Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 66 No.406, August 1849. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
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!
And then, vainly grasping at every argument his blunt sense could suggest – then talked Roland much and grandly of the duties men owed – even if they threw off all love to their father – still to their father's name; and then his pride, always so lively, grew irritable and harsh, and seemed, no doubt, to the perverted ears of the son, unlovely and unloving. And that pride, without serving one purpose of good, did yet more mischief; for the youth caught the disease, but in a wrong way. And he said to himself, —
"Ho! then my father is a great man, with all these ancestors and big words! And he has lands and a castle – and yet how miserably we live, and how he stints me! But if he has cause for pride in all these dead men, why, so have I. And are these lodgings, these appurtenances, fit for the 'gentleman' he says I am?"
Even in England, the gipsy blood broke out as before; and the youth found vagrant associates, heaven knows how or where; and strange-looking forms, gaudily shabby, and disreputably smart, were seen lurking in the corner of the street, or peering in at the window, slinking off if they saw Roland – and Roland could not stoop to be a spy. And the son's heart grew harder and harder against his father, and his father's face now never smiled on him. Then bills came in, and duns knocked at the door. Bills and duns to a man who shrunk from the thought of a debt, as an ermine from a spot on its hide! And the son's short answer to remonstrance was, – "Am I not a gentleman? – these are the things gentlemen require." Then perhaps Roland remembered the experiment of his French friend, and left his bureau unlocked, and said, "Ruin me if you will, but no debts. There is money in those drawers – they are unlocked." That trust would for ever have cured of extravagance a youth with a high and delicate sense of honour: the pupil of the Gitános did not understand the trust; he thought it conveyed a natural though ungracious permission to take out what he wanted – and he took! To Roland this seemed a theft, and a theft of the coarsest kind: but when he so said, the son started indignant, and saw in that which had been so touching an appeal to his honour, but a trap to decoy him into disgrace. In short, neither could understand the other. Roland forbade his son to stir from the house; and the young man the same night let himself out, and stole forth into the wide world, to enjoy or defy it in his own wild way.
It would be tedious to follow him through his various adventures and experiments on fortune, (even if I knew them all, which I do not.) And now, putting altogether aside his right name, which he had voluntarily abandoned, and not embarrassing the reader with the earlier aliases assumed, I shall give to my unfortunate kinsman the name by which I first knew him,