THE PRECEPTOR.
Roland removed to France, and fixed his abode in the environs of Paris.
He placed Blanche at a convent in the immediate neighbourhood, 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 farther, 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 Gitános.
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 _Encyclopédie_, 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?
O 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! O 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 père 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 early habits and adventurous temper.
He formed acquaintances among the loose young haunters of cafés,
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 blest 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 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!