Chapter XIII

Mr. Tulliver Further Entangles the Skein of Life


Owing to this new adjustment of Mrs. Glegg's thoughts, Mrs. Pullet
found her task of mediation the next day surprisingly easy. Mrs.
Glegg, indeed checked her rather sharply for thinking it would be
necessary to tell her elder sister what was the right mode of behavior
in family matters. Mrs. Pullet's argument, that it would look ill in
the neighborhood if people should have it in their power to say that
there was a quarrel in the family, was particularly offensive. If the
family name never suffered except through Mrs. Glegg, Mrs. Pullet
might lay her head on her pillow in perfect confidence.

"It's not to be expected, I suppose," observed Mrs. Glegg, by way of
winding up the subject, "as I shall go to the mill again before Bessy
comes to see me, or as I shall go and fall down o' my knees to Mr.
Tulliver, and ask his pardon for showing him favors; but I shall bear
no malice, and when Mr. Tulliver speaks civil to me, I'll speak civil
to him. Nobody has any call to tell me what's becoming."

Finding it unnecessary to plead for the Tullivers, it was natural that
aunt Pullet should relax a little in her anxiety for them, and recur
to the annoyance she had suffered yesterday from the offspring of that
apparently ill-fated house. Mrs. Glegg heard a circumstantial
narrative, to which Mr. Pullet's remarkable memory furnished some
items; and while aunt Pullet pitied poor Bessy's bad luck with her
children, and expressed a half-formed project of paying for Maggie's
being sent to a distant boarding-school, which would not prevent her
being so brown, but might tend to subdue some other vices in her, aunt
Glegg blamed Bessy for her weakness, and appealed to all witnesses who
should be living when the Tulliver children had turned out ill, that
she, Mrs. Glegg, had always said how it would be from the very first,
observing that it was wonderful to herself how all her words came
true.

"Then I may call and tell Bessy you'll bear no malice, and everything
be as it was before?" Mrs. Pullet said, just before parting.

"Yes, you may, Sophy," said Mrs. Glegg; "you may tell Mr. Tulliver,
and Bessy too, as I'm not going to behave ill because folks behave ill
to me; I know it's my place, as the eldest, to set an example in every
respect, and I do it. Nobody can say different of me, if they'll keep
to the truth."

Mrs. Glegg being in this state of satisfaction in her own lofty
magnanimity, I leave you to judge what effect was produced on her by
the reception of a short letter from Mr. Tulliver that very evening,
after Mrs. Pullet's departure, informing her that she needn't trouble
her mind about her five hundred pounds, for it should be paid back to
her in the course of the next month at farthest, together with the
interest due thereon until the time of payment. And furthermore, that
Mr. Tulliver had no wish to behave uncivilly to Mrs. Glegg, and she
was welcome to his house whenever she liked to come, but he desired no
favors from her, either for himself or his children.

It was poor Mrs. Tulliver who had hastened this catastrophe, entirely
through that irrepressible hopefulness of hers which led her to expect
that similar causes may at any time produce different results. It had
very often occurred in her experience that Mr. Tulliver had done
something because other people had said he was not able to do it, or
had pitied him for his supposed inability, or in any other way piqued
his pride; still, she thought to-day, if she told him when he came in
to tea that sister Pullet was gone to try and make everything up with
sister Glegg, so that he needn't think about paying in the money, it
would give a cheerful effect to the meal. Mr. Tulliver had never
slackened in his resolve to raise the money, but now he at once
determined to write a letter to Mrs. Glegg, which should cut off all
possibility of mistake. Mrs. Pullet gone to beg and pray for _him_
indeed! Mr. Tulliver did not willingly write a letter, and found the
relation between spoken and written language, briefly known as
spelling, one of the most puzzling things in this puzzling world.
Nevertheless, like all fervid writing, the task was done in less time
than usual, and if the spelling differed from Mrs. Glegg's,--why, she
belonged, like himself, to a generation with whom spelling was a
matter of private judgment.

Mrs. Glegg did not alter her will in consequence of this letter, and
cut off the Tulliver children from their sixth and seventh share in
her thousand pounds; for she had her principles. No one must be able
to say of her when she was dead that she had not divided her money
with perfect fairness among her own kin. In the matter of wills,
personal qualities were subordinate to the great fundamental fact of
blood; and to be determined in the distribution of your property by
caprice, and not make your legacies bear a direct ratio to degrees of
kinship, was a prospective disgrace that would have embittered her
life. This had always been a principle in the Dodson family; it was
one form if that sense of honor and rectitude which was a proud
tradition in such families,--a tradition which has been the salt of
our provincial society.

But though the letter could not shake Mrs. Glegg's principles, it made
the family breach much more difficult to mend; and as to the effect it
produced on Mrs. Glegg's opinion of Mr. Tulliver, she begged to be
understood from that time forth that she had nothing whatever to say
about him; his state of mind, apparently, was too corrupt for her to
contemplate it for a moment. It was not until the evening before Tom
went to school, at the beginning of August, that Mrs. Glegg paid a
visit to her sister Tulliver, sitting in her gig all the while, and
showing her displeasure by markedly abstaining from all advice and
criticism; for, as she observed to her sister Deane, "Bessy must bear
the consequence o' having such a husband, though I'm sorry for her,"
and Mrs. Deane agreed that Bessy was pitiable.

That evening Tom observed to Maggie: "Oh my! Maggie, aunt Glegg's
beginning to come again; I'm glad I'm going to school. _You'll_ catch
it all now!"

Maggie was already so full of sorrow at the thought of Tom's going
away from her, that this playful exultation of his seemed very unkind,
and she cried herself to sleep that night.

Mr. Tulliver's prompt procedure entailed on him further promptitude in
finding the convenient person who was desirous of lending five hundred
pounds on bond. "It must be no client of Wakem's," he said to himself;
and yet at the end of a fortnight it turned out to the contrary; not
because Mr. Tulliver's will was feeble, but because external fact was
stronger. Wakem's client was the only convenient person to be found.
Mr. Tulliver had a destiny as well as Oedipus, and in this case
he might plead, like Oedipus, that his deed was inflicted on him
rather than committed by him.