Colonel Mountjoy had an appointment in India that kept him there
permanently. Consequently he was constrained to send his two daughters
to England when they were quite children. His wife had died of cholera
at Madras. The girls were Letice and Betty. There was a year's
difference in their ages, but they were extraordinarily alike, so much
so that they might have been supposed to be twins.
Letice was given up to the charge of Miss Mountjoy, her father's sister,
and Betty to that of Lady Lacy, her maternal aunt. Their father would
have preferred that his daughters should have been together, but there
were difficulties in the way; neither of the ladies was inclined to be
burdened with both, and if both had been placed with one the other might
have regarded and resented this as a slight.
As the children grew up their likeness in feature became more close, but
they diverged exceedingly in expression. A sullenness, an unhappy look,
a towering fire of resentment characterised that of Letice, whereas the
face of Betty was open and gay.
This difference was due to the difference in their bringing up.
Lady Lacy, who had a small house in North Devon, was a kindly,
intellectual, and broad-minded old lady, of sweet disposition but a
decided will. She saw a good deal of society, and did her best to train
Betty to be an educated and liberal-minded woman of culture and
graceful manners. She did not send her to school, but had her taught at
home; and on the excuse that her eyes were weak by artificial light she
made the girl read to her in the evenings, and always read books that
were standard and calculated to increase her knowledge and to develop
her understanding. Lady Lacy detested all shams, and under her influence
Betty grew up to be thoroughly straightforward, healthy-minded, and
true.
On the other hand, Miss Mountjoy was, as Letice called her, a Killjoy.
She had herself been reared in the midst of the Clapham sect; had become
rigid in all her ideas, narrow in all her sympathies, and a bundle of
prejudices.
The present generation of young people know nothing of the system of
repression that was exercised in that of their fathers and mothers. Now
the tendency is wholly in the other direction, and too greatly so. It is
possibly due to a revulsion of feeling against a training that is looked
back upon with a shudder.
To that narrow school there existed but two categories of men and women,
the Christians and the Worldlings, and those who pertained to it
arrogated to themselves the former title. The Judgment had already begun
with the severance of the sheep from the goats, and the saints who
judged the world had their Jerusalem at Clapham.
In that school the works of the great masters of English literature,
Shakespeare, Pope, Scott, Byron, were taboo; no work of imagination was
tolerated save the Apocalypse, and that was degraded into a polemic by
such scribblers as Elliot and Cumming.
No entertainments, not even the oratorios of Handel, were tolerated;
they savoured of the world. The nearest approach to excitement was found
in a missionary meeting. The Chinese contract the feet of their
daughters, but those English Claphamites cramped the minds of their
children. The Venetians made use of an iron prison, with gradually
contracting walls, that finally crushed the life out of the captive.
But these elect Christians put their sons and daughters into a school
that squeezed their energies and their intelligences to death.
Dickens caricatured such people in Mrs. Jellyby and Mr. Chadband; but he
sketched them only in their external aspect, and left untouched their
private action in distorting young minds, maiming their wills, damping
down all youthful buoyancy.
But the result did not answer the expectations of those who adopted this
system with the young. Some daughters, indeed, of weaker wills were
permanently stunted and shaped on the approved model, but nearly all the
sons, and most of the daughters, on obtaining their freedom, broke away
into utter frivolity and dissipation, or, if they retained any religious
impressions, galloped through the Church of England, performing strange
antics on the way, and plunged into the arms of Rome.
Such was the system to which the high-spirited, strong-willed Letice was
subjected, and from which was no escape. The consequence was that Letice
tossed and bit at her chains, and that there ensued frequent outbreaks
of resentment against her aunt.
"Oh, Aunt Hannah! I want something to read."
After some demur, and disdainful rejection of more serious works, she
was allowed Milton.