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.”
The Final Rescue
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.
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.
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.
