Chapter: Showing That Old Acquaintances Are Capable of Surprising Us


When Maggie was at home again, her mother brought her news of an
unexpected line of conduct in aunt Glegg. As long as Maggie had not
been heard of, Mrs. Glegg had half closed her shutters and drawn down
her blinds. She felt assured that Maggie was drowned; that was far
more probable than that her niece and legatee should have done
anything to wound the family honor in the tenderest point. When at
last she learned from Tom that Maggie had come home, and gathered from
him what was her explanation of her absence, she burst forth in severe
reproof of Tom for admitting the worst of his sister until he was
compelled. If you were not to stand by your "kin" as long as there was
a shred of honor attributable to them, pray what were you to stand by?
Lightly to admit conduct in one of your own family that would force
you to alter your will, had never been the way of the Dodsons; and
though Mrs. Glegg had always augured ill of Maggie's future at a time
when other people were perhaps less clear-sighted, yet fair play was a
jewel, and it was not for her own friends to help to rob the girl of
her fair fame, and to cast her out from family shelter to the scorn of
the outer world, until she had become unequivocally a family disgrace.
The circumstances were unprecedented in Mrs. Glegg's experience;
nothing of that kind had happened among the Dodsons before; but it was
a case in which her hereditary rectitude and personal strength of
character found a common channel along with her fundamental ideas of
clanship, as they did in her lifelong regard to equity in money
matters. She quarrelled with Mr. Glegg, whose kindness, flowing
entirely into compassion for Lucy, made him as hard in his judgment of
Maggie as Mr. Deane himself was; and fuming against her sister
Tulliver because she did not at once come to her for advice and help,
shut herself up in her own room with Baxter's "Saints' Rest" from
morning till night, denying herself to all visitors, till Mr. Glegg
brought from Mr. Deane the news of Stephen's letter. Then Mrs. Glegg
felt that she had adequate fighting-ground; then she laid aside
Baxter, and was ready to meet all comers. While Mrs. Pullet could do
nothing but shake her head and cry, and wish that cousin Abbot had
died, or any number of funerals had happened rather than this, which
had never happened before, so that there was no knowing how to act,
and Mrs. Pullet could never enter St. Ogg's again, because
"acquaintances" knew of it all, Mrs. Glegg only hoped that Mrs. Wooll,
or any one else, would come to her with their false tales about her
own niece, and she would know what to say to that ill-advised person!

Again she had a scene of remonstrance with Tom, all the more severe in
proportion to the greater strength of her present position. But Tom,
like other immovable things, seemed only the more rigidly fixed under
that attempt to shake him. Poor Tom! he judged by what he had been
able to see; and the judgment was painful enough to himself. He
thought he had the demonstration of facts observed through years by
his own eyes, which gave no warning of their imperfection, that
Maggie's nature was utterly untrustworthy, and too strongly marked
with evil tendencies to be safely treated with leniency. He would act
on that demonstration at any cost; but the thought of it made his days
bitter to him. Tom, like every one of us, was imprisoned within the
limits of his own nature, and his education had simply glided over
him, leaving a slight deposit of polish; if you are inclined to be
severe on his severity, remember that the responsibility of tolerance
lies with those who have the wider vision. There had arisen in Tom a
repulsion toward Maggie that derived its very intensity from their
early childish love in the time when they had clasped tiny fingers
together, and their later sense of nearness in a common duty and a
common sorrow; the sight of her, as he had told her, was hateful to
him. In this branch of the Dodson family aunt Glegg found a stronger
nature than her own; a nature in which family feeling had lost the
character of clanship by taking on a doubly deep dye of personal
pride.

Mrs. Glegg allowed that Maggie ought to be punished,--she was not a
woman to deny that; she knew what conduct was,--but punished in
proportion to the misdeeds proved against her, not to those which were
cast upon her by people outside her own family who might wish to show
that their own kin were better.

"Your aunt Glegg scolded me so as niver was, my dear," said poor Mrs.
Tulliver, when she came back to Maggie, "as I didn't go to her before;
she said it wasn't for her to come to me first. But she spoke like a
sister, too; _having_ she allays was, and hard to please,--oh
dear!--but she's said the kindest word as has ever been spoke by you
yet, my child. For she says, for all she's been so set again' having
one extry in the house, and making extry spoons and things, and
putting her about in her ways, you shall have a shelter in her house,
if you'll go to her dutiful, and she'll uphold you against folks as
say harm of you when they've no call. And I told her I thought you
couldn't bear to see anybody but me, you were so beat down with
trouble; but she said, '_I_ won't throw ill words at her; there's them
out o' th' family 'ull be ready enough to do that. But I'll give her
good advice; an' she must be humble.' It's wonderful o' Jane; for I'm
sure she used to throw everything I did wrong at me,--if it was the
raisin-wine as turned out bad, or the pies too hot, or whativer it
was."

"Oh, mother," said poor Maggie, shrinking from the thought of all the
contact her bruised mind would have to bear, "tell her I'm very
grateful; I'll go to see her as soon as I can; but I can't see any one
just yet, except Dr. Kenn. I've been to him,--he will advise me, and
help me to get some occupation. I can't live with any one, or be
dependent on them, tell aunt Glegg; I must get my own bread. But did
you hear nothing of Philip--Philip Wakem? Have you never seen any one
that has mentioned him?"

"No, my dear; but I've been to Lucy's, and I saw your uncle, and he
says they got her to listen to the letter, and she took notice o' Miss
Guest, and asked questions, and the doctor thinks she's on the turn to
be better. What a world this is,--what trouble, oh dear! The law was
the first beginning, and it's gone from bad to worse, all of a sudden,
just when the luck seemed on the turn?" This was the first lamentation
that Mrs. Tulliver had let slip to Maggie, but old habit had been
revived by the interview with sister Glegg.

"My poor, poor mother!" Maggie burst out, cut to the heart with pity
and compunction, and throwing her arms round her mother's neck; "I was
always naughty and troublesome to you. And now you might have been
happy if it hadn't been for me."

"Eh, my dear," said Mrs. Tulliver, leaning toward the warm young
cheek; "I must put up wi' my children,--I shall never have no more;
and if they bring me bad luck, I must be fond on it. There's nothing
else much to be fond on, for my furnitur' went long ago. And you'd got
to be very good once; I can't think how it's turned out the wrong way
so!"

Still two or three more days passed, and Maggie heard nothing of
Philip; anxiety about him was becoming her predominant trouble, and
she summoned courage at last to inquire about him of Dr. Kenn, on his
next visit to her. He did not even know if Philip was at home. The
elder Wakem was made moody by an accumulation of annoyance; the
disappointment in this young Jetsome, to whom, apparently, he was a
good deal attached, had been followed close by the catastrophe to his
son's hopes after he had done violence to his own strong feeling by
conceding to them, and had incautiously mentioned this concession in
St. Ogg's; and he was almost fierce in his brusqueness when any one
asked him a question about his son.

But Philip could hardly have been ill, or it would have been known
through the calling in of the medical man; it was probable that he was
gone out of the town for a little while. Maggie sickened under this
suspense, and her imagination began to live more and more persistently
in what Philip was enduring. What did he believe about her?

At last Bob brought her a letter, without a postmark, directed in a
hand which she knew familiarly in the letters of her own name,--a hand
in which her name had been written long ago, in a pocket Shakespeare
which she possessed. Her mother was in the room, and Maggie, in
violent agitation, hurried upstairs that she might read the letter in
solitude. She read it with a throbbing brow.

  "Maggie,--I believe in you; I know you never meant to deceive me; I
  know you tried to keep faith to me and to all. I believed this
  before I had any other evidence of it than your own nature. The
  night after I last parted from you I suffered torments. I had seen
  what convinced me that you were not free; that there was another
  whose presence had a power over you which mine never possessed; but
  through all the suggestions--almost murderous suggestions--of rage
  and jealousy, my mind made its way to believe in your truthfulness.
  I was sure that you meant to cleave to me, as you had said; that
  you had rejected him; that you struggled to renounce him, for
  Lucy's sake and for mine. But I could see no issue that was not
  fatal for _you;_ and that dread shut out the very thought of
  resignation. I foresaw that he would not relinquish you, and I
  believed then, as I believe now, that the strong attraction which
  drew you together proceeded only from one side of your characters,
  and belonged to that partial, divided action of our nature which
  makes half the tragedy of the human lot. I have felt the vibration
  of chords in your nature that I have continually felt the want of
  in his. But perhaps I am wrong; perhaps I feel about you as the
  artist does about the scene over which his soul has brooded with
  love; he would tremble to see it confided to other hands; he would
  never believe that it could bear for another all the meaning and
  the beauty it bears for him.

  "I dared not trust myself to see you that morning; I was filled
  with selfish passion; I was shattered by a night of conscious
  delirium. I told you long ago that I had never been resigned even
  to the mediocrity of my powers; how could I be resigned to the loss
  of the one thing which had ever come to me on earth with the
  promise of such deep joy as would give a new and blessed meaning to
  the foregoing pain,--the promise of another self that would lift my
  aching affection into the divine rapture of an ever-springing,
  ever-satisfied want?

  "But the miseries of that night had prepared me for what came
  before the next. It was no surprise to me. I was certain that he
  had prevailed on you to sacrifice everything to him, and I waited
  with equal certainty to hear of your marriage. I measured your love
  and his by my own. But I was wrong, Maggie. There is something
  stronger in you than your love for him.

  "I will not tell you what I went through in that interval. But even
  in its utmost agony--even in those terrible throes that love must
  suffer before it can be disembodied of selfish desire--my love for
  you sufficed to withhold me from suicide, without the aid of any
  other motive. In the midst of my egoism, I yet could not bear to
  come like a death-shadow across the feast of your joy. I could not
  bear to forsake the world in which you still lived and might need
  me; it was part of the faith I had vowed to you,--to wait and
  endure. Maggie, that is a proof of what I write now to assure you
  of,--that no anguish I have had to bear on your account has been
  too heavy a price to pay for the new life into which I have entered
  in loving you. I want you to put aside all grief because of the
  grief you have caused me. I was nurtured in the sense of privation;
  I never expected happiness; and in knowing you, in loving you, I
  have had, and still have, what reconciles me to life. You have been
  to my affections what light, what color is to my eyes, what music
  is to the inward ear, you have raised a dim unrest into a vivid
  consciousness. The new life I have found in caring for your joy and
  sorrow more than for what is directly my own, has transformed the
  spirit of rebellious murmuring into that willing endurance which is
  the birth of strong sympathy. I think nothing but such complete and
  intense love could have initiated me into that enlarged life which
  grows and grows by appropriating the life of others; for before, I
  was always dragged back from it by ever-present painful
  self-consciousness. I even think sometimes that this gift of
  transferred life which has come to me in loving you, may be a new
  power to me.

  "Then, dear one, in spite of all, you have been the blessing of my
  life. Let no self-reproach weigh on you because of me. It is I who
  should rather reproach myself for having urged my feelings upon
  you, and hurried you into words that you have felt as fetters. You
  meant to be true to those words; you _have_ been true. I can
  measure your sacrifice by what I have known in only one half-hour
  of your presence with me, when I dreamed that you might love me
  best. But, Maggie, I have no just claim on you for more than
  affectionate remembrance.

  "For some time I have shrunk from writing to you, because I have
  shrunk even from the appearance of wishing to thrust myself before
  you, and so repeating my original error. But you will not
  misconstrue me. I know that we must keep apart for a long while;
  cruel tongues would force us apart, if nothing else did. But I
  shall not go away. The place where you are is the one where my mind
  must live, wherever I might travel. And remember that I am
  unchangeably yours,--yours not with selfish wishes, but with a
  devotion that excludes such wishes.

  "God comfort you, my loving, large-souled Maggie. If every one else
  has misconceived you, remember that you have never been doubted by
  him whose heart recognized you ten years ago.

  "Do not believe any one who says I am ill, because I am not seen
  out of doors. I have only had nervous headaches,--no worse than I
  have sometimes had them before. But the overpowering heat inclines
  me to be perfectly quiescent in the daytime. I am strong enough to
  obey any word which shall tell me that I can serve you by word or
  deed.

                          "Yours to the last,
                           "_Philip Wakem_."

As Maggie knelt by the bed sobbing, with that letter pressed under
her, her feelings again and again gathered themselves in a whispered
cry, always in the same words,--

"O God, is there any happiness in love that could make me forget
_their_ pain?"

 The unexpected behavior comes from none other than Mrs. Glegg. Mrs. Tulliver reports on this to Maggie. Turns out that Mrs. Glegg heard about everything from Tom and tells him off for thinking so badly of his sister. Mrs. Glegg says that family needs to stick together and that Maggie is family first and foremost. She refuses to believe the worst of Maggie and even gets into an argument with Mr. Glegg, who has taken Lucy's side in the whole thing. After hearing of Stephen's letter Mrs. Glegg feels vindicated and tells off anyone who doubts Maggie's honor. Aunt Pullet is totally distraught and has no idea how to act since nothing like this has ever happened to the family before. Mrs. Glegg goes after Tom again after Stephen's letter arrives. Tom won't budge, though, and sticks to his bad opinion of Maggie. Mrs. Glegg feels that Maggie should be punished but in proportion to the actual crime and should be punished by the family, not by outsiders who don't know what's going on. Mrs. Tulliver tells Maggie that Mrs. Glegg has invited her to live at the Gleggs' house. Maggie is very grateful but insists that she needs to make her own way in the world now. A few days go by and finally Maggie receives a letter from Philip. This letter is epic. Philip tells Maggie that he believes in her and that he still loves her and doesn't blame her for anything. He understands that they had a weird situation and made hasty promises to each other when they were young. Philip tells Maggie that loving her was the best thing that has ever happened to him and he doesn't regret it at all. He tells her he forgives her everything and hopes she'll be happy and not to worry about him. Maggie does what anyone with a heart would do after reading a letter like that: cries.

