Mrs. Moss’s tears came again at this unexpected
kindness, and she could say nothing.
“Come, come!—the little wench shall
come and see you. I’ll bring her and Tom
some day before he goes to school. You mustn’t
fret. I’ll allays be a good brother to
you.”
“Thank you for that word, brother,” said
Mrs. Moss, drying her tears; then turning to Lizzy,
she said, “Run now, and fetch the colored egg
for cousin Maggie.” Lizzy ran in, and quickly
reappeared with a small paper parcel.
“It’s boiled hard, brother, and colored
with thrums, very pretty; it was done o’ purpose
for Maggie. Will you please to carry it in your
pocket?”
“Ay, ay,” said Mr. Tulliver, putting it
carefully in his side pocket. “Good-by.”
And so the respectable miller returned along the Basset
lanes rather more puzzled than before as to ways and
means, but still with the sense of a danger escaped.
It had come across his mind that if he were hard upon
his sister, it might somehow tend to make Tom hard
upon Maggie at some distant day, when her father was
no longer there to take her part; for simple people,
like our friend Mr. Tulliver, are apt to clothe unimpeachable
feelings in erroneous ideas, and this was his confused
way of explaining to himself that his love and anxiety
for “the little wench” had given him a
new sensibility toward his sister.
To Garum Firs
While the possible troubles of Maggie’s future
were occupying her father’s mind, she herself
was tasting only the bitterness of the present.
Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed
by no memories of outlived sorrow.
The fact was, the day had begun ill with Maggie.
The pleasure of having Lucy to look at, and the prospect
of the afternoon visit to Garum Firs, where she would
hear uncle Pullet’s musical box, had been marred
as early as eleven o’clock by the advent of the
hair-dresser from St. Ogg’s, who had spoken
in the severest terms of the condition in which he
had found her hair, holding up one jagged lock after
another and saying, “See here! tut, tut, tut!”
in a tone of mingled disgust and pity, which to Maggie’s
imagination was equivalent to the strongest expression
of public opinion. Mr. Rappit, the hair-dresser,
with his well-anointed coronal locks tending wavily
upward, like the simulated pyramid of flame on a monumental
urn, seemed to her at that moment the most formidable
of her contemporaries, into whose street at St. Ogg’s
she would carefully refrain from entering through the
rest of her life.
