I remember the day of the funeral quite distinctly. My father's two brothers came, though he had had scarcely any intercourse with them for years. They were most respectable men, quite free from my father's errors; but they had not half his life and energy. Such was the strength of his constitution that so recently as the time of our journey in Wales his health was not visibly impaired, and at the time of his death he had that rare possession for a man of thirty-nine, a complete set of perfectly sound teeth.
His coffin was carried on the shoulders of six men from Ivy Cottage to the graveyard near the chapel. Shaw at that time had only a chapel, a hideous building on a bleak piece of rising ground, surrounded by many graves. It never looked more dreary than on that wretched January day in 1844, when we stood round as the sexton threw earth on my father's coffin. He was laid in the same tomb with the poor young wife who had loved him truly, and to whom he had been a tender and devoted husband whilst their short union lasted.
I am the only survivor of that day's ceremony. The little procession has all followed my father into the darkness, descending one by one into graves separated by great spaces of land and sea. And when this is printed I, too, shall be asleep in mine.
CHAPTER VII.
1845.
Dislike to Shaw in consequence of the dreadful life I led there with my father.—My guardian.—Her plan for my education.—Doncaster School.—Mr. Cape and his usher.—The usher's intolerance of Dissenters. —My feeling for architecture and music.—The drawing-master.—My guardian insists on my learning French.—Our French master, Sig. Testa.—A painful incident.—I begin to learn the violin.—Dancing.—My aversion to cricket.—Early readings.—Love of Scott.—My first library.—Classical studies.
One consequence of the horrible life I had led at Ivy Cottage was a permanent dislike to the place and the neighborhood, the evil effects of which will be seen in the sequel. For the present it is enough to say that I never went there again quite willingly. After my father's death my grandmother lived in the village, and I was taken to see her every year until her death; but though she was a very kind old lady, it was a trial to me to visit her. I used to lie awake in her house at nights, realizing those horrible nights I had passed at Ivy Cottage, with such extreme intensity that it seemed as if my father might enter the room at any time. This was not a superstitious dread of apparitions; but the association of ideas brought back the past with a clearness that was extremely painful. Even now, at a distance of more than forty years, I avoid whatever reminds me of that time, and am not sorry that this narrative now leads to something else.
My father had no great affection for his brothers, who on their part could not have much esteem for him, so there was a mutual coolness which prevented him from appointing either of them to be my guardian. Probably they felt this as a slight, for, although always kind to me, they held completely aloof from anything like paternal interference with my education. My father had named his eldest sister, Mary, as my sole guardian, with, two lawyers as co-executors with her. The reader will probably think it was a mistake to appoint an old maid to be guardian to a boy; but my aunt was a woman of excellent sense, and certainly not disposed to bring me up effeminately; indeed, her willingness to encourage me in everything manly was such that she would always inflict upon herself considerable anxiety about my safety rather than prevent me from taking my full share of the more or less perilous exercises of youth. As to my education and profession her scheme was very simple and clear, and would have been perfectly rational if I had been all that she wished me to be. According to her plan I was to go to good schools first, and then be prepared for Oxford by tutors, and become a clergyman. There was some thought at one time of sending me to one of the great public schools; but this was abandoned, and I was first sent to Burnley School again, and then, after the summer holidays of 1845, to Doncaster, where I was a boarder in the house of the head-master.
A word from me in favor of one of the public schools would probably have decided my guardian to send me there; but there was a vis inertiae in my total want of social and scholastic ambition. I never in my life felt the faintest desire to rise in the world either by making the acquaintance of people of rank (which is the main reason why boys of middling station are sent to aristocratic schools), or by getting letters put after my name as a reward for learning what had no intrinsic charm for me. In the worldly sense I never had any ambition whatever.
It seemed rather hard, after living at Burnley with my kind guardian, to be sent to Doncaster School and separated from her for five months at a time, but she thought the separation necessary, as there was nothing in the world she dreaded more than that her great affection might spoil me. Always gentle in her ways, always kind and considerate, that admirable woman had still a remarkable firmness of character, and would act, on due occasion, in direct opposition both to her own feelings and to mine, if she believed that duty required it.