Mrs Tullivers Teraphim, or Household Gods
WHEN the coach set down Tom and Maggie, it was five hours since she had started from home, and she was thinking with some trembling that her father had perhaps missed her and asked for `the little wen vain. She thought of no other ge that might have happened. She hurried along the gravel walk aered the house before Tom, but irance she was startled by a strong smell of tobacco. The parlour door was ajar - that was where the smell came from. It was very strange: could any visitor be smoking at a time like this? Was her mother there? If so, she must be told that Tom was e. Maggie, after this pause of surprise was only i of opening the door when Tom came up and they both looked in the parlether. There was a coarse, dingy man, of whose fa had some vague recolle, sitting in his fathers chair, smoking, with a jug and glass beside him.
The truth flashed on Toms mind in an instant. To `have the bailiff in the house, and `to be sold up, were phrases which he had beeo, even as a little boy: they were part of the disgrad misery of `failing, of losing all ones money and being ruined - sinking into the dition of poor w people. It seemed only natural this should happen since his father had lost all his property, ahought of no more special cause for this particular form of misfortuhan the loss of the lawsuit. But the immediate presence of this disgrace was so much keener an experieo Tom than the worst form of apprehension, that he felt at this moment as if his real trouble had only just begun: it was a tou the irritated nerve pared with its spontaneous dull ag.
`How do you do, sir? said the man, taking the pipe out of his mouth with rough, embarrassed civility. The two young startled faces made him a little unfortable.
But Tom turned away hastily without speaking: the sight was too hateful. Maggie had not uood the appearance of this stranger, as Tom had: she followed him, whispering `Who it be, Tom? What is the matter? Then with a sudden undefined dread lest this stranger might have something to do with a ge in her father, she rushed upstairs, cheg herself at the bedroom door to throw off her bo, aer on tiptoe. All was silent there: her father was lying, heedless of everything around him, with his eyes closed as when she had left him. A servant was there, but not her mother.
`Wheres my mother? she whispered. The servant did not know.
Maggie hastened out, and said to Tom, `Father is lying quiet: let us go and look for my mother; I wonder where she is.
Mrs Tulliver was not downstairs - not in any of the bedrooms. There was but one room below the attic which Maggie had left unsearched: it was the store-room where her mother kept all her linen and all the precious `best things that were only uned and brought out on special occasions. Tom, preg Maggie as they returned along the passage, opehe door of this room and immediately said, `Mother!
Mrs Tulliver was seated there with all her laid-up treasures. One of the lines en: the silver tea-pot was uned from its many folds of paper, and the best a was laid out oop of the closed line; spoons and skewers and ladles were spread in rows on the shelves; and the poor woman was shaking her head and weeping with a bitter tension of the mouth, over the mark `Elizabeth Dodson on the er of some table cloths she held in her lap.
She dropped them and started up as Tom spoke.
`O my boy, my boy, she said, clasping him ro