Maggie Rooney

“ What troubles you?" And lifting up her head, Rose Warner answered, "I was thinking how this new love of yours would take you from me, and I should be alone."
"No, not alone," he said, wiping her tears away. "Maggie and I have arranged that matter. You are to live with us, and instead of losing me you are to gain another—a sister, Rose. You have often wished you had one, and you could surely find none worthier than Maggie Miller."
"Will she watch over you, Henry? Will she be to you what your wife should be?" asked Rose; and Henry answered: "She is not at all like you, my little sister. ”

“ She did not finish the sentence, neither did she understand that if Rose to him was something dearer than a sister, she, Maggie Miller, did not care to know it.
"Is she beautiful as her name, this Rose?" she asked at last.
"She is beautiful, but not so beautiful as you. There are few who are," answered Henry; and his eyes fixed themselves upon Maggie to see how she would bear the compliment. ”

“ Maggie tried to think so too, and her sleep that night was sweeter than it had been before for many weeks—but the next day came, and the next, and Maggie's eyes grew dim with watching and with tears, for up and down the road, as far as she could see, there came no trace of him for whom she waited.
"I might have known it; it was foolish of me to think otherwise," she sighed; and, turning sadly from the window where all the afternoon she had been sitting, she laid her head wearily upon the lap of Rose. ”

“ And Maggie, listening to the voices which speak to her so oft in the autumn wind, the running brook, the opening flower, and the falling leaf, has learned a lesson different far from those taught her daily by the prim, stiff governess, who, imported from England six years ago, has drilled both Theo and Maggie in all the prescribed rules of high life as practiced in the Old World. She has taught them how to sit and how to stand, how to eat and how to drink, as becomes young ladies of Conway blood and birth. ”

“ The day seemed long to Maggie, and when at nightfall he came to them again it was difficult to tell which was the more pleased at his return, Margaret or Rose.
"Did you see Theo?" asked the former; and Henry replied: "George told me she had gone to Hillsdale. Madam Conway is very sick."
"For me! for me! She's sick with mourning for me!" cried Maggie. "Darling grandma! she does love me still, and I will go home to her at once."
Then the painful thought rushed over her: "If she wished for me, she would send. It's the humiliation, not the love, that makes her sick. ”

“ But not thus early was Rose to die, and with the waning summer days she came slowly back to life. More beautiful than ever, because more ethereal and fair, she walked the earth like one who, having struggled with a mighty sorrow, had won the victory at last; and Henry Warner, when he looked on her sweet, placid face, and listened to her voice as she made plans for the future, when Maggie would be his wife, dreamed not of the grave hidden in the deep recesses of her heart, where grew no flower of hope or semblance of earthly joy. ”

“ He strove to read, he went to his studio, he went to Brighton; but he saw Maggie in all things. She was with him—a sort of vague pain that kept him strangely conscious of life.
Once convinced he was a lover he became the man with a mission; his heart swelled with mysterious promptings, and felt the spur of duty. No longer was delay admissible. A day, an hour might involve the loss of all. Should he go round to the Manor House and tell Maggie of the message he had received to love her and save her? She would now be watering her flowers in the green-houses. ”

“ It makes me faint,’ and shudderingly she drew nearer to her husband, who, to his dying hour, never forgot the wild, dark eyes which looked down so reproachfully upon him that memorable wintry day.
Three years have passed away since the time when first we met with Maggie Lee—three years which seemed so long to her then, and which have brought her so much pain. She has watched the snow and ice as they melted from off the hill-side. She has seen the grass spring up by the open door—has heard the robin singing in the old oak tree—has felt the summer air upon her cheek. ”

“ While the butler remained it was Maggie that she had come to see and Maggie that—in spite of this attendant's high blankness on the subject of all possibilities on that lady's part—she would cheerfully, by the fire, wait for. As soon as they were alone together, however, she mounted, as with the whizz and the red light of a rocket, from the form to the fact, saying straight out, as she stood and looked at him: "What else, my dear, what in the world else can we do?" ”

“ If you have forgotten her, you surely remember the two girls in flats, one of whom seemed so much distressed at her grandmother's remarks. She, the distressed one, was Maggie; the other was Theo; and the old lady was Madam Conway, who, luckily for me, chances at this time to be in England, buying up goods, I presume. Maggie says that this trip to Worcester, together with a camp-meeting held in the Hillsdale woods last year, is the extent of her travels, and one would think so to see her. A perfect child of nature, full of fun, beautiful as a Hebe, and possessing the kindest heart in the world. ”

“ Kept up a minute longer it would break and collapse—so that Maggie felt herself the next thing turn with a start to her father. "Can't she be stopped? Hasn't she done it enough?"—some such question as that she let herself ask him to suppose in her. Then it was that, across half the gallery—for he hadn't moved from where she had first seen him—he struck her as confessing, with strange tears in his own eyes, to sharp identity of emotion. "Poor thing, poor thing"—it reached straight—"isn't she, for one's credit, on the swagger?" ”

“ Read in youth by the light of sympathy with insurgency, Maggie is adorable, and her brother Tom is but a better-looking Jonas Chuzzlewit. Read in age by the light of respect for conformity and self-control, much of Maggie's charm vanishes, while most of Tom's hardness becomes both respectable and inevitable. Maggie was truly a thorn in the side of a proud country family, not accustomed to its little daughters running off to join the gipsies, nor to its grown girls eloping with their cousin's lover. ”

“ She could not own that half-crazed woman for her grandmother! As Hagar talked Maggie had risen, and now, tall, and erect as the mountain ash which grew on her native hills, she stood before Hagar, every vestige of color faded from her face, her eyes dark as midnight and glowing like coals of living fire, while her hands, locked despairingly together, moved slowly towards Hagar, as if to thrust her aside. ”

“ Maggie had liked her to understand so far as this was possible, but hadn't been slow to see afterwards how the possibility was limited, when one came to think, by mysteries she was not to sound. This inability in her was indeed not remarkable, inasmuch as the Princess herself, as we have seen, was only now in a position to boast of touching bottom. Maggie inwardly lived in a consciousness that she could but partly open even to so good a friend and her own visitation of the fuller expanse of which was for that matter still going on. ”

“ As regards herself Maggie had become more conscious from week to week of his ingenuities of intention to make up to her for their forfeiture, in so dire a degree, of any reality of frankness—a privation that had left on his lips perhaps a little of the same thirst with which she fairly felt her own distorted, the torment of the lost pilgrim who listens in desert sands for the possible, the impossible, plash of water. ”

“ Peeps forth, with little Maggie
Has any fault to find. [234]
When winsome little Maggie,
With basket on her arm,
In which her father’s luncheon
Is wrapped so nice and warm—
When she enters the long workshop
And pauses at his side,
Quick down he lays his hammer
And turns in love and pride,
To look into her limpid eyes,
And stroke her sunny hair,
And jest and frolic with her—
Forgetting toil and care—
For the music of her laughter
And the mirth of her replies,
The while there’s not a happier man,
Or richer, ’neath the skies. ”

“ If Maggie had not so firmly made up her mind never to say, either to her good friend or to any one else, more than she meant about her father, she might have found herself betrayed into some such overflow during the week spent in London with her husband after the others had adjourned to Fawns for the summer. ”

“ Madam Conway had not yet appeared, and, as Anna Jeffrey just then left the room, Mr. Carrollton was for some moments alone with Maggie. Winding his arm around her waist, and giving her a most expressive look, he said, "Maggie, are those tears for me?"
Instantly the bright blushes stole over Maggie's face and neck, for she remembered the time when once before he had asked her a similar question. Not now, as then, did she turn away from 'him, but she answered frankly: "Yes, they are. You look so pale and thin, I'm sure you must be very ill." ”

“ If you care for me nothing else matters. God will see to the rest."
"I don't like leaving things to other people," Maggie said slowly. "Now I suppose I've shocked you. But there you are; I shall always be shocking you."
"Nothing that you can say will shock me," he answered firmly. "Do you know that that's part of the charm you have for me, you dear little wild thing? If you will come and live with me perhaps you will see how God works, how mysterious are His ways, and what He means to do for you—"
Maggie shivered: "Oh, now you're talking like Aunt Anne. ”

“ Viewed through the light of what followed, I have never been able to visualize Maggie moving down the hall. It has always been a menacing figure, rather shadowy than real. And the hail itself takes on grotesque proportions, becomes inordinately long, an infinity of hall, fading away into time and distance.
Yet it was only a moment, of course, until I stood by the telephone. Maggie had been at work. The wooden box which covered the battery-jars had been removed, and lay on its side. ”

“ Extraordinary, beyond question, was one branch of his characteristic mute wonderment—it characterised above all, with its subject before it, his modesty: the strange dim doubt, waking up for him at the end of the years, of whether Maggie's mother had, after all, been capable of the maximum. The maximum of tenderness he meant—as the terms existed for him; the maximum of immersion in the fact of being married. Maggie herself was capable ”

“ How did he move and walk, how above all did he, or how would he, look—he who with his so nobly handsome face could look such wonderful things—in case of being left alone with some of the subjects of his wonder? There were subjects for wonder among these very neighbours; only Maggie herself had her own odd way—which didn't moreover the least irritate him—of really liking them in proportion as they could strike her as strange. ”

“ When Christmas time drew near, Miss Hester one day, while Maggie was at school, opened some long-closed drawers in her desk to see if she could find something to give Maggie on that day, for she had not forgotten her own youthful days when Christmas was the event of the year.
Among the long-forgotten treasures of the past, she came upon a little locket given her when she was about Maggie’s age, by her only brother, who had gone to the war and been killed in battle, severing the last link that bound the solitary girl to the world. Since that, she had lived alone and shrank from all society. ”

“ There was a time in Maggie's life when a kind, judicious, thoughtful, Christian woman might have kept her from falling, might have won her confidence, become her guide and teacher, and piloted her through the dangerous shoals and quicksands which beset a bright, attractive, handsome young girl, left to make her own way alone and unprotected. ”

“ The latter spent most of his time out at soak in pale-green snow storms, busy with a nickel-plated revolver, rescuing aged strangers from villains.
Maggie lost herself in sympathy with the wanderers swooning in snow storms beneath happy-hued church windows. And a choir within singing "Joy to the World." To Maggie and the rest of the audience this was transcendental realism. Joy always within, and they, like the actor, inevitably without. ”

“ This meaning was that she had decided, that she had been infinitely conscious of Maggie's presence before, that she knew she should at last find her alone, and that she wanted her, for some reason, enough to have presumably called on Bob Assingham for aid. He had taken her chair and let her go, and the arrangement was for Maggie a signal proof of her earnestness; of the energy in fact, that, though superficially commonplace in a situation in which people weren't supposed to be watching each other, was what affected our young woman on the spot as a breaking of bars. ”

“ You are too good for this, Maggie—it must not be, it shall not be. As I said before, death would be better.” They stood in front of the canal locks and Maggie looked with a beating heart on the deep water that a ray from a crescent moon faintly indicated. “A woman is helpless until she finds her lord, he who shall save, the saviour who shall bring her home safe to the fold. He exists! ”

“ But when Maggie rose to return home—saying that it was time for her to be looking after Ronald's supper—her friend seemed to pull herself together somewhat, and at once and cheerfully accepted Maggie's invitation to come and have tea with her the following afternoon.
'For you have been so little in to see us lately,' the small Maggie said; 'and Ronald always engaged with the American people—and often in the evening too as well as the whole day long.'
'But I must make a great deal of you now that you are going away,' said Miss Douglas, smiling. ”