THE AWAKENING OF MR. WYCHERLY
Ay; you would gaze on a wind-shaken tree
By the hour, nor count time lost.
PARACELSUS.
Montagu's education was taken in hand at once, and a very curious course of instruction it proved to be. Mr. Wycherly taught him to read, and to read Latin at the same time that he learned to read English. He also, which Montagu very much preferred, told him endless stories, historical and mythological, and in illustration thereof gave him for himself his own two precious oblong folios of Flaxman's "Compositions," on the very first birthday the little boy spent with Miss Esperance. These books were for Montagu the only nursery picture books he knew, and Ulysses and Hector were as real and familiar to him as "Jack the Giant Killer" or "Bluebeard" to the ordinary child. He treasured them and treated them always with the greatest care and tenderness. They were the one possession he declined to share with Edmund, who was careless, and tore things, to whom wide margins and spacious pages made no appeal. He pored over the pictures for hours at a time, arriving at a very clear conception of the beauty of pure line.
When the children first came Mr. Wycherly might have been seen, during all such time as those energetic young people left to him, immersed in the study of a serviceable sheepskin volume, the Wrexham edition of Roger Ascham's "Schoolmaster," making notes on the margins of the same, and marking such passages as seemed to him especially applicable to the matter under consideration.
Years after the owner's death Montagu found and read the wise old book, and realised how humbly and patiently Mr. Wycherly had set himself to follow out whatever he considered most valuable in the teaching of one whose mental attitude toward youth was certainly centuries in advance of his age. On the flyleaf he had written in his small, delicate handwriting: "In all my life, if I have done but little harm, I have done no good or useful thing. God help me that I may do this thing well," and Montagu, with an almost rapturous remembrance of his teaching, could testify that the prayer had not been made in vain.
It was no doubt a good thing for Montagu that his tutor had such a common-sense standard of teaching always before him, for Mr. Wycherly's own inclination was apt to draw him away from the grind of grammar to discourse with enthusiasm on the beauties and solemnities of the authors he so loved. Montagu was quick and receptive, with considerable power of concentration, and because he loved his teacher, he speedily grew to love the subjects that he taught, so that he might truly have said with Lady Jane Grey: "My book hath been so much my pleasure, and bringeth daily to me more pleasure and more, that in respect of it all other pleasures, in very deed, be but trifles and troubles unto me."
Mr. Wycherly's sitting-room was much the largest in the little house. It was on the first floor and of a cheerful aspect, having two windows facing east and south, respectively. Here, for Montagu's own special use, were placed a little square oak table with stout, stumpy legs, of a solid steadiness that even the most fidgety of little boys could not shake, and a three-legged stool that had once served Elsa as a milking-stool. These were set sideways in the window looking on to the kitchen garden, as being a view less likely to distract the learner than that of the other, from which one beheld the front garden with the green railings, and the village street with all its possible excitements. The little table possessed a drawer with bright handles, and in this drawer Montagu kept his own exercise books, his pen with the pebble handle that Elsa had given him, his box of pencils, and every scrap of paper suitable for drawing on, that he could collect—generally half sheets torn off letters by the careful hand of Miss Esperance. The table itself, in imitation of Mr. Wycherly's, was piled with books, but they were in orderly piles, and never set open, one on the top of the other, as was the older scholar's habit.
There was another reason why Mr. Wycherly chose that window for Montagu: the morning sun shone straight through it, and the scholar, always something of a stranger in this chill north, craved all the sunshine he could get for the child. He liked to lean back in his own deep-seated revolving chair, set by the big knee-hole table in the centre of the room, and watch the little stooping figure in the patch of sunshine in the window, laboriously tracing the Greek characters so neatly and carefully. A large-eyed thin-faced boy was Montagu, somewhat sallow, with the round shoulders got during those early studies which he never lost in later life.
It was not only during lessons that Montagu sat at his little table: long hours did he spend there on wet days while the wind howled round the little house like a hungry wolf, and the rain battered on the panes like shot—making drawings for himself of the battle in the "great harbour of Syracuse," which he had read about in Thomas Hobbes's translation. For Mr. Wycherly's shelves abounded in translations as well as in the "original texts," and although, like most translators, he disagreed with all accepted renderings, yet he encouraged Montagu's use of them, perhaps that he, himself, might the better, by-and-by, point out where he considered that they failed.
These drawings were afterwards bestowed upon Edmund, who would listen to Montagu's classic stories when they dealt with battles or ships, but who otherwise infinitely preferred Elsa's more homely legends regarding the doings of "Cockie Lockie and Henny Penny."