The Mill on the Floss
delicate damask napkin, which she pinned before her in the fashion of
an apron. The door did, in fact, soon open, but instead of the
tea-tray, Sally introduced an object so startling that both Mrs Pullet
and Mrs Tulliver gave a scream, causing uncle Pullet to swallow his
lozenge—for the fifth time in his life, as he afterward noted.
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 discoloured with mud, holding out two
tiny blackened hands, and making a very piteous face. To account for
this unprecedented apparition in aunt Pullet’s parlour, 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 semi-belief 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
μέγεθος 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 parlour
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
misdemeanour, 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.