第20章

`There the half-penny lies,' he said, `I don't want your half-penny;I wouldn't have kept it.But you wanted to cheat: I hate a cheat.I shan't go along with you any more,' he added, turning round homeward, not without casting a regret towards the rat-catching and other pleasures which he must relinquish along with Bob's society.

`You may let it alone, then,' Bob called out after him.`I shall cheat if I like - there's no fun i' playing, else.And I know where there's goldfinch's nest, but I'll take care you don't....An' you're a nasty fightin'

turkey-cock, you are....'

Tom walked on without looking round, and Yap followed his example, the cold bath having moderated his passions.

`Go along wi' you, then, wi' your drownded dog - I wouldn't own such a dog, I wouldn't,' said Bob, getting louder, in a last effort to sustain his defiance.But Tom was not to be provoked into turning round, and Bob's voice began to falter a little as she said, `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 no 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 honour - 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 Rhadamanthinepersonage, having more than the usual share of boys' 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.