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.
