The Mill on the Floss (16 page)

Chapter X
Maggie Behaves Worse Than She Expected

The startling object which thus made an epoch for uncle Pullet
was no other than little Lucy, with one side of her person, from
her small foot to her bonnet-crown, wet and discolored with mud,
holding out two tiny blackened hands, and making a very piteous
face. To account for this unprecedented apparition in aunt Pullet's
parlor, we must return to the moment when the three children went
to play out of doors, and the small demons who had taken possession
of Maggie's soul at an early period of the day had returned in all
the greater force after a temporary absence. All the disagreeable
recollections of the morning were thick upon her, when Tom, whose
displeasure toward her had been considerably refreshed by her
foolish trick of causing him to upset his cowslip wine, said,
"Here, Lucy, you come along with me," and walked off to the area
where the toads were, as if there were no Maggie in existence.
Seeing this, Maggie lingered at a distance, looking like a small
Medusa with her snakes cropped. Lucy was naturally pleased that
cousin Tom was so good to her, and it was very amusing to see him
tickling a fat toad with a piece of string when the toad was safe
down the area, with an iron grating over him. Still Lucy wished
Maggie to enjoy the spectacle also, especially as she would
doubtless find a name for the toad, and say what had been his past
history; for Lucy had a delighted semibelief in Maggie's stories
about the live things they came upon by accident,–how Mrs. Earwig
had a wash at home, and one of her children had fallen into the hot
copper, for which reason she was running so fast to fetch the
doctor. Tom had a profound contempt for this nonsense of Maggie's,
smashing the earwig at once as a superfluous yet easy means of
proving the entire unreality of such a story; but Lucy, for the
life of her, could not help fancying there was something in it, and
at all events thought it was very pretty make-believe. So now the
desire to know the history of a very portly toad, added to her
habitual affectionateness, made her run back to Maggie and say,
"Oh, there is such a big, funny toad, Maggie! Do come and see!"

Maggie said nothing, but turned away from her with a deeper
frown. As long as Tom seemed to prefer Lucy to her, Lucy made part
of his unkindness. Maggie would have thought a little while ago
that she could never be cross with pretty little Lucy, any more
than she could be cruel to a little white mouse; but then, Tom had
always been quite indifferent to Lucy before, and it had been left
to Maggie to pet and make much of her. As it was, she was actually
beginning to think that she should like to make Lucy cry by
slapping or pinching her, especially as it might vex Tom, whom it
was of no use to slap, even if she dared, because he didn't mind
it. And if Lucy hadn't been there, Maggie was sure he would have
got friends with her sooner.

Tickling a fat toad who is not highly sensitive is an amusement
that it is possible to exhaust, and Tom by and by began to look
round for some other mode of passing the time. But in so prim a
garden, where they were not to go off the paved walks, there was
not a great choice of sport. The only great pleasure such a
restriction suggested was the pleasure of breaking it, and Tom
began to meditate an insurrectionary visit to the pond, about a
field's length beyond the garden.

"I say, Lucy," he began, nodding his head up and down with great
significance, as he coiled up his string again, "what do you think
I mean to do?"

"What, Tom?" said Lucy, with curiosity.

"I mean to go to the pond and look at the pike. You may go with
me if you like," said the young sultan.

"Oh, Tom,
dare
you?" said Lucy. "Aunt said we mustn't
go out of the garden."

"Oh, I shall go out at the other end of the garden," said Tom.
"Nobody 'ull see us. Besides, I don't care if they do,–I'll run off
home."

"But
I
couldn't run," said Lucy, who had never before
been exposed to such severe temptation.

"Oh, never mind; they won't be cross with
you
," said
Tom. "You say I took you."

Tom walked along, and Lucy trotted by his side, timidly enjoying
the rare treat of doing something naughty,–excited also by the
mention of that celebrity, the pike, about which she was quite
uncertain whether it was a fish or a fowl.

Maggie saw them leaving the garden, and could not resist the
impulse to follow. Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose
sight of their objects than love, and that Tom and Lucy should do
or see anything of which she was ignorant would have been an
intolerable idea to Maggie. So she kept a few yards behind them,
unobserved by Tom, who was presently absorbed in watching for the
pike,–a highly interesting monster; he was said to be so very old,
so very large, and to have such a remarkable appetite. The pike,
like other celebrities, did not show when he was watched for, but
Tom caught sight of something in rapid movement in the water, which
attracted him to another spot on the brink of the pond.

"Here, Lucy!" he said in a loud whisper, "come here! take care!
keep on the grass!–don't step where the cows have been!" he added,
pointing to a peninsula of dry grass, with trodden mud on each side
of it; for Tom's contemptuous conception of a girl included the
attribute of being unfit to walk in dirty places.

Lucy came carefully as she was bidden, and bent down to look at
what seemed a golden arrow-head darting through the water. It was a
water-snake, Tom told her; and Lucy at last could see the
serpentine wave of its body, very much wondering that a snake could
swim. Maggie had drawn nearer and nearer; she
must
see it
too, though it was bitter to her, like everything else, since Tom
did not care about her seeing it. At last she was close by Lucy;
and Tom, who had been aware of her approach, but would not notice
it till he was obliged, turned round and said,–

"Now, get away, Maggie; there's no room for you on the grass
here. Nobody asked
you
to come."

There were passions at war in Maggie at that moment to have made
a tragedy, if tragedies were made by passion only; but the
essential τι μεγεθως which was present in the passion was wanting
to the action; the utmost Maggie could do, with a fierce thrust of
her small brown arm, was to push poor little pink-and-white Lucy
into the cow-trodden mud.

Then Tom could not restrain himself, and gave Maggie two smart
slaps on the arm as he ran to pick up Lucy, who lay crying
helplessly. Maggie retreated to the roots of a tree a few yards
off, and looked on impenitently. Usually her repentance came
quickly after one rash deed, but now Tom and Lucy had made her so
miserable, she was glad to spoil their happiness,–glad to make
everybody uncomfortable. Why should she be sorry? Tom was very slow
to forgive
her
, however sorry she might have been.

"I shall tell mother, you know, Miss Mag," said Tom, loudly and
emphatically, as soon as Lucy was up and ready to walk away. It was
not Tom's practice to "tell," but here justice clearly demanded
that Maggie should be visited with the utmost punishment; not that
Tom had learned to put his views in that abstract form; he never
mentioned "justice," and had no idea that his desire to punish
might be called by that fine name. Lucy was too entirely absorbed
by the evil that had befallen her,–the spoiling of her pretty best
clothes, and the discomfort of being wet and dirty,–to think much
of the cause, which was entirely mysterious to her. She could never
have guessed what she had done to make Maggie angry with her; but
she felt that Maggie was very unkind and disagreeable, and made no
magnanimous entreaties to Tom that he would not "tell," only
running along by his side and crying piteously, while Maggie sat on
the roots of the tree and looked after them with her small Medusa
face.

"Sally," said Tom, when they reached the kitchen door, and Sally
looked at them in speechless amaze, with a piece of
bread-and-butter in her mouth and a toasting-fork in her
hand,–"Sally, tell mother it was Maggie pushed Lucy into the
mud."

"But Lors ha' massy, how did you get near such mud as that?"
said Sally, making a wry face, as she stooped down and examined the
corpus delicti
.

Tom's imagination had not been rapid and capacious enough to
include this question among the foreseen consequences, but it was
no sooner put than he foresaw whither it tended, and that Maggie
would not be considered the only culprit in the case. He walked
quietly away from the kitchen door, leaving Sally to that pleasure
of guessing which active minds notoriously prefer to ready-made
knowledge.

Sally, as you are aware, lost no time in presenting Lucy at the
parlor door, for to have so dirty an object introduced into the
house at Garum Firs was too great a weight to be sustained by a
single mind.

"Goodness gracious!" aunt Pullet exclaimed, after preluding by
an inarticulate scream; "keep her at the door, Sally! Don't bring
her off the oil-cloth, whatever you do."

"Why, she's tumbled into some nasty mud," said Mrs. Tulliver,
going up to Lucy to examine into the amount of damage to clothes
for which she felt herself responsible to her sister Deane.

"If you please, 'um, it was Miss Maggie as pushed her in," said
Sally; "Master Tom's been and said so, and they must ha' been to
the pond, for it's only there they could ha' got into such
dirt."

"There it is, Bessy; it's what I've been telling you," said Mrs.
Pullet, in a tone of prophetic sadness; "it's your
children,–there's no knowing what they'll come to."

Mrs. Tulliver was mute, feeling herself a truly wretched mother.
As usual, the thought pressed upon her that people would think she
had done something wicked to deserve her maternal troubles, while
Mrs. Pullet began to give elaborate directions to Sally how to
guard the premises from serious injury in the course of removing
the dirt. Meantime tea was to be brought in by the cook, and the
two naughty children were to have theirs in an ignominious manner
in the kitchen. Mrs. Tulliver went out to speak to these naughty
children, supposing them to be close at hand; but it was not until
after some search that she found Tom leaning with rather a
hardened, careless air against the white paling of the
poultry-yard, and lowering his piece of string on the other side as
a means of exasperating the turkey-cock.

"Tom, you naughty boy, where's your sister?" said Mrs. Tulliver,
in a distressed voice.

"I don't know," said Tom; his eagerness for justice on Maggie
had diminished since he had seen clearly that it could hardly be
brought about without the injustice of some blame on his own
conduct.

"Why, where did you leave her?" said the mother, looking
round.

"Sitting under the tree, against the pond," said Tom, apparently
indifferent to everything but the string and the turkey-cock.

"Then go and fetch her in this minute, you naughty boy. And how
could you think o' going to the pond, and taking your sister where
there was dirt? You know she'll do mischief if there's mischief to
be done."

It was Mrs. Tulliver's way, if she blamed Tom, to refer his
misdemeanor, somehow or other, to Maggie.

The idea of Maggie sitting alone by the pond roused an habitual
fear in Mrs. Tulliver's mind, and she mounted the horse-block to
satisfy herself by a sight of that fatal child, while Tom
walked–not very quickly–on his way toward her.

"They're such children for the water, mine are," she said aloud,
without reflecting that there was no one to hear her; "they'll be
brought in dead and drownded some day. I wish that river was far
enough."

But when she not only failed to discern Maggie, but presently
saw Tom returning from the pool alone, this hovering fear entered
and took complete possession of her, and she hurried to meet
him.

"Maggie's nowhere about the pond, mother," said Tom; "she's gone
away."

You may conceive the terrified search for Maggie, and the
difficulty of convincing her mother that she was not in the pond.
Mrs. Pullet observed that the child might come to a worse end if
she lived, there was no knowing; and Mr. Pullet, confused and
overwhelmed by this revolutionary aspect of things,–the tea
deferred and the poultry alarmed by the unusual running to and
fro,–took up his spud as an instrument of search, and reached down
a key to unlock the goose-pen, as a likely place for Maggie to lie
concealed in.

Tom, after a while, started the idea that Maggie was gone home
(without thinking it necessary to state that it was what he should
have done himself under the circumstances), and the suggestion was
seized as a comfort by his mother.

"Sister, for goodness' sake let 'em put the horse in the
carriage and take me home; we shall perhaps find her on the road.
Lucy can't walk in her dirty clothes," she said, looking at that
innocent victim, who was wrapped up in a shawl, and sitting with
naked feet on the sofa.

Aunt Pullet was quite willing to take the shortest means of
restoring her premises to order and quiet, and it was not long
before Mrs. Tulliver was in the chaise, looking anxiously at the
most distant point before her. What the father would say if Maggie
was lost, was a question that predominated over every other.

Chapter XI
Maggie Tries to Run away from Her Shadow

Maggie'S intentions, as usual, were on a larger scale than Tom
imagined. The resolution that gathered in her mind, after Tom and
Lucy had walked away, was not so simple as that of going home. No!
she would run away and go to the gypsies, and Tom should never see
her any more. That was by no means a new idea to Maggie; she had
been so often told she was like a gypsy, and "half wild," that when
she was miserable it seemed to her the only way of escaping
opprobrium, and being entirely in harmony with circumstances, would
be to live in a little brown tent on the commons; the gypsies, she
considered, would gladly receive her and pay her much respect on
account of her superior knowledge. She had once mentioned her views
on this point to Tom and suggested that he should stain his face
brown, and they should run away together; but Tom rejected the
scheme with contempt, observing that gypsies were thieves, and
hardly got anything to eat and had nothing to drive but a donkey.
To-day however, Maggie thought her misery had reached a pitch at
which gypsydom was her refuge, and she rose from her seat on the
roots of the tree with the sense that this was a great crisis in
her life; she would run straight away till she came to Dunlow
Common, where there would certainly be gypsies; and cruel Tom, and
the rest of her relations who found fault with her, should never
see her any more. She thought of her father as she ran along, but
she reconciled herself to the idea of parting with him, by
determining that she would secretly send him a letter by a small
gypsy, who would run away without telling where she was, and just
let him know that she was well and happy, and always loved him very
much.