The Mill on the Floss
broadcloth now, and have my legs under the same table with the heads of
the best firms in St Ogg’s.”
Uncle Deane tapped his box, and seemed to expand a little under his
waistcoat and gold chain, as he squared his shoulders in the chair.
“Is there any place at liberty that you know of now, uncle, that I
should do for? I should like to set to work at once,” said Tom, with a
slight tremor in his voice.
“Stop a bit, stop a bit; we mustn’t be in too great a hurry. You must
bear in mind, if I put you in a place you’re a bit young for, because
you happen to be my nephew, I shall be responsible for you. And there’s
no better reason, you know, than your being my nephew; because it
remains to be seen whether you’re good for anything.”
“I hope I shall never do you any discredit, uncle,” said Tom, hurt, as
all boys are at the statement of the unpleasant truth that people feel
no ground for trusting them. “I care about my own credit too much for
that.”
“Well done, Tom, well done! That’s the right spirit, and I never refuse
to help anybody if they’ve a mind to do themselves justice. There’s a
young man of two-and-twenty I’ve got my eye on now. I shall do what I
can for that young man; he’s got some pith in him. But then, you see,
he’s made good use of his time,—a first-rate calculator,—can tell you
the cubic contents of anything in no time, and put me up the other day
to a new market for Swedish bark; he’s uncommonly knowing in
manufactures, that young fellow.”
“I’d better set about learning book-keeping, hadn’t I, uncle?” said
Tom, anxious to prove his readiness to exert himself.
“Yes, yes, you can’t do amiss there. But—Ah, Spence, you’re back again.
Well Tom, there’s nothing more to be said just now, I think, and I must
go to business again. Good-by. Remember me to your mother.”
Mr Deane put out his hand, with an air of friendly dismissal, and Tom
had not courage to ask another question, especially in the presence of
Mr Spence. So he went out again into the cold damp air. He had to call
at his uncle Glegg’s about the money in the Savings Bank, and by the
time he set out again the mist had thickened, and he could not see very
far before him; but going along River Street again, he was startled,
when he was within two yards of the projecting side of a shop-window,
by the words “Dorlcote Mill” in large letters on a hand-bill, placed as
if on purpose to stare at him. It was the catalogue of the sale to take
place the next week; it was a reason for hurrying faster out of the
town.
Poor Tom formed no visions of the distant future as he made his way
homeward; he only felt that the present was very hard. It seemed a
wrong toward him that his uncle Deane had no confidence in him,—did not
see at once that he should acquit himself well, which Tom himself was
as certain of as of the daylight. Apparently he, Tom Tulliver, was
likely to be held of small account in the world; and for the first time
he felt a sinking of heart under the sense that he really was very
ignorant, and could do very little. Who was that enviable young man
that could tell the cubic contents of things in no time, and make
suggestions about Swedish bark! Tom had been used to be so entirely
satisfied with himself, in spite of his breaking down in a
demonstration, and construing _nunc illas promite vires_ as “now
promise those men”; but now he suddenly felt at a disadvantage, because
he knew less than some one else knew. There must be a world of things
connected with that Swedish bark, which, if he only knew them, might
have helped him to get on. It would have been much easier to make a
figure with a spirited horse and a new saddle.
Two hours ago, as Tom was walking to St Ogg’s, he saw the distant
future before him as he might have seen a tempting stretch of smooth
sandy beach beyond a belt of flinty shingles; he was on the grassy bank
then, and thought the shingles might soon be passed. But now his feet
were on the sharp stones; the belt of shingles had widened, and the
stretch of sand had dwindled into narrowness.
“What did my Uncle Deane say, Tom?” said Maggie, putting her arm
through Tom’s as he was warming himself rather drearily by the kitchen
fire. “Did he say he would give you a situation?”
“No, he didn’t say that. He didn’t quite promise me anything; he seemed
to think I couldn’t have a very good situation. I’m too young.”
“But didn’t he speak kindly, Tom?”
“Kindly? Pooh! what’s the use of talking about that? I wouldn’t care
about his speaking kindly, if I could get a situation. But it’s such a
nuisance and bother; I’ve been at school all this while learning Latin
and things,—not a bit of good to me,—and now my uncle says I must set
about learning book-keeping and calculation, and those things. He seems
to make out I’m good for nothing.”
Tom’s mouth twitched with a bitter expression as he looked at the fire.
“Oh, what a pity we haven’t got Dominie Sampson!” said Maggie, who
couldn’t help mingling some gayety with their sadness. “If he had
taught me book-keeping by double entry and after the Italian method, as
he did Lucy Bertram, I could teach you, Tom.”
“_You_ teach! Yes, I dare say. That’s always the tone you take,” said
Tom.
“Dear Tom, I was only joking,” said Maggie, putting her cheek against
his coat-sleeve.
“But it’s always the same, Maggie,” said Tom, with the little frown he
put on when he was about to be justifiably severe. “You’re always
setting yourself up above me and every one else, and I’ve wanted to
tell you about it several times. You ought not to have spoken as you
did to my uncles and aunts; you should leave it to me to take care of
my mother and you, and not put yourself forward. You think you know
better than any one, but you’re almost always wrong. I can judge much
better than you can.”
Poor Tom! he had just come from being lectured and made to feel his
inferiority; the reaction of his strong, self-asserting nature must
take place somehow; and here was a case in which he could justly show
himself dominant. Maggie’s cheek flushed and her lip quivered with
conflicting resentment and affection, and a certain awe as well as
admiration of Tom’s firmer and more effective character. She did not
answer immediately; very angry words rose to her lips, but they were
driven back again, and she said at last:
“You often think I’m conceited, Tom, when I don’t mean what I say at
all in that way. I don’t mean to put myself above you; I know you
behaved better than I did yesterday. But you are always so harsh to me,
Tom.”
With the last words the resentment was rising again.
“No, I’m not harsh,” said Tom, with severe decision. “I’m always kind
to you, and so I shall be; I shall always take care of you. But you
must mind what I say.”
Their mother came in now, and Maggie rushed away, that her burst of
tears, which she felt must come, might not happen till she was safe
upstairs. They were very bitter tears; everybody in the world seemed so
hard and unkind to Maggie; there was no indulgence, no fondness, such
as she imagined when she fashioned the world afresh in her own
thoughts. In books there were people who were always agreeable or
tender, and delighted to do things that made one happy, and who did not
show their kindness by finding fault. The world outside the books was
not a happy one, Maggie felt; it seemed to be a world where people
behaved the best to those they did not pretend to love, and that did
not belong to them. And if life had no love in it, what else was there
for Maggie? Nothing but poverty and the companionship of her mother’s
narrow griefs, perhaps of her father’s heart-cutting childish
dependence. There is no hopelessness so sad as that of early youth,
when the soul is made up of wants, and has no long memories, no
superadded life in the life of others; though we who looked on think
lightly of such premature despair, as if our vision of the future
lightened the blind sufferer’s present.
Maggie, in her brown frock, with her eyes reddened and her heavy hair
pushed back, looking from the bed where her father lay to the dull
walls of this sad chamber which was the centre of her world, was a
creature full of eager, passionate longings for all that was beautiful
and glad; thirsty for all knowledge; with an ear straining after dreamy
music that died away and would not come near to her; with a blind,
unconscious yearning for something that would link together the
wonderful impressions of this mysterious life, and give her soul a
sense of home in it.
No wonder, when there is this contrast between the outward and the
inward, that painful collisions come of it.
Chapter VI.
Tending to Refute the Popular Prejudice against the Present of a
Pocket-Knife
In that dark time of December, the sale of the household furniture
lasted beyond the middle of the second day. Mr Tulliver, who had begun,
in his intervals of consciousness, to manifest an irritability which
often appeared to have as a direct effect the recurrence of spasmodic
rigidity and insensibility, had lain in this living death throughout
the critical hours when the noise of the sale came nearest to his
chamber. Mr Turnbull had decided that it would be a less risk to let
him remain where he was than to remove him to Luke’s cottage,—a plan
which the good Luke had proposed to Mrs Tulliver, thinking it would be
very bad if the master were “to waken up” at the noise of the sale; and
the wife and children had sat imprisoned in the silent chamber,
watching the large prostrate figure on the bed, and trembling lest the
blank face should suddenly show some response to the sounds which fell
on their own ears with such obstinate, painful repetition.
But it was over at last, that time of importunate certainty and
eye-straining suspense. The sharp sound of a voice, almost as metallic
as the rap that followed it, had ceased; the tramping of footsteps on
the gravel had died out. Mrs Tulliver’s blond face seemed aged ten
years by the last thirty hours; the poor woman’s mind had been busy
divining when her favourite things were being knocked down by the
terrible hammer; her heart had been fluttering at the thought that
first one thing and then another had gone to be identified as hers in
the hateful publicity of the Golden Lion; and all the while she had to
sit and make no sign of this inward agitation. Such things bring lines
in well-rounded faces, and broaden the streaks of white among the hairs
that once looked as if they had been dipped in pure sunshine. Already,
at three o’clock, Kezia, the good-hearted, bad-tempered housemaid, who
regarded all people that came to the sale as her personal enemies, the
dirt on whose feet was of a peculiarly vile quality, had begun to scrub
and swill with an energy much assisted by a continual low muttering
against “folks as came to buy up other folk’s things,” and made light
of “scrazing” the tops of mahogany tables over which better folks than
themselves had had to—suffer a waste of tissue through evaporation. She
was not scrubbing indiscriminately, for there would be further dirt of
the same atrocious kind made by people who had still to fetch away
their purchases; but she was bent on bringing the parlour, where that
“pipe-smoking pig,” the bailiff, had sat, to such an appearance of
scant comfort as could be given to it by cleanliness and the few
articles of furniture bought in for the family. Her mistress and the
young folks should have their tea in it that night, Kezia was
determined.
It was between five and six o’clock, near the usual teatime, when she
came upstairs and said that Master Tom was wanted. The person who
wanted him was in the kitchen, and in the first moments, by the
imperfect fire and candle light, Tom had not even an indefinite sense