Still, among the various excesses to which human nature is subject, moralists have never numbered that of being too fond of the people who openly revile us.The successful Yellow candidate for the borough of Old Topping perhaps fells no pursuant meditative hatred toward the Blue tor who consoles his subscribers with vituperative rhetoric against Yellow men who sell their country and are the demons of private life: but he might not be sorry, if law and opportunity favoured, to kick that Blue editor to a deeper shade of his favourite colour.Prosperous men take a little vengeance now and then, as they take a diversion, when it comes easily in their way and is no hindrance to business; and such small unimpassioned revenges have an enormous effect in life, running through all degrees of pleasant infliction, blocking the fit men out of places, and blackening characters in unpremeditated talk.Still more, to see people who have been only insignificantly offensive to us, reduced in life and humiliated without any special efforts of ours is apt to have a soothing, flattering influence:
Providence, or some other prince of this world, it appears, has undertaken the task of retribution for us; and really, by an agreeable constitution of things, our enemies, somehow, don't prosper.
Wakem was not without this parenthetic vindictiveness towards the uncomplimentary miller, and now Mrs Tulliver had put the notion into his head it presented itself to him as a pleasure to do the very thing that would cause Mr Tulliver the most deadly mortification, and a pleasure of a complex kind, not made up of crude malice but mingling with it the relish of self-approbation.
To see an enemy humiliated gives a certain contentment, but this is jejune compared with the highly blent satisfaction of seeing him humiliated by your benevolent action of concession on his behalf.That is a sort of revenge which falls into the scale of virtue, and Wakem was not without an intention of keeping that scale respectably filled.He had once had the pleasure of putting an old enemy of his into one of the St Ogg's almshouses, to the rebuilding of which he had given a large subscription; and here was an opportunity of providing for another by making him his own servant.
Such things give a completeness to prosperity, and contribute elements of agreeable consciousness that are not dreamed of by that short-sighted overheated vindictiveness, which goes out of its way to wreak itself in direct injury.And Tulliver with his rough tongue field by a sense of obligation, would make a better servant than any chance fellow who was cap-in-hand for a situation.Tulliver was known to be a man of proud honesty, and Wakem was too acute not to believe in the existence of honesty.He was given to observing individuals, not to judging of them according to maxims, and no one knew better than he, that all men were not like himself.Besides he intended to overlook the whole business of land and mill pretty closely:
he was fond of these practical rural matters.But there were good reasons for purchasing Dorlcote Mill, quite apart form any benevolent vengeance on the miller.It was really a capital investment; besides, Guest &Co.were going to bid for it.Mr Guest and Mr Wakem were on friendly dining terms, and the attorney liked to predominate over a ship-owner and mill-owner who was a little too loud in the town affairs as well as in his table talk.
For Wakem was not a mere man of business: he was considered a pleasant fellow in the upper circles at Ogg's, chatted amusingly over his port wine, did a little amateur farming, and had certainly been an excellent husband and father: at church, when he went there, he sat under the handsomest of mural monuments erected to the memory of his wife.Most men would have married again under his circumstances but he was said to be more tender to his deformed son than most men were to their best shapen offspring.
Not that Mr Wakem had not other sons besides Philip, but towards them he held only a chiaroscuro parentage, and provided for them in a grade of life duly beneath his own.In this fact, indeed, there lay the clenching motive to the purchase of Dorlcote Mill.While Mrs Tulliver was talking, it had occurred to the rapid-minded lawyer, among all the other circumstances of the case, that this purchase would in a few years to come furnish a highly suitable position for a certain favourite lad whom he meant to bring on in the world.
These were the mental conditions on which Mrs Tulliver had undertaken to act persuasively, and had failed: a fact which may receive some illustration from the remark of a great philosopher, that fly-fishers fail in preparing their bait so as to make it alluring in the right quarter for want of a due acquaintance with the subjectivity of fishes.
