Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (73 page)

It must be owned that Tom was fond of Bob’s company. How could it be otherwise? Bob knew, directly he saw a bird’s egg, whether it was a swallow’s, or a tomtit’s, or a yellow-hammer’s; he found out all the wasps’ nests, and could set all sort of traps; he could climb the trees like a squirrel, and had quite a magical power of detecting hedgehogs and stoats; and he had courage to do things that were rather naughty, such as making gaps in the hedgerows, throwing stones after the sheep, and killing a cat that was wandering incognito.

Such qualities in an inferior, who could always be treated with authority in spite of his superior knowingness, had necessarily a fatal fascination for Tom; and every holiday-time Maggie was sure to have days of grief because he had gone off with Bob.

Well! there was no hope for it; he was gone now, and Maggie could think of no comfort but to sit down by the hollow, or wander by the hedgerow, and fancy it was all different, refashioning her little world into just what she should like it to be.

Maggie’s was a troublous life, and this was the form in which she took her opium.

Meanwhile Tom, forgetting all about Maggie and the sting of reproach which he had left in her heart, was hurrying along with Bob, whom he had met accidentally, to the scene of a great rat-catching in a neighboring barn. Bob knew all about this particular affair, and spoke of the sport with an enthusiasm which no one who is not either divested of all manly feeling, or pitiably ignorant of rat-catching, can fail to imagine. For a person suspected of preternatural wickedness, Bob was really not so very villanous-looking; there was even something agreeable in his snub-nosed face, with its close-curled border of red hair. But then his trousers were always rolled up at the knee, for the convenience of wading on the slightest notice; and his virtue, supposing it to exist, was undeniably “virtue in rags,” which, on the authority even of bilious philosophers, who think all well-dressed merit overpaid, is notoriously likely to remain unrecognized (perhaps because it is seen so seldom).

“I know the chap as owns the ferrets,” said Bob, in a hoarse treble voice, as he shuffled along, keeping his blue eyes fixed on the river, like an amphibious animal who foresaw occasion for darting in. “He lives up the Kennel Yard at Sut Ogg’s, he does. He’s the biggest rot-catcher anywhere, he is. I’d sooner, be a rot-catcher nor anything, I would. The moles is nothing to the rots. But Lors! you mun ha’ ferrets. Dogs is no good. Why, there’s that dog, now!” Bob continued, pointing with an air of disgust toward Yap, “he’s no more good wi’ a rot nor nothin’. I see it myself, I did, at the rot-catchin’ i’ your feyther’s barn.”

Yap, feeling the withering influence of this scorn, tucked his tail in and shrank close to Tom’s leg, who felt a little hurt for him, but had not the superhuman courage to seem behindhand with Bob in contempt for a dog who made so poor a figure.

“No, no,” he said, “Yap’s no good at sport. I’ll have regular good dogs for rats and everything, when I’ve done school.”

“Hev ferrets, Measter Tom,” said Bob, eagerly,–”them white ferrets wi’ pink eyes; Lors, you might catch your own rots, an’ you might put a rot in a cage wi’ a ferret, an’ see ‘em fight, you might. That’s what I’d do, I know, an’ it ‘ud be better fun a’most nor seein’ two chaps fight,–if it wasn’t them chaps as sold cakes an’ oranges at the Fair, as the things flew out o’ their baskets, an’ some o’ the cakes was smashed–But they tasted just as good,” added Bob, by way of note or addendum, after a moment’s pause.

“But, I say, Bob,” said Tom, in a tone of deliberation, “ferrets are nasty biting things,–they’ll bite a fellow without being set on.”

“Lors! why that’s the beauty on ‘em. If a chap lays hold o’ your ferret, he won’t be long before he hollows out a good un, he won’t.”

At this moment a striking incident made the boys pause suddenly in their walk. It was the plunging of some small body in the water from among the neighboring bulrushes; if it was not a water-rat, Bob intimated that he was ready to undergo the most unpleasant consequences.

“Hoigh! Yap,–hoigh! there he is,” said Tom, clapping his hands, as the little black snout made its arrowy course to the opposite bank. “Seize him, lad! seize him!”

Yap agitated his ears and wrinkled his brows, but declined to plunge, trying whether barking would not answer the purpose just as well.

“Ugh! you coward!” said Tom, and kicked him over, feeling humiliated as a sportsman to possess so poor-spirited an animal. Bob abstained from remark and passed on, choosing, however, to walk in the shallow edge of the overflowing river by way of change.

“He’s none so full now, the Floss isn’t,” said Bob, as he kicked the water up before him, with an agreeable sense of being insolent to it. “Why, last ‘ear, the meadows was all one sheet o’ water, they was.”

“Ay, but,” said Tom, whose mind was prone to see an opposition between statements that were really accordant,–”but there was a big flood once, when the Round Pool was made. I know there was, ‘cause father says so. And the sheep and cows all drowned, and the boats went all over the fields ever such a way.”

“I don’t care about a flood comin’,” said Bob; “I don’t mind the water, no more nor the land. I’d swim, I would.”

“Ah, but if you got nothing to eat for ever so long?” said Tom, his imagination becoming quite active under the stimulus of that dread. “When I’m a man, I shall make a boat with a wooden house on the top of it, like Noah’s ark, and keep plenty to eat in it,–rabbits and things,–all ready. And then if the flood came, you know, Bob, I shouldn’t mind. And I’d take you in, if I saw you swimming,” he added, in the tone of a benevolent patron.

“I aren’t frighted,” said Bob, to whom hunger did not appear so appalling. “But I’d get in an’ knock the rabbits on th’ head when you wanted to eat ‘em.”

“Ah, and I should have halfpence, and we’d play at heads-and-tails,” said Tom, not contemplating the possibility that this recreation might have fewer charms for his mature age. “I’d divide fair to begin with, and then we’d see who’d win.”

“I’ve got a halfpenny o’ my own,” said Bob, proudly, coming out of the water and tossing his halfpenny in the air. “Yeads or tails?”

“Tails,” said Tom, instantly fired with the desire to win.

“It’s yeads,” said Bob, hastily, snatching up the halfpenny as it fell.

“It wasn’t,” said Tom, loudly and peremptorily. “You give me the halfpenny; I’ve won it fair.”

“I sha’n’t,” said Bob, holding it tight in his pocket.

“Then I’ll make you; see if I don’t,” said Tom.

“Yes, I can.”

“You can’t make me do nothing, you can’t,” said Bob.

“No, you can’t.”

“I’m master.”

“I don’t care for you.”

“But I’ll make you care, you cheat,” said Tom, collaring Bob and shaking him.

“You get out wi’ you,” said Bob, giving Tom a kick.

Tom’s blood was thoroughly up: he went at Bob with a lunge and threw him down, but Bob seized hold and kept it like a cat, and pulled Tom down after him. They struggled fiercely on the ground for a moment or two, till Tom, pinning Bob down by the shoulders, thought he had the mastery.

“You, say you’ll give me the halfpenny now,” he said, with difficulty, while he exerted himself to keep the command of Bob’s arms.

But at this moment Yap, who had been running on before, returned barking to the scene of action, and saw a favorable opportunity for biting Bob’s bare leg not only with inpunity but with honor. The pain from Yap’s teeth, instead of surprising Bob into a relaxation of his hold, gave it a fiercer tenacity, and with a new exertion of his force he pushed Tom backward and got uppermost. But now Yap, who could get no sufficient purchase before, set his teeth in a new place, so that Bob, harassed in this way, let go his hold of Tom, and, almost throttling Yap, flung him into the river. By this time Tom was up again, and before Bob had quite recovered his balance after the act of swinging Yap, Tom fell upon him, threw him down, and got his knees firmly on Bob’s chest.

“You give me the halfpenny now,” said Tom.

“Take it,” said Bob, sulkily.

“No, I sha’n’t take it; you give it me.”

Bob took the halfpenny out of his pocket, and threw it away from him on the ground.

Tom loosed his hold, and left Bob to rise.

“There the halfpenny lies,” he said. “I don’t want your halfpenny; I wouldn’t have kept it. But you wanted to cheat; I hate a cheat. I sha’n’t go along with you any more,” he added, turning round homeward, not without casting a regret toward the rat-catching and other pleasures which he must relinquish along with Bob’s society.

“You may let it alone, then,” Bob called out after him. “I shall cheat if I like; there’s no fun i’ playing else; and I know where there’s a goldfinch’s nest, but I’ll take care you don’t. An’ you’re a nasty fightin’ turkey-cock, you are––”

Tom walked on without looking around, and Yap followed his example, the cold bath having moderated his passions.

“Go along wi’ you, then, wi’ your drowned dog; I wouldn’t own such a dog–I wouldn’t,” said Bob, getting louder, in a last effort to sustain his defiance. But Tom was not to be provoked into turning round, and Bob’s voice began to falter a little as he said,–

“An’ I’n gi’en you everything, an’ showed you everything, an’ niver wanted nothin’ from you. An’ there’s your horn-handed knife, then as you gi’en me.” Here Bob flung the knife as far as he could after Tom’s retreating footsteps. But it produced no effect, except the sense in Bob’s mind that there was a terrible void in his lot, now that knife was gone.

He stood still till Tom had passed through the gate and disappeared behind the hedge. The knife would do not good on the ground there; it wouldn’t vex Tom; and pride or resentment was a feeble passion in Bob’s mind compared with the love of a pocket-knife. His very fingers sent entreating thrills that he would go and clutch that familiar rough buck’s-horn handle, which they had so often grasped for mere affection, as it lay idle in his pocket. And there were two blades, and they had just been sharpened! What is life without a pocket-knife to him who has once tasted a higher existence? No; to throw the handle after the hatchet is a comprehensible act of desperation, but to throw one’s pocket-knife after an implacable friend is clearly in every sense a hyperbole, or throwing beyond the mark. So Bob shuffled back to the spot where the beloved knife lay in the dirt, and felt quite a new pleasure in clutching it again after the temporary separation, in opening one blade after the other, and feeling their edge with his well-hardened thumb. Poor Bob! he was not sensitive on the point of honor, not a chivalrous character. That fine moral aroma would not have been thought much of by the public opinion of Kennel Yard, which was the very focus or heart of Bob’s world, even if it could have made itself perceptible there; yet, for all that, he was not utterly a sneak and a thief as our friend Tom had hastily decided.

But Tom, you perceive, was rather a Rhadamanthine personage, having more than the usual share of boy’s justice in him,–the justice that desires to hurt culprits as much as they deserve to be hurt, and is troubled with no doubts concerning the exact amount of their deserts. Maggie saw a cloud on his brow when he came home, which checked her joy at his coming so much sooner than she had expected, and she dared hardly speak to him as he stood silently throwing the small gravel-stones into the mill-dam. It is not pleasant to give up a rat-catching when you have set your mind on it. But if Tom had told his strongest feeling at that moment, he would have said, “I’d do just the same again.” That was his usual mode of viewing his past actions; whereas Maggie was always wishing she had done something different.

CHAPTER VII

Enter the Aunts and Uncles

The Dodsons were certainly a handsome family, and Mrs. Glegg was not the least handsome of the sisters. As she sat in Mrs. Tulliver’s arm-chair, no impartial observer could have denied that for a woman of fifty she had a very comely face and figure, though Tom and Maggie considered their aunt Glegg as the type of ugliness. It is true she despised the advantages of costume, for though, as she often observed, no woman had better clothes, it was not her way to wear her new things out before her old ones. Other women, if they liked, might have their best thread-lace in every wash; but when Mrs. Glegg died, it would be found that she had better lace laid by in the right-hand drawer of her wardrobe in the Spotted Chamber than ever Mrs. Wooll of St. Ogg’s had bought in her life, although Mrs. Wooll wore her lace before it was paid for. So of her curled fronts: Mrs. Glegg had doubtless the glossiest and crispest brown curls in her drawers, as well as curls in various degrees of fuzzy laxness; but to look out on the week-day world from under a crisp and glossy front would be to introduce a most dreamlike and unpleasant confusion between the sacred and the secular. Occasionally, indeed, Mrs. Glegg wore one of her third-best fronts on a week-day visit, but not at a sister’s house; especially not at Mrs. Tulliver’s, who, since her marriage, had hurt her sister’s feelings greatly by wearing her own hair, though, as Mrs. Glegg observed to Mrs. Deane, a mother of a family, like Bessy, with a husband always going to law, might have been expected to know better. But Bessy was always weak!

So if Mrs. Glegg’s front to-day was more fuzzy and lax than usual, she had a design under it: she intended the most pointed and cutting allusion to Mrs. Tulliver’s bunches of blond curls, separated from each other by a due wave of smoothness on each side of the parting. Mrs. Tulliver had shed tears several times at sister Glegg’s unkindness on the subject of these unmatronly curls, but the consciousness of looking the handsomer for them naturally administered support. Mrs. Glegg chose to wear her bonnet in the house to-day,–united and tilted slightly, of course–a frequent practice of hers when she was on a visit, and happened to be in a severe humor: she didn’t know what draughts there might be in strange houses. For the same reason she wore a small sable tippet, which reached just to her shoulders, and was very far from meeting across her well-formed chest, while her long neck was protected by a chevaux-de-frise of miscellaneous frilling. One would need to be learned in the fashions of those times to know how far in the rear of them Mrs. Glegg’s slate-colored silk gown must have been; but from certain constellations of small yellow spots upon it, and a mouldy odor about it suggestive of a damp clothes-chest, it was probable that it belonged to a stratum of garments just old enough to have come recently into wear.

Mrs. Glegg held her large gold watch in her hand with the many-doubled chain round her fingers, and observed to Mrs. Tulliver, who had just returned from a visit to the kitchen, that whatever it might be by other people’s clocks and watches, it was gone half-past twelve by hers.

“I don’t know what ails sister Pullet,” she continued. “It used to be the way in our family for one to be as early as another,–I’m sure it was so in my poor father’s time,–and not for one sister to sit half an hour before the others came. But if the ways o’ the family are altered, it sha’n’t be my fault; I’ll never be the one to come into a house when all the rest are going away. I wonder at sister Deane,–she used to be more like me. But if you’ll take my advice, Bessy, you’ll put the dinner forrard a bit, sooner than put it back, because folks are late as ought to ha’ known better.”

“Oh dear, there’s no fear but what they’ll be all here in time, sister,” said Mrs. Tulliver, in her mild-peevish tone. “The dinner won’t be ready till half-past one. But if it’s long for you to wait, let me fetch you a cheesecake and a glass o’ wine.”

“Well, Bessy!” said Mrs. Glegg, with a bitter smile and a scarcely perceptible toss of her head, “I should ha’ thought you’d known your own sister better. I never did eat between meals, and I’m not going to begin. Not but what I hate that nonsense of having your dinner at half-past one, when you might have it at one. You was never brought up in that way, Bessy.”

“Why, Jane, what can I do? Mr. Tulliver doesn’t like his dinner before two o’clock, but I put it half an hour earlier because o’ you.”

“Yes, yes, I know how it is with husbands,–they’re for putting everything off; they’ll put the dinner off till after tea, if they’ve got wives as are weak enough to give in to such work; but it’s a pity for you, Bessy, as you haven’t got more strength o’ mind. It’ll be well if your children don’t suffer for it. And I hope you’ve not gone and got a great dinner for us,–going to expense for your sisters, as ‘ud sooner eat a crust o’ dry bread nor help to ruin you with extravagance. I wonder you don’t take pattern by your sister Deane; she’s far more sensible. And here you’ve got two children to provide for, and your husband’s spent your fortin i’ going to law, and’s likely to spend his own too. A boiled joint, as you could make broth of for the kitchen,” Mrs. Glegg added, in a tone of emphatic protest, “and a plain pudding, with a spoonful o’ sugar, and no spice, ‘ud be far more becoming.”

With sister Glegg in this humor, there was a cheerful prospect for the day. Mrs. Tulliver never went the length of quarrelling with her, any more than a water-fowl that puts out its leg in a deprecating manner can be said to quarrel with a boy who throws stones. But this point of the dinner was a tender one, and not at all new, so that Mrs. Tulliver could make the same answer she had often made before.

“Mr. Tulliver says he always will have a good dinner for his friends while he can pay for it,” she said; “and he’s a right to do as he likes in his own house, sister.”

“Well, Bessy, I can’t leave your children enough out o’ my savings to keep ‘em from ruin. And you mustn’t look to having any o’ Mr. Glegg’s money, for it’s well if I don’t go first,–he comes of a long-lived family; and if he was to die and leave me well for my life, he’d tie all the money up to go back to his own kin.”

The sound of wheels while Mrs. Glegg was speaking was an interruption highly welcome to Mrs. Tulliver, who hastened out to receive sister Pullet; it must be sister Pullet, because the sound was that of a four-wheel.

Mrs. Glegg tossed her head and looked rather sour about the mouth at the thought of the “four-wheel.” She had a strong opinion on that subject.

Sister Pullet was in tears when the one-horse chaise stopped before Mrs. Tulliver’s door, and it was apparently requisite that she should shed a few more before getting out; for though her husband and Mrs. Tulliver stood ready to support her, she sat still and shook her head sadly, as she looked through her tears at the vague distance.

“Why, whativer is the matter, sister?” said Mrs. Tulliver. She was not an imaginative woman, but it occurred to her that the large toilet-glass in sister Pullet’s best bedroom was possibly broken for the second time.

There was no reply but a further shake of the head, as Mrs. Pullet slowly rose and got down from the chaise, not without casting a glance at Mr. Pullet to see that he was guarding her handsome silk dress from injury. Mr. Pullet was a small man, with a high nose, small twinkling eyes, and thin lips, in a fresh-looking suit of black and a white cravat, that seemed to have been tied very tight on some higher principle than that of mere personal ease. He bore about the same relation to his tall, good-looking wife, with her balloon sleeves, abundant mantle, and a large befeathered and beribboned bonnet, as a small fishing-smack bears to a brig with all its sails spread.

It is a pathetic sight and a striking example of the complexity introduced into the emotions by a high state of civilization, the sight of a fashionably dressed female in grief. From the sorrow of a Hottentot to that of a woman in large buckram sleeves, with several bracelets on each arm, an architectural bonnet, and delicate ribbon strings, what a long series of gradations! In the enlightened child of civilization the abandonment characteristic of grief is checked and varied in the subtlest manner, so as to present an interesting problem to the analytic mind. If, with a crushed heart and eyes half blinded by the mist of tears, she were to walk with a too-devious step through a door-place, she might crush her buckram sleeves too, and the deep consciousness of this possibility produces a composition of forces by which she takes a line that just clears the door-post. Perceiving that the tears are hurrying fast, she unpins her strings and throws them languidly backward, a touching gesture, indicative, even in the deepest gloom, of the hope in future dry moments when cap-strings will once more have a charm. As the tears subside a little, and with her head leaning backward at the angle that will not injure her bonnet, she endures that terrible moment when grief, which has made all things else a weariness, has itself become weary; she looks down pensively at her bracelets, and adjusts their clasps with that pretty studied fortuity which would be gratifying to her mind if it were once more in a calm and healthy state.

Mrs. Pullet brushed each door-post with great nicety, about the latitude of her shoulders (at that period a woman was truly ridiculous to an instructed eye if she did not measure a yard and a half across the shoulders), and having done that sent the muscles of her face in quest of fresh tears as she advanced into the parlor where Mrs. Glegg was seated.

“Well, sister, you’re late; what’s the matter?” said Mrs. Glegg, rather sharply, as they shook hands.

Mrs. Pullet sat down, lifting up her mantle carefully behind, before she answered,–

“She’s gone,” unconsciously using an impressive figure of rhetoric.

“It isn’t the glass this time, then,” thought Mrs. Tulliver.

“Died the day before yesterday,” continued Mrs. Pullet; “an’ her legs was as thick as my body,”‘ she added, with deep sadness, after a pause. “They’d tapped her no end o’ times, and the water–they say you might ha’ swum in it, if you’d liked.”

“Well, Sophy, it’s a mercy she’s gone, then, whoever she may be,” said Mrs. Glegg, with the promptitude and emphasis of a mind naturally clear and decided; “but I can’t think who you’re talking of, for my part.”

“But I know,” said Mrs. Pullet, sighing and shaking her head; “and there isn’t another such a dropsy in the parish. I know as it’s old Mrs. Sutton o’ the Twentylands.”

“Well, she’s no kin o’ yours, nor much acquaintance as I’ve ever heared of,” said Mrs. Glegg, who always cried just as much as was proper when anything happened to her own “kin,” but not on other occasions.

“She’s so much acquaintance as I’ve seen her legs when they was like bladders. And an old lady as had doubled her money over and over again, and kept it all in her own management to the last, and had her pocket with her keys in under her pillow constant. There isn’t many old parish’ners like her, I doubt.”

“And they say she’d took as much physic as ‘ud fill a wagon,” observed Mr. Pullet.

“Ah!” sighed Mrs. Pullet, “she’d another complaint ever so many years before she had the dropsy, and the doctors couldn’t make out what it was. And she said to me, when I went to see her last Christmas, she said, ‘Mrs. Pullet, if ever you have the dropsy, you’ll think o’ me.’ She did say so,” added Mrs. Pullet, beginning to cry bitterly again; “those were her very words. And she’s to be buried o’ Saturday, and Pullet’s bid to the funeral.”

“Sophy,” said Mrs. Glegg, unable any longer to contain her spirit of rational remonstrance,–”Sophy, I wonder at you, fretting and injuring your health about people as don’t belong to you. Your poor father never did so, nor your aunt Frances neither, nor any o’ the family as I ever heard of. You couldn’t fret no more than this, if we’d heared as our cousin Abbott had died sudden without making his will.”

Mrs. Pullet was silent, having to finish her crying, and rather flattered than indignant at being upbraided for crying too much. It was not everybody who could afford to cry so much about their neighbors who had left them nothing; but Mrs. Pullet had married a gentleman farmer, and had leisure and money to carry her crying and everything else to the highest pitch of respectability.

“Mrs. Sutton didn’t die without making her will, though,” said Mr. Pullet, with a confused sense that he was saying something to sanction his wife’s tears; “ours is a rich parish, but they say there’s nobody else to leave as many thousands behind ‘em as Mrs. Sutton. And she’s left no leggicies to speak on,–left it all in a lump to her husband’s nevvy.”

“There wasn’t much good i’ being so rich, then,” said Mrs. Glegg, “if she’d got none but husband’s kin to leave it to. It’s poor work when that’s all you’ve got to pinch yourself for. Not as I’m one o’ those as ‘ud like to die without leaving more money out at interest than other folks had reckoned; but it’s a poor tale when it must go out o’ your own family.”