With his green tail coat, his stiff shirt collar, his flat thumbs stuck in the armholes of his nankeen waistcoat, his long flat feet turned inward, his reddish mutton-chop whiskers his hat on the back of his head, and his clean, fresh, blooming, virtuous, English face—the sight of him was not sympathetic when he appeared at last.
[Illustration: "GOOD OLD SLADE">[
Occasionally, in the course of his tuition, illness or domestic affairs would, to his great regret, detain him from our midst, and the beatitude we would experience when the conviction gradually dawned upon us that we were watching for him in vain was too deep for either words or deeds or outward demonstration of any sort. It was enough to sit on our stone posts and let it steal over us by degrees.
These beatitudes were few and far between. It would be infelicitous, perhaps, to compare the occasional absences of a highly respectable English tutor to an angel's visits, but so we felt them.
And then he would make up for it next afternoon, that conscientious Englishman; which was fair enough to our parents, but not to us. And then what extra severity, as interest for the beggarly loan of half an afternoon! What rappings on ink-stained knuckles with a beastly, hard, round, polished, heavy-wooded, business-like English ruler!
It was our way in those days to think that everything English was beastly—an expression our parents thought we were much too fond of using.
But perhaps we were not without some excuse for this unpardonable sentiment. For there was another English family in Passy—the Prendergasts, an older family than ours—that is, the parents (and uncles and aunts) were middle-aged, the grandmother dead, and the children grown up. We had not the honor of their acquaintance. But whether that was their misfortune and our fault (or vice versâ) I cannot tell. Let us hope the former.
They were of an opposite type to ours, and, though I say it, their type was a singularly unattractive one; perhaps it may have been the original of those caricatures of our compatriots by which French comic artists have sought to avenge Waterloo. It was stiff, haughty, contemptuous. It had prominent front teeth, a high nose, a long upper lip, a receding jaw; it had dull, cold, stupid, selfish green eyes, like a pike's, that swerved neither to right nor left, but looked steadily over peoples' heads as it stalked along in its pride of impeccable British self-righteousness.
At the sudden sight of it (especially on Sundays) all the cardinal virtues became hateful on the spot and respectability a thing to run away from. Even that smooth, close-shaven cleanliness was so Puritanically aggressive as to make one abhor the very idea of soap.
Its accent, when it spoke French (in shops), instead of being musical and sweet and sympathetic, like Madame Seraskier's, was barbarous and grotesque, with dreadful "ongs," and "angs," and "ows," and "ays"; and its manner overbearing, suspicious, and disdainful; and then we could hear its loud, insolent English asides; and though it was tall and straight and not outwardly deformed, it looked such a kill-joy skeleton at a feast, such a portentous carnival mask of solemn emptiness, such a dreary, doleful, unfunny figure of fun, that one felt Waterloo might some day be forgiven, even in Passy; but the Prendergasts, never!