Percival St. John had been brought up at home under the eye of his
mother and the care of an excellent man who had been tutor to himself
and his brothers. The tutor was not much of a classical scholar, for in
great measure he had educated himself; and he who does so, usually lacks
the polish and brilliancy of one whose footsteps have been led early
to the Temple of the Muses. In fact, Captain Greville was a gallant
soldier, with whom Vernon St. John had been acquainted in his own brief
military career, and whom circumstances had so reduced in life as to
compel him to sell his commission and live as he could. He had always
been known in his regiment as a reading man, and his authority looked up
to in all the disputes as to history and dates, and literary anecdotes,
which might occur at the mess-table. Vernon considered him the most
learned man of his acquaintance; and when, accidentally meeting him in
London, he learned his fallen fortunes, he congratulated himself on
a very brilliant idea when he suggested that Captain Greville should
assist him in the education of his boys and the management of his
estate. At first, all that Greville modestly undertook, with respect to
the former, and, indeed, was expected to do, was to prepare the young
gentlemen for Eton, to which Vernon, with the natural predilection of
an Eton man, destined his sons. But the sickly constitutions of the
two elder justified Lady Mary in her opposition to a public school; and
Percival conceived early so strong an affection for a sailor’s life that
the father’s intentions were frustrated. The two elder continued their
education at home, and Percival, at an earlier age than usual, went to
sea. The last was fortunate enough to have for his captain one of that
new race of naval officers who, well educated and accomplished, form a
notable contrast to the old heroes of Smollett. Percival, however,
had not been long in the service before the deaths of his two elder
brothers, preceded by that of his father, made him the head of his
ancient house, and the sole prop of his mother’s earthly hopes. He
conquered with a generous effort the passion for his noble profession,
which service had but confirmed, and returned home with his fresh,
childlike nature uncorrupted, his constitution strengthened, his lively
and impressionable mind braced by the experience of danger and the
habits of duty, and quietly resumed his reading under Captain Greville,
who moved from the Hall to a small house in the village.
Now, the education he had received, from first to last, was less adapted
prematurely to quicken his intellect and excite his imagination than to
warm his heart and elevate, while it chastened, his moral qualities; for
in Lady Mary there was, amidst singular sweetness of temper, a high cast
of character and thought. She was not what is commonly called clever,
and her experience of the world was limited, compared to that of most
women of similar rank who pass their lives in the vast theatre of
London. But she became superior by a certain single-heartedness which
made truth so habitual to her that the light in which she lived rendered
all objects around her clear. One who is always true in the great duties
of life is nearly always wise. And Vernon, when he had fairly buried his
faults, had felt a noble shame for the excesses into which they had
led him. Gradually more and more wedded to his home, he dropped his old
companions. He set grave guard on his talk (his habits now required
no guard), lest any of the ancient levity should taint the ears of his
children. Nothing is more common in parents than their desire that their
children should escape their faults. We scarcely know ourselves till
we have children; and then, if we love them duly, we look narrowly into
failings that become vices, when they serve as examples to the young.
The inborn gentleman, with the native courage and spirit and horror
of trick and falsehood which belong to that chivalrous abstraction,
survived almost alone in Vernon St. John; and his boys sprang up in the
atmosphere of generous sentiments and transparent truth. The tutor was
in harmony with the parents,--a soldier every inch of him; not a mere
disciplinarian, yet with a profound sense of duty, and a knowledge that
duty is to be found in attention to details. In inculcating the habit
of subordination, so graceful to the young, he knew how to make himself
beloved, and what is harder still, to be understood. The soul of this
poor soldier was white and unstained, as the arms of a maiden knight;
it was full of suppressed but lofty enthusiasm. He had been ill used,
whether by Fate or the Horse Guards; his career had been a failure; but
he was as loyal as if his hand held the field-marshal’s truncheon, and
the garter bound his knee. He was above all querulous discontent. From
him, no less than from his parents, Percival caught, not only a spirit
of honour worthy the antiqua fides of the poets, but that peculiar
cleanliness of thought, if the expression may be used, which belongs to
the ideal of youthful chivalry. In mere booklearning, Percival, as may
be supposed, was not very extensively read; but his mind, if not largely
stored, had a certain unity of culture, which gave it stability and
individualized its operations. Travels, voyages, narratives of heroic
adventure, biographies of great men, had made the favourite pasture of
his enthusiasm. To this was added the more stirring, and, perhaps, the
more genuine order of poets who make you feel and glow, rather than
doubt and ponder. He knew at least enough of Greek to enjoy old Homer;
and if he could have come but ill through a college examination into
Aeschylus and Sophocles, he had dwelt with fresh delight on the rushing
storm of spears in the “Seven before Thebes,” and wept over the heroic
calamities of Antigone. In science, he was no adept; but his clear
good sense and quick appreciation of positive truths had led him easily
through the elementary mathematics, and his somewhat martial spirit had
made him delight in the old captain’s lectures on military tactics. Had
he remained in the navy, Percival St. John would doubtless have been
distinguished. His talents fitted him for straightforward, manly action;
and he had a generous desire of distinction, vague, perhaps, the moment
he was taken from his profession, and curbed by his diffidence in
himself and his sense of deficiencies in the ordinary routine of purely
classical education. Still, he had in him all the elements of a true
man,--a man to go through life with a firm step and a clear conscience
and a gallant hope. Such a man may not win fame,--that is an accident;
but he must occupy no despicable place in the movement of the world.
It was at first intended to send Percival to Oxford; but for some reason
or other that design was abandoned. Perhaps Lady Mary, over cautious, as
mothers left alone sometimes are, feared the contagion to which a
young man of brilliant expectations and no studious turn is necessarily
exposed in all places of miscellaneous resort. So Percival was sent
abroad for two years, under the guardianship of Captain Greville. On his
return, at the age of nineteen, the great world lay before him, and
he longed ardently to enter. For a year Lady Mary’s fears and fond
anxieties detained him at Laughton; but though his great tenderness for
his mother withheld Percival from opposing her wishes by his own, this
interval of inaction affected visibly his health and spirits. Captain
Greville, a man of the world, saw the cause sooner than Lady Mary, and
one morning, earlier than usual, he walked up to the Hall.
The captain, with all his deference to the sex, was a plain man enough
when business was to be done. Like his great commander, he came to the
point in a few words.
“My dear Lady Mary, our boy must go to London,--we are killing him
here.”
“Mr. Greville!” cried Lady Mary, turning pale and putting aside her
embroidery,--“killing him?”
“Killing the man in him. I don’t mean to alarm you; I dare say his lungs
are sound enough, and that his heart would bear the stethoscope to the
satisfaction of the College of Surgeons. But, my dear ma’am, Percival is
to be a man; it is the man you are killing by keeping him tied to your
apron-string.”
“Oh, Mr. Greville, I am sure you don’t wish to wound me, but--”
“I beg ten thousand pardons. I am rough, but truth is rough sometimes.”
“It is not for my sake,” said the mother, warmly, and with tears in her
eyes, “that I have wished him to be here. If he is dull, can we not fill
the house for him?”
“Fill a thimble, my dear Lady Mary. Percival should have a plunge in the
ocean.”
“But he is so young yet,--that horrid London; such
temptations,--fatherless, too!”
“I have no fear of the result if Percival goes now, while his principles
are strong and his imagination is not inflamed; but if we keep him here
much longer against his bent, he will learn to brood and to muse, write
bad poetry perhaps, and think the world withheld from him a thousand
times more delightful than it is. This very dread of temptation
will provoke his curiosity, irritate his fancy, make him imagine the
temptation must be a very delightful thing. For the first time in my
life, ma’am, I have caught him sighing over fashionable novels, and
subscribing to the Southampton Circulating Library. Take my word for it,
it is time that Percival should begin life, and swim without corks.”
Lady Mary had a profound confidence in Greville’s judgment and affection
for Percival, and, like a sensible woman, she was aware of her own
weakness. She remained silent for a few moments, and then said, with an
effort,--
“You know how hateful London is to me now,--how unfit I am to return to
the hollow forms of its society; still, if you think it right, I will
take a house for the season, and Percival can still be under our eye.”
“No, ma’am,--pardon me,--that will be the surest way to make him either
discontented or hypocritical. A young man of his prospects and temper
can hardly be expected to chime in with all our sober, old-fashioned
habits. You will impose on him--if he is to conform to our hours and
notions and quiet set--a thousand irksome restraints; and what will
be the consequence? In a year he will be of age, and can throw us
off altogether, if he pleases. I know the boy; don’t seem to distrust
him,--he may be trusted. You place the true restraint on temptation when
you say to him: ‘We confide to you our dearest treasure,--your honour,
your morals, your conscience, yourself!’”
“But at least you will go with him, if it must be so,” said Lady Mary,
after a few timid arguments, from which, one by one, she was driven.
“I! What for? To be a jest of the young puppies he must know; to make
him ashamed of himself and me,--himself as a milksop, and me as a dry
nurse?”
“But this was not so abroad.”
“Abroad, ma’am, I gave him full swing I promise you; and when we went
abroad he was two years younger.”
“But he is a mere child still.”
“Child, Lady Mary! At his age I had gone through two sieges. There
are younger faces than his at a mess-room. Come, come! I know what you
fear,--he may commit some follies; very likely. He may be taken in,
and lose some money,--he can afford it, and he will get experience in
return. Vices he has none. I have seen him,--ay, with the vicious. Send
him out against the world like a saint of old, with his Bible in his
hand, and no spot on his robe. Let him see fairly what is, not stay here
to dream of what is not. And when he’s of age, ma’am, we must get him
an object, a pursuit; start him for the county, and make him serve the
State. He will understand that business pretty well. Tush! tush! what is
there to cry at?”
The captain prevailed. We don’t say that his advice would have been
equally judicious for all youths of Percival’s age; but he knew well
the nature to which he confided; he knew well how strong was that young
heart in its healthful simplicity and instinctive rectitude; and he
appreciated his manliness not too highly when he felt that all evident
props and aids would be but irritating tokens of distrust.
And thus, armed only with letters of introduction, his mother’s tearful
admonitions, and Greville’s experienced warnings, Percival St. John was
launched into London life. After the first month or so, Greville came
up to visit him, do him sundry kind, invisible offices amongst his
old friends, help him to equip his apartments, and mount his stud; and
wholly satisfied with the result of his experiment, returned in high
spirits, with flattering reports, to the anxious mother.
But, indeed, the tone of Percival’s letters would have been sufficient
to allay even maternal anxiety. He did not write, as sons are apt to
do, short excuses for not writing more at length, unsatisfactory
compressions of details (exciting worlds of conjecture) into a hurried
sentence. Frank and overflowing, those delightful epistles gave accounts
fresh from the first impressions of all he saw and did. There was a
racy, wholesome gusto in his enjoyment of novelty and independence. His
balls and his dinners and his cricket at Lord’s, his partners and his
companions, his general gayety, his occasional ennui, furnished ample
materials to one who felt he was corresponding with another heart, and
had nothing to fear or to conceal.
But about two months before this portion of our narrative opens with
the coronation, Lady Mary’s favourite sister, who had never married,
and who, by the death of her parents, was left alone in the worse than
widowhood of an old maid, had been ordered to Pisa for a complaint
that betrayed pulmonary symptoms; and Lady Mary, with her usual
unselfishness, conquered both her aversion to movement and her wish to
be in reach of her son, to accompany abroad this beloved and solitary
relative. Captain Greville was pressed into service as their joint
cavalier. And thus Percival’s habitual intercourse with his two
principal correspondents received a temporary check.