Part 68 (2/2)
She was shown up at once, after being announced, into Dr. Kenn's study, where he sat amongst piled-up books, for which he had little appet.i.te, leaning his cheek against the head of his youngest child, a girl of three. The child was sent away with the servant, and when the door was closed, Dr. Kenn said, placing a chair for Maggie,--
”I was coming to see you, Miss Tulliver; you have antic.i.p.ated me; I am glad you did.”
Maggie looked at him with her childlike directness as she had done at the bazaar, and said, ”I want to tell you everything.” But her eyes filled fast with tears as she said it, and all the pent-up excitement of her humiliating walk would have its vent before she could say more.
”Do tell me everything,” Dr. Kenn said, with quiet kindness in his grave, firm voice. ”Think of me as one to whom a long experience has been granted, which may enable him to help you.”
In rather broken sentences, and with some effort at first, but soon with the greater ease that came from a sense of relief in the confidence, Maggie told the brief story of a struggle that must be the beginning of a long sorrow. Only the day before, Dr. Kenn had been made acquainted with the contents of Stephen's letter, and he had believed them at once, without the confirmation of Maggie's statement.
That involuntary plaint of hers, ”_Oh, I must go_,” had remained with him as the sign that she was undergoing some inward conflict.
Maggie dwelt the longest on the feeling which had made her come back to her mother and brother, which made her cling to all the memories of the past. When she had ended, Dr. Kenn was silent for some minutes; there was a difficulty on his mind. He rose, and walked up and down the hearth with his hands behind him. At last he seated himself again, and said, looking at Maggie,--
”Your prompting to go to your nearest friends,--to remain where all the ties of your life have been formed,--is a true prompting, to which the Church in its original const.i.tution and discipline responds, opening its arms to the penitent, watching over its children to the last; never abandoning them until they are hopelessly reprobate. And the Church ought to represent the feeling of the community, so that every parish should be a family knit together by Christian brotherhood under a spiritual father. But the ideas of discipline and Christian fraternity are entirely relaxed,--they can hardly be said to exist in the public mind; they hardly survive except in the partial, contradictory form they have taken in the narrow communities of schismatics; and if I were not supported by the firm faith that the Church must ultimately recover the full force of that const.i.tution which is alone fitted to human needs, I should often lose heart at observing the want of fellows.h.i.+p and sense of mutual responsibility among my own flock. At present everything seems tending toward the relaxation of ties,--toward the subst.i.tution of wayward choice for the adherence to obligation, which has its roots in the past. Your conscience and your heart have given you true light on this point, Miss Tulliver; and I have said all this that you may know what my wish about you--what my advice to you--would be, if they sprang from my own feeling and opinion unmodified by counteracting circ.u.mstances.”
Dr. Kenn paused a little while. There was an entire absence of effusive benevolence in his manner; there was something almost cold in the gravity of his look and voice. If Maggie had not known that his benevolence was persevering in proportion to its reserve, she might have been chilled and frightened. As it was, she listened expectantly, quite sure that there would be some effective help in his words. He went on.
”Your inexperience of the world, Miss Tulliver, prevents you from antic.i.p.ating fully the very unjust conceptions that will probably be formed concerning your conduct,--conceptions which will have a baneful effect, even in spite of known evidence to disprove them.”
”Oh, I do,--I begin to see,” said Maggie, unable to repress this utterance of her recent pain. ”I know I shall be insulted. I shall be thought worse than I am.”
”You perhaps do not yet know,” said Dr. Kenn, with a touch of more personal pity, ”that a letter is come which ought to satisfy every one who has known anything of you, that you chose the steep and difficult path of a return to the right, at the moment when that return was most of all difficult.”
”Oh, where is he?” said poor Maggie, with a flush and tremor that no presence could have hindered.
”He is gone abroad; he has written of all that pa.s.sed to his father.
He has vindicated you to the utmost; and I hope the communication of that letter to your cousin will have a beneficial effect on her.”
Dr. Kenn waited for her to get calm again before he went on.
”That letter, as I said, ought to suffice to prevent false impressions concerning you. But I am bound to tell you, Miss Tulliver, that not only the experience of my whole life, but my observation within the last three days, makes me fear that there is hardly any evidence which will save you from the painful effect of false imputations. The persons who are the most incapable of a conscientious struggle such as yours are precisely those who will be likely to shrink from you, because they will not believe in your struggle. I fear your life here will be attended not only with much pain, but with many obstructions.
For this reason--and for this only--I ask you to consider whether it will not perhaps be better for you to take a situation at a distance, according to your former intention. I will exert myself at once to obtain one for you.”
”Oh, if I could but stop here!” said Maggie. ”I have no heart to begin a strange life again. I should have no stay. I should feel like a lonely wanderer, cut off from the past. I have written to the lady who offered me a situation to excuse myself. If I remained here, I could perhaps atone in some way to Lucy--to others; I could convince them that I'm sorry. And,” she added, with some of the old proud fire flas.h.i.+ng out, ”I will not go away because people say false things of me. They shall learn to retract them. If I must go away at last, because--because others wish it, I will not go now.”
”Well,” said Dr. Kenn, after some consideration, ”if you determine on that, Miss Tulliver, you may rely on all the influence my position gives me. I am bound to aid and countenance you by the very duties of my office as a parish priest. I will add, that personally I have a deep interest in your peace of mind and welfare.”
”The only thing I want is some occupation that will enable me to get my bread and be independent,” said Maggie. ”I shall not want much. I can go on lodging where I am.”
”I must think over the subject maturely,” said Dr. Kenn, ”and in a few days I shall be better able to ascertain the general feeling. I shall come to see you; I shall bear you constantly in mind.”
When Maggie had left him, Dr. Kenn stood ruminating with his hands behind him, and his eyes fixed on the carpet, under a painful sense of doubt and difficulty. The tone of Stephen's letter, which he had read, and the actual relations of all the persons concerned, forced upon him powerfully the idea of an ultimate marriage between Stephen and Maggie as the least evil; and the impossibility of their proximity in St.
Ogg's on any other supposition, until after years of separation, threw an insurmountable prospective difficulty over Maggie's stay there. On the other hand, he entered with all the comprehension of a man who had known spiritual conflict, and lived through years of devoted service to his fellow-men, into that state of Maggie's heart and conscience which made the consent to the marriage a desecration to her; her conscience must not be tampered with; the principle on which she had acted was a safer guide than any balancing of consequences. His experience told him that intervention was too dubious a responsibility to be lightly incurred; the possible issue either of an endeavor to restore the former relations with Lucy and Philip, or of counselling submission to this irruption of a new feeling, was hidden in a darkness all the more impenetrable because each immediate step was clogged with evil.
The great problem of the s.h.i.+fting relation between pa.s.sion and duty is clear to no man who is capable of apprehending it; the question whether the moment has come in which a man has fallen below the possibility of a renunciation that will carry any efficacy, and must accept the sway of a pa.s.sion against which he had struggled as a trespa.s.s, is one for which we have no master-key that will fit all cases. The casuists have become a byword of reproach; but their perverted spirit of minute discrimination was the shadow of a truth to which eyes and hearts are too often fatally sealed,--the truth, that moral judgments must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circ.u.mstances that mark the individual lot.
All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims; because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy. And the man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgment solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality,--without any care to a.s.sure themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a hardly earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human.
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