第55章

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'am 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.