This is the best that can be done where the moral is so explicit; and the device of intricacy serves to divert attention from a too exact correspondence between cause and effect.
In Miss Edgeworth’s clear and well-ordered world the results of choice and action are inevitable; but her plots (she was the pioneer of plot in children’s books) involve a puzzle, and in the solution there is always an element of surprise.
That Bristol merchant in “Waste Not, Want Not,”[151] who invited his two nephews to stay with him, in order to decide which of them he should adopt, bears more than a chance resemblance to Mr. Day. If the two boys had been girls, the story might have been his own; but in literature, as in life, Mr. Day was prone to digress; he never could have followed the relentless order of events from the untying of the two parcels by Hal and Benjamin (the Merton and Sandford of this drama) to its logical result. There is a cumulative fatality about this which puts it beyond question.
No sooner has the inconsequent Hal watched the careful untying of Ben’s parcel, and cut the whipcord of his own “precipitately in sundry places” than the uncle gives them each a top.
“And now” (a child never could resist the interruption). “And now, he won’t have any string for his top!”
The improvident one, however, finds a way out by spinning it with his hat-string (the consequence of this is deferred); and then, after whipping the banisters aimlessly with the cut string, drops it upon the stairs. Little Patty, his cousin, running downstairs with his pocket-handkerchief (which he is in too desperate a hurry to fetch himself), falls down a whole flight of stairs; and the assiduous Ben, hunting for her lost shoe, finds it sticking in a loop of whipcord.
For a time, the string theme is allowed to drop, but it comes up again as a chief agent of the catastrophe. Hal, on his way to the Archery-meeting stoops to pick up his ball and loses his hat. (“The string, as we may recollect, our wasteful hero had used in spinning his top”.). Running down the hill after it, he falls prostrate in his green and white uniform into a treacherous bed of red mud, and becomes the laughing-stock of his companions.
Last and bitterest of all, he sees his prudent cousin replace a cracked bow-string and win the contest by drawing from his pocket “an excellent piece of whipcord”. Not a reader but echoes, with additions, the unfortunate Hal’s exclamation: “The everlasting whipcord, I declare!”
This single strand goes in and out with the shuttle-motion of a nursery rhyme:
This is the string that Hal cut.