“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.”