Tom Is Expected
It was a heavy disappointment to Maggie that she was
not allowed to go with her father in the gig when
he went to fetch Tom home from the academy; but the
morning was too wet, Mrs. Tulliver said, for a little
girl to go out in her best bonnet. Maggie took
the opposite view very strongly, and it was a direct
consequence of this difference of opinion that when
her mother was in the act of brushing out the reluctant
black crop Maggie suddenly rushed from under her hands
and dipped her head in a basin of water standing near,
in the vindictive determination that there should
be no more chance of curls that day.
“Maggie, Maggie!” exclaimed Mrs. Tulliver,
sitting stout and helpless with the brushes on her
lap, “what is to become of you if you’re
so naughty? I’ll tell your aunt Glegg and
your aunt Pullet when they come next week, and they’ll
never love you any more. Oh dear, oh dear! look
at your clean pinafore, wet from top to bottom.
Folks ’ull think it’s a judgment on me
as I’ve got such a child,—they’ll
think I’ve done summat wicked.”
Before this remonstrance was finished, Maggie was
already out of hearing, making her way toward the
great attic that run under the old high-pitched roof,
shaking the water from her black locks as she ran,
like a Skye terrier escaped from his bath. This
attic was Maggie’s favorite retreat on a wet
day, when the weather was not too cold; here she fretted
out all her ill humors, and talked aloud to the worm-eaten
floors and the worm-eaten shelves, and the dark rafters
festooned with cobwebs; and here she kept a Fetish
which she punished for all her misfortunes. This
was the trunk of a large wooden doll, which once stared
with the roundest of eyes above the reddest of cheeks;
but was now entirely defaced by a long career of vicarious
suffering. Three nails driven into the head commemorated
as many crises in Maggie’s nine years of earthly
struggle; that luxury of vengeance having been suggested
to her by the picture of Jael destroying Sisera in
the old Bible. The last nail had been driven
in with a fiercer stroke than usual, for the Fetish
on that occasion represented aunt Glegg. But
immediately afterward Maggie had reflected that if
she drove many nails in she would not be so well able
to fancy that the head was hurt when she knocked it
against the wall, nor to comfort it, and make believe
to poultice it, when her fury was abated; for even
aunt Glegg would be pitiable when she had been hurt
very much, and thoroughly humiliated, so as to beg
her niece’s pardon. Since then she had driven
no more nails in, but had soothed herself by alternately
grinding and beating the wooden head against the rough
brick of the great chimneys that made two square pillars
supporting the roof. That was what she did this
morning on reaching the attic, sobbing all the while
with a passion that expelled every other form of consciousness,—even
