The Preceptor.
Roland removed to France, and fixed his abode in the environs of Paris. He placed Blanche at a convent in the immediate neighborhood, going to see her daily, and gave himself up to the education of his son. The boy was apt to learn; but to unlearn was here the arduous task,—and for that task it would have needed either the passionless experience, the exquisite forbearance, of a practised teacher, or the love and confidence and yielding heart of a believing pupil. Roland felt that he was not the man to be the teacher, and that his son’s heart remained obstinately closed to him. He looked round, and found at the other side of Paris what seemed a suitable preceptor,—a young Frenchman of some distinction in letters, more especially in science, with all a Frenchman’s eloquence of talk, full of high-sounding sentiments that pleased the romantic enthusiasm of the Captain; so Roland, with sanguine hopes, confided his son to this man’s care. The boy’s natural quickness mastered readily all that pleased his taste; he learned to speak and write French with rare felicity and precision. His tenacious memory, and those flexile organs in which the talent for languages is placed, served, with the help of an English master, to revive his earlier knowledge of his father’s tongue and to enable him to speak it with fluent correctness,—though there was always in his accent something which had struck me as strange; but not suspecting it to be foreign, I had thought it a theatrical affectation. He did not go far into science,—little further, perhaps, than a smattering of French mathematics; but he acquired a remarkable facility and promptitude in calculation. He devoured eagerly the light reading thrown in his way, and picked up thence that kind of knowledge which novels and plays afford, for good or evil, according as the novel or the play elevates the understanding and ennobles the passions, or merely corrupts the fancy and lowers the standard of human nature. But of all that Roland desired him to be taught, the son remained as ignorant as before. Among the other misfortunes of this ominous marriage, Roland’s wife had possessed all the superstitions of a Roman Catholic Spaniard; and with these the boy had unconsciously intermingled doctrines far more dreary, imbibed from the dark paganism of the Gitanos.
Roland had sought a Protestant for his son’s tutor. The preceptor was nominally a Protestant,—a biting derider of all superstitions, indeed! He was such a Protestant as some defender of Voltaire’s religion says the Great Wit would have been had he lived in a Protestant country. The Frenchman laughed the boy out of his superstitions, to leave behind them the sneering scepticism of the Encyclopedie, without those redeeming ethics on which all sects of philosophy are agreed, but which, unhappily, it requires a philosopher to comprehend.
This preceptor was doubtless not aware of the mischief he was doing; and for the rest, he taught his pupil after his own system,—a mild and plausible one, very much like the system we at home are recommended to adopt: “Teach the understanding,—all else will follow;” “Learn to read something, and it will all come right;” “Follow the bias of the pupil’s mind,—thus you develop genius, not thwart it.” Mind, understanding, genius,—fine things! But to educate the whole man you must educate something more than these. Not for want of mind, understanding, genius, have Borgias and Neros left their names as monuments of horror to mankind. Where, in all this teaching, was one lesson to warm the heart and guide the soul?
Oh, mother mine, that the boy had stood by thy knee and heard from thy lips why life was given us, in what life shall end, and how heaven stands open to us night and day! Oh, father mine, that thou hadst been his preceptor, not in book-learning, but the heart’s simple wisdom! Oh that he had learned from thee, in parables closed with practice, the happiness of self-sacrifice, and how “good deeds should repair the bad”!
It was the misfortune of this boy, with his daring and his beauty, that there was in his exterior and his manner that which attracted indulgent interest and a sort of compassionate admiration. The Frenchman liked him, believed his story, thought him ill-treated by that hard-visaged English soldier. All English people were so disagreeable, particularly English soldiers; and the Captain once mortally offended the Frenchman by calling Vilainton un grand homme, and denying, with brutal indignation, that the English had poisoned Napoleon! So, instead of teaching the son to love and revere his father, the Frenchman shrugged his shoulders when the boy broke into some unfilial complaint, and at most said, “Mais, cher enfant, ton pere est Anglais,—c’est tout dire.” Meanwhile, as the child sprang rapidly into precocious youth, he was permitted a liberty in his hours of leisure of which he availed himself with all the zest of his earlier habits and adventurous temper. He formed acquaintances among the loose young haunters of cafes and spendthrifts of that capital,—the wits! He became an excellent swordsman and pistol-shot, adroit in all games in which skill helps fortune. He learned betimes to furnish himself with money, by the cards and the billiard-balls.
But delighted with the easy home he had obtained, he took care to school his features and smooth his manner in his father’s visits, to make the most of what he had learned of less ignoble knowledge, and, with his characteristic imitativeness, to cite the finest sentiments he had found in his plays; and novels. What father is not credulous? Roland believed, and wept tears of joy. And now he thought the time was come to take back the boy,—to return with a worthy heir to the old Tower. He thanked and blessed the tutor; he took the son. But under pretence that he had yet some things to master, whether in book knowledge or manly accomplishments, the youth begged his father at all events not yet to return to England,—to let him attend his tutor daily for some months. Roland consented, moved from his old quarters, and took a lodging for both in the same suburb as that in which the teacher resided. But soon, when they were under one roof, the boy’s habitual tastes, and his repugnance to all paternal authority, were betrayed. To do my unhappy cousin justice (such as that justice is), though he had the cunning for a short disguise, he had not the hypocrisy to maintain systematic deceit. He could play a part for a while, from an exulting joy in his own address; but he could not wear a mask with the patience of cold-blooded dissimulation. Why enter into painful details, so easily divined by the intelligent reader? The faults of the son were precisely those to which Roland would be least indulgent. To the ordinary scrapes of high-spirited boyhood no father, I am sure, would have been more lenient; but to anything that seemed low, petty,—that grated on him as a gentleman and soldier,—there, not for worlds would I have braved the darkness of his frown, and the woe that spoke like scorn in his voice. And when, after all warning and prohibition were in vain, Roland found his son in the middle of the night in a resort of gamblers and sharpers, carrying all before him with his cue, in the full flush of triumph, and a great heap of five-franc pieces before him, you may conceive with what wrath the proud, hasty, passionate man drove out, cane in hand, the obscene associates, flinging after them the son’s ill-gotten gains; and with what resentful humiliation the son was compelled to follow the father home. Then Roland took the boy to England, but not to the old Tower; that hearth of his ancestors was still too sacred for the footsteps of the vagrant heir!
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