`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.
`O what a pity we haven't got Dominie Sampson,' said Maggie, who couldn't help mingling some gaiety with their sadness.`If he had taught me book-keeping by double entry and after the Italian method, as he did Lucy Bertram, Icould teach you, Tom.'
` You teach! Yes, I daresay.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 look 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.A girl of no startling appearance, and who will never be a Sappho or a Madame Roland or anything else that the world takes wide note of, may still hold forces within her as the living plant-seed does, which will make a way for themselves, often in a shattering, violent manner.
