But at the end of the second day, when Maggie had
become more accustomed to her father’s fits
of insensibility, and to the expectation that he would
revive from them, the thought of Tom had become urgent
with her too; and when her mother sate crying
at night and saying, “My poor lad—it’s
nothing but right he should come home,” Maggie
said, “Let me go for him, and tell him, mother;
I’ll go to-morrow morning if father doesn’t
know me and want me. It would be so hard for Tom
to come home and not know anything about it beforehand.”
And the next morning Maggie went, as we have seen.
Sitting on the coach on their way home, the brother
and sister talked to each other in sad, interrupted
whispers.
“They say Mr. Wakem has got a mortgage or something
on the land, Tom,” said Maggie. “It
was the letter with that news in it that made father
ill, they think.”
“I believe that scoundrel’s been planning
all along to ruin my father,” said Tom, leaping
from the vaguest impressions to a definite conclusion.
“I’ll make him feel for it when I’m
a man. Mind you never speak to Philip again.”
“Oh, Tom!” said Maggie, in a tone of sad
remonstrance; but she had no spirit to dispute anything
then, still less to vex Tom by opposing him.
Mrs. Tulliver’s Teraphim, or Household Gods
When the coach set down Tom and Maggie, it was five
hours since she had started from home, and she was
thinking with some trembling that her father had perhaps
missed her, and asked for “the little wench”
in vain. She thought of no other change that
might have happened.
She hurried along the gravel-walk and entered the
house before Tom; but in the entrance she was startled
by a strong smell of tobacco. The parlor door
was ajar; that was where the smell came from.
It was very strange; could any visitor be smoking
at a time like this? Was her mother there?
If so, she must be told that Tom was come. Maggie,
after this pause of surprise, was only in the act
of opening the door when Tom came up, and they both
looked into the parlor together.
There was a coarse, dingy man, of whose face Tom had
some vague recollection, sitting in his father’s
chair, smoking, with a jug and glass beside him.
The truth flashed on Tom’s mind in an instant.
To “have the bailiff in the house,” and
“to be sold up,” were phrases which he
had been used to, even as a little boy; they were
part of the disgrace and misery of “failing,”
of losing all one’s money, and being ruined,—sinking
into the condition of poor working people. It
seemed only natural this should happen, since his
father had lost all his property, and he thought of
no more special cause for this particular form of
misfortune than the loss of the lawsuit. But the
immediate presence of this disgrace was so much keener
an experience to Tom than the worst form of apprehension,
that he felt at this moment as if his real trouble
had only just begin; it was a touch on the irritated
nerve compared with its spontaneous dull aching.
