Chapter: Tom's "First Half"


Tom Tulliver's sufferings during the first quarter he was at King's
Lorton, under the distinguished care of the Rev. Walter Stelling, were
rather severe. At Mr. Jacob's academy life had not presented itself to
him as a difficult problem; there were plenty of fellows to play with,
and Tom being good at all active games,--fighting especially,--had
that precedence among them which appeared to him inseparable from the
personality of Tom Tulliver. Mr. Jacobs himself, familiarly known as
Old Goggles, from his habit of wearing spectacles, imposed no painful
awe; and if it was the property of snuffy old hypocrites like him to
write like copperplate and surround their signatures with arabesques,
to spell without forethought, and to spout "my name is Norval" without
bungling, Tom, for his part, was glad he was not in danger of those
mean accomplishments. He was not going to be a snuffy schoolmaster,
he, but a substantial man, like his father, who used to go hunting
when he was younger, and rode a capital black mare,--as pretty a bit
of horse-flesh as ever you saw; Tom had heard what her points were a
hundred times. _He_ meant to go hunting too, and to be generally
respected. When people were grown up, he considered, nobody inquired
about their writing and spelling; when he was a man, he should be
master of everything, and do just as he liked. It had been very
difficult for him to reconcile himself to the idea that his
school-time was to be prolonged and that he was not to be brought up
to his father's business, which he had always thought extremely
pleasant; for it was nothing but riding about, giving orders, and
going to market; and he thought that a clergyman would give him a
great many Scripture lessons, and probably make him learn the Gospel
and Epistle on a Sunday, as well as the Collect. But in the absence of
specific information, it was impossible for him to imagine that school
and a schoolmaster would be something entirely different from the
academy of Mr. Jacobs. So, not to be at a deficiency, in case of his
finding genial companions, he had taken care to carry with him a small
box of percussion-caps; not that there was anything particular to be
done with them, but they would serve to impress strange boys with a
sense of his familiarity with guns. Thus poor Tom, though he saw very
clearly through Maggie's illusions, was not without illusions of his
own, which were to be cruelly dissipated by his enlarged experience at
King's Lorton.

He had not been there a fortnight before it was evident to him that
life, complicated not only with the Latin grammar but with a new
standard of English pronunciation, was a very difficult business, made
all the more obscure by a thick mist of bashfulness. Tom, as you have
observed, was never an exception among boys for ease of address; but
the difficulty of enunciating a monosyllable in reply to Mr. or Mrs.
Stelling was so great, that he even dreaded to be asked at table
whether he would have more pudding. As to the percussion-caps, he had
almost resolved, in the bitterness of his heart, that he would throw
them into a neighboring pond; for not only was he the solitary pupil,
but he began even to have a certain scepticism about guns, and a
general sense that his theory of life was undermined. For Mr. Stelling
thought nothing of guns, or horses either, apparently; and yet it was
impossible for Tom to despise Mr. Stelling as he had despised Old
Goggles. If there were anything that was not thoroughly genuine about
Mr. Stelling, it lay quite beyond Tom's power to detect it; it is only
by a wide comparison of facts that the wisest full-grown man can
distinguish well-rolled barrels from mere supernal thunder.

Mr. Stelling was a well-sized, broad-chested man, not yet thirty, with
flaxen hair standing erect, and large lightish-gray eyes, which were
always very wide open; he had a sonorous bass voice, and an air of
defiant self-confidence inclining to brazenness. He had entered on his
career with great vigor, and intended to make a considerable
impression on his fellowmen. The Rev. Walter Stelling was not a man
who would remain among the "inferior clergy" all his life. He had a
true British determination to push his way in the world,--as a
schoolmaster, in the first place, for there were capital masterships
of grammar-schools to be had, and Mr. Stelling meant to have one of
them; but as a preacher also, for he meant always to preach in a
striking manner, so as to have his congregation swelled by admirers
from neighboring parishes, and to produce a great sensation whenever
he took occasional duty for a brother clergyman of minor gifts. The
style of preaching he had chosen was the extemporaneous, which was
held little short of the miraculous in rural parishes like King's
Lorton. Some passages of Massillon and Bourdaloue, which he knew by
heart, were really very effective when rolled out in Mr. Stelling's
deepest tones; but as comparatively feeble appeals of his own were
delivered in the same loud and impressive manner, they were often
thought quite as striking by his hearers. Mr. Stelling's doctrine was
of no particular school; if anything, it had a tinge of
evangelicalism, for that was "the telling thing" just then in the
diocese to which King's Lorton belonged. In short, Mr. Stelling was a
man who meant to rise in his profession, and to rise by merit,
clearly, since he had no interest beyond what might be promised by a
problematic relationship to a great lawyer who had not yet become Lord
Chancellor. A clergyman who has such vigorous intentions naturally
gets a little into debt at starting; it is not to be expected that he
will live in the meagre style of a man who means to be a poor curate
all his life; and if the few hundreds Mr. Timpson advanced toward his
daughter's fortune did not suffice for the purchase of handsome
furniture, together with a stock of wine, a grand piano, and the
laying out of a superior flower-garden, it followed in the most
rigorous manner, either that these things must be procured by some
other means, or else that the Rev. Mr. Stelling must go without them,
which last alternative would be an absurd procrastination of the
fruits of success, where success was certain. Mr. Stelling was so
broad-chested and resolute that he felt equal to anything; he would
become celebrated by shaking the consciences of his hearers, and he
would by and by edit a Greek play, and invent several new readings. He
had not yet selected the play, for having been married little more
than two years, his leisure time had been much occupied with
attentions to Mrs. Stelling; but he had told that fine woman what he
meant to do some day, and she felt great confidence in her husband, as
a man who understood everything of that sort.

But the immediate step to future success was to bring on Tom Tulliver
during this first half-year; for, by a singular coincidence, there had
been some negotiation concerning another pupil from the same
neighborhood and it might further a decision in Mr. Stelling's favor,
if it were understood that young Tulliver, who, Mr. Stelling observed
in conjugal privacy, was rather a rough cub, had made prodigious
progress in a short time. It was on this ground that he was severe
with Tom about his lessons; he was clearly a boy whose powers would
never be developed through the medium of the Latin grammar, without
the application of some sternness. Not that Mr. Stelling was a
harsh-tempered or unkind man; quite the contrary. He was jocose with
Tom at table, and corrected his provincialisms and his deportment in
the most playful manner; but poor Tom was only the more cowed and
confused by this double novelty, for he had never been used to jokes
at all like Mr. Stelling's; and for the first time in his life he had
a painful sense that he was all wrong somehow. When Mr. Stelling said,
as the roast-beef was being uncovered, "Now, Tulliver! which would you
rather decline, roast-beef or the Latin for it?" Tom, to whom in his
coolest moments a pun would have been a hard nut, was thrown into a
state of embarrassed alarm that made everything dim to him except the
feeling that he would rather not have anything to do with Latin; of
course he answered, "Roast-beef," whereupon there followed much
laughter and some practical joking with the plates, from which Tom
gathered that he had in some mysterious way refused beef, and, in
fact, made himself appear "a silly." If he could have seen a
fellow-pupil undergo these painful operations and survive them in good
spirits, he might sooner have taken them as a matter of course. But
there are two expensive forms of education, either of which a parent
may procure for his son by sending him as solitary pupil to a
clergyman: one is the enjoyment of the reverend gentleman's undivided
neglect; the other is the endurance of the reverend gentleman's
undivided attention. It was the latter privilege for which Mr.
Tulliver paid a high price in Tom's initiatory months at King's
Lorton.

That respectable miller and maltster had left Tom behind, and driven
homeward in a state of great mental satisfaction. He considered that
it was a happy moment for him when he had thought of asking Riley's
advice about a tutor for Tom. Mr. Stelling's eyes were so wide open,
and he talked in such an off-hand, matter-of-fact way, answering every
difficult, slow remark of Mr. Tulliver's with, "I see, my good sir, I
see"; "To be sure, to be sure"; "You want your son to be a man who
will make his way in the world,"--that Mr. Tulliver was delighted to
find in him a clergyman whose knowledge was so applicable to the
every-day affairs of this life. Except Counsellor Wylde, whom he had
heard at the last sessions, Mr. Tulliver thought the Rev. Mr Stelling
was the shrewdest fellow he had ever met with,--not unlike Wylde, in
fact; he had the same way of sticking his thumbs in the armholes of
his waistcoat. Mr. Tulliver was not by any means an exception in
mistaking brazenness for shrewdness; most laymen thought Stelling
shrewd, and a man of remarkable powers generally; it was chiefly by
his clerical brethren that he was considered rather a full fellow. But
he told Mr. Tulliver several stories about "Swing" and incendiarism,
and asked his advice about feeding pigs in so thoroughly secular and
judicious a manner, with so much polished glibness of tongue, that the
miller thought, here was the very thing he wanted for Tom. He had no
doubt this first-rate man was acquainted with every branch of
information, and knew exactly what Tom must learn in order to become a
match for the lawyers, which poor Mr. Tulliver himself did _not_ know,
and so was necessarily thrown for self-direction on this wide kind of
inference. It is hardly fair to laugh at him, for I have known much
more highly instructed persons than he make inferences quite as wide,
and not at all wiser.

As for Mrs. Tulliver, finding that Mrs. Stelling's views as to the
airing of linen and the frequent recurrence of hunger in a growing boy
entirely coincided with her own; moreover, that Mrs. Stelling, though
so young a woman, and only anticipating her second confinement, had
gone through very nearly the same experience as herself with regard to
the behavior and fundamental character of the monthly nurse,--she
expressed great contentment to her husband, when they drove away, at
leaving Tom with a woman who, in spite of her youth, seemed quite
sensible and motherly, and asked advice as prettily as could be.

"They must be very well off, though," said Mrs. Tulliver, "for
everything's as nice as can be all over the house, and that watered
silk she had on cost a pretty penny. Sister Pullet has got one like
it."

"Ah," said Mr. Tulliver, "he's got some income besides the curacy, I
reckon. Perhaps her father allows 'em something. There's Tom 'ull be
another hundred to him, and not much trouble either, by his own
account; he says teaching comes natural to him. That's wonderful,
now," added Mr. Tulliver, turning his head on one side, and giving his
horse a meditative tickling on the flank.

Perhaps it was because teaching came naturally to Mr. Stelling, that
he set about it with that uniformity of method and independence of
circumstances which distinguish the actions of animals understood to
be under the immediate teaching of nature. Mr. Broderip's amiable
beaver, as that charming naturalist tells us, busied himself as
earnestly in constructing a dam, in a room up three pair of stairs in
London, as if he had been laying his foundation in a stream or lake in
Upper Canada. It was "Binny's" function to build; the absence of water
or of possible progeny was an accident for which he was not
accountable. With the same unerring instinct Mr. Stelling set to work
at his natural method of instilling the Eton Grammar and Euclid into
the mind of Tom Tulliver. This, he considered, was the only basis of
solid instruction; all other means of education were mere
charlatanism, and could produce nothing better than smatterers. Fixed
on this firm basis, a man might observe the display of various or
special knowledge made by irregularly educated people with a pitying
smile; all that sort of thing was very well, but it was impossible
these people could form sound opinions. In holding this conviction Mr.
Stelling was not biassed, as some tutors have been, by the excessive
accuracy or extent of his own scholarship; and as to his views about
Euclid, no opinion could have been freer from personal partiality. Mr.
Stelling was very far from being led astray by enthusiasm, either
religious or intellectual; on the other hand, he had no secret belief
that everything was humbug. He thought religion was a very excellent
thing, and Aristotle a great authority, and deaneries and prebends
useful institutions, and Great Britain the providential bulwark of
Protestantism, and faith in the unseen a great support to afflicted
minds; he believed in all these things, as a Swiss hotel-keeper
believes in the beauty of the scenery around him, and in the pleasure
it gives to artistic visitors. And in the same way Mr. Stelling
believed in his method of education; he had no doubt that he was doing
the very best thing for Mr. Tulliver's boy. Of course, when the miller
talked of "mapping" and "summing" in a vague and diffident manner, Mr
Stelling had set his mind at rest by an assurance that he understood
what was wanted; for how was it possible the good man could form any
reasonable judgment about the matter? Mr Stelling's duty was to teach
the lad in the only right way,--indeed he knew no other; he had not
wasted his time in the acquirement of anything abnormal.

He very soon set down poor Tom as a thoroughly stupid lad; for though
by hard labor he could get particular declensions into his brain,
anything so abstract as the relation between cases and terminations
could by no means get such a lodgment there as to enable him to
recognize a chance genitive or dative. This struck Mr. Stelling as
something more than natural stupidity; he suspected obstinacy, or at
any rate indifference, and lectured Tom severely on his want of
thorough application. "You feel no interest in what you're doing,
sir," Mr. Stelling would say, and the reproach was painfully true. Tom
had never found any difficulty in discerning a pointer from a setter,
when once he had been told the distinction, and his perceptive powers
were not at all deficient. I fancy they were quite as strong as those
of the Rev. Mr. Stelling; for Tom could predict with accuracy what
number of horses were cantering behind him, he could throw a stone
right into the centre of a given ripple, he could guess to a fraction
how many lengths of his stick it would take to reach across the
playground, and could draw almost perfect squares on his slate without
any measurement. But Mr. Stelling took no note of these things; he
only observed that Tom's faculties failed him before the abstractions
hideously symbolized to him in the pages of the Eton Grammar, and that
he was in a state bordering on idiocy with regard to the demonstration
that two given triangles must be equal, though he could discern with
great promptitude and certainty the fact that they _were_ equal.
Whence Mr. Stelling concluded that Tom's brain, being peculiarly
impervious to etymology and demonstrations, was peculiarly in need of
being ploughed and harrowed by these patent implements; it was his
favorite metaphor, that the classics and geometry constituted that
culture of the mind which prepared it for the reception of any
subsequent crop. I say nothing against Mr. Stelling's theory; if we
are to have one regimen for all minds, his seems to me as good as any
other. I only know it turned out as uncomfortably for Tom Tulliver as
if he had been plied with cheese in order to remedy a gastric weakness
which prevented him from digesting it. It is astonishing what a
different result one gets by changing the metaphor! Once call the
brain an intellectual stomach, and one's ingenious conception of the
classics and geometry as ploughs and harrows seems to settle nothing.
But then it is open to some one else to follow great authorities, and
call the mind a sheet of white paper or a mirror, in which case one's
knowledge of the digestive process becomes quite irrelevant. It was
doubtless an ingenious idea to call the camel the ship of the desert,
but it would hardly lead one far in training that useful beast. O
Aristotle! if you had had the advantage of being "the freshest modern"
instead of the greatest ancient, would you not have mingled your
praise of metaphorical speech, as a sign of high intelligence, with a
lamentation that intelligence so rarely shows itself in speech without
metaphor,--that we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by
saying it is something else?

Tom Tulliver, being abundant in no form of speech, did not use any
metaphor to declare his views as to the nature of Latin; he never
called it an instrument of torture; and it was not until he had got on
some way in the next half-year, and in the Delectus, that he was
advanced enough to call it a "bore" and "beastly stuff." At present,
in relation to this demand that he should learn Latin declensions and
conjugations, Tom was in a state of as blank unimaginativeness
concerning the cause and tendency of his sufferings, as if he had been
an innocent shrewmouse imprisoned in the split trunk of an ash-tree in
order to cure lameness in cattle. It is doubtless almost incredible to
instructed minds of the present day that a boy of twelve, not
belonging strictly to "the masses," who are now understood to have the
monopoly of mental darkness, should have had no distinct idea how
there came to be such a thing as Latin on this earth; yet so it was
with Tom. It would have taken a long while to make conceivable to him
that there ever existed a people who bought and sold sheep and oxen,
and transacted the every-day affairs of life, through the medium of
this language; and still longer to make him understand why he should
be called upon to learn it, when its connection with those affairs had
become entirely latent. So far as Tom had gained any acquaintance with
the Romans at Mr. Jacob's academy, his knowledge was strictly correct,
but it went no farther than the fact that they were "in the New
Testament"; and Mr. Stelling was not the man to enfeeble and
emasculate his pupil's mind by simplifying and explaining, or to
reduce the tonic effect of etymology by mixing it with smattering,
extraneous information, such as is given to girls.

Yet, strange to say, under this vigorous treatment Tom became more
like a girl than he had ever been in his life before. He had a large
share of pride, which had hitherto found itself very comfortable in
the world, despising Old Goggles, and reposing in the sense of
unquestioned rights; but now this same pride met with nothing but
bruises and crushings. Tom was too clear-sighted not to be aware that
Mr. Stelling's standard of things was quite different, was certainly
something higher in the eyes of the world than that of the people he
had been living amongst, and that, brought in contact with it, he, Tom
Tulliver, appeared uncouth and stupid; he was by no means indifferent
to this, and his pride got into an uneasy condition which quite
nullified his boyish self-satisfaction, and gave him something of the
girl's susceptibility. He was a very firm, not to say obstinate,
disposition, but there was no brute-like rebellion and recklessness in
his nature; the human sensibilities predominated, and if it had
occurred to him that he could enable himself to show some quickness at
his lessons, and so acquire Mr. Stelling's approbation, by standing on
one leg for an inconvenient length of time, or rapping his head
moderately against the wall, or any voluntary action of that sort, he
would certainly have tried it. But no; Tom had never heard that these
measures would brighten the understanding, or strengthen the verbal
memory; and he was not given to hypothesis and experiment. It did
occur to him that he could perhaps get some help by praying for it;
but as the prayers he said every evening were forms learned by heart,
he rather shrank from the novelty and irregularity of introducing an
extempore passage on a topic of petition for which he was not aware of
any precedent. But one day, when he had broken down, for the fifth
time, in the supines of the third conjugation, and Mr. Stelling,
convinced that this must be carelessness, since it transcended the
bounds of possible stupidity, had lectured him very seriously,
pointing out that if he failed to seize the present golden opportunity
of learning supines, he would have to regret it when he became a
man,--Tom, more miserable than usual, determined to try his sole
resource; and that evening, after his usual form of prayer for his
parents and "little sister" (he had begun to pray for Maggie when she
was a baby), and that he might be able always to keep God's
commandments, he added, in the same low whisper, "and please to make
me always remember my Latin." He paused a little to consider how he
should pray about Euclid--whether he should ask to see what it meant,
or whether there was any other mental state which would be more
applicable to the case. But at last he added: "And make Mr. Stelling
say I sha'n't do Euclid any more. Amen."

The fact that he got through his supines without mistake the next day,
encouraged him to persevere in this appendix to his prayers, and
neutralized any scepticism that might have arisen from Mr. Stelling's
continued demand for Euclid. But his faith broke down under the
apparent absence of all help when he got into the irregular verbs. It
seemed clear that Tom's despair under the caprices of the present
tense did not constitute a _nodus_ worthy of interference, and since
this was the climax of his difficulties, where was the use of praying
for help any longer? He made up his mind to this conclusion in one of
his dull, lonely evenings, which he spent in the study, preparing his
lessons for the morrow. His eyes were apt to get dim over the page,
though he hated crying, and was ashamed of it; he couldn't help
thinking with some affection even of Spouncer, whom he used to fight
and quarrel with; he would have felt at home with Spouncer, and in a
condition of superiority. And then the mill, and the river, and Yap
pricking up his ears, ready to obey the least sign when Tom said,
"Hoigh!" would all come before him in a sort of calenture, when his
fingers played absently in his pocket with his great knife and his
coil of whipcord, and other relics of the past.

Tom, as I said, had never been so much like a girl in his life before,
and at that epoch of irregular verbs his spirit was further depressed
by a new means of mental development which had been thought of for him
out of school hours. Mrs. Stelling had lately had her second baby, and
as nothing could be more salutary for a boy than to feel himself
useful, Mrs. Stelling considered she was doing Tom a service by
setting him to watch the little cherub Laura while the nurse was
occupied with the sickly baby. It was quite a pretty employment for
Tom to take little Laura out in the sunniest hour of the autumn day;
it would help to make him feel that Lorton Parsonage was a home for
him, and that he was one of the family. The little cherub Laura, not
being an accomplished walker at present, had a ribbon fastened round
her waist, by which Tom held her as if she had been a little dog
during the minutes in which she chose to walk; but as these were rare,
he was for the most part carrying this fine child round and round the
garden, within sight of Mrs. Stelling's window, according to orders.
If any one considers this unfair and even oppressive toward Tom, I beg
him to consider that there are feminine virtues which are with
difficulty combined, even if they are not incompatible. When the wife
of a poor curate contrives, under all her disadvantages, to dress
extremely well, and to have a style of coiffure which requires that
her nurse shall occasionally officiate as lady's-maid; when, moreover,
her dinner-parties and her drawing-room show that effort at elegance
and completeness of appointment to which ordinary women might imagine
a large income necessary, it would be unreasonable to expect of her
that she should employ a second nurse, or even act as a nurse herself.
Mr. Stelling knew better; he saw that his wife did wonders already,
and was proud of her. It was certainly not the best thing in the world
for young Tulliver's gait to carry a heavy child, but he had plenty of
exercise in long walks with himself, and next half-year Mr. Stelling
would see about having a drilling-master. Among the many means whereby
Mr. Stelling intended to be more fortunate than the bulk of his
fellow-men, he had entirely given up that of having his own way in his
own house. What then? He had married "as kind a little soul as ever
breathed," according to Mr. Riley, who had been acquainted with Mrs.
Stelling's blond ringlets and smiling demeanor throughout her maiden
life, and on the strength of that knowledge would have been ready any
day to pronounce that whatever domestic differences might arise in her
married life must be entirely Mr. Stelling's fault.

If Tom had had a worse disposition, he would certainly have hated the
little cherub Laura, but he was too kind-hearted a lad for that; there
was too much in him of the fibre that turns to true manliness, and to
protecting pity for the weak. I am afraid he hated Mrs. Stelling, and
contracted a lasting dislike to pale blond ringlets and broad plaits,
as directly associated with haughtiness of manner, and a frequent
reference to other people's "duty." But he couldn't help playing with
little Laura, and liking to amuse her; he even sacrificed his
percussion-caps for her sake, in despair of their ever serving a
greater purpose,--thinking the small flash and bang would delight her,
and thereby drawing down on himself a rebuke from Mrs. Stelling for
teaching her child to play with fire. Laura was a sort of
playfellow--and oh, how Tom longed for playfellows! In his secret
heart he yearned to have Maggie with him, and was almost ready to dote
on her exasperating acts of forgetfulness; though, when he was at
home, he always represented it as a great favor on his part to let
Maggie trot by his side on his pleasure excursions.

And before this dreary half-year was ended, Maggie actually came. Mrs.
Stelling had given a general invitation for the little girl to come
and stay with her brother; so when Mr. Tulliver drove over to King's
Lorton late in October, Maggie came too, with the sense that she was
taking a great journey, and beginning to see the world. It was Mr.
Tulliver's first visit to see Tom, for the lad must learn not to think
too much about home.

"Well, my lad," he said to Tom, when Mr. Stelling had left the room to
announce the arrival to his wife, and Maggie had begun to kiss Tom
freely, "you look rarely! School agrees with you."

Tom wished he had looked rather ill.

"I don't think I _am_ well, father," said Tom; "I wish you'd ask Mr.
Stelling not to let me do Euclid; it brings on the toothache, I
think."

(The toothache was the only malady to which Tom had ever been
subject.)

"Euclid, my lad,--why, what's that?" said Mr. Tulliver.

"Oh, I don't know; it's definitions, and axioms, and triangles, and
things. It's a book I've got to learn in--there's no sense in it."

"Go, go!" said Mr. Tulliver, reprovingly; "you mustn't say so. You
must learn what your master tells you. He knows what it's right for
you to learn."

"_I'll_ help you now, Tom," said Maggie, with a little air of
patronizing consolation. "I'm come to stay ever so long, if Mrs.
Stelling asks me. I've brought my box and my pinafores, haven't I,
father?"

"_You_ help me, you silly little thing!" said Tom, in such high
spirits at this announcement that he quite enjoyed the idea of
confounding Maggie by showing her a page of Euclid. "I should like to
see you doing one of _my_ lessons! Why, I learn Latin too! Girls never
learn such things. They're too silly."

"I know what Latin is very well," said Maggie, confidently, "Latin's a
language. There are Latin words in the Dictionary. There's bonus, a
gift."

"Now, you're just wrong there, Miss Maggie!" said Tom, secretly
astonished. "You think you're very wise! But 'bonus' means 'good,' as
it happens,--bonus, bona, bonum."

"Well, that's no reason why it shouldn't mean 'gift,'" said Maggie,
stoutly. "It may mean several things; almost every word does. There's
'lawn,'--it means the grass-plot, as well as the stuff
pocket-handkerchiefs are made of."

"Well done, little 'un," said Mr. Tulliver, laughing, while Tom felt
rather disgusted with Maggie's knowingness, though beyond measure
cheerful at the thought that she was going to stay with him. Her
conceit would soon be overawed by the actual inspection of his books.

Mrs. Stelling, in her pressing invitation, did not mention a longer
time than a week for Maggie's stay; but Mr. Stelling, who took her
between his knees, and asked her where she stole her dark eyes from,
insisted that she must stay a fortnight. Maggie thought Mr. Stelling
was a charming man, and Mr. Tulliver was quite proud to leave his
little wench where she would have an opportunity of showing her
cleverness to appreciating strangers. So it was agreed that she should
not be fetched home till the end of the fortnight.

"Now, then, come with me into the study, Maggie," said Tom, as their
father drove away. "What do you shake and toss your head now for, you
silly?" he continued; for though her hair was now under a new
dispensation, and was brushed smoothly behind her ears, she seemed
still in imagination to be tossing it out of her eyes. "It makes you
look as if you were crazy."

"Oh, I can't help it," said Maggie, impatiently. "Don't tease me, Tom.
Oh, what books!" she exclaimed, as she saw the bookcases in the study.
"How I should like to have as many books as that!"

"Why, you couldn't read one of 'em," said Tom, triumphantly. "They're
all Latin."

"No, they aren't," said Maggie. "I can read the back of
this,--'History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.'"

"Well, what does that mean? _You_ don't know," said Tom, wagging his
head.

"But I could soon find out," said Maggie, scornfully.

"Why, how?"

"I should look inside, and see what it was about."

"You'd better not, Miss Maggie," said Tom, seeing her hand on the
volume. "Mr. Stelling lets nobody touch his books without leave, and
_I_ shall catch it, if you take it out."

"Oh, very well. Let me see all _your_ books, then," said Maggie,
turning to throw her arms round Tom's neck, and rub his cheek with her
small round nose.

Tom, in the gladness of his heart at having dear old Maggie to dispute
with and crow over again, seized her round the waist, and began to
jump with her round the large library table. Away they jumped with
more and more vigor, till Maggie's hair flew from behind her ears, and
twirled about like an animated mop. But the revolutions round the
table became more and more irregular in their sweep, till at last
reaching Mr. Stelling's reading stand, they sent it thundering down
with its heavy lexicons to the floor. Happily it was the ground-floor,
and the study was a one-storied wing to the house, so that the
downfall made no alarming resonance, though Tom stood dizzy and aghast
for a few minutes, dreading the appearance of Mr. or Mrs. Stelling.

"Oh, I say, Maggie," said Tom at last, lifting up the stand, "we must
keep quiet here, you know. If we break anything Mrs. Stelling'll make
us cry peccavi."

"What's that?" said Maggie.

"Oh, it's the Latin for a good scolding," said Tom, not without some
pride in his knowledge.

"Is she a cross woman?" said Maggie.

"I believe you!" said Tom, with an emphatic nod.

"I think all women are crosser than men," said Maggie. "Aunt Glegg's a
great deal crosser than uncle Glegg, and mother scolds me more than
father does."

"Well, _you'll_ be a woman some day," said Tom, "so _you_ needn't
talk."

"But I shall be a _clever_ woman," said Maggie, with a toss.

"Oh, I dare say, and a nasty conceited thing. Everybody'll hate you."

"But you oughtn't to hate me, Tom; it'll be very wicked of you, for I
shall be your sister."

"Yes, but if you're a nasty disagreeable thing I _shall_ hate you."

"Oh, but, Tom, you won't! I sha'n't be disagreeable. I shall be very
good to you, and I shall be good to everybody. You won't hate me
really, will you, Tom?"

"Oh, bother! never mind! Come, it's time for me to learn my lessons.
See here! what I've got to do," said Tom, drawing Maggie toward him
and showing her his theorem, while she pushed her hair behind her
ears, and prepared herself to prove her capability of helping him in
Euclid. She began to read with full confidence in her own powers, but
presently, becoming quite bewildered, her face flushed with
irritation. It was unavoidable; she must confess her incompetency, and
she was not fond of humiliation.

"It's nonsense!" she said, "and very ugly stuff; nobody need want to
make it out."

"Ah, there, now, Miss Maggie!" said Tom, drawing the book away, and
wagging his head at her, "You see you're not so clever as you thought
you were."

"Oh," said Maggie, pouting, "I dare say I could make it out, if I'd
learned what goes before, as you have."

"But that's what you just couldn't, Miss Wisdom," said Tom. "For it's
all the harder when you know what goes before; for then you've got to
say what definition 3 is, and what axiom V. is. But get along with you
now; I must go on with this. Here's the Latin Grammar. See what you
can make of that."

Maggie found the Latin Grammar quite soothing after her mathematical
mortification; for she delighted in new words, and quickly found that
there was an English Key at the end, which would make her very wise
about Latin, at slight expense. She presently made up her mind to skip
the rules in the Syntax, the examples became so absorbing. These
mysterious sentences, snatched from an unknown context,--like strange
horns of beasts, and leaves of unknown plants, brought from some
far-off region,--gave boundless scope to her imagination, and were all
the more fascinating because they were in a peculiar tongue of their
own, which she could learn to interpret. It was really very
interesting, the Latin Grammar that Tom had said no girls could learn;
and she was proud because she found it interesting. The most
fragmentary examples were her favourites. _Mors omnibus est communis_
would have been jejune, only she liked to know the Latin; but the
fortunate gentleman whom every one congratulated because he had a son
"endowed with _such_ a disposition" afforded her a great deal of
pleasant conjecture, and she was quite lost in the "thick grove
penetrable by no star," when Tom called out,--

"Now, then, Magsie, give us the Grammar!"

"Oh, Tom, it's such a pretty book!" she said, as she jumped out of the
large arm-chair to give it him; "it's much prettier than the
Dictionary. I could learn Latin very soon. I don't think it's at all
hard."

"Oh, I know what you've been doing," said Tom; "you've been reading
the English at the end. Any donkey can do that."

Tom seized the book and opened it with a determined and business-like
air, as much as to say that he had a lesson to learn which no donkeys
would find themselves equal to. Maggie, rather piqued, turned to the
bookcases to amuse herself with puzzling out the titles.

Presently Tom called to her: "Here, Magsie, come and hear if I can say
this. Stand at that end of the table, where Mr. Stelling sits when he
hears me."

Maggie obeyed, and took the open book.

"Where do you begin, Tom?"

"Oh, I begin at _'Appellativa arborum,'_ because I say all over again
what I've been learning this week."

Tom sailed along pretty well for three lines; and Maggie was beginning
to forget her office of prompter in speculating as to what _mas_ could
mean, which came twice over, when he stuck fast at _Sunt etiam
volucrum_.

"Don't tell me, Maggie; _Sunt etiam volucrum_--_Sunt etiam
volucrum_--_ut ostrea, cetus_----"

"No," said Maggie, opening her mouth and shaking her head.

"_Sunt etiam volucrum_," said Tom, very slowly, as if the next words
might be expected to come sooner when he gave them this strong hint
that they were waited for.

"C, e, u," said Maggie, getting impatient.

"Oh, I know--hold your tongue," said Tom. "_Ceu passer, hirundo;
Ferarum_--_ferarum_----" Tom took his pencil and made several hard
dots with it on his book-cover--"_ferarum_----"

"Oh dear, oh dear, Tom," said Maggie, "what a time you are! _Ut_----"

"_Ut ostrea_----"

"No, no," said Maggie, "_ut tigris_----"

"Oh yes, now I can do," said Tom; "it was _tigris, vulpes_, I'd
forgotten: _ut tigris, volupes; et Piscium_."

With some further stammering and repetition, Tom got through the next
few lines.

"Now, then," he said, "the next is what I've just learned for
to-morrow. Give me hold of the book a minute."

After some whispered gabbling, assisted by the beating of his fist on
the table, Tom returned the book.

"_Mascula nomina in a_," he began.

"No, Tom," said Maggie, "that doesn't come next. It's _Nomen non
creskens genittivo_----"

"_Creskens genittivo!_" exclaimed Tom, with a derisive laugh, for Tom
had learned this omitted passage for his yesterday's lesson, and a
young gentleman does not require an intimate or extensive acquaintance
with Latin before he can feel the pitiable absurdity of a false
quantity. "_Creskens genittivo!_ What a little silly you are, Maggie!"

"Well, you needn't laugh, Tom, for you didn't remember it at all. I'm
sure it's spelt so; how was I to know?"

"Phee-e-e-h! I told you girls couldn't learn Latin. It's _Nomen non
crescens genitivo_."

"Very well, then," said Maggie, pouting. "I can say that as well as you
can. And you don't mind your stops. For you ought to stop twice as
long at a semicolon as you do at a comma, and you make the longest
stops where there ought to be no stop at all."

"Oh, well, don't chatter. Let me go on."

They were presently fetched to spend the rest of the evening in the
drawing-room, and Maggie became so animated with Mr. Stelling, who,
she felt sure, admired her cleverness, that Tom was rather amazed and
alarmed at her audacity. But she was suddenly subdued by Mr.
Stelling's alluding to a little girl of whom he had heard that she
once ran away to the gypsies.

"What a very odd little girl that must be!" said Mrs. Stelling,
meaning to be playful; but a playfulness that turned on her supposed
oddity was not at all to Maggie's taste. She feared that Mr. Stelling,
after all, did not think much of her, and went to bed in rather low
spirits. Mrs. Stelling, she felt, looked at her as if she thought her
hair was very ugly because it hung down straight behind.

Nevertheless it was a very happy fortnight to Maggie, this visit to
Tom. She was allowed to be in the study while he had his lessons, and
in her various readings got very deep into the examples in the Latin
Grammar. The astronomer who hated women generally caused her so much
puzzling speculation that she one day asked Mr. Stelling if all
astronomers hated women, or whether it was only this particular
astronomer. But forestalling his answer, she said,--

"I suppose it's all astronomers; because, you know, they live up in
high towers, and if the women came there they might talk and hinder
them from looking at the stars."

Mr. Stelling liked her prattle immensely, and they were on the best
terms. She told Tom she should like to go to school to Mr. Stelling,
as he did, and learn just the same things. She knew she could do
Euclid, for she had looked into it again, and she saw what A B C
meant; they were the names of the lines.

"I'm sure you couldn't do it, now," said Tom; "and I'll just ask Mr.
Stelling if you could."

"I don't mind," said the little conceited minx, "I'll ask him myself."

"Mr. Stelling," she said, that same evening when they were in the
drawing-room, "couldn't I do Euclid, and all Tom's lessons, if you
were to teach me instead of him?"

"No, you couldn't," said Tom, indignantly. "Girls can't do Euclid; can
they, sir?"

"They can pick up a little of everything, I dare say," said Mr.
Stelling. "They've a great deal of superficial cleverness; but they
couldn't go far into anything. They're quick and shallow."

Tom, delighted with this verdict, telegraphed his triumph by wagging
his head at Maggie, behind Mr. Stelling's chair. As for Maggie, she
had hardly ever been so mortified. She had been so proud to be called
"quick" all her little life, and now it appeared that this quickness
was the brand of inferiority. It would have been better to be slow,
like Tom.

"Ha, ha! Miss Maggie!" said Tom, when they were alone; "you see it's
not such a fine thing to be quick. You'll never go far into anything,
you know."

And Maggie was so oppressed by this dreadful destiny that she had no
spirit for a retort.

But when this small apparatus of shallow quickness was fetched away in
the gig by Luke, and the study was once more quite lonely for Tom, he
missed her grievously. He had really been brighter, and had got
through his lessons better, since she had been there; and she had
asked Mr. Stelling so many questions about the Roman Empire, and
whether there really ever was a man who said, in Latin, "I would not
buy it for a farthing or a rotten nut," or whether that had only been
turned into Latin, that Tom had actually come to a dim understanding
of the fact that there had once been people upon the earth who were so
fortunate as to know Latin without learning it through the medium of
the Eton Grammar. This luminous idea was a great addition to his
historical acquirements during this half-year, which were otherwise
confined to an epitomized history of the Jews.

But the dreary half-year _did_ come to an end. How glad Tom was to see
the last yellow leaves fluttering before the cold wind! The dark
afternoons and the first December snow seemed to him far livelier than
the August sunshine; and that he might make himself the surer about
the flight of the days that were carrying him homeward, he stuck
twenty-one sticks deep in a corner of the garden, when he was three
weeks from the holidays, and pulled one up every day with a great
wrench, throwing it to a distance with a vigor of will which would
have carried it to limbo, if it had been in the nature of sticks to
travel so far.

But it was worth purchasing, even at the heavy price of the Latin
Grammar, the happiness of seeing the bright light in the parlor at
home, as the gig passed noiselessly over the snow-covered bridge; the
happiness of passing from the cold air to the warmth and the kisses
and the smiles of that familiar hearth, where the pattern of the rug
and the grate and the fire-irons were "first ideas" that it was no
more possible to criticise than the solidity and extension of matter.
There is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes where
we were born, where objects became dear to us before we had known the
labor of choice, and where the outer world seemed only an extension of
our own personality; we accepted and loved it as we accepted our own
sense of existence and our own limbs. Very commonplace, even ugly,
that furniture of our early home might look if it were put up to
auction; an improved taste in upholstery scorns it; and is not the
striving after something better and better in our surroundings the
grand characteristic that distinguishes man from the brute, or, to
satisfy a scrupulous accuracy of definition, that distinguishes the
British man from the foreign brute? But heaven knows where that
striving might lead us, if our affections had not a trick of twining
round those old inferior things; if the loves and sanctities of our
life had no deep immovable roots in memory. One's delight in an
elderberry bush overhanging the confused leafage of a hedgerow bank,
as a more gladdening sight than the finest cistus or fuchsia spreading
itself on the softest undulating turf, is an entirely unjustifiable
preference to a nursery-gardener, or to any of those regulated minds
who are free from the weakness of any attachment that does not rest on
a demonstrable superiority of qualities. And there is no better reason
for preferring this elderberry bush than that it stirs an early
memory; that it is no novelty in my life, speaking to me merely
through my present sensibilities to form and color, but the long
companion of my existence, that wove itself into my joys when joys
were vivid.



The Christmas Holidays


Fine old Christmas, with the snowy hair and ruddy face, had done his
duty that year in the noblest fashion, and had set off his rich gifts
of warmth and color with all the heightening contrast of frost and
snow.

Snow lay on the croft and river-bank in undulations softer than the
limbs of infancy; it lay with the neatliest finished border on every
sloping roof, making the dark-red gables stand out with a new depth of
color; it weighed heavily on the laurels and fir-trees, till it fell
from them with a shuddering sound; it clothed the rough turnip-field
with whiteness, and made the sheep look like dark blotches; the gates
were all blocked up with the sloping drifts, and here and there a
disregarded four-footed beast stood as if petrified "in unrecumbent
sadness"; there was no gleam, no shadow, for the heavens, too, were
one still, pale cloud; no sound or motion in anything but the dark
river that flowed and moaned like an unresting sorrow. But old
Christmas smiled as he laid this cruel-seeming spell on the outdoor
world, for he meant to light up home with new brightness, to deepen
all the richness of indoor color, and give a keener edge of delight to
the warm fragrance of food; he meant to prepare a sweet imprisonment
that would strengthen the primitive fellowship of kindred, and make
the sunshine of familiar human faces as welcome as the hidden
day-star. His kindness fell but hardly on the homeless,--fell but
hardly on the homes where the hearth was not very warm, and where the
food had little fragrance; where the human faces had had no sunshine
in them, but rather the leaden, blank-eyed gaze of unexpectant want.
But the fine old season meant well; and if he has not learned the
secret how to bless men impartially, it is because his father Time,
with ever-unrelenting unrelenting purpose, still hides that secret in
his own mighty, slow-beating heart.

And yet this Christmas day, in spite of Tom's fresh delight in home,
was not, he thought, somehow or other, quite so happy as it had always
been before. The red berries were just as abundant on the holly, and
he and Maggie had dressed all the windows and mantlepieces and
picture-frames on Christmas eve with as much taste as ever, wedding
the thick-set scarlet clusters with branches of the black-berried ivy.
There had been singing under the windows after midnight,--supernatural
singing, Maggie always felt, in spite of Tom's contemptuous insistence
that the singers were old Patch, the parish clerk, and the rest of the
church choir; she trembled with awe when their carolling broke in upon
her dreams, and the image of men in fustian clothes was always thrust
away by the vision of angels resting on the parted cloud. The midnight
chant had helped as usual to lift the morning above the level of
common days; and then there were the smell of hot toast and ale from
the kitchen, at the breakfast hour; the favorite anthem, the green
boughs, and the short sermon gave the appropriate festal character to
the church-going; and aunt and uncle Moss, with all their seven
children, were looking like so many reflectors of the bright
parlor-fire, when the church-goers came back, stamping the snow from
their feet. The plum-pudding was of the same handsome roundness as
ever, and came in with the symbolic blue flames around it, as if it
had been heroically snatched from the nether fires, into which it had
been thrown by dyspeptic Puritans; the dessert was as splendid as
ever, with its golden oranges, brown nuts, and the crystalline light
and dark of apple-jelly and damson cheese; in all these things
Christmas was as it had always been since Tom could remember; it was
only distinguished, if by anything, by superior sliding and snowballs.

Christmas was cheery, but not so Mr. Tulliver. He was irate and
defiant; and Tom, though he espoused his father's quarrels and shared
his father's sense of injury, was not without some of the feeling that
oppressed Maggie when Mr. Tulliver got louder and more angry in
narration and assertion with the increased leisure of dessert. The
attention that Tom might have concentrated on his nuts and wine was
distracted by a sense that there were rascally enemies in the world,
and that the business of grown-up life could hardly be conducted
without a good deal of quarrelling. Now, Tom was not fond of
quarrelling, unless it could soon be put an end to by a fair stand-up
fight with an adversary whom he had every chance of thrashing; and his
father's irritable talk made him uncomfortable, though he never
accounted to himself for the feeling, or conceived the notion that his
father was faulty in this respect.

The particular embodiment of the evil principle now exciting Mr.
Tulliver's determined resistance was Mr. Pivart, who, having lands
higher up the Ripple, was taking measures for their irrigation, which
either were, or would be, or were bound to be (on the principle that
water was water), an infringement on Mr. Tulliver's legitimate share
of water-power. Dix, who had a mill on the stream, was a feeble
auxiliary of Old Harry compared with Pivart. Dix had been brought to
his senses by arbitration, and Wakem's advice had not carried _him_
far. No; Dix, Mr. Tulliver considered, had been as good as nowhere in
point of law; and in the intensity of his indignation against Pivart,
his contempt for a baffled adversary like Dix began to wear the air of
a friendly attachment. He had no male audience to-day except Mr. Moss,
who knew nothing, as he said, of the "natur' o' mills," and could only
assent to Mr. Tulliver's arguments on the _a priori_ ground of family
relationship and monetary obligation; but Mr. Tulliver did not talk
with the futile intention of convincing his audience, he talked to
relieve himself; while good Mr. Moss made strong efforts to keep his
eyes wide open, in spite of the sleepiness which an unusually good
dinner produced in his hard-worked frame. Mrs. Moss, more alive to the
subject, and interested in everything that affected her brother,
listened and put in a word as often as maternal preoccupations
allowed.

"Why, Pivart's a new name hereabout, brother, isn't it?" she said; "he
didn't own the land in father's time, nor yours either, before I was
married."

"New name? Yes, I should think it _is_ a new name," said Mr. Tulliver,
with angry emphasis. "Dorlcote Mill's been in our family a hundred
year and better, and nobody ever heard of a Pivart meddling with the
river, till this fellow came and bought Bincome's farm out of hand,
before anybody else could so much as say 'snap.' But I'll _Pivart_
him!" added Mr. Tulliver, lifting his glass with a sense that he had
defined his resolution in an unmistakable manner.

"You won't be forced to go to law with him, I hope, brother?" said
Mrs. Moss, with some anxiety.

"I don't know what I shall be forced to; but I know what I shall force
_him_ to, with his dikes and erigations, if there's any law to be
brought to bear o' the right side. I know well enough who's at the
bottom of it; he's got Wakem to back him and egg him on. I know Wakem
tells him the law can't touch him for it, but there's folks can handle
the law besides Wakem. It takes a big raskil to beat him; but there's
bigger to be found, as know more o' th' ins and outs o' the law, else
how came Wakem to lose Brumley's suit for him?"

Mr. Tulliver was a strictly honest man, and proud of being honest, but
he considered that in law the ends of justice could only be achieved
by employing a stronger knave to frustrate a weaker. Law was a sort of
cock-fight, in which it was the business of injured honesty to get a
game bird with the best pluck and the strongest spurs.

"Gore's no fool; you needn't tell me that," he observed presently, in
a pugnacious tone, as if poor Gritty had been urging that lawyer's
capabilities; "but, you see, he isn't up to the law as Wakem is. And
water's a very particular thing; you can't pick it up with a
pitchfork. That's why it's been nuts to Old Harry and the lawyers.
It's plain enough what's the rights and the wrongs of water, if you
look at it straight-forrard; for a river's a river, and if you've got
a mill, you must have water to turn it; and it's no use telling me
Pivart's erigation and nonsense won't stop my wheel; I know what
belongs to water better than that. Talk to me o' what th' engineers
say! I say it's common sense, as Pivart's dikes must do me an injury.
But if that's their engineering, I'll put Tom to it by-and-by, and he
shall see if he can't find a bit more sense in th' engineering
business than what _that_ comes to."

Tom, looking round with some anxiety at this announcement of his
prospects, unthinkingly withdrew a small rattle he was amusing baby
Moss with, whereupon she, being a baby that knew her own mind with
remarkable clearness, instantaneously expressed her sentiments in a
piercing yell, and was not to be appeased even by the restoration of
the rattle, feeling apparently that the original wrong of having it
taken from her remained in all its force. Mrs. Moss hurried away with
her into another room, and expressed to Mrs. Tulliver, who accompanied
her, the conviction that the dear child had good reasons for crying;
implying that if it was supposed to be the rattle that baby clamored
for, she was a misunderstood baby. The thoroughly justifiable yell
being quieted, Mrs. Moss looked at her sister-in-law and said,--

"I'm sorry to see brother so put out about this water work."

"It's your brother's way, Mrs. Moss; I'd never anything o' that sort
before I was married," said Mrs. Tulliver, with a half-implied
reproach. She always spoke of her husband as "your brother" to Mrs.
Moss in any case when his line of conduct was not matter of pure
admiration. Amiable Mrs. Tulliver, who was never angry in her life,
had yet her mild share of that spirit without which she could hardly
have been at once a Dodson and a woman. Being always on the defensive
toward her own sisters, it was natural that she should be keenly
conscious of her superiority, even as the weakest Dodson, over a
husband's sister, who, besides being poorly off, and inclined to "hang
on" her brother, had the good-natured submissiveness of a large,
easy-tempered, untidy, prolific woman, with affection enough in her
not only for her own husband and abundant children, but for any number
of collateral relations.

"I hope and pray he won't go to law," said Mrs. Moss, "for there's
never any knowing where that'll end. And the right doesn't allays win.
This Mr. Pivart's a rich man, by what I can make out, and the rich
mostly get things their own way."

"As to that," said Mrs. Tulliver, stroking her dress down, "I've seen
what riches are in my own family; for my sisters have got husbands as
can afford to do pretty much what they like. But I think sometimes I
shall be drove off my head with the talk about this law and erigation;
and my sisters lay all the fault to me, for they don't know what it is
to marry a man like your brother; how should they? Sister Pullet has
her own way from morning till night."

"Well," said Mrs. Moss, "I don't think I should like my husband if he
hadn't got any wits of his own, and I had to find head-piece for him.
It's a deal easier to do what pleases one's husband, than to be
puzzling what else one should do."

"If people come to talk o' doing what pleases their husbands," said
Mrs. Tulliver, with a faint imitation of her sister Glegg, "I'm sure
your brother might have waited a long while before he'd have found a
wife that 'ud have let him have his say in everything, as I do. It's
nothing but law and erigation now, from when we first get up in the
morning till we go to bed at night; and I never contradict him; I only
say, 'Well, Mr. Tulliver, do as you like; but whativer you do, don't
go to law."

Mrs. Tulliver, as we have seen, was not without influence over her
husband. No woman is; she can always incline him to do either what she
wishes, or the reverse; and on the composite impulses that were
threatening to hurry Mr. Tulliver into "law," Mrs. Tulliver's
monotonous pleading had doubtless its share of force; it might even be
comparable to that proverbial feather which has the credit or
discredit of breaking the camel's back; though, on a strictly
impartial view, the blame ought rather to lie with the previous weight
of feathers which had already placed the back in such imminent peril
that an otherwise innocent feather could not settle on it without
mischief. Not that Mrs. Tulliver's feeble beseeching could have had
this feather's weight in virtue of her single personality; but
whenever she departed from entire assent to her husband, he saw in her
the representative of the Dodson family; and it was a guiding
principle with Mr. Tulliver to let the Dodsons know that they were not
to domineer over _him_, or--more specifically--that a male Tulliver
was far more than equal to four female Dodsons, even though one of
them was Mrs. Glegg.

But not even a direct argument from that typical Dodson female herself
against his going to law could have heightened his disposition toward
it so much as the mere thought of Wakem, continually freshened by the
sight of the too able attorney on market-days. Wakem, to his certain
knowledge, was (metaphorically speaking) at the bottom of Pivart's
irrigation; Wakem had tried to make Dix stand out, and go to law about
the dam; it was unquestionably Wakem who had caused Mr. Tulliver to
lose the suit about the right of road and the bridge that made a
thoroughfare of his land for every vagabond who preferred an
opportunity of damaging private property to walking like an honest man
along the highroad; all lawyers were more or less rascals, but Wakem's
rascality was of that peculiarly aggravated kind which placed itself
in opposition to that form of right embodied in Mr. Tulliver's
interests and opinions. And as an extra touch of bitterness, the
injured miller had recently, in borrowing the five hundred pounds,
been obliged to carry a little business to Wakem's office on his own
account. A hook-nosed glib fellow! as cool as a cucumber,--always
looking so sure of his game! And it was vexatious that Lawyer Gore was
not more like him, but was a bald, round-featured man, with bland
manners and fat hands; a game-cock that you would be rash to bet upon
against Wakem. Gore was a sly fellow. His weakness did not lie on the
side of scrupulosity; but the largest amount of winking, however
significant, is not equivalent to seeing through a stone wall; and
confident as Mr. Tulliver was in his principle that water was water,
and in the direct inference that Pivart had not a leg to stand on in
this affair of irrigation, he had an uncomfortable suspicion that
Wakem had more law to show against this (rationally) irrefragable
inference than Gore could show for it. But then, if they went to law,
there was a chance for Mr. Tulliver to employ Counsellor Wylde on his
side, instead of having that admirable bully against him; and the
prospect of seeing a witness of Wakem's made to perspire and become
confounded, as Mr. Tulliver's witness had once been, was alluring to
the love of retributive justice.

Much rumination had Mr. Tulliver on these puzzling subjects during his
rides on the gray horse; much turning of the head from side to side,
as the scales dipped alternately; but the probable result was still
out of sight, only to be reached through much hot argument and
iteration in domestic and social life. That initial stage of the
dispute which consisted in the narration of the case and the
enforcement of Mr. Tulliver's views concerning it throughout the
entire circle of his connections would necessarily take time; and at
the beginning of February, when Tom was going to school again, there
were scarcely any new items to be detected in his father's statement
of the case against Pivart, or any more specific indication of the
measures he was bent on taking against that rash contravener of the
principle that water was water. Iteration, like friction, is likely to
generate heat instead of progress, and Mr. Tulliver's heat was
certainly more and more palpable. If there had been no new evidence on
any other point, there had been new evidence that Pivart was as "thick
as mud" with Wakem.

"Father," said Tom, one evening near the end of the holidays, "uncle
Glegg says Lawyer Wakem _is_ going to send his son to Mr. Stelling. It
isn't true, what they said about his going to be sent to France. You
won't like me to go to school with Wakem's son, shall you?"

"It's no matter for that, my boy," said Mr. Tulliver; "don't you learn
anything bad of him, that's all. The lad's a poor deformed creatur,
and takes after his mother in the face; I think there isn't much of
his father in him. It's a sign Wakem thinks high o' Mr. Sterling, as
he sends his son to him, and Wakem knows meal from bran."

Mr. Tulliver in his heart was rather proud of the fact that his son
was to have the same advantages as Wakem's; but Tom was not at all
easy on the point. It would have been much clearer if the lawyer's son
had not been deformed, for then Tom would have had the prospect of
pitching into him with all that freedom which is derived from a high
moral sanction.



The New Schoolfellow


It was a cold, wet January day on which Tom went back to school; a day
quite in keeping with this severe phase of his destiny. If he had not
carried in his pocket a parcel of sugar-candy and a small Dutch doll
for little Laura, there would have been no ray of expected pleasure to
enliven the general gloom. But he liked to think how Laura would put
out her lips and her tiny hands for the bits of sugarcandy; and to
give the greater keenness to these pleasures of imagination, he took
out the parcel, made a small hole in the paper, and bit off a crystal
or two, which had so solacing an effect under the confined prospect
and damp odors of the gig-umbrella, that he repeated the process more
than once on his way.

"Well, Tulliver, we're glad to see you again," said Mr. Stelling,
heartily. "Take off your wrappings and come into the study till
dinner. You'll find a bright fire there, and a new companion."

Tom felt in an uncomfortable flutter as he took off his woollen
comforter and other wrappings. He had seen Philip Wakem at St. Ogg's,
but had always turned his eyes away from him as quickly as possible.
He would have disliked having a deformed boy for his companion, even
if Philip had not been the son of a bad man. And Tom did not see how a
bad man's son could be very good. His own father was a good man, and
he would readily have fought any one who said the contrary. He was in
a state of mingled embarrassment and defiance as he followed Mr.
Stelling to the study.

"Here is a new companion for you to shake hands with, Tulliver," said
that gentleman on entering the study,--"Master Philip Wakem. I shall
leave you to make acquaintance by yourselves. You already know
something of each other, I imagine; for you are neighbors at home."

Tom looked confused and awkward, while Philip rose and glanced at him
timidly. Tom did not like to go up and put out his hand, and he was
not prepared to say, "How do you do?" on so short a notice.

Mr. Stelling wisely turned away, and closed the door behind him; boys'
shyness only wears off in the absence of their elders.

Philip was at once too proud and too timid to walk toward Tom. He
thought, or rather felt, that Tom had an aversion to looking at him;
every one, almost, disliked looking at him; and his deformity was more
conspicuous when he walked. So they remained without shaking hands or
even speaking, while Tom went to the fire and warmed himself, every
now and then casting furtive glances at Philip, who seemed to be
drawing absently first one object and then another on a piece of paper
he had before him. He had seated himself again, and as he drew, was
thinking what he could say to Tom, and trying to overcome his own
repugnance to making the first advances.

Tom began to look oftener and longer at Philip's face, for he could
see it without noticing the hump, and it was really not a disagreeable
face,--very old-looking, Tom thought. He wondered how much older
Philip was than himself. An anatomist--even a mere physiognomist--
would have seen that the deformity of Philip's spine was not a
congenital hump, but the result of an accident in infancy; but you
do not expect from Tom any acquaintance with such distinctions;
to him, Philip was simply a humpback. He had a vague notion
that the deformity of Wakem's son had some relation to the lawyer's
rascality, of which he had so often heard his father talk with hot
emphasis; and he felt, too, a half-admitted fear of him as probably
a spiteful fellow, who, not being able to fight you, had cunning
ways of doing you a mischief by the sly. There was a humpbacked
tailor in the neighborhood of Mr. Jacobs's academy, who was considered
a very unamiable character, and was much hooted after by public-spirited
boys solely on the ground of his unsatisfactory moral qualities; so
that Tom was not without a basis of fact to go upon. Still, no face
could be more unlike that ugly tailor's than this melancholy boy's
face,--the brown hair round it waved and curled at the ends like a
girl's; Tom thought that truly pitiable. This Wakem was a pale,
puny fellow, and it was quite clear he would not be able to play at
anything worth speaking of; but he handled his pencil in an enviable
manner, and was apparently making one thing after another without
any trouble. What was he drawing? Tom was quite warm now, and wanted
something new to be going forward. It was certainly more agreeable
to have an ill-natured humpback as a companion than to stand looking
out of the study window at the rain, and kicking his foot against
the washboard in solitude; something would happen every day,--
"a quarrel or something"; and Tom thought he should rather like to
show Philip that he had better not try his spiteful tricks on _him_.
He suddenly walked across the hearth and looked over Philip's paper.

"Why, that's a donkey with panniers, and a spaniel, and partridges in
the corn!" he exclaimed, his tongue being completely loosed by
surprise and admiration. "Oh my buttons! I wish I could draw like
that. I'm to learn drawing this half; I wonder if I shall learn to
make dogs and donkeys!"

"Oh, you can do them without learning," said Philip; "I never learned
drawing."

"Never learned?" said Tom, in amazement. "Why, when I make dogs and
horses, and those things, the heads and the legs won't come right;
though I can see how they ought to be very well. I can make houses,
and all sorts of chimneys,--chimneys going all down the wall,--and
windows in the roof, and all that. But I dare say I could do dogs and
horses if I was to try more," he added, reflecting that Philip might
falsely suppose that he was going to "knock under," if he were too
frank about the imperfection of his accomplishments.

"Oh, yes," said Philip, "it's very easy. You've only to look well at
things, and draw them over and over again. What you do wrong once, you
can alter the next time."

"But haven't you been taught _any_thing?" said Tom, beginning to have
a puzzled suspicion that Philip's crooked back might be the source of
remarkable faculties. "I thought you'd been to school a long while."

"Yes," said Philip, smiling; "I've been taught Latin and Greek and
mathematics, and writing and such things."

"Oh, but I say, you don't like Latin, though, do you?" said Tom,
lowering his voice confidentially.

"Pretty well; I don't care much about it," said Philip.

"Ah, but perhaps you haven't got into the _Propria quae maribus_," said
Tom, nodding his head sideways, as much as to say, "that was the test;
it was easy talking till you came to _that_."

Philip felt some bitter complacency in the promising stupidity of this
well-made, active-looking boy; but made polite by his own extreme
sensitiveness, as well as by his desire to conciliate, he checked his
inclination to laugh, and said quietly,--

"I've done with the grammar; I don't learn that any more."

"Then you won't have the same lessons as I shall?" said Tom, with a
sense of disappointment.

"No; but I dare say I can help you. I shall be very glad to help you
if I can."

Tom did not say "Thank you," for he was quite absorbed in the thought
that Wakem's son did not seem so spiteful a fellow as might have been
expected.

"I say," he said presently, "do you love your father?"

"Yes," said Philip, coloring deeply; "don't you love yours?"

"Oh yes--I only wanted to know," said Tom, rather ashamed of himself,
now he saw Philip coloring and looking uncomfortable. He found much
difficulty in adjusting his attitude of mind toward the son of Lawyer
Wakem, and it had occurred to him that if Philip disliked his father,
that fact might go some way toward clearing up his perplexity.

"Shall you learn drawing now?" he said, by way of changing the
subject.

"No," said Philip. "My father wishes me to give all my time to other
things now."

"What! Latin and Euclid, and those things?" said Tom.

"Yes," said Philip, who had left off using his pencil, and was resting
his head on one hand, while Tom was learning forward on both elbows,
and looking with increasing admiration at the dog and the donkey.

"And you don't mind that?" said Tom, with strong curiosity.

"No; I like to know what everybody else knows. I can study what I like
by-and-by."

"I can't think why anybody should learn Latin," said Tom. "It's no
good."

"It's part of the education of a gentleman," said Philip. "All
gentlemen learn the same things."

"What! do you think Sir John Crake, the master of the harriers, knows
Latin?" said Tom, who had often thought he should like to resemble Sir
John Crake.

"He learned it when he was a boy, of course," said Philip. "But I dare
say he's forgotten it."

"Oh, well, I can do that, then," said Tom, not with any epigrammatic
intention, but with serious satisfaction at the idea that, as far as
Latin was concerned, there was no hindrance to his resembling Sir John
Crake. "Only you're obliged to remember it while you're at school,
else you've got to learn ever so many lines of 'Speaker.' Mr.
Stelling's very particular--did you know? He'll have you up ten times
if you say 'nam' for 'jam,'--he won't let you go a letter wrong, _I_
can tell you."

"Oh, I don't mind," said Philip, unable to choke a laugh; "I can
remember things easily. And there are some lessons I'm very fond of.
I'm very fond of Greek history, and everything about the Greeks. I
should like to have been a Greek and fought the Persians, and then
have come home and have written tragedies, or else have been listened
to by everybody for my wisdom, like Socrates, and have died a grand
death." (Philip, you perceive, was not without a wish to impress the
well-made barbarian with a sense of his mental superiority.)

"Why, were the Greeks great fighters?" said Tom, who saw a vista in
this direction. "Is there anything like David and Goliath and Samson
in the Greek history? Those are the only bits I like in the history of
the Jews."

"Oh, there are very fine stories of that sort about the Greeks,--about
the heroes of early times who killed the wild beasts, as Samson did.
And in the Odyssey--that's a beautiful poem--there's a more wonderful
giant than Goliath,--Polypheme, who had only one eye in the middle of
his forehead; and Ulysses, a little fellow, but very wise and cunning,
got a red-hot pine-tree and stuck it into this one eye, and made him
roar like a thousand bulls."

"Oh, what fun!" said Tom, jumping away from the table, and stamping
first with one leg and then the other. "I say, can you tell me all
about those stories? Because I sha'n't learn Greek, you know. Shall
I?" he added, pausing in his stamping with a sudden alarm, lest the
contrary might be possible. "Does every gentleman learn Greek? Will
Mr. Stelling make me begin with it, do you think?"

"No, I should think not, very likely not," said Philip. "But you may
read those stories without knowing Greek. I've got them in English."

"Oh, but I don't like reading; I'd sooner have you tell them me. But
only the fighting ones, you know. My sister Maggie is always wanting
to tell me stories, but they're stupid things. Girls' stories always
are. Can you tell a good many fighting stories?"

"Oh yes," said Philip; "lots of them, besides the Greek stories. I can
tell you about Richard Coeur-de-Lion and Saladin, and about William
Wallace and Robert Bruce and James Douglas,--I know no end."

"You're older than I am, aren't you?" said Tom.

"Why, how old are _you?_ I'm fifteen."

"I'm only going in fourteen," said Tom. "But I thrashed all the
fellows at Jacob's--that's where I was before I came here. And I beat
'em all at bandy and climbing. And I wish Mr. Stelling would let us go
fishing. _I_ could show you how to fish. You _could_ fish, couldn't
you? It's only standing, and sitting still, you know."

Tom, in his turn, wished to make the balance dip in his favor. This
hunchback must not suppose that his acquaintance with fighting stories
put him on a par with an actual fighting hero, like Tom Tulliver.
Philip winced under this allusion to his unfitness for active sports,
and he answered almost peevishly,--

"I can't bear fishing. I think people look like fools sitting watching
a line hour after hour, or else throwing and throwing, and catching
nothing."

"Ah, but you wouldn't say they looked like fools when they landed a
big pike, I can tell you," said Tom, who had never caught anything
that was "big" in his life, but whose imagination was on the stretch
with indignant zeal for the honor of sport. Wakem's son, it was plain,
had his disagreeable points, and must be kept in due check. Happily
for the harmony of this first interview, they were now called to
dinner, and Philip was not allowed to develop farther his unsound
views on the subject of fishing. But Tom said to himself, that was
just what he should have expected from a hunchback.



"The Young Idea"


The alterations of feeling in that first dialogue between Tom and
Philip continued to make their intercourse even after many weeks of
schoolboy intimacy. Tom never quite lost the feeling that Philip,
being the son of a "rascal," was his natural enemy; never thoroughly
overcame his repulsion to Philip's deformity. He was a boy who adhered
tenaciously to impressions once received; as with all minds in which
mere perception predominates over thought and emotion, the external
remained to him rigidly what it was in the first instance. But then it
was impossible not to like Philip's company when he was in a good
humor; he could help one so well in one's Latin exercises, which Tom
regarded as a kind of puzzle that could only be found out by a lucky
chance; and he could tell such wonderful fighting stories about Hal of
the Wynd, for example, and other heroes who were especial favorites
with Tom, because they laid about them with heavy strokes. He had
small opinion of Saladin, whose cimeter could cut a cushion in two in
an instant; who wanted to cut cushions? That was a stupid story, and
he didn't care to hear it again. But when Robert Bruce, on the black
pony, rose in his stirrups, and lifting his good battle-axe, cracked
at once the helmet and the skull of the too hasty knight at
Bannockburn, then Tom felt all the exaltation of sympathy, and if he
had had a cocoanut at hand, he would have cracked it at once with the
poker. Philip in his happier moods indulged Tom to the top of his
bent, heightening the crash and bang and fury of every fight with all
the artillery of epithets and similes at his command. But he was not
always in a good humor or happy mood. The slight spurt of peevish
susceptibility which had escaped him in their first interview was a
symptom of a perpetually recurring mental ailment, half of it nervous
irritability, half of it the heart-bitterness produced by the sense of
his deformity. In these fits of susceptibility every glance seemed to
him to be charged either with offensive pity or with ill-repressed
disgust; at the very least it was an indifferent glance, and Philip
felt indifference as a child of the south feels the chill air of a
northern spring. Poor Tom's blundering patronage when they were out of
doors together would sometimes make him turn upon the well-meaning lad
quite savagely; and his eyes, usually sad and quiet, would flash with
anything but playful lightning. No wonder Tom retained his suspicions
of the humpback.

But Philip's self-taught skill in drawing was another link between
them; for Tom found, to his disgust, that his new drawing-master gave
him no dogs and donkeys to draw, but brooks and rustic bridges and
ruins, all with a general softness of black-lead surface, indicating
that nature, if anything, was rather satiny; and as Tom's feeling for
the picturesque in landscape was at present quite latent, it is not
surprising that Mr. Goodrich's productions seemed to him an
uninteresting form of art. Mr. Tulliver, having a vague intention that
Tom should be put to some business which included the drawing out of
plans and maps, had complained to Mr. Riley, when he saw him at
Mudport, that Tom seemed to be learning nothing of that sort;
whereupon that obliging adviser had suggested that Tom should have
drawing-lessons. Mr. Tulliver must not mind paying extra for drawing;
let Tom be made a good draughtsman, and he would be able to turn his
pencil to any purpose. So it was ordered that Tom should have
drawing-lessons; and whom should Mr. Stelling have selected as a
master if not Mr. Goodrich, who was considered quite at the head of
his profession within a circuit of twelve miles round King's Lorton?
By which means Tom learned to make an extremely fine point to his
pencil, and to represent landscape with a "broad generality," which,
doubtless from a narrow tendency in his mind to details, he thought
extremely dull.

All this, you remember, happened in those dark ages when there were no
schools of design; before schoolmasters were invariably men of
scrupulous integrity, and before the clergy were all men of enlarged
minds and varied culture. In those less favored days, it is no fable
that there were other clergymen besides Mr. Stelling who had narrow
intellects and large wants, and whose income, by a logical confusion
to which Fortune, being a female as well as blindfold, is peculiarly
liable, was proportioned not to their wants but to their intellect,
with which income has clearly no inherent relation. The problem these
gentlemen had to solve was to readjust the proportion between their
wants and their income; and since wants are not easily starved to
death, the simpler method appeared to be to raise their income. There
was but one way of doing this; any of those low callings in which men
are obliged to do good work at a low price were forbidden to
clergymen; was it their fault if their only resource was to turn out
very poor work at a high price? Besides, how should Mr. Stelling be
expected to know that education was a delicate and difficult business,
any more than an animal endowed with a power of boring a hole through
a rock should be expected to have wide views of excavation? Mr.
Stelling's faculties had been early trained to boring in a straight
line, and he had no faculty to spare. But among Tom's contemporaries,
whose fathers cast their sons on clerical instruction to find them
ignorant after many days, there were many far less lucky than Tom
Tulliver. Education was almost entirely a matter of luck--usually of
ill-luck--in those distant days. The state of mind in which you take a
billiard-cue or a dice-box in your hand is one of sober certainty
compared with that of old-fashioned fathers, like Mr. Tulliver, when
they selected a school or a tutor for their sons. Excellent men, who
had been forced all their lives to spell on an impromptu-phonetic
system, and having carried on a successful business in spite of this
disadvantage, had acquired money enough to give their sons a better
start in life than they had had themselves, must necessarily take
their chance as to the conscience and the competence of the
schoolmaster whose circular fell in their way, and appeared to promise
so much more than they would ever have thought of asking for,
including the return of linen, fork, and spoon. It was happy for them
if some ambitious draper of their acquaintance had not brought up his
son to the Church, and if that young gentleman, at the age of
four-and-twenty, had not closed his college dissipations by an
imprudent marriage; otherwise, these innocent fathers, desirous of
doing the best for their offspring, could only escape the draper's son
by happening to be on the foundation of a grammar-school as yet
unvisited by commissioners, where two or three boys could have, all to
themselves, the advantages of a large and lofty building, together
with a head-master, toothless, dim-eyed and deaf, whose erudite
indistinctness and inattention were engrossed by them at the rate of
three hundred pounds a-head,--a ripe scholar, doubtless, when first
appointed; but all ripeness beneath the sun has a further stage less
esteemed in the market.

Tom Tulliver, then, compared with many other British youths of his
time who have since had to scramble through life with some fragments
of more or less relevant knowledge, and a great deal of strictly
relevant ignorance, was not so very unlucky. Mr. Stelling was a
broad-chested, healthy man, with the bearing of a gentleman, a
conviction that a growing boy required a sufficiency of beef, and a
certain hearty kindness in him that made him like to see Tom looking
well and enjoying his dinner; not a man of refined conscience, or with
any deep sense of the infinite issues belonging to every-day duties,
not quite competent to his high offices; but incompetent gentlemen
must live, and without private fortune it is difficult to see how they
could all live genteelly if they had nothing to do with education or
government. Besides, it was the fault of Tom's mental constitution
that his faculties could not be nourished on the sort of knowledge Mr.
Stelling had to communicate. A boy born with a deficient power of
apprehending signs and abstractions must suffer the penalty of his
congenital deficiency, just as if he had been born with one leg
shorter than the other. A method of education sanctioned by the long
practice of our venerable ancestors was not to give way before the
exceptional dulness of a boy who was merely living at the time then
present. And Mr. Stelling was convinced that a boy so stupid at signs
and abstractions must be stupid at everything else, even if that
reverend gentleman could have taught him everything else. It was the
practice of our venerable ancestors to apply that ingenious instrument
the thumb-screw, and to tighten and tighten it in order to elicit
non-existent facts; they had a fixed opinion to begin with, that the
facts were existent, and what had they to do but to tighten the
thumb-screw? In like manner, Mr. Stelling had a fixed opinion that all
boys with any capacity could learn what it was the only regular thing
to teach; if they were slow, the thumb-screw must be tightened,--the
exercises must be insisted on with increased severity, and a page of
Virgil be awarded as a penalty, to encourage and stimulate a too
languid inclination to Latin verse.

The thumb-screw was a little relaxed, however, during this second
half-year. Philip was so advanced in his studies, and so apt, that Mr.
Stelling could obtain credit by his facility, which required little
help, much more easily than by the troublesome process of overcoming
Tom's dulness. Gentlemen with broad chests and ambitious intentions do
sometimes disappoint their friends by failing to carry the world
before them. Perhaps it is that high achievements demand some other
unusual qualification besides an unusual desire for high prizes;
perhaps it is that these stalwart gentlemen are rather indolent, their
_divinae particulum aurae_ being obstructed from soaring by a too hearty
appetite. Some reason or other there was why Mr. Stelling deferred the
execution of many spirited projects,--why he did not begin the editing
of his Greek play, or any other work of scholarship, in his leisure
hours, but, after turning the key of his private study with much
resolution, sat down to one of Theodore Hook's novels. Tom was
gradually allowed to shuffle through his lessons with less rigor, and
having Philip to help him, he was able to make some show of having
applied his mind in a confused and blundering way, without being
cross-examined into a betrayal that his mind had been entirely neutral
in the matter. He thought school much more bearable under this
modification of circumstances; and he went on contentedly enough,
picking up a promiscuous education chiefly from things that were not
intended as education at all. What was understood to be his education
was simply the practice of reading, writing, and spelling, carried on
by an elaborate appliance of unintelligible ideas, and by much failure
in the effort to learn by rote.

Nevertheless, there was a visible improvement in Tom under this
training; perhaps because he was not a boy in the abstract, existing
solely to illustrate the evils of a mistaken education, but a boy made
of flesh and blood, with dispositions not entirely at the mercy of
circumstances.

There was a great improvement in his bearing, for example; and some
credit on this score was due to Mr. Poulter, the village schoolmaster,
who, being an old Peninsular soldier, was employed to drill Tom,--a
source of high mutual pleasure. Mr. Poulter, who was understood by the
company at the Black Swan to have once struck terror into the hearts
of the French, was no longer personally formidable. He had rather a
shrunken appearance, and was tremulous in the mornings, not from age,
but from the extreme perversity of the King's Lorton boys, which
nothing but gin could enable him to sustain with any firmness. Still,
he carried himself with martial erectness, had his clothes
scrupulously brushed, and his trousers tightly strapped; and on the
Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, when he came to Tom, he was always
inspired with gin and old memories, which gave him an exceptionally
spirited air, as of a superannuated charger who hears the drum. The
drilling-lessons were always protracted by episodes of warlike
narrative, much more interesting to Tom than Philip's stories out of
the Iliad; for there were no cannon in the Iliad, and besides, Tom had
felt some disgust on learning that Hector and Achilles might possibly
never have existed. But the Duke of Wellington was really alive, and
Bony had not been long dead; therefore Mr. Poulter's reminiscences of
the Peninsular War were removed from all suspicion of being mythical.
Mr. Poulter, it appeared, had been a conspicuous figure at Talavera,
and had contributed not a little to the peculiar terror with which his
regiment of infantry was regarded by the enemy. On afternoons when his
memory was more stimulated than usual, he remembered that the Duke of
Wellington had (in strict privacy, lest jealousies should be awakened)
expressed his esteem for that fine fellow Poulter. The very surgeon
who attended him in the hospital after he had received his
gunshot-wound had been profoundly impressed with the superiority of
Mr. Poulter's flesh,--no other flesh would have healed in anything
like the same time. On less personal matters connected with the
important warfare in which he had been engaged, Mr. Poulter was more
reticent, only taking care not to give the weight of his authority to
any loose notions concerning military history. Any one who pretended
to a knowledge of what occurred at the siege of Badajos was especially
an object of silent pity to Mr. Poulter; he wished that prating person
had been run down, and had the breath trampled out of him at the first
go-off, as he himself had,--he might talk about the siege of Badajos
then! Tom did not escape irritating his drilling-master occasionally,
by his curiosity concerning other military matters than Mr. Poulter's
personal experience.

"And General Wolfe, Mr. Poulter,--wasn't he a wonderful fighter?" said
Tom, who held the notion that all the martial heroes commemorated on
the public-house signs were engaged in the war with Bony.

"Not at all!" said Mr. Poulter, contemptuously. "Nothing o' the sort!
Heads up!" he added, in a tone of stern command, which delighted Tom,
and made him feel as if he were a regiment in his own person.

"No, no!" Mr. Poulter would continue, on coming to a pause in his
discipline; "they'd better not talk to me about General Wolfe. He did
nothing but die of his wound; that's a poor haction, I consider. Any
other man 'ud have died o' the wounds I've had. One of my sword-cuts
'ud ha' killed a fellow like General Wolfe."

"Mr. Poulter," Tom would say, at any allusion to the sword, "I wish
you'd bring your sword and do the sword-exercise!"

For a long while Mr. Poulter only shook his head in a significant
manner at this request, and smiled patronizingly, as Jupiter may have
done when Semele urged her too ambitious request. But one afternoon,
when a sudden shower of heavy rain had detained Mr. Poulter twenty
minutes longer than usual at the Black Swan, the sword was
brought,--just for Tom to look at.

"And this is the real sword you fought with in all the battles, Mr.
Poulter?" said Tom, handling the hilt. "Has it ever cut a Frenchman's
head off?"

"Head off? Ah! and would, if he'd had three heads."

"But you had a gun and bayonet besides?" said Tom. "_I_ should like
the gun and bayonet best, because you could shoot 'em first and spear
'em after. Bang! Ps-s-s-s!" Tom gave the requisite pantomime to
indicate the double enjoyment of pulling the trigger and thrusting the
spear.

"Ah, but the sword's the thing when you come to close fighting," said
Mr. Poulter, involuntarily falling in with Tom's enthusiasm, and
drawing the sword so suddenly that Tom leaped back with much agility.

"Oh, but, Mr. Poulter, if you're going to do the exercise," said Tom,
a little conscious that he had not stood his ground as became an
Englishman, "let me go and call Philip. He'll like to see you, you
know."

"What! the humpbacked lad?" said Mr. Poulter, contemptuously; "what's
the use of _his_ looking on?"

"Oh, but he knows a great deal about fighting," said Tom, "and how
they used to fight with bows and arrows, and battle-axes."

"Let him come, then. I'll show him something different from his bows
and arrows," said Mr. Poulter, coughing and drawing himself up, while
he gave a little preliminary play to his wrist.

Tom ran in to Philip, who was enjoying his afternoon's holiday at the
piano, in the drawing-room, picking out tunes for himself and singing
them. He was supremely happy, perched like an amorphous bundle on the
high stool, with his head thrown back, his eyes fixed on the opposite
cornice, and his lips wide open, sending forth, with all his might,
impromptu syllables to a tune of Arne's which had hit his fancy.

"Come, Philip," said Tom, bursting in; "don't stay roaring 'la la'
there; come and see old Poulter do his sword-exercise in the
carriage-house!"

The jar of this interruption, the discord of Tom's tones coming across
the notes to which Philip was vibrating in soul and body, would have
been enough to unhinge his temper, even if there had been no question
of Poulter the drilling-master; and Tom, in the hurry of seizing
something to say to prevent Mr. Poulter from thinking he was afraid of
the sword when he sprang away from it, had alighted on this
proposition to fetch Philip, though he knew well enough that Philip
hated to hear him mention his drilling-lessons. Tom would never have
done so inconsiderate a thing except under the severe stress of his
personal pride.

Philip shuddered visibly as he paused from his music. Then turning
red, he said, with violent passion,--

"Get away, you lumbering idiot! Don't come bellowing at me; you're not
fit to speak to anything but a cart-horse!"

It was not the first time Philip had been made angry by him, but Tom
had never before been assailed with verbal missiles that he understood
so well.

"I'm fit to speak to something better than you, you poor-spirited
imp!" said Tom, lighting up immediately at Philip's fire. "You know I
won't hit you, because you're no better than a girl. But I'm an honest
man's son, and _your_ father's a rogue; everybody says so!"

Tom flung out of the room, and slammed the door after him, made
strangely heedless by his anger; for to slam doors within the hearing
of Mrs. Stelling, who was probably not far off, was an offence only to
be wiped out by twenty lines of Virgil. In fact, that lady did
presently descend from her room, in double wonder at the noise and the
subsequent cessation of Philip's music. She found him sitting in a
heap on the hassock, and crying bitterly.

"What's the matter, Wakem? what was that noise about? Who slammed the
door?"

Philip looked up, and hastily dried his eyes. "It was Tulliver who
came in--to ask me to go out with him."

"And what are you in trouble about?" said Mrs. Stelling.

Philip was not her favorite of the two pupils; he was less obliging
than Tom, who was made useful in many ways. Still, his father paid
more than Mr. Tulliver did, and she meant him to feel that she behaved
exceedingly well to him. Philip, however, met her advances toward a
good understanding very much as a caressed mollusk meets an invitation
to show himself out of his shell. Mrs. Stelling was not a loving,
tender-hearted woman; she was a woman whose skirt sat well, who
adjusted her waist and patted her curls with a preoccupied air when
she inquired after your welfare. These things, doubtless, represent a
great social power, but it is not the power of love; and no other
power could win Philip from his personal reserve.

He said, in answer to her question, "My toothache came on, and made me
hysterical again."

This had been the fact once, and Philip was glad of the recollection;
it was like an inspiration to enable him to excuse his crying. He had
to accept eau-de-Cologne and to refuse creosote in consequence; but
that was easy.

Meanwhile Tom, who had for the first time sent a poisoned arrow into
Philip's heart, had returned to the carriage-house, where he found Mr.
Poulter, with a fixed and earnest eye, wasting the perfections of his
sword-exercise on probably observant but inappreciative rats. But Mr.
Poulter was a host in himself; that is to say, he admired himself more
than a whole army of spectators could have admired him. He took no
notice of Tom's return, being too entirely absorbed in the cut and
thrust,--the solemn one, two, three, four; and Tom, not without a
slight feeling of alarm at Mr. Poulter's fixed eye and hungry-looking
sword, which seemed impatient for something else to cut besides the
air, admired the performance from as great a distance as possible. It
was not until Mr. Poulter paused and wiped the perspiration from his
forehead, that Tom felt the full charm of the sword-exercise, and
wished it to be repeated.

"Mr. Poulter," said Tom, when the sword was being finally sheathed, "I
wish you'd lend me your sword a little while to keep."

"No no, young gentleman," said Mr. Poulter, shaking his head
decidedly; "you might do yourself some mischief with it."

"No, I'm sure I wouldn't; I'm sure I'd take care and not hurt myself.
I shouldn't take it out of the sheath much, but I could ground arms
with it, and all that."

"No, no, it won't do, I tell you; it won't do," said Mr. Poulter,
preparing to depart. "What 'ud Mr. Stelling say to me?"

"Oh, I say, do, Mr. Poulter! I'd give you my five-shilling piece if
you'd let me keep the sword a week. Look here!" said Tom, reaching out
the attractively large round of silver. The young dog calculated the
effect as well as if he had been a philosopher.

"Well," said Mr. Poulter, with still deeper gravity, "you must keep it
out of sight, you know."

"Oh yes, I'll keep it under the bed," said Tom, eagerly, "or else at
the bottom of my large box."

"And let me see, now, whether you can draw it out of the sheath
without hurting yourself." That process having been gone through more
than once, Mr. Poulter felt that he had acted with scrupulous
conscientiousness, and said, "Well, now, Master Tulliver, if I take
the crown-piece, it is to make sure as you'll do no mischief with the
sword."

"Oh no, indeed, Mr. Poulter," said Tom, delightedly handing him the
crown-piece, and grasping the sword, which, he thought, might have
been lighter with advantage.

"But if Mr. Stelling catches you carrying it in?" said Mr. Poulter,
pocketing the crown-piece provisionally while he raised this new
doubt.

"Oh, he always keeps in his upstairs study on Saturday afternoon,"
said Tom, who disliked anything sneaking, but was not disinclined to a
little stratagem in a worthy cause. So he carried off the sword in
triumph mixed with dread--dread that he might encounter Mr. or Mrs.
Stelling--to his bedroom, where, after some consideration, he hid it
in the closet behind some hanging clothes. That night he fell asleep
in the thought that he would astonish Maggie with it when she
came,--tie it round his waist with his red comforter, and make her
believe that the sword was his own, and that he was going to be a
soldier. There was nobody but Maggie who would be silly enough to
believe him, or whom he dared allow to know he had a sword; and Maggie
was really coming next week to see Tom, before she went to a
boarding-school with Lucy.

If you think a lad of thirteen would have been so childish, you must
be an exceptionally wise man, who, although you are devoted to a civil
calling, requiring you to look bland rather than formidable, yet
never, since you had a beard, threw yourself into a martial attitude,
and frowned before the looking-glass. It is doubtful whether our
soldiers would be maintained if there were not pacific people at home
who like to fancy themselves soldiers. War, like other dramatic
spectacles, might possibly cease for want of a "public."



Maggie's Second Visit


This last breach between the two lads was not readily mended, and for
some time they spoke to each other no more than was necessary. Their
natural antipathy of temperament made resentment an easy passage to
hatred, and in Philip the transition seemed to have begun; there was
no malignity in his disposition, but there was a susceptibility that
made him peculiarly liable to a strong sense of repulsion. The ox--we
may venture to assert it on the authority of a great classic--is not
given to use his teeth as an instrument of attack, and Tom was an
excellent bovine lad, who ran at questionable objects in a truly
ingenious bovine manner; but he had blundered on Philip's tenderest
point, and had caused him as much acute pain as if he had studied the
means with the nicest precision and the most envenomed spite. Tom saw
no reason why they should not make up this quarrel as they had done
many others, by behaving as if nothing had happened; for though he had
never before said to Philip that his father was a rogue, this idea had
so habitually made part of his feeling as to the relation between
himself and his dubious schoolfellow, who he could neither like nor
dislike, that the mere utterance did not make such an epoch to him as
it did to Philip. And he had a right to say so when Philip hectored
over _him_, and called him names. But perceiving that his first
advances toward amity were not met, he relapsed into his least
favorable disposition toward Philip, and resolved never to appeal to
him either about drawing or exercise again. They were only so far
civil to each other as was necessary to prevent their state of feud
from being observed by Mr. Stelling, who would have "put down" such
nonsense with great vigor.

When Maggie came, however, she could not help looking with growing
interest at the new schoolfellow, although he was the son of that
wicked Lawyer Wakem, who made her father so angry. She had arrived in
the middle of school-hours, and had sat by while Philip went through
his lessons with Mr. Stelling. Tom, some weeks ago, had sent her word
that Philip knew no end of stories,--not stupid stories like hers; and
she was convinced now from her own observation that he must be very
clever; she hoped he would think _her_ rather clever too, when she
came to talk to him. Maggie, moreover, had rather a tenderness for
deformed things; she preferred the wry-necked lambs, because it seemed
to her that the lambs which were quite strong and well made wouldn't
mind so much about being petted; and she was especially fond of
petting objects that would think it very delightful to be petted by
her. She loved Tom very dearly, but she often wished that he _cared_
more about her loving him.

"I think Philip Wakem seems a nice boy, Tom," she said, when they went
out of the study together into the garden, to pass the interval before
dinner. "He couldn't choose his father, you know; and I've read of
very bad men who had good sons, as well as good parents who had bad
children. And if Philip is good, I think we ought to be the more sorry
for him because his father is not a good man. _You_ like him, don't
you?"

"Oh, he's a queer fellow," said Tom, curtly, "and he's as sulky as can
be with me, because I told him his father was a rogue. And I'd a right
to tell him so, for it was true; and _he_ began it, with calling me
names. But you stop here by yourself a bit, Maggie, will you? I've got
something I want to do upstairs."

"Can't I go too?" said Maggie, who in this first day of meeting again
loved Tom's shadow.

"No, it's something I'll tell you about by-and-by, not yet," said Tom,
skipping away.

In the afternoon the boys were at their books in the study, preparing
the morrow's lesson's that they might have a holiday in the evening in
honor of Maggie's arrival. Tom was hanging over his Latin grammar,
moving his lips inaudibly like a strict but impatient Catholic
repeating his tale of paternosters; and Philip, at the other end of
the room, was busy with two volumes, with a look of contented
diligence that excited Maggie's curiosity; he did not look at all as
if he were learning a lesson. She sat on a low stool at nearly a right
angle with the two boys, watching first one and then the other; and
Philip, looking off his book once toward the fire-place, caught the
pair of questioning dark eyes fixed upon him. He thought this sister
of Tulliver's seemed a nice little thing, quite unlike her brother; he
wished _he_ had a little sister. What was it, he wondered, that made
Maggie's dark eyes remind him of the stories about princesses being
turned into animals? I think it was that her eyes were full of
unsatisfied intelligence, and unsatisfied beseeching affection.

"I say, Magsie," said Tom at last, shutting his books and putting them
away with the energy and decision of a perfect master in the art of
leaving off, "I've done my lessons now. Come upstairs with me."

"What is it?" said Maggie, when they were outside the door, a slight
suspicion crossing her mind as she remembered Tom's preliminary visit
upstairs. "It isn't a trick you're going to play me, now?"

"No, no, Maggie," said Tom, in his most coaxing tone; "It's something
you'll like _ever so_."

He put his arm round her neck, and she put hers round his waist, and
twined together in this way, they went upstairs.

"I say, Magsie, you must not tell anybody, you know," said Tom, "else
I shall get fifty lines."

"Is it alive?" said Maggie, whose imagination had settled for the
moment on the idea that Tom kept a ferret clandestinely.

"Oh, I sha'n't tell you," said he. "Now you go into that corner and
hide your face, while I reach it out," he added, as he locked the
bedroom door behind them. "I'll tell you when to turn round. You
mustn't squeal out, you know."

"Oh, but if you frighten me, I shall," said Maggie, beginning to look
rather serious.

"You won't be frightened, you silly thing," said Tom. "Go and hide
your face, and mind you don't peep."

"Of course I sha'n't peep," said Maggie, disdainfully; and she buried
her face in the pillow like a person of strict honor.

But Tom looked round warily as he walked to the closet; then he
stepped into the narrow space, and almost closed the door. Maggie kept
her face buried without the aid of principle, for in that
dream-suggestive attitude she had soon forgotten where she was, and
her thoughts were busy with the poor deformed boy, who was so clever,
when Tom called out, "Now then, Magsie!"

Nothing but long meditation and preconcerted arrangement of effects
would have enabled Tom to present so striking a figure as he did to
Maggie when she looked up. Dissatisfied with the pacific aspect of a
face which had no more than the faintest hint of flaxen eyebrow,
together with a pair of amiable blue-gray eyes and round pink cheeks
that refused to look formidable, let him frown as he would before the
looking-glass (Philip had once told him of a man who had a horseshoe
frown, and Tom had tried with all his frowning might to make a
horseshoe on his forehead), he had had recourse to that unfailing
source of the terrible, burnt cork, and had made himself a pair of
black eyebrows that met in a satisfactory manner over his nose, and
were matched by a less carefully adjusted blackness about the chin. He
had wound a red handkerchief round his cloth cap to give it the air of
a turban, and his red comforter across his breast as a scarf,--an
amount of red which, with the tremendous frown on his brow, and the
decision with which he grasped the sword, as he held it with its point
resting on the ground, would suffice to convey an approximate idea of
his fierce and bloodthirsty disposition.

Maggie looked bewildered for a moment, and Tom enjoyed that moment
keenly; but in the next she laughed, clapped her hands together, and
said, "Oh, Tom, you've made yourself like Bluebeard at the show."

It was clear she had not been struck with the presence of the
sword,--it was not unsheathed. Her frivolous mind required a more
direct appeal to its sense of the terrible, and Tom prepared for his
master-stroke. Frowning with a double amount of intention, if not of
corrugation, he (carefully) drew the sword from its sheath, and
pointed it at Maggie.

"Oh, Tom, please don't!" exclaimed Maggie, in a tone of suppressed
dread, shrinking away from him into the opposite corner. "I _shall_
scream--I'm sure I shall! Oh, don't I wish I'd never come upstairs!"

The corners of Tom's mouth showed an inclination to a smile of
complacency that was immediately checked as inconsistent with the
severity of a great warrior. Slowly he let down the scabbard on the
floor, lest it should make too much noise, and then said sternly,--

"I'm the Duke of Wellington! March!" stamping forward with the right
leg a little bent, and the sword still pointing toward Maggie, who,
trembling, and with tear-filled eyes, got upon the bed, as the only
means of widening the space between them.

Tom, happy in this spectator of his military performances, even though
the spectator was only Maggie, proceeded, with the utmost exertion of
his force, to such an exhibition of the cut and thrust as would
necessarily be expected of the Duke of Wellington.

"Tom, I _will not_ bear it, I _will_ scream," said Maggie, at the
first movement of the sword. "You'll hurt yourself; you'll cut your
head off!"

"One--two," said Tom, resolutely, though at "two" his wrist trembled a
little. "Three" came more slowly, and with it the sword swung
downward, and Maggie gave a loud shriek. The sword had fallen, with
its edge on Tom's foot, and in a moment after he had fallen too.
Maggie leaped from the bed, still shrieking, and immediately there was
a rush of footsteps toward the room. Mr. Stelling, from his upstairs
study, was the first to enter. He found both the children on the
floor. Tom had fainted, and Maggie was shaking him by the collar of
his jacket, screaming, with wild eyes. She thought he was dead, poor
child! and yet she shook him, as if that would bring him back to life.
In another minute she was sobbing with joy because Tom opened his
eyes. She couldn't sorrow yet that he had hurt his foot; it seemed as
if all happiness lay in his being alive.



A Love-Scene


Poor Tom bore his severe pain heroically, and was resolute in not
"telling" of Mr. Poulter more than was unavoidable; the five-shilling
piece remained a secret even to Maggie. But there was a terrible dread
weighing on his mind, so terrible that he dared not even ask the
question which might bring the fatal "yes"; he dared not ask the
surgeon or Mr. Stelling, "Shall I be lame, Sir?" He mastered himself
so as not to cry out at the pain; but when his foot had been dressed,
and he was left alone with Maggie seated by his bedside, the children
sobbed together, with their heads laid on the same pillow. Tom was
thinking of himself walking about on crutches, like the wheelwright's
son; and Maggie, who did not guess what was in his mind, sobbed for
company. It had not occurred to the surgeon or to Mr. Stelling to
anticipate this dread in Tom's mind, and to reassure him by hopeful
words. But Philip watched the surgeon out of the house, and waylaid
Mr. Stelling to ask the very question that Tom had not dared to ask
for himself.

"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.



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.

Tom had not heard anything from home for some weeks,--a fact which did
not surprise him, for his father and mother were not apt to manifest
their affection in unnecessary letters,--when, to his great surprise,
on the morning of a dark, cold day near the end of November, he was
told, soon after entering the study at nine o'clock, that his sister
was in the drawing-room. It was Mrs. Stelling who had come into the
study to tell him, and she left him to enter the drawing-room alone.

Maggie, too, was tall now, with braided and coiled hair; she was
almost as tall as Tom, though she was only thirteen; and she really
looked older than he did at that moment. She had thrown off her
bonnet, her heavy braids were pushed back from her forehead, as if it
would not bear that extra load, and her young face had a strangely
worn look, as her eyes turned anxiously toward the door. When Tom
entered she did not speak, but only went up to him, put her arms round
his neck, and kissed him earnestly. He was used to various moods of
hers, and felt no alarm at the unusual seriousness of her greeting.

"Why, how is it you're come so early this cold morning, Maggie? Did
you come in the gig?" said Tom, as she backed toward the sofa, and
drew him to her side.

"No, I came by the coach. I've walked from the turnpike."

"But how is it you're not at school? The holidays have not begun yet?"

"Father wanted me at home," said Maggie, with a slight trembling of
the lip. "I came home three or four days ago."

"Isn't my father well?" said Tom, rather anxiously.

"Not quite," said Maggie. "He's very unhappy, Tom. The lawsuit is
ended, and I came to tell you because I thought it would be better for
you to know it before you came home, and I didn't like only to send
you a letter."

"My father hasn't lost?" said Tom, hastily, springing from the sofa,
and standing before Maggie with his hands suddenly thrust into his
pockets.

"Yes, dear Tom," said Maggie, looking up at him with trembling.

Tom was silent a minute or two, with his eyes fixed on the floor. Then
he said:

"My father will have to pay a good deal of money, then?"

"Yes," said Maggie, rather faintly.

"Well, it can't be helped," said Tom, bravely, not translating the
loss of a large sum of money into any tangible results. "But my
father's very much vexed, I dare say?" he added, looking at Maggie,
and thinking that her agitated face was only part of her girlish way
of taking things.

"Yes," said Maggie, again faintly. Then, urged to fuller speech by
Tom's freedom from apprehension, she said loudly and rapidly, as if
the words _would_ burst from her: "Oh, Tom, he will lose the mill and
the land and everything; he will have nothing left."

Tom's eyes flashed out one look of surprise at her, before he turned
pale, and trembled visibly. He said nothing, but sat down on the sofa
again, looking vaguely out of the opposite window.

Anxiety about the future had never entered Tom's mind. His father had
always ridden a good horse, kept a good house, and had the cheerful,
confident air of a man who has plenty of property to fall back upon.
Tom had never dreamed that his father would "fail"; _that_ was a form
of misfortune which he had always heard spoken of as a deep disgrace,
and disgrace was an idea that he could not associate with any of his
relations, least of all with his father. A proud sense of family
respectability was part of the very air Tom had been born and brought
up in. He knew there were people in St. Ogg's who made a show without
money to support it, and he had always heard such people spoken of by
his own friends with contempt and reprobation. He had a strong belief,
which was a lifelong habit, and required no definite evidence to rest
on, that his father could spend a great deal of money if he chose; and
since his education at Mr. Stelling's had given him a more expensive
view of life, he had often thought that when he got older he would
make a figure in the world, with his horse and dogs and saddle, and
other accoutrements of a fine young man, and show himself equal to any
of his contemporaries at St. Ogg's, who might consider themselves a
grade above him in society because their fathers were professional
men, or had large oil-mills. As to the prognostics and headshaking of
his aunts and uncles, they had never produced the least effect on him,
except to make him think that aunts and uncles were disagreeable
society; he had heard them find fault in much the same way as long as
he could remember. His father knew better than they did.

The down had come on Tom's lip, yet his thoughts and expectations had
been hitherto only the reproduction, in changed forms, of the boyish
dreams in which he had lived three years ago. He was awakened now with
a violent shock.

Maggie was frightened at Tom's pale, trembling silence. There was
something else to tell him,--something worse. She threw her arms round
him at last, and said, with a half sob:

"Oh, Tom--dear, dear Tom, don't fret too much; try and bear it well."

Tom turned his cheek passively to meet her entreating kisses, and
there gathered a moisture in his eyes, which he just rubbed away with
his hand. The action seemed to rouse him, for he shook himself and
said: "I shall go home, with you, Maggie. Didn't my father say I was
to go?"

"No, Tom, father didn't wish it," said Maggie, her anxiety about _his_
feeling helping her to master her agitation. What _would_ he do when
she told him all? "But mother wants you to come,--poor mother!--she
cries so. Oh, Tom, it's very dreadful at home."

Maggie's lips grew whiter, and she began to tremble almost as Tom had
done. The two poor things clung closer to each other, both
trembling,--the one at an unshapen fear, the other at the image of a
terrible certainty. When Maggie spoke, it was hardly above a whisper.

"And--and--poor father----"

Maggie could not utter it. But the suspense was intolerable to Tom. A
vague idea of going to prison, as a consequence of debt, was the shape
his fears had begun to take.

"Where's my father?" he said impatiently. "_Tell_ me, Maggie."

"He's at home," said Maggie, finding it easier to reply to that
question. "But," she added, after a pause, "not himself--he fell off
his horse. He has known nobody but me ever since--he seems to have
lost his senses. O father, father----"

With these last words, Maggie's sobs burst forth with the more
violence for the previous struggle against them. Tom felt that
pressure of the heart which forbids tears; he had no distinct vision
of their troubles as Maggie had, who had been at home; he only felt
the crushing weight of what seemed unmitigated misfortune. He
tightened his arm almost convulsively round Maggie as she sobbed, but
his face looked rigid and tearless, his eyes blank,--as if a black
curtain of cloud had suddenly fallen on his path.

But Maggie soon checked herself abruptly; a single thought had acted
on her like a startling sound.

"We must set out, Tom, we must not stay. Father will miss me; we must
be at the turnpike at ten to meet the coach." She said this with hasty
decision, rubbing her eyes, and rising to seize her bonnet.

Tom at once felt the same impulse, and rose too. "Wait a minute,
Maggie," he said. "I must speak to Mr. Stelling, and then we'll go."

He thought he must go to the study where the pupils were; but on his
way he met Mr. Stelling, who had heard from his wife that Maggie
appeared to be in trouble when she asked for her brother, and now that
he thought the brother and sister had been alone long enough, was
coming to inquire and offer his sympathy.

"Please, sir, I must go home," Tom said abruptly, as he met Mr.
Stelling in the passage. "I must go back with my sister directly. My
father's lost his lawsuit--he's lost all his property--and he's very
ill."

Mr. Stelling felt like a kind-hearted man; he foresaw a probable money
loss for himself, but this had no appreciable share in his feeling,
while he looked with grave pity at the brother and sister for whom
youth and sorrow had begun together. When he knew how Maggie had come,
and how eager she was to get home again, he hurried their departure,
only whispering something to Mrs. Stelling, who had followed him, and
who immediately left the room.

Tom and Maggie were standing on the door-step, ready to set out, when
Mrs. Stelling came with a little basket, which she hung on Maggie's
arm, saying: "Do remember to eat something on the way, dear." Maggie's
heart went out toward this woman whom she had never liked, and she
kissed her silently. It was the first sign within the poor child of
that new sense which is the gift of sorrow,--that susceptibility to
the bare offices of humanity which raises them into a bond of loving
fellowship, as to haggard men among the ice-bergs the mere presence of
an ordinary comrade stirs the deep fountains of affection.

Mr. Stelling put his hand on Tom's shoulder and said: "God bless you,
my boy; let me know how you get on." Then he pressed Maggie's hand;
but there were no audible good-byes. Tom had so often thought how
joyful he should be the day he left school "for good"! And now his
school years seemed like a holiday that had come to an end.

The two slight youthful figures soon grew indistinct on the distant
road,--were soon lost behind the projecting hedgerow.

They had gone forth together into their life of sorrow, and they would
never more see the sunshine undimmed by remembered cares. They had
entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood
had forever closed behind them.




Book III

_The Downfall_

 Tom's "First Half" Tom finds life at King's Lorton, where he is now the sole student to Mr. Stelling, unpleasant. The material is harder than anything he has faced before, and he has Mr. Stelling's undivided attention. Mr. and Mrs. Tulliver, though, are both quite pleased with what they see when they leave him there. Mr. Tulliver thinks Mr. Stelling seems quite shrewd, and Mrs. Tulliver is pleased with Mrs. Stelling's housekeeping. A little while later Mr. Tulliver brings Maggie to visit Tom for a fortnight. Maggie quite enjoys getting a chance to follow along with Tom's lessons, and likes to show off her cleverness to Mr. Stelling, who enjoys her conversation. Mr. Stelling, though, says that girls are often quick and shallow, but aren't able to get deeply into anything, devastating Maggie, who has always taken pride in being called quick. Chapter II - The Christmas Holidays Tom comes back to Dorlcote Mill for the Christmas holidays, and is very happy to be home. However, Mr. Tulliver's bad mood dims the festivities for Tom. Mr. Tulliver is upset because Mr. Pivart, a neighboring farmer, adversely affects the mill's water power with his irrigation plans. He becomes more and more bitter towards Mr. Pivart and the lawyer Mr. Wakem, who he believes is behind everything. Tom finds out Wakem's son will be joining him at Mr. Stelling's, but Mr. Tulliver doesn't mind since he likes the idea of Tom having the same advantages as his foe's son. Chapter III - The New Schoolfellow Tom returns to Mr. Stelling's after the holiday, where he meets Philip Wakem. Due to an accident in infancy, Philip's spine is deformed, resulting in his hunchback. Philip is sensitive and intelligent. Tom feels awkward around the boy at first because of his appearance and Mr. Tulliver's hatred of his father, but he warms to the boy upon hearing tales of mythical and historical war figures. Each wants to make it clear that he is superior to the other in some ways - Philip in intellect and Tom in physical prowess. Chapter IV - "The Young Idea" Tom doesn't quite get over his negative feelings towards Philip, but he does enjoy his company when Philip's in a good mood - which is fairly inconsistent because of his irritable personality stemming from his sensitivity about his deformity. Tom also enjoys that Philip's presence leads to Mr. Stelling not focusing on him quite so intensely, so his schooling becomes less unpleasant. This term also includes physical education for Tom taught by Mr. Poulter, a former soldier. Tom convinces Mr. Poulter to bring his sword to King's Lorton. Tom's excitement drives him to interrupt Phillip's intense piano-playing in order to ask the boy to join him. In a rage, Phillip calls Tom stupid and Tom retorts that Mr. Wakem is a scoundrel. Tom goes back to Mr. Poulter, and bribes him to lend him his sword for a week. Chapter V - Maggie's Second Visit The enmity caused by this fight between Philip and Tom continues, and they barely speak to one another. Maggie comes for another visit, and is quickly impressed with Philip's cleverness. Tom brings Maggie up to his room where he surprises her with his loaned sword. In trying to show off his moves, he drops the point on his own foot and promptly faints. Chapter VI - A Love-Scene While the doctor is treating his injured foot, Tom is afraid to ask whether he will be permanently lame. As no one thinks to ask on his behalf and reassure him, Philip - knowing how difficult it would be for Tom to go through life deformed - brings him the news that he will soon be back to normal. This leads to reconciliation between the boys, and from then on Philip spends all his time outside of class with Maggie and Tom. As a result, Maggie and Philip become quite close and she promises to kiss him when she sees him again, though, he is disappointed that her affection stems from pity and not simply his intellect. Once Maggie leaves, Tom and Philip eventually cool to their original mixed feelings for one another. Chapter VII - The Golden Gates Are Passed Maggie and Lucy go to boarding school at Laceham on the Floss. Mr. Tulliver finally enters into the long-threatened lawsuit with Mr. Pivart, who is represented by Mr. Wakem, increasing Mr. Tulliver's animosity towards him and his son. Maggie thus regrets that she'll probably never be able to be close with Philip again. Tom, now 16, enters his last quarter at Mr. Stelling's believing his father's lawsuit to be approaching its end - and assuming his father will win. Maggie, now 13, comes to King's Lorton unexpectedly to tell Tom that Mr. Tulliver has lost the lawsuit, and as a result will lose the mill and all his land. Even worse, it seems he has fallen off of his horse and been gravely injured, recognizing no one but Maggie since the accident.

