Chapter Nineteen.
A chapter of disappointments, which Ralph hopes the reader will not share—Some comparisons which he hopes will not be found odious, and some reflections which he thinks cannot be resented.
My friends will perceive, that at the time of which I am speaking, the stage-coach contained, if not actually a bad character, I a person on the very verge of being one—that I was that graceless, yet tolerated being, a scamp, was very certain—yet my gentle demeanour, my smooth, bright countenance, and never-ceasing placid smile, would have given a very different impression of my qualities. I have been thus liberal in my confessions, in order that parents may see that their duties do not terminate where those of the schoolmaster begin; that the schoolmaster himself must be taken to task, and the watcher watched. I had been placed in one of the first boarding-schools near town; a most liberal stipend had been paid with me; I had every description of master; yet, after all this outlay of money, which is not dross—and waste of time, which is beyond price precious, what was I at leaving this academy? Let the good folks withinside of the Stickenham stage testify; by one trick or another I had contrived to make them all tolerably uncomfortable before the journey was half over.
But where am I going? Caesar and his fortunes are embarked in a stage-coach. An hour and a half had elapsed when I perceived that the horses were dragging the vehicle slowly up a steep hill. The full-leaved trees are arching for us, overhead, a verdant canopy; the air becomes more bracing and elastic: and even I feel its invigorating influence, and cease to drop slily the gravelly dirt I had collected from my shoes, down the neck and back of a very pretty girl, who sat blushing furiously on my left. Now the summit is gained and, in another moment, the coach thunders down the other side of the hill. But what a beautiful view is spread before my fascinated eyes! and then rose up in my young heart the long sleeping emotions of love, and kindred affection. Into whose arms was I to be received? whose were to be the beautiful lips that were now longing to kiss me with parental, perhaps fraternal rapture? Had I a sister? Could I doubt it at that ecstatic moment? How I would love her! The fatted calf was not only killed, but cooked, to welcome the long lost. Nor Latin, nor French, nor Greek, nor Mathematics, should embitter the passing moments. This young summer, that breathed such aromatic joy around me, had put on its best smile to welcome me to my paternal abode. “No doubt,” said I to myself—“no doubt, but that some one of the strange stories that I told of myself at Root’s, is going to be realised.”
In the midst of these rapturous anticipations, each later one becoming more wild and more glorious than the previous one that begot it, it wanting still an hour of sundown, all at once the coach stopped before a house, upon a gentle elevation—stopped with a jerk, too, as if it were going to usher in some glorious event. I looked out, and behold! in hated gold letters, upon the hated blue board, the bitterly hated word “Academy” met my agonised sight.
I burst into tears. I needed no voice to tell me that I was the person to alight. I knew my doom. Farewell to all my glorious visions! I could have hurled back into the face of the laughing sun, my hate, and called him deceiver and traitor; for had he not, with other causes conspired to smile me, five minutes ago, into a fool’s paradise?
“Master Rattlin, won’t you please to alight?” said one of those under-toned, gerund-singing voices, that my instinct told me to be an usher’s.
“No, thank’ee, sir,” said I, amidst my sobbings, “I want to go home.”
“But you are to get down here, however,” said my evil-omened inviter. “Your boxes are all off the coach, and the coachman wants to go forward.”
“So do I.”
“It’s excessively droll this—hi, hi, hi as sure as my name’s Saltseller, it is excessively droll. So you want to get forward, Master Rattlin? why come to school then, that’s the way—droll, isn’t it? Why, you’ve been riding backwards all the way, too—time to change—droll that—hi, hi!”
“It’s no change,” said I, getting out, sulkily, “from one school to another—and do you call this a school?” I continued, looking round contemptuously, for I found about twenty little boys playing upon a green knoll before the house, and over which we were compelled to walk to reach it, as the road did not come near the habitation. “Do you call this a school? Well, if you catch me being flogged here, I’m a sop, that’s all—a school! And I suppose you’re the usher—I don’t think those little boys bumped you last half-year.”
“I don’t think they did,” said Mr Saltseller, which was actually the wretch’s name, and with whom I fell desperately in hate at first sight. “Bump me!” he exclaimed soliloquising—and with that air of astonishment, as if he had heard the most monstrous impossibility spoken of imaginable. “Bump me? droll, isn’t it—excessively? Where have you been brought up, Master Rattlin?”
“Where they bar out tyrannical masters, and bump sneaking ushers,” said I. “That’s where I was brought up.”
“Then that’s what I call very bad bringing up.”
“Not so bad as being brought down here, anyhow.”
His next “excessively droll, isn’t it?” brought us to the door of the academy; but, in passing over the play-ground, I could see, at once, that I was with quite another class of beings than those who composed my late school-fellows. They were evidently more delicately nurtured; they had not the air of schoolboy daring to which I had been so much accustomed, and they called each other “Master.” Everything, too, seemed to be upon a miniature scale. The house was much smaller, yet there was an air of comfort and of health around, that at first I did not appreciate, though I could not help remarking it.
No sooner was I conducted into the passage, than I heard a voice which I thought I remembered, exclaim, “Show Master Rattlin in here, and shut the door.”
I entered; and the next moment I was in the arms of the mysterious and very beautiful lady that had called to see me the few times that I have recorded; and who, I conceived, was intimately connected with my existence. I think that I have before said that she never avowed herself, either to my nurse or to myself, as more than my godmother. She evinced a brief, but violent emotion; and then controlled her features to a very staid and matronly expression. For myself I wept most bitterly; from many mingled emotions; but, to the shame of human nature, and of my own, wounded pride was the most intolerable pang that I felt. In all my day-dreams, I had made this lady the presiding genius. I gave her, in my inmost heart, all the reverence and the filial affection of a son; but it was the implied understanding between my love and my vanity, that in joining herself to me as a mother, she was to bestow upon me a duchess at least; though I should not have thought myself over-well used had it been a princess. And here were all these glorious anticipations merged, sunk, destroyed, in the person of a boarding-school mistress of about twenty boys, myself the biggest. It was no use that I said to myself, over and over again, she is not less lovely—her voice less musical, her manner less endearing, or her apparel less rich. The startling truth was ever in my ear—she “keeps a school,” and consequently, she cannot be my mother.
She could not know what was passing in my mind; but it was evident that my grief was of that intensity that nearly approached to misery. She took me by the hand, showed me my nice little bed, the large garden, the river that ran at the bottom of it, and placed before me fruit and cakes; I would not be consoled; what business had she to be a schoolmistress? I had a thousand times rather have had Mrs Brandon for a mother again—she had never deceived me. But I was soon aware that this lady, whom I now, for the first time, heard named, as Mrs Cherfeuil, was as little disposed to grant me the honour of calling her mother, as I was to bestow it. I was introduced to her husband as the son of a female friend of hers of early life; that she had stood godmother to me, that my parentage was respectable; and, as she before had sufficient references to satisfy him from the agent, who had called a week before my arrival, the good man thought there was nothing singular in the affair.
But let us describe this good man, my new pedagogue. In all things he was the antithesis of Mr Root. The latter was large, florid, and decidedly handsome—Mr Cherfeuil was little, sallow, and more than decidedly ugly. Mr Root was worldly wise, and very ignorant; Mr Cherfeuil, a fool in the world, and very learned. The mind of Mr Root was so empty, that he found no trouble in arranging his one idea and a half; Mr Cherfeuil’s was so full that there was no room for any arrangement at all. Mr Root would have thought himself a fool if he condescended to write poetry; but he supposed he could, for he never tried. Mr Cherfeuil would have thought any man a fool that did not perceive at once that he, Cherfeuil, was born a great poet. Shall I carry, after the manner of Plutarch, the comparison any further? No; let us bring it to an abrupt conclusion, by saying, in a few words, that Mr Root was English, Mr Cherfeuil French; that the one had a large school, and the other a little one and that both were immeasurably great men in their own estimation—though not universally so in that of others.
Mr Cherfeuil was ambitious to be thought five feet high, his attitude, therefore, was always erect; and, to give himself an air of consequence, he bridled and strutted like a full-breasted pigeon, with his head thrown back, and was continually in the act of wriggling his long chin into his ample neckerchief. He could not ask you how do you do, or say in answer to that question, “I thank you, sare, very well,” without stamping prettily with his foot, as if cracking a snail, and tossing his chin into the air as if he were going to balance a ladder upon it. Then, though his features were compressed into a small, monkeyfied compass, they were themselves, individually, upon a magnificent scale. It was as if there had been crowded half a dozen gigantic specimens of human ugliness into my lady’s china closet, all of which were elbowing each other for room. The eyes would have been called large, had it not been for the vast proportions of the nose, and the nose would have been thought preposterous, had it not been for the horrible dimensions of the mouth. Yet the expression of all these anomalies, though very grotesque, was not unpleasing. You smiled with satisfaction when you saw how great the improvement was that baboonery had made toward manhood. You might call him, in a word, a queer, little, ugly-looking box of yellow mortality, that contained some amiable qualities, and a great many valuable attainments. Of good sense, or of common sense, he was never known to show, during the whole period of his life, but one instance; and that was a most important one—a complete deference, in all things, to his stately and beautiful wife. Her dominion was undivided, complete, and unremitting. How she came to marry him was one of those human riddles that will never be satisfactorily resolved. He had been a French émigré, had had a most superior education, played on several instruments without taste, understood everything connected with the classics but their beauty, and was deeply versed in mathematics, without comprehending their utility.
At this school my progress was rapid. All the care and attention that the most maternal of hearts could bestow upon me were mine; yet there was no approach to anything like familiarity on the part of Mrs Cherfeuil. There lay a large wild common before the house; there was a noble collection of deep water in the vicinity, in which I perfected my natatory studies (affected phraseology is the fashion), and my body strengthened, my mind improved, and I began to taste of real happiness.
It would be amusing work to write a biography of some of the most remarkable ushers. They seem to be the bats of the social scale. Gentlemen will not own them, and the classes beneath reject them. They are generally self-sufficient; the dependency of their situation makes them mean, and the exercise of delegated power tyrannical. If they have either spirit or talent, they lift themselves above their situation; but when they cannot do this, they are, in my estimation, the most abject of all classes—gipsies and beggars not excepted. Mr Cherfeuil was, in himself, a mine of learning; but he delivered it out from the dark cavities of his mind, encumbered with so much ore, and in such misshaped masses, that it required another person to arrange for use what he was so lavish in producing. A good usher or assistant was therefore necessary; but I do not recollect more than one, out of the thirty or forty that came and went during the three years I was at the school.
This class of people are, alas! fatally susceptible of the tender impulses. They always find the rosy cheeks of the housemaid or the en bon point of the cook irresistible. And they have themselves such delicate soft hands, so white and so ashy. On Sundays, too, their linen is generally clean! so, altogether, the maid-servants find them killing.
Mr Saltseller, who found everything droll, and who used to paint his cheeks, lost his situation just at the precise moment that the housemaid lost her character. Two losses together were not of very great moment; then we had another, and another, and another; and more characters were lost—till at last there did come a man:—
“Take him for all in all,
I ne’er shall look upon his like again.”
He was very tall, stout, of a pompous carriage, un homme magnifique. He wore a green coat, false hair, a black patch over his left eye, and was fifty, or rather, fifty-five. His face was large, round, and the least in the world bloated. This Adonis of matured ushers, after school-hours, would hang a guitar from his broad neck, by means of a pale pink riband, and walk up and down on the green before the house, thrum, thrum, thrumming, the admiration of all the little boys, and the coveted of all the old tabbies in the village. Oh, he was the beau-idéal of a vieux garçon. We recommend all school-assistants to learn the guitar and grow fat—if they can; and then, perhaps, they may prosper, like Mr Sigismund Pontifex. He contrived to elope with a maiden lady, of good property, just ten years older than himself: the sweet, innocent, indiscreet ones went off by stealth one morning before daylight, in a chaise-and-four, and returned a week after, Mr and Mrs Pontifex.
The gentleman hung up his guitar, and for ever; and every fine day he was found, pipe in mouth and tankard in hand, presiding at the bowling-green of the Black Lion, the acknowledged and revered umpire—cherished by mine host, and referred to by the players. I write this life for instruction. Gentlemen ushers, look to it—be ambitious—learn the guitar, and make your mouths water with ideas of prospective tankards of ale, and odoriferous pipes.