“An’ I’n gi’en you everything,
an’ showed you everything, an’ niver wanted
nothin’ from you. An’ there’s
your horn-handed knife, then as you gi’en me.”
Here Bob flung the knife as far as he could after Tom’s
retreating footsteps. But it produced no effect,
except the sense in Bob’s mind that there was
a terrible void in his lot, now that knife was gone.
He stood still till Tom had passed through the gate
and disappeared behind the hedge. The knife would
do not good on the ground there; it wouldn’t
vex Tom; and pride or resentment was a feeble passion
in Bob’s mind compared with the love of a pocket-knife.
His very fingers sent entreating thrills that he would
go and clutch that familiar rough buck’s-horn
handle, which they had so often grasped for mere affection,
as it lay idle in his pocket. And there were two
blades, and they had just been sharpened! What
is life without a pocket-knife to him who has once
tasted a higher existence? No; to throw the handle
after the hatchet is a comprehensible act of desperation,
but to throw one’s pocket-knife after an implacable
friend is clearly in every sense a hyperbole, or throwing
beyond the mark. So Bob shuffled back to the
spot where the beloved knife lay in the dirt, and felt
quite a new pleasure in clutching it again after the
temporary separation, in opening one blade after the
other, and feeling their edge with his well-hardened
thumb. Poor Bob! he was not sensitive on the point
of honor, not a chivalrous character. That fine
moral aroma would not have been thought much of by
the public opinion of Kennel Yard, which was the very
focus or heart of Bob’s world, even if it could
have made itself perceptible there; yet, for all that,
he was not utterly a sneak and a thief as our friend
Tom had hastily decided.
But Tom, you perceive, was rather a Rhadamanthine
personage, having more than the usual share of boy’s
justice in him,—the justice that desires
to hurt culprits as much as they deserve to be hurt,
and is troubled with no doubts concerning the exact
amount of their deserts. Maggie saw a cloud on
his brow when he came home, which checked her joy
at his coming so much sooner than she had expected,
and she dared hardly speak to him as he stood silently
throwing the small gravel-stones into the mill-dam.
It is not pleasant to give up a rat-catching when
you have set your mind on it. But if Tom had told
his strongest feeling at that moment, he would have
said, “I’d do just the same again.”
That was his usual mode of viewing his past actions;
whereas Maggie was always wishing she had done something
different.
