The weeks did not pass without plenty of unpleasant encounters with his cousin, while pretty well every day there was a snubbing or downright bullying from his uncle.
“But never you mind, Mr Tom,” Pringle would say; “things always come right in the end.”
One of Tom’s greatest troubles was his home life, and the evident aversion shown to him by his aunt. She had received him coldly and distantly at the first, and her manner did not become warmer as the months wore on. Possibly she had once been a sweet, amiable woman, but troubles with her husband and son had produced an acidity of temper and habit of complaining which were not pleasant for those with whom she lived. Her husband escaped, from the fact that she held him in fear, while Sam was too much idolised to receive anything but the fondest attentions.
Tom’s perceptions were keen enough, and he soon saw for himself that his uncle repented his generosity in taking him into his home; while his aunt’s feeling for him was evidently one of jealousy, as if his presence was likely to interfere with her darling’s prospects.
She resented his being there more and more; and though Tom tried hard to win her love and esteem, he found at the end of six months that he was as far from his object as ever.
“I’m only in the way there,” he often said to himself; “I wish I could live always here at the office.”
But as he thought this he looked round with a slight shiver, and thought of how dreary it would be shut up there with the law-books, tin boxes, and dusty papers, and he gave up the idea.
Often of a night it was like a temptation to him—that intense longing to be free; and he would sit with a book before him, but his mind wandering far away, following the adventures of boys of his own age who had gone away to seek their fortunes, and if they had not found all they sought, had at least achieved some kind of success.
And how grand it would be, he thought, with his cheeks flushing, to be independent, and work his own way without encountering day by day his uncle’s sour sneers and reproaches, his aunt’s cold looks, and his cousin’s tyranny.
“I could make my way, I know I could,” he thought, and the outlook grew day by day more rosy. Those were pleasant paths, he told himself, that he wanted to tread, and it never occurred to him that if he went among strangers they might be harder than his uncle.