Book 3 - Chapter 6

Tending to Refute the Popular Prejudice against the Present of a
Pocket-Knife

In that dark time of December, the sale of the household furniture
lasted beyond the middle of the second day. Mr. Tulliver, who had
begun, in his intervals of consciousness, to manifest an irritability
which often appeared to have as a direct effect the recurrence of
spasmodic rigidity and insensibility, had lain in this living death
throughout the critical hours when the noise of the sale came nearest
to his chamber. Mr. Turnbull had decided that it would be a less risk
to let him remain where he was than to remove him to Luke's
cottage,--a plan which the good Luke had proposed to Mrs. Tulliver,
thinking it would be very bad if the master were "to waken up" at the
noise of the sale; and the wife and children had sat imprisoned in the
silent chamber, watching the large prostrate figure on the bed, and
trembling lest the blank face should suddenly show some response to
the sounds which fell on their own ears with such obstinate, painful
repetition.

But it was over at last, that time of importunate certainty and
eye-straining suspense. The sharp sound of a voice, almost as metallic
as the rap that followed it, had ceased; the tramping of footsteps on
the gravel had died out. Mrs. Tulliver's blond face seemed aged ten
years by the last thirty hours; the poor woman's mind had been busy
divining when her favorite things were being knocked down by the
terrible hammer; her heart had been fluttering at the thought that
first one thing and then another had gone to be identified as hers in
the hateful publicity of the Golden Lion; and all the while she had to
sit and make no sign of this inward agitation. Such things bring lines
in well-rounded faces, and broaden the streaks of white among the
hairs that once looked as if they had been dipped in pure sunshine.
Already, at three o'clock, Kezia, the good-hearted, bad-tempered
housemaid, who regarded all people that came to the sale as her
personal enemies, the dirt on whose feet was of a peculiarly vile
quality, had begun to scrub and swill with an energy much assisted by
a continual low muttering against "folks as came to buy up other
folk's things," and made light of "scrazing" the tops of mahogany
tables over which better folks than themselves had had to--suffer a
waste of tissue through evaporation. She was not scrubbing
indiscriminately, for there would be further dirt of the same
atrocious kind made by people who had still to fetch away their
purchases; but she was bent on bringing the parlor, where that
"pipe-smoking pig," the bailiff, had sat, to such an appearance of
scant comfort as could be given to it by cleanliness and the few
articles of furniture bought in