Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19

Whether the R.V. portmanteaus brought one or the other of these emotions to
the tenants of the Dudley mansion, it might not be easy to settle. Elsie
professed to be pleased with the thought of having an adventurous young
stranger, with stories to tell, an inmate of their quiet, not to say dull,
family. Under almost any other circumstances, her father would have been
unwilling to take a young fellow of whom he knew so little under his roof;
but this was his nephew, and anything that seemed like to amuse or please
Elsie was agreeable to him. He had grown almost desperate, and felt as if
any change in the current of her life and feelings might save her from some
strange paroxysm of dangerous mental exaltation or sullen perversion of
disposition, from which some fearful calamity might come to herself or
others.

Dick had been some weeks at the Dudley mansion. A few days before, he had
made a sudden dash for the nearest large city,--and when the Doctor met
him, he was just returning from his visit.

* * * * *

It had been a curious meeting between the two young persons, who had parted
so young and after such strange relations with each other. When Dick first
presented himself at the mansion, not one in the house would have known him
for the boy who had left them all so suddenly years ago. He was so dark,
partly from his descent, partly from long habits of exposure, that Elsie
looked almost fair beside him. He had something of the family beauty which
belonged to his cousin, but his eye had a fierce passion in it, very unlike
the cold glitter of Elsie's. Like many people of strong and imperious
temper, he was soft-voiced and very gentle in his address, when he had no
special reason for being otherwise. He soon found reasons enough to be as
amiable as he could force himself to be with his uncle and his
cousin. Elsie was to his fancy. She had a strange attraction for him, quite
unlike anything he had ever known in other women. There was something, too,
in early associations: when those who parted as children meet as man and
woman, there is always a renewal of that early experience which followed
the taste of the forbidden fruit,--a natural blush of consciousness, not
without its charm.

Nothing could be more becoming than the behavior of "Richard Venner,
Esquire, the guest of Dudley Venner, Esquire, at his noble mansion," as he
was announced in the Court column of the "Rockland Weekly Universe." He was
pleased to find himself treated with kindness and attention as a
relative. He made himself very agreeable by abundant details concerning the
religious, political, social, commercial, and educational progress of the
South American cities and states. He was himself much interested in
everything that was going on about the Dudley mansion, walked all over it,
noticed its valuable wood-lots with special approbation, was delighted with
the grand old house and its furniture, and would not be easy until he had
seen all the family silver and heard its history. In return, he had much to
tell of his father, now dead,--the only one of the Tenners, beside
themselves, in whose fate his uncle was interested. With Elsie, he was
subdued and almost tender in his manner; with the few visitors whom they
saw, shy and silent,--perhaps a little watchful, if any young man happened
to be among them.

Young fellows placed on their good behavior are apt to get restless and
nervous, all ready to fly off into some mischief or other. Dick Venner had
his half-tamed horse with him to work off his suppressed life with. When
the savage passion of his young blood came over him, he would fetch out the
mustang, screaming and kicking as these amiable beasts are wont to do,
strap the Spanish saddle tight to his back, vault into it, and, after
getting away from the village, strike the long spurs into his sides and
whirl away in a wild gallop, until the black horse was flecked with white
foam, and the cruel steel points were red with his blood. When horse and
rider were alike tired, he would fling the bridle on his neck and saunter
homeward, always contriving to get to the stable in a quiet way, and coming
into the house as calm as a bishop after a sober trot on his steady-going
cob.

After a few weeks of this kind of life, he began to want some more fierce
excitement. He had tried making downright love to Elsie, with no great
success as yet, in his own opinion. The girl was capricious in her
treatment of him, sometimes scowling and repellent, sometimes familiar,
very often, as she used to be of old, teasing and malicious. All this,
perhaps, made her more interesting to a young man who was tired of easy
conquests. There was a strange fascination in her eyes, too, which at times
was quite irresistible, so that he would feel himself drawn to her by a
power which seemed to take away his will for the moment It may have been
nothing but the common charm of bright eyes; but he had never before
experienced the same kind of attraction.

Perhaps she was not so very different from what she had been as a child,
after all. At any rate, so it seemed to Dick Venner, who, as was said
before, had tried making love to her. They were sitting alone in the study
one day; Elsie had round her neck that somewhat peculiar ornament, the
golden _torque_, which she had worn to the great party. Youth is
adventurous and very curious about neck laces, brooches, chains, and other
such adornments, so long as they are worn by young persons of the female
sex. Dick was seized with a great passion for examining this curious chain,
and, after some preliminary questions, was rash enough to lean towards her
and put out his hand toward the neck that lay in the golden coil. She threw
her head back, her eyes narrowing and her forehead drawing down so that
Dick thought her head actually flattened itself. He started involuntarily;
for she looked so like the little girl who had struck him with those sharp
flashing teeth, that the whole scene came back, and he felt the stroke
again as if it had just been given, and the two white scars began to sting
as they did after the old Doctor had burned them with that stick of gray
caustic, which looked so like a slate pencil, and felt so much like the end
of a red-hot poker.

It took something more than a gallop to set him right after this. The next
day he mentioned having received a letter from a mercantile agent with whom
he had dealings. What his business was is, perhaps, none of our
business. At any rate, it required him to go at once to the city where his
correspondent resided.

Independently of this "business" which called him, there may have been
other motives, such as have been hinted at. People who have been living for
a long time in dreary country-places, without any emotion beyond such as
are occasioned by a trivial pleasure or annoyance, often get crazy at last
for a vital paroxysm of some kind or other. In this state they rush to the
great cities for a plunge into their turbid life-baths, with a frantic
thirst for every exciting pleasure, which makes them the willing and easy
victims of all those who sell the Devil's wares on commission. The less
intelligent and instructed class of unfortunates, who venture with their
ignorance and their instincts into what is sometimes called the "life" of
great cities, are put through a rapid course of instruction which entitles
them very commonly to a diploma from the police court. But they only
illustrate the working of the same tendency in mankind at large which has
been occasionally noticed in the sons of ministers and other eminently
worthy people, by many ascribed to that intense congenital hatred for
goodness which distinguishes human nature from that of the brute, but
perhaps as readily accounted for by considering it as the yawning and
stretching of a young soul cramped too long in one moral posture.

Richard Venner was a young man of remarkable experience for his years. He
ran less risk, therefore, in exposing himself to the temptations and
dangers of a great city than many older men, who, seeking the livelier
scenes of excitement to be found in large towns as a relaxation after the
monotonous routine of family-life, are too often taken advantage of and
made the victims of their sentiments or their generous confidence in their
fellow-creatures. Such was not his destiny. There was something about him
which looked as if he would not take bullying kindly. He had also the
advantage of being acquainted with most of those ingenious devices by which
the proverbial inconstancy of fortune is steadied to something more nearly
approaching fixed laws, and the dangerous risks which have so often led
young men to ruin and suicide are practically reduced to somewhat less than
nothing. So that Mr, Richard Venner worked off his nervous energies without
any troublesome adventure, and was ready to return to Rockland in less than
a week, without having lightened the money-belt he wore round his body, or
tarnished the long glittering knife he carried in his boot.

Dick had sent his trunk to the nearest town through which the railroad
leading to the city passed. He rode off on his black horse and left him at
the place where he took the cars. On arriving at the city station, he took
a coach and drove to one of the great hotels. Thither drove also a
sagacious-looking, middle-aged man, who entered his name as "W. Thompson"
in the book at the office immediately after that of "R. Venner." Mr,
"Thompson" kept a carelessly observant eye upon Mr. Venner during his stay
at the hotel, and followed him to the cars when he left, looking over his
shoulder when he bought his ticket at the station, and seeing him fairly
off without obtruding himself in any offensive way upon his
attention. Mr. Thompson, known in other quarters as Detective Policeman
Terry, got very little by his trouble. Richard Venner did not turn out to
be the wife-poisoner, the defaulting cashier, the river-pirate, or the
great counterfeiter. He paid his hotel-bill as a gentleman should always
do, if he has the money, and can spare it. The detective had probably
overrated his own sagacity when he ventured to suspect Mr. Venner. He
reported to his chief that there was a knowing-looking fellow he had been
round after, but he rather guessed he was nothing more than "one o' them
Southern sportsmen."

The poor fellows at the stable where Dick had left his horse had had
trouble enough with him. One of the ostlers was limping about with a lame
leg, and another had lost a mouthful of his coat, which came very near
carrying a piece of his shoulder with it. When Mr. Venner came back for his
beast, he was as wild as if he had just been lassoed, screaming, kicking,
rolling over to get rid of his saddle,--and when his rider was at last
mounted, jumping about in a way to dislodge any common horseman. To all
this Dick replied by sticking his long spurs deeper and deeper into his
flanks, until the creature found he was mastered, and dashed off as if all
the thistles of the Pampas were pricking him.

"One more gallop, Juan!" This was in the last mile of the road before he
came to the town--which brought him in sight of the mansion-house. It was
in this last gallop that the fiery mustang and his rider flashed by the old
Doctor. Cassia pointed her sharp ears and shied to let them pass. The
Doctor turned and looked through the little round glass in the back of his
sulky.

"Dick Turpin, there, will find more than his match!" said the Doctor.

CHAPTER XII.

THE APOLLINEAN INSTITUTE.

_With Extracts from the "Report of the Committee."_

The readers of this narrative will hardly expect any elaborate details of
the educational management of the Apollinean Institute. They cannot be
supposed to take the same interest in its affairs as was shown by the
Annual Committees who reported upon its condition and prospects. As these
Committees were, however, an important part of the mechanism of the
establishment, some general account of their organization and a few
extracts from the Report of the one last appointed may not be out of place.

Whether Mr. Silas Peckham had some contrivance for packing his Committees,
whether they happened always to be made up of optimists by nature, whether
they were cajoled into good-humor by polite attentions, or whether they
were always really delighted with the wonderful acquirements of the pupils
and the admirable order of the school, it is certain that their Annual
Reports were couched in language which might warm the heart of the most
cold-blooded and calculating father that ever had a family of daughters to
educate. In fact, these Annual Reports were considered by Mr. Peckham as
his most effective advertisements.

The first thing, therefore, was to see that the Committee was made up of
persons known to the public. Some worn-out politician, in that leisurely
and amiable transition-state which comes between official extinction and
the paralysis which will finish him as soon as his brain gets a little
softer, made an admirable Chairman for Mr. Peckham, when he had the luck to
pick up such an article. Old reputations, like old fashions, are more
prized in the grassy than in the stony districts. An effete celebrity, who
would never be heard of again in the great places until the funeral sermon
waked up his memory for one parting spasm, finds himself in full flavor of
renown a little farther back from the changing winds of the sea-coast. If
such a public character was not to be had, so that there was no chance of
heading the Report with the name of the Honorable Mr. Somebody, the next
best thing was to get the Reverend Dr. Somebody to take that conspicuous
position. Then would follow two or three local worthies with Esquire after
their names. If any stray literary personage from one of the great cities
happened to be within reach, he was pounced upon by Mr. Silas Peckham. It
was a hard case for the poor man, who had travelled a hundred miles or two
to the outside suburbs after peace and unwatered milk, to be pumped for a
speech in this unexpected way. It was harder still, if he had been induced
to venture a few tremulous remarks, to be obliged to write them out for the
"Rockland Weekly Universe," with the chance of seeing them used as an
advertising certificate as long as he lived, if he lived as long as the
late Dr. Waterhouse did after giving his certificate in favor of Whitwell's
celebrated Cephalic Snuff.

The Report of the last Committee had been signed by the Honorable ----,
late ---- of ----, as Chairman. (It is with reluctance that the name and
titles are left in blank; but our public characters are so familiarly known
to the whole community that this reserve becomes necessary.) The other
members of the Committee were the Reverend Mr. Butters, of a neighboring
town, who was to make the prayer before the Exercises of the Exhibition,
and two or three notabilities of Rockiand, with geoponic eyes, and
glabrous, bumpless foreheads. A few extracts from the Report are
subjoined:--

"The Committee have great pleasure in recording their unanimous opinion,
that the Institution was never in so flourishing a condition....

"The health of the pupils is excellent; the admirable quality of food
supplied shows itself in their appearance; their blooming aspect excited
the admiration of the Committee, and bears testimony to the assiduity of
the excellent Matron.

"......moral and religious condition most encouraging, which they cannot
but attribute to the personal efforts and instruction of the faithful
Principal, who considers religious instruction a solemn duty which he
cannot commit to other people.

".......great progress in their studies, under the intelligent
superintendence of the accomplished Principal, assisted by Mr. Badger,
[Mr. Langdon's predecessor,] Miss Darley, the lady who superintends the
English branches, Miss Crabs, her assistant and teacher of Modern
Languages, and Mr. Schneider, teacher of French, German, Latin, and Music.

"Education is the great business of the Institute. Amusements are objects
of a secondary nature; but these are by no means neglected....

".........English compositions of great originality and beauty, creditable
alike to the head and heart of their accomplished authors......several
poems of a very high order of merit, which would do honor to the literature
of any age or country.....life-like drawings, showing great proficiency....
Many converse fluently in various modern languages......perform the most
difficult airs with the skill of professional musicians.....

".....advantages unsurpassed, if equalled, by those of any Institution in
the country, and reflecting the highest honor on the distinguished Head of
the Establishment, SILAS PECKHAM, Esquire, and his admirable Lady, the
MATRON, with their worthy assistants....."

The perusal of this Report did Mr. Bernard more good than a week's vacation
would have done. It gave him such a laugh as he had not had for a
month. The way in which Silas Peckham had made his Committee say what he
wanted them to--for he recognized a number of expressions in the Report as
coming directly from the lips of his principal, and could not help thinking
how cleverly he had _forced_ his phrases, as jugglers do the particular
card they wish their dupe to take--struck him as particularly neat and
pleasing.

He had passed through the sympathetic and emotional stages in his new
experience, and had arrived at the philosophical and practical state, which
takes things coolly, and goes to work to set them right. He had breadth
enough of view to see that there was nothing so very exceptional in this
educational trader's dealings with his subordinates, but he had also manly
feeling enough to attack the particular individual instance of wrong before
him. There are plenty of dealers in morals, as in ordinary traffic, who
confine themselves to wholesale business. They leave the small necessity of
their next-door neighbor to the retailers, who are poorer in statistics and
general facts, but richer in the every-day charities. Mr. Bernard felt, at
first, as one does who sees a gray rat steal out of a drain and begin
gnawing at the bark of some tree loaded with fruit or blossoms, which he
will soon girdle, if he is let alone. The first impulse is to murder him
with the nearest ragged stone. Then one remembers that he is a rodent,
acting after the law of his kind, and cools down and is contented to drive
him off and guard the tree against his teeth for the future. As soon as
this is done, one can watch his attempts at mischief with a certain
amusement.

This was the kind of process Mr. Bernard had gone through. First, the
indignant surprise of a generous nature, when it comes unexpectedly into
relations with a mean one. Then the impulse of extermination,--a divine
instinct, intended to keep down vermin of all classes to their working
averages in the economy of Nature. Then a return of cheerful tolerance,--a
feeling, that, if the Deity could bear with rats and sharpers, he could;
with a confident trust, that, in the long run, terriers and honest men
would have the upperhand, and a grateful consciousness that he had been
sent just at the right time to come between a patient victim and the master
who held her in peonage.

Having once made up his mind what to do, Mr. Bernard was as good-natured
and hopeful as ever. He had the great advantage, from his professional
training, of knowing how to recognize and deal with the nervous
disturbances to which overtasked women are so liable. He saw well enough
that Helen Darley would certainly kill herself or lose her wits, if he
could not lighten her labors and lift off a large part of her weight of
cares. The worst of it was, that she of those women who naturally overwork
themselves, like those horses who will go at the top of their pace until
they drop. Such women are dreadfully unmanageable. It is as hard reasoning
with them as it would have been reasoning with lo, when she was flying over
land and sea, driven by the sting of the never-sleeping gadfly.

This was a delicate, interesting game that he played. Under one innocent
pretext or another, he invaded this or that special province she had made
her own. He would collect the themes and have them all read and marked,
answer all the puzzling questions in mathematics, make the other teachers
come to him for directions, and in this way gradually took upon himself not
only all the general superintendence that belonged to his office, but stole
away so many of the special duties which might fairly have belonged to his
assistant, that, before she knew it, she was looking better and feeling
more cheerful than for many and many a month before.

When the nervous energy is depressed by any bodily cause, or exhausted by
overworking, there follow effects which have often been misinterpreted by
moralists, and especially by theologians. The conscience itself becomes
neuralgic, sometimes actually inflamed, so that the least touch is
agony. Of all liars and false accusers, a sick conscience is the most
inventive and indefatigable. The devoted daughter, wife, mother, whose life
has been given to unselfish labors, who has filled a place which it seems
to others only and angel would make good, reproaches herself with
incompetence and neglect of duty. The humble Christian, who has been a
model to others, calls himself a worm of the dust on one page of his diary,
and arraigns himself on the next for coming short of the perfection of an
archangel.

Conscience itself requires a conscience, or nothing can be more
unscrupulous. It told Saul that he did well in persecuting the
Christians. It has goaded countless multitudes of various creeds to endless
forms of self-torture. The cities of India are full of cripples it has
made. The hill-sides of Syria are riddled with holes, where miserable
hermits, whose lives it had palsied, lived and died like the vermin they
harbored. Our libraries are crammed with books written by spiritual
hypochondriacs, who inspected all their moral secretions a dozen times a
day. They are full of interest, but they should be transferred from the
shelf of the theologian to that of the medical man who makes a study of
insanity.

This was the state into which too much work and too much responsibility
were bringing Helen Darley, when the new master came and lifted so much of
the burden that was crushing her as must be removed before she could have a
chance to recover her natural elasticity and buoyancy. Many of the noblest
women, suffering like her, but less fortunate in being relieved at the
right moment, die worried out of life by the perpetual teasing of this
inflamed, neuralgic conscience. So subtile is the line which separates the
true and almost angelic sensibility of a healthy, but exalted nature, from
the soreness of a soul which is sympathizing with a morbid state of the
body, that it is no wonder they are often confounded. And thus many good
women are suffered to perish by that form of spontaneous combustion in
which the victim goes on toiling day and night with the hidden fire
consuming her, until all at once her cheek whitens, and, as we look upon
her, she drops away, a heap of ashes. The more they over-work themselves,
the more exacting becomes the sense of duty,--as the draught of the
locomotive's furnace blows stronger and makes the fire burn more fiercely,
the faster it spins along the track.

It is not very likely, as was said at the beginning of this chapter, that
we shall trouble ourselves a great deal about the internal affairs of the
Apollinean Institute. These schools are, in the nature of things, not so
very unlike each other as to require a minute description for each
particular one among them. They have all very much the same general
features, pleasing and displeasing. All feeding-establishments have
something odious about them,--from the wretched country-houses where
paupers are farmed out to the lowest bidder, up to the commons-tables at
colleges, and even the fashionable boarding-house. A person's appetite
should be at war with no other purse than his own. Young people,
especially, who have a bone-factory at work in them, and have to feed the
living looms of innumerable growing tissues, should be provided for, if
possible, by those that love them like their own flesh and blood. Elsewhere
their appetites will be sure to make them enemies, or, what are almost as
bad, friends whose interests are at variance with the claims of their
exacting necessities and demands.

Besides, all commercial transactions in regard to the most sacred interests
of life are hateful even to those who profit by them. The clergyman, the
physician, the teacher, must be paid; but each of them, if his duty be
performed in the true spirit, can hardly help a shiver of disgust when.
money is counted out to him for administering the consolations of religion,
for saving some precious life, for sowing the seeds of Christian
civilization in young, ingenuous souls.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19