As Tom trudged home his mind was full of dreary thoughts
and wild plans; but at last he said to himself, wearily:
“There is but the one way out. I must follow
her plan. But with a variation—I will
not ask for the money and ruin myself; I will ROB the
old skinflint.”
Few things are harder
to put up with than the annoyance of
a good example.
—Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar
It were not best
that we should all think alike; it is
difference of opinion
that makes horse races. —Pudd’nhead
Wilson’s Calendar
Dawson’s Landing was comfortably finishing its
season of dull repose and waiting patiently for the
duel. Count Luigi was waiting, too; but not patiently,
rumor said. Sunday came, and Luigi insisted on
having his challenge conveyed. Wilson carried
it. Judge Driscoll declined to fight with an
assassin—“that is,” he added
significantly, “in the field of honor.”
Elsewhere, of course, he would be ready. Wilson
tried to convince him that if he had been present
himself when Angelo told him about the homicide committed
by Luigi, he would not have considered the act discreditable
to Luigi; but the obstinate old man was not to be moved.
Wilson went back to his principal and reported the
failure of his mission. Luigi was incensed, and
asked how it could be that the old gentleman, who
was by no means dull-witted, held his trifling nephew’s
evidence in inferences to be of more value than Wilson’s.
But Wilson laughed, and said:
“That is quite simple; that is easily explicable.
I am not his doll—his baby—his
infatuation: his nature is. The judge and
his late wife never had any children. The judge
and his wife were past middle age when this treasure
fell into their lap. One must make allowances
for a parental instinct that has been starving for
twenty-five or thirty years. It is famished,
it is crazed with hunger by that time, and will be
entirely satisfied with anything that comes handy;
its taste is atrophied, it can’t tell mud cat
from shad. A devil born to a young couple is
measurably recognizable by them as a devil before long,
but a devil adopted by an old couple is an angel to
them, and remains so, through thick and thin.
Tom is this old man’s angel; he is infatuated
with him. Tom can persuade him into things which
other people can’t—not all things;
I don’t mean that, but a good many—particularly
one class of things: the things that create or
abolish personal partialities or prejudices in the
old man’s mind. The old man liked both of
you. Tom conceived a hatred for you. That
was enough; it turned the old man around at once.
The oldest and strongest friendship must go to the
ground when one of these late-adopted darlings throws
a brick at it.”
“It’s a curious philosophy,” said
Luigi.
