Under all this grim melancholy and narrowing concentration
of desire, Mr. Tulliver retained the feeling toward
his “little wench” which made her presence
a need to him, though it would not suffice to cheer
him. She was still the desire of his eyes; but
the sweet spring of fatherly love was now mingled
with bitterness, like everything else. When Maggie
laid down her work at night, it was her habit to get
a low stool and sit by her father’s knee, leaning
her cheek against it. How she wished he would
stroke her head, or give some sign that he was soothed
by the sense that he had a daughter who loved him!
But now she got no answer to her little caresses,
either from her father or from Tom,—the
two idols of her life. Tom was weary and abstracted
in the short intervals when he was at home, and her
father was bitterly preoccupied with the thought that
the girl was growing up, was shooting up into a woman;
and how was she to do well in life? She had a
poor chance for marrying, down in the world as they
were. And he hated the thought of her marrying
poorly, as her aunt Gritty had done; that would
be a thing to make him turn in his grave,—the
little wench so pulled down by children and toil,
as her aunt Moss was. When uncultured minds,
confined to a narrow range of personal experience,
are under the pressure of continued misfortune, their
inward life is apt to become a perpetually repeated
round of sad and bitter thoughts; the same words,
the same scenes, are revolved over and over again,
the same mood accompanies them; the end of the year
finds them as much what they were at the beginning
as if they were machines set to a recurrent series
of movements.
The sameness of the days was broken by few visitors.
Uncles and aunts paid only short visits now; of course,
they could not stay to meals, and the constraint caused
by Mr. Tulliver’s savage silence, which seemed
to add to the hollow resonance of the bare, uncarpeted
room when the aunts were talking, heightened the unpleasantness
of these family visits on all sides, and tended to
make them rare. As for other acquaintances, there
is a chill air surrounding those who are down in the
world, and people are glad to get away from them, as
from a cold room; human beings, mere men and women,
without furniture, without anything to offer you,
who have ceased to count as anybody, present an embarrassing
negation of reasons for wishing to see them, or of
subjects on which to converse with them. At that
distant day, there was a dreary isolation in the civilized
Christian society of these realms for families that
had dropped below their original level, unless they
belonged to a sectarian church, which gets some warmth
of brotherhood by walling in the sacred fire.
