Books: The Mill on the Floss

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"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.

Chapter VI

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.

Chapter VII

The Golden Gates Are Passed

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

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

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

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

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.