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,