The Essential Works of George Eliot. George Eliot

don’t know what I shall be forced to; but I know what I shall force him to, with his dikes and erigations, if there’s any law to be brought to bear o’ the right side. I know well enough who’s at the bottom of it; he’s got Wakem to back him and egg him on. I know Wakem tells him the law can’t touch him for it, but there’s folks can handle the law besides Wakem. It takes a big raskil to beat him; but there’s bigger to be found, as know more o’ th’ ins and outs o’ the law, else how came Wakem to lose Brumley’s suit for him?”

      Mr. Tulliver was a strictly honest man, and proud of being honest, but he considered that in law the ends of justice could only be achieved by employing a stronger knave to frustrate a weaker. Law was a sort of cock-fight, in which it was the business of injured honesty to get a game bird with the best pluck and the strongest spurs.

      “Gore’s no fool; you needn’t tell me that,” he observed presently, in a pugnacious tone, as if poor Gritty had been urging that lawyer’s capabilities; “but, you see, he isn’t up to the law as Wakem is. And water’s a very particular thing; you can’t pick it up with a pitchfork. That’s why it’s been nuts to Old Harry and the lawyers. It’s plain enough what’s the rights and the wrongs of water, if you look at it straight-forrard; for a river’s a river, and if you’ve got a mill, you must have water to turn it; and it’s no use telling me Pivart’s erigation and nonsense won’t stop my wheel; I know what belongs to water better than that. Talk to me o’ what th’ engineers say! I say it’s common sense, as Pivart’s dikes must do me an injury. But if that’s their engineering, I’ll put Tom to it by-and-by, and he shall see if he can’t find a bit more sense in th’ engineering business than what that comes to.”

      Tom, looking round with some anxiety at this announcement of his prospects, unthinkingly withdrew a small rattle he was amusing baby Moss with, whereupon she, being a baby that knew her own mind with remarkable clearness, instantaneously expressed her sentiments in a piercing yell, and was not to be appeased even by the restoration of the rattle, feeling apparently that the original wrong of having it taken from her remained in all its force. Mrs. Moss hurried away with her into another room, and expressed to Mrs. Tulliver, who accompanied her, the conviction that the dear child had good reasons for crying; implying that if it was supposed to be the rattle that baby clamored for, she was a misunderstood baby. The thoroughly justifiable yell being quieted, Mrs. Moss looked at her sister-in-law and said,—

      “I’m sorry to see brother so put out about this water work.”

      “It’s your brother’s way, Mrs. Moss; I’d never anything o’ that sort before I was married,” said Mrs. Tulliver, with a half-implied reproach. She always spoke of her husband as “your brother” to Mrs. Moss in any case when his line of conduct was not matter of pure admiration. Amiable Mrs. Tulliver, who was never angry in her life, had yet her mild share of that spirit without which she could hardly have been at once a Dodson and a woman. Being always on the defensive toward her own sisters, it was natural that she should be keenly conscious of her superiority, even as the weakest Dodson, over a husband’s sister, who, besides being poorly off, and inclined to “hang on” her brother, had the good-natured submissiveness of a large, easy-tempered, untidy, prolific woman, with affection enough in her not only for her own husband and abundant children, but for any number of collateral relations.

      “I hope and pray he won’t go to law,” said Mrs. Moss, “for there’s never any knowing where that’ll end. And the right doesn’t allays win. This Mr. Pivart’s a rich man, by what I can make out, and the rich mostly get things their own way.”

      “As to that,” said Mrs. Tulliver, stroking her dress down, “I’ve seen what riches are in my own family; for my sisters have got husbands as can afford to do pretty much what they like. But I think sometimes I shall be drove off my head with the talk about this law and erigation; and my sisters lay all the fault to me, for they don’t know what it is to marry a man like your brother; how should they? Sister Pullet has her own way from morning till night.”

      “Well,” said Mrs. Moss, “I don’t think I should like my husband if he hadn’t got any wits of his own, and I had to find head-piece for him. It’s a deal easier to do what pleases one’s husband, than to be puzzling what else one should do.”

      “If people come to talk o’ doing what pleases their husbands,” said Mrs. Tulliver, with a faint imitation of her sister Glegg, “I’m sure your brother might have waited a long while before he’d have found a wife that ’ud have let him have his say in everything, as I do. It’s nothing but law and erigation now, from when we first get up in the morning till we go to bed at night; and I never contradict him; I only say, ‘Well, Mr. Tulliver, do as you like; but whativer you do, don’t go to law.”

      Mrs. Tulliver, as we have seen, was not without influence over her husband. No woman is; she can always incline him to do either what she wishes, or the reverse; and on the composite impulses that were threatening to hurry Mr. Tulliver into “law,” Mrs. Tulliver’s monotonous pleading had doubtless its share of force; it might even be comparable to that proverbial feather which has the credit or discredit of breaking the camel’s back; though, on a strictly impartial view, the blame ought rather to lie with the previous weight of feathers which had already placed the back in such imminent peril that an otherwise innocent feather could not settle on it without mischief. Not that Mrs. Tulliver’s feeble beseeching could have had this feather’s weight in virtue of her single personality; but whenever she departed from entire assent to her husband, he saw in her the representative of the Dodson family; and it was a guiding principle with Mr. Tulliver to let the Dodsons know that they were not to domineer over him, or—more specifically—that a male Tulliver was far more than equal to four female Dodsons, even though one of them was Mrs. Glegg.

      But not even a direct argument from that typical Dodson female herself against his going to law could have heightened his disposition toward it so much as the mere thought of Wakem, continually freshened by the sight of the too able attorney on market-days. Wakem, to his certain knowledge, was (metaphorically speaking) at the bottom of Pivart’s irrigation; Wakem had tried to make Dix stand out, and go to law about the dam; it was unquestionably Wakem who had caused Mr. Tulliver to lose the suit about the right of road and the bridge that made a thoroughfare of his land for every vagabond who preferred an opportunity of damaging private property to walking like an honest man along the highroad; all lawyers were more or less rascals, but Wakem’s rascality was of that peculiarly aggravated kind which placed itself in opposition to that form of right embodied in Mr. Tulliver’s interests and opinions. And as an extra touch of bitterness, the injured miller had recently, in borrowing the five hundred pounds, been obliged to carry a little business to Wakem’s office on his own account. A hook-nosed glib fellow! as cool as a cucumber,—always looking so sure of his game! And it was vexatious that Lawyer Gore was not more like him, but was a bald, round-featured man, with bland manners and fat hands; a game-cock that you would be rash to bet upon against Wakem. Gore was a sly fellow. His weakness did not lie on the side of scrupulosity; but the largest amount of winking, however significant, is not equivalent to seeing through a stone wall; and confident as Mr. Tulliver was in his principle that water was water, and in the direct inference that Pivart had not a leg to stand on in this affair of irrigation, he had an uncomfortable suspicion that Wakem had more law to show against this (rationally) irrefragable inference than Gore could show for it. But then, if they went to law, there was a chance for Mr. Tulliver to employ Counsellor Wylde on his side, instead of having that admirable bully against him; and the prospect of seeing a witness of Wakem’s made to perspire and become confounded, as Mr. Tulliver’s witness had once been, was alluring to the love of retributive justice.

      Much rumination had Mr. Tulliver on these puzzling subjects during his rides on the gray horse; much turning of the head from side to side, as the scales dipped alternately; but the probable result was still out of sight, only to be reached through much hot argument and iteration in domestic and social life. That initial stage of the dispute which consisted in the narration of the case and the enforcement of Mr. Tulliver’s views concerning it throughout the entire circle of his connections would necessarily take time; and at the beginning of February, when Tom was going to school again, there were scarcely any