Book VI—The Great Temptation   
X. 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.      1   
  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.      2   
  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.      3   
  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.      4   
  “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.      5   
  “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?”      6   
  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.      7   
  “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.”      8   
  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.      9   
  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.     10   
  “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.”     11   
  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.     12   
  A mad impulse seized on Stephen; he darted toward the arm, and showered kisses on it, clasping the wrist.     13   
  But the next moment Maggie snatched it from him, and glared at him like a wounded war-goddess, quivering with rage and humiliation.     14   
  “How dare you?” She spoke in a deeply shaken, half-smothered voice. “What right have I given you to insult me?”     15   
  She darted from him into the adjoining room, and threw herself on the sofa, panting and trembling.     16   
  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.     17   
  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.     18   
  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.     19   
  “Leave me to myself, if you please,” she said, with impetuous haughtiness, “and for the future avoid me.”     20   
  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.     21   
  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.     22   
  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.     23   
  But presently the visitor came out into the garden alone, and seated himself by her on the garden-chair. It was not Stephen.     24   
  “We can just catch the tips of the Scotch firs, Maggie, from this seat,” said Philip.     25   
  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.     26   
  “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.”     27   
  “I have been there, I go there, continually,” said Philip. “I have nothing but the past to live upon.”     28   
  A keen remembrance and keen pity impelled Maggie to put her hand in Philip’s. They had so often walked hand in hand!     29   
  “I remember all the spots,” she said,—“just where you told me of particular things, beautiful stories that I had never heard of before.”     30   
  “You will go there again soon, won’t you, Maggie?” said Philip, getting timid. “The Mill will soon be your brother’s home again.”     31   
  “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?”     32   
  “Then the future will never join on to the past again, Maggie? That book is quite closed?”     33   
  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.     34   
  “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.”     35   
  “Is that the only reason that would keep us apart forever, Maggie?” said Philip, with a desperate determination to have a definite answer.     36   
  “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.     37   
  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.     38   
  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.

Book VI—The Great Temptation   
XI. 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.      1   
  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,—      2   
  “Goodness me! who is that gentleman coming in at the gate?”      3   
  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.      4   
  “Who is it, my dear?” said Mrs. Moss, seeing in Maggie’s face the evidence that she knew.      5   
  “It is Mr. Stephen Guest,” said Maggie, rather faintly. “My cousin Lucy’s—a gentleman who is very intimate at my cousin’s.”      6   
  Stephen was already close to them, had jumped off his horse, and now raised his hat as he advanced.      7   
  “Hold the horse, Willy,” said Mrs. Moss to the twelve-year-old boy.      8   
  “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?”      9   
  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.     10   
  Stephen turned too, and walked by her side, leading his horse.     11   
  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,—     12   
  “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.”     13   
  “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.”     14   
  Maggie gave a slight start, such as might have come from the slightest possible electric shock.     15   
  “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.”     16   
  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.     17   
  They were come nearly in front of the gate again, and she paused, trembling.     18   
  “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.”     19   
  “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.”     20   
  Maggie did not—dared not—look. She had already seen the harassed face. But she said gently,—     21   
  “I don’t think any evil of you.”     22   
  “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.”     23   
  “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.”     24   
  A great tear fell from under her lowered eyelids.     25   
  “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.”     26   
  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.”     27   
  “Oh, no,” said Maggie, hurriedly, “my aunt will think it so strange.”     28   
  “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.     29   
  “Take my arm,” said Stephen, entreatingly; and she took it, feeling all the while as if she were sliding downward in a nightmare.     30   
  “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.”     31   
  “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.     32   
  “And I have other ties,” Maggie went on, at last, with a desperate effort, “even if Lucy did not exist.”     33   
  “You are engaged to Philip Wakem?” said Stephen, hastily. “Is it so?”     34   
  “I consider myself engaged to him; I don’t mean to marry any one else.”     35   
  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,—     36   
  “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.”     37   
  “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.     38   
  “Tell me, then, that you don’t care for me,” he said, almost violently. “Tell me that you love some one else better.”     39   
  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.     40   
  “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.”     41   
  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!     42   
  “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?”     43   
  Her breath was on his face, his lips were very near hers, but there was a great dread dwelling in his love for her.     44   
  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.     45   
  “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.”     46   
  “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.”     47   
  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.     48   
  “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.”     49   
  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,—     50   
  “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.”     51   
  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.     52   
  “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.”     53   
  One kiss, and then a long look, until Maggie said tremulously, “Let me go,—let me make haste back.”     54   
  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.     55   
  “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.     56   
  “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.”     57   
  The poor child threw her arms round her aunt’s neck, and fell into long, deep sobs.     58

Book VI—The Great Temptation   
XII. 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.      1   
  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!      2   
  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!      3   
  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 manœuvres, as any other great tactician would have done, against the weaker side of the enemy.      4   
  “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.”      5   
  “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.”      6   
  “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.”      7   
  “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.      8   
  “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.”      9   
  “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.”     10   
  “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.     11   
  “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?”     12   
  “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.”     13   
  “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.     14   
  “Mr. Glegg,” said Mrs. G., “if you’re going to be undelicate, let me know.”     15   
  “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.”     16   
  “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——”     17   
  “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.”     18   
  “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.”     19   
  “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.”     20   
  “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.”     21   
  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?”     22   
  “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.”     23   
  “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——”     24   
  “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.     25   
  “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.”     26   
  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.     27   
  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.”     28   
  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.     29   
  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.”     30   
  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.

Book VI—The Great Temptation   
XIII. 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.      1   
  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.      2   
  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.      3   
  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.      4   
  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,—      5   
  “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?”      6   
  “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.”      7   
  “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.”      8   
  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.      9   
  “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?”     10   
  “Oh, I hate a large party in a boat,” he said, almost irritably. “I’ll come when you have no one else.”     11   
  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.     12   
  “As Miss Deane didn’t know she was excluding others by inviting me,” said Philip, “I am bound to resign.”     13   
  “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.     14   
  “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.”     15   
  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.     16   
  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?     17   
  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?     18   
  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.     19   
  “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 at 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.”     20   
  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.     21   
  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.     22   
  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.     23   
  “He is not coming,” said Stephen, in a low tone. “I am going in the boat.”     24   
  “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?”     25   
  “He is not well; he asked me to come instead.”     26   
  “Lucy is gone to Lindum,” said Maggie, taking off her bonnet with hurried, trembling fingers. “We must not go.”     27   
  “Very well,” said Stephen, dreamily, looking at her, as he rested his arm on the back of his chair. “Then we’ll stay here.”     28   
  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.     29   
  “The man is waiting; he has taken the cushions,” she said. “Will you go and tell him?”     30   
  “What shall I tell him?” said Stephen, almost in a whisper. He was looking at the lips now.     31   
  Maggie made no answer.     32   
  “Let us go,” Stephen murmured entreatingly, rising, and taking her hand to raise her too. “We shall not be long together.”     33   
  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.     34   
  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.     35   
  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.     36   
  “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.     37   
  He went on watching the water, and said, in a strange, dreamy, absent tone, “Yes, a long way.”     38   
  “Oh, what shall I do?” cried Maggie, in an agony. “We shall not get home for hours, and Lucy? O God, help me!”     39   
  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.     40   
  Stephen moved and sat near her, and gently drew down the clasped hands.     41   
  “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.”     42   
  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.     43   
  “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.”     44   
  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.     45   
  “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.”     46   
  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,—     47   
  “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.”     48   
  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.     49   
  “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.     50   
  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.     51   
  “You will be chill, Maggie, in this thin dress. Let me raise the cloak over your shoulders. Get up an instant, dearest.”     52   
  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.     53   
  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.     54   
  “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.”     55   
  Maggie’s heart began to beat with reawakened alarm at this new proposition; but she was silent,—one course seemed as difficult as another.     56   
  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.     57   
  “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.”     58   
  Maggie, now really faint and trembling with fear, was t aken 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.     59   
  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.

Book VI—The Great Temptation   
XIV. 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.      1   
  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.      2   
  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.      3   
  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.      4   
  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.      5   
  “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.”      6   
  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.      7   
  “We shall not be together; we shall have parted.”      8   
  The blood rushed to Stephen’s face.      9   
  “We shall not,” he said. “I’ll die first.”     10   
  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.     11   
  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.”     12   
  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,—     13   
  “I’m not going; we must part here.”     14   
  “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.”     15   
  “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.”     16   
  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.     17   
  “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.”     18   
  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.     19   
  “We must not wait,” she said, in a low but distinct voice; “we must part at once.”     20   
  “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?”     21   
  “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.”     22   
  “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.”     23   
  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.     24   
  “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.”     25   
  “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.”     26   
  “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.”     27   
  “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?”     28   
  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,—     29   
  “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——”     30   
  Maggie’s voice was getting choked as she uttered these last words.     31   
  “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.”     32   
  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.     33   
  “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.”     34   
  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.     35   
  “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.”     36   
  Stephen loosed her hand, and rising impatiently, walked up and down the room in suppressed rage.     37   
  “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.”     38   
  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.     39   
  “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.”     40   
  “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.”     41   
  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.     42   
  “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.     43   
  “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.”     44   
  Maggie’s eyes opened wide in one terrified look at the face that was close to hers, and she started up, pale again.     45   
  “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.”     46   
  “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.”     47   
  “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.”     48   
  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,—     49   
  “Go, then,—leave me; don’t torture me any longer,—I can’t bear it.”     50   
  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,—     51   
  “Leave me.”     52   
  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.     53   
  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.     54   
  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.     55   
  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   
I. The Return to the Mill   
     
BETWEEN four and five o’clock on the afternoon of the fifth day from that on which Stephen and Maggie had left St. Ogg’s, Tom Tulliver was standing on the gravel walk outside the old house at Dorlcote Mill. He was master there now; he had half fulfilled his father’s dying wish, and by years of steady self-government and energetic work he had brought himself near to the attainment of more than the old respectability which had been the proud inheritance of the Dodsons and Tullivers.      1   
  But Tom’s face, as he stood in the hot, still sunshine of that summer afternoon, had no gladness, no triumph in it. His mouth wore its bitterest expression, his severe brow its hardest and deepest fold, as he drew down his hat farther over his eyes to shelter them from the sun, and thrusting his hands deep into his pockets, began to walk up and down the gravel. No news of his sister had been heard since Bob Jakin had come back in the steamer from Mudport, and put an end to all improbable suppositions of an accident on the water by stating that he had seen her land from a vessel with Mr. Stephen Guest. Would the next news be that she was married,—or what? Probably that she was not married; Tom’s mind was set to the expectation of the worst that could happen,—not death, but disgrace.      2   
  As he was walking with his back toward the entrance gate, and his face toward the rushing mill-stream, a tall, dark-eyed figure, that we know well, approached the gate, and paused to look at him with a fast-beating heart. Her brother was the human being of whom she had been most afraid from her childhood upward; afraid with that fear which springs in us when we love one who is inexorable, unbending, unmodifiable, with a mind that we can never mould ourselves upon, and yet that we cannot endure to alienate from us.      3   
  That deep-rooted fear was shaking Maggie now; but her mind was unswervingly bent on returning to her brother, as the natural refuge that had been given her. In her deep humiliation under the retrospect of her own weakness,—in her anguish at the injury she had inflicted,—she almost desired to endure the severity of Tom’s reproof, to submit in patient silence to that harsh, disapproving judgment against which she had so often rebelled; it seemed no more than just to her now,—who was weaker than she was? She craved that outward help to her better purpose which would come from complete, submissive confession; from being in the presence of those whose looks and words would be a reflection of her own conscience.      4   
  Maggie had been kept on her bed at York for a day with that prostrating headache which was likely to follow on the terrible strain of the previous day and night. There was an expression of physical pain still about her brow and eyes, and her whole appearance, with her dress so long unchanged, was worn and distressed. She lifted the latch of the gate and walked in slowly. Tom did not hear the gate; he was just then close upon the roaring dam; but he presently turned, and lifting up his eyes, saw the figure whose worn look and loneliness seemed to him a confirmation of his worst conjectures. He paused, trembling and white with disgust and indignation.      5   
  Maggie paused too, three yards before him. She felt the hatred in his face, felt it rushing through her fibres; but she must speak.      6   
  “Tom,” she began faintly, “I am come back to you,—I am come back home—for refuge—to tell you everything.”      7   
  “You will find no home with me,” he answered, with tremulous rage. “You have disgraced us all. You have disgraced my father’s name. You have been a curse to your best friends. You have been base, deceitful; no motives are strong enough to restrain you. I wash my hands of you forever. You don’t belong to me.”      8   
  Their mother had come to the door now. She stood paralyzed by the double shock of seeing Maggie and hearing Tom’s words.      9   
  “Tom,” said Maggie, with more courage, “I am perhaps not so guilty as you believe me to be. I never meant to give way to my feelings. I struggled against them. I was carried too far in the boat to come back on Tuesday. I came back as soon as I could.”     10   
  “I can’t believe in you any more,” said Tom, gradually passing from the tremulous excitement of the first moment to cold inflexibility. “You have been carrying on a clandestine relation with Stephen Guest,—as you did before with another. He went to see you at my aunt Moss’s; you walked alone with him in the lanes; you must have behaved as no modest girl would have done to her cousin’s lover, else that could never have happened. The people at Luckreth saw you pass; you passed all the other places; you knew what you were doing. You have been using Philip Wakem as a screen to deceive Lucy,—the kindest friend you ever had. Go and see the return you have made her. She’s ill; unable to speak. My mother can’t go near her, lest she should remind her of you.”     11   
  Maggie was half stunned,—too heavily pressed upon by her anguish even to discern any difference between her actual guilt and her brother’s accusations, still less to vindicate herself.     12   
  “Tom,” she said, crushing her hands together under her cloak, in the effort to speak again, “whatever I have done, I repent it bitterly. I want to make amends. I will endure anything. I want to be kept from doing wrong again.”     13   
  “What will keep you?” said Tom, with cruel bitterness. “Not religion; not your natural feelings of gratitude and honor. And he—he would deserve to be shot, if it were not——But you are ten times worse than he is. I loathe your character and your conduct. You struggled with your feelings, you say. Yes! I have had feelings to struggle with; but I conquered them. I have had a harder life than you have had; but I have found my comfort in doing my duty. But I will sanction no such character as yours; the world shall know that I feel the difference between right and wrong. If you are in want, I will provide for you; let my mother know. But you shall not come under my roof. It is enough that I have to bear the thought of your disgrace; the sight of you is hateful to me.”     14   
  Slowly Maggie was turning away with despair in her heart. But the poor frightened mother’s love leaped out now, stronger than all dread.     15   
  “My child! I’ll go with you. You’ve got a mother.”     16   
  Oh, the sweet rest of that embrace to the heart-stricken Maggie! More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.     17   
  Tom turned and walked into the house.     18   
  “Come in, my child,” Mrs. Tulliver whispered. “He’ll let you stay and sleep in my bed. He won’t deny that if I ask him.”     19   
  “No, mother,” said Maggie, in a low tone, like a moan. “I will never go in.”     20   
  “Then wait for me outside. I’ll get ready and come with you.”     21   
  When his mother appeared with her bonnet on, Tom came out to her in the passage, and put money into her hands.     22   
  “My house is yours, mother, always,” he said. “You will come and let me know everything you want; you will come back to me.”     23   
  Poor Mrs. Tulliver took the money, too frightened to say anything. The only thing clear to her was the mother’s instinct that she would go with her unhappy child.     24   
  Maggie was waiting outside the gate; she took her mother’s hand and they walked a little way in silence.     25   
  “Mother,” said Maggie, at last, “we will go to Luke’s cottage. Luke will take me in. He was very good to me when I was a little girl.”     26   
  “He’s got no room for us, my dear, now; his wife’s got so many children. I don’t know where to go, if it isn’t to one o’ your aunts; and I hardly durst,” said poor Mrs. Tulliver, quite destitute of mental resources in this extremity.     27   
  Maggie was silent a little while, and then said,—     28   
  “Let us go to Bob Jakin’s, mother; his wife will have room for us. if they have no other lodger.”     29   
  So they went on their way to St. Ogg’s, to the old house by the river-side.     30   
  Bob himself was at home, with a heaviness at heart which resisted even the new joy and pride of possessing a two-months’-old baby, quite the liveliest of its age that had ever been born to prince or packman. He would perhaps not so thoroughly have understood all the dubiousness of Maggie’s appearance with Mr. Stephen Guest on the quay at Mudport if he had not witnessed the effect it produced on Tom when he went to report it; and since then, the circumstances which in any case gave a disastrous character to her elopement had passed beyond the more polite circles of St. Ogg’s, and had become matter of common talk, accessible to the grooms and errand-boys. So that when he opened the door and saw Maggie standing before him in her sorrow and weariness, he had no questions to ask except one which he dared only ask himself,—where was Mr. Stephen Guest? Bob, for his part, hoped he might be in the warmest department of an asylum understood to exist in the other world for gentlemen who are likely to be in fallen circumstances there.     31   
  The lodgings were vacant, and both Mrs. Jakin the larger and Mrs. Jakin the less were commanded to make all things comfortable for “the old Missis and the young Miss”; alas that she was still “Miss!” The ingenious Bob was sorely perplexed as to how this result could have come about; how Mr. Stephen Guest could have gone away from her, or could have let her go away from him, when he had the chance of keeping her with him. But he was silent, and would not allow his wife to ask him a question; would not present himself in the room, lest it should appear like intrusion and a wish to pry; having the same chivalry toward dark-eyed Maggie as in the days when he had bought her the memorable present of books.     32   
  But after a day or two Mrs. Tulliver was gone to the Mill again for a few hours to see to Tom’s household matters. Maggie had wished this; after the first violent outburst of feeling which came as soon as she had no longer any active purpose to fulfil, she was less in need of her mother’s presence; she even desired to be alone with her grief. But she had been solitary only a little while in the old sitting-room that looked on the river, when there came a tap at the door, and turning round her sad face as she said “Come in,” she saw Bob enter, with the baby in his arms and Mumps at his heels.     33   
  “We’ll go back, if it disturbs you, Miss,” said Bob.     34   
  “No,” said Maggie, in a low voice, wishing she could smile.     35   
  Bob, closing the door behind him, came and stood before her.     36   
  “You see, we’ve got a little un, Miss, and I want’d you to look at it, and take it in your arms, if you’d be so good. For we made free to name it after you, and it ’ud be better for your takin’ a bit o’ notice on it.”     37   
  Maggie could not speak, but she put out her arms to receive the tiny baby, while Mumps snuffed at it anxiously, to ascertain that this transference was all right. Maggie’s heart had swelled at this action and speech of Bob’s; she knew well enough that it was a way he had chosen to show his sympathy and respect.     38   
  “Sit down, Bob,” she said presently, and he sat down in silence, finding his tongue unmanageable in quite a new fashion, refusing to say what he wanted it to say.     39   
  “Bob,” she said, after a few moments, looking down at the baby, and holding it anxiously, as if she feared it might slip from her mind and her fingers, “I have a favor to ask of you.”     40   
  “Don’t you speak so, Miss,” said Bob, grasping the skin of Mumps’s neck; “if there’s anything I can do for you, I should look upon it as a day’s earnings.”     41   
  “I want you to go to Dr. Kenn’s, and ask to speak to him, and tell him that I am here, and should be very grateful if he would come to me while my mother is away. She will not come back till evening.”     42   
  “Eh, Miss, I’d do it in a minute,—it is but a step,—but Dr. Kenn’s wife lies dead; she’s to be buried to-morrow; died the day I come from Mudport. It’s all the more pity she should ha’ died just now, if you want him. I hardly like to go a-nigh him yet.”     43   
  “Oh no, Bob,” said Maggie, “we must let it be,—till after a few days, perhaps, when you hear that he is going about again. But perhaps he may be going out of town—to a distance,” she added, with a new sense of despondency at this idea.     44   
  “Not he, Miss,” said Bob. “He’ll none go away. He isn’t one o’ them gentlefolks as go to cry at waterin’-places when their wives die; he’s got summat else to do. He looks fine and sharp after the parish, he does. He christened the little un; an’ he was at me to know what I did of a Sunday, as I didn’t come to church. But I told him I was upo’ the travel three parts o’ the Sundays,—an’ then I’m so used to bein’ on my legs, I can’t sit so long on end,—‘an’ lors, sir,’ says I, ‘a packman can do wi’ a small ’lowance o’ church; it tastes strong,’ says I; ‘there’s no call to lay it on thick.’ Eh, Miss, how good the little un is wi’ you! It’s like as if it knowed you; it partly does, I’ll be bound,—like the birds know the mornin’.”     45   
  Bob’s tongue was now evidently loosed from its unwonted bondage, and might even be in danger of doing more work than was required of it. But the subjects on which he longed to be informed were so steep and difficult of approach, that his tongue was likely to run on along the level rather than to carry him on that unbeaten road. He felt this, and was silent again for a little while, ruminating much on the possible forms in which he might put a question. At last he said, in a more timid voice than usual,—     46   
  “Will you give me leave to ask you only one thing, Miss?”     47   
  Maggie was rather startled, but she answered, “Yes, Bob, if it is about myself—not about any one else.”     48   
  “Well, Miss, it’s this. Do you owe anybody a grudge?”     49   
  “No, not any one,” said Maggie, looking up at him inquiringly. “Why?”     50   
  “Oh, lors, Miss,” said Bob, pinching Mumps’s neck harder than ever. “I wish you did, an’ tell me; I’d leather him till I couldn’t see—I would—an’ the Justice might do what he liked to me arter.”     51   
  “Oh, Bob,” said Maggie, smiling faintly, “you’re a very good friend to me. “But I shouldn’t like to punish any one, even if they’d done me wrong; I’ve done wrong myself too often.”     52   
  This view of things was puzzling to Bob, and threw more obscurity than ever over what could possibly have happened between Stephen and Maggie. But further questions would have been too intrusive, even if he could have framed them suitably, and he was obliged to carry baby away again to an expectant mother.     53   
  “Happen you’d like Mumps for company, Miss,” he said when he had taken the baby again. “He’s rare company, Mumps is; he knows iverything, an’ makes no bother about it. If I tell him, he’ll lie before you an’ watch you, as still,—just as he watches my pack. You’d better let me leave him a bit; he’ll get fond on you. Lors, it’s a fine thing to hev a dumb brute fond on you; it’ll stick to you, an’ make no jaw.”     54   
  “Yes, do leave him, please,” said Maggie. “I think I should like to have Mumps for a friend.”     55   
  “Mumps, lie down there,” said Bob, pointing to a place in front of Maggie, “and niver do you stir till you’re spoke to.”     56   
  Mumps lay down at once, and made no sign of restlessness when his master left the room.     57

   
Book VII—The Final Rescue   
II. St. Ogg’s Passes Judgment   
     
IT was soon known throughout St. Ogg’s that Miss Tulliver was come back; she had not, then, eloped in order to be married to Mr. Stephen Guest,—at all events, Mr. Stephen Guest had not married her; which came to the same thing, so far as her culpability was concerned. We judge others according to results; how else?—not knowing the process by which results are arrived at. If Miss Tulliver, after a few months of well-chosen travel, had returned as Mrs. Stephen Guest, with a post-marital trousseau, and all the advantages possessed even by the most unwelcome wife of an only son, public opinion, which at St. Ogg’s, as else where, always knew what to think, would have judged in strict consistency with those results. Public opinion, in these cases, is always of the feminine gender,—not the world, but the world’s wife; and she would have seen that two handsome young people—the gentleman of quite the first family in St. Ogg’s—having found themselves in a false position, had been led into a course which, to say the least of it, was highly injudicious, and productive of sad pain and disappointment, especially to that sweet young thing, Miss Deane. Mr. Stephen Guest had certainly not behaved well; but then, young men were liable to those sudden infatuated attachments; and bad as it might seem in Mrs. Stephen Guest to admit the faintest advances from her cousin’s lover (indeed it had been said that she was actually engaged to young Wakem,—old Wakem himself had mentioned it), still, she was very young,—“and a deformed young man, you know!—and young Guest so very fascinating; and, they say, he positively worships her (to be sure, that can’t last!), and he ran away with her in the boat quite against her will, and what could she do? She couldn’t come back then; no one would have spoken to her; and how very well that maize-colored satinette becomes her complexion! It seems as if the folds in front were quite come in; several of her dresses are made so,—they say he thinks nothing too handsome to buy for her. Poor Miss Deane! She is very pitiable; but then there was no positive engagement; and the air at the coast will do her good. After all, if young Guest felt no more for her than that it was better for her not to marry him. What a wonderful marriage for a girl like Miss Tulliver,—quite romantic? Why, young Guest will put up for the borough at the next election. Nothing like commerce nowadays! That young Wakem nearly went out of his mind; he always was rather queer; but he’s gone abroad again to be out of the way,—quite the best thing for a deformed young man. Miss Unit declares she will never visit Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Guest,—such nonsense! pretending to be better than other people. Society couldn’t be carried on if we inquired into private conduct in that way,—and Christianity tells us to think no evil,—and my belief is, that Miss Unit had no cards sent her.”      1   
  But the results, we know, were not of a kind to warrant this extenuation of the past. Maggie had returned without a trousseau, without a husband,—in that degraded and outcast condition to which error is well known to lead; and the world’s wife, with that fine instinct which is given her for the preservation of Society, saw at once that Miss Tulliver’s conduct had been of the most aggravated kind. Could anything be more detestable? A girl so much indebted to her friends—whose mother as well as herself had received so much kindness from the Deanes—to lay the design of winning a young man’s affections away from her own cousin, who had behaved like a sister to her! Winning his affections? That was not the phrase for such a girl as Miss Tulliver; it would have been more correct to say that she had been actuated by mere unwomanly boldness and unbridled passion. There was always something questionable about her. That connection with young Wakem, which, they said, had been carried on for years, looked very ill,—disgusting, in fact! But with a girl of that disposition! To the world’s wife there had always been something in Miss Tulliver’s very physique that a refined instinct felt to be prophetic of harm. As for poor Mr. Stephen Guest, he was rather pitiable than otherwise; a young man of five-and-twenty is not to be too severely judged in these cases,—he is really very much at the mercy of a designing, bold girl. And it was clear that he had given way in spite of himself: he had shaken her off as soon as he could; indeed, their having parted so soon looked very black indeed—for her. To be sure, he had written a letter, laying all the blame on himself, and telling the story in a romantic fashion so as to try and make her appear quite innocent; of course he would do that! But the refined instinct of the world’s wife was not to be deceived; providentially!—else what would become of Society? Why, her own brother had turned her from his door; he had seen enough, you might be sure, before he would do that. A truly respectable young man, Mr. Tom Tulliver; quite likely to rise in the world! His sister’s disgrace was naturally a heavy blow to him. It was to be hoped that she would go out of the neighborhood,—to America, or anywhere,—so as to purify the air of St. Ogg’s from the stain of her presence, extremely dangerous to daughters there! No good could happen to her; it was only to be hoped she would repent, and that God would have mercy on her: He had not the care of society on His hands, as the world’s wife had.      2   
  It required nearly a fortnight for fine instinct to assure itself of these inspirations; indeed, it was a whole week before Stephen’s letter came, telling his father the facts, and adding that he was gone across to Holland,—had drawn upon the agent at Mudport for money,—was incapable of any resolution at present.      3   
  Maggie, all this while, was too entirely filled with a more agonizing anxiety to spend any thought on the view that was being taken of her conduct by the world of St. Ogg’s; anxiety about Stephen, Lucy, Philip, beat on her poor heart in a hard, driving, ceaseless storm of mingled love, remorse, and pity. If she had thought of rejection and injustice at all, it would have seemed to her that they had done their worst; that she could hardly feel any stroke from them intolerable since the words she had heard from her brother’s lips. Across all her anxiety for the loved and the injured, those words shot again and again, like a horrible pang that would have brought misery and dread even into a heaven of delights. The idea of ever recovering happiness never glimmered in her mind for a moment; it seemed as if every sensitive fibre in her were too entirely preoccupied by pain ever to vibrate again to another influence. Life stretched before her as one act of penitence; and all she craved, as she dwelt on her future lot, was something to guarantee her from more falling; her own weakness haunted her like a vision of hideous possibilities, that made no peace conceivable except such as lay in the sense of a sure refuge.      4   
  But she was not without practical intentions; the love of independence was too strong an inheritance and a habit for her not to remember that she must get her bread; and when other projects looked vague, she fell back on that of returning to her plain sewing, and so getting enough to pay for her lodging at Bob’s. She meant to persuade her mother to return to the Mill by and by, and live with Tom again; and somehow or other she would maintain herself at St. Ogg’s. Dr. Kenn would perhaps help her and advise her. She remembered his parting words at the bazaar. She remembered the momentary feeling of reliance that had sprung in her when he was talking with her, and she waited with yearning expectation for the opportunity of confiding everything to him. Her mother called every day at Mr. Deane’s to learn how Lucy was; the report was always sad,—nothing had yet roused her from the feeble passivity which had come on with the first shock. But of Philip, Mrs. Tulliver had learned nothing; naturally, no one whom she met would speak to her about what related to her daughter. But at last she summoned courage to go and see sister Glegg, who of course would know everything, and had been even to see Tom at the Mill in Mrs. Tulliver’s absence, though he had said nothing of what had passed on the occasion.      5   
  As soon as her mother was gone, Maggie put on her bonnet. She had resolved on walking to the Rectory and asking to see Dr. Kenn; he was in deep grief, but the grief of another does not jar upon us in such circumstances. It was the first time she had been beyond the door since her return; nevertheless her mind was so bent on the purpose of her walk, that the unpleasantness of meeting people on the way, and being stared at, did not occur to her. But she had no sooner passed beyond the narrower streets which she had to thread from Bob’s dwelling, than she became aware of unusual glances cast at her; and this consciousness made her hurry along nervously, afraid to look to right or left. Presently, however, she came full on Mrs. and Miss Turnbull, old acquaintances of her family; they both looked at her strangely, and turned a little aside without speaking. All hard looks were pain to Maggie, but her self-reproach was too strong for resentment. No wonder they will not speak to me, she thought; they are very fond of Lucy. But now she knew that she was about to pass a group of gentlemen, who were standing at the door of the billiard-rooms, and she could not help seeing young Torry step out a little with his glass at his eye, and bow to her with that air of nonchalance which he might have bestowed on a friendly barmaid.      6   
  Maggie’s pride was too intense for her not to feel that sting, even in the midst of her sorrow; and for the first time the thought took strong hold of her that she would have other obloquy cast on her besides that which was felt to be due to her breach of faith toward Lucy. But she was at the Rectory now; there, perhaps, she would find something else than retribution. Retribution may come from any voice; the hardest, cruelest, most imbruted urchin at the street-corner can inflict it; surely help and pity are rarer things, more needful for the righteous to bestow.      7   
  She was shown up at once, after being announced, into Dr. Kenn’s study, where he sat amongst piled-up books, for which he had little appetite, leaning his cheek against the head of his youngest child, a girl of three. The child was sent away with the servant, and when the door was closed, Dr. Kenn said, placing a chair for Maggie,—      8   
  “I was coming to see you, Miss Tulliver; you have anticipated me; I am glad you did.”      9   
  Maggie looked at him with her childlike directness as she had done at the bazaar, and said, “I want to tell you everything.” But her eyes filled fast with tears as she said it, and all the pent-up excitement of her humiliating walk would have its vent before she could say more.     10   
  “Do tell me everything,” Dr. Kenn said, with quiet kindness in his grave, firm voice. ”Think of me as one to whom a long experience has been granted, which may enable him to help you.”     11   
  In rather broken sentences, and with some effort at first, but soon with the greater ease that came from a sense of relief in the confidence, Maggie told the brief story of a struggle that must be the beginning of a long sorrow. Only the day before, Dr. Kenn had been made acquainted with the contents of Stephen’s letter, and he had believed them at once, without the confirmation of Maggie’s statement. That involuntary plaint of hers, “Oh, I must go,” had remained with him as the sign that she was undergoing some inward conflict.     12   
  Maggie dwelt the longest on the feeling which had made her come back to her mother and brother, which made her cling to all the memories of the past. When she had ended, Dr. Kenn was silent for some minutes; there was a difficulty on his mind. He rose, and walked up and down the hearth with his hands behind him. At last he seated himself again, and said, looking at Maggie,—     13   
  “Your prompting to go to your nearest friends,—to remain where all the ties of your life have been formed,—is a true prompting, to which the Church in its original constitution and discipline responds, opening its arms to the penitent, watching over its children to the last; never abandoning them until they are hopelessly reprobate. And the Church ought to represent the feeling of the community, so that every parish should be a family knit together by Christian brotherhood under a spiritual father. But the ideas of discipline and Christian fraternity are entirely relaxed,—they can hardly be said to exist in the public mind; they hardly survive except in the partial, contradictory form they have taken in the narrow communities of schismatics; and if I were not supported by the firm faith that the Church must ultimately recover the full force of that constitution which is alone fitted to human needs, I should often lose heart at observing the want of fellowship and sense of mutual responsibility among my own flock. At present everything seems tending toward the relaxation of ties,—toward the substitution of wayward choice for the adherence to obligation, which has its roots in the past. Your conscience and your heart have given you true light on this point, Miss Tulliver; and I have said all this that you may know what my wish about you—what my advice to you—would be, if they sprang from my own feeling and opinion unmodified by counteracting circumstances.”     14   
  Dr. Kenn paused a little while. There was an entire absence of effusive benevolence in his manner; there was something almost cold in the gravity of his look and voice. If Maggie had not known that his benevolence was persevering in proportion to its reserve, she might have been chilled and frightened. As it was, she listened expectantly, quite sure that there would be some effective help in his words. He went on.     15   
  “Your inexperience of the world, Miss Tulliver, prevents you from anticipating fully the very unjust conceptions that will probably be formed concerning your conduct,—conceptions which will have a baneful effect, even in spite of known evidence to disprove them.”     16   
  “Oh, I do,—I begin to see,” said Maggie, unable to repress this utterance of her recent pain. “I know I shall be insulted. I shall be thought worse than I am.”     17   
  “You perhaps do not yet know,” said Dr. Kenn, with a touch of more personal pity, “that a letter is come which ought to satisfy every one who has known anything of you, that you chose the steep and difficult path of a return to the right, at the moment when that return was most of all difficult.”     18   
  “Oh, where is he?” said poor Maggie, with a flush and tremor that no presence could have hindered.     19   
  “He is gone abroad; he has written of all that passed to his father. He has vindicated you to the utmost; and I hope the communication of that letter to your cousin will have a beneficial effect on her.”     20   
  Dr. Kenn waited for her to get calm again before he went on.     21   
  “That letter, as I said, ought to suffice to prevent false impressions concerning you. But I am bound to tell you, Miss Tulliver, that not only the experience of my whole life, but my observation within the last three days, makes me fear that there is hardly any evidence which will save you from the painful effect of false imputations. The persons who are the most incapable of a conscientious struggle such as yours are precisely those who will be likely to shrink from you, because they will not believe in your struggle. I fear your life here will be attended not only with much pain, but with many obstructions. For this reason—and for this only—I ask you to consider whether it will not perhaps be better for you to take a situation at a distance, according to your former intention. I will exert myself at once to obtain one for you.”     22   
  “Oh, if I could but stop here!” said Maggie. “I have no heart to begin a strange life again. I should have no stay. I should feel like a lonely wanderer, cut off from the past. I have written to the lady who offered me a situation to excuse myself. If I remained here, I could perhaps atone in some way to Lucy—to others; I could convince them that I’m sorry. And,” she added, with some of the old proud fire flashing out, “I will not go away because people say false things of me. They shall learn to retract them. If I must go away at last, because—because others wish it, I will not go now.”     23   
  “Well,” said Dr. Kenn, after some consideration, “if you determine on that, Miss Tulliver, you may rely on all the influence my position gives me. I am bound to aid and countenance you by the very duties of my office as a parish priest. I will add, that personally I have a deep interest in your peace of mind and welfare.”     24   
  “The only thing I want is some occupation that will enable me to get my bread and be independent,” said Maggie. “I shall not want much. I can go on lodging where I am.”     25   
  “I must think over the subject maturely,” said Dr. Kenn, “and in a few days I shall be better able to ascertain the general feeling. I shall come to see you; I shall bear you constantly in mind.”     26   
  When Maggie had left him, Dr. Kenn stood ruminating with his hands behind him, and his eyes fixed on the carpet, under a painful sense of doubt and difficulty. The tone of Stephen’s letter, which he had read, and the actual relations of all the persons concerned, forced upon him powerfully the idea of an ultimate marriage between Stephen and Maggie as the least evil; and the impossibility of their proximity in St. Ogg’s on any other supposition, until after years of separation, threw an insurmountable prospective difficulty over Maggie’s stay there. On the other hand, he entered with all the comprehension of a man who had known spiritual conflict, and lived through years of devoted service to his fellow-men, into that state of Maggie’s heart and conscience which made the consent to the marriage a desecration to her; her conscience must not be tampered with; the principle on which she had acted was a safer guide than any balancing of consequences. His experience told him that intervention was too dubious a responsibility to be lightly incurred; the possible issue either of an endeavor to restore the former relations with Lucy and Philip, or of counselling submission to this irruption of a new feeling, was hidden in a darkness all the more impenetrable because each immediate step was clogged with evil.     27   
  The great problem of the shifting relation between passion and duty is clear to no man who is capable of apprehending it; the question whether the moment has come in which a man has fallen below the possibility of a renunciation that will carry any efficacy, and must accept the sway of a passion against which he had struggled as a trespass, is one for which we have no master-key that will fit all cases. The casuists have become a byword of reproach; but their perverted spirit of minute discrimination was the shadow of a truth to which eyes and hearts are too often fatally sealed,—the truth, that moral judgments must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot.     28   
  All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims; because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims. and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy. And the man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgment solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality,—without any care to assure themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a hardly earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human.

Book VII—The Final Rescue   
III. 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!      1   
  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.      2   
  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.      3   
  “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.”      4   
  “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?”      5   
  “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.      6   
  “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.”      7   
  “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!”      8   
  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.      9   
  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?     10   
  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.”
  11   
  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,—     12   
  “O God, is there any happiness in love that could make me forget their pain?”

Book VII—The Final Rescue   
IV. Maggie and Lucy   
     
BY the end of the week Dr. Kenn had made up his mind that there was only one way in which he could secure to Maggie a suitable living at St. Ogg’s. Even with his twenty years’ experience as a parish priest, he was aghast at the obstinate continuance of imputations against her in the face of evidence. Hitherto he had been rather more adored and appealed to than was quite agreeable to him; but now, in attempting to open the ears of women to reason, and their consciences to justice, on behalf of Maggie Tulliver, he suddenly found himself as powerless as he was aware he would have been if he had attempted to influence the shape of bonnets. Dr. Kenn could not be contradicted; he was listened to in silence; but when he left the room, a comparison of opinions among his hearers yielded much the same result as before. Miss Tulliver had undeniably acted in a blamable manner, even Dr. Kenn did not deny that; how, then, could he think so lightly of her as to put that favorable interpretation on everything she had done? Even on the supposition that required the utmost stretch of belief,—namely, that none of the things said about Miss Tulliver were true,—still, since they had been said about her, they had cast an odor round her which must cause her to be shrunk from by every woman who had to take care of her own reputation—and of Society. To have taken Maggie by the hand and said, “I will not believe unproved evil of you; my lips shall not utter it; my ears shall be closed against it; I, too, am an erring mortal, liable to stumble, apt to come short of my most earnest efforts; your lot has been harder than mine, your temptation greater; let us help each other to stand and walk without more falling,”—to have done this would have demanded courage, deep pity, self-knowledge, generous trust; would have demanded a mind that tasted no piquancy in evil-speaking, that felt no self-exaltation in condemning, that cheated itself with no large words into the belief that life can have any moral end, any high religion, which excludes the striving after perfect truth, justice, and love toward the individual men and women who come across our own path. The ladies of St. Ogg’s were not beguiled by any wide speculative conceptions; but they had their favorite abstraction, called Society, which served to make their consciences perfectly easy in doing what satisfied their own egoism,—thinking and speaking the worst of Maggie Tulliver, and turning their backs upon her. It was naturally disappointing to Dr. Kenn, after two years of superfluous incense from his feminine parishioners, to find them suddenly maintaining their views in opposition to his; but then they maintained them in opposition to a higher Authority, which they had venerated longer. That Authority had furnished a very explicit answer to persons who might inquire where their social duties began, and might be inclined to take wide views as to the starting-point. The answer had not turned on the ultimate good of Society, but on “a certain man” who was found in trouble by the wayside.      1   
  Not that St. Ogg’s was empty of women with some tenderness of heart and conscience; probably it had as fair a proportion of human goodness in it as any other small trading town of that day. But until every good man is brave, we must expect to find many good women timid,—too timid even to believe in the correctness of their own best promptings, when these would place them in a minority. And the men at St. Ogg’s were not all brave, by any means; some of them were even fond of scandal, and to an extent that might have given their conversation an effeminate character, if it had not been distinguished by masculine jokes, and by an occasional shrug of the shoulders at the mutual hatred of women. It was the general feeling of the masculine mind at St. Ogg’s that women were not to be interfered with in their treatment of each other.      2   
  And thus every direction in which Dr. Kenn had turned, in the hope of procuring some kind recognition and some employment for Maggie, proved a disappointment to him. Mrs. James Torry could not think of taking Maggie as a nursery governess, even temporarily,—a young woman about whom “such things had been said,” and about whom “gentlemen joked”; and Miss Kirke, who had a spinal complaint, and wanted a reader and companion, felt quite sure that Maggie’s mind must be of a quality with which she, for her part, could not risk any contact. Why did not Miss Tulliver accept the shelter offered her by her aunt Glegg? It did not become a girl like her to refuse it. Or else, why did she not go out of the neighborhood, and get a situation where she was not known? (It was not, apparently, of so much importance that she should carry her dangerous tendencies into strange families unknown at St. Ogg’s.) She must be very bold and hardened to wish to stay in a parish where she was so much stared at and whispered about.      3   
  Dr. Kenn, having great natural firmness, began, in the presence of this opposition, as every firm man would have done, to contract a certain strength of determination over and above what would have been called forth by the end in view. He himself wanted a daily governess for his younger children; and though he had hesitated in the first instance to offer this position to Maggie, the resolution to protest with the utmost force of his personal and priestly character against her being crushed and driven away by slander, was now decisive. Maggie gratefully accepted an employment that gave her duties as well as a support; her days would be filled now, and solitary evenings would be a welcome rest. She no longer needed the sacrifice her mother made in staying with her, and Mrs. Tulliver was persuaded to go back to the Mill.      4   
  But now it began to be discovered that Dr. Kenn, exemplary as he had hitherto appeared, had his crotchets, possibly his weaknesses. The masculine mind of St. Ogg’s smiled pleasantly, and did not wonder that Kenn liked to see a fine pair of eyes daily, or that he was inclined to take so lenient a view of the past; the feminine mind, regarded at that period as less powerful, took a more melancholy view of the case. If Dr. Kenn should be beguiled into marrying that Miss Tulliver! It was not safe to be too confident, even about the best of men; an apostle had fallen, and wept bitterly afterwards; and though Peter’s denial was not a close precedent, his repentance was likely to be.      5   
  Maggie had not taken her daily walks to the Rectory for many weeks, before the dreadful possibility of her some time or other becoming the Rector’s wife had been talked of so often in confidence, that ladies were beginning to discuss how they should behave to her in that position. For Dr. Kenn, it had been understood, had sat in the schoolroom half an hour one morning, when Miss Tulliver was giving her lessons,—nay, he had sat there every morning; he had once walked home with her,—he almost always walked home with her,—and if not, he went to see her in the evening. What an artful creature she was! What a mother for those children! It was enough to make poor Mrs. Kenn turn in her grave, that they should be put under the care of this girl only a few weeks after her death. Would he be so lost to propriety as to marry her before the year was out? The masculine mind was sarcastic, and thought not.      6   
  The Miss Guests saw an alleviation to the sorrow of witnessing a folly in their Rector; at least their brother would be safe; and their knowledge of Stephen’s tenacity was a constant ground of alarm to them, lest he should come back and marry Maggie. They were not among those who disbelieved their brother’s letter; but they had no confidence in Maggie’s adherence to her renunciation of him; they suspected that she had shrunk rather from the elopement than from the marriage, and that she lingered in St. Ogg’s, relying on his return to her. They had always thought her disagreeable; they now thought her artful and proud; having quite as good grounds for that judgment as you and I probably have for many strong opinions of the same kind. Formerly they had not altogether delighted in the contemplated match with Lucy, but now their dread of a marriage between Stephen and Maggie added its momentum to their genuine pity and indignation on behalf of the gentle forsaken girl, in making them desire that he should return to her. As soon as Lucy was able to leave home, she was to seek relief from the oppressive heat of this August by going to the coast with the Miss Guests; and it was in their plans that Stephen should be induced to join them. On the very first hint of gossip concerning Maggie and Dr. Kenn, the report was conveyed in Miss Guest’s letter to her brother.      7   
  Maggie had frequent tidings through her mother, or aunt Glegg, or Dr. Kenn, of Lucy’s gradual progress toward recovery, and her thoughts tended continually toward her uncle Deane’s house; she hungered for an interview with Lucy, if it were only for five minutes, to utter a word of penitence, to be assured by Lucy’s own eyes and lips that she did not believe in the willing treachery of those whom she had loved and trusted. But she knew that even if her uncle’s indignation had not closed his house against her, the agitation of such an interview would have been forbidden to Lucy. Only to have seen her without speaking would have been some relief; for Maggie was haunted by a face cruel in its very gentleness; a face that had been turned on hers with glad, sweet looks of trust and love from the twilight time of memory; changed now to a sad and weary face by a first heart-stroke. And as the days passed on, that pale image became more and more distinct; the picture grew and grew into more speaking definiteness under the avenging hand of remorse; the soft hazel eyes, in their look of pain, were bent forever on Maggie, and pierced her the more because she could see no anger in them. But Lucy was not yet able to go to church, or any place where Maggie could see her; and even the hope of that departed, when the news was told her by aunt Glegg, that Lucy was really going away in a few days to Scarborough with the Miss Guests, who had been heard to say that they expected their brother to meet them there.      8   
  Only those who have known what hardest inward conflict is, can know what Maggie felt as she sat in her loneliness the evening after hearing that news from Mrs. Glegg,—only those who have known what it is to dread their own selfish desires as the watching mother would dread the sleeping-potion that was to still her own pain.      9   
  She sat without candle in the twilight, with the window wide open toward the river; the sense of oppressive heat adding itself undistinguishably to the burthen of her lot. Seated on a chair against the window, with her arm on the windowsill she was looking blankly at the flowing river, swift with the backward-rushing tide, struggling to see still the sweet face in its unreproaching sadness, that seemed now from moment to moment to sink away and be hidden behind a form that thrust itself between, and made darkness. Hearing the door open, she thought Mrs. Jakin was coming in with her supper, as usual; and with that repugnance to trivial speech which comes with languor and wretchedness, she shrank from turning round and saying she wanted nothing; good little Mrs. Jakin would be sure to make some well-meant remarks. But the next moment, without her having discerned the sound of a footstep, she felt a light hand on her shoulder, and heard a voice close to her saying, “Maggie!”     10   
  The face was there,—changed, but all the sweeter; the hazel eyes were there, with their heart-piercing tenderness.     11   
  “Maggie!” the soft voice said. “Lucy!” answered a voice with a sharp ring of anguish in it; and Lucy threw her arms round Maggie’s neck, and leaned her pale cheek against the burning brow.     12   
  “I stole out,” said Lucy, almost in a whisper, while she sat down close to Maggie and held her hand, “when papa and the rest were away. Alice is come with me. I asked her to help me. But I must only stay a little while, because it is so late.”     13   
  It was easier to say that at first than to say anything else. They sat looking at each other. It seemed as if the interview must end without more speech, for speech was very difficult. Each felt that there would be something scorching in the words that would recall the irretrievable wrong. But soon, as Maggie looked, every distinct thought began to be overflowed by a wave of loving penitence, and words burst forth with a sob.     14   
  “God bless you for coming, Lucy.”     15   
  The sobs came thick on each other after that.     16   
  “Maggie, dear, be comforted,” said Lucy now, putting her cheek against Maggie’s again. “Don’t grieve.” And she sat still, hoping to soothe Maggie with that gentle caress.     17   
  “I didn’t mean to deceive you, Lucy,” said Maggie, as soon as she could speak. “It always made me wretched that I felt what I didn’t like you to know. It was because I thought it would all be conquered, and you might never see anything to wound you.”     18   
  “I know, dear,” said Lucy. “I know you never meant to make me unhappy. It is a trouble that has come on us all; you have more to bear than I have—and you gave him up, when—you did what it must have been very hard to do.”     19   
  They were silent again a little while, sitting with clasped hands, and cheeks leaned together.     20   
  “Lucy,” Maggie began again, “he struggled too. He wanted to be true to you. He will come back to you. Forgive him—he will be happy then——”     21   
  These words were wrung forth from Maggie’s deepest soul, with an effort like the convulsed clutch of a drowning man. Lucy trembled and was silent.     22   
  A gentle knock came at the door. It was Alice, the maid, who entered and said,—     23   
  “I daren’t stay any longer, Miss Deane. They’ll find it out, and there’ll be such anger at your coming out so late.”     24   
  Lucy rose and said, “Very well, Alice,—in a minute.”     25   
  “I’m to go away on Friday, Maggie,” she added, when Alice had closed the door again. “When I come back, and am strong, they will let me do as I like. I shall come to you when I please then.”     26   
  “Lucy,” said Maggie, with another great effort, “I pray to God continually that I may never be the cause of sorrow to you any more.”     27   
  She pressed the little hand that she held between hers, and looked up into the face that was bent over hers. Lucy never forgot that look.     28   
  “Maggie,” she said, in a low voice, that had the solemnity of confession in it, “you are better than I am. I can’t——”     29   
  She broke off there, and said no more. But they clasped each other again in a last embrace.     30

Book VII—The Final Rescue   
V. The Last Conflict   
     
IN the second week of September, Maggie was again sitting in her lonely room, battling with the old shadowy enemies that were forever slain and rising again. It was past midnight, and the rain was beating heavily against the window, driven with fitful force by the rushing, loud-moaning wind. For the day after Lucy’s visit there had been a sudden change in the weather; the heat and drought had given way to cold variable winds, and heavy falls of rain at intervals; and she had been forbidden to risk the contemplated journey until the weather should become more settled. In the counties higher up the Floss the rains had been continuous, and the completion of the harvest had been arrested. And now, for the last two days, the rains on this lower course of the river had been incessant, so that the old men had shaken their heads and talked of sixty years ago, when the same sort of weather, happening about the equinox, brought on the great floods, which swept the bridge away, and reduced the town to great misery. But the younger generation, who had seen several small floods, thought lightly of these sombre recollections and forebodings; and Bob Jakin, naturally prone to take a hopeful view of his own luck, laughed at his mother when she regretted their having taken a house by the riverside, observing that but for that they would have had no boats, which were the most lucky of possessions in case of a flood that obliged them to go to a distance for food.      1   
  But the careless and the fearful were alike sleeping in their beds now. There was hope that the rain would abate by the morrow; threatenings of a worse kind, from sudden thaws after falls of snow, had often passed off, in the experience of the younger ones; and at the very worst, the banks would be sure to break lower down the river when the tide came in with violence, and so the waters would be carried off, without causing more than temporary inconvenience, and losses that would be felt only by the poorer sort, whom charity would relieve.      2   
  All were in their beds now, for it was past midnight; all except some solitary watchers such as Maggie. She was seated in her little parlor toward the river, with one candle, that left everything dim in the room except a letter which lay before her on the table. That letter, which had come to her to-day, was one of the causes that had kept her up far on into the night, unconscious how the hours were going, careless of seeking rest, with no image of rest coming across her mind, except of that far, far off rest from which there would be no more waking for her into this struggling earthly life.      3   
  Two days before Maggie received that letter, she had been to the Rectory for the last time. The heavy rain would have prevented her from going since; but there was another reason. Dr. Kenn, at first enlightened only by a few hints as to the new turn which gossip and slander had taken in relation to Maggie, had recently been made more fully aware of it by an earnest remonstrance from one of his male parishioners against the indiscretion of persisting in the attempt to overcome the prevalent feeling in the parish by a course of resistance. Dr. Kenn, having a conscience void of offence in the matter, was still inclined to persevere,—was still averse to give way before a public sentiment that was odious and contemptible; but he was finally wrought upon by the consideration of the peculiar responsibility attached to his office, of avoiding the appearance of evil,—an “appearance” that is always dependent on the average quality of surrounding minds. Where these minds are low and gross, the area of that “appearance” is proportionately widened. Perhaps he was in danger of acting from obstinacy; perhaps it was his duty to succumb. Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course; and to recede was always painful to Dr. Kenn. He made up his mind that he must advise Maggie to go away from St. Ogg’s for a time; and he performed that difficult task with as much delicacy as he could, only stating in vague terms that he found his attempt to countenance her stay was a source of discord between himself and his parishioners, that was likely to obstruct his usefulness as a clergyman. He begged her to allow him to write to a clerical friend of his, who might possibly take her into his own family as governess; and, if not, would probably know of some other available position for a young woman in whose welfare Dr. Kenn felt a strong interest.      4   
  Poor Maggie listened with a trembling lip; she could say nothing but a faint “Thank you, I shall be grateful”; and she walked back to her lodgings, through the driving rain, with a new sense of desolation. She must be a lonely wanderer; she must go out among fresh faces, that would look at her wonderingly, because the days did not seem joyful to her; she must begin a new life, in which she would have to rouse herself to receive new impressions; and she was so unspeakably, sickeningly weary! There was no home, no help for the erring; even those who pitied were constrained to hardness. But ought she to complain? Ought she to shrink in this way from the long penance of life, which was all the possibility she had of lightening the load to some other sufferers, and so changing that passionate error into a new force of unselfish human love? All the next day she sat in her lonely room, with a window darkened by the cloud and the driving rain, thinking of that future, and wrestling for patience; for what repose could poor Maggie ever win except by wrestling?      5   
  And on the third day—this day of which she had just sat out the close—the letter had come which was lying on the table before her.      6   
  The letter was from Stephen. He was come back from Holland; he was at Mudport again, unknown to any of his friends, and had written to her from that place, enclosing the letter to a person whom he trusted in St. Ogg’s. From beginning to end it was a passionate cry of reproach; an appeal against her useless sacrifice of him, of herself, against that perverted notion of right which led her to crush all his hopes, for the sake of a mere idea, and not any substantial good,—his hopes, whom she loved, and who loved her with that single overpowering passion, that worship, which a man never gives to a woman more than once in his life.      7   
  “They have written to me that you are to marry Kenn. As if I should believe that! Perhaps they have told you some such fables about me. Perhaps they tell you I’ve been ’travelling.’ My body has been dragged about somewhere; but I have never travelled from the hideous place where you left me; where I started up from the stupor of helpless rage to find you gone.      8   
  “Maggie! whose pain can have been like mine? Whose injury is like mine? Who besides me has met that long look of love that has burnt itself into my soul, so that no other image can come there? Maggie, call me back to you! Call me back to life and goodness! I am banished from both now. I have no motives; I am indifferent to everything. Two months have only deepened the certainty that I can never care for life without you. Write me one word; say ’Come!’ In two days I should be with you. Maggie, have you forgotten what it was to be together,—to be within reach of a look, to be within hearing of each other’s voice?”      9   
  When Maggie first read this letter she felt as if her real temptation had only just begun. At the entrance of the chill dark cavern, we turn with unworn courage from the warm light; but how, when we have trodden far in the damp darkness, and have begun to be faint and weary; how, if there is a sudden opening above us, and we are invited back again to the life-nourishing day? The leap of natural longing from under the pressure of pain is so strong, that all less immediate motives are likely to be forgotten—till the pain has been escaped from.     10   
  For hours Maggie felt as if her struggle had been in vain. For hours every other thought that she strove to summon was thrust aside by the image of Stephen waiting for the single word that would bring him to her. She did not read the letter: she heard him uttering it, and the voice shook her with its old strange power. All the day before she had been filled with the vision of a lonely future through which she must carry the burthen of regret, upheld only by clinging faith. And here, close within her reach, urging itself upon her even as a claim, was another future, in which hard endurance and effort were to be exchanged for easy, delicious leaning on another’s loving strength! And yet that promise of joy in the place of sadness did not make the dire force of the temptation to Maggie.     11   
  It was Stephen’s tone of misery, it was the doubt in the justice of her own resolve, that made the balance tremble, and made her once start from her seat to reach the pen and paper, and write “Come!”     12   
  But close upon that decisive act, her mind recoiled; and the sense of contradiction with her past self in her moments of strength and clearness came upon her like a pang of conscious degradation. No, she must wait; she must pray; the light that had forsaken her would come again; she should feel again what she had felt when she had fled away, under an inspiration strong enough to conquer agony,—to conquer love; she should feel again what she had felt when Lucy stood by her, when Philip’s letter had stirred all the fibres that bound her to the calmer past.     13   
  She sat quite still, far on into the night, with no impulse to change her attitude, without active force enough even for the mental act of prayer; only waiting for the light that would surely come again. It came with the memories that no passion could long quench; the long past came back to her, and with it the fountains of self-renouncing pity and affection, of faithfulness and resolve. The words that were marked by the quiet hand in the little old book that she had long ago learned by heart, rushed even to her lips, and found a vent for themselves in a low murmur that was quite lost in the loud driving of the rain against the window and the loud moan and roar of the wind. “I have received the Cross, I have received it from Thy hand; I will bear it, and bear it till death, as Thou hast laid it upon me.”     14   
  But soon other words rose that could find no utterance but in a sob,—“Forgive me, Stephen! It will pass away. You will come back to her.”     15   
  She took up the letter, held it to the candle, and let it burn slowly on the hearth. To-morrow she would write to him the last word of parting.     16   
  “I will bear it, and bear it till death. But how long it will be before death comes! I am so young, so healthy. How shall I have patience and strength? Am I to struggle and fall and repent again? Has life other trials as hard for me still?”     17   
  With that cry of self-despair, Maggie fell on her knees against the table, and buried her sorrow-stricken face. Her soul went out to the Unseen Pity that would be with her to the end. Surely there was something being taught her by this experience of great need; and she must be learning a secret of human tenderness and long-suffering, that the less erring could hardly know? “O God, if my life is to be long, let me live to bless and comfort——”     18   
  At that moment Maggie felt a startling sensation of sudden cold about her knees and feet; it was water flowing under her. She started up; the stream was flowing under the door that led into the passage. She was not bewildered for an instant; she knew it was the flood!     19   
  The tumult of emotion she had been enduring for the last twelve hours seemed to have left a great calm in her; without screaming, she hurried with the candle upstairs to Bob Jakin’s bedroom. The door was ajar; she went in and shook him by the shoulder.     20   
  “Bob, the flood is come! it is in the house; let us see if we can make the boats safe.”     21   
  She lighted his candle, while the poor wife, snatching up her baby, burst into screams; and then she hurried down again to see if the waters were rising fast. There was a step down into the room at the door leading from the staircase; she saw that the water was already on a level with the step. While she was looking, something came with a tremendous crash against the window, and sent the leaded panes and the old wooden framework inward in shivers, the water pouring in after it.     22   
  “It is the boat!” cried Maggie. “Bob, come down to get the boats!”     23   
  And without a moment’s shudder of fear, she plunged through the water, which was rising fast to her knees, and by the glimmering light of the candle she had left on the stairs, she mounted on to the window-sill, and crept into the boat, which was left with the prow lodging and protruding through the window. Bob was not long after her, hurrying without shoes or stockings, but with the lanthorn in his hand.     24   
  “Why, they’re both here,—both the boats,” said Bob, as he got into the one where Maggie was. “It’s wonderful this fastening isn’t broke too, as well as the mooring.”     25   
  In the excitement of getting into the other boat, unfastening it, and mastering an oar, Bob was not struck with the danger Maggie incurred. We are not apt to fear for the fearless, when we are companions in their danger, and Bob’s mind was absorbed in possible expedients for the safety of the helpless indoors. The fact that Maggie had been up, had waked him, and had taken the lead in activity, gave Bob a vague impression of her as one who would help to protect, not need to be protected. She too had got possession of an oar, and had pushed off, so as to release the boat from the overhanging window-frame.     26   
  “The water’s rising so fast,” said Bob, “I doubt it’ll be in at the chambers before long,—th’ house is so low. I’ve more mind to get Prissy and the child and the mother into the boat, if I could, and trusten to the water,—for th’ old house is none so safe. And if I let go the boat—but you,” he exclaimed, suddenly lifting the light of his lanthorn on Maggie, as she stood in the rain with the oar in her hand and her black hair streaming.     27   
  Maggie had no time to answer, for a new tidal current swept along the line of the houses, and drove both the boats out on to the wide water, with a force that carried them far past the meeting current of the river.     28   
  In the first moments Maggie felt nothing, thought of nothing, but that she had suddenly passed away from that life which she had been dreading; it was the transition of death, without its agony,—and she was alone in the darkness with God.     29   
  The whole thing had been so rapid, so dreamlike, that the threads of ordinary association were broken; she sank down on the seat clutching the oar mechanically, and for a long while had no distinct conception of her position. The first thing that waked her to fuller consciousness was the cessation of the rain, and a perception that the darkness was divided by the faintest light, which parted the overhanging gloom from the immeasurable watery level below. She was driven out upon the flood,—that awful visitation of God which her father used to talk of; which had made the nightmare of her childish dreams. And with that thought there rushed in the vision of the old home, and Tom, and her mother,—they had all listened together.     30   
  “O God, where am I? Which is the way home?” she cried out, in the dim loneliness.     31   
  What was happening to them at the Mill? The flood had once nearly destroyed it. They might be in danger, in distress,—her mother and her brother, alone there, beyond reach of help! Her whole soul was strained now on that thought; and she saw the long-loved faces looking for help into the darkness, and finding none.     32   
  She was floating in smooth water now,—perhaps far on the overflooded fields. There was no sense of present danger to check the outgoing of her mind to the old home; and she strained her eyes against the curtain of gloom that she might seize the first sight of her whereabout,—that she might catch some faint suggestion of the spot toward which all her anxieties tended.     33   
  Oh, how welcome, the widening of that dismal watery level, the gradual uplifting of the cloudy firmament, the slowly defining blackness of objects above the glassy dark! Yes, she must be out on the fields; those were the tops of hedgerow trees. Which way did the river lie? Looking behind her, she saw the lines of black trees; looking before her, there were none; then the river lay before her. She seized an oar and began to paddle the boat forward with the energy of wakening hope; the dawning seemed to advance more swiftly, now she was in action; and she could soon see the poor dumb beasts crowding piteously on a mound where they had taken refuge. Onward she paddled and rowed by turns in the growing twilight; her wet clothes clung round her, and her streaming hair was dashed about by the wind, but she was hardly conscious of any bodily sensations,—except a sensation of strength, inspired by mighty emotion. Along with the sense of danger and possible rescue for those long-remembered beings at the old home, there was an undefined sense of reconcilement with her brother; what quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs? Vaguely Maggie felt this, in the strong resurgent love toward her brother that swept away all the later impressions of hard, cruel offence and misunderstanding, and left only the deep, underlying, unshakable memories of early union.     34   
  But now there was a large dark mass in the distance, and near to her Maggie could discern the current of the river. The dark mass must be—yes, it was—St. Ogg’s. Ah, now she knew which way to look for the first glimpse of the well-known trees—the gray willows, the now yellowing chestnuts—and above them the old roof! But there was no color, no shape yet; all was faint and dim. More and more strongly the energies seemed to come and put themselves forth, as if her life were a stored-up force that was being spent in this hour, unneeded for any future.     35   
  She must get her boat into the current of the Floss, else she would never be able to pass the Ripple and approach the house; this was the thought that occurred to her, as she imagined with more and more vividness the state of things round the old home. But then she might be carried very far down, and be unable to guide her boat out of the current again. For the first time distinct ideas of danger began to press upon her; but there was no choice of courses, no room for hesitation, and she floated into the current. Swiftly she went now without effort; more and more clearly in the lessening distance and the growing light she began to discern the objects that she knew must be the well-known trees and roofs; nay, she was not far off a rushing, muddy current that must be the strangely altered Ripple.     36   
  Great God! there were floating masses in it, that might dash against her boat as she passed, and cause her to perish too soon. What were those masses?     37   
  For the first time Maggie’s heart began to beat in an agony of dread. She sat helpless, dimly conscious that she was being floated along, more intensely conscious of the anticipated clash. But the horror was transient; it passed away before the oncoming warehouses of St. Ogg’s. She had passed the mouth of the Ripple, then; now, she must use all her skill and power to manage the boat and get it if possible out of the current. She could see now that the bridge was broken down; she could see the masts of a stranded vessel far out over the watery field. But no boats were to be seen moving on the river,—such as had been laid hands on were employed in the flooded streets.     38   
  With new resolution, Maggie seized her oar, and stood up again to paddle; but the now ebbing tide added to the swiftness of the river, and she was carried along beyond the bridge. She could hear shouts from the windows overlooking the river, as if the people there were calling to her. It was not till she had passed on nearly to Tofton that she could get the boat clear of the current. Then with one yearning look toward her uncle Deane’s house that lay farther down the river, she took to both her oars and rowed with all her might across the watery fields, back toward the Mill. Color was beginning to awake now, and as she approached the Dorlcote fields, she could discern the tints of the trees, could see the old Scotch firs far to the right, and the home chestnuts,—oh, how deep they lay in the water,—deeper than the trees on this side the hill! And the roof of the Mill—where was it? Those heavy fragments hurrying down the Ripple,—what had they meant? But it was not the house,—the house stood firm; drowned up to the first story, but still firm,—or was it broken in at the end toward the Mill?     39   
  With panting joy that she was there at last,—joy that overcame all distress,—Maggie neared the front of the house. At first she heard no sound; she saw no object moving. Her boat was on a level with the upstairs window. She called out in a loud, piercing voice,—     40   
  “Tom, where are you? Mother, where are you? Here is Maggie!”     41   
  Soon, from the window of the attic in the central gable, she heard Tom’s voice,—     42   
  “Who is it? Have you brought a boat?”     43   
  “It is I, Tom,—Maggie. Where is mother?”     44   
  “She is not here; she went to Garum the day before yesterday. I’ll come down to the lower window.”     45   
  “Alone, Maggie?” said Tom, in a voice of deep astonishment, as he opened the middle window, on a level with the boat.     46   
  “Yes, Tom; God has taken care of me, to bring me to you. Get in quickly. Is there no one else?”     47   
  “No,” said Tom, stepping into the boat; “I fear the man is drowned; he was carried down the Ripple, I think, when part of the Mill fell with the crash of trees and stones against it; I’ve shouted again and again, and there has been no answer. Give me the oars, Maggie.”     48   
  It was not till Tom had pushed off and they were on the wide water,—he face to face with Maggie,—that the full meaning of what had happened rushed upon his mind. It came with so overpowering a force,—it was such a new revelation to his spirit, of the depths in life that had lain beyond his vision, which he had fancied so keen and clear,—that he was unable to ask a question. They sat mutely gazing at each other,—Maggie with eyes of intense life looking out from a weary, beaten face; Tom pale, with a certain awe and humiliation. Thought was busy though the lips were silent; and though he could ask no question, he guessed a story of almost miraculous, divinely protected effort. But at last a mist gathered over the blue-gray eyes, and the lips found a word they could utter,—the old childish “Magsie!”     49   
  Maggie could make no answer but a long, deep sob of that mysterious, wondrous happiness that is one with pain.     50   
  As soon as she could speak, she said, “We will go to Lucy, Tom; we’ll go and see if she is safe, and then we can help the rest.”     51   
  Tom rowed with untired vigor, and with a different speed from poor Maggie’s. The boat was soon in the current of the river again, and soon they would be at Tofton.     52   
  “Park House stands high up out of the flood,” said Maggie. “Perhaps they have got Lucy there.”     53   
  Nothing else was said; a new danger was being carried toward them by the river. Some wooden machinery had just given way on one of the wharves, and huge fragments were being floated along. The sun was rising now, and the wide area of watery desolation was spread out in dreadful clearness around them; in dreadful clearness floated onward the hurrying, threatening masses. A large company in a boat that was working its way along under the Tofton houses observed their danger, and shouted, “Get out of the current!”     54   
  But that could not be done at once; and Tom, looking before him, saw death rushing on them. Huge fragments, clinging together in fatal fellowship, made one wide mass across the stream.     55   
  “It is coming, Maggie!” Tom said, in a deep, hoarse voice, loosing the oars, and clasping her.     56   
  The next instant the boat was no longer seen upon the water, and the huge mass was hurrying on in hideous triumph.     57   
  But soon the keel of the boat reappeared, a black speck on the golden water.     58   
  The boat reappeared, but brother and sister had gone down in an embrace never to be parted; living through again in one supreme moment the days when they had clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together.