ving 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.
"It ain't philosophy at all--it's a fact. And there is something
pathetic and beautiful about it, too. I think there is nothing more
pathetic than to see one of these poor old childless couples taking a
menagerie of yelping little worthless dogs to their hearts; and then
adding some cursing and squawking parrots and a jackass-voiced macaw; and
next a couple of hundred screeching songbirds, and presently some fetid
guinea pigs and rabbits, and a howling colony of cats. It is a