CHAPTER XVI.
A Pair of Philanthropists.
I need not describe the many struggles of feeling which Edgar went through on that memorable Sunday, before he finally made up his mind to accept Mr. Tottenham’s proposal, and do the only thing which remained possible for him, his only alternative between work of some sort and idleness—between spending his last little remnant of money and beginning to earn some more—a thing which he had never yet done in his life. It was very strange to the young man, after so long an interval of a very different life, to return vicariously, as it were, not in his own right, to the habits and surroundings of luxury. He felt a whimsical inclination at first to explain to everybody he encountered that he was, so to speak, an impostor, having no right to all the good things about him, but being only Mr. Tottenham’s upper servant, existing in the atmosphere of the drawing-room only on sufferance and by courtesy. People in such circumstances are generally, I believe, very differently affected, or so at least one reads in story. They are generally pictured as standing perpetually on the defensive, looking out for offence, anticipating injury, and in a sore state of compulsory humility or rather humiliation. I do not know whether Edgar’s humorous character could ever have been driven by ill-usage to feel in this way, but as he had no ill-usage to put up with, but much the reverse, he took a totally different view. After the first conflict with himself was over, which we have already indicated, he came to consider his tutorship a good joke, as indeed, I am sorry to say, everybody else did—even Phil, who was in high glee over his new instructor.
“I don’t know what I am to teach him,” Edgar had said to the boy’s parents when he came down to the conservatory on the memorable Sunday I have already described, and joined the anxious pair.
“Teach him whatever you know,” Lady Mary had answered; but Edgar’s half mirthful, half dismayed sense of unfitness for the post they thrust upon him was not much altered by this impulsive speech.
“What do I know?” he said to himself next morning when, coming down early before any one else, he found himself alone in the library, with all the materials for instruction round him. Edgar had not himself been educated in England, and he did not know whether such knowledge as he possessed might not suffer from being transmitted in an unusual way without the orthodox form. “My Latin and Greek may be good enough, though I doubt it,” he said, when Mr. Tottenham joined him, “but how if they are found to be quite out of the Eton shape, and therefore no good to Phil?”
“Never mind the Eton shape, or any other shape,” said Mr. Tottenham, “you heard what Mary said, and her opinion may be relied upon. Teach him what you know. Why, he is only twelve, he has time enough for mere shape, I hope.”
And thus Edgar was again silenced. He was, however, a tolerably good scholar, and as it happened, in pure idleness had lately betaken himself again to those classical studies which so many men lay aside with their youth. And in the library at Tottenham’s there was a crowd of books bearing upon all possible theories of education, which Edgar, with a private smile at himself, carried to his room with him in detachments, and pored over with great impartiality, reading the most opposite systems one after another. When he told Lady Mary about his studies, she afforded immediate advice and information. She knew a great deal more about them than he did. She had tried various systems, each antagonistic to the other, in her own pet schools in the village, and she was far from having made up her mind on the subject.
“I confess to you frankly, Mr. Earnshaw,” said Lady Mary, “sometimes I think we have nothing in the world to trust to but education, which is the rational view; and sometimes I feel that I put no faith in it at all.”
“That is something like my own opinion,” said Earnshaw, “though I have permitted you to do yourselves the injustice of appointing me tutor to Phil.”
“Education, like everything else, depends so much on one’s theory of life,” said Lady Mary, “Mr. Tottenham and I think differently on the subject, which is a great pity, though I don’t see that it does us much harm. My husband is content to take things as they are, which is by much the more comfortable way; but that too is a matter of temperament. Phil will be sure to get on if you will bring him into real correspondence with your own mind. Molly gives me a great deal more trouble; a man can get himself educated one way or another, a woman can’t.”