“YOU are ruining the children, my dear Sir William,” said my gentle mother, one day when I had been particularly witty; “and the Abbe Montreuil declares it absolutely necessary that they should go to school.”
“To school!” said my uncle, who was caressing his right leg, as it lay over his left knee,—“to school, Madam! you are joking. What for, pray?”
“Instruction, my dear Sir William,” replied my mother.
“Ah, ah; I forgot that; true, true!” said my uncle, despondingly, and there was a pause. My mother counted her rosary; my uncle sank into a revery; my twin brother pinched my leg under the table, to which I replied by a silent kick; and my youngest fixed his large, dark, speaking eyes upon a picture of the Holy Family, which hung opposite to him.
My uncle broke the silence; he did it with a start.
“Od’s fish, Madam,”—(my uncle dressed his oaths, like himself, a little after the example of Charles II.)—“od’s fish, Madam, I have thought of a better plan than that; they shall have instruction without going to school for it.”
“And how, Sir William?”
“I will instruct them myself, Madam,” and William slapped the calf of the leg he was caressing.
My mother smiled.
“Ay, Madam, you may smile; but I and my Lord Dorset were the best scholars of the age; you shall read my play.”
“Do, Mother,” said I, “read the play. Shall I tell her some of the jests in it, Uncle?”
My mother shook her head in anticipative horror, and raised her finger reprovingly. My uncle said nothing, but winked at me; I understood the signal, and was about to begin, when the door opened, and the Abbe Montreuil entered. My uncle released his right leg, and my jest was cut off. Nobody ever inspired a more dim, religious awe than the Abbe Montreuil. The priest entered with a smile. My mother hailed the entrance of an ally.
“Father,” said she, rising, “I have just represented to my good brother the necessity of sending my sons to school; he has proposed an alternative which I will leave you to discuss with him.”
“And what is it?” said Montreuil, sliding into a chair, and patting Gerald’s head with a benignant air.
“To educate them himself,” answered my mother, with a sort of satirical gravity. My uncle moved uneasily in his seat, as if, for the first time, he saw something ridiculous in the proposal.
The smile, immediately fading from the thin lips of the priest, gave way to an expression of respectful approbation. “An admirable plan,” said he slowly, “but liable to some little exceptions, which Sir William will allow me to point out.”
My mother called to us, and we left the room with her. The next time we saw my uncle, the priest’s reasonings had prevailed. The following week we all three went to school. My father had been a Catholic, my mother was of the same creed, and consequently we were brought up in that unpopular faith. But my uncle, whose religion had been sadly undermined at court, was a terrible caviller at the holy mysteries of Catholicism; and while his friends termed him a Protestant, his enemies hinted, falsely enough, that he was a sceptic. When Montreuil first followed us to Devereux Court, many and bitter were the little jests my worthy uncle had provided for his reception; and he would shake his head with a notable archness whenever he heard our reverential description of the expected guest. But, somehow or other, no sooner had he seen the priest than all his proposed railleries deserted him. Not a single witticism came to his assistance, and the calm, smooth face of the ecclesiastic seemed to operate upon the fierce resolves of the facetious knight in the same manner as the human eye is supposed to awe into impotence the malignant intentions of the ignobler animals. Yet nothing could be blander than the demeanour of the Abbe Montreuil; nothing more worldly, in their urbanity, than his manner and address. His garb was as little clerical as possible, his conversation rather familiar than formal, and he invariably listened to every syllable the good knight uttered with a countenance and mien of the most attentive respect.
What then was the charm by which the singular man never failed to obtain an ascendency, in some measure allied with fear, over all in whose company he was thrown? This was a secret my uncle never could solve, and which only in later life I myself was able to discover. It was partly by the magic of an extraordinary and powerful mind, partly by an expression of manner, if I may use such a phrase, that seemed to sneer most, when most it affected to respect; and partly by an air like that of a man never exactly at ease; not that he was shy, or ungraceful, or even taciturn,—no! it was an indescribable embarrassment, resembling that of one playing a part, familiar to him, indeed, but somewhat distasteful. This embarrassment, however, was sufficient to be contagious, and to confuse that dignity in others, which, strangely enough, never forsook himself.
He was of low origin, but his address and appearance did not betray his birth. Pride suited his mien better than familiarity; and his countenance, rigid, thoughtful, and cold, even through smiles, in expression was strikingly commanding. In person he was slightly above the middle standard; and had not the texture of his frame been remarkably hard, wiry, and muscular, the total absence of all superfluous flesh would have given the lean gauntness of his figure an appearance of almost spectral emaciation. In reality, his age did not exceed twenty-eight years; but his high broad forehead was already so marked with line and furrow, his air was so staid and quiet, his figure so destitute of the roundness and elasticity of youth, that his appearance always impressed the beholder with the involuntary idea of a man considerably more advanced in life. Abstemious to habitual penance, and regular to mechanical exactness in his frequent and severe devotions, he was as little inwardly addicted to the pleasures and pursuits of youth, as he was externally possessed of its freshness and its bloom.
Nor was gravity with him that unmeaning veil to imbecility which Rochefoucauld has so happily called “the mystery of the body.” The variety and depth of his learning fully sustained the respect which his demeanour insensibly created. To say nothing of his lore in the dead tongues, he possessed a knowledge of the principal European languages besides his own, namely, English, Italian, German, and Spanish, not less accurate and little less fluent than that of a native; and he had not only gained the key to these various coffers of intellectual wealth, but he had also possessed himself of their treasures. He had been educated at St. Omer: and, young as he was, he had already acquired no inconsiderable reputation among his brethren of that illustrious and celebrated Order of Jesus which has produced some of the worst and some of the best men that the Christian world has ever known,—which has, in its successful zeal for knowledge, and the circulation of mental light, bequeathed a vast debt of gratitude to posterity; but which, unhappily encouraging certain scholastic doctrines, that by a mind at once subtle and vicious can be easily perverted into the sanction of the most dangerous and systematized immorality, has already drawn upon its professors an almost universal odium.
So highly established was the good name of Montreuil that when, three years prior to the time of which I now speak, he had been elected to the office he held in our family, it was scarcely deemed a less fortunate occurrence for us to gain so learned and so pious a preceptor, than it was for him to acquire a situation of such trust and confidence in the household of a Marshal of France and the especial favourite of Louis XIV.
It was pleasant enough to mark the gradual ascendency he gained over my uncle; and the timorous dislike which the good knight entertained for him, yet struggled to conceal. Perhaps that was the only time in his life in which Sir William Devereux was a hypocrite.
Enough of the priest at present; I return to his charge. To school we went: our parting with our uncle was quite pathetic; mine in especial. “Hark ye, Sir Count,” whispered he (I bore my father’s title), “hark ye, don’t mind what the old priest tells you; your real man of wit never wants the musty lessons of schools in order to make a figure in the world. Don’t cramp your genius, my boy; read over my play, and honest George Etherege’s ‘Man of Mode;’ they’ll keep your spirits alive, after dozing over those old pages which Homer (good soul!) dozed over before. God bless you, my child; write to me; no one, not even your mother, shall see your letters; and—and be sure, my fine fellow, that you don’t fag too hard. The glass of life is the best book, and one’s natural wit the only diamond that can write legibly on it.”
Such were my uncle’s parting admonitions; it must be confessed that, coupled with the dramatic gifts alluded to, they were likely to be of infinite service to the debutant for academical honours. In fact, Sir William Devereux was deeply impregnated with the notion of his time,—that ability and inspiration were the same thing, and that, unless you were thoroughly idle, you could not be thoroughly a genius. I verily believe that he thought wisdom got its gems, as Abu Zeid al Hassan* declares some Chinese philosophers thought oysters got their pearls, namely, by gaping!
* In his Commentary on the account of China by two Travellers.
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