My education had been superintended exclusively by my mother. Under her intelligent control I had mastered the common rudiments of learning, and had acquired, from my intellectual association with her, a taste for poetry and light philosophy. I read every thing with an earnestness which knew no satiety. In my fifteenth year, my mind was a rude mass of incongruous erudition; possessing learning without accuracy, and information without wisdom. My character derived a rudeness from the unbroken solitude of my studies, taking, like the insect of the forest, the hue of the leaf on which it lived and banqueted. The "Book of Martyrs," awakened into melancholy the sympathies of my heart, and lashed into bitterness the fierce intolerance of my passions. I was religious only in the vengeance of persecution! How often have I felt, beneath the prayers of my mother, the gentleness of a hallowed contrition stealing over my proud heart. Alas! that this contagious sympathy should leave no impression; for I would return to my favorite feast of blood, and arise from its enjoyment a tyrant and a bigot.
The day on which I was sent to school, is deeply marked on my memory. The preparations for my departure, the advice of my mother, the remonstrances of my nurse, and the tears of Scipio, were the gloomy heralds of my utter desolation of heart. Our slaves, as I passed them in the chariot, left their work and ran to bless me. Many of them bade me farewell with struggling emotion, while several of the old ones told me to be of stout heart, and never forget that I was a Granby. I sobbed aloud in the fulness of my heart, when I gave them my hand. The sternness of manhood has never blushed for those tears.
My teacher was a native of Scotland, and officiated as the minister to the parish in which he resided. Like most scholars, he could turn to the example of Socrates for resignation under the rule of the shrillest of all Xantippes. It was the principal weapon he used in his marital patience, but with that success which always made him doubt his own victory. He was a curious compound of pedantry, simplicity, and erudition. His existence was a verb, and his whole life was a dull routine of plain theology and pompous verbosity. He was under many ties of gratitude to our family, and my arrival was greeted by him with demonstrations of pleasure and affection.
I was now almost alone in the world. The silken luxury, the aristocratic pride, and the unsubdued temper in which I had been bred, utterly disqualified me for the democracy in which I was placed. In the solitude of my pride I turned to the resources of study, and by a severity of character I chilled into cold contempt the incipient friendship of many a noble and ingenuous heart. I made but one friend, and to him I clung with affectionate enthusiasm. To Arthur Ludwell I disclosed the secret feelings and desires of my nature. He could reprove me without inflicting pain, and excite me to labor without flattery. His heart was the chosen citadel of every virtue under heaven, and he was wont to bear the whirlwind of my passions without a murmur of resentment. On one occasion I had treated him with excessive rudeness. He bore my pride with his accustomed fortitude; and that night, after I had retired to bed, he entered my room, and thinking me asleep, he bent over my face and wept like a child. Could I ask a keener reproach? Could I demand a better proof of the purity and delicacy of his affection?
In this school there was a student named Pilton, the only son of one who had been many years before my birth, an overseer on the plantation of my father, and who had amassed, by economy and industry, a large fortune. He was a rude, vulgar, and unfeeling boy, with a harsh countenance and coarsely built frame. His hair was a dingy red, and his frame uncouth and repulsive; yet he possessed a genius which could grasp every difficulty, and an intellect which could master the asperities of every science. I hated him with a vindictive and uncompromising energy. I did not envy him, for I could not so far disgrace the dignity of that passion (the cousin-german of school-boy emulation) as to extend its malevolence to such a being. My feelings towards him, were disgust and unalterable contempt. He was frank without liberality, and candid without honor. Deceit flung its patched mantle over the chronic vice of his character, and duplicity ruled a heart in which nature had thrown neither fire, delicacy, nor elevation. From the influence of his mind he had attached to himself a considerable party of the timid, irresolute, and indolent; yet he shrunk from the merciless venom of my scorn. Though a coward he could display the courage of necessity, and would sometimes retort my sarcasms with severity and firmness. Shortly before our separation, we had quarrelled with implacable fierceness. I called him a coward, and an ill-bred vagrant. He replied to my attack in these words, which ever in after-life, writhed around my memory in a cold and scorpion-like embrace:
"Mr. Granby! I know the history of your proud family. You are seventeen years of age. Do you not dread the mystery of that number, which made your grandfather a premature dotard? Beware! I am revenged. You will live a lunatic and die a driveller."
I was silent under this fearful curse. The narrative of my grandfather's precocious youth and imbecile adolescence, his lofty chivalry and stubborn pride, which I had often drank from the garrulity of my nurse, was borne before me in a full and freshening tide. I controlled my struggling passions, and quitted my adversary humbled more by the agony of my own feelings, than excited by the bitterness of his retort. This scene constituted an era in the history of my hate. Revenge hourly lashed itself into frenzy; and amid the bustle of the day and the solitude of the night, I never ceased from the pursuit of an opportunity to gratify the deeply seated passion of my heart. I never forgave him! I banqueted on that merciless revenge, which dripping in a steady and uniform course through the recesses of my heart, formed a cold and impenetrable stalactite of withering malignity. It was a treasured, honored, and hoarded hate which planted itself firmly in my bosom, and which eagerly longed for its time of fruition. Even now, when time has worn down the fierceness of my life and softened into resignation the frown of destiny, this passion blooms on, with more freshness and constancy than the mistletoe which scatters its wild luxuriance around the blasted and ruined oak.
The period now approached when I was to quit school. I had never returned home, but the pains of absence had been alleviated by the monthly visits of Scipio, always laden with letters of reproof from my mother, love from Lucy, ambition from my brother, and scraps of Horace and quaint gallantries from my uncle. I had learned rapidly and accurately, mastering the spirit and elegance of the Latin language, and acquiring that measure of Greek literature which enables the Virginian scholar to play the pedant on it for one year, and authorises him to forget it in two.
Arthur Ludwell had promised to accompany me home; and in a short time the Chalgrave chariot, with its massy doors, conceited driver, tangled harness and gazing postilion, brought the glad tidings of my return to the home of my fathers. I quitted school without regret, for there I had spent some of the most miserable hours of my existence. With how much delusive philosophy do we dwell on the vapid pleasures of our schoolboy days! and when tired of the poor farce of cheating ourselves into a little happiness, we labor to coax ourselves into tenderness by invoking the remembrance of some shadowy and negative dream. Our cares, vexations and disappointments, as men, make us envy the apparent tranquillity of the boy, while we forget that youth, though a smaller circumference of mortality, has yet the same centre of passion, hope and disappointment. In the spring-time of life we are full of elastic anticipation; and over the brilliant horizon which it creates, each cloud drifts rapidly by and none sojourns to darken the brilliant outline. We fondly believe that all beyond is a candid and generous world, eager to applaud our genius or reciprocate our sympathies. How soon is this gossamer fabric crushed beneath the rugged grasp of reality, and how truly do we find that anticipation is folly, and retrospection an utter foolishness of heart.
On a laughing morning in spring I quitted school for home, with all my buoyant feelings of filial and fraternal love chastised into wretchedness by the curse of Pilton.