VII
MY FIRST TUTOR—THE REIGN OF TERROR
Late in the October vacation the tranquil routine of our household was stirred by news of import to us children. We were to have a tutor of our own, and a school-room under our roof in true Old Virginia style—a fashion transplanted from the mother-country, eight generations before.
Our father “did not believe in boarding-schools,” holding that parents shirked a sacred duty in putting the moral and mental training of their offspring into the hands of hirelings, and sending them away from home at the formative age, just when girls and boys are most in need of the mother’s love and watchful care of their health and principles. Yet he fully appreciated the deficiencies of the small private schools we had attended, and would not hearken for a moment to the suggestion that we should be entered as day-scholars in the “Old-Field School,” which prefigured the Co-educational Institute of to-day. “Nice” girls and well-born boys attended a school of this kind, and lads were prepared for college there. The master was himself a college graduate. And the school was within easy distance of Scottville.
“Too much of an omnium gatherum to suit my taste!” I had overheard my father say to a friend who urged the advantages of this place, adding that B. L. was “a good teacher and fair classical scholar.” “He may be proficient in the classics, but he spells the name of one dead language, ‘Latten.’ I saw it in his own handwriting. I doubt not that he can parse in that tongue. I believe him capable of talking of the ‘three R’s.’ My children may never become accomplished, but they shall be able to write and speak—and spell—their mother-tongue correctly!”
Besides Mea and myself there were to be in the home-class ten other pupils, the daughters of personal friends of like mind with the independent thinker, and my brother Herbert, lately inducted into the integuments distinctive of his sex, was to have his trial taste of schooling. Our mother had taught us all to read and to write before committing our scholastic education to other hands. I fancy we may attribute to her training in the rudiments of learning the gratifying circumstance that one and all of her children have spelled—as did both parents—with absolute correctness.
The big dining-room in the left wing of the rambling house to which we had removed from Bellevue when the owner desired to take possession of it, was to be divided by a partition into school-room and hall; a room opening from the former would be the tutor’s chamber, and an apartment in another wing was to be the dining-room. Among other charming changes in house and family, Dorinda Moody, a ward of my father’s of whom I was particularly fond, was to live with us and attend “our school.”
I trod upon air all day long, and dismissed the fairy and wonder tales, with which I was wont to dream myself to sleep nightly, for visions of the real and present. “Our Tutor”—a title I rolled as a sweet morsel under my restless tongue—was a divinity student from Union Theological Seminary, in Prince Edward County. The widow of the founder of this school of the prophets, and the former pastor of my parents, lived in the immediate neighborhood of the seminary, and was the intermediary in the transaction. Through her my father was put into communication with the faculty—scholars and gentlemen all of them!!—who agreed in recommending the student whom I have dubbed “Mr. Tayloe” in my Old-Field School-Girl. (The significance of the twin exclamation-points will be manifest in the next few pages.)
The sun had shivered out of sight below the horizon on a raw November day when I returned home after a tramp over soaked and sere fields, attended by my young maid and her elder sister—“bright” mulattoes—and was met in the end-porch by their mother, my mother’s personal attendant and the supervisor of nursery-tenants. She was the prettiest mulatto I have ever seen, owing her regular features and long hair, as she was proud of telling, to an Indian ancestor. He had entailed upon her the additional bequest of a peppery temper, and it was on deck now. She was full of bustle and tartly consequential.
“Lordy, Miss Virginny! whar have you been traipsin’ so late with jus’ these chillun to look after you? It’s pretty nigh plum dark, an’ you, a young lady, cavortin’ roun’ the country like a tom-boy!”
She hauled me into the house while she talked, and pulled off my shawl and hood, scolding vehemently at the sight of my muddy shoes, and promising Molly and Paulina a whipping apiece for not bringing me back sooner.