The Mill on the Floss (51 page)

Philip's face had flushed, and there was a momentary eagerness
of expression, as if he had been about to resist this decision with
all his might.

But he controlled himself, and said, with assumed calmness:
"Well, Maggie, if we must part, let us try and forget it for one
half hour; let us talk together a little while, for the last
time."

He took her hand, and Maggie felt no reason to withdraw it; his
quietness made her all the more sure she had given him great pain,
and she wanted to show him how unwillingly she had given it. They
walked together hand in hand in silence.

"Let us sit down in the hollow," said Philip, "where we stood
the last time. See how the dog-roses have strewed the ground, and
spread their opal petals over it."

They sat down at the roots of the slanting ash.

"I've begun my picture of you among the Scotch firs, Maggie,"
said Philip, "so you must let me study your face a little, while
you stay,–since I am not to see it again. Please turn your head
this way."

This was said in an entreating voice, and it would have been
very hard of Maggie to refuse. The full, lustrous face, with the
bright black coronet, looked down like that of a divinity well
pleased to be worshipped, on the pale-hued, small-featured face
that was turned up to it.

"I shall be sitting for my second portrait then," she said,
smiling. "Will it be larger than the other?"

"Oh yes, much larger. It is an oil-painting. You will look like
a tall Hamadryad, dark and strong and noble, just issued from one
of the fir-trees, when the stems are casting their afternoon
shadows on the grass."

"You seem to think more of painting than of anything now,
Philip?"

"Perhaps I do," said Philip, rather sadly; "but I think of too
many things,–sow all sorts of seeds, and get no great harvest from
any one of them. I'm cursed with susceptibility in every direction,
and effective faculty in none. I care for painting and music; I
care for classic literature, and mediæval literature, and modern
literature; I flutter all ways, and fly in none."

"But surely that is a happiness to have so many tastes,–to enjoy
so many beautiful things, when they are within your reach," said
Maggie, musingly. "It always seemed to me a sort of clever
stupidity only to have one sort of talent,–almost like a
carrier-pigeon."

"It might be a happiness to have many tastes if I were like
other men," said Philip, bitterly. "I might get some power and
distinction by mere mediocrity, as they do; at least I should get
those middling satisfactions which make men contented to do without
great ones. I might think society at St. Ogg's agreeable then. But
nothing could make life worth the purchase-money of pain to me, but
some faculty that would lift me above the dead level of provincial
existence. Yes, there is one thing,–a passion answers as well as a
faculty."

Maggie did not hear the last words; she was struggling against
the consciousness that Philip's words had set her own discontent
vibrating again as it used to do.

"I understand what you mean," she said, "though I know so much
less than you do. I used to think I could never bear life if it
kept on being the same every day, and I must always be doing things
of no consequence, and never know anything greater. But, dear
Philip, I think we are only like children that some one who is
wiser is taking care of. Is it not right to resign ourselves
entirely, whatever may be denied us? I have found great peace in
that for the last two or three years, even joy in subduing my own
will."

"Yes, Maggie," said Philip, vehemently; "and you are shutting
yourself up in a narrow, self-delusive fanaticism, which is only a
way of escaping pain by starving into dulness all the highest
powers of your nature. Joy and peace are not resignation;
resignation is the willing endurance of a pain that is not allayed,
that you don't expect to be allayed. Stupefaction is not
resignation; and it is stupefaction to remain in ignorance,–to shut
up all the avenues by which the life of your fellow-men might
become known to you. I am not resigned; I am not sure that life is
long enough to learn that lesson.
You
are not resigned;
you are only trying to stupefy yourself."

Maggie's lips trembled; she felt there was some truth in what
Philip said, and yet there was a deeper consciousness that, for any
immediate application it had to her conduct, it was no better than
falsity. Her double impression corresponded to the double impulse
of the speaker. Philip seriously believed what he said, but he said
it with vehemence because it made an argument against the
resolution that opposed his wishes. But Maggie's face, made more
childlike by the gathering tears, touched him with a tenderer, less
egotistic feeling. He took her hand and said gently:

Don't let us think of such things in this short half-hour,
Maggie. Let us only care about being together. We shall be friends
in spite of separation. We shall always think of each other. I
shall be glad to live as long as you are alive, because I shall
think there may always come a time when I can–when you will let me
help you in some way."

"What a dear, good brother you would have been, Philip," said
Maggie, smiling through the haze of tears. "I think you would have
made as much fuss about me, and been as pleased for me to love you,
as would have satisfied even me. You would have loved me well
enough to bear with me, and forgive me everything. That was what I
always longed that Tom should do. I was never satisfied with a
little
of anything. That is why it is better for me to do
without earthly happiness altogether. I never felt that I had
enough music,–I wanted more instruments playing together; I wanted
voices to be fuller and deeper. Do you ever sing now, Philip?" she
added abruptly, as if she had forgotten what went before.

"Yes," he said, "every day, almost. But my voice is only
middling, like everything else in me."

"Oh, sing me something,–just one song. I
may
listen to
that before I go,–something you used to sing at Lorton on a
Saturday afternoon, when we had the drawing-room all to ourselves,
and I put my apron over my head to listen."

"
I
know," said Philip; and Maggie buried her face in
her hands while he sang
sotto voce
, "Love in her eyes sits
playing," and then said, "That's it, isn't it?"

"Oh no, I won't stay," said Maggie, starting up. "It will only
haunt me. Let us walk, Philip. I must go home."

She moved away, so that he was obliged to rise and follow
her.

"Maggie," he said, in a tone of remonstrance, "don't persist in
this wilful, senseless privation. It makes me wretched to see you
benumbing and cramping your nature in this way. You were so full of
life when you were a child; I thought you would be a brilliant
woman,–all wit and bright imagination. And it flashes out in your
face still, until you draw that veil of dull quiescence over
it."

"Why do you speak so bitterly to me, Philip?" said Maggie.

"Because I foresee it will not end well; you can never carry on
this self-torture."

"I shall have strength given me," said Maggie, tremulously.

"No, you will not, Maggie; no one has strength given to do what
is unnatural. It is mere cowardice to seek safety in negations. No
character becomes strong in that way. You will be thrown into the
world some day, and then every rational satisfaction of your nature
that you deny now will assault you like a savage appetite."

Maggie started and paused, looking at Philip with alarm in her
face.

"Philip, how dare you shake me in this way? You are a
tempter."

"No, I am not; but love gives insight, Maggie, and insight often
gives foreboding.
Listen
to me,–let
me
supply you
with books; do let me see you sometimes,–be your brother and
teacher, as you said at Lorton. It is less wrong that you should
see me than that you should be committing this long suicide."

Maggie felt unable to speak. She shook her head and walked on in
silence, till they came to the end of the Scotch firs, and she put
out her hand in sign of parting.

"Do you banish me from this place forever, then, Maggie? Surely
I may come and walk in it sometimes? If I meet you by chance, there
is no concealment in that?"

It is the moment when our resolution seems about to become
irrevocable–when the fatal iron gates are about to close upon
us–that tests our strength. Then, after hours of clear reasoning
and firm conviction, we snatch at any sophistry that will nullify
our long struggles, and bring us the defeat that we love better
than victory.

Maggie felt her heart leap at this subterfuge of Philip's, and
there passed over her face that almost imperceptible shock which
accompanies any relief. He saw it, and they parted in silence.

Philip's sense of the situation was too complete for him not to
be visited with glancing fears lest he had been intervening too
presumptuously in the action of Maggie's conscience, perhaps for a
selfish end. But no!–he persuaded himself his end was not selfish.
He had little hope that Maggie would ever return the strong feeling
he had for her; and it must be better for Maggie's future life,
when these petty family obstacles to her freedom had disappeared,
that the present should not be entirely sacrificed, and that she
should have some opportunity of culture,–some interchange with a
mind above the vulgar level of those she was now condemned to live
with. If we only look far enough off for the consequence of our
actions, we can always find some point in the combination of
results by which those actions can be justified; by adopting the
point of view of a Providence who arranges results, or of a
philosopher who traces them, we shall find it possible to obtain
perfect complacency in choosing to do what is most agreeable to us
in the present moment. And it was in this way that Philip justified
his subtle efforts to overcome Maggie's true prompting against a
concealment that would introduce doubleness into her own mind, and
might cause new misery to those who had the primary natural claim
on her. But there was a surplus of passion in him that made him
half independent of justifying motives. His longing to see Maggie,
and make an element in her life, had in it some of that savage
impulse to snatch an offered joy which springs from a life in which
the mental and bodily constitution have made pain predominate. He
had not his full share in the common good of men; he could not even
pass muster with the insignificant, but must be singled out for
pity, and excepted from what was a matter of course with others.
Even to Maggie he was an exception; it was clear that the thought
of his being her lover had never entered her mind.

Do not think too hardly of Philip. Ugly and deformed people have
great need of unusual virtues, because they are likely to be
extremely uncomfortable without them; but the theory that unusual
virtues spring by a direct consequence out of personal
disadvantages, as animals get thicker wool in severe climates, is
perhaps a little overstrained. The temptations of beauty are much
dwelt upon, but I fancy they only bear the same relation to those
of ugliness, as the temptation to excess at a feast, where the
delights are varied for eye and ear as well as palate, bears to the
temptations that assail the desperation of hunger. Does not the
Hunger Tower stand as the type of the utmost trial to what is human
in us?

Philip had never been soothed by that mother's love which flows
out to us in the greater abundance because our need is greater,
which clings to us the more tenderly because we are the less likely
to be winners in the game of life; and the sense of his father's
affection and indulgence toward him was marred by the keener
perception of his father's faults. Kept aloof from all practical
life as Philip had been, and by nature half feminine in
sensitiveness, he had some of the woman's intolerant repulsion
toward worldliness and the deliberate pursuit of sensual enjoyment;
and this one strong natural tie in his life,–his relation as a
son,–was like an aching limb to him. Perhaps there is inevitably
something morbid in a human being who is in any way unfavorably
excepted from ordinary conditions, until the good force has had
time to triumph; and it has rarely had time for that at
two-and-twenty. That force was present in Philip in much strength,
but the sun himself looks feeble through the morning mists.

Chapter IV
Another Love-Scene

Early in the following April, nearly a year after that dubious
parting you have just witnessed, you may, if you like, again see
Maggie entering the Red Deeps through the group of Scotch firs. But
it is early afternoon and not evening, and the edge of sharpness in
the spring air makes her draw her large shawl close about her and
trip along rather quickly; though she looks round, as usual, that
she may take in the sight of her beloved trees. There is a more
eager, inquiring look in her eyes than there was last June, and a
smile is hovering about her lips, as if some playful speech were
awaiting the right hearer. The hearer was not long in
appearing.

"Take back your
Corinne
," said Maggie, drawing a book
from under her shawl. "You were right in telling me she would do me
no good; but you were wrong in thinking I should wish to be like
her."

"Wouldn't you really like to be a tenth Muse, then, Maggie?"
said Philip looking up in her face as we look at a first parting in
the clouds that promises us a bright heaven once more.

"Not at all," said Maggie, laughing. "The Muses were
uncomfortable goddesses, I think,–obliged always to carry rolls and
musical instruments about with them. If I carried a harp in this
climate, you know, I must have a green baize cover for it; and I
should be sure to leave it behind me by mistake."