I am not sure that she loves me or would consent to marry me.
But if she would consent,–if she did love me well enough,–I should marry her."
"And this is the return you make me for all the indulgences I've heaped on you?" said Wakem, getting white, and beginning to tremble under an enraged sense of impotence before Philip's calm defiance and concentration of purpose.
"No, father," said Philip, looking up at him for the first time;
"I don't regard it as a return.
You have been an indulgent father to me; but I have always felt that it was because you had an affectionate wish to give me as much happiness as my unfortunate lot would admit, not that it was a debt you expected me to pay by sacrificing all my chances of happiness to satisfy feelings of yours which I can never share."
"I think most sons would share their father's feelings in this case," said Wakem, bitterly.
"The girl's father was an ignorant mad brute, who was within an inch of murdering me.
The whole town knows it.
And the brother is just as insolent, only in a cooler way.
He forbade her seeing you, you say; he'll break every bone in your body, for your greater happiness, if you don't take care.
But you seem to have made up your mind; you have counted the consequences, I suppose.
Of course you are independent of me; you can marry this girl to-morrow, if you like; you are a man of five-and-twenty,–you can go your way, and I can go mine.
We need have no more to do with each other."
Wakem rose and walked toward the door, but something held him back, and instead of leaving the room, he walked up and down it.
Philip was slow to reply, and when he spoke, his tone had a more incisive quietness and clearness than ever.
"No; I can't marry Miss Tulliver, even if she would have me, if I have only my own resources to maintain her with.
I have been brought up to no profession.
I can't offer her poverty as well as deformity."
"Ah, there is a reason for your clinging to me, doubtless," said Wakem, still bitterly, though Philip's last words had given him a pang; they had stirred a feeling which had been a habit for a quarter of a century.
He threw himself into the chair again.
"I expected all this," said Philip.
"I know these scenes are often happening between father and son.
If I were like other men of my age, I might answer your angry words by still angrier; we might part; I should marry the woman I love, and have a chance of being as happy as the rest.
But if it will be a satisfaction to you to annihilate the very object of everything you've done for me, you have an advantage over most fathers; you can completely deprive me of the only thing that would make my life worth having."
Philip paused, but his father was silent.
"You know best what satisfaction you would have, beyond that of gratifying a ridiculous rancor worthy only of wandering savages."
"Ridiculous rancor!" Wakem burst out.
"What do you mean?
Damn it! is a man to be horsewhipped by a boor and love him for it?
Besides, there's that cold, proud devil of a son, who said a word to me I shall not forget when we had the settling.
He would be as pleasant a mark for a bullet as I know, if he were worth the expense."
"I don't mean your resentment toward them," said Philip, who had his reasons for some sympathy with this view of Tom, "though a feeling of revenge is not worth much, that you should care to keep it.
I mean your extending the enmity to a helpless girl, who has too much sense and goodness to share their narrow prejudices.
She has never entered into the family quarrels."
"What does that signify?
We don't ask what a woman does; we ask whom she belongs to.
It's altogether a degrading thing to you, to think of marrying old Tulliver's daughter."
For the first time in the dialogue, Philip lost some of his self-control, and colored with anger.
"Miss Tulliver," he said, with bitter incisiveness, "has the only grounds of rank that anything but vulgar folly can suppose to belong to the middle class; she is thoroughly refined, and her friends, whatever else they may be, are respected for irreproachable honor and integrity.
All St. Ogg's, I fancy, would pronounce her to be more than my equal."
Wakem darted a glance of fierce question at his son; but Philip was not looking at him, and with a certain penitent consciousness went on, in a few moments, as if in amplification of his last words,–
"Find a single person in St. Ogg's who will not tell you that a beautiful creature like her would be throwing herself away on a pitiable object like me."
"Not she!" said Wakem, rising again, and forgetting everything else in a burst of resentful pride, half fatherly, half personal.
"It would be a deuced fine match for her.
It's all stuff about an accidental deformity, when a girl's really attached to a man."
"But girls are not apt to get attached under those circumstances," said Philip.
"Well, then," said Wakem, rather brutally, trying to recover his previous position, "if she doesn't care for you, you might have spared yourself the trouble of talking to me about her, and you might have spared me the trouble of refusing my consent to what was never likely to happen."
Wakem strode to the door, and without looking round again, banged it after him.
Philip was not without confidence that his father would be ultimately wrought upon as he had expected, by what had passed; but the scene had jarred upon his nerves, which were as sensitive as a woman's.