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TOM HELMER.
When Tom Helmer's father died, his mother, who had never been
able to manage him, sent him to school to get rid of him,
lamented his absence till he returned, then writhed and fretted
under his presence until again he went. Never thereafter did
those two, mother and son, meet, whether from a separation of
months or of hours, without at once tumbling into an obstinate
difference. When the youth was at home, their sparring, to call
it by a mild name, went on from morning to night, and sometimes
almost from night to morning. Primarily, of course, the fault lay
with the mother; and things would have gone far worse, had not
the youth, along with the self-will of his mother, inherited his
father's good nature. At school he was a great favorite, and
mostly had his own way, both with boys and masters, for, although
a fool, he was a pleasant fool, clever, fond of popularity, and
complaisant with everybody--except always his mother, the merest
word from whom would at once rouse all the rebel in his blood. In
person he was tall and loosely knit, with large joints and
extremities. His face was handsome and vivacious, expressing far
more than was in him to express, and giving ground for
expectation such as he had never met. He was by no means an ill-
intentioned fellow, preferred doing well and acting fairly, and
neither at school nor at college had got into any serious scrape.
But he had never found it imperative to reach out after his own
ideal of duty. He had never been worthy the name of student, or
cared much for anything beyond the amusements the universities
provide so liberally, except dabbling in literature. Perhaps his
only vice was self-satisfaction--which few will admit to be a
vice; remonstrance never reached him; to himself he was ever in
the right, judging himself only by his sentiments and vague
intents, never by his actions; that these had little
correspondence never struck him; it had never even struck him
that they ought to correspond. In his own eyes he did well
enough, and a good deal better. Gifted not only with fluency of
speech, that crowning glory and ruin of a fool, but with
plausibility of tone and demeanor, a confidence that imposed both
on himself and on others, and a certain dropsical
impressionableness of surface which made him seem and believe
himself sympathetic, nobody could well help liking him, and it
took some time to make one accept the disappointment he caused.
He was now in his twenty-first year, at home, pretending that
nothing should make him go back to Oxford, and enjoying more than
ever the sport of plaguing his mother. A soul-doctor might have
prescribed for him a course of small-pox, to be followed by
intermittent fever, with nobody to wait upon him but Mrs. Gamp:
after that, his mother might have had a possible chance with him,
and he with his mother. But, unhappily, he had the best of
health--supreme blessing in the eyes of the fool whom it enables
to be a worse fool still; and was altogether the true son of his
mother, who consoled herself for her absolute failure in his
moral education with the reflection that she had reared him sound
in wind and limb. Plaguing his mother, amusing himself as best he
could, riding about the country on a good mare, of which he was
proud, he was living in utter idleness, affording occasion for
much wonder that he had never yet disgraced himself. He talked to
everybody who would talk to him, and made acquaintance with
anybody on the spur of the moment's whim. He would sit on a log
with a gypsy, and bamboozle him with lies made for the purpose,
then thrash him for not believing them. He called here and called
there, made himself specially agreeable everywhere, went to every
ball and evening party to which he could get admittance in the
neighborhood, and flirted with any girl who would let him. He
meant no harm, neither had done much, and was imagined by most
incapable of doing any. The strange thing to some was that he
staid on in the country, and did not go to London and run up
bills for his mother to pay; but the mare accounted for a good
deal; and the fact that almost immediately on his late return he
had seen Letty and fallen in love with her at first sight,
accounted for a good deal more. Not since then, however, had he
yet been able to meet her so as only to speak to her; for
Thornwick was one of the few houses of the middle class in the
neighborhood where he was not encouraged to show himself. He was
constantly, therefore, on the watch for a chance of seeing her,
and every Sunday went to church in that same hope and no other.
But Letty knew nothing of the favor in which she stood with him;
for, although Tom had, as we have heard, confessed to her friend
Mary Marston his admiration of her, Mary had far too much good
sense to make herself his ally in the matter.
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