Alfred dropped alongside and was going to try to comfort
her, but she said:
“Go away and leave me alone, can’t you!
I hate you!”
So the boy halted, wondering what he could have done—for
she had said she would look at pictures all through
the nooning—and she walked on, crying.
Then Alfred went musing into the deserted schoolhouse.
He was humiliated and angry. He easily guessed
his way to the truth—the girl had simply
made a convenience of him to vent her spite upon Tom
Sawyer. He was far from hating Tom the less when
this thought occurred to him. He wished there
was some way to get that boy into trouble without much
risk to himself. Tom’s spelling-book fell
under his eye. Here was his opportunity.
He gratefully opened to the lesson for the afternoon
and poured ink upon the page.
Becky, glancing in at a window behind him at the moment,
saw the act, and moved on, without discovering herself.
She started homeward, now, intending to find Tom and
tell him; Tom would be thankful and their troubles
would be healed. Before she was half way home,
however, she had changed her mind. The thought
of Tom’s treatment of her when she was talking
about her picnic came scorching back and filled her
with shame. She resolved to let him get whipped
on the damaged spelling-book’s account, and
to hate him forever, into the bargain.
Tom arrived at home in a dreary mood, and the
first thing his aunt said to him showed him that he
had brought his sorrows to an unpromising market:
“Tom, I’ve a notion to skin you alive!”
“Auntie, what have I done?”
“Well, you’ve done enough. Here I
go over to Sereny Harper, like an old softy, expecting
I’m going to make her believe all that rubbage
about that dream, when lo and behold you she’d
found out from Joe that you was over here and heard
all the talk we had that night. Tom, I don’t
know what is to become of a boy that will act like
that. It makes me feel so bad to think you could
let me go to Sereny Harper and make such a fool of
myself and never say a word.”
This was a new aspect of the thing. His smartness
of the morning had seemed to Tom a good joke before,
and very ingenious. It merely looked mean and
shabby now. He hung his head and could not think
of anything to say for a moment. Then he said:
“Auntie, I wish I hadn’t done it—but
I didn’t think.”
“Oh, child, you never think. You never
think of anything but your own selfishness. You
could think to come all the way over here from Jackson’s
Island in the night to laugh at our troubles, and you
could think to fool me with a lie about a dream; but
you couldn’t ever think to pity us and save
us from sorrow.”
“Auntie, I know now it was mean, but I didn’t
mean to be mean. I didn’t, honest.
And besides, I didn’t come over here to laugh
at you that night.”
