Maggie

“ 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. ”

“ Every moment as he went toward it, he expected the door to open, and a sense of unkindness was chilling his heart, when he heard a swift, light step behind him. He turned, and there stood Maggie. She had the dew of the sea on her face, her cheeks were like a rose, pink and wet before sunrise. Her eyes had a glint as of the morning star in them, she was trembling and panting with her surprise and rapid motion. ”

“ 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?" ”

“ 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. ”

“ Maggie was full of the sense of that—so full that it made her impatient; whereupon she moved forward a little, placing herself in range of the eyes that had been looking off elsewhere, but that she had suddenly called to recognition. Charlotte, who had evidently not dreamed of being followed, instinctively, with her pale stare, stiffened herself for protest. Maggie could make that out—as well as, further, however, that her second impression of her friend's approach had an instant effect on her attitude. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Maggie had liked, in London, and in the world at large, so many more people than she had thought it right to fear, right even to so much as judge, that it positively quickened her fever to have to recognise, in this case, such a lapse of all the sequences. It was only that a charming clever woman wondered about her—that is wondered about her as Amerigo's wife, and wondered, moreover, with the intention of kindness and the spontaneity, almost, of surprise. ”

“ This girl, whom Maggie was never to see again hung as a picture in the rooms of her mind for the rest of her life—the youth, the desperate anxiety as of one who throws her last piece upon the gaming-table, the poverty of the shabby black dress, the real physical austerity and asceticism of the white cheeks and the thin arms and pale hands—this figure remained a symbol for Maggie. She used to wonder in after years, when fortune had carried her far enough away from all this world, what had happened to that girl. ”

“ 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?" ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Maggie is like me, reserved as to her deepest feelings: and it may be that you have scarcely read as yet her true nature. She is capable of giving such devoted love. Dear Constance, have you won it yet? Forgive me for asking the question. Forgive a mother's anxieties. I can scarcely judge from Maggie's letters, but I have had doubts, and your letter has awakened real fear. Your mention of her is so slight, compared with all that you say of my other dear girls. ”

“ She was ready to lie again if her companion would but give her the opening. Then she should know she had done all. Charlotte looked at her hard, as if to compare her face with her note of resentment; and Maggie, feeling this, met it with the signs of an impression that might pass for the impression of defeat. “I want really to possess him,” said Mrs. Verver. “I happen also to feel that he’s worth it.”
Maggie rose as if to receive her. “Oh—worth it!” she wonderfully threw off. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Maggie responsively mused. “Yes,” she said the next moment, “that’s why Amerigo stays.”
“Let alone it’s why Charlotte goes.” that Mrs. Assingham, and emboldened, smiled “So he knows—?”
But Maggie hung back. “Amerigo—?” After which, however, she blushed—to her companion’s recognition.
“Your father. He knows what YOU know? I mean,” Fanny faltered—“well, how much does he know?” Maggie’s silence and Maggie’s eyes had in fact arrested the push of the question—which, for a decent consistency, she couldn’t yet quite abandon. “What I should rather say is does he know how much?” ”

“ 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 ”

“ Poor Maggie! And you’ve had such a hard life—and your boarder leaving, too! That’ll make a lot of difference in your pocketbook, won’t it? But, Maggie, you’ll have to have some new clothes.”
“Of course. I’ve been shopping this afternoon. I’ve got to have—oh, lots of things.”
“Of course you have. And, Maggie,”—Miss Flora’s face grew eager,—“please, please, won’t you let me help you a little—about those clothes? And get some nice ones—some real nice ones, for once. You know how I’d love to! Please, Maggie, there’s a good girl!” ”

“ Yes, Maggie, your father’s God is our God, and he will never forsake his people. I will wipe away these tears, and put faith in him for the future.” And the grandmother dried her eyes, and rising from her low seat, said cheerfully, “Maggie, dear, go to the gate, and watch for your brother Jack. When you see him coming across the field, let me know, and I will dish up the supper, so as to have it ready.” ”

“ But Maggie has more actual affinity with poets and artists than with saints and martyrs. Her soul thrills like a finely-touched instrument to the beauty of the world around her, and though she doubts whether there may not even be a sinfulness in the indulgence of this enjoyment, yet the summer flowers and the summer sunshine put her scruples to flight. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Maggie knew quite well that it was coming. She was lying in a long chair near the fire, a shawl over her knees. It was a blustering day at the end of February. The windows rattled, and the wind rushing down the chimney blew the flame into little flags and pennants of colour.
Paul came and stood by the fire, warming his hands, his legs spread out. Maggie looked at him with a long comprehensive glance that took him in from head to foot. She seemed to know then that she was going to marry him. A voice seemed to say to her: "Look at him well. This is the man you're going to live with. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We gazed out into the night, out and across the sea. At the same moment, out there on the terrible Ba, a blue light sprang up, revealing the yacht and even its people on board. She was leaning well over to one side, her masts gone, and the spray dashing over her.
"Come!" cried Maggie, "there is no time to lose. We can guide their boat to the cave. Come, cousin!"
I felt dazed, thunderstruck. Was I to take active part in a forlorn hope? Was Maggie—how beautiful and daring she looked now!—to assume the rôle of a modern Grace Darling? So it appeared. ”

“ 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 had gone through the form of recalling this, and the light of their ancient candour, shining from so far back, had seemed to bring out some things so strangely that, with the sharpness of the vision, she had risen to her feet. "Well, with a 'life' Fawns will certainly do." ”

“ She cannot, when she looks upon the beautiful girl who comes each day to her lonely hut, and whom she worships with a species of wild idolatry. Maggie knows not why it is, and yet to her there is a peculiar fascination about that strange old woman, with her snow-white hair, her wrinkled face, her bony hand, and wild, dark eyes, which, when they rest on her, have in them a look of unutterable tenderness. ”

“ Maggie had in due course seen her begin to "work" this fortunately natural source of sympathy for all it was worth. She took possession of the ground throughout its extent; she abounded, to odd excess, one might have remarked, in the assumption of its being for her, with her husband, all the ground, the finest clearest air and most breatheable medium common to them. ”

“ In any case, the whole account of Maggie's childhood, the admirable pathos of the childish yearnings, and the quaint chorus of uncles and aunts, the adventure with the gipsies, the wanderings by the Floss, the visit to Tom in his school, have a freshness and brilliance of colouring showing that the workmanship is as perfect as the sentiment is tender. But when Maggie ceases to be the most fascinating child in fiction, and becomes the heroine of a novel, the falling off is grievous. ”