There was much more talk before bedtime. Mr.
Tulliver naturally wanted to hear all the particulars
of Tom’s trading adventures, and he listened
with growing excitement and delight. He was curious
to know what had been said on every occasion; if possible,
what had been thought; and Bob Jakin’s part
in the business threw him into peculiar outbursts
of sympathy with the triumphant knowingness of that
remarkable packman. Bob’s juvenile history,
so far as it had come under Mr. Tulliver’s knowledge,
was recalled with that sense of astonishing promise
it displayed, which is observable in all reminiscences
of the childhood of great men.
It was well that there was this interest of narrative
to keep under the vague but fierce sense of triumph
over Wakem, which would otherwise have been the channel
his joy would have rushed into with dangerous force.
Even as it was, that feeling from time to time gave
threats of its ultimate mastery, in sudden bursts of
irrelevant exclamation.
It was long before Mr. Tulliver got to sleep that
night; and the sleep, when it came, was filled with
vivid dreams. At half-past five o’clock
in the morning, when Mrs. Tulliver was already rising,
he alarmed her by starting up with a sort of smothered
shout, and looking round in a bewildered way at the
walls of the bedroom.
“What’s the matter, Mr. Tulliver?”
said his wife. He looked at her, still with a
puzzled expression, and said at last:
“Ah!—I was dreaming—did
I make a noise?—I thought I’d got
hold of him.”
A Day of Reckoning
Mr. Tulliver was an essentially sober man,—able
to take his glass and not averse to it, but never
exceeding the bounds of moderation. He had naturally
an active Hotspur temperament, which did not crave
liquid fire to set it aglow; his impetuosity was usually
equal to an exciting occasion without any such reinforcements;
and his desire for the brandy-and-water implied that
the too sudden joy had fallen with a dangerous shock
on a frame depressed by four years of gloom and unaccustomed
hard fare. But that first doubtful tottering moment
passed, he seemed to gather strength with his gathering
excitement; and the next day, when he was seated at
table with his creditors, his eye kindling and his
cheek flushed with the consciousness that he was about
to make an honorable figure once more, he looked more
like the proud, confident, warm-hearted, and warm-tempered
Tulliver of old times than might have seemed possible
to any one who had met him a week before, riding along
as had been his wont for the last four years since
the sense of failure and debt had been upon him,—with
his head hanging down, casting brief, unwilling looks
on those who forced themselves on his notice.
He made his speech, asserting his honest principles
with his old confident eagerness, alluding to the rascals
and the luck that had been against him, but that he
