Receiving no answer beyond a variation of the grunt, the tutor staring all the time into the heart of the fire, the dear man went on to tell of books that had been read aloud in the family, as a supplementary course to what we had learned in school, referring to me now and then when he did nor recall title or subject. I fancy, now, that he did this to rid us both of the embarrassment of the first interview, and to draw out the taciturn stranger who was to guide my mind in future. Loyal as was my worshipful admiration of my father, I could not but feel, although I could not have formulated the thought, that the trend of talk was not tactful.
Nevertheless, I glowed inwardly with indignation that the third person present never once took his eyes from the roaring fire, and that his face, round, fair, and almost boyish in contour, wore a slight smile, rather supercilious than amused, his brows knitting above the smile in a fashion I was to know more of in the next ten months.
I have drawn Mr. Tayloe’s portrait at full length in An Old-Field School-Girl, and I need not waste time and nervous tissue in repetition of the unlovely picture. He was the Evil Genius of my childhood, and the term of his tutelage may be called the dark underside of an otherwise happy school-life. Looking back from the unclouded heights of mature age, I see that my childish valuation of him was correct. He was, in his association with all without the walls of the school-room—always excepting the servants, who took his measure amazingly soon—a gentleman in bearing and speech. He was, I have heard, well-born. He had gained rank as a student in the university of which he was a graduate.
At heart and in grain he was a coarse, cruel tyrant, beloved by none of his pupils, hated by my brother Herbert and myself with an intensity hardly conceivable in children of our tender years. I owe him one evil debt I can never forget. Up to now I had had my little gusts of temper and fleeting grudges against those who angered me. Save for the episode of the doll-whipping recorded in an earlier chapter, I had never cherished—if I had felt—an emotion of vindictiveness or a desire for revenge. This man—this embryo minister of the gospel of love and peace—aroused in me passions that had slumbered unsuspected by all—most of all, by myself.
From the beginning he disliked me. Perhaps because he chose to assume, from the manner of my introduction to him, that I was a spoiled, conceited child who ought to be “taken down.” Perhaps because, while I flushed up hotly under rebuke and sarcasms that entered lavishly into the process of “taking down,” I never broke down abjectly under these, after the manner of other pupils. Our father had the true masculine dislike for womanish tears. He had drilled us from babyhood to restrain the impulse to cry. Many a time I was sent from the table or room when my eyes filled, with the stern injunction, “Go to your room and stay there until you can control yourself!” I thought it harsh treatment, then. I have thanked and blessed him for the discipline a thousand times since. Our tutor, I verily believed then, and I do not doubt now, gloated in the sight of the sufferings wrought by his brutality. I can give it no milder name. I have seen him smile—a tigerish gleam—when he had scolded the ten outsiders—the “externes,” as the French call them—into convulsive weeping. Mea and I felt the lash of his tongue quite as keenly as the rest, but our home-drill stood us in good stead.
He rarely found fault with her. She was a comely girl, nearly fourteen, and womanly for that age, exemplary in deportment, and an excellent student. It could never be said of her that she “lacked application.” If one thing were more hateful to me than his surliness and sneers to me, it was his cubbish gallantry to my pretty sister. He pronounced her openly the most promising of his scholars, and volunteered to give her private lessons in botany. Such tokens of preference may have been the proof of a nascent attachment on his part, or but another of his honorable ways of amusing himself. It was a genuine comfort to me to see that she met his gallantries with quiet self-possession and cool indifference remarkable in a country girl who knew nothing of “society” and flirtation.
I was the black sheep of the flock, as he took pains to say twice or a dozen times a week, in the hearing of the school. To me he imparted privately the agreeable information that I “would never be anything but a disgrace to my parents; that, in spite of what my father might say to the contrary, I was stupid by nature and incorrigibly lazy.” He rang the changes upon that first unfortunate interview until I was goaded to dumb frenzy. The persecution, begun with the opening day of the term, was never abated. He would overhear from his chamber window snatches of talk between my mates and myself, as we played or sat in the garden below—merry, flippant nothings, as harmless as the twitter of the birds in the trees over our heads. When we were reassembled in the school-room he would make my part in the prattle the text of a lecture ten minutes long, holding the astonished, quivering child up to ridicule, or stinging her to the quick with invectives. When he lost his temper—which happened often—he spared nobody. He went out of his way to attack me. Lest this should read like the exaggeration of fancied slights to the self-willed, pert youngling he believed me to be, let me cull one or two sprigs of rue from the lush growth that embittered ten months of my existence:
I cut my finger to the bone one morning (I carry the scar still). My mother bound it up in haste, for the school-bell was ringing. I got into my seat just in time for the opening exercises. A chapter was read—verse by verse—in turn by the pupils, after which the prospective divine “offered” a prayer. He stood with his eyes shut and his forehead knitted into a frown. We knelt with our backs to him before our chairs around the room. It seems but natural to me, in reflecting upon that perfunctory “exercise,” that our reading “in course” should never, during Mr. Tayloe’s reign, have gone beyond the Old Testament. We read that exactly as it came—word for word. There was nothing of the New Testament in his walk or conversation.
On this day we had a chapter in Kings—First or Second—in which occurred a verse my father would have skipped quietly at our family worship. Sarah L. was the biggest girl in the class—in her sixteenth year, and quite grown up. She dexterously slipped past the bit of Bible history, taking the next verse, as if by accident.
“Go back and read your verse!” thundered the young theologue. “I will have no false modesty in my school.”