He hurried down-stairs and left poor Maggie to that bitter sense of the irrevocable which was almost an every-day experience of her small soul.
She could see clearly enough now the thing was done that it was very foolish, and that she should have to hear and think more about her hair than ever;for Maggie rushed to her deeds with passionate impulse, and then saw not only their consequences, but what would have happened if they had not been done, with all the detail and exaggerated circumstances of an active imagination.
Tom never did the same sort of foolish things as Maggie, having a wonderful, instinctive discernment of what would turn to his advantage or disadvantage, and so it happened that though he was much more wilful and inflexible than Maggie, his mother hardly ever called him naughty.But if Tom did make a mistake of that sort he espoused it and stood by it: he `didn't mind':
- if he broke the lash of his father's gigwhip by lashing the gate, he couldn't help it - the whip shouldn't have got caught in the hinge.If Tom Tulliver whipped a gate he was convinced, not that the whipping of gates by all boys was a justifiable act, but that he Tom Tulliver was justifiable in whipping that particular gate, and he wasn't going to be sorry.But Maggie, as she stood crying before the glass, felt it impossible that she should go down to dinner and endure the severe eyes and severe words of her aunts, while Tom, and Lucy, and Kezia who waited at table, and perhaps her father and her uncles, would laugh at her - for if Tom had laughed at her of course every one else would: and if she had only let her hair alone, she could have sat with Tom and Lucy and had the apricot pudding and the custard! What could she do but sob? She sat as helpless and despairing among her black locks as Ajax among the slaughtered sheep.Very trivial, perhaps, this anguish seems to weather-worn mortals who have to think of Christmas bills, dead loves and broken friendships, but it was not less bitter to Maggie - perhaps it was even more bitter - than what we are fond of calling antithetically the real troubles of mature life.`Ah, my child, you will have real troubles to fret about by and by,' is the consolation we have almost all of us had administered to us in our childhood, and have repeated to other children since we have been grown up.We have all of us sobbed so piteously standing with tiny bare legs above our little socks, when we lost sight of our mother or nurse in some strange place, but we can no longer recall the poignancy of that moment till we weep over it, as we do over the remembered sufferings of five or ten years ago.Every one of those keen moments has left its trace and lives in us still, but such traces have blent themselves irrecoverably with the firmer texture of our youth and man-hood; and so it comes that we can look on at the troubles of our children with a smiling disbelief in the reality of their pain.
Is there any one who can recover the experience of his childhood, not merely with a memory of what he did and what happened to him, of what he liked and disliked when he was in frock and trousers, but with an intimate penetration, a revived consciousness of what he felt then - when it was so long from one Midsummer to another? - what he felt when his schoolfellows shut him out of their game because he would pitch the ball wrong out of mere wilfulness;or on a rainy day in the holidays when he didn't know how to amuse himself and fell from idleness into mischief, from mischief into defiance, and from defiance into sulkiness; or when his mother absolutely refused to let him have a tailed coat that `half,' although every other boy of his age had gone into tails already? Surely if we could recall that early bitterness, and the dim guesses, the strangely perspectiveless conception of life that gave the bitterness its intensity, we should not pooh-pooh the griefs of our children.
`Miss Maggie, you're to come down this minute,' said Kezia, entering the room hurriedly.`Lawks! what have you been a-doing? I niver see such a fright.'
`Don't, Kezia,' said Maggie, angrily.`Go away!'
`But I tell you, you're to come down, Miss, this minute: your mother says so,' said Kezia, going up to Maggie and taking her by the hand to raise her from the floor.
`Get away, Kezia, I don't want any dinner,' said Maggie, resisting Kezia's arm, `I shan't come.'
`O well, I can't stay: I've got to wait at dinner,' said Kezia, going out again.
`Maggie, you little silly,' said Tom, peeping into the room ten minutes after, `why don't you come and have your dinner? There's lots o' goodies, and my mother says you're to come.What are you crying for, you little spooney?'
O it was dreadful! Tom was so hard and unconcerned: if he had been crying on the floor, Maggie would have cried too.And there was the dinner, so nice; and she was so hungry.It was very bitter.
But Tom was not altogether hard.He was not inclined to cry, and did not feel that Maggie's grief spoiled his prospect of the sweets; but he went and put his head near her, and said in a lower, comforting tone, `Won't you come, then, Magsie? Shall I bring you a bit o' pudding when I've had mine?...and a custard and things?'
`Ye-e-es,' said Maggie, beginning to feel life a little more tolerable.
`Very well,' said Tom, going away.But he turned again at the door and said, `But you'd better come, you know.There's the dessert - nuts, you know - and cowslip wine.'
Maggie's tears had ceased, and she looked reflective as Tom left her.
His good nature had taken off the keenest edge of her suffering, and nuts with cowslip wine began to assert their legitimate influence.