CHAPTER 3
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Showing that Old Acquaintances Are Capable of Surprising UsWHEN Maggie was at home again, her mother brought her news of an ued line of du<cite>9９lib.</cite> 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 drowhat was far more probable than that her nied legatee should have done anything to wound the family honour ie point. When, at last, she learned from Tom that Maggie had e 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 pelled. If you were not to stand by your `kin as long as there was a shred of honour attributable to them, pray what were you to stand by? Lightly to admit du 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 Maggies 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 friend to help to rob the girl of her fair fame, and to cast her out from family shelter to the s of the outer world, until she had bee unequivocally a family disgrace. The circumstances were unpreted in Mrs Gleggs 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 on el along with her fual ideas of ship, as they did in her lifelard to equity in money matters. She quarrelled with Mr Glegg, whose kindness, flowiirely into passion 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 one to her for advid help, shut herself up in her own room with Baxters Saints Rest from m till night, denying herself to all visitors, till Mr Glegg brought from Mr Deahe news of Stepheer. Then Mrs Glegg felt that she had adequate fighting-ground - then she laid aside Baxter and was ready to meet all ers. 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 e Oggs again, because `acquaintances knew of it all, Mrs Glegg only hoped that Mrs Wooll or any one else would e tobbr>?</abbr> 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 se of remonstrah Tom, all the more severe, in proportion to the greater strength of her present position. But Tom, like other immovable things, seemed only the midly fixed uhat attempt to shake him. Poor Tom! he judged by what he had been able to see: and the judgment ainful enough to himself. He thought he had the demonstration of facts observed through years by his own eyes which gave n of their imperfe, that Maggies nature was utterly untrustworthy and toly marked with evil tendeo be safely treated with leniency: he would a 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, a a slight deposit of polish. If you are ined 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 towards Maggie that derived its very iy from their early childish love iime when they had clasped tiny fiogether, and their later sense of nearness in a on duty and a on 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 ship in 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 duct 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 baaggie, `as I didnt go to her before - she said it wasnt for her to e to me first. But she spoke like a sister, too: having she allays was, and hard to please - O dear! - but shes said the ki word as ever been spoke by you yet, my child. For she says, for all shes been so set again having ory<u></u> in the house, and makiry spoons and things, and putting her about in her ways, you shall have a shelter in her house, if youll go to her dutiful, and shell uphold you again folks as say harm of you when theyve no call. And I told her I thought you couldo see nobody but me - you was so beat down with trouble; but she said - "I wont throw ill words at her - theres them out o th family ull be ready enough to do that. But Ill give her good advice - an she must be humble." Its wonderful o Jane - for Im 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.
`O mother, said pgie, shrinking from the thought of all the tact her bruised mind would have to bear. `Tell her Im very grateful - Ill go to see her as soon as I ; but I t see any one just yet, except Dr Kenn. Ive been to him - he will advise me and help me to get some occupation. I t live with any one, or be depe oell aunt Glegg; I must get my own bread. But did you hear nothing to Philip - Philip Wakem? Have you never seen any ohat has mentioned him?
`No, my dear: but Ive been to Lucys, and I saw your uncle, and he says, they got her to listen to the letter, and she took notiiss Guest, and asked questions, and the doctor thinks shes ourn to be better. What a world this is - what trouble, O dear! The law was the first beginning, an its gone from bad to worse all of a sudden, just when the luck seemed ourn. 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 pun, and throwing her arms round her mothers neck, `I was always naughty and troublesome to you. And now you might have been happy, if it hadnt been for me.
`Eh, my dear, said Mrs Tulliver, leaning towards 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 - theres nothing else much to be fond on, for my furnitur went long ago. And youd got to be very good once - I t think how its turned out the wrong way so!
Still two or three more days passed, and Maggie heard nothing of Philip: ay about him was being her predominant trouble, and she summoned ce at last to inquire about him of Dr Kenn, on his visit to her. He did not even know if Philip was at home: the elder Wakem was made moody by an accumulation of annoyahe disappoi in this young <bdo>?</bdo>Jetsome, to whom apparently he was a good deal attached, had been followed close by the catastrophe to his sons hopes after he had ceded his feelings to them, and incautiously mentiohis cession in St Oggs; and he was almost fier 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 robable that he was go of the town for a little while. Maggie sied uhis suspense, and her imagination began to live more and more persistently in hilip was enduring. What did he believe about her?
At last, Bht her a letter without a postmark - directed in a hand which she knew familiarly iters 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 vinced 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 - e and jealousy, my mind made its way to belief 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 Lucys sake and for mine. But I could see no issue that was not fatal for you, and that dread shut out the very thought nation. I foresaw that he would not relinquish you, and I believed then, as I believe now, that the strong attra which drew you together proceeded only from one side of your characters, and beloo that partial, divided a 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 tinually felt the want of in his. But perhaps I am wrong; perhaps I feel about you as the artist does about the se over which his soul has brooded with love; he would tremble to see it fided 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 m - I was filled with selfish passion; I was shattered by a night of scious delirium. I told you long ago that I had never been resigned even to the mediocrity of my powers: how could I be resigo the loss of the ohing which had ever e to me oh with the promise of such deep joy as would give a new and blessed meaning to the foing pain, - the promise of another self that would lift my ag affe 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 . 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 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 e 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 art 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 at 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 reciles me to life. You have been to my affes what light, what colour is to my eyes - what music it to the inward ear: you have raised a dim u into a vivid sciousness. The new life I have found in g 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 suplete 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-sciousness. I even think sometimes that this gift of transferred life which has e 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 measure your sacrifice by what I have known in only one half-hour of your preseh me when I dreamed that you might love me best. But, Maggie, I have no just claim on you for more than affeate 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 inal error. But you will not misstrue 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 one where my mind must live, wherever I might travel. And remember that I am ungeably yours: yours - not with selfish wishes - but with a devotion that excludes such wishes.
God fort you, - my loving, large-souled Maggie. If every one else had misceived you - remember that you have never been doubted by him whose heart reised 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 overp heat ines me to be perfectly quiest in the daytime. I am strong enough to obey any word which shall tell me that I serve you by word or deed.
Yours, to the last,
PHILIP WAKEM
As Maggie k 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 fet their pain?
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