“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. His imagination did not dwell on the outward calamity and its future effect on Tom’s life, but it made vividly present to him the probable state of Tom’s feeling. Philip had only lived fourteen years, but those years had, most of them, been steeped in the sense of a lot irremediably hard.
“Mr Askern says you’ll soon be all right again, Tulliver, did you know?” he said rather timidly, as he stepped gently up to Tom’s bed. “I’ve just been to ask Mr Stelling, and he says you’ll walk as well as ever again by-and-day.”
Tom looked up with that momentary stopping of the breath which comes with a sudden joy; then he gave a long sigh, and turned his blue-gray eyes straight on Philip’s face, as he had not done for a fortnight or more. As for Maggie, this intimation of a possibility she had not thought of before affected her as a new trouble; the bare idea of Tom’s being always lame overpowered the assurance that such a misfortune was not likely to befall him, and she clung to him and cried afresh.
“Don’t be a little silly, Magsie,” said Tom, tenderly, feeling very brave now. “I shall soon get well.”
“Good-by, Tulliver,” said Philip, putting out his small, delicate hand, which Tom clasped immediately with his more substantial fingers.
“I say,” said Tom, “ask Mr Stelling to let you come and sit with me sometimes, till I get up again, Wakem; and tell me about Robert Bruce, you know.”
After that, Philip spent all his time out of school-hours with Tom and Maggie. Tom liked to hear fighting stories as much as ever, but he insisted strongly on the fact that those great fighters who did so many wonderful things and came off unhurt, wore excellent armor from head to foot, which made fighting easy work, he considered. He should not have hurt his foot if he had had an iron shoe on. He listened with great interest to a new story of Philip’s about a man who had a very bad wound in his foot, and cried out so dreadfully with the pain that his friends could bear with him no longer, but put him ashore on a desert island, with nothing but some wonderful poisoned arrows to kill animals with for food.