“Well, Mr Glegg! it’s a poor return I get for making you the wife…

“Well, Mr Glegg! it’s a poor return I get for making you the wife I’ve made you all these years. If this is the way I’m to be treated, I’d better ha’ known it before my poor father died, and then, when I’d wanted a home, I should ha’ gone elsewhere, as the choice was offered me.”

Mr Glegg paused from his porridge and looked up, not with any new amazement, but simply with that quiet, habitual wonder with which we regard constant mysteries.

“Why, Mrs G., what have I done now?”

“Done now, Mr Glegg? done now?—I’m sorry for you.”

Not seeing his way to any pertinent answer, Mr Glegg reverted to his porridge.

“There’s husbands in the world,” continued Mrs Glegg, after a pause, “as ’ud have known how to do something different to siding with everybody else against their own wives. Perhaps I’m wrong and you can teach me better. But I’ve allays heard as it’s the husband’s place to stand by the wife, instead o’ rejoicing and triumphing when folks insult her.”

“Now, what call have you to say that?” said Mr Glegg, rather warmly, for though a kind man, he was not as meek as Moses. “When did I rejoice or triumph over you?”

“There’s ways o’ doing things worse than speaking out plain, Mr Glegg. I’d sooner you’d tell me to my face as you make light of me, than try to make out as everybody’s in the right but me, and come to your breakfast in the morning, as I’ve hardly slept an hour this night, and sulk at me as if I was the dirt under your feet.”

“Sulk at you?” said Mr Glegg, in a tone of angry facetiousness. “You’re like a tipsy man as thinks everybody’s had too much but himself.”

“Don’t lower yourself with using coarse language to me, Mr Glegg! It makes you look very small, though you can’t see yourself,” said Mrs Glegg, in a tone of energetic compassion. “A man in your place should set an example, and talk more sensible.”

“Yes; but will you listen to sense?” retorted Mr Glegg, sharply. “The best sense I can talk to you is what I said last night,—as you’re i’ the wrong to think o’ calling in your money, when it’s safe enough if you’d let it alone, all because of a bit of a tiff, and I was in hopes you’d ha’ altered your mind this morning. But if you’d like to call it in, don’t do it in a hurry now, and breed more enmity in the family, but wait till there’s a pretty mortgage to be had without any trouble. You’d have to set the lawyer to work now to find an investment, and make no end o’ expense.”

Mrs Glegg felt there was really something in this, but she tossed her head and emitted a guttural interjection to indicate that her silence was only an armistice, not a peace. And, in fact hostilities soon broke out again.

“I’ll thank you for my cup o’ tea, now, Mrs G.,” said Mr Glegg, seeing that she did not proceed to give it him as usual, when he had finished his porridge. She lifted the teapot with a slight toss of the head, and said,—

“I’m glad to hear you’ll thank me, Mr Glegg. It’s little thanks I get for what I do for folks i’ this world. Though there’s never a woman o’ your side o’ the family, Mr Glegg, as is fit to stand up with me, and I’d say it if I was on my dying bed. Not but what I’ve allays conducted myself civil to your kin, and there isn’t one of ’em can say the contrary, though my equils they aren’t, and nobody shall make me say it.”

“You’d better leave finding fault wi’ my kin till you’ve left off quarrelling with your own, Mrs G.,” said Mr Glegg, with angry sarcasm. “I’ll trouble you for the milk-jug.”

“That’s as false a word as ever you spoke, Mr Glegg,” said the lady, pouring out the milk with unusual profuseness, as much as to say, if he wanted milk he should have it with a vengeance. “And you know it’s false. I’m not the woman to quarrel with my own kin; you may, for I’ve known you to do it.”

“Why, what did you call it yesterday, then, leaving your sister’s house in a tantrum?”

“I’d no quarrel wi’ my sister, Mr Glegg, and it’s false to say it. Mr Tulliver’s none o’ my blood, and it was him quarrelled with me, and drove me out o’ the house. But perhaps you’d have had me stay and be swore at, Mr Glegg; perhaps you was vexed not to hear more abuse and foul language poured out upo’ your own wife. But, let me tell you, it’s your disgrace.”

“Did ever anybody hear the like i’ this parish?” said Mr Glegg, getting hot. “A woman, with everything provided for her, and allowed to keep her own money the same as if it was settled on her, and with a gig new stuffed and lined at no end o’ expense, and provided for when I die beyond anything she could expect—to go on i’ this way, biting and snapping like a mad dog! It’s beyond everything, as God A ’mighty should ha’ made women so.” (These last words were uttered in a tone of sorrowful agitation. Mr Glegg pushed his tea from him, and tapped the table with both his hands.)

“Well, Mr Glegg, if those are your feelings, it’s best they should be known,” said Mrs Glegg, taking off her napkin, and folding it in an excited manner. “But if you talk o’ my being provided for beyond what I could expect, I beg leave to tell you as I’d a right to expect a many things as I don’t find. And as to my being like a mad dog, it’s well if you’re not cried shame on by the county for your treatment of me, for it’s what I can’t bear, and I won’t bear——”

Here Mrs Glegg’s voice intimated that she was going to cry, and breaking off from speech, she rang the bell violently.

“Sally,” she said, rising from her chair, and speaking in rather a choked voice, “light a fire up-stairs, and put the blinds down. Mr Glegg, you’ll please to order what you’d like for dinner. I shall have gruel.”

Mrs Glegg walked across the room to the small book-case, and took down Baxter’s “Saints’ Everlasting Rest,” which she carried with her up-stairs. It was the book she was accustomed to lay open before her on special occasions,—on wet Sunday mornings, or when she heard of a death in the family, or when, as in this case, her quarrel with Mr Glegg had been set an octave higher than usual.

But Mrs Glegg carried something else up-stairs with her, which, together with the “Saints’ Rest” and the gruel, may have had some influence in gradually calming her feelings, and making it possible for her to endure existence on the ground-floor, shortly before tea-time. This was, partly, Mr Glegg’s suggestion that she would do well to let her five hundred lie still until a good investment turned up; and, further, his parenthetic hint at his handsome provision for her in case of his death. Mr Glegg, like all men of his stamp, was extremely reticent about his will; and Mrs Glegg, in her gloomier moments, had forebodings that, like other husbands of whom she had heard, he might cherish the mean project of heightening her grief at his death by leaving her poorly off, in which case she was firmly resolved that she would have scarcely any weeper on her bonnet, and would cry no more than if he had been a second husband. But if he had really shown her any testamentary tenderness, it would be affecting to think of him, poor man, when he was gone; and even his foolish fuss about the flowers and garden-stuff, and his insistence on the subject of snails, would be touching when it was once fairly at an end. To survive Mr Glegg, and talk eulogistically of him as a man who might have his weaknesses, but who had done the right thing by her, not-withstanding his numerous poor relations; to have sums of interest coming in more frequently, and secrete it in various corners, baffling to the most ingenious of thieves (for, to Mrs Glegg’s mind, banks and strong-boxes would have nullified the pleasure of property; she might as well have taken her food in capsules); finally, to be looked up to by her own family and the neighbourhood, so as no woman can ever hope to be who has not the præterite and present dignity comprised in being a “widow well left,”—all this made a flattering and conciliatory view of the future. So that when good Mr Glegg, restored to good humour by much hoeing, and moved by the sight of his wife’s empty chair, with her knitting rolled up in the corner, went up-stairs to her, and observed that the bell had been tolling for poor Mr Morton, Mrs Glegg answered magnanimously, quite as if she had been an uninjured woman: “Ah! then, there’ll be a good business for somebody to take to.”

Baxter had been open at least eight hours by this time, for it was nearly five o’clock; and if people are to quarrel often, it follows as a corollary that their quarrels cannot be protracted beyond certain limits.

Mr and Mrs Glegg talked quite amicably about the Tullivers that evening. Mr Glegg went the length of admitting that Tulliver was a sad man for getting into hot water, and was like enough to run through his property; and Mrs Glegg, meeting this acknowledgment half-way, declared that it was beneath her to take notice of such a man’s conduct, and that, for her sister’s sake, she would let him keep the five hundred a while longer, for when she put it out on a mortgage she should only get four per cent.

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 behaviour in family matters. Mrs Pullet’s argument, that it would look ill in the neighbourhood 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 favours; 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 favours 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 of that sense of honour and rectitude which was a proud tradition in such families,—a tradition which has been the salt of our provincial society.