The Complete Novels of George Eliot. George Eliot

nor half the chaps can put into their talk from breakfast to sundown. There’s one chap carries pots,—a poor, low trade as any on the road,—he says, ‘Why Toby’s nought but a mongrel; there’s nought to look at in her.’ But I says to him, ‘Why, what are you yoursen but a mongrel? There wasn’t much pickin’ o’ your feyther an’ mother, to look at you.’ Not but I like a bit o’ breed myself, but I can’t abide to see one cur grinnin’ at another. I wish you good evenin’, Miss,” said Bob, abruptly taking up his pack again, under the consciousness that his tongue was acting in an undisciplined manner.

      “Won’t you come in the evening some time, and see my brother, Bob?” said Maggie.

      “Yes, Miss, thank you—another time. You’ll give my duty to him, if you please. Eh, he’s a fine growed chap, Mr. Tom is; he took to growin’ i’ the legs, an’ I didn’t.”

      The pack was down again, now, the hook of the stick having somehow gone wrong.

      “You don’t call Mumps a cur, I suppose?” said Maggie, divining that any interest she showed in Mumps would be gratifying to his master.

      “No, Miss, a fine way off that,” said Bob, with pitying smile; “Mumps is as fine a cross as you’ll see anywhere along the Floss, an’ I’n been up it wi’ the barge times enow. Why, the gentry stops to look at him; but you won’t catch Mumps a-looking at the gentry much,—he minds his own business, he does.”

      The expression of Mump’s face, which seemed to be tolerating the superfluous existence of objects in general, was strongly confirmatory of this high praise.

      “He looks dreadfully surly,” said Maggie. “Would he let me pat him?”

      “Ay, that would he, and thank you. He knows his company, Mumps does. He isn’t a dog as ’ull be caught wi’ gingerbread; he’d smell a thief a good deal stronger nor the gingerbread, he would. Lors, I talk to him by th’ hour together, when I’m walking i’ lone places, and if I’n done a bit o’ mischief, I allays tell him. I’n got no secrets but what Mumps knows ’em. He knows about my big thumb, he does.”

      “Your big thumb—what’s that, Bob?” said Maggie.

      “That’s what it is, Miss,” said Bob, quickly, exhibiting a singularly broad specimen of that difference between the man and the monkey. “It tells i’ measuring out the flannel, you see. I carry flannel, ’cause it’s light for my pack, an’ it’s dear stuff, you see, so a big thumb tells. I clap my thumb at the end o’ the yard and cut o’ the hither side of it, and the old women aren’t up to’t.”

      “But Bob,” said Maggie, looking serious, “that’s cheating; I don’t like to hear you say that.”

      “Don’t you, Miss?” said Bob regretfully. “Then I’m sorry I said it. But I’m so used to talking to Mumps, an’ he doesn’t mind a bit o’ cheating, when it’s them skinflint women, as haggle an’ haggle, an’ ’ud like to get their flannel for nothing, an’ ’ud niver ask theirselves how I got my dinner out on’t. I niver cheat anybody as doesn’t want to cheat me, Miss,—lors, I’m a honest chap, I am; only I must hev a bit o’ sport, an’ now I don’t go wi’ th’ ferrets, I’n got no varmint to come over but them haggling women. I wish you good evening, Miss.”

      “Good-by, Bob. Thank you very much for bringing me the books. And come again to see Tom.”

      “Yes, Miss,” said Bob, moving on a few steps; then turning half round he said, “I’ll leave off that trick wi’ my big thumb, if you don’t think well on me for it, Miss; but it ’ud be a pity, it would. I couldn’t find another trick so good,—an’ what ’ud be the use o’ havin’ a big thumb? It might as well ha’ been narrow.”

      Maggie, thus exalted into Bob’s exalting Madonna, laughed in spite of herself; at which her worshipper’s blue eyes twinkled too, and under these favoring auspices he touched his cap and walked away.

      The days of chivalry are not gone, notwithstanding Burke’s grand dirge over them; they live still in that far-off worship paid by many a youth and man to the woman of whom he never dreams that he shall touch so much as her little finger or the hem of her robe. Bob, with the pack on his back, had as respectful an adoration for this dark-eyed maiden as if he had been a knight in armor calling aloud on her name as he pricked on to the fight.

      That gleam of merriment soon died away from Maggie’s face, and perhaps only made the returning gloom deeper by contrast. She was too dispirited even to like answering questions about Bob’s present of books, and she carried them away to her bedroom, laying them down there and seating herself on her one stool, without caring to look at them just yet. She leaned her cheek against the window-frame, and thought that the light-hearted Bob had a lot much happier than hers.

      Maggie’s sense of loneliness, and utter privation of joy, had deepened with the brightness of advancing spring. All the favorite outdoor nooks about home, which seemed to have done their part with her parents in nurturing and cherishing her, were now mixed up with the home-sadness, and gathered no smile from the sunshine. Every affection, every delight the poor child had had, was like an aching nerve to her. There was no music for her any more,—no piano, no harmonized voices, no delicious stringed instruments, with their passionate cries of imprisoned spirits sending a strange vibration through her frame. And of all her school-life there was nothing left her now but her little collection of school-books, which she turned over with a sickening sense that she knew them all, and they were all barren of comfort. Even at school she had often wished for books with more in them; everything she learned there seemed like the ends of long threads that snapped immediately. And now—without the indirect charm of school-emulation—Télémaque was mere bran; so were the hard, dry questions on Christian Doctrine; there was no flavor in them, no strength. Sometimes Maggie thought she could have been contented with absorbing fancies; if she could have had all Scott’s novels and all Byron’s poems!—then, perhaps, she might have found happiness enough to dull her sensibility to her actual daily life. And yet they were hardly what she wanted. She could make dream-worlds of her own, but no dream-world would satisfy her now. She wanted some explanation of this hard, real life,—the unhappy-looking father, seated at the dull breakfast-table; the childish, bewildered mother; the little sordid tasks that filled the hours, or the more oppressive emptiness of weary, joyless leisure; the need of some tender, demonstrative love; the cruel sense that Tom didn’t mind what she thought or felt, and that they were no longer playfellows together; the privation of all pleasant things that had come to her more than to others,—she wanted some key that would enable her to understand, and in understanding, to endure, the heavy weight that had fallen on her young heart. If she had been taught “real learning and wisdom, such as great men knew,” she thought she should have held the secrets of life; if she had only books, that she might learn for herself what wise men knew! Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets. She knew little of saints and martyrs, and had gathered, as a general result of her teaching, that they were a temporary provision against the spread of Catholicism, and had all died at Smithfield.

      In one of these meditations it occurred to her that she had forgotten Tom’s school-books, which had been sent home in his trunk. But she found the stock unaccountably shrunk down to the few old ones which had been well thumbed,—the Latin Dictionary and Grammar, a Delectus, a torn Eutropius, the well-worn Virgil, Aldrich’s Logic, and the exasperating Euclid. Still, Latin, Euclid, and Logic would surely be a considerable step in masculine wisdom,—in that knowledge which made men contented, and even glad to live. Not that the yearning for effectual wisdom was quite unmixed; a certain mirage would now and then rise on the desert of the future, in which she seemed to see herself honored for her surprising attainments. And so the poor child, with her soul’s hunger and her illusions of self-flattery, began to nibble at this thick-rinded fruit of the tree of knowledge, filling her vacant hours with Latin, geometry, and the forms of the syllogism, and feeling a gleam of triumph now and then that her understanding was quite equal to these peculiarly masculine studies. For a week or two she went on resolutely enough, though with an occasional sinking of heart, as if she had set out toward the Promised