MRS. TYROLD expressed much astonishment that her husband could afford any countenance to this new plan. ‘Your expectations from it,’ she cried, ‘can be no higher than my own; you have certainly some influence with your brother; why, then, will you suffer him thus egregiously to expose himself?’
‘I cannot protect his pride,’ answered Mr. Tyrold, ‘at the expence of his comfort. His faculties want some object, his thoughts some employment. Inaction bodily and intellectual pervading the same character, cannot but fix disgust upon every stage and every state of life. Vice alone is worse than such double inertion. Where mental vigour can be kept alive without offence to religion and virtue, innocence as well as happiness is promoted; and the starter of difficulties with regard to the means which point to such an end, inadvertently risks both. To save the mind from preying inwardly upon itself, it must be encouraged to some outward pursuit. There is no other way to elude apathy, or escape discontent; none other to guard the temper from that quarrel with itself, which ultimately ends in quarrelling with all mankind.’
‘But may you not, by refusing to send him your son, induce him to seek recreation in some more rational way?’
‘Recreation, my dear Georgiana, must be spontaneous. Bidden pleasures fly the perversity of our tastes. Let us take care, then, scrupulously, of our duties, but suffer our amusements to take care of themselves. A project, a pastime, such as this, is, at least, as harmless as it is hopeless, since the utmost sport of wit, or acrimony of malice, can only fasten a laugh upon it: and how few are the diversions of the rich and indolent that can so lightly be acquitted!’
Lionel, the new young student, speedily, though but little to her satisfaction, abetted the judgment of his mother. He was no sooner summoned to Cleves, than, enchanted to find himself a fellow-pupil with his uncle, he conceived the highest ideas of his own premature genius: and when this vanity, from the avowed ignorance of the artless baronet, subsided, it was only replaced by a sovereign contempt of his new associate. He made the most pompous display of his own little acquirements; he took every opportunity to ask questions of Sir Hugh which he knew he could not answer; and he would sometimes, with an arch mock solemnity, carry his exercise to him, and beg his assistance.
Sir Hugh bore this juvenile impertinence with unshaken good humour. But the spirits of Lionel were too mutinous for such lenity; he grew bolder in his attacks, and more fearless of consequences; and in a very short time, his uncle seemed to him little more than the butt at which he might level the shafts of his rising triumph; till tired, at length, though not angry, the baronet applied to Dr. Orkborne, and begged he would teach him, out of hand, some small little smattering of Latin sentences, by which he might make the young pedant think better of him.
Dr. Orkborne complied, and wrote him a few brief exercises; but these, after toiling day and night to learn, he pronounced so ill, and so constantly mis-applied, that, far from impressing his fellow-labourer with more respect, the moment he uttered a single word of his new lesson, the boy almost rolled upon the floor with convulsive merriment.
Sir Hugh, with whom these phrases neither lost nor gained by mistaking one word for another, appealed to Dr. Orkborne to remedy what he conceived to be an unaccountable failure. Dr. Orkborne, absorbed in his new personal pursuit, to which he daily grew more devoted, was earnest to be as little as possible interrupted, and therefore only advised him to study his last lesson, before he pressed for any thing new.
Study, however, was unavailing, and he heard this injunction with despair; but finding it constantly repeated upon every application for help, he was seized with a horror of the whole attempt, and begged to consult with Mr. Tyrold.
‘This gentleman you have recommended to me for my tutor,’ he cried, ‘is certainly a great scholar; I don’t mean to doubt that the least in the world, being no judge: and he is complaisant enough too, considering all that; but yet I have rather a suspicion he is afraid I shall make no hand of it; which is a thing so disheartening to a person in the line of improvement, that, to tell you the honest truth, I am thinking of giving the whole up at a blow; for, Lord help me! What shall I be the better for knowing Latin and Greek? It’s not worth a man’s while to think of it, after being a boy. And so, if you please, I’d rather you’d take Lionel home again.’
Mr. Tyrold agreed; but asked what he meant to do further concerning the Doctor?
‘Why that, brother, is the very thing my poor ignorant head wants your advice for: because, as to that plan about our learning all together, I see it won’t do; for either the boys will grow up to be no better scholars than their uncle, which is to say, none at all; or else they’ll hold everybody cheap, when they meet with a person knowing nothing; so I’ll have no more hand in it. And I shall really be glad enough to get such a thing off my mind; for it’s been weight enough upon it from the beginning.’
He then desired the opinion of Mr. Tyrold what step he should take to prevent the arrival of Clermont Lynmere, whom, he said, he dreaded to see, being determined to have no more little boys about him for some time to come.
Mr. Tyrold recommended re-settling him at Eton: but Sir Hugh declared he could not possibly do that, because the poor little fellow had written him word he was glad to leave school. ‘And I don’t doubt,’ he added, ‘but he’ll make the best figure of us all; because I had him put in the right mode from the first; though, I must needs own, I had as lieve see him a mere dunce all his life, supposing I should live so long, which God forbid in regard to his dying, as have him turn out a mere coxcomb of a pedant, laughing and grinning at everybody that can’t spell a Greek noun.’
Mr. Tyrold promised to take the matter into consideration; but early the next morning, the baronet again summoned him, and joyfully made known, that a scheme had come into his own head, which answered all purposes. In the first place, he said, he had really taken so prodigious a dislike to learning, that he was determined to send Clermont over the seas, to finish his Greek and Latin; not because he was fond of foreign parts, but for fear, if he should let him come to Cleves, the great distaste he had now conceived against those sort of languages, might disgust the poor boy from his book. And he had most luckily recollected, in the middle of the night, that he had a dear friend, one Mr. Westwyn, who was going the very next month to carry his own son to Leipsic; which was just what had put the thought into his head; because, by that means, Clermont might be removed from one studying place to t’other, without loss of time.
‘But for all that,’ he continued, ‘as this good gentleman here has been doing no harm, I won’t have him become a sufferer for my changing my mind: and so, not to affront him by giving him nothing to do, which would be like saying, “You may go your ways,” I intend he should try Indiana.’
Observing Mr. Tyrold now look with the extremest surpise, he added; ‘To be sure, being a girl, it is rather out of the way; but as there is never another boy, what can I do? Besides I shan’t so much mind her getting a little learning, because she’s not likely to make much hand of it. And this one thing, I can tell you, which I have learnt of my own accord; I’ll never press a person to set about studying at my time of life as long as I live, knowing what a plague it is.’
Lionel returned to Etherington with his father, and the rest of the scheme was put into execution without delay. Mr. Westwyn conveyed Clermont from Eton to Leipsic, where he settled him with the preceptor and masters appointed for his own son; and Dr. Orkborne was desired to become the tutor of Indiana.
At first, quitting his learned residence, the Doctor might indignantly have blushed at the proposition of an employment so much beneath his abilities: but he now heard it without the smallest emotion; sedately revolving in his mind, that his literary work would not be affected by the ignorance or absurdity of his several pupils.