Book 5 - Chapter 5

The Cloven Tree

Secrets are rarely betrayed or discovered according to any programme
our fear has sketched out. Fear is almost always haunted by terrible
dramatic scenes, which recur in spite of the best-argued probabilities
against them; and during a year that Maggie had had the burthen of
concealment on her mind, the possibility of discovery had continually
presented itself under the form of a sudden meeting with her father or
Tom when she was walking with Philip in the Red Deeps. She was aware
that this was not one of the most likely events; but it was the scene
that most completely symbolized her inward dread. Those slight
indirect suggestions which are dependent on apparently trivial
coincidences and incalculable states of mind, are the favorite
machinery of Fact, but are not the stuff in which Imagination is apt
to work.

Certainly one of the persons about whom Maggie's fears were furthest
from troubling themselves was her aunt Pullet, on whom, seeing that
she did not live in St. Ogg's, and was neither sharp-eyed nor
sharp-tempered, it would surely have been quite whimsical of them to
fix rather than on aunt Glegg. And yet the channel of fatality--the
pathway of the lightning--was no other than aunt Pullet. She did not
live at St. Ogg's, but the road from Garum Firs lay by the Red Deeps,
at the end opposite that by which Maggie entered.

The day after Maggie's last meeting with Philip, being a Sunday on
which Mr. Pullet was bound to appear in funeral hatband and scarf at
St. Ogg's church, Mrs. Pullet made this the occasion of dining with
sister Glegg, and taking tea with poor sister Tulliver. Sunday was the
one day in the week on which Tom was at home in the afternoon; and
today the brighter spirits he had been in of late had flowed over in
unusually cheerful open chat with his father, and in the invitation,
"Come, Magsie, you come too!" when he strolled out with his mother in
the garden to see the advancing cherry-blossoms. He had been better
pleased with Maggie since she had been less odd and ascetic; he was
even getting rather proud of her; several persons had remarked in his
hearing that his sister was a very fine girl. To-day there was a
peculiar brightness in her face, due in reality to an undercurrent of
excitement, which had as much doubt and pain as pleasure in it; but it
might pass for a sign of happiness.

"You look very well, my dear," said aunt Pullet, shaking her head
sadly, as they sat round the tea-table. "I niver thought your girl 'ud
be so good-looking, Bessy. But you must wear pink, my dear; that blue
thing as your aunt Glegg gave you turns you into a crowflower. Jane
never _was_ tasty. Why don't you wear that gown o' mine?"

"It is so pretty and so