In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim. Frances Hodgson BurnettЧитать онлайн книгу.
his family had regarded him with a sense of despair. In the first place, he was too big. His brothers were tall, lithe-limbed youths, who were graceful, dark-eyed, dark-haired, and had a general air of brilliancy. They figured well at college and in their world; they sang and danced in a manner which, combining itself with the name of De Willoughby, gave them quite an ennobled sort of distinction, a touch of patrician bravado added to their picturesqueness in the eyes of the admiring; and their little indiscretions were of a nature to be ignored or treated with gentle consideration as the natural result of their youth, spirit, and Southern blood. But at nineteen Thomas had attained a height of six feet five, with a proportionate breadth and ponderousness. His hands and feet were a disgrace to a De Willoughby, and his voice was a roar when he was influenced by anything like emotion. Displays of emotion, however, were but rare occurrences with him. He was too lazy to be roused to anger or any other violent feeling. He spent his leisure hours in lying upon sofas or chairs and getting very much in everybody’s way. He lounged through school and college without the slightest éclat attending his progress.
It became the pastime of the household to make rather a butt of him, and for the most part he bore himself under the difficulties of his position peaceably enough, though there had been times when his weighty retorts had caused some sharp wincing.
“You’re an ill-natured devil, Tom,” his brother De Courcy said to him, as he stood fingering the ornaments on the mantel after one such encounter. “You’re an ill-natured devil.”
Tom was stretched on a sofa, with his big hands under his head, and did not condescend to look around.
“I’m not such a thundering fool as you take me for, that’s all,” he answered. “I’ve got my eyes open. Keep to your side of the street, and I will keep to mine.”
It was true that he had his eyes open and had more wit and feeling than they gave him credit for. No one understood him, not even his mother, who had deplored him from the first hour of his overweighted babyhood, when she had given him over to the care of his negro nurse in despair.
In the midst of a large family occupied with all the small gaieties attendant upon popularity and social distinction in a provincial town, he lived a lonely life, and one not without its pathetic side if it had been so looked upon. But even he himself had never regarded the matter from a sentimental point of view. He endeavoured to resign himself to his fate and meet it philosophically.
“I wasn’t cut out for this sort of thing, boys,” he had said to his friends at college, where he had been rather popular. “I wasn’t cut out for it. Go ahead and leave me behind. I’m not a bad sort of fellow, but there is too much of me in one way and too little in another. What the Lord made such a man as me for after six thousand years’ experience, I haven’t found out yet. A man may as well make up his mind about himself first as last. I’ve made up mine and nobody differs from me so far as I’ve gone.”
When he left college his brothers had already chosen their vocations. Delisle County knew them as promising young lawyers, each having distinguished himself with much fiery eloquence in an occasional case. The cases had not always been gained, but the fervour and poetry of the appeals to the rather muddled and startled agriculturists who formed the juries were remembered with admiration and as being worthy of Delisleville, and were commented upon in the Delisleville Oriflamme as the “fit echoings of an eloquence long known in our midst as the birthright of those bearing one of our proudest names, an eloquence spurred to its eagle flights by the warm, chivalric blood of a noble race.”
But the “warm, chivalric blood” of the race in question seemed to move but slowly in veins of its most substantial representative. The inertness of his youngest son roused that fine old Southern gentleman and well-known legal dignitary, Judge De Willoughby, to occasional outbursts of the fiery eloquence before referred to which might well have been productive of remarkable results.
“Good God, sir!” he would trumpet forth, “good God, sir! have we led the State for generation after generation to be disgraced and degraded and dragged in the dust by one of our own stock at last? The De Willoughbys have been gentlemen, sir, distinguished at the bar, in politics, and in the highest social circles of the South; and here we have a De Willoughby whose tastes would be no credit to—to his overseer, a De Willoughby who has apparently neither the ambition nor the qualification to shine in the sphere in which he was born! Blow your damned brains out, if you have any; blow your damned brains out, and let’s have an end of the whole disgraceful business.”
This referred specially to Tom’s unwillingness to enter upon the study of medicine, which had been chosen for him.
“I should make a better farmer,” he said, bitterly, after a prolonged discussion. “I’m not the build for women’s bedrooms and children’s bedsides. De Courcy would have suited you better.”
“De Courcy is a gentleman—a gentleman, sir! He was born one and would shine in any profession a gentleman may adorn. As for you, this is the only thing left for you, and you shall try it, by G——!”
“Oh,” said Tom, “I’ll try it. I can only fail, and I’ve done that before.”
He did try it forthwith, applying himself to his studies with a persistence quite creditable. He read lying upon sofas and lounging in the piazzas, and in course of time was sent to attend lectures in Philadelphia.
Whether he could have gained his diploma or not was never decided. Those of the professors who commented on him at all, spoke of him as slow but persevering, and regarded him rather as a huge receiving machine of orderly habits. The Judge began to congratulate himself upon his determination, and his mother thought it “a good thing poor Tom was disposed of.”
But one terrible morning just before the first course of lectures was completed, he suddenly returned, walking into the Judge’s office without any previous intimation of his intention.
When he turned in his seat and confronted him, the Judge lost his breath.
“You!” he cried; “you!”
“Yes,” said Tom, “I’ve come back.” He was rather pale and nervous, but there was a dogged, resigned look in his eyes. “I’ve made up my mind,” he added, “that I cannot stand it. Turn me loose on one of your plantations to—to boss niggers. You said once I was fit for an overseer. Perhaps you weren’t wrong. Say the word and I’ll start to-morrow.”
The Judge’s aquiline countenance turned gray with fury. His fine mustache seemed to curl itself anew.
“You—you accursed scoundrel!” he gasped. “You accursed, underbred hound! Tell me what this means, or I’ll strangle you.”
“You’ll say I’m a fool,” said Tom, “and I suppose it’s true, and—and——” with a tremour in his voice, “I’ve no need to be particular about the names you call me. I ought to be used to them by this time.”
“Speak out,” thundered the Judge, “and tell me the whole disgraceful truth!”
“It won’t take long,” said Tom; “I told it when I said I’d made up my mind I couldn’t stand it. I’ve been walking the hospitals and attending the clinics for the last three months, and I’ve had a chance to see what my life would be if I went through. I’ve seen things to make a man tremble when they came back to him in the dead of night—agony and horror—women and children! Good Lord! I can’t tell you. De Courcy could, but I can’t. I’d rather be in hell than live such a life day after day. I tried to stand up against it at first. I thought I might get used to it, but I haven’t the nerve—or something was wrong. It got worse and worse, until I used to start up out of my sleep in a cold sweat, hearing screams and groans and prayers. That was the worst of all—their prayers to us to help them and not to hurt them. Four days ago a child was brought in—a child four or five years old. There was an operation to be performed, and I was the man chosen to hold it still. Its mother was sent out of the room. My God! how it screamed when it saw her go and knew it was to be left to us. They told me to hold it because I was the strongest, and—and I put my hands on it.