The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (best beach reads of all time .txt) 📕

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 could 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 masterstroke. 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.

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.