The Mill on the Floss (29 page)

"I beg your pardon, sir,–but does Mr. Askern say Tulliver will
be lame?"

"Oh, no; oh, no," said Mr. Stelling, "not permanently; only for
a little while."

"Did he tell Tulliver so, sir, do you think?"

"No; nothing was said to him on the subject."

"Then may I go and tell him, sir?"

"Yes, to be sure; now you mention it, I dare say he may be
troubling about that. Go to his bedroom, but be very quiet at
present."

It had been Philip's first thought when he heard of the
accident,–"Will Tulliver be lame? It will be very hard for him if
he is"; and Tom's hitherto unforgiven offences were washed out by
that pity. Philip felt that they were no longer in a state of
repulsion, but were being drawn into a common current of suffering
and sad privation. His imagination did not dwell on the outward
calamity and its future effect on Tom's life, but it made vividly
present to him the probable state of Tom's feeling. Philip had only
lived fourteen years, but those years had, most of them, been
steeped in the sense of a lot irremediably hard.

"Mr. Askern says you'll soon be all right again, Tulliver, did
you know?" he said rather timidly, as he stepped gently up to Tom's
bed. "I've just been to ask Mr. Stelling, and he says you'll walk
as well as ever again by-and-day."

Tom looked up with that momentary stopping of the breath which
comes with a sudden joy; then he gave a long sigh, and turned his
blue-gray eyes straight on Philip's face, as he had not done for a
fortnight or more. As for Maggie, this intimation of a possibility
she had not thought of before affected her as a new trouble; the
bare idea of Tom's being always lame overpowered the assurance that
such a misfortune was not likely to befall him, and she clung to
him and cried afresh.

"Don't be a little silly, Magsie," said Tom, tenderly, feeling
very brave now. "I shall soon get well."

"Good-by, Tulliver," said Philip, putting out his small,
delicate hand, which Tom clasped immediately with his more
substantial fingers.

"I say," said Tom, "ask Mr. Stelling to let you come and sit
with me sometimes, till I get up again, Wakem; and tell me about
Robert Bruce, you know."

After that, Philip spent all his time out of school-hours with
Tom and Maggie. Tom liked to hear fighting stories as much as ever,
but he insisted strongly on the fact that those great fighters who
did so many wonderful things and came off unhurt, wore excellent
armor from head to foot, which made fighting easy work, he
considered. He should not have hurt his foot if he had had an iron
shoe on. He listened with great interest to a new story of Philip's
about a man who had a very bad wound in his foot, and cried out so
dreadfully with the pain that his friends could bear with him no
longer, but put him ashore on a desert island, with nothing but
some wonderful poisoned arrows to kill animals with for food.

"I didn't roar out a bit, you know," Tom said, "and I dare say
my foot was as bad as his. It's cowardly to roar."

But Maggie would have it that when anything hurt you very much,
it was quite permissible to cry out, and it was cruel of people not
to bear it. She wanted to know if Philoctetes had a sister, and why
she
didn't go with him on the desert island and take care
of him.

One day, soon after Philip had told this story, he and Maggie
were in the study alone together while Tom's foot was being
dressed. Philip was at his books, and Maggie, after sauntering idly
round the room, not caring to do anything in particular, because
she would soon go to Tom again, went and leaned on the table near
Philip to see what he was doing, for they were quite old friends
now, and perfectly at home with each other.

"What are you reading about in Greek?" she said. "It's poetry, I
can see that, because the lines are so short."

"It's about Philoctetes, the lame man I was telling you of
yesterday," he answered, resting his head on his hand, and looking
at her as if he were not at all sorry to be interrupted. Maggie, in
her absent way, continued to lean forward, resting on her arms and
moving her feet about, while her dark eyes got more and more fixed
and vacant, as if she had quite forgotten Philip and his book.

"Maggie," said Philip, after a minute or two, still leaning on
his elbow and looking at her, "if you had had a brother like me, do
you think you should have loved him as well as Tom?"

Maggie started a little on being roused from her reverie, and
said, "What?" Philip repeated his question.

"Oh, yes, better," she answered immediately. "No, not better;
because I don't think I
could
love you better than Tom.
But I should be so sorry,–
so sorry
for you."

Philip colored; he had meant to imply, would she love him as
well in spite of his deformity, and yet when she alluded to it so
plainly, he winced under her pity. Maggie, young as she was, felt
her mistake. Hitherto she had instinctively behaved as if she were
quite unconscious of Philip's deformity; her own keen sensitiveness
and experience under family criticism sufficed to teach her this as
well as if she had been directed by the most finished breeding.

"But you are so very clever, Philip, and you can play and sing,"
she added quickly. "I wish you
were
my brother. I'm very
fond of you. And you would stay at home with me when Tom went out,
and you would teach me everything; wouldn't you,–Greek and
everything?"

"But you'll go away soon, and go to school, Maggie," said
Philip, "and then you'll forget all about me, and not care for me
any more. And then I shall see you when you're grown up, and you'll
hardly take any notice of me."

"Oh, no, I sha'n't forget you, I'm sure," said Maggie, shaking
her head very seriously. "I never forget anything, and I think
about everybody when I'm away from them. I think about poor Yap;
he's got a lump in his throat, and Luke says he'll die. Only don't
you tell Tom. because it will vex him so. You never saw Yap; he's a
queer little dog,–nobody cares about him but Tom and me."

"Do you care as much about me as you do about Yap, Maggie?" said
Philip, smiling rather sadly.

"Oh, yes, I should think so," said Maggie, laughing.

"I'm very fond of
you
, Maggie; I shall never forget
you
," said Philip, "and when I'm very unhappy, I shall
always think of you, and wish I had a sister with dark eyes, just
like yours."

"Why do you like my eyes?" said Maggie, well pleased. She had
never heard any one but her father speak of her eyes as if they had
merit.

"I don't know," said Philip. "They're not like any other eyes.
They seem trying to speak,–trying to speak kindly. I don't like
other people to look at me much, but I like you to look at me,
Maggie."

"Why, I think you're fonder of me than Tom is," said Maggie,
rather sorrowfully. Then, wondering how she could convince Philip
that she could like him just as well, although he was crooked, she
said:

"Should you like me to kiss you, as I do Tom? I will, if you
like."

"Yes, very much; nobody kisses me."

Maggie put her arm round his neck and kissed him quite
earnestly.

"There now," she said, "I shall always remember you, and kiss
you when I see you again, if it's ever so long. But I'll go now,
because I think Mr. Askern's done with Tom's foot."

When their father came the second time, Maggie said to him, "Oh,
father, Philip Wakem is so very good to Tom; he is such a clever
boy, and I
do
love him. And you love him too, Tom, don't
you?
Say
you love him," she added entreatingly.

Tom colored a little as he looked at his father, and said: "I
sha'n't be friends with him when I leave school, father; but we've
made it up now, since my foot has been bad, and he's taught me to
play at draughts, and I can beat him."

"Well, well," said Mr. Tulliver, "if he's good to you, try and
make him amends, and be good to
him
. He's a poor crooked
creature, and takes after his dead mother. But don't you be getting
too thick with him; he's got his father's blood in him too. Ay, ay,
the gray colt may chance to kick like his black sire."

The jarring natures of the two boys effected what Mr. Tulliver's
admonition alone might have failed to effect; in spite of Philip's
new kindness, and Tom's answering regard in this time of his
trouble, they never became close friends. When Maggie was gone, and
when Tom by-and-by began to walk about as usual, the friendly
warmth that had been kindled by pity and gratitude died out by
degrees, and left them in their old relation to each other. Philip
was often peevish and contemptuous; and Tom's more specific and
kindly impressions gradually melted into the old background of
suspicion and dislike toward him as a queer fellow, a humpback, and
the son of a rogue. If boys and men are to be welded together in
the glow of transient feeling, they must be made of metal that will
mix, else they inevitably fall asunder when the heat dies out.

Chapter VII
The Golden Gates Are Passed

So Tom went on even to the fifth half-year–till he was turned
sixteen–at King's Lorton, while Maggie was growing with a rapidity
which her aunts considered highly reprehensible, at Miss Firniss's
boarding-school in the ancient town of Laceham on the Floss, with
cousin Lucy for her companion. In her early letters to Tom she had
always sent her love to Philip, and asked many questions about him,
which were answered by brief sentences about Tom's toothache, and a
turf-house which he was helping to build in the garden, with other
items of that kind. She was pained to hear Tom say in the holidays
that Philip was as queer as ever again, and often cross. They were
no longer very good friends, she perceived; and when she reminded
Tom that he ought always to love Philip for being so good to him
when his foot was bad, he answered: "Well, it isn't my fault;
I
don't do anything to him." She hardly ever saw Philip
during the remainder of their school-life; in the Midsummer
holidays he was always away at the seaside, and at Christmas she
could only meet him at long intervals in the street of St. Ogg's.
When they did meet, she remembered her promise to kiss him, but, as
a young lady who had been at a boarding-school, she knew now that
such a greeting was out of the question, and Philip would not
expect it. The promise was void, like so many other sweet, illusory
promises of our childhood; void as promises made in Eden before the
seasons were divided, and when the starry blossoms grew side by
side with the ripening peach,–impossible to be fulfilled when the
golden gates had been passed.

But when their father was actually engaged in the
long-threatened lawsuit, and Wakem, as the agent at once of Pivart
and Old Harry, was acting against him, even Maggie felt, with some
sadness, that they were not likely ever to have any intimacy with
Philip again; the very name of Wakem made her father angry, and she
had once heard him say that if that crook-backed son lived to
inherit his father's ill-gotten gains, there would be a curse upon
him. "Have as little to do with him at school as you can, my lad,"
he said to Tom; and the command was obeyed the more easily because
Mr. Sterling by this time had two additional pupils; for though
this gentleman's rise in the world was not of that meteor-like
rapidity which the admirers of his extemporaneous eloquence had
expected for a preacher whose voice demanded so wide a sphere, he
had yet enough of growing prosperity to enable him to increase his
expenditure in continued disproportion to his income.

As for Tom's school course, it went on with mill-like monotony,
his mind continuing to move with a slow, half-stifled pulse in a
medium uninteresting or unintelligible ideas. But each vacation he
brought home larger and larger drawings with the satiny rendering
of landscape, and water-colors in vivid greens, together with
manuscript books full of exercises and problems, in which the
handwriting was all the finer because he gave his whole mind to it.
Each vacation he brought home a new book or two, indicating his
progress through different stages of history, Christian doctrine,
and Latin literature; and that passage was not entirely without
results, besides the possession of the books. Tom's ear and tongue
had become accustomed to a great many words and phrases which are
understood to be signs of an educated condition; and though he had
never really applied his mind to any one of his lessons, the
lessons had left a deposit of vague, fragmentary, ineffectual
notions. Mr. Tulliver, seeing signs of acquirement beyond the reach
of his own criticism, thought it was probably all right with Tom's
education; he observed, indeed, that there were no maps, and not
enough "summing"; but he made no formal complaint to Mr. Stelling.
It was a puzzling business, this schooling; and if he took Tom
away, where could he send him with better effect?

By the time Tom had reached his last quarter at King's Lorton,
the years had made striking changes in him since the day we saw him
returning from Mr. Jacobs's academy. He was a tall youth now,
carrying himself without the least awkwardness, and speaking
without more shyness than was a becoming symptom of blended
diffidence and pride; he wore his tail-coat and his stand-up
collars, and watched the down on his lip with eager impatience,
looking every day at his virgin razor, with which he had provided
himself in the last holidays. Philip had already left,–at the
autumn quarter,–that he might go to the south for the winter, for
the sake of his health; and this change helped to give Tom the
unsettled, exultant feeling that usually belongs to the last months
before leaving school. This quarter, too, there was some hope of
his father's lawsuit being decided;
that
made the prospect
of home more entirely pleasurable. For Tom, who had gathered his
view of the case from his father's conversation, had no doubt that
Pivart would be beaten.