Mr Tulliver lingered nowhere away from home: he hurried away from market, he refused all invitations to stay and chat, as in old times, in the houses where he called on business.He could not be reconciled with his lot: there was no attitude in which his pride did not feel its bruises; and in all behaviour towards him, whether kind or cold, he detected an allusion to the change in his circumstances.Even the days on which Wakem came to ride round the land and inquire into the business, were not so black to him as those market days on which he had met several creditors who had accepted a composition from him.To save something towards the repayment of those creditors was the object towards which he was now bending all his thoughts and efforts; and under the influence of this all-compelling demand of his nature, the somewhat profuse man who hated to be stinted or to stint any one else in his own house, was gradually metamorphosed into the keen-eyed grudger of morsels.Mrs Tulliver could not economise enough to satisfy him, in their food and firing, and he would eat nothing himself but what was of the coarsest quality.Tom, though depressed and strongly repelled by his father's sullennness and the dreariness of home, entered thoroughly into his father's feelings about paying the creditors and the poor lad brought his first quarter's money, with a delicious sense of achievement, and gave it to his father to put into the tin box which held the savings.
The little store of sovereigns in the tin box seemed to be the only sight that brought a faint beam of pleasure into the miller's eyes - faint and transient, for it was soon dispelled by the thought that the time would be long - perhaps longer than his life - before the narrow savings could remove the hateful incubus of debt.A deficit of more than five hundred pounds with the accumulating interest seemed a deep pit to fill with the savings from thirty shillings a week, even when Tom's probable savings were to be added.On this one point there was entire community of feeling in the four widely differing beings who sat round the dying fire of sticks which made a cheap warmth for them on the verge of bed time.Mrs Tulliver carried the proud integrity of the Dodsons in her blood, and had been brought up to think that to wrong people of their money, which was another phrase for debt, was a sort of moral pillory: it would have been wickedness, to her mind, to have run counter to her husband's desire to `do the right thing' and retrieve his name.She had a confused dreamy notion that if the creditors were all paid, her plate and linen ought to come back to her, but she had an inbred perception that while people owed money they were unable to pay, they couldn't rightly call anything their own.She murmured a little that Mr Tulliver so peremptorily refused to receive anything in repayment from Mr and Mrs Moss: but to all his requirements of household economy she was submissive to the point of denying herself the cheapest indulgences of mere flavour: her only rebellion was to smuggle into the kitchen something that would make rather a better supper than usual for Tom.
