The virtue of the world is not mainly in its leaders. In the midst of
the multitude which follows there is often something better than in the
one that goes before. Old generals wanted to take Toulon, but one of
their young colonels showed them how. The junior counsel has been known
not unfrequently to make a better argument than his senior fellow,--if,
indeed, he did not make both their arguments. Good ministers will tell
you they have parishioners who beat them in the practice of the virtues.
A great establishment, got up on commercial principles, like the
Apollinean Institute, might yet be well carried on, if it happened to
get good teachers. And when Master Langdon came to see its management,
he recognized that there must be fidelity and intelligence somewhere
among the instructors. It was only necessary to look for a moment at
the fair, open forehead, the still, tranquil eye of gentle, habitual
authority, the sweet gravity that lay upon the lips, to hear the clear
answers to the pupils' questions, to notice how every request had the
force without the form of a command, and the young man could not doubt
that the good genius of the school stood before him in the person of
Helen barley.
It was the old story. A poor country-clergyman dies, and leaves a widow
and a daughter. In Old England the daughter would have eaten the bitter
bread of a governess in some rich family. In New England she must keep
a school. So, rising from one sphere to another, she at length finds
herself the prima donna in the department of instruction in Mr. Silas
Peckham's educational establishment.
What a miserable thing it is to be poor. She was dependent, frail,
sensitive, conscientious. She was in the power of a hard, grasping,
thin-blooded, tough-fibred, trading educator, who neither knew nor cared
for a tender woman's sensibilities, but who paid her and meant to have
his money's worth out of her brains, and as much more than his
money's worth as he could get. She was consequently, in plain English,
overworked, and an overworked woman is always a sad sight,--sadder a
great deal than an overworked man, because she is so much more fertile
in capacities of suffering than a man. She has so many varieties of
headache,--sometimes as if Jael were driving the nail that killed Sisera
into her temples,--sometimes letting her work with half her brain while
the other half throbs as if it would go to pieces,--sometimes tightening
round the brows as if her cap-band were a ring of iron,--and then her
neuralgias, and her backaches, and her fits of depression, in which she
thinks she is nothing and less than nothing, and those paroxysms which
men speak slightingly of as hysterical,--convulsions, that is all, only
not commonly fatal ones,--so many trials which belong to her fine and
mobile structure,--that she is always entitled to pity, when she is
placed in conditions which develop her nervous tendencies.
The poor young lady's work had, of course, been doubled since the
departure of Master Langdon's predecessor. Nobody knows what the
weariness of instruction is, as soon as the teacher's faculties begin to
be overtasked, but those who have tried it. The relays of fresh pupils,
each new set with its exhausting powers in full action, coming one after
another, take out all the reserved forces and faculties of resistance
from the subject of their draining process.
The day's work was over, and it was late in the evening, when she
sat down, tired and faint, with a great bundle of girls' themes or
compositions to read over before she could rest her weary head on the
pillow of her narrow trundle-bed, and forget for a while the treadmill
stair of labor she was daily climbing.
How she dreaded this most forlorn of all a teacher's tasks! She
was conscientious in her duties, and would insist on reading every
sentence,--there was no saying where she might find faults of grammar or
bad spelling. There might have been twenty or thirty of these themes
in the bundle before her. Of course she knew pretty well the leading
sentiments they could contain: that beauty was subject to the accidents
of time; that wealth was inconstant, and existence uncertain; that
virtue was its own reward; that youth exhaled, like the dewdrop from the
flower, ere the sun had reached its meridian; that life was o'ershadowed
with trials; that the lessons of virtue instilled by our beloved
teachers were to be our guides through all our future career. The
imagery employed consisted principally of roses, lilies, birds, clouds,
and brooks, with the celebrated comparison of wayward genius to
meteor. Who does not know the small, slanted, Italian hand of
these girls'-compositions, their stringing together of the good old
traditional copy-book phrases; their occasional gushes of sentiment,
their profound estimates of the world, sounding to the old folks that
read them as the experience of a bantam pullet's last-hatched young one
with the chips of its shell on its head would sound to a Mother Cary's
chicken, who knew the great ocean with all its typhoons and tornadoes?
Yet every now and then one is liable to be surprised with strange
clairvoyant flashes, that can hardly be explained, except by the
mysterious inspiration which every now and then seizes a young girl and
exalts her intelligence, just as hysteria in other instances exalts the
sensibility,--a little something of that which made Joan of Arc, and the
Burney girl who prophesied “Evelina,” and the Davidson sisters. In the
midst of these commonplace exercises which Miss Darley read over so
carefully were two or three that had something of individual flavor
about them, and here and there there was an image or an epithet which
showed the footprint of a passionate nature, as a fallen scarlet feather
marks the path the wild flamingo has trodden.
The young lady-teacher read them with a certain indifference of manner,
as one reads proofs--noting defects of detail, but not commonly
arrested by the matters treated of. Even Miss Charlotte Ann Wood's poem,
beginning--
“How sweet at evening's balmy hour,”
did not excite her. She marked the inevitable false rhyme of Cockney and
Yankee beginners, morn and dawn, and tossed the verses on the pile of
papers she had finished. She was looking over some of the last of them
in a rather listless way,--for the poor thing was getting sleepy in
spite of herself,--when she came to one which seemed to rouse her
attention, and lifted her drooping lids. She looked at it a moment
before she would touch it. Then she took hold of it by one corner and
slid it off from the rest. One would have said she was afraid of it,
or had some undefined antipathy which made it hateful to her. Such odd
fancies are common enough in young persons in her nervous state. Many of
these young people will jump up twenty times a day and run to dabble
the tips of their fingers in water, after touching the most inoffensive
objects.
This composition was written in a singular, sharp-pointed, long, slender
hand, on a kind of wavy, ribbed paper. There was something strangely
suggestive about the look of it, but exactly of what, Miss barley either
could not or did not try to think. The subject of the paper was The
Mountain,--the composition being a sort of descriptive rhapsody. It
showed a startling familiarity with some of the savage scenery of the
region. One would have said that the writer must have threaded its
wildest solitudes by the light of the moon and stars as well as by
day. As the teacher read on, her color changed, and a kind of tremulous
agitation came over her. There were hints in this strange paper she did
not know what to make of. There was something in its descriptions and
imagery that recalled,--Miss Darley could not say what,--but it made her
frightfully nervous. Still she could not help reading, till she came
to one passage which so agitated her, that the tired and over-wearied
girl's self-control left her entirely. She sobbed once or twice, then
laughed convulsively; and flung herself on the bed, where she worked out
a set hysteric spasm as she best might, without anybody to rub her hands
and see that she did not hurt herself.
By and by she got quiet, rose and went to her bookcase, took down a
volume of Coleridge, and read a short time, and so to bed, to sleep and
wake from time to time with a sudden start out of uneasy dreams.
Perhaps it is of no great consequence what it was in the composition
which set her off into this nervous paroxysm. She was in such a state
that almost any slight agitation would have brought on the attack, and
it was the accident of her transient excitability, very probably, which
made a trifling cause the seeming occasion of so much disturbance. The
theme was signed, in the same peculiar, sharp, slender hand, E. Venner,
and was, of course, written by that wild-looking girl who had excited
the master's curiosity and prompted his question, as before mentioned.
The next morning the lady-teacher looked pale and wearied, naturally
enough, but she was in her place at the usual hour, and Master Langdon
in his own.
The girls had not yet entered the school room.
“You have been ill, I am afraid,” said Mr. Bernard.
“I was not well yesterday,” she, answered. “I had a worry and a kind of
fright. It is so dreadful to have the charge of all these young souls
and bodies. Every young girl ought to walk locked close, arm in arm,
between two guardian angels. Sometimes I faint almost with the thought
of all that I ought to do, and of my own weakness and wants.--Tell me,
are there not natures born so out of parallel with the lines of natural
law that nothing short of a miracle can bring them right?”
Mr. Bernard had speculated somewhat, as all thoughtful persons of his
profession are forced to do, on the innate organic tendencies with which
individuals, families, and races are born. He replied, therefore, with
a smile, as one to whom the question suggested a very familiar class of
facts.
“Why, of course. Each of us is only the footing-up of a double column of
figures that goes back to the first pair. Every unit tells,--and some of
them are plus, and some minus. If the columns don't add up right, it is
commonly because we can't make out all the figures. I don't mean to say
that something may not be added by Nature to make up for losses and keep
the race to its average, but we are mainly nothing but the answer to
a long sum in addition and subtraction. No doubt there are people born
with impulses at every possible angle to the parallels of Nature, as you
call them. If they happen to cut these at right angles, of course they
are beyond the reach of common influences. Slight obliquities are what
we have most to do with in education. Penitentiaries and insane asylums
take care of most of the right-angle cases.--I am afraid I have put it
too much like a professor, and I am only a student, you know. Pray, what
set you to asking me this? Any strange cases among the scholars?”
The meek teacher's blue eyes met the luminous glance that came with the
question. She, too, was of gentle blood,--not meaning by that that she
was of any noted lineage, but that she came of a cultivated stock, never
rich, but long trained to intellectual callings. A thousand decencies,
amenities, reticences, graces, which no one thinks of until he misses
them, are the traditional right of those who spring from such families.
And when two persons of this exceptional breeding meet in the midst
of the common multitude, they seek each other's company at once by the
natural law of elective affinity. It is wonderful how men and women know
their peers. If two stranger queens, sole survivors of two shipwrecked
vessels, were cast, half-naked, on a rock together, each would at once
address the other as “Our Royal Sister.”
Helen Darley looked into the dark eyes of Bernard Langdon glittering
with the light which flashed from them with his question. Not as those
foolish, innocent country-girls of the small village did she look into
them, to be fascinated and bewildered, but to sound them with a calm,
steadfast purpose. “A gentleman,” she said to herself, as she read his
expression and his features with a woman's rapid, but exhausting glance.
“A lady,” he said to himself, as he met her questioning look,--so brief,
so quiet, yet so assured, as of one whom necessity had taught to read
faces quickly without offence, as children read the faces of parents,
as wives read the faces of hard-souled husbands. All this was but a few
seconds' work, and yet the main point was settled. If there had been any
vulgar curiosity or coarseness of any kind lurking in his expression,
she would have detected it. If she had not lifted her eyes to his face
so softly and kept them there so calmly and withdrawn them so quietly,
he would not have said to himself, “She is a LADY,” for that word
meant a good deal to the descendant of the courtly Wentworths and the
scholarly Langdons.
“There are strange people everywhere, Mr. Langdon,” she said, “and I
don't think our schoolroom is an exception. I am glad you believe in the
force of transmitted tendencies. It would break my heart, if I did not
think that there are faults beyond the reach of everything but God's
special grace. I should die, if I thought that my negligence or
incapacity was alone responsible for the errors and sins of those I have
charge of. Yet there are mysteries I do not know how to account for.”
She looked all round the schoolroom, and then said, in a whisper, “Mr.
Langdon, we had a girl that stole, in the school, not long ago. Worse
than that, we had a girl who tried to set us on fire. Children of good
people, both of them. And we have a girl now that frightens me so”--
The door opened, and three misses came in to take their seats: three
types, as it happened, of certain classes, into which it would not have
been difficult to distribute the greater number of the girls in
the school.--Hannah Martin. Fourteen years and three months old.
Short-necked, thick-waisted, round-cheeked, smooth, vacant forehead,
large, dull eyes. Looks good-natured, with little other expression.
Three buns in her bag, and a large apple. Has a habit of attacking her
provisions in school-hours.--Rosa Milburn. Sixteen. Brunette, with
a rare-ripe flush in her cheeks. Color comes and goes easily. Eyes
wandering, apt to be downcast. Moody at times. Said to be passionate,
if irritated. Finished in high relief. Carries shoulders well back
and walks well, as if proud of her woman's life, with a slight rocking
movement, being one of the wide-flanged pattern, but seems restless,--a
hard girl to look after. Has a romance in her pocket, which she means
to read in school-time.--Charlotte Ann Wood. Fifteen. The poetess before
mentioned. Long, light ringlets, pallid complexion, blue eyes. Delicate
child, half unfolded. Gentle, but languid and despondent. Does not go
much with the other girls, but reads a good deal, especially poetry,
underscoring favorite passages. Writes a great many verses, very fast,
not very correctly; full of the usual human sentiments, expressed in
the accustomed phrases. Under-vitalized. Sensibilities not covered with
their normal integuments. A negative condition, often confounded with
genius, and sometimes running into it. Young people who fall out of line
through weakness of the active faculties are often confounded with those
who step out of it through strength of the intellectual ones.
The girls kept coming in, one after another, or in pairs or groups,
until the schoolroom was nearly full. Then there was a little pause, and
a light step was heard in the passage. The lady-teacher's eyes turned to
the door, and the master's followed them in the same direction.
A girl of about seventeen entered. She was tall and slender, but
rounded, with a peculiar undulation of movement, such as one sometimes
sees in perfectly untutored country-girls, whom Nature, the queen of
graces, has taken in hand, but more commonly in connection with the
very highest breeding of the most thoroughly trained society. She was
a splendid scowling beauty, black-browed, with a flash of white teeth
which was always like a surprise when her lips parted. She wore a
checkered dress, of a curious pattern, and a camel's-hair scarf twisted
a little fantastically about her. She went to her seat, which she had
moved a short distance apart from the rest, and, sitting down, began
playing listlessly with her gold chain, as was a common habit with her,
coiling it and uncoiling it about her slender wrist, and braiding it
in with her long, delicate fingers. Presently she looked up. Black,
piercing eyes, not large,--a low forehead, as low as that of Clytie in
the Townley bust,--black hair, twisted in heavy braids,--a face that one
could not help looking at for its beauty, yet that one wanted to look
away from for something in its expression, and could not for those
diamond eyes. They were fixed on the lady-teacher now. The latter turned
her own away, and let them wander over the other scholars. But they
could not help coming back again for a single glance at the wild beauty.
The diamond eyes were on her still. She turned the leaves of several of
her books, as if in search of some passage, and, when she thought she
had waited long enough to be safe, once more stole a quick look at the
dark girl. The diamond eyes were still upon her. She put her kerchief
to her forehead, which had grown slightly moist; she sighed once, almost
shivered, for she felt cold; then, following some ill-defined impulse,
which she could not resist, she left her place and went to the young
girl's desk.
“What do you want of me, Elsie Venner?” It was a strange question to
put, for the girl had not signified that she wished the teacher to come
to her.
“Nothing,” she said. “I thought I could make you come.” The girl
spoke in a low tone, a kind of half-whisper. She did not lisp, yet her
articulation of one or two consonants was not absolutely perfect.
“Where did you get that flower, Elsie?” said Miss Darley. It was a rare
alpine flower, which was found only in one spot among the rocks of The
Mountain.
“Where it grew,” said Elsie Veneer. “Take it.” The teacher could not
refuse her. The girl's finger tips touched hers as she took it. How cold
they were for a girl of such an organization!
The teacher went back to her seat. She made an excuse for quitting the
schoolroom soon afterwards. The first thing she did was to fling the
flower into her fireplace and rake the ashes over it. The second was to
wash the tips of her fingers, as if she had been another Lady Macbeth. A
poor, over-tasked, nervous creature,--we must not think too much of her
fancies.
After school was done, she finished the talk with the master which had
been so suddenly interrupted. There were things spoken of which may
prove interesting by and by, but there are other matters we must first
attend to.