matter, Maggie? Has something happened?" Philip said, in
inexpressible anxiety, his imagination being only too ready to weave
everything that was fatal to them both.

"No, nothing," said Maggie, rousing her latent will. Philip must not
have that odious thought in his mind; she would banish it from her
own. "Nothing," she repeated, "except in my own mind. You used to say
I should feel the effect of my starved life, as you called it; and I
do. I am too eager in my enjoyment of music and all luxuries, now they
are come to me."

She took up her work and occupied herself resolutely, while Philip
watched her, really in doubt whether she had anything more than this
general allusion in her mind. It was quite in Maggie's character to be
agitated by vague self-reproach. But soon there came a violent
well-known ring at the door-bell resounding through the house.

"Oh, what a startling announcement!" said Maggie, quite mistress of
herself, though not without some inward flutter. "I wonder where Lucy
is."

Lucy had not been deaf to the signal, and after an interval long
enough for a few solicitous but not hurried inquiries, she herself
ushered Stephen in.

"Well, old fellow," he said, going straight up to Philip and shaking
him heartily by the hand, bowing to Maggie in passing, "it's glorious
to have you back again; only I wish you'd conduct yourself a little
less like a sparrow with a residence on the house-top, and not go in
and out constantly without letting the servants know. This is about
the twentieth time I've had to scamper up those countless stairs to
that painting-room of yours, all to no purpose, because your people
thought you were at home. Such incidents embitter friendship."

"I've so few visitors, it seems hardly worth while to leave notice of
my exit and entrances," said Philip, feeling rather oppressed just
then by Stephen's bright strong presence and strong voice.

"Are you quite well this morning, Miss Tulliver?" said Stephen,
turning to Maggie with stiff politeness, and putting out his hand with
the air of fulfilling a social duty.

Maggie gave the tips of her fingers, and said, "Quite well, thank
you," in a tone of proud indifference. Philip's eyes were watching
them keenly; but Lucy was used to seeing variations in their manner to
each other, and only thought with regret that there was some natural
antipathy which every now and then surmounted their mutual good-will.
"Maggie is not the sort of woman Stephen admires, and she is irritated
by something in him which she interprets as conceit," was the silent
observation that accounted for everything to guileless Lucy. Stephen
and Maggie had no sooner completed this studied greeting than each
felt hurt by the other's coldness. And Stephen, while rattling on in
questions to Philip about his recent sketching expedition, was
thinking all the more about Maggie because he was not drawing her into
the conversation as he had invariably done before. "Maggie and Philip
are not looking happy," thought Lucy; "this first interview has been
saddening to them."

"I think we people who have not been galloping," she said to Stephen,
"are all a little damped by the rain. Let us have some music. We ought
to take advantage of having Philip and you together. Give us the duet
in 'Masaniello'; Maggie has not heard that, and I know it will suit
her."

"Come, then," said Stephen, going toward the piano, and giving a
foretaste of the tune in his deep "brum-brum," very pleasant to hear.

"You, please, Philip,--you play the accompaniment," said Lucy, "and
then I can go on with my work. You _will_ like to play, sha'n't you?"
she added, with a pretty, inquiring look, anxious, as usual, lest she
should have proposed what was not pleasant to another; but with
yearnings toward her unfinished embroidery.

Philip had brightened at the proposition, for there is no feeling,
perhaps, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find
relief in music,--that does not make a man sing or play the better;
and Philip had an abundance of pent-up feeling at this moment, as
complex as any trio or quartet that was ever meant to express love and
jealousy and resignation and fierce suspicion, all at the same time.

"Oh, yes," he said, seating himself at the piano, "it is a way of
eking out one's imperfect life and being three people at once,--to
sing and make the piano sing, and hear them both all the while,--or
else to sing and paint."

"Ah, there you are an enviable fellow. I can do nothing with my
hands," said Stephen. "That has generally been observed in men of
great administrative capacity, I believe,--a tendency to predominance
of the reflective powers in me! Haven't you observed that, Miss
Tulliver?"

Stephen had fallen by mistake into his habit of playful appeal to
Maggie, and she could not repress the answering flush and epigram.

"I _have_ observed a tendency to predominance," she said, smiling; and
Philip at that moment devoutly hoped that she found the tendency
disagreeable.

"Come, come," said Lucy; "music, music! We will discuss each other's
qualities another time."

Maggie always tried in vain to go on with her work when music began.
She tried harder than ever to-day; for the thought that Stephen knew
how much she cared for his singing was one that no longer roused a
merely playful resistance; and she knew, too, that it was his habit
always to stand so that he could look at her. But it was of no use;
she soon threw her work down, and all her intentions were lost in the
vague state of emotion produced by the inspiring duet,--emotion that
seemed to make her at once strong and weak; strong for all enjoyment,
weak for all resistance. When the strain passed into the minor, she
half started from her seat with the sudden thrill of that change. Poor
Maggie! She looked very beautiful when her soul was being played on in
this way by the inexorable power of sound. You might have seen the
slightest perceptible quivering through her whole frame as she leaned
a little forward, clasping her hands as if to steady herself; while
her eyes dilated and brightened into that wide-open, childish
expression of wondering delight which always came back in her happiest
moments. Lucy, who at other times had always been at the piano when
Maggie was looking in this way, could not resist the impulse to steal
up to her and kiss her. Philip, too, caught a glimpse of her now and
then round the open book on the desk, and felt that he had never
before seen her under so strong an influence.

"More, more!" said Lucy, when the duet had been encored. "Something
spirited again. Maggie always says she likes a great rush of sound."

"It must be 'Let us take the road,' then," said Stephen,--"so suitable
for a wet morning. But are you prepared to abandon the most sacred
duties of life, and come and sing with us?"

"Oh, yes," said Lucy, laughing. "If you will look out the 'Beggar's
Opera' from the large canterbury. It has a dingy cover."

"That is a great clue, considering there are about a score covers here
of rival dinginess," said Stephen, drawing out the canterbury.

"Oh, play something the while, Philip," said Lucy, noticing that his
fingers were wandering over the keys. "What is that you are falling
into?--something delicious that I don't know."

"Don't you know that?" said Philip, bringing out the tune more
definitely. "It's from the 'Sonnambula'--'Ah! perche non posso
odiarti.' I don't know the opera, but it appears the tenor is telling
the heroine that he shall always love her though she may forsake him.
You've heard me sing it to the English words, 'I love thee still.'"

It was not quite unintentionally that Philip had wandered into this
song, which might be an indirect expression to Maggie of what he could
not prevail on himself to say to her directly. Her ears had been open
to what he was saying, and when he began to sing, she understood the
plaintive passion of the music. That pleading tenor had no very fine
qualities as a voice, but it was not quite new to her; it had sung to
her by snatches, in a subdued way, among the grassy walks and hollows,
and underneath the leaning ash-tree in the Red Deeps. There seemed to
be some reproach in the words; did Philip mean that? She wished she
had assured him more distinctly in their conversation that she desired
not to renew the hope of love between them, _only_ because it clashed
with her inevitable circumstances. She was touched, not thrilled by
the song; it suggested distinct memories and thoughts, and brought
quiet regret in the place of excitement.

"That's the way with you tenors," said Stephen, who was waiting with
music in his hand while Philip finished the song. "You demoralize the
fair sex by warbling your sentimental love and constancy under all
sorts of vile treatment. Nothing short of having your heads served up
in a dish like that mediaeval tenor or troubadour, would prevent you
from expressing your entire resignation. I must administer an
antidote, while Miss Deane prepares to tear herself away from her
bobbins."

Stephen rolled out, with saucy energy,--

  "Shall I, wasting in despair,
  Die because a woman's fair?"

and seemed to make all the air in the room alive with a new influence.
Lucy, always proud of what Stephen did, went toward the piano with
laughing, admiring looks at him; and Maggie, in spite of her
resistance to the spirit of the song and to the singer, was taken hold
of and shaken by the invisible influence,--was borne along by a wave
too strong for her.

But, angrily resolved not to betray herself, she seized her work, and
went on making false stitches and pricking her fingers with much
perseverance, not looking up or taking notice of what was going
forward, until all the three voices united in "Let us take the road."

I am afraid there would have been a subtle, stealing gratification in
her mind if she had known how entirely this saucy, defiant Stephen was
occupied with her; how he was passing rapidly from a determination to
treat her with ostentatious indifference to an irritating desire for
some sign of inclination from her,--some interchange of subdued word
or look with her. It was not long before he found an opportunity, when
they had passed to the music of "The Tempest." Maggie, feeling the
need of a footstool, was walking across the room to get one, when
Stephen, who was not singing just then, and was conscious of all her
movements, guessed her want, and flew to anticipate her, lifting the
footstool with an entreating look at her, which made it impossible not
to return a glance of gratitude. And then, to have the footstool
placed carefully by a too self-confident personage,--not _any_
self-confident personage, but one in particular, who suddenly looks
humble and anxious, and lingers, bending still, to ask if there is not
some draught in that position between the window and the fireplace,
and if he may not be allowed to move the work-table for her,--these
things will summon a little of the too ready, traitorous tenderness
into a woman's eyes, compelled as she is in her girlish time to learn
her life-lessons in very trivial language. And to Maggie such things
had not been every-day incidents, but were a new element in her life,
and found her keen appetite for homage quite fresh. That tone of
gentle solicitude obliged her to look at the face that was bent toward
her, and to say, "No, thank you"; and nothing could prevent that
mutual glance from being delicious to both, as it had been the evening
before.

It was but an ordinary act of politeness in Stephen; it had hardly
taken two minutes; and Lucy, who was singing, scarcely noticed it. But
to Philip's mind, filled already with a vague anxiety that was likely
to find a definite ground for itself in any trivial incident, this
sudden eagerness in Stephen, and the change in Maggie's face, which
was plainly reflecting a beam from his, seemed so strong a contrast
with the previous overwrought signs of indifference, as to be charged
with painful meaning. Stephen's voice, pouring in again, jarred upon
his nervous susceptibility as if it had been the clang of sheet-iron,
and he felt inclined to make the piano shriek in utter discord. He had
really seen no communicable ground for suspecting any ususual feeling
between Stephen and Maggie; his own reason told him so, and he wanted
to go home at once that he might reflect coolly on these false images,
till he had convinced himself of their nullity. But then, again, he
wanted to stay as long as Stephen stayed,--always to be present when
Stephen was present with Maggie. It seemed to poor Philip so natural,
nay, inevitable, that any man who was near Maggie should fall in love
with her! There was no promise of happiness for her if she were
beguiled into loving Stephen Guest; and this thought emboldened Philip
to view his own love for her in the light of a less unequal offering.
He was beginning to play very falsely under this deafening inward
tumult, and Lucy was looking at him in astonishment, when Mrs.
Tulliver's entrance to summon them to lunch came as an excuse for
abruptly breaking off the music.

"Ah, Mr. Philip!" said Mr. Deane, when they entered the dining-room,
"I've not seen you for a long while. Your father's not at home, I
think, is he? I went after him to the office the other day, and they
said he was out of town."

"He's been to Mudport on business for several days," said Philip; "but
he's come back now."

"As fond of his farming hobby as ever, eh?"

"I believe so," said Philip, rather wondering at this sudden interest
in his father's pursuits.

"Ah!" said Mr. Deane, "he's got some land in his own hands on this
side the river as well as the other, I think?"

"Yes, he has."

"Ah!" continued Mr. Deane, as he dispensed the pigeonpie, "he must
find farming a heavy item,--an expensive hobby. I never had a hobby
myself, never would give in to that. And the worst of all hobbies are
those that people think they can get money at. They shoot their money
down like corn out of a sack then."

Lucy felt a little nervous under her father's apparently gratuitous
criticism of Mr. Wakem's expenditure. But it ceased there, and Mr.
Deane became unusually silent and meditative during his luncheon.
Lucy, accustomed to watch all indications in her father, and having
reasons, which had recently become strong, for an extra interest in
what referred to the Wakems, felt an unusual curiosity to know what had
prompted her father's questions. His subsequent silence made her
suspect there had been some special reason for them in his mind.

With this idea in her head, she resorted to her usual plan when she
wanted to tell or ask her father anything particular: she found a
reason for her aunt Tulliver to leaving the dining-room after dinner,
and seated herself on a small stool at her father's knee. Mr. Deane,
under those circumstances, considered that he tasted some of the most
agreeable moments his merits had purchased him in life,
notwithstanding that Lucy, disliking to have her hair powdered with
snuff, usually began by mastering his snuff-box on such occasions.

"You don't want to go to sleep yet, papa, _do_ you?" she said, as she
brought up her stool and opened the large fingers that clutched the
snuff-box.

"Not yet," said Mr. Deane, glancing at the reward of merit in the
decanter. "But what do _you_ want?" he added, pinching the dimpled
chin fondly,--"to coax some more sovereigns out of my pocket for your
bazaar? Eh?"

"No, I have no base motives at all to-day. I only want to talk, not to
beg. I want to know what made you ask Philip Wakem about his father's
farming to-day, papa? It seemed rather odd, because you never hardly
say anything to him about his father; and why should you care about
Mr. Wakem's losing money by his hobby?"

"Something to do with business," said Mr. Deane, waving his hands, as
if to repel intrusion into that mystery.

"But, papa, you always say Mr. Wakem has brought Philip up like a
girl; how came you to think you should get any business knowledge out
of him? Those abrupt questions sounded rather oddly. Philip thought
them queer."

"Nonsense, child!" said Mr. Deane, willing to justify his social
demeanor, with which he had taken some pains in his upward progress.
"There's a report that Wakem's mill and farm on the other side of the
river--Dorlcote Mill, your uncle Tulliver's, you know--isn't answering
so well as it did. I wanted to see if your friend Philip would let
anything out about his father's being tired of farming."

"Why? Would you buy the mill, papa, if he would part with it?" said
Lucy, eagerly. "Oh, tell me everything; here, you shall have your
snuff-box if you'll tell me. Because Maggie says all their hearts are
set on Tom's getting back the mill some time. It was one of the last
things her father said to Tom, that he must get back the mill."

"Hush, you little puss," said Mr. Deane, availing himself of the
restored snuff-box. "You must not say a word about this thing; do you
hear? There's very little chance of their getting the mill or of
anybody's getting it out of Wakem's hands. And if he knew that we
wanted it with a view to the Tulliver's getting it again, he'd be the
less likely to part with it. It's natural, after what happened. He
behaved well enough to Tulliver before; but a horsewhipping is not
likely to be paid for with sugar-plums."

"Now, papa," said Lucy, with a little air of solemnity, "will you
trust me? You must not ask me all my reasons for what I'm going to
say, but I have very strong reasons. And I'm very cautious; I am,
indeed."

"Well, let us hear."

"Why, I believe, if you will let me take Philip Wakem into our
confidence,--let me tell him all about your wish to buy, and what it's
for; that my cousins wish to have it, and why they wish to have it,--I
believe Philip would help to bring it about. I know he would desire to
do it."

"I don't see how that can be, child," said Mr. Deane, looking puzzled.
"Why should _he_ care?"--then, with a sudden penetrating look at his
daughter, "You don't think the poor lad's fond of you, and so you can
make him do what you like?" (Mr. Deane felt quite safe about his
daughter's affections.)

"No, papa; he cares very little about me,--not so much as I care about
him. But I have a reason for being quite sure of what I say. Don't you
ask me. And if you ever guess, don't tell me. Only give me leave to do
as I think fit about it."

Lucy rose from her stool to seat herself on her father's knee, and
kissed him with that last request.

"Are you sure you won't do mischief, now?" he said, looking at her
with delight.

"Yes, papa, quite sure. I'm very wise; I've got all your business
talents. Didn't you admire my accompt-book, now, when I showed it
you?"

"Well, well, if this youngster will keep his counsel, there won't be
much harm done. And to tell the truth, I think there's not much chance
for us any other way. Now, let me go off to sleep."



Wakem in a New Light


Before three days had passed after the conversation you have just
overheard between Lucy and her father she had contrived to have a
private interview with Philip during a visit of Maggie's to her aunt
Glegg. For a day and a night Philip turned over in his mind with
restless agitation all that Lucy had told him in that interview, till
he had thoroughly resolved on a course of action. He thought he saw
before him now a possibility of altering his position with respect to
Maggie, and removing at least one obstacle between them. He laid his
plan and calculated all his moves with the fervid deliberation of a
chess-player in the days of his first ardor, and was amazed himself at
his sudden genius as a tactician. His plan was as bold as it was
thoroughly calculated. Having watched for a moment when his father had
nothing more urgent on his hands than the newspaper, he went behind
him, laid a hand on his shoulder, and said,--

"Father, will you come up into my sanctum, and look at my new
sketches? I've arranged them now."

"I'm getting terrible stiff in the joints, Phil, for climbing those
stairs of yours," said Wakem, looking kindly at his son as he laid
down his paper. "But come along, then."

"This is a nice place for you, isn't it, Phil?--a capital light that
from the roof, eh?" was, as usual, the first thing he said on entering
the painting-room. He liked to remind himself and his son too that his
fatherly indulgence had provided the accommodation. He had been a good
father. Emily would have nothing to reproach him with there, if she
came back again from her grave.

"Come, come," he said, putting his double eye-glass over his nose, and
seating himself to take a general view while he rested, "you've got a
famous show here. Upon my word, I don't see that your things aren't as
good as that London artist's--what's his name--that Leyburn gave so
much money for."

Philip shook his head and smiled. He had seated himself on his
painting-stool, and had taken a lead pencil in his hand, with which he
was making strong marks to counteract the sense of tremulousness. He
watched his father get up, and walk slowly round, good-naturedly
dwelling on the pictures much longer than his amount of genuine taste
for landscape would have prompted, till he stopped before a stand on
which two pictures were placed,--one much larger than the other, the
smaller one in a leather case.

"Bless me! what have you here?" said Wakem, startled by a sudden
transition from landscape to portrait. "I thought you'd left off
figures. Who are these?"

"They are the same person," said Philip, with calm promptness, "at
different ages."

"And what person?" said Wakem, sharply fixing his eyes with a growing
look of suspicion on the larger picture.

"Miss Tulliver. The small one is something like what she was when I
was at school with her brother at King's Lorton; the larger one is not
quite so good a likeness of what she was when I came from abroad."

Wakem turned round fiercely, with a flushed face, letting his
eye-glass fall, and looking at his son with a savage expression for a
moment, as if he was ready to strike that daring feebleness from the
stool. But he threw himself into the armchair again, and thrust his
hands into his trouser-pockets, still looking angrily at his son,
however. Philip did not return the look, but sat quietly watching the
point of his pencil.

"And do you mean to say, then, that you have had any acquaintance with
her since you came from abroad?" said Wakem, at last, with that vain
effort which rage always makes to throw as much punishment as it
desires to inflict into words and tones, since blows are forbidden.

"Yes; I saw a great deal of her for a whole year before her father's
death. We met often in that thicket--the Red Deeps--near Dorlcote
Mill. I love her dearly; I shall never love any other woman. I have
thought of her ever since she was a little girl."

"Go on, sir! And you have corresponded with her all this while?"

"No. I never told her I loved her till just before we parted, and she
promised her brother not to see me again or to correspond with me. I
am not sure that she loves me or would consent to marry me. But if she
would consent,--if she _did_ love me well enough,--I should marry
her."

"And this is the return you make me for all the indulgences I've
heaped on you?" said Wakem, getting white, and beginning to tremble
under an enraged sense of impotence before Philip's calm defiance and
concentration of purpose.

"No, father," said Philip, looking up at him for the first time; "I
don't regard it as a return. You have been an indulgent father to me;
but I have always felt that it was because you had an affectionate
wish to give me as much happiness as my unfortunate lot would admit,
not that it was a debt you expected me to pay by sacrificing all my
chances of happiness to satisfy feelings of yours which I can never
share."

"I think most sons would share their father's feelings in this case,"
said Wakem, bitterly. "The girl's father was an ignorant mad brute,
who was within an inch of murdering me. The whole town knows it. And
the brother is just as insolent, only in a cooler way. He forbade her
seeing you, you say; he'll break every bone in your body, for your
greater happiness, if you don't take care. But you seem to have made
up your mind; you have counted the consequences, I suppose. Of course
you are independent of me; you can marry this girl to-morrow, if you
like; you are a man of five-and-twenty,--you can go your way, and I
can go mine. We need have no more to do with each other."

Wakem rose and walked toward the door, but something held him back,
and instead of leaving the room, he walked up and down it. Philip was
slow to reply, and when he spoke, his tone had a more incisive
quietness and clearness than ever.

"No; I can't marry Miss Tulliver, even if she would have me, if I have
only my own resources to maintain her with. I have been brought up to
no profession. I can't offer her poverty as well as deformity."

"Ah, _there_ is a reason for your clinging to me, doubtless," said
Wakem, still bitterly, though Philip's last words had given him a
pang; they had stirred a feeling which had been a habit for a quarter
of a century. He threw himself into the chair again.

"I expected all this," said Philip. "I know these scenes are often
happening between father and son. If I were like other men of my age,
I might answer your angry words by still angrier; we might part; I
should marry the woman I love, and have a chance of being as happy as
the rest. But if it will be a satisfaction to you to annihilate the
very object of everything you've done for me, you have an advantage
over most fathers; you can completely deprive me of the only thing
that would make my life worth having."

Philip paused, but his father was silent.

"You know best what satisfaction you would have, beyond that of
gratifying a ridiculous rancor worthy only of wandering savages."

"Ridiculous rancor!" Wakem burst out. "What do you mean? Damn it! is a
man to be horsewhipped by a boor and love him for it? Besides, there's
that cold, proud devil of a son, who said a word to me I shall not
forget when we had the settling. He would be as pleasant a mark for a
bullet as I know, if he were worth the expense."

"I don't mean your resentment toward them," said Philip, who had his
reasons for some sympathy with this view of Tom, "though a feeling of
revenge is not worth much, that you should care to keep it. I mean
your extending the enmity to a helpless girl, who has too much sense
and goodness to share their narrow prejudices. _She_ has never entered
into the family quarrels."

"What does that signify? We don't ask what a woman does; we ask whom
she belongs to. It's altogether a degrading thing to you, to think of
marrying old Tulliver's daughter."

For the first time in the dialogue, Philip lost some of his
self-control, and colored with anger.

"Miss Tulliver," he said, with bitter incisiveness, "has the only
grounds of rank that anything but vulgar folly can suppose to belong
to the middle class; she is thoroughly refined, and her friends,
whatever else they may be, are respected for irreproachable honor and
integrity. All St. Ogg's, I fancy, would pronounce her to be more than
my equal."

Wakem darted a glance of fierce question at his son; but Philip was
not looking at him, and with a certain penitent consciousness went on,
in a few moments, as if in amplification of his last words,--

"Find a single person in St. Ogg's who will not tell you that a
beautiful creature like her would be throwing herself away on a
pitiable object like me."

"Not she!" said Wakem, rising again, and forgetting everything else in
a burst of resentful pride, half fatherly, half personal. "It would be
a deuced fine match for her. It's all stuff about an accidental
deformity, when a girl's really attached to a man."

"But girls are not apt to get attached under those circumstances,"
said Philip.

"Well, then," said Wakem, rather brutally, trying to recover his
previous position, "if she doesn't care for you, you might have spared
yourself the trouble of talking to me about her, and you might have
spared me the trouble of refusing my consent to what was never likely
to happen."

Wakem strode to the door, and without looking round again, banged it
after him.

Philip was not without confidence that his father would be ultimately
wrought upon as he had expected, by what had passed; but the scene had
jarred upon his nerves, which were as sensitive as a woman's. He
determined not to go down to dinner; he couldn't meet his father again
that day. It was Wakem's habit, when he had no company at home, to go
out in the evening, often as early as half-past seven; and as it was
far on in the afternoon now, Philip locked up his room and went out
for a long ramble, thinking he would not return until his father was
out of the house again. He got into a boat, and went down the river to
a favorite village, where he dined, and lingered till it was late
enough for him to return. He had never had any sort of quarrel with
his father before, and had a sickening fear that this contest, just
begun, might go on for weeks; and what might not happen in that time?
He would not allow himself to define what that involuntary question
meant. But if he could once be in the position of Maggie's accepted,
acknowledged lover, there would be less room for vague dread. He went
up to his painting-room again, and threw himself with a sense of
fatigue into the armchair, looking round absently at the views of
water and rock that were ranged around, till he fell into a doze, in
which he fancied Maggie was slipping down a glistening, green, slimy
channel of a waterfall, and he was looking on helpless, till he was
awakened by what seemed a sudden, awful crash.

It was the opening of the door, and he could hardly have dozed more
than a few moments, for there was no perceptible change in the evening
light. It was his father who entered; and when Philip moved to vacate
the chair for him, he said,--

"Sit still. I'd rather walk about."

He stalked up and down the room once or twice, and then, standing
opposite Philip with his hands thrust in his side pockets, he said, as
if continuing a conversation that had not been broken off,--

"But this girl seems to have been fond of you, Phil, else she wouldn't
have met you in that way."

Philip's heart was beating rapidly, and a transient flush passed over
his face like a gleam. It was not quite easy to speak at once.

"She liked me at King's Lorton, when she was a little girl, because I
used to sit with her brother a great deal when he had hurt his foot.
She had kept that in her memory, and thought of me as a friend of a
long while ago. She didn't think of me as a lover when she met me."

"Well, but you made love to her at last. What did she say then?" said
Wakem, walking about again.

"She said she _did_ love me then."

"Confound it, then; what else do you want? Is she a jilt?"

"She was very young then," said Philip, hesitatingly. "I'm afraid she
hardly knew what she felt. I'm afraid our long separation, and the
idea that events must always divide us, may have made a difference."

"But she's in the town. I've seen her at church. Haven't you spoken to
her since you came back?"

"Yes, at Mr. Deane's. But I couldn't renew my proposals to her on
several grounds. One obstacle would be removed if you would give your
consent,--if you would be willing to think of her as a daughter-in-law."

Wakem was silent a little while, pausing before Maggie's picture.

"She's not the sort of woman your mother was, though, Phil," he said,
at last. "I saw her at church,--she's handsomer than this,--deuced
fine eyes and fine figure, I saw; but rather dangerous and
unmanageable, eh?"

"She's very tender and affectionate, and so simple,--without the airs
and petty contrivances other women have."

"Ah?" said Wakem. Then looking round at his son, "But your mother
looked gentler; she had that brown wavy hair and gray eyes, like
yours. You can't remember her very well. It was a thousand pities I'd
no likeness of her."

"Then, shouldn't you be glad for me to have the same sort of
happiness, father, to sweeten my life for me? There can never be
another tie so strong to you as that which began eight-and-twenty
years ago, when you married my mother, and you have been tightening it
ever since."

"Ah, Phil, you're the only fellow that knows the best of me," said
Wakem, giving his hand to his son. "We must keep together if we can.
And now, what am I to do? You must come downstairs and tell me. Am I
to go and call on this dark-eyed damsel?"

The barrier once thrown down in this way, Philip could talk freely to
his father of their entire relation with the Tullivers,--of the desire
to get the mill and land back into the family, and of its transfer to
Guest & Co. as an intermediate step. He could venture now to be
persuasive and urgent, and his father yielded with more readiness than
he had calculated on.

"_I_ don't care about the mill," he said at last, with a sort of angry
compliance. "I've had an infernal deal of bother lately about the
mill. Let them pay me for my improvements, that's all. But there's one
thing you needn't ask me. I shall have no direct transactions with
young Tulliver. If you like to swallow him for his sister's sake, you
may; but I've no sauce that will make him go down."

I leave you to imagine the agreeable feelings with which Philip went
to Mr. Deane the next day, to say that Mr. Wakem was ready to open the
negotiations, and Lucy's pretty triumph as she appealed to her father
whether she had not proved her great business abilities. Mr. Deane was
rather puzzled, and suspected that there had been something "going on"
among the young people to which he wanted a clew. But to men of Mr.
Deane's stamp, what goes on among the young people is as extraneous to
the real business of life as what goes on among the birds and
butterflies, until it can be shown to have a malign bearing on
monetary affairs. And in this case the bearing appeared to be entirely
propitious.



Charity in Full-Dress


The culmination of Maggie's career as an admired member of society in
St. Ogg's was certainly the day of the bazaar, when her simple noble
beauty, clad in a white muslin of some soft-floating kind, which I
suspect must have come from the stores of aunt Pullet's wardrobe,
appeared with marked distinction among the more adorned and
conventional women around her. We perhaps never detect how much of our
social demeanor is made up of artificial airs until we see a person
who is at once beautiful and simple; without the beauty, we are apt to
call simplicity awkwardness. The Miss Guests were much too well-bred
to have any of the grimaces and affected tones that belong to
pretentious vulgarity; but their stall being next to the one where
Maggie sat, it seemed newly obvious to-day that Miss Guest held her
chin too high, and that Miss Laura spoke and moved continually with a
view to effect.

All well-dressed St. Ogg's and its neighborhood were there; and it
would have been worth while to come even from a distance, to see the
fine old hall, with its open roof and carved oaken rafters, and great
oaken folding-doors, and light shed down from a height on the
many-colored show beneath; a very quaint place, with broad faded
stripes painted on the walls, and here and there a show of heraldic
animals of a bristly, long-snouted character, the cherished emblems of
a noble family once the seigniors of this now civic hall. A grand
arch, cut in the upper wall at one end, surmounted an oaken orchestra,
with an open room behind it, where hothouse plants and stalls for
refreshments were disposed; an agreeable resort for gentlemen disposed
to loiter, and yet to exchange the occasional crush down below for a
more commodious point of view. In fact, the perfect fitness of this
ancient building for an admirable modern purpose, that made charity
truly elegant, and led through vanity up to the supply of a deficit,
was so striking that hardly a person entered the room without
exchanging the remark more than once. Near the great arch over the
orchestra was the stone oriel with painted glass, which was one of the
venerable inconsistencies of the old hall; and it was close by this
that Lucy had her stall, for the convenience of certain large plain
articles which she had taken charge of for Mrs. Kenn. Maggie had
begged to sit at the open end of the stall, and to have the sale of
these articles rather than of bead-mats and other elaborate products
of which she had but a dim understanding. But it soon appeared that
the gentlemen's dressing-gowns, which were among her commodities, were
objects of such general attention and inquiry, and excited so
troublesome a curiosity as to their lining and comparative merits,
together with a determination to test them by trying on, as to make
her post a very conspicuous one. The ladies who had commodities of
their own to sell, and did not want dressing-gowns, saw at once the
frivolity and bad taste of this masculine preference for goods which
any tailor could furnish; and it is possible that the emphatic notice
of various kinds which was drawn toward Miss Tulliver on this public
occasion, threw a very strong and unmistakable light on her subsequent
conduct in many minds then present. Not that anger, on account of
spurned beauty can dwell in the celestial breasts of charitable
ladies, but rather that the errors of persons who have once been much
admired necessarily take a deeper tinge from the mere force of
contrast; and also, that to-day Maggie's conspicuous position, for the
first time, made evident certain characteristics which were
subsequently felt to have an explanatory bearing. There was something
rather bold in Miss Tulliver's direct gaze, and something undefinably
coarse in the style of her beauty, which placed her, in the opinion of
all feminine judges, far below her cousin Miss Deane; for the ladies
of St. Ogg's had now completely ceded to Lucy their hypothetic claims
on the admiration of Mr. Stephen Guest.

As for dear little Lucy herself, her late benevolent triumph about the
Mill, and all the affectionate projects she was cherishing for Maggie
and Philip, helped to give her the highest spirits to-day, and she
felt nothing but pleasure in the evidence of Maggie's attractiveness.
It is true, she was looking very charming herself, and Stephen was
paying her the utmost attention on this public occasion; jealously
buying up the articles he had seen under her fingers in the process of
making, and gayly helping her to cajole the male customers into the
purchase of the most effeminate futilities. He chose to lay aside his
hat and wear a scarlet fez of her embroidering; but by superficial
observers this was necessarily liable to be interpreted less as a
compliment to Lucy than as a mark of coxcombry. "Guest is a great
coxcomb," young Torry observed; "but then he is a privileged person in
St. Ogg's--he carries all before him; if another fellow did such
things, everybody would say he made a fool of himself."

And Stephen purchased absolutely nothing from Maggie, until Lucy said,
in rather a vexed undertone,--

"See, now; all the things of Maggie's knitting will be gone, and you
will not have bought one. There are those deliciously soft warm things
for the wrists,--do buy them."

"Oh no," said Stephen, "they must be intended for imaginative persons,
who can chill themselves on this warm day by thinking of the frosty
Caucasus. Stern reason is my forte, you know. You must get Philip to
buy those. By the way, why doesn't he come?"

"He never likes going where there are many people, though I enjoined
him to come. He said he would buy up any of my goods that the rest of
the world rejected. But now, do go and buy something of Maggie."

"No, no; see, she has got a customer; there is old Wakem himself just
coming up."

Lucy's eyes turned with anxious interest toward Maggie to see how she
went through this first interview, since a sadly memorable time, with
a man toward whom she must have so strange a mixture of feelings; but
she was pleased to notice that Wakem had tact enough to enter at once
into talk about the bazaar wares, and appear interested in purchasing,
smiling now and then kindly at Maggie, and not calling on her to speak
much, as if he observed that she was rather pale and tremulous.

"Why, Wakem is making himself particularly amiable to your cousin,"
said Stephen, in an undertone to Lucy; "is it pure magnanimity? You
talked of a family quarrel."

"Oh, that will soon be quite healed, I hope," said Lucy, becoming a
little indiscreet in her satisfaction, and speaking with an air of
significance. But Stephen did not appear to notice this, and as some
lady-purchasers came up, he lounged on toward Maggie's end, handling
trifles and standing aloof until Wakem, who had taken out his purse,
had finished his transactions.

"My son came with me," he overheard Wakem saying, "but he has vanished
into some other part of the building, and has left all these
charitable gallantries to me. I hope you'll reproach him for his
shabby conduct."

She returned his smile and bow without speaking, and he turned away,
only then observing Stephen and nodding to him. Maggie, conscious that
Stephen was still there, busied herself with counting money, and
avoided looking up. She had been well pleased that he had devoted
himself to Lucy to-day, and had not come near her. They had begun the
morning with an indifferent salutation, and both had rejoiced in being
aloof from each other, like a patient who has actually done without
his opium, in spite of former failures in resolution. And during the
last few days they had even been making up their minds to failures,
looking to the outward events that must soon come to separate them, as
a reason for dispensing with self-conquest in detail.

Stephen moved step by step as if he were being unwillingly dragged,
until he had got round the open end of the stall, and was half hidden
by a screen of draperies. Maggie went on counting her money till she
suddenly heard a deep gentle voice saying, "Aren't you very tried? Do
let me bring you something,--some fruit or jelly, mayn't I?"

The unexpected tones shook her like a sudden accidental vibration of a
harp close by her.

"Oh no, thank you," she said faintly, and only half looking up for an
instant.

"You look so pale," Stephen insisted, in a more entreating tone. "I'm
sure you're exhausted. I must disobey you, and bring something."

"No, indeed, I couldn't take it."

"Are you angry with me? What have I done? _Do_ look at me."

"Pray, go away," said Maggie, looking at him helplessly, her eyes
glancing immediately from him to the opposite corner of the orchestra,
which was half hidden by the folds of the old faded green curtain.
Maggie had no sooner uttered this entreaty than she was wretched at
the admission it implied; but Stephen turned away at once, and
following her upward glance, he saw Philip Wakem sealed in the
half-hidden corner, so that he could command little more than that
angle of the hall in which Maggie sat. An entirely new though occurred
to Stephen, and linking itself with what he had observed of Wakem's
manner, and with Lucy's reply to his observation, it convinced him
that there had been some former relation between Philip and Maggie
beyond that childish one of which he had heard. More than one impulse
made him immediately leave the hall and go upstairs to the
refreshment-room, where, walking up to Philip, he sat down behind him,
and put his hand on his shoulder.

"Are you studying for a portrait, Phil," he said, "or for a sketch of
that oriel window? By George, it makes a capital bit from this dark
corner, with the curtain just marking it off."

"I have been studying expression," said Philip, curtly.

"What! Miss Tulliver's? It's rather of the savage-moody order to-day,
I think,--something of the fallen princess serving behind a counter.
Her cousin sent me to her with a civil offer to get her some
refreshment, but I have been snubbed, as usual. There's natural
antipathy between us, I suppose; I have seldom the honor to please
her."

"What a hypocrite you are!" said Philip, flushing angrily.

"What! because experience must have told me that I'm universally
pleasing? I admit the law, but there's some disturbing force here."

"I am going," said Philip, rising abruptly.

"So am I--to get a breath of fresh air; this place gets oppressive. I
think I have done suit and service long enough."

The two friends walked downstairs together without speaking. Philip
turned through the outer door into the court-yard; but Stephen,
saying, "Oh, by the by, I must call in here," went on along the
passage to one of the rooms at the other end of the building, which
were appropriated to the town library. He had the room all to himself,
and a man requires nothing less than this when he wants to dash his
cap on the table, throw himself astride a chair, and stare at a high
brick wall with a frown which would not have been beneath the occasion
if he had been slaying "the giant Python." The conduct that issues
from a moral conflict has often so close a resemblance to vice that
the distinction escapes all outward judgments founded on a mere
comparison of actions. It is clear to you, I hope, that Stephen was
not a hypocrite,--capable of deliberate doubleness for a selfish end;
and yet his fluctuations between the indulgence of a feeling and the
systematic concealment of it might have made a good case in support of
Philip's accusation.

Meanwhile, Maggie sat at her stall cold and trembling, with that
painful sensation in the eyes which comes from resolutely repressed
tears. Was her life to be always like this,--always bringing some new
source of inward strife? She heard confusedly the busy, indifferent
voices around her, and wished her mind could flow into that easy
babbling current. It was at this moment that Dr. Kenn, who had quite
lately come into the hall, and was now walking down the middle with
his hands behind him, taking a general view, fixed his eyes on Maggie
for the first time, and was struck with the expression of pain on her
beautiful face. She was sitting quite still, for the stream of
customers had lessened at this late hour in the afternoon; the
gentlemen had chiefly chosen the middle of the day, and Maggie's stall
was looking rather bare. This, with her absent, pained expression,
finished the contrast between her and her companions, who were all
bright, eager, and busy. He was strongly arrested. Her face had
naturally drawn his attention as a new and striking one at church, and
he had been introduced to her during a short call on business at Mr.
Deane's, but he had never spoken more than three words to her. He
walked toward her now, and Maggie, perceiving some one approaching,
roused herself to look up and be prepared to speak. She felt a
childlike, instinctive relief from the sense of uneasiness in this
exertion, when she saw it was Dr. Kenn's face that was looking at her;
that plain, middle-aged face, with a grave, penetrating kindness in
it, seeming to tell of a human being who had reached a firm, safe
strand, but was looking with helpful pity toward the strugglers still
tossed by the waves, had an effect on Maggie at this moment which was
afterward remembered by her as if it had been a promise. The
middle-aged, who have lived through their strongest emotions, but are
yet in the time when memory is still half passionate and not merely
contemplative, should surely be a sort of natural priesthood, whom
life has disciplined and consecrated to be the refuge and rescue of
early stumblers and victims of self-despair. Most of us, at some
moment in our young lives, would have welcomed a priest of that
natural order in any sort of canonicals or uncanonicals, but had to
scramble upward into all the difficulties of nineteen entirely without
such aid, as Maggie did.

"You find your office rather a fatiguing one, I fear, Miss Tulliver,"
said Dr. Kenn.

"It is, rather," said Maggie, simply, not being accustomed to simpler
amiable denials of obvious facts.

"But I can tell Mrs. Kenn that you have disposed of her goods very
quickly," he added; "she will be very much obliged to you."

"Oh, I have done nothing; the gentlemen came very fast to buy the
dressing-gowns and embroidered waistcoats, but I think any of the
other ladies would have sold more; I didn't know what to say about
them."

Dr. Kenn smiled. "I hope I'm going to have you as a permanent
parishioner now, Miss Tulliver; am I? You have been at a distance from
us hitherto."

"I have been a teacher in a school, and I'm going into another
situation of the same kind very soon."

"Ah? I was hoping you would remain among your friends, who are all in
this neighborhood, I believe."

"Oh, _I must go_," said Maggie, earnestly, looking at Dr. Kenn with an
expression of reliance, as if she had told him her history in those
three words. It was one of those moments of implicit revelation which
will sometimes happen even between people who meet quite
transiently,--on a mile's journey, perhaps, or when resting by the
wayside. There is always this possibility of a word or look from a
stranger to keep alive the sense of human brotherhood.

Dr. Kenn's ear and eye took in all the signs that this brief
confidence of Maggie's was charged with meaning.

"I understand," he said; "you feel it right to go. But that will not
prevent our meeting again, I hope; it will not prevent my knowing you
better, if I can be of any service to you."

He put out his hand and pressed hers kindly before he turned away.

"She has some trouble or other at heart," he thought. "Poor child! she
looks as if she might turn out to be one of

  'The souls by nature pitched too high,
  By suffering plunged too low.'

"There's something wonderfully honest in those beautiful eyes."

It may be surprising that Maggie, among whose many imperfections an
excessive delight in admiration and acknowledged supremacy were not
absent now, any more than when she was instructing the gypsies with a
view toward achieving a royal position among them, was not more elated
on a day when she had had the tribute of so many looks and smiles,
together with that satisfactory consciousness which had necessarily
come from being taken before Lucy's chevalglass, and made to look at
the full length of her tall beauty, crowned by the night of her massy
hair. Maggie had smiled at herself then, and for the moment had
forgotten everything in the sense of her own beauty. If that state of
mind could have lasted, her choice would have been to have Stephen
Guest at her feet, offering her a life filled with all luxuries, with
daily incense of adoration near and distant, and with all
possibilities of culture at her command. But there were things in her
stronger than vanity,--passion and affection, and long, deep memories
of early discipline and effort, of early claims on her love and pity;
and the stream of vanity was soon swept along and mingled
imperceptibly with that wider current which was at its highest force
today, under the double urgency of the events and inward impulses
brought by the last week.

Philip had not spoken to her himself about the removal of obstacles
between them on his father's side,--he shrank from that; but he had
told everything to Lucy, with the hope that Maggie, being informed
through her, might give him some encouraging sign that their being
brought thus much nearer to each other was a happiness to her. The
rush of conflicting feelings was too great for Maggie to say much when
Lucy, with a face breathing playful joy, like one of Correggio's
cherubs, poured forth her triumphant revelation; and Lucy could hardly
be surprised that she could do little more than cry with gladness at
the thought of her father's wish being fulfilled, and of Tom's getting
the Mill again in reward for all his hard striving. The details of
preparation for the bazaar had then come to usurp Lucy's attention for
the next few days, and nothing had been said by the cousins on
subjects that were likely to rouse deeper feelings. Philip had been to
the house more than once, but Maggie had had no private conversation
with him, and thus she had been left to fight her inward battle
without interference.

But when the bazaar was fairly ended, and the cousins were alone
again, resting together at home, Lucy said,--

"You must give up going to stay with your aunt Moss the day after
to-morrow, Maggie; write a note to her, and tell her you have put it
off at my request, and I'll send the man with it. She won't be
displeased; you'll have plenty of time to go by-and-by; and I don't
want you to go out of the way just now."

"Yes, indeed I must go, dear; I can't put it off. I wouldn't leave
aunt Gritty out for the world. And I shall have very little time, for
I'm going away to a new situation on the 25th of June."

"Maggie!" said Lucy, almost white with astonishment.

"I didn't tell you, dear," said Maggie, making a great effort to
command herself, "because you've been so busy. But some time ago I
wrote to our old governess, Miss Firniss, to ask her to let me know if
she met with any situation that I could fill, and the other day I had
a letter from her telling me that I could take three orphan pupils of
hers to the coast during the holidays, and then make trial of a
situation with her as teacher. I wrote yesterday to accept the offer."

Lucy felt so hurt that for some moments she was unable to speak.

"Maggie," she said at last, "how could you be so unkind to me--not to
tell me--to take _such_ a step--and now!" She hesitated a little, and
then added, "And Philip? I thought everything was going to be so
happy. Oh, Maggie, what is the reason? Give it up; let me write. There
is nothing now to keep you and Philip apart."

"Yes," said Maggie, faintly. "There is Tom's feeling. He said I must
give him up if I married Philip. And I know he will not change--at
least not for a long while--unless something happened to soften him."

"But I will talk to him; he's coming back this week. And this good
news about the Mill will soften him. And I'll talk to him about
Philip. Tom's always very compliant to me; I don't think he's so
obstinate."

"But I must go," said Maggie, in a distressed voice. "I must leave
some time to pack. Don't press me to stay, dear Lucy."

Lucy was silent for two or three minutes, looking away and ruminating.
At length she knelt down by her cousin, and looking up in her face
with anxious seriousness, said,--

"Maggie, is it that you don't love Philip well enough to marry him?
Tell me--trust me."

Maggie held Lucy's hands tightly in silence a little while. Her own
hands were quite cold. But when she spoke, her voice was quite clear
and distinct.

"Yes, Lucy, I would choose to marry him. I think it would be the best
and highest lot for me,--to make his life happy. He loved me first. No
one else could be quite what he is to me. But I can't divide myself
from my brother for life. I must go away, and wait. Pray don't speak
to me again about it."

Lucy obeyed in pain and wonder. The next word she said was,--

"Well, dear Maggie, at least you will go to the dance at Park House
to-morrow, and have some music and brightness, before you go to pay
these dull dutiful visits. Ah! here come aunty and the tea."



The Spell Seems Broken


The suite of rooms opening into each other at Park House looked duly
brilliant with lights and flowers and the personal splendors of
sixteen couples, with attendant parents and guardians. The focus of
brilliancy was the long drawing-room, where the dancing went forward,
under the inspiration of the grand piano; the library, into which it
opened at one end, had the more sober illumination of maturity, with
caps and cards; and at the other end the pretty sitting-room, with a
conservatory attached, was left as an occasional cool retreat. Lucy,
who had laid aside her black for the first time, and had her pretty
slimness set off by an abundant dress of white crape, was the
acknowledged queen of the occasion; for this was one of the Miss
Guests' thoroughly condescending parties, including no member of any
aristocracy higher than that of St. Ogg's, and stretching to the
extreme limits of commercial and professional gentility.

Maggie at first refused to dance, saying that she had forgotten all
the figures--it was so many years since she had danced at school; and
she was glad to have that excuse, for it is ill dancing with a heavy
heart. But at length the music wrought in her young limbs, and the
longing came; even though it was the horrible young Torry, who walked
up a second time to try and persuade her. She warned him that she
could not dance anything but a country-dance; but he, of course, was
willing to wait for that high felicity, meaning only to be
complimentary when he assured her at several intervals that it was a
"great bore" that she couldn't waltz, he would have liked so much to
waltz with her. But at last it was the turn of the good old-fashioned
dance which has the least of vanity and the most of merriment in it,
and Maggie quite forgot her troublous life in a childlike enjoyment of
that half-rustic rhythm which seems to banish pretentious etiquette.
She felt quite charitably toward young Torry, as his hand bore her
along and held her up in the dance; her eyes and cheeks had that fire
of young joy in them which will flame out if it can find the least
breath to fan it; and her simple black dress, with its bit of black
lace, seemed like the dim setting of a jewel.

Stephen had not yet asked her to dance; had not yet paid her more than
a passing civility. Since yesterday, that inward vision of her which
perpetually made part of his consciousness, had been half screened by
the image of Philip Wakem, which came across it like a blot; there was
some attachment between her and Philip; at least there was an
attachment on his side, which made her feel in some bondage. Here,
then, Stephen told himself, was another claim of honor which called on
him to resist the attraction that was continually threatening to
overpower him. He told himself so; and yet he had once or twice felt a
certain savage resistance, and at another moment a shuddering
repugnance, to this intrusion of Philip's image, which almost made it
a new incitement to rush toward Maggie and claim her for himself.
Nevertheless, he had done what he meant to do this evening,--he had
kept aloof from her; he had hardly looked at her; and he had been
gayly assiduous to Lucy. But now his eyes were devouring Maggie; he
felt inclined to kick young Torry out of the dance, and take his
place. Then he wanted the dance to end that he might get rid of his
partner. The possibility that he too should dance with Maggie, and
have her hand in his so long, was beginning to possess him like a
thirst. But even now their hands were meeting in the dance,--were
meeting still to the very end of it, though they were far off each
other.

Stephen hardly knew what happened, or in what automatic way he got
through the duties of politeness in the interval, until he was free
and saw Maggie seated alone again, at the farther end of the room. He
made his way toward her round the couples that were forming for the
waltz; and when Maggie became conscious that she was the person he
sought, she felt, in spite of all the thoughts that had gone before, a
glowing gladness at heart. Her eyes and cheeks were still brightened
with her childlike enthusiasm in the dance; her whole frame was set to
joy and tenderness; even the coming pain could not seem bitter,--she
was ready to welcome it as a part of life, for life at this moment
seemed a keen, vibrating consciousness poised above pleasure or pain.
This one, this last night, she might expand unrestrainedly in the
warmth of the present, without those chill, eating thoughts of the
past and the future.

"They're going to waltz again," said Stephen, bending to speak to her,
with that glance and tone of subdued tenderness which young dreams
create to themselves in the summer woods when low, cooing voices fill
the air. Such glances and tones bring the breath of poetry with them
into a room that is half stifling with glaring gas and hard
flirtation.

"They are going to waltz again. It is rather dizzy work to look on,
and the room is very warm; shall we walk about a little?"

He took her hand and placed it within his arm, and they walked on into
the sitting-room, where the tables were strewn with engravings for the
accommodation of visitors who would not want to look at them. But no
visitors were here at this moment. They passed on into the
conservatory.

"How strange and unreal the trees and flowers look with the lights
among them!" said Maggie, in a low voice. "They look as if they
belonged to an enchanted land, and would never fade away; I could
fancy they were all made of jewels."

She was looking at the tier of geraniums as she spoke, and Stephen
made no answer; but he was looking at her; and does not a supreme poet
blend light and sound into one, calling darkness mute, and light
eloquent? Something strangely powerful there was in the light of
Stephen's long gaze, for it made Maggie's face turn toward it and look
upward at it, slowly, like a flower at the ascending brightness. And
they walked unsteadily on, without feeling that they were walking;
without feeling anything but that long, grave, mutual gaze which has
the solemnity belonging to all deep human passion. The hovering
thought that they must and would renounce each other made this moment
of mute confession more intense in its rapture.

But they had reached the end of the conservatory, and were obliged to
pause and turn. The change of movement brought a new consciousness to
Maggie; she blushed deeply, turned away her head, and drew her arm
from Stephen's, going up to some flowers to smell them. Stephen stood
motionless, and still pale.

"Oh, may I get this rose?" said Maggie, making a great effort to say
something, and dissipate the burning sense of irretrievable
confession. "I think I am quite wicked with roses; I like to gather
them and smell them till they have no scent left."

Stephen was mute; he was incapable of putting a sentence together, and
Maggie bent her arm a little upward toward the large half-opened rose
that had attracted her. Who has not felt the beauty of a woman's arm?
The unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled
elbow, and all the varied gently lessening curves, down to the
delicate wrist, with its tiniest, almost imperceptible nicks in the
firm softness. A woman's arm touched the soul of a great sculptor two
thousand years ago, so that he wrought an image of it for the
Parthenon which moves us still as it clasps lovingly the timeworn
marble of a headless trunk. Maggie's was such an arm as that, and it
had the warm tints of life.

A mad impulse seized on Stephen; he darted toward the arm, and
showered kisses on it, clasping the wrist.

But the next moment Maggie snatched it from him, and glared at him
like a wounded war-goddess, quivering with rage and humiliation.

"How dare you?" She spoke in a deeply shaken, half-smothered voice.
"What right have I given you to insult me?"

She darted from him into the adjoining room, and threw herself on the
sofa, panting and trembling.

A horrible punishment was come upon her for the sin of allowing a
moment's happiness that was treachery to Lucy, to Philip, to her own
better soul. That momentary happiness had been smitten with a blight,
a leprosy; Stephen thought more lightly of _her_ than he did of Lucy.

As for Stephen, he leaned back against the framework of the
conservatory, dizzy with the conflict of passions,--love, rage, and
confused despair; despair at his want of self-mastery, and despair
that he had offended Maggie.

The last feeling surmounted every other; to be by her side again and
entreat forgiveness was the only thing that had the force of a motive
for him, and she had not been seated more than a few minutes when he
came and stood humbly before her. But Maggie's bitter rage was
unspent.

"Leave me to myself, if you please," she said, with impetuous
haughtiness, "and for the future avoid me."

Stephen turned away, and walked backward and forward at the other end
of the room. There was the dire necessity of going back into the
dancing-room again, and he was beginning to be conscious of that. They
had been absent so short a time, that when he went in again the waltz
was not ended.

Maggie, too, was not long before she re-entered. All the pride of her
nature was stung into activity; the hateful weakness which had dragged
her within reach of this wound to her self-respect had at least
wrought its own cure. The thoughts and temptations of the last month
should all be flung away into an unvisited chamber of memory. There
was nothing to allure her now; duty would be easy, and all the old
calm purposes would reign peacefully once more. She re-entered the
drawing-room still with some excited brightness in her face, but with
a sense of proud self-command that defied anything to agitate her. She
refused to dance again, but she talked quite readily and calmly with
every one who addressed her. And when they got home that night, she
kissed Lucy with a free heart, almost exulting in this scorching
moment, which had delivered her from the possibility of another word
or look that would have the stamp of treachery toward that gentle,
unsuspicious sister.

The next morning Maggie did not set off to Basset quite so soon as she
had expected. Her mother was to accompany her in the carriage, and
household business could not be dispatched hastily by Mrs. Tulliver.
So Maggie, who had been in a hurry to prepare herself, had to sit
waiting, equipped for the drive, in the garden. Lucy was busy in the
house wrapping up some bazaar presents for the younger ones at Basset,
and when there was a loud ring at the door-bell, Maggie felt some
alarm lest Lucy should bring out Stephen to her; it was sure to be
Stephen.

But presently the visitor came out into the garden alone, and seated
himself by her on the garden-chair. It was not Stephen.

"We can just catch the tips of the Scotch firs, Maggie, from this
seat," said Philip.

They had taken each other's hands in silence, but Maggie had looked at
him with a more complete revival of the old childlike affectionate
smile than he had seen before, and he felt encouraged.

"Yes," she said, "I often look at them, and wish I could see the low
sunlight on the stems again. But I have never been that way but
once,--to the churchyard with my mother."

"I have been there, I go there, continually," said Philip. "I have
nothing but the past to live upon."

A keen remembrance and keen pity impelled Maggie to put her hand in
Philip's. They had so often walked hand in hand!

"I remember all the spots," she said,--"just where you told me of
particular things, beautiful stories that I had never heard of
before."

"You will go there again soon, won't you, Maggie?" said Philip,
getting timid. "The Mill will soon be your brother's home again."

"Yes; but I shall not be there," said Maggie. "I shall only hear of
that happiness. I am going away again; Lucy has not told you,
perhaps?"

"Then the future will never join on to the past again, Maggie? That
book is quite closed?"

The gray eyes that had so often looked up at her with entreating
worship, looked up at her now, with a last struggling ray of hope in
them, and Maggie met them with her large sincere gaze.

"That book never will be closed, Philip," she said, with grave
sadness; "I desire no future that will break the ties of the past. But
the tie to my brother is one of the strongest. I can do nothing
willingly that will divide me always from him."

"Is that the only reason that would keep us apart forever, Maggie?"
said Philip, with a desperate determination to have a definite answer.

"The only reason," said Maggie, with calm decision. And she believed
it. At that moment she felt as if the enchanted cup had been dashed to
the ground. The reactionary excitement that gave her a proud
self-mastery had not subsided, and she looked at the future with a
sense of calm choice.

They sat hand in hand without looking at each other or speaking for a
few minutes; in Maggie's mind the first scenes of love and parting
were more present than the actual moment, and she was looking at
Philip in the Red Deeps.

Philip felt that he ought to have been thoroughly happy in that answer
of hers; she was as open and transparent as a rock-pool. Why was he
not thoroughly happy? Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short
of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.



In the Lane


Maggie had been four days at her aunt Moss's giving the early June
sunshine quite a new brightness in the care-dimmed eyes of that
affectionate woman, and making an epoch for her cousins great and
small, who were learning her words and actions by heart, as if she had
been a transient avatar of perfect wisdom and beauty.

She was standing on the causeway with her aunt and a group of cousins
feeding the chickens, at that quiet moment in the life of the
farmyards before the afternoon milking-time. The great buildings round
the hollow yard were as dreary and tumbledown as ever, but over the
old garden-wall the straggling rose-bushes were beginning to toss
their summer weight, and the gray wood and old bricks of the house, on
its higher level, had a look of sleepy age in the broad afternoon
sunlight, that suited the quiescent time. Maggie, with her bonnet over
her arm, was smiling down at the hatch of small fluffy chickens, when
her aunt exclaimed,--

"Goodness me! who is that gentleman coming in at the gate?"

It was a gentleman on a tall bay horse; and the flanks and neck of the
horse were streaked black with fast riding. Maggie felt a beating at
head and heart, horrible as the sudden leaping to life of a savage
enemy who had feigned death.

"Who is it, my dear?" said Mrs. Moss, seeing in Maggie's face the
evidence that she knew.

"It is Mr. Stephen Guest," said Maggie, rather faintly. "My cousin
Lucy's--a gentleman who is very intimate at my cousin's."

Stephen was already close to them, had jumped off his horse, and now
raised his hat as he advanced.

"Hold the horse, Willy," said Mrs. Moss to the twelve-year-old boy.

"No, thank you," said Stephen, pulling at the horse's impatiently
tossing head. "I must be going again immediately. I have a message to
deliver to you, Miss Tulliver, on private business. May I take the
liberty of asking you to walk a few yards with me?"

He had a half-jaded, half-irritated look, such as a man gets when he
has been dogged by some care or annoyance that makes his bed and his
dinner of little use to him. He spoke almost abruptly, as if his
errand were too pressing for him to trouble himself about what would
be thought by Mrs. Moss of his visit and request. Good Mrs. Moss,
rather nervous in the presence of this apparently haughty gentleman,
was inwardly wondering whether she would be doing right or wrong to
invite him again to leave his horse and walk in, when Maggie, feeling
all the embarrassment of the situation, and unable to say anything,
put on her bonnet, and turned to walk toward the gate.

Stephen turned too, and walked by her side, leading his horse.

Not a word was spoken till they were out in the lane, and had walked
four or five yards, when Maggie, who had been looking straight before
her all the while, turned again to walk back, saying, with haughty
resentment,--

"There is no need for me to go any farther. I don't know whether you
consider it gentlemanly and delicate conduct to place me in a position
that forced me to come out with you, or whether you wished to insult
me still further by thrusting an interview upon me in this way."

"Of course you are angry with me for coming," said Stephen, bitterly.
"Of course it is of no consequence what a man has to suffer; it is
only your woman's dignity that you care about."

Maggie gave a slight start, such as might have come from the slightest
possible electric shock.

"As if it were not enough that I'm entangled in this way; that I'm mad
with love for you; that I resist the strongest passion a man can feel,
because I try to be true to other claims; but you must treat me as if
I were a coarse brute, who would willingly offend you. And when, if I
had my own choice, I should ask you to take my hand and my fortune and
my whole life, and do what you liked with them! I know I forgot
myself. I took an unwarrantable liberty. I hate myself for having done
it. But I repented immediately; I've been repenting ever since. You
ought not to think it unpardonable; a man who loves with his whole
soul, as I do you, is liable to be mastered by his feelings for a
moment; but you know--you must believe--that the worst pain I could
have is to have pained you; that I would give the world to recall the
error."

Maggie dared not speak, dared not turn her head. The strength that had
come from resentment was all gone, and her lips were quivering
visibly. She could not trust herself to utter the full forgiveness
that rose in answer to that confession.

They were come nearly in front of the gate again, and she paused,
trembling.

"You must not say these things; I must not hear them," she said,
looking down in misery, as Stephen came in front of her, to prevent
her from going farther toward the gate. "I'm very sorry for any pain
you have to go through; but it is of no use to speak."

"Yes, it _is_ of use," said Stephen, impetuously. "It would be of use
if you would treat me with some sort of pity and consideration,
instead of doing me vile injustice in your mind. I could bear
everything more quietly if I knew you didn't hate me for an insolent
coxcomb. Look at me; see what a hunted devil I am; I've been riding
thirty miles every day to get away from the thought of you."

Maggie did not--dared not--look. She had already seen the harassed
face. But she said gently,--

"I don't think any evil of you."

"Then, dearest, look at me," said Stephen, in deepest, tenderest tones
of entreaty. "Don't go away from me yet. Give me a moment's happiness;
make me feel you've forgiven me."

"Yes, I do forgive you," said Maggie, shaken by those tones, and all
the more frightened at herself. "But pray let me go in again. Pray go
away."

A great tear fell from under her lowered eyelids.

"I can't go away from you; I can't leave you," said Stephen, with
still more passionate pleading. "I shall come back again if you send
me away with this coldness; I can't answer for myself. But if you will
go with me only a little way I can live on that. You see plainly
enough that your anger has only made me ten times more unreasonable."

Maggie turned. But Tancred, the bay horse, began to make such spirited
remonstrances against this frequent change of direction, that Stephen,
catching sight of Willy Moss peeping through the gate, called out,
"Here! just come and hold my horse for five minutes."

"Oh, no," said Maggie, hurriedly, "my aunt will think it so strange."

"Never mind," Stephen answered impatiently; "they don't know the
people at St. Ogg's. Lead him up and down just here for five minutes,"
he added to Willy, who was now close to them; and then he turned to
Maggie's side, and they walked on. It was clear that she _must_ go on
now.

"Take my arm," said Stephen, entreatingly; and she took it, feeling
all the while as if she were sliding downward in a nightmare.

"There is no end to this misery," she began, struggling to repel the
influence by speech. "It is wicked--base--ever allowing a word or look
that Lucy--that others might not have seen. Think of Lucy."

"I do think of her--bless her. If I didn't----" Stephen had laid his
hand on Maggie's that rested on his arm, and they both felt it
difficult to speak.

"And I have other ties," Maggie went on, at last, with a desperate
effort, "even if Lucy did not exist."

"You are engaged to Philip Wakem?" said Stephen, hastily. "Is it so?"

"I consider myself engaged to him; I don't mean to marry any one
else."

Stephen was silent again until they had turned out of the sun into a
side lane, all grassy and sheltered. Then he burst out impetuously,--

"It is unnatural, it is horrible. Maggie, if you loved me as I love
you, we should throw everything else to the winds for the sake of
belonging to each other. We should break all these mistaken ties that
were made in blindness, and determine to marry each other."

"I would rather die than fall into that temptation," said Maggie, with
deep, slow distinctness, all the gathered spiritual force of painful
years coming to her aid in this extremity. She drew her arm from his
as she spoke.

"Tell me, then, that you don't care for me," he said, almost
violently. "Tell me that you love some one else better."

It darted through Maggie's mind that here was a mode of releasing
herself from outward struggle,--to tell Stephen that her whole heart
was Philip's. But her lips would not utter that, and she was silent.

"If you do love me, dearest," said Stephen, gently, taking her hand
again and laying it within his arm, "it is better--it is right that we
should marry each other. We can't help the pain it will give. It is
come upon us without our seeking; it is natural; it has taken hold of
me in spite of every effort I have made to resist it. God knows, I've
been trying to be faithful to tacit engagements, and I've only made
things worse; I'd better have given way at first."

Maggie was silent. If it were _not_ wrong--if she were once convinced
of that, and need no longer beat and struggle against this current,
soft and yet strong as the summer stream!

"Say 'yes,' dearest," said Stephen, leaning to look entreatingly in
her face. "What could we care about in the whole world beside, if we
belonged to each other?"

Her breath was on his face, his lips were very near hers, but there
was a great dread dwelling in his love for her.

Her lips and eyelids quivered; she opened her eyes full on his for an
instant, like a lovely wild animal timid and struggling under
caresses, and then turned sharp round toward home again.

"And after all," he went on, in an impatient tone, trying to defeat
his own scruples as well as hers, "I am breaking no positive
engagement; if Lucy's affections had been withdrawn from me and given
to some one else, I should have felt no right to assert a claim on
her. If you are not absolutely pledged to Philip, we are neither of us
bound."

"You don't believe that; it is not your real feeling," said Maggie,
earnestly. "You feel, as I do, that the real tie lies in the feelings
and expectations we have raised in other minds. Else all pledges might
be broken, when there was no outward penalty. There would be no such
thing as faithfulness."

Stephen was silent; he could not pursue that argument; the opposite
conviction had wrought in him too strongly through his previous time
of struggle. But it soon presented itself in a new form.

"The pledge _can't_ be fulfilled," he said, with impetuous insistence.
"It is unnatural; we can only pretend to give ourselves to any one
else. There is wrong in that too; there may be misery in it for _them_
as well as for us. Maggie, you must see that; you do see that."

He was looking eagerly at her face for the least sign of compliance;
his large, firm, gentle grasp was on her hand. She was silent for a
few moments, with her eyes fixed on the ground; then she drew a deep
breath, and said, looking up at him with solemn sadness,--

"Oh, it is difficult,--life is very difficult! It seems right to me
sometimes that we should follow our strongest feeling; but then, such
feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has
made for us,--the ties that have made others dependent on us,--and
would cut them in two. If life were quite easy and simple, as it might
have been in Paradise, and we could always see that one being first
toward whom--I mean, if life did not make duties for us before love
comes, love would be a sign that two people ought to belong to each
other. But I see--I feel it is not so now; there are things we must
renounce in life; some of us must resign love. Many things are
difficult and dark to me; but I see one thing quite clearly,--that I
must not, cannot, seek my own happiness by sacrificing others. Love is
natural; but surely pity and faithfulness and memory are natural too.
And they would live in me still, and punish me if I did not obey them.
I should be haunted by the suffering I had caused. Our love would be
poisoned. Don't urge me; help me,--help me, _because_ I love you."

Maggie had become more and more earnest as she went on; her face had
become flushed, and her eyes fuller and fuller of appealing love.
Stephen had the fibre of nobleness in him that vibrated to her appeal;
but in the same moment--how could it be otherwise?--that pleading
beauty gained new power over him.

"Dearest," he said, in scarcely more than a whisper, while his arm
stole round her, "I'll do, I'll bear anything you wish. But--one
kiss--one--the last--before we part."

One kiss, and then a long look, until Maggie said tremulously, "Let me
go,--let me make haste back."

She hurried along, and not another word was spoken. Stephen stood
still and beckoned when they came within sight of Willy and the horse,
and Maggie went on through the gate. Mrs. Moss was standing alone at
the door of the old porch; she had sent all the cousins in, with kind
thoughtfulness. It might be a joyful thing that Maggie had a rich and
handsome lover, but she would naturally feel embarrassed at coming in
again; and it might _not_ be joyful. In either case Mrs. Moss waited
anxiously to receive Maggie by herself. The speaking face told plainly
enough that, if there was joy, it was of a very agitating, dubious
sort.

"Sit down here a bit, my dear." She drew Maggie into the porch, and
sat down on the bench by her; there was no privacy in the house.

"Oh, aunt Gritty, I'm very wretched! I wish I could have died when I
was fifteen. It seemed so easy to give things up then; it is so hard
now."

The poor child threw her arms round her aunt's neck, and fell into
long, deep sobs.



A Family Party


Maggie left her good aunt Gritty at the end of the week, and went to
Garum Firs to pay her visit to aunt Pullet according to agreement. In
the mean time very unexpected things had happened, and there was to be
a family party at Garum to discuss and celebrate a change in the
fortunes of the Tullivers, which was likely finally to carry away the
shadow of their demerits like the last limb of an eclipse, and cause
their hitherto obscured virtues to shine forth in full-rounded
splendor. It is pleasant to know that a new ministry just come into
office are not the only fellow-men who enjoy a period of high
appreciation and full-blown eulogy; in many respectable families
throughout this realm, relatives becoming creditable meet with a
similar cordiality of recognition, which in its fine freedom from the
coercion of any antecedents, suggests the hopeful possibility that we
may some day without any notice find ourselves in full millennium,
with cockatrices who have ceased to bite, and wolves that no longer
show their teeth with any but the blandest intentions.

Lucy came so early as to have the start even of aunt Glegg; for she
longed to have some undisturbed talk with Maggie about the wonderful
news. It seemed, did it not? said Lucy, with her prettiest air of
wisdom, as if everything, even other people's misfortunes (poor
creatures!) were conspiring now to make poor dear aunt Tulliver, and
cousin Tom, and naughty Maggie too, if she were not obstinately bent
on the contrary, as happy as they deserved to be after all their
troubles. To think that the very day--the _very day_--after Tom had
come back from Newcastle, that unfortunate young Jetsome, whom Mr.
Wakem had placed at the Mill, had been pitched off his horse in a
drunken fit, and was lying at St. Ogg's in a dangerous state, so that
Wakem had signified his wish that the new purchasers should enter on
the premises at once!

It was very dreadful for that unhappy young man, but it did seem as if
the misfortune had happened then, rather than at any other time, in
order that cousin Tom might all the sooner have the fit reward of his
exemplary conduct,--papa thought so very highly of him. Aunt Tulliver
must certainly go to the Mill now, and keep house for Tom; that was
rather a loss to Lucy in the matter of household comfort; but then, to
think of poor aunty being in her old place again, and gradually
getting comforts about her there!

On this last point Lucy had her cunning projects, and when she and
Maggie had made their dangerous way down the bright stairs into the
handsome parlor, where the very sunbeams seemed cleaner than
elsewhere, she directed her manoeuvres, as any other great tactician
would have done, against the weaker side of the enemy.

"Aunt Pullet," she said, seating herself on the sofa, and caressingly
adjusting that lady's floating cap-string, "I want you to make up your
mind what linen and things you will give Tom toward housekeeping;
because you are always so generous,--you give such nice things, you
know; and if you set the example, aunt Glegg will follow."

"That she never can, my dear," said Mrs. Pullet, with unusual vigor,
"for she hasn't got the linen to follow suit wi' mine, I can tell you.
She'd niver the taste, not if she'd spend the money. Big checks and
live things, like stags and foxes, all her table-linen is,--not a spot
nor a diamond among 'em. But it's poor work dividing one's linen
before one dies,--I niver thought to ha' done that, Bessy," Mrs.
Pullet continued, shaking her head and looking at her sister Tulliver,
"when you and me chose the double diamont, the first flax iver we'd
spun, and the Lord knows where yours is gone."

"I'd no choice, I'm sure, sister," said poor Mrs. Tulliver, accustomed
to consider herself in the light of an accused person. "I'm sure it
was no wish o' mine, iver, as I should lie awake o' nights thinking o'
my best bleached linen all over the country."

"Take a peppermint, Mrs. Tulliver," said uncle Pullet, feeling that he
was offering a cheap and wholesome form of comfort, which he was
recommending by example.

"Oh, but, aunt Pullet," said Lucy, "you've so much beautiful linen.
And suppose you had had daughters! Then you must have divided it when
they were married."

"Well, I don't say as I won't do it," said Mrs. Pullet, "for now Tom's
so lucky, it's nothing but right his friends should look on him and
help him. There's the tablecloths I bought at your sale, Bessy; it was
nothing but good natur' o' me to buy 'em, for they've been lying in
the chest ever since. But I'm not going to give Maggie any more o' my
Indy muslin and things, if she's to go into service again, when she
might stay and keep me company, and do my sewing for me, if she wasn't
wanted at her brother's."

"Going into service" was the expression by which the Dodson mind
represented to itself the position of teacher or governess; and
Maggie's return to that menial condition, now circumstances offered
her more eligible prospects, was likely to be a sore point with all
her relatives, besides Lucy. Maggie in her crude form, with her hair
down her back, and altogether in a state of dubious promise, was a
most undesirable niece; but now she was capable of being at once
ornamental and useful. The subject was revived in aunt and uncle
Glegg's presence, over the tea and muffins.

"Hegh, hegh!" said Mr. Glegg, good-naturedly patting Maggie on the
back, "nonsense, nonsense! Don't let us hear of you taking a place
again, Maggie. Why, you must ha' picked up half-a-dozen sweethearts at
the bazaar; isn't there one of 'em the right sort of article? Come,
now?"

"Mr. Glegg," said his wife, with that shade of increased politeness in
her severity which she always put on with her crisper fronts, "you'll
excuse me, but you're far too light for a man of your years. It's
respect and duty to her aunts, and the rest of her kin as are so good
to her, should have kept my niece from fixing about going away again
without consulting us; not sweethearts, if I'm to use such a word,
though it was never heared in _my_ family."

"Why, what did they call us, when we went to see 'em, then, eh,
neighbor Pullet? They thought us sweet enough then," said Mr. Glegg,
winking pleasantly; while Mr. Pullet, at the suggestion of sweetness,
took a little more sugar.

"Mr. Glegg," said Mrs. G., "if you're going to be undelicate, let me
know."

"La, Jane, your husband's only joking," said Mrs. Pullet; "let him
joke while he's got health and strength. There's poor Mr. Tilt got his
mouth drawn all o' one side, and couldn't laugh if he was to try."

"I'll trouble you for the muffineer, then, Mr. Glegg," said Mrs. G.,
"if I may be so bold to interrupt your joking. Though it's other
people must see the joke in a niece's putting a slight on her mother's
eldest sister, as is the head o' the family; and only coming in and
out on short visits, all the time she's been in the town, and then
settling to go away without my knowledge,--as I'd laid caps out on
purpose for her to make 'em up for me,--and me as have divided my
money so equal----"

"Sister," Mrs. Tulliver broke in anxiously, "I'm sure Maggie never
thought o' going away without staying at your house as well as the
others. Not as it's my wish she should go away at all, but quite
contrairy. I'm sure I'm innocent. I've said over and over again, 'My
dear, you've no call to go away.' But there's ten days or a fortnight
Maggie'll have before she's fixed to go; she can stay at your house
just as well, and I'll step in when I can, and so will Lucy."

"Bessy," said Mrs. Glegg, "if you'd exercise a little more thought,
you might know I should hardly think it was worth while to unpin a
bed, and go to all that trouble now, just at the end o' the time, when
our house isn't above a quarter of an hour's walk from Mr. Deane's.
She can come the first thing in the morning, and go back the last at
night, and be thankful she's got a good aunt so close to her to come
and sit with. I know _I_ should, when I was her age."

"La, Jane," said Mrs. Pullet, "it 'ud do your beds good to have
somebody to sleep in 'em. There's that striped room smells dreadful
mouldy, and the glass mildewed like anything. I'm sure I thought I
should be struck with death when you took me in."

"Oh, there is Tom!" exclaimed Lucy, clapping her hands. "He's come on
Sindbad, as I told him. I was afraid he was not going to keep his
promise."

Maggie jumped up to kiss Tom as he entered, with strong feeling, at
this first meeting since the prospect of returning to the Mill had
been opened to him; and she kept his hand, leading him to the chair by
her side. To have no cloud between herself and Tom was still a
perpetual yearning in her, that had its root deeper than all change.
He smiled at her very kindly this evening, and said, "Well, Magsie,
how's aunt Moss?"

"Come, come, sir," said Mr. Glegg putting out his hand. "Why, you're
such a big man, you carry all before you, it, seems. You're come into
your luck a good deal earlier than us old folks did; but I wish you
joy, I wish you joy. You'll get the Mill all for your own again some
day, I'll be bound. You won't stop half-way up the hill."

"But I hope he'll bear in mind as it's his mother's family as he owes
it to," said Mrs. Glegg. "If he hadn't had them to take after, he'd
ha' been poorly off. There was never any failures, nor lawing, nor
wastefulness in our family, nor dying without wills----"

"No, nor sudden deaths," said aunt Pullet; "allays the doctor called
in. But Tom had the Dodson skin; I said that from the first. And I
don't know what _you_ mean to do, sister Glegg, but I mean to give him
a tablecloth of all my three biggest sizes but one, besides sheets. I
don't say what more I shall do; but _that_ I shall do, and if I should
die to-morrow, Mr. Pullet, you'll bear it in mind,--though you'll be
blundering with the keys, and never remember as that on the third
shelf o' the left-hand wardrobe, behind the night-caps with the broad
ties,--not the narrow-frilled uns,--is the key of the drawer in the
Blue Room, where the key o' the Blue Closet is. You'll make a mistake,
and I shall niver be worthy to know it. You've a memory for my pills
and draughts, wonderful,--I'll allays say that of you,--but you're
lost among the keys." This gloomy prospect of the confusion that would
ensue on her decease was very affecting to Mrs. Pullet.

"You carry it too far, Sophy,--that locking in and out," said Mrs.
Glegg, in a tone of some disgust at this folly. "You go beyond your
own family. There's nobody can say I don't lock up; but I do what's
reasonable, and no more. And as for the linen, I shall look out what's
serviceable, to make a present of to my nephey; I've got cloth as has
never been whitened, better worth having than other people's fine
holland; and I hope he'll lie down in it and think of his aunt."

Tom thanked Mrs. Glegg, but evaded any promise to meditate nightly on
her virtues; and Mrs. Glegg effected a diversion for him by asking
about Mr. Deane's intentions concerning steam.

Lucy had had her far-sighted views in begging Tom to come on Sindbad.
It appeared, when it was time to go home, that the man-servant was to
ride the horse, and cousin Tom was to drive home his mother and Lucy.
"You must sit by yourself, aunty," said that contriving young lady,
"because I must sit by Tom; I've a great deal to say to him."

In the eagerness of her affectionate anxiety for Maggie, Lucy could
not persuade herself to defer a conversation about her with Tom, who,
she thought, with such a cup of joy before him as this rapid
fulfilment of his wish about the Mill, must become pliant and
flexible. Her nature supplied her with no key to Tom's; and she was
puzzled as well as pained to notice the unpleasant change on his
countenance when she gave him the history of the way in which Philip
had used his influence with his father. She had counted on this
revelation as a great stroke of policy, which was to turn Tom's heart
toward Philip at once, and, besides that, prove that the elder Wakem
was ready to receive Maggie with all the honors of a daughter-in-law.
Nothing was wanted, then, but for dear Tom, who always had that
pleasant smile when he looked at cousin Lucy, to turn completely
round, say the opposite of what he had always said before, and declare
that he, for his part, was delighted that all the old grievances
should be healed, and that Maggie should have Philip with all suitable
despatch; in cousin Lucy's opinion nothing could be easier.

But to minds strongly marked by the positive and negative qualities
that create severity,--strength of will, conscious rectitude of
purpose, narrowness of imagination and intellect, great power of
self-control, and a disposition to exert control over others,--prejudices
come as the natural food of tendencies which can get no sustenance
out of that complex, fragmentary, doubt-provoking knowledge which
we call truth. Let a prejudice be bequeathed, carried in the air,
adopted by hearsay, caught in through the eye,--however it may come,
these minds will give it a habitation; it is something to assert
strongly and bravely, something to fill up the void of spontaneous
ideas, something to impose on others with the authority of conscious
right; it is at once a staff and a baton. Every prejudice that will
answer these purposes is self-evident. Our good, upright Tom Tulliver's
mind was of this class; his inward criticism of his father's faults
did not prevent him from adopting his father's prejudice; it was a
prejudice against a man of lax principle and lax life, and it was a
meeting-point for all the disappointed feelings of family and personal
pride. Other feelings added their force to produce Tom's bitter
repugnance to Philip, and to Maggie's union with him; and
notwithstanding Lucy's power over her strong-willed cousin, she got
nothing but a cold refusal ever to sanction such a marriage; "but of
course Maggie could do as she liked,--she had declared her
determination to be independent. For Tom's part, he held himself bound
by his duty to his father's memory, and by every manly feeling, never
to consent to any relation with the Wakems."

Thus, all that Lucy had effected by her zealous mediation was to fill
Tom's mind with the expectation that Maggie's perverse resolve to go
into a situation again would presently metamorphose itself, as her
resolves were apt to do, into something equally perverse, but entirely
different,--a marriage with Philip Wakem.



Borne Along by the Tide


In less than a week Maggie was at St. Ogg's again,--outwardly in much
the same position as when her visit there had just begun. It was easy
for her to fill her mornings apart from Lucy without any obvious
effort; for she had her promised visits to pay to her aunt Glegg, and
it was natural that she should give her mother more than usual of her
companionship in these last weeks, especially as there were
preparations to be thought of for Tom's housekeeping. But Lucy would
hear of no pretext for her remaining away in the evenings; she must
always come from aunt Glegg's before dinner,--"else what shall I have
of you?" said Lucy, with a tearful pout that could not be resisted.

And Mr. Stephen Guest had unaccountably taken to dining at Mr. Deane's
as often as possible, instead of avoiding that, as he used to do. At
first he began his mornings with a resolution that he would not dine
there, not even go in the evening, till Maggie was away. He had even
devised a plan of starting off on a journey in this agreeable June
weather; the headaches which he had constantly been alleging as a
ground for stupidity and silence were a sufficient ostensible motive.
But the journey was not taken, and by the fourth morning no distinct
resolution was formed about the evenings; they were only foreseen as
times when Maggie would still be present for a little while,--when one
more touch, one more glance, might be snatched. For why not? There was
nothing to conceal between them; they knew, they had confessed their
love, and they had renounced each other; they were going to part.
Honor and conscience were going to divide them; Maggie, with that
appeal from her inmost soul, had decided it; but surely they might
cast a lingering look at each other across the gulf, before they
turned away never to look again till that strange light had forever
faded out of their eyes.

Maggie, all this time, moved about with a quiescence and even torpor
of manner, so contrasted with her usual fitful brightness and ardor,
that Lucy would have had to seek some other cause for such a change,
if she had not been convinced that the position in which Maggie stood
between Philip and her brother, and the prospect of her self-imposed
wearisome banishment, were quite enough to account for a large amount
of depression. But under this torpor there was a fierce battle of
emotions, such as Maggie in all her life of struggle had never known
or foreboded; it seemed to her as if all the worst evil in her had
lain in ambush till now, and had suddenly started up full-armed, with
hideous, overpowering strength! There were moments in which a cruel
selfishness seemed to be getting possession of her; why should not
Lucy, why should not Philip, suffer? _She_ had had to suffer through
many years of her life; and who had renounced anything for her? And
when something like that fulness of existence--love, wealth, ease,
refinement, all that her nature craved--was brought within her reach,
why was she to forego it, that another might have it,--another, who
perhaps needed it less? But amidst all this new passionate tumult
there were the old voices making themselves heard with rising power,
till, from time to time, the tumult seemed quelled. _Was_ that
existence which tempted her the full existence she dreamed? Where,
then, would be all the memories of early striving; all the deep pity
for another's pain, which had been nurtured in her through years of
affection and hardship; all the divine presentiment of something
higher than mere personal enjoyment, which had made the sacredness of
life? She might as well hope to enjoy walking by maiming her feet, as
hope to enjoy an existence in which she set out by maiming the faith
and sympathy that were the best organs of her soul. And then, if pain
were so hard to _her_, what was it to others? "Ah, God! preserve me
from inflicting--give me strength to bear it." How had she sunk into
this struggle with a temptation that she would once have thought
herself as secure from as from deliberate crime? When was that first
hateful moment in which she had been conscious of a feeling that
clashed with her truth, affection, and gratitude, and had not shaken
it from her with horror, as if it had been a loathsome thing? And yet,
since this strange, sweet, subduing influence did not, should not,
conquer her,--since it was to remain simply her own suffering,--her
mind was meeting Stephen's in that thought of his, that they might
still snatch moments of mute confession before the parting came. For
was not he suffering too? She saw it daily--saw it in the sickened
look of fatigue with which, as soon as he was not compelled to exert
himself, he relapsed into indifference toward everything but the
possibility of watching her. Could she refuse sometimes to answer that
beseeching look which she felt to be following her like a low murmur
of love and pain? She refused it less and less, till at last the
evening for them both was sometimes made of a moment's mutual gaze;
they thought of it till it came, and when it had come, they thought of
nothing else.

One other thing Stephen seemed now and then to care for, and that was
to sing; it was a way of speaking to Maggie. Perhaps he was not
distinctly conscious that he was impelled to it by a secret
longing--running counter to all his self-confessed resolves--to deepen
the hold he had on her. Watch your own speech, and notice how it is
guided by your less conscious purposes, and you will understand that
contradiction in Stephen.

Philip Wakem was a less frequent visitor, but he came occasionally in
the evening, and it happened that he was there when Lucy said, as they
sat out on the lawn, near sunset,--

"Now Maggie's tale of visits to aunt Glegg is completed, I mean that
we shall go out boating every day until she goes. She has not had half
enough boating because of these tiresome visits, and she likes it
better than anything. Don't you, Maggie?"

"Better than any sort of locomotion, I hope you mean," said Philip,
smiling at Maggie, who was lolling backward in a low garden-chair;
"else she will be selling her soul to that ghostly boatman who haunts
the Floss, only for the sake of being drifted in a boat forever."

"Should you like to be her boatman?" said Lucy. "Because, if you
would, you can come with us and take an oar. If the Floss were but a
quiet lake instead of a river, we should be independent of any
gentleman, for Maggie can row splendidly. As it is, we are reduced to
ask services of knights and squires, who do not seem to offer them
with great alacrity."

She looked playful reproach at Stephen, who was sauntering up and
down, and was just singing in pianissimo falsetto,--

  "The thirst that from the soul doth rise
  Doth ask a drink divine."

He took no notice, but still kept aloof; he had done so frequently
during Philip's recent visits.

"You don't seem inclined for boating," said Lucy, when he came to sit
down by her on the bench. "Doesn't rowing suit you now?"

"Oh, I hate a large party in a boat," he said, almost irritably. "I'll
come when you have no one else."

Lucy colored, fearing that Philip would be hurt; it was quite a new
thing for Stephen to speak in that way; but he had certainly not been
well of late. Philip colored too, but less from a feeling of personal
offence than from a vague suspicion that Stephen's moodiness had some
relation to Maggie, who had started up from her chair as he spoke, and
had walked toward the hedge of laurels to look at the descending
sunlight on the river.

"As Miss Deane didn't know she was excluding others by inviting me,"
said Philip, "I am bound to resign."

"No, indeed, you shall not," said Lucy, much vexed. "I particularly
wish for your company to-morrow. The tide will suit at half-past ten;
it will be a delicious time for a couple of hours to row to Luckreth
and walk back, before the sun gets too hot. And how can you object to
four people in a boat?" she added, looking at Stephen.

"I don't object to the people, but the number," said Stephen, who had
recovered himself, and was rather ashamed of his rudeness. "If I voted
for a fourth at all, of course it would be you, Phil. But we won't
divide the pleasure of escorting the ladies; we'll take it
alternately. I'll go the next day."

This incident had the effect of drawing Philip's attention with
freshened solicitude toward Stephen and Maggie; but when they
re-entered the house, music was proposed, and Mrs. Tulliver and Mr.
Deane being occupied with cribbage, Maggie sat apart near the table
where the books and work were placed, doing nothing, however, but
listening abstractedly to the music. Stephen presently turned to a
duet which he insisted that Lucy and Philip should sing; he had often
done the same thing before; but this evening Philip thought he divined
some double intention in every word and look of Stephen's, and watched
him keenly, angry with himself all the while for this clinging
suspicion. For had not Maggie virtually denied any ground for his
doubts on her side? And she was truth itself; it was impossible not to
believe her word and glance when they had last spoken together in the
garden. Stephen might be strongly fascinated by her (what was more
natural?), but Philip felt himself rather base for intruding on what
must be his friend's painful secret. Still he watched. Stephen, moving
away from the piano, sauntered slowly toward the table near which
Maggie sat, and turned over the newspapers, apparently in mere
idleness. Then he seated himself with his back to the piano, dragging
a newspaper under his elbow, and thrusting his hand through his hair,
as if he had been attracted by some bit of local news in the "Laceham
Courier." He was in reality looking at Maggie who had not taken the
slightest notice of his approach. She had always additional strength
of resistance when Philip was present, just as we can restrain our
speech better in a spot that we feel to be hallowed. But at last she
heard the word "dearest" uttered in the softest tone of pained
entreaty, like that of a patient who asks for something that ought to
have been given without asking. She had never heard that word since
the moments in the lane at Basset, when it had come from Stephen again
and again, almost as involuntarily as if it had been an inarticulate
cry. Philip could hear no word, but he had moved to the opposite side
of the piano, and could see Maggie start and blush, raise her eyes an
instant toward Stephen's face, but immediately look apprehensively
toward himself. It was not evident to her that Philip had observed
her; but a pang of shame, under the sense of this concealment, made
her move from her chair and walk to her mother's side to watch the
game at cribbage.

Philip went home soon after in a state of hideous doubt mingled with
wretched certainty. It was impossible for him now to resist the
conviction that there was some mutual consciousness between Stephen
and Maggie; and for half the night his irritable, susceptible nerves
were pressed upon almost to frenzy by that one wretched fact; he could
attempt no explanation that would reconcile it with her words and
actions. When, at last, the need for belief in Maggie rose to its
habitual predominance, he was not long in imagining the truth,--she
was struggling, she was banishing herself; this was the clue to all he
had seen since his return. But athwart that belief there came other
possibilities that would not be driven out of sight. His imagination
wrought out the whole story; Stephen was madly in love with her; he
must have told her so; she had rejected him, and was hurrying away.
But would he give her up, knowing--Philip felt the fact with
heart-crushing despair--that she was made half helpless by her feeling
toward him?

When the morning came, Philip was too ill to think of keeping his
engagement to go in the boat. In his present agitation he could decide
on nothing; he could only alternate between contradictory intentions.
First, he thought he must have an interview with Maggie, and entreat
her to confide in him; then, again, he distrusted his own
interference. Had he not been thrusting himself on Maggie all along?
She had uttered words long ago in her young ignorance; it was enough
to make her hate him that these should be continually present with her
as a bond. And had he any right to ask her for a revelation of
feelings which she had evidently intended to withhold from him? He
would not trust himself to see her, till he had assured himself that
he could act from pure anxiety for her, and not from egoistic
irritation. He wrote a brief note to Stephen, and sent it early by the
servant, saying that he was not well enough to fulfil his engagement
to Miss Deane. Would Stephen take his excuse, and fill his place?

Lucy had arranged a charming plan, which had made her quite content
with Stephen's refusal to go in the boat. She discovered that her
father was to drive to Lindum this morning at ten; Lindum was the very
place she wanted to go to, to make purchases,--important purchases,
which must by no means be put off to another opportunity; and aunt
Tulliver must go too, because she was concerned in some of the
purchases.

"You will have your row in the boat just the same, you know," she said
to Maggie when they went out of the breakfast-room and upstairs
together; "Philip will be here it half-past ten, and it is a delicious
morning. Now don't say a word against it, you dear dolorous thing.
What is the use of my being a fairy godmother, if you set your face
against all the wonders I work for you? Don't think of awful cousin
Tom; you may disobey him a little."

Maggie did not persist in objecting. She was almost glad of the plan,
for perhaps it would bring her some strength and calmness to be alone
with Philip again; it was like revisiting the scene of a quieter life,
in which the very struggles were repose, compared with the daily
tumult of the present. She prepared herself for the boat and at
half-past ten sat waiting in the drawing-room.

The ring of the door-bell was punctual, and she was thinking with
half-sad, affectionate pleasure of the surprise Philip would have in
finding that he was to be with her alone, when she distinguished a
firm, rapid step across the hall, that was certainly not Philip's; the
door opened, and Stephen Guest entered.

In the first moment they were both too much agitated to speak; for
Stephen had learned from the servant that the others were gone out.
Maggie had started up and sat down again, with her heart beating
violently; and Stephen, throwing down his cap and gloves, came and sat
by her in silence. She thought Philip would be coming soon; and with
great effort--for she trembled visibly--she rose to go to a distant
chair.

"He is not coming," said Stephen, in a low tone. "I am going in the
boat."

"Oh, we can't go," said Maggie, sinking into her chair again. "Lucy
did not expect--she would be hurt. Why is not Philip come?"

"He is not well; he asked me to come instead."

"Lucy is gone to Lindum," said Maggie, taking off her bonnet with
hurried, trembling fingers. "We must not go."

"Very well," said Stephen, dreamily, looking at her, as he rested his
arm on the back of his chair. "Then we'll stay here."

He was looking into her deep, deep eyes, far off and mysterious at the
starlit blackness, and yet very near, and timidly loving. Maggie sat
perfectly still--perhaps for moments, perhaps for minutes--until the
helpless trembling had ceased, and there was a warm glow on her check.

"The man is waiting; he has taken the cushions," she said. "Will you
go and tell him?"

"What shall I tell him?" said Stephen, almost in a whisper. He was
looking at the lips now.

Maggie made no answer.

"Let us go," Stephen murmured entreatingly, rising, and taking her
hand to raise her too. "We shall not be long together."

And they went. Maggie felt that she was being led down the garden
among the roses, being helped with firm, tender care into the boat,
having the cushion and cloak arranged for her feet, and her parasol
opened for her (which she had forgotten), all by this stronger
presence that seemed to bear her along without any act of her own
will, like the added self which comes with the sudden exalting
influence of a strong tonic, and she felt nothing else. Memory was
excluded.

They glided rapidly along, Stephen rowing, helped by the
backward-flowing tide, past the Tofton trees and houses; on between
the silent sunny fields and pastures, which seemed filled with a
natural joy that had no reproach for theirs. The breath of the young,
unwearied day, the delicious rhythmic dip of the oars, the fragmentary
song of a passing bird heard now and then, as if it were only the
overflowing of brimful gladness, the sweet solitude of a twofold
consciousness that was mingled into one by that grave, untiring gaze
which need not be averted,--what else could there be in their minds
for the first hour? Some low, subdued, languid exclamation of love
came from Stephen from time to time, as he went on rowing idly, half
automatically; otherwise they spoke no word; for what could words have
been but an inlet to thought? and thought did not belong to that
enchanted haze in which they were enveloped,--it belonged to the past
and the future that lay outside the haze. Maggie was only dimly
conscious of the banks, as they passed them, and dwelt with no
recognition on the villages; she knew there were several to be passed
before they reached Luckreth, where they always stopped and left the
boat. At all times she was so liable to fits of absence, that she was
likely enough to let her waymarks pass unnoticed.

But at last Stephen, who had been rowing more and more idly, ceased to
row, laid down the oars, folded his arms, and looked down on the water
as if watching the pace at which the boat glided without his help.
This sudden change roused Maggie. She looked at the far-stretching
fields, at the banks close by, and felt that they were entirely
strange to her. A terrible alarm took possession of her.

"Oh, have we passed Luckreth, where we were to stop?" she exclaimed,
looking back to see if the place were out of sight. No village was to
be seen. She turned around again, with a look of distressed
questioning at Stephen.

He went on watching the water, and said, in a strange, dreamy, absent
tone, "Yes, a long way."

"Oh, what shall I do?" cried Maggie, in an agony. "We shall not get
home for hours, and Lucy? O God, help me!"

She clasped her hands and broke into a sob, like a frightened child;
she thought of nothing but of meeting Lucy, and seeing her look of
pained surprise and doubt, perhaps of just upbraiding.

Stephen moved and sat near her, and gently drew down the clasped
hands.

"Maggie," he said, in a deep tone of slow decision, "let us never go
home again, till no one can part us,--till we are married."

The unusual tone, the startling words, arrested Maggie's sob, and she
sat quite still, wondering; as if Stephen might have seen some
possibilities that would alter everything, and annul the wretched
facts.

"See, Maggie, how everything has come without our seeking,--in spite
of all our efforts. We never thought of being alone together again; it
has all been done by others. See how the tide is carrying us out, away
from all those unnatural bonds that we have been trying to make faster
round us, and trying in vain. It will carry us on to Torby, and we can
land there, and get some carriage, and hurry on to York and then to
Scotland,--and never pause a moment till we are bound to each other,
so that only death can part us. It is the only right thing, dearest;
it is the only way of escaping from this wretched entanglement.
Everything has concurred to point it out to us. We have contrived
nothing, we have thought of nothing ourselves."

Stephen spoke with deep, earnest pleading. Maggie listened, passing
from her startled wonderment to the yearning after that belief that
the tide was doing it all, that she might glide along with the swift,
silent stream, and not struggle any more. But across that stealing
influence came the terrible shadow of past thoughts; and the sudden
horror lest now, at last, the moment of fatal intoxication was close
upon her, called up feelings of angry resistance toward Stephen.

"Let me go!" she said, in an agitated tone, flashing an indignant look
at him, and trying to get her hands free. "You have wanted to deprive
me of any choice. You knew we were come too far; you have dared to
take advantage of my thoughtlessness. It is unmanly to bring me into
such a position."

Stung by this reproach, he released her hands, moved back to his
former place, and folded his arms, in a sort of desperation at the
difficulty Maggie's words had made present to him. If she would not
consent to go on, he must curse himself for the embarrassment he had
led her into. But the reproach was the unendurable thing; the one
thing worse than parting with her was, that she should feel he had
acted unworthily toward her. At last he said, in a tone of suppressed
rage,--

"I didn't notice that we had passed Luckreth till we had got to the
next village; and then it came into my mind that we would go on. I
can't justify it; I ought to have told you. It is enough to make you
hate me, since you don't love me well enough to make everything else
indifferent to you, as I do you. Shall I stop the boat and try to get
you out here? I'll tell Lucy that I was mad, and that you hate me; and
you shall be clear of me forever. No one can blame you, because I have
behaved unpardonably to you."

Maggie was paralyzed; it was easier to resist Stephen's pleading than
this picture he had called up of himself suffering while she was
vindicated; easier even to turn away from his look of tenderness than
from this look of angry misery, that seemed to place her in selfish
isolation from him. He had called up a state of feeling in which the
reasons which had acted on her conscience seemed to be transmitted
into mere self-regard. The indignant fire in her eyes was quenched,
and she began to look at him with timid distress. She had reproached
him for being hurried into irrevocable trespass,--she, who had been so
weak herself.

"As if I shouldn't feel what happened to you--just the same," she
said, with reproach of another kind,--the reproach of love, asking for
more trust. This yielding to the idea of Stephen's suffering was more
fatal than the other yielding, because it was less distinguishable
from that sense of others' claims which was the moral basis of her
resistance.

He felt all the relenting in her look and tone; it was heaven opening
again. He moved to her side, and took her hand, leaning his elbow on
the back of the boat, and saying nothing. He dreaded to utter another
word, he dreaded to make another movement, that might provoke another
reproach or denial from her. Life hung on her consent; everything else
was hopeless, confused, sickening misery. They glided along in this
way, both resting in that silence as in a haven, both dreading lest
their feelings should be divided again,--till they became aware that
the clouds had gathered, and that the slightest perceptible freshening
of the breeze was growing and growing, so that the whole character of
the day was altered.

"You will be chill, Maggie, in this thin dress. Let me raise the cloak
over your shoulders. Get up an instant, dearest."

Maggie obeyed; there was an unspeakable charm in being told what to
do, and having everything decided for her. She sat down again covered
with the cloak, and Stephen took to his oars again, making haste; for
they must try to get to Torby as fast as they could. Maggie was hardly
conscious of having said or done anything decisive. All yielding is
attended with a less vivid consciousness than resistance; it is the
partial sleep of thought; it is the submergence of our own personality
by another. Every influence tended to lull her into acquiescence. That
dreamy gliding in the boat which had lasted for four hours, and had
brought some weariness and exhaustion; the recoil of her fatigued
sensations from the impracticable difficulty of getting out of the
boat at this unknown distance from home, and walking for long
miles,--all helped to bring her into more complete subjection to that
strong, mysterious charm which made a last parting from Stephen seem
the death of all joy, and made the thought of wounding him like the
first touch of the torturing iron before which resolution shrank. And
then there was the present happiness of being with him, which was
enough to absorb all her languid energy.

Presently Stephen observed a vessel coming after them. Several
vessels, among them the steamer to Mudport, had passed them with the
early tide, but for the last hour they had seen none. He looked more
and more eagerly at this vessel, as if a new thought had come into his
mind along with it, and then he looked at Maggie hesitatingly.

"Maggie, dearest," he said at last, "if this vessel should be going to
Mudport, or to any convenient place on the coast northward, it would
be our best plan to get them to take us on board. You are fatigued,
and it may soon rain; it may be a wretched business, getting to Torby
in this boat. It's only a trading vessel, but I dare say you can be
made tolerably comfortable. We'll take the cushions out of the boat.
It is really our best plan. They'll be glad enough to take us. I've
got plenty of money about me. I can pay them well."

Maggie's heart began to beat with reawakened alarm at this new
proposition; but she was silent,--one course seemed as difficult as
another.

Stephen hailed the vessel. It was a Dutch vessel going to Mudport, the
English mate informed him, and, if this wind held, would be there in
less than two days.

"We had got out too far with our boat," said Stephen. "I was trying to
make for Torby. But I'm afraid of the weather; and this lady--my
wife--will be exhausted with fatigue and hunger. Take us on
board--will you?--and haul up the boat. I'll pay you well."

Maggie, now really faint and trembling with fear, was taken on board,
making an interesting object of contemplation to admiring Dutchmen.
The mate feared the lady would have a poor time of it on board, for
they had no accommodation for such entirely unlooked-for
passengers,--no private cabin larger than an old-fashioned church-pew.
But at least they had Dutch cleanliness, which makes all other
inconveniences tolerable; and the boat cushions were spread into a
couch for Maggie on the poop with all alacrity. But to pace up and
down the deck leaning on Stephen--being upheld by his strength--was
the first change that she needed; then came food, and then quiet
reclining on the cushions, with the sense that no new resolution
_could_ be taken that day. Everything must wait till to-morrow.
Stephen sat beside her with her hand in his; they could only speak to
each other in low tones; only look at each other now and then, for it
would take a long while to dull the curiosity of the five men on
board, and reduce these handsome young strangers to that minor degree
of interest which belongs, in a sailor's regard, to all objects nearer
than the horizon. But Stephen was triumphantly happy. Every other
thought or care was thrown into unmarked perspective by the certainty
that Maggie must be his. The leap had been taken now; he had been
tortured by scruples, he had fought fiercely with overmastering
inclination, he had hesitated; but repentance was impossible. He
murmured forth in fragmentary sentences his happiness, his adoration,
his tenderness, his belief that their life together must be heaven,
that her presence with him would give rapture to every common day;
that to satisfy her lightest wish was dearer to him than all other
bliss; that everything was easy for her sake, except to part with her;
and now they never _would_ part; he would belong to her forever, and
all that was his was hers,--had no value for him except as it was
hers. Such things, uttered in low, broken tones by the one voice that
has first stirred the fibre of young passion, have only a feeble
effect--on experienced minds at a distance from them. To poor Maggie
they were very near; they were like nectar held close to thirsty lips;
there was, there _must_ be, then, a life for mortals here below which
was not hard and chill,--in which affection would no longer be
self-sacrifice. Stephen's passionate words made the vision of such a
life more fully present to her than it had ever been before; and the
vision for the time excluded all realities,--all except the returning
sun-gleams which broke out on the waters as the evening approached,
and mingled with the visionary sunlight of promised happiness; all
except the hand that pressed hers, and the voice that spoke to her,
and the eyes that looked at her with grave, unspeakable love.

There was to be no rain, after all; the clouds rolled off to the
horizon again, making the great purple rampart and long purple isles
of that wondrous land which reveals itself to us when the sun goes
down,--the land that the evening star watches over. Maggie was to
sleep all night on the poop; it was better than going below; and she
was covered with the warmest wrappings the ship could furnish. It was
still early, when the fatigues of the day brought on a drowsy longing
for perfect rest, and she laid down her head, looking at the faint,
dying flush in the west, where the one golden lamp was getting
brighter and brighter. Then she looked up at Stephen, who was still
seated by her, hanging over her as he leaned his arm against the
vessel's side. Behind all the delicious visions of these last hours,
which had flowed over her like a soft stream, and made her entirely
passive, there was the dim consciousness that the condition was a
transient one, and that the morrow must bring back the old life of
struggle; that there were thoughts which would presently avenge
themselves for this oblivion. But now nothing was distinct to her; she
was being lulled to sleep with that soft stream still flowing over
her, with those delicious visions melting and fading like the wondrous
aerial land of the west.



Waking


When Maggie was gone to sleep, Stephen, weary too with his
unaccustomed amount of rowing, and with the intense inward life of the
last twelve hours, but too restless to sleep, walked and lounged about
the deck with his cigar far on into midnight, not seeing the dark
water, hardly conscious there were stars, living only in the near and
distant future. At last fatigue conquered restlessness, and he rolled
himself up in a piece of tarpaulin on the deck near Maggie's feet.

She had fallen asleep before nine, and had been sleeping for six hours
before the faintest hint of a midsummer daybreak was discernible. She
awoke from that vivid dreaming which makes the margin of our deeper
rest. She was in a boat on the wide water with Stephen, and in the
gathering darkness something like a star appeared, that grew and grew
till they saw it was the Virgin seated in St. Ogg's boat, and it came
nearer and nearer, till they saw the Virgin was Lucy and the boatman
was Philip,--no, not Philip, but her brother, who rowed past without
looking at her; and she rose to stretch out her arms and call to him,
and their own boat turned over with the movement, and they began to
sink, till with one spasm of dread she seemed to awake, and find she
was a child again in the parlor at evening twilight, and Tom was not
really angry. From the soothed sense of that false waking she passed
to the real waking,--to the plash of water against the vessel, and the
sound of a footstep on the deck, and the awful starlit sky. There was
a moment of utter bewilderment before her mind could get disentangled
from the confused web of dreams; but soon the whole terrible truth
urged itself upon her. Stephen was not by her now; she was alone with
her own memory and her own dread. The irrevocable wrong that must blot
her life had been committed; she had brought sorrow into the lives of
others,--into the lives that were knit up with hers by trust and love.
The feeling of a few short weeks had hurried her into the sins her
nature had most recoiled from,--breach of faith and cruel selfishness;
she had rent the ties that had given meaning to duty, and had made
herself an outlawed soul, with no guide but the wayward choice of her
own passion. And where would that lead her? Where had it led her now?
She had said she would rather die than fall into that temptation. She
felt it now,--now that the consequences of such a fall had come before
the outward act was completed. There was at least this fruit from all
her years of striving after the highest and best,--that her soul
though betrayed, beguiled, ensnared, could never deliberately consent
to a choice of the lower. And a choice of what? O God! not a choice of
joy, but of conscious cruelty and hardness; for could she ever cease
to see before her Lucy and Philip, with their murdered trust and
hopes? Her life with Stephen could have no sacredness; she must
forever sink and wander vaguely, driven by uncertain impulse; for she
had let go the clue of life,--that clue which once in the far-off
years her young need had clutched so strongly. She had renounced all
delights then, before she knew them, before they had come within her
reach. Philip had been right when he told her that she knew nothing of
renunciation; she had thought it was quiet ecstasy; she saw it face to
face now,--that sad, patient, loving strength which holds the clue of
life,--and saw that the thorns were forever pressing on its brow. The
yesterday, which could never be revoked,--if she could have changed it
now for any length of inward silent endurance, she would have bowed
beneath that cross with a sense of rest.

Day break came and the reddening eastern light, while her past life
was grasping her in this way, with that tightening clutch which comes
in the last moments of possible rescue. She could see Stephen now
lying on the deck still fast asleep, and with the sight of him there
came a wave of anguish that found its way in a long-suppressed sob.
The worst bitterness of parting--the thought that urged the sharpest
inward cry for help--was the pain it must give to _him_. But
surmounting everything was the horror at her own possible failure, the
dread lest her conscience should be benumbed again, and not rise to
energy till it was too late. Too late! it was too late already not to
have caused misery; too late for everything, perhaps, but to rush away
from the last act of baseness,--the tasting of joys that were wrung
from crushed hearts.

The sun was rising now, and Maggie started up with the sense that a
day of resistance was beginning for her. Her eyelashes were still wet
with tears, as, with her shawl over her head, she sat looking at the
slowly rounding sun. Something roused Stephen too, and getting up from
his hard bed, he came to sit beside her. The sharp instinct of anxious
love saw something to give him alarm in the very first glance. He had
a hovering dread of some resistance in Maggie's nature that he would
be unable to overcome. He had the uneasy consciousness that he had
robbed her of perfect freedom yesterday; there was too much native
honor in him, for him not to feel that, if her will should recoil, his
conduct would have been odious, and she would have a right to reproach
him.

But Maggie did not feel that right; she was too conscious of fatal
weakness in herself, too full of the tenderness that comes with the
foreseen need for inflicting a wound. She let him take her hand when
he came to sit down beside her, and smiled at him, only with rather a
sad glance; she could say nothing to pain him till the moment of
possible parting was nearer. And so they drank their cup of coffee
together, and walked about the deck, and heard the captain's assurance
that they should be in at Mudport by five o'clock, each with an inward
burthen; but in him it was an undefined fear, which he trusted to the
coming hours to dissipate; in her it was a definite resolve on which
she was trying silently to tighten her hold. Stephen was continually,
through the morning, expressing his anxiety at the fatigue and
discomfort she was suffering, and alluded to landing and to the change
of motion and repose she would have in a carriage, wanting to assure
himself more completely by presupposing that everything would be as he
had arranged it. For a long while Maggie contented herself with
assuring him that she had had a good night's rest, and that she didn't
mind about being on the vessel,--it was not like being on the open
sea, it was only a little less pleasant than being in a boat on the
Floss. But a suppressed resolve will betray itself in the eyes, and
Stephen became more and more uneasy as the day advanced, under the
sense that Maggie had entirely lost her passiveness. He longed, but
did not dare, to speak of their marriage, of where they would go after
it, and the steps he would take to inform his father, and the rest, of
what had happened. He longed to assure himself of a tacit assent from
her. But each time he looked at her, he gathered a stronger dread of
the new, quiet sadness with which she met his eyes. And they were more
and more silent.

"Here we are in sight of Mudport," he said at last. "Now, dearest," he
added, turning toward her with a look that was half beseeching, "the
worst part of your fatigue is over. On the land we can command
swiftness. In another hour and a half we shall be in a chaise
together, and that will seem rest to you after this."

Maggie felt it was time to speak; it would only be unkind now to
assent by silence. She spoke in the lowest tone, as he had done, but
with distinct decision.

"We shall not be together; we shall have parted."

The blood rushed to Stephen's face.

"We shall not," he said. "I'll die first."

It was as he had dreaded--there was a struggle coming. But neither of
them dared to say another word till the boat was let down, and they
were taken to the landing-place. Here there was a cluster of gazers
and passengers awaiting the departure of the steamboat to St. Ogg's.
Maggie had a dim sense, when she had landed, and Stephen was hurrying
her along on his arm, that some one had advanced toward her from that
cluster as if he were coming to speak to her. But she was hurried
along, and was indifferent to everything but the coming trial.

A porter guided them to the nearest inn and posting-house, and Stephen
gave the order for the chaise as they passed through the yard. Maggie
took no notice of this, and only said, "Ask them to show us into a
room where we can sit down."

When they entered, Maggie did not sit down, and Stephen, whose face
had a desperate determination in it, was about to ring the bell, when
she said, in a firm voice,--

"I'm not going; we must part here."

"Maggie," he said, turning round toward her, and speaking in the tones
of a man who feels a process of torture beginning, "do you mean to
kill me? What is the use of it now? The whole thing is done."

"No, it is not done," said Maggie. "Too much is done,--more than we
can ever remove the trace of. But I will go no farther. Don't try to
prevail with me again. I couldn't choose yesterday."

What was he to do? He dared not go near her; her anger might leap out,
and make a new barrier. He walked backward and forward in maddening
perplexity.

"Maggie," he said at last, pausing before her, and speaking in a tone
of imploring wretchedness, "have some pity--hear me--forgive me for
what I did yesterday. I will obey you now; I will do nothing without
your full consent. But don't blight our lives forever by a rash
perversity that can answer no good purpose to any one, that can only
create new evils. Sit down, dearest; wait--think what you are going to
do. Don't treat me as if you couldn't trust me."

He had chosen the most effective appeal; but Maggie's will was fixed
unswervingly on the coming wrench. She had made up her mind to suffer.

"We must not wait," she said, in a low but distinct voice; "we must
part at once."

"We _can't_ part, Maggie," said Stephen, more impetuously. "I can't
bear it. What is the use of inflicting that misery on me? The
blow--whatever it may have been--has been struck now. Will it help any
one else that you should drive me mad?"

"I will not begin any future, even for you," said Maggie, tremulously,
"with a deliberate consent to what ought not to have been. What I told
you at Basset I feel now; I would rather have died than fall into this
temptation. It would have been better if we had parted forever then.
But we must part now."

"We will _not_ part," Stephen burst out, instinctively placing his
back against the door, forgetting everything he had said a few moments
before; "I will not endure it. You'll make me desperate; I sha'n't
know what I do."

Maggie trembled. She felt that the parting could not be effected
suddenly. She must rely on a slower appeal to Stephen's better self;
she must be prepared for a harder task than that of rushing away while
resolution was fresh. She sat down. Stephen, watching her with that
look of desperation which had come over him like a lurid light,
approached slowly from the door, seated himself close beside her, and
grasped her hand. Her heart beat like the heart of a frightened bird;
but this direct opposition helped her. She felt her determination
growing stronger.

"Remember what you felt weeks ago," she began, with beseeching
earnestness; "remember what we both felt,--that we owed ourselves to
others, and must conquer every inclination which could make us false
to that debt. We have failed to keep our resolutions; but the wrong
remains the same."

"No, it does _not_ remain the same," said Stephen. "We have proved
that it was impossible to keep our resolutions. We have proved that
the feeling which draws us toward each other is too strong to be
overcome. That natural law surmounts every other; we can't help what
it clashes with."

"It is not so, Stephen; I'm quite sure that is wrong. I have tried to
think it again and again; but I see, if we judged in that way, there
would be a warrant for all treachery and cruelty; we should justify
breaking the most sacred ties that can ever be formed on earth. If the
past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but
the inclination of the moment."

"But there are ties that can't be kept by mere resolution," said
Stephen, starting up and walking about again. "What is outward
faithfulness? Would they have thanked us for anything so hollow as
constancy without love?"

Maggie did not answer immediately. She was undergoing an inward as
well as an outward contest. At last she said, with a passionate
assertion of her conviction, as much against herself as against him,--

"That seems right--at first; but when I look further, I'm sure it is
_not_ right. Faithfulness and constancy mean something else besides
doing what is easiest and pleasantest to ourselves. They mean
renouncing whatever is opposed to the reliance others have in
us,--whatever would cause misery to those whom the course of our lives
has made dependent on us. If we--if I had been better, nobler, those
claims would have been so strongly present with me,--I should have
felt them pressing on my heart so continually, just as they do now in
the moments when my conscience is awake,--that the opposite feeling
would never have grown in me, as it has done; it would have been
quenched at once, I should have prayed for help so earnestly, I should
have rushed away as we rush from hideous danger. I feel no excuse for
myself, none. I should never have failed toward Lucy and Philip as I
have done, if I had not been weak, selfish, and hard,--able to think
of their pain without a pain to myself that would have destroyed all
temptation. Oh, what is Lucy feeling now? She believed in me--she
loved me--she was so good to me. Think of her----"

Maggie's voice was getting choked as she uttered these last words.

"I _can't_ think of her," said Stephen, stamping as if with pain. "I
can think of nothing but you, Maggie. You demand of a man what is
impossible. I felt that once; but I can't go back to it now. And where
is the use of _your_ thinking of it, except to torture me? You can't
save them from pain now; you can only tear yourself from me, and make
my life worthless to me. And even if we could go back, and both fulfil
our engagements,--if that were possible now,--it would be hateful,
horrible, to think of your ever being Philip's wife,--of your ever
being the wife of a man you didn't love. We have both been rescued
from a mistake."

A deep flush came over Maggie's face, and she couldn't speak. Stephen
saw this. He sat down again, taking her hand in his, and looking at
her with passionate entreaty.

"Maggie! Dearest! If you love me, you are mine. Who can have so great
a claim on you as I have? My life is bound up in your love. There is
nothing in the past that can annul our right to each other; it is the
first time we have either of us loved with our whole heart and soul."

Maggie was still silent for a little while, looking down. Stephen was
in a flutter of new hope; he was going to triumph. But she raised her
eyes and met his with a glance that was filled with the anguish of
regret, not with yielding.

"No, not with my whole heart and soul, Stephen," she said with timid
resolution. "I have never consented to it with my whole mind. There
are memories, and affections, and longings after perfect goodness,
that have such a strong hold on me; they would never quit me for long;
they would come back and be pain to me--repentance. I couldn't live in
peace if I put the shadow of a wilful sin between myself and God. I
have caused sorrow already--I know--I feel it; but I have never
deliberately consented to it; I have never said, 'They shall suffer,
that I may have joy.' It has never been my will to marry you; if you
were to win consent from the momentary triumph of my feeling for you,
you would not have my whole soul. If I could wake back again into the
time before yesterday, I would choose to be true to my calmer
affections, and live without the joy of love."

Stephen loosed her hand, and rising impatiently, walked up and down
the room in suppressed rage.

"Good God!" he burst out at last, "what a miserable thing a woman's
love is to a man's! I could commit crimes for you,--and you can
balance and choose in that way. But you _don't_ love me; if you had a
tithe of the feeling for me that I have for you, it would be
impossible to you to think for a moment of sacrificing me. But it
weighs nothing with you that you are robbing me of _my_ life's
happiness."

Maggie pressed her fingers together almost convulsively as she held
them clasped on her lap. A great terror was upon her, as if she were
ever and anon seeing where she stood by great flashes of lightning,
and then again stretched forth her hands in the darkness.

"No, I don't sacrifice you--I couldn't sacrifice you," she said, as
soon as she could speak again; "but I can't believe in a good for you,
that I feel, that we both feel, is a wrong toward others. We can't
choose happiness either for ourselves or for another; we can't tell
where that will lie. We can only choose whether we will indulge
ourselves in the present moment, or whether we will renounce that, for
the sake of obeying the divine voice within us,--for the sake of being
true to all the motives that sanctify our lives. I know this belief is
hard; it has slipped away from me again and again; but I have felt
that if I let it go forever, I should have no light through the
darkness of this life."

"But, Maggie," said Stephen, seating himself by her again, "is it
possible you don't see that what happened yesterday has altered the
whole position of things? What infatuation is it, what obstinate
prepossession, that blinds you to that? It is too late to say what we
might have done or what we ought to have done. Admitting the very
worst view of what has been done, it is a fact we must act on now; our
position is altered; the right course is no longer what it was before.
We must accept our own actions and start afresh from them. Suppose we
had been married yesterday? It is nearly the same thing. The effect on
others would not have been different. It would only have made this
difference to ourselves," Stephen added bitterly, "that you might have
acknowledged then that your tie to me was stronger than to others."

Again a deep flush came over Maggie's face, and she was silent.
Stephen thought again that he was beginning to prevail,--he had never
yet believed that he should _not_ prevail; there are possibilities
which our minds shrink from too completely for us to fear them.

"Dearest," he said, in his deepest, tenderest tone, leaning toward
her, and putting his arm round her, "you _are_ mine now,--the world
believes it; duty must spring out of that now.

"In a few hours you will be legally mine, and those who had claims on
us will submit,--they will see that there was a force which declared
against their claims."

Maggie's eyes opened wide in one terrified look at the face that was
close to hers, and she started up, pale again.

"Oh, I can't do it," she said, in a voice almost of agony; "Stephen,
don't ask me--don't urge me. I can't argue any longer,--I don't know
what is wise; but my heart will not let me do it. I see,--I feel their
trouble now; it is as if it were branded on my mind. _I_ have
suffered, and had no one to pity me; and now I have made others
suffer. It would never leave me; it would embitter your love to me. I
_do_ care for Philip--in a different way; I remember all we said to
each other; I know how he thought of me as the one promise of his
life. He was given to me that I might make his lot less hard; and I
have forsaken him. And Lucy--she has been deceived; she who trusted me
more than any one. I cannot marry you; I cannot take a good for myself
that has been wrung out of their misery. It is not the force that
ought to rule us,--this that we feel for each other; it would rend me
away from all that my past life has made dear and holy to me. I can't
set out on a fresh life, and forget that; I must go back to it, and
cling to it, else I shall feel as if there were nothing firm beneath
my feet."

"Good God, Maggie!" said Stephen, rising too and grasping her arm,
"you rave. How can you go back without marrying me? You don't know
what will be said, dearest. You see nothing as it really is."

"Yes, I do. But they will believe me. I will confess everything. Lucy
will believe me--she will forgive you, and--and--oh, _some_ good will
come by clinging to the right. Dear, dear Stephen, let me go!--don't
drag me into deeper remorse. My whole soul has never consented; it
does not consent now."

Stephen let go her arm, and sank back on his chair, half-stunned by
despairing rage. He was silent a few moments, not looking at her;
while her eyes were turned toward him yearningly, in alarm at this
sudden change. At last he said, still without looking at her,--

"Go, then,--leave me; don't torture me any longer,--I can't bear it."

Involuntarily she leaned toward him and put out her hand to touch his.
But he shrank from it as if it had been burning iron, and said
again,--

"Leave me."

Maggie was not conscious of a decision as she turned away from that
gloomy averted face, and walked out of the room; it was like an
automatic action that fulfils a forgotten intention. What came after?
A sense of stairs descended as if in a dream, of flagstones, of a
chaise and horses standing, then a street, and a turning into another
street where a stage-coach was standing, taking in passengers, and the
darting thought that that coach would take her away, perhaps toward
home. But she could ask nothing yet; she only got into the coach.

Home--where her mother and brother were, Philip, Lucy, the scene of
her very cares and trials--was the haven toward which her mind tended;
the sanctuary where sacred relics lay, where she would be rescued from
more falling. The thought of Stephen was like a horrible throbbing
pain, which yet, as such pains do, seemed to urge all other thoughts
into activity. But among her thoughts, what others would say and think
of her conduct was hardly present. Love and deep pity and remorseful
anguish left no room for that.

The coach was taking her to York, farther away from home; but she did
not learn that until she was set down in the old city at midnight. It
was no matter; she could sleep there, and start home the next day. She
had her purse in her pocket, with all her money in it,--a bank-note
and a sovereign; she had kept it in her pocket from forgetfulness,
after going out to make purchases the day before yesterday.

Did she lie down in the gloomy bedroom of the old inn that night with
her will bent unwaveringly on the path of penitent sacrifice? The
great struggles of life are not so easy as that; the great problems of
life are not so clear. In the darkness of that night she saw Stephen's
face turned toward her in passionate, reproachful misery; she lived
through again all the tremulous delights of his presence with her that
made existence an easy floating in a stream of joy, instead of a quiet
resolved endurance and effort. The love she had renounced came back
upon her with a cruel charm; she felt herself opening her arms to
receive it once more; and then it seemed to slip away and fade and
vanish, leaving only the dying sound of a deep, thrilling voice that
said, "Gone, forever gone."




Book VII

_The Final Rescue_

 A Duet in Paradise Two years later, Mrs. Deane has died and Mrs. Tulliver - who had come to take care of her sister in her illness - is now living at the Deanes'. Lucy tells Stephen Guest that her cousin Maggie is leaving the school where she has been teaching since Mr. Tulliver's death and coming to stay at Lucy's. Stephen isn't pleased, thinking this means he won't get any time alone with Lucy any more. They are in the stage of courtship where each is certain of the other's regard, although no declarations have yet been made. Chapter II - First Impressions Lucy tells Maggie about her feelings for Stephen. She asks if Maggie feels as negatively toward Philip as Tom does because he is Stephen's good friend and Lucy wants to invite him to sing with them. Maggie tells her that she always liked Philip, but before she has a chance to explain that even so, she can't see him, Stephen arrives, interrupting them. Stephen and Maggie are immediately struck by each other. Lucy, worried only that they wouldn't get along and relieved to see that they do, doesn't suspect anything. After talking for a while, Stephen takes the cousins on a boat ride. He reflects that he finds Maggie's character quirks quite interesting even though he usually doesn't like anything eccentric in a woman. The Pullets visit the Deane house and lament Maggie's lack of proper evening wear. Mrs. Pullet promises to give the girl some of her old dresses. Chapter III - Confidential Moments Lucy comes to Maggie's bedroom as she gets ready for bed and asks her what she thought of Stephen. The subject of Philip comes up and Maggie, swearing Lucy to secrecy, tells her what had happened between them - and that Tom will still forbid any contact. Lucy determines that she will find a way for Maggie and Philip to marry. Chapter IV - Brother and Sister Maggie goes to see Tom, who is lodging at Bob Jakin's house. While waiting for Tom to arrive home, Bob tells Maggie that he's worried about Tom, who seems always melancholy and hardly ever socializes. He mentions a puppy that Tom made a lot of fuss to get, and Maggie knows he means Lucy's puppy, and so realizes Tom may be in love with Lucy. Tom arrives, and Maggie tells him that she wants his permission to see Philip, as Lucy wishes. Tom tells her that if she decides to marry Philip, she'll have to give Tom up forever, but that he will allow her to see Philip in company at Lucy's, even though he doesn't have any faith in her. Chapter V - Showing that Tom Had Opened the Oyster Mr. Deane tells Tom that he has done a very good job, and, as the world moves faster now than when he was coming up in it, he and Mr. Guest want to offer Tom a share in the business. Tom is grateful, but he has his heart on returning to Dorlcote Mill. He brings up the idea that the firm might again consider buying his father's mill; since the new caretaker is currently mismanaging the mill, Tom figures Mr. Wakem might be willing to part with it. Mr. Deane says he'll bring it up with Mr. Guest, the head of the business, and they'll look into it. Chapter VI - Illustrating the Laws of Attraction Maggie is incorporated into Lucy's social life, and so for the first time experiences a young lady's life. Her beauty is very much admired by the people of St. Ogg's, and her deficiencies in social customs and lack of coquetry mean that the other young women aren't threatened by her, so she is welcomed. Stephen comes to see Lucy more and more, and although his attentiveness towards her seems to be growing, he and Maggie are more and more entranced by each other, although they hide it well. One evening, when Stephen knows Lucy to have a dinner engagement, he comes by under the guise of leaving music for his sweetheart. But he and Maggie are both overcome by being alone together, and after he leaves Stephen tells himself he must not trust himself to be alone with her again. Chapter VII - Philip Re-enters Philip, having returned from a trip, comes to see Lucy and Maggie for the first time. Maggie tells him that she has spoken to Tom, and he has released her from her vow to relinquish contact with Philip. They speak for a little in private before Stephen arrives and Lucy rejoins them. Maggie and Stephen are at first stiff with each other, and then very kind, and though Lucy thinks nothing of it, Philip quickly grows suspicious. Before dinner, Mr. Deane asks Philip a few questions about how his father is enjoying running his farms. Lucy finds this odd, so questions her father about it when they are alone. He explains that they want to try to get the mill back from Wakem and to restore Tom in his father's place. Lucy convinces her father to let her tell Philip, because she thinks he will help them make it happen. Chapter VIII - Wakem in a New Light Lucy quickly finds a time to tell Philip, and he develops a plan. He admits to his father that he has always loved Maggie, who tells him he can marry her if he likes, but it will be the end of their relationship. Philip says this is impossible since he has been raised to no profession would be thrust into poverty. Mr. Wakem storms out in anger, but returns later in the evening and agrees to give them his blessing. Philip brings up the question of the mill, and Mr. Wakem agrees to that as well, so long as he doesn't have to have any direct dealings with Tom. Chapter IX - Charity in Full-Dress At the church bazaar, Mr. Wakem approaches Maggie's stand and is quite pleasant to her. Stephen witnesses this, and soon after notices that Philip has perched himself across the room where he has a clear view of Maggie, leading him to believe that there is some sort of history between Maggie and Philip. From his seat, Philip has also seen the exchange between Stephen and Maggie, and is quite convinces that there is something between them. Though Lucy told Maggie that Mr. Wakem would support her marrying Philip and would sell the mill to Guest & Co., Maggie announces that she has accepted a new governess position which begins soon. She explains that she can't give up Tom to marry Philip, and she fears Tom won't change his mind about that for a very long time - if ever. Chapter X - The Spell Seems Broken Maggie and Lucy go to a dance at the Guests' home, Park House. Stephen is proud of himself for paying no attention to Maggie, until she starts dancing, and then he cannot stop himself from approaching her and asking her to walk with him in the conservatory. They share a look in which both reveal their feelings, but when Stephen can't stop himself from kissing her arm, Maggie runs off, furious. The next morning, while Maggie is waiting for her mother so they can go to visit Mrs. Moss, Philip visits. He asks her if there is a chance they will ever be like they were in the past, and she says that she cannot break her ties to Tom, but that is the only thing holding her back. Philip is largely relieved, although he still has some suspicions. Chapter XI - In the Lane Maggie has been at her aunt Moss's four days when Stephen suddenly shows up, saying he has a private message for her. When they are alone, he declares his love for her and apologizes for his conduct, but tells her he is being tortured enough by his own feelings and she has to forgive him. She does, and he says that they should marry, that that is the only way either of them will ever be happy, and that it would be cruel for them to marry Lucy and Philip, feeling the way they do. She tells him that she loves him, too, but that if she married him, she would forever by haunted by the suffering they had caused, and so because they love each other, he must help her to resist him. He acquiesces, but asks for one kiss before they part, which she gives him. Chapter XII - A Family Party After her visit with Mrs. Moss, Maggie goes next to stay with Mrs. Pullet. In the brief interlude preceding this, Mr. Wakem's manager of Dorlcote Mill had been drunkenly thrown from his horse and was gravely injured, such that Mr. Wakem turned the property over to Guest & Co. even sooner than expected, and Tom becomes the manager. Everyone gathers at the Pullets' farm to celebrate the news, and Lucy encourages Mrs. Pullet to donate some linens to Tom's new home at the mill. When it's time to leave, she insists on sitting with Tom so she can talk to him about Maggie and Philip. She explains how Philip convinced his father to sell the mill, expecting that to convince him to forgive Philip, but instead he is resolute, insisting that Maggie can do as she pleases but he will never have any relationship with the Wakems. Chapter XIII - Borne Along by the Tide Maggie returns to Lucy's less than a week later. Maggie manages to avoid Lucy in the mornings by going on promised visits to Aunt Glegg and helping Mrs. Tulliver prepare to move to the mill, but in the evenings Lucy insists she spend time with her. Stephen resolves to go on a trip until Maggie leaves, but he can't hold himself to it, instead going to Lucy's as often as possible to see Maggie as much as he can in what little time they have left. Lucy notices that Maggie is particularly melancholy, but she assumes it is because Tom won't let her marry Philip, and so still suspects nothing. In reality, Maggie is much quieter than usual because she is fighting an inner battle between her desire to marry Stephen - whom she loves - and live in happiness and comfort, and her desire to do the right thing and not hurt Lucy and Philip, who are both very important to her. Philip pays a visit, and Lucy entreats him to come the next morning to row her and Maggie on the river. Philip is not completely satisfied by Maggie's word that she would marry him if not for her brother, watches Stephen and Maggie closely, and becomes almost convinced that there is some kind of mutual regard and understanding between the two of them. He is so upset by this belief that the next morning he sends Stephen a note saying he is too ill to row the ladies, so asks Stephen to go in his stead. Lucy had contrived to get herself and the rest of the household out of the way so that Maggie and Philip could be alone in the boat, so when Stephen arrives, Maggie is the only one home. They go out in the boat, each in a daze, until Stephen stops rowing and Maggie realizes they have passed their expected stopping place. Stephen proposes that they elope. Maggie at first is furious, but seeing how hurt Stephen is by her refusal, she yields. They ask to be taken aboard a larger vessel heading to Mudport, pretending to be a married couple. Maggie goes into a trance-like state of acquiescence, enjoying Stephen's nearness and care for her, and not struggling with her conflicting desires for happiness and to do what's right. Chapter XIV - Waking Maggie wakes on the boat from intense dreaming, and realizes she has done an irrevocable wrong to those dearest to her. Though she despairs to cause Stephen pain, she realizes she must leave him, because though she has already caused pain to those she loves, she doesn't feel she deserves to get the joy out of that pain that marrying him would give her. Stephen wakes, and though she doesn't say anything about it, he worries from the look in her eyes that she has changed her mind. When they finally near Mudport, she tells him that this is indeed the case - they must part. Stephen tries and tries to convince her, but she is resolved that she would be unable to marry him and live with herself. She must choose unhappiness rather than continue to hurt those to whom she is bound. She leaves.

