Book 3 - Chapter 9

An Item Added to the Family Register

That first moment of renunciation and submission was followed by days
of violent struggle in the miller's mind, as the gradual access of
bodily strength brought with it increasing ability to embrace in one
view all the conflicting conditions under which he found himself.
Feeble limbs easily resign themselves to be tethered, and when we are
subdued by sickness it seems possible to us to fulfil pledges which
the old vigor comes back and breaks. There were times when poor
Tulliver thought the fulfilment of his promise to Bessy was something
quite too hard for human nature; he had promised her without knowing
what she was going to say,--she might as well have asked him to carry
a ton weight on his back. But again, there were many feelings arguing
on her side, besides the sense that life had been made hard to her by
having married him. He saw a possibility, by much pinching, of saving
money out of his salary toward paying a second dividend to his
creditors, and it would not be easy elsewhere to get a situation such
as he could fill.

He had led an easy life, ordering much and working little, and had no
aptitude for any new business. He must perhaps take to day-labor, and
his wife must have help from her sisters,--a prospect doubly bitter to
him, now they had let all Bessy's precious things be sold, probably
because they liked to set her against him, by making her feel that he
had brought her to that pass. He listened to their admonitory talk,
when they came to urge on him what he was bound to do for poor Bessy's
sake, with averted eyes, that every now and then flashed on them
furtively when their backs were turned. Nothing but the dread of
needing their help could have made it an easier alternative to take
their advice.

But the strongest influence of all was the love of the old premises
where he had run about when he was a boy, just as Tom had done after
him. The Tullivers had lived on this spot for generations, and he had
sat listening on a low stool on winter evenings while his father
talked of the old half-timbered mill that had been there before the
last great floods which damaged it so that his grandfather pulled it
down and built the new one. It was when he got able to walk about and
look at all the old objects that he felt the strain of his clinging
affection for the old home as part of his life, part of himself. He
couldn't bear to think of himself living on any other spot than this,
where he knew the sound of every gate door, and felt that the shape
and color of every roof and weather-stain and broken hillock was good,
because his growing senses had been fed on them. Our instructed
vagrancy, which was hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs