Mr Riley Gives His Advice Concerning a School for Tom THE gentleman in the ample white cravat and shirt-frill, taking his brandy and water so pleasantly with his good friend Tulliver, is Mr Riley:
a gentleman with a waxen complexion and fat hands, rather highly educated for an auctioneer and appraiser, but large-hearted enough to show a great deal of bonhommie towards ****** country acquaintances of hospitable habits.Mr Riley spoke of such acquaintances kindly as `people of the old school.' The conversation had come to a pause.Mr Tulliver, not without a particular reason, had abstained from a seventh recital of the cool retort by which Riley had shown himself too many for Dix, and how Wakem had had his comb cut for once in his life, now the business of the dam had been settled by arbitration, and how there never would have been any dispute at all about the height of water if everybody was what they should be, and Old Harry hadn't made the lawyers.Mr Tulliver was on the whole a man of safe traditional opinions; but on one or two points he had trusted to his unassisted intellect and had arrived at several questionable conclusions, among the rest, that rats, weevils, and lawyers were created by Old Harry.
Unhappily he had no one to tell him that this was rampant Manichæism, else he might have seen his error.But to-day it was clear that the good principle was triumphant: this affair of the water-power had been a tangled business somehow, for all it seemed - look at it one way - as plain as water's water, but, big a puzzle as it was, it hadn't got the better of Riley.Mr Tulliver took his brandy and water a little stronger than usual, and, for a man who might be supposed to have a few hundreds lying idle at his banker's, was rather incautiously open in expressing his high estimate of his friend's business talents.
But the dam was a subject of conversation that would keep: it could always be taken up again at the same point and exactly in the same condition;and there was another subject, as you know, on which Mr Tulliver was in pressing want of Mr Riley's advice.This was his particular reason for remaining silent for a short space after his last draught, and rubbing his knees in a meditative manner.He was not a man to make an abrupt transition.
This was a puzzling world, as he often said, and if you drive your waggon in a hurry you may light on an awkward corner.Mr Riley, meanwhile, was not impatient.Why should he be? Even Hotspur, one would think, must have been patient in his slippers on a warm hearth, taking copious snuff, and sipping gratuitous brandy and water.
`There's a thing I've got i' my head,' said Mr Tulliver at last, in rather a lower tone than usual, as he turned his head and looked steadfastly at his companion.
`Ah?' said Mr Riley, in a tone of mild interest.He was a man with heavy waxen eyelids and high-arched eyebrows, looking exactly the same under all circumstances.This immovability of face and the habit of taking a pinch of snuff before he gave an answer, made him trebly oracular to Mr Tulliver.
`It's a very particlar thing,' he went on, `it's about my boy Tom.'
At the sound of this name, Maggie, who was seated on a low stool close by the fire, with a large book open on her lap, shook her heavy hair back and looked up eagerly.There were few sounds that roused Maggie when she was dreaming over her book, but Tom's name served as well as the shrillest whistle: in an instant she was on the watch, with gleaming eyes, like a Skye terrier suspecting mischief, or at all events determined to fly at any one who threatened it towards Tom.
`You see, I want to put him to a new school at Midsummer,' said Mr Tulliver, `he's comin' away from the 'Cademy at Ladyday, an' I shall let him run loose for a quarter; but after that I want to send him to a downright good school, where they'll make a scholard of him.'
`Well,' said Mr Riley, `there's no greater advantage you can give him than a good education.Not,' he added, with polite significance, `not that a man can't be an excellent miller and farmer and a shrewd sensible fellow into the bargain without much help from the schoolmaster.'
`I believe you,' said Mr Tulliver, winking and turning his head on one side, `but that's where it is.I don't mean Tom to be a miller and farmer.I see no fun i' that: why, if I made him a miller an' farmer, he'd be expectin' to take to the mill an' the land, an' a-hinting at me as it was time for me to lay by an' think o' my latter end.Nay, nay, I've seen enough o' that wi' sons.I'll niver pull my coat off before I go to bed.
I shall give Tom an eddication an' put him to a business, as he may make a nest for himself an' not want to push me out o' mine.Pretty well if he gets it when I'm dead an' gone.I shan't be put off wi' spoon-meat afore I've lost my teeth.'
This was evidently a point on which Mr Tulliver felt strongly, and the impetus which had given unusual rapidity and emphasis to his speech showed itself still unexhausted for some minutes afterwards in a defiant motion of the head from side to side, and an occasional `Nay, nay,' like a subsiding growl.
These angry symptoms were keenly observed by Maggie, and cut her to the quick: Tom, it appeared, was supposed capable of turning his father out of doors, and of ****** the future in some way tragic by his wickedness.
This was not to be borne, and Maggie jumped up from her stool, forgetting all about her heavy book, which fell with a bang within the fender; and going up between her father's knees, said, in a half crying, half indignant voice, `Father, Tom wouldn't be naughty to you ever, I know he wouldn't.'
Mrs Tulliver was out of the room superintending a choice supper-dish, and Mr Tulliver's heart was touched, so Maggie was not scolded about the book.Mr Riley quietly picked it up and looked at it while the father laughed with a certain tenderness in his hard lined face, and patted his little girl on the back, and then held her hands and kept her between his knees.