“You never will again!”
“When you are gone—” and the poor victim’s voice died away.
“Tom, you will not stay after me. It is settled that when I go to Balliol, you leave Stoneborough, and go to Mr. Wilmot as pupil. Those scamps shall never have you in their clutches again.”
It did not produce the ecstasy Norman had expected. The boy still sat on the ground, staring at his brother, as if the good news hardly penetrated the gloom; and, after a disappointing silence, recurred to the most immediate cause of distress: “Eight shillings and tenpence halfpenny! Norman, if you would only lend it to me, you shall have all my tin till I have made it up—sixpence a week, and half-a-crown on New Year’s Day.”
“I am not going to pay Mr. Axworthy’s reckoning,” said Norman, rather angrily. “You will never be better till you have told my father the whole.”
“Do you think they will send in the bill to my father?” asked Tom, in alarm.
“No, indeed! that is the last thing they will do,” said Norman; “but I would not have you come to him only for such a sneaking reason.”
“But the girls would hear it. Oh, if I thought Mary and Margaret would ever hear it—Norman, I can’t—”
Norman assured him that there was not the slightest reason that these passages should ever come to the knowledge of his sisters. Tom was excessively afraid of his father, but he could not well be more wretched than he was already; and he was brought to assent when Norman showed him that he had never been happy since the affair of the blotting-paper, when his father’s looks and tones had become objects of dread to his guilty conscience. Was not the only means of recovering a place in papa’s esteem to treat him with confidence?
Tom answered not, and would only shudder when his brother took upon him to declare that free confession would gain pardon even for the doings at the Green Man.