Rattlin the Reefer Part 6

I was cured in three hours of being a saint, of despising flogging, and of aping Samuel.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

RALPH RECEIVES AN INFUSION OF PATRIOTISM--IS HIMSELF DRILLED AND DRILLS A TOUCH HOLE--HE TURNS OUT A MONSTROUS BIG LIAR--SOMEBODY COMES TO SEE HIM WHOM n.o.bODY CAN SEE, AND THE MYSTERY ENDS IN ANOTHER MIGRATION.

It is the nature of men and boys to run into extremes. I have carried the reader with me through my desponding and enthusiastic epochs. I now come to the most miserable of all, my mendacious one. An avowed poet is ent.i.tled, _de jure_, to a good lat.i.tude of fiction; but I abused this privilege most woefully. I became a confirmed and intrepid liar--and this, too, was the natural course of my education, or the want of it. I began to read all manner of romances. There was a military and chivalrous spirit strong in the school--the mania for volunteering was general, and our numerous school were almost all trained to arms. The government itself supplied us with a half-dozen drill sergeants to complete us in our manual and platoon exercises. We had a very pretty uniform, and our equipments as infantry were complete in all things, save and excepting that all the muskets of the junior boys had no touch-holes. Mine was delivered to me in this innocent state. Oh! that was a great mortification on field-days, when we were allowed to incorporate with the --- and --- Volunteers, whilst all the big lads actually fired off real powder, in line with real men, to be obliged to snap a wooden flint against a sparkless hammer. A mortification I could not, would not, endure.

There was a regular contention between Mr Root, my musket, and myself; and at last, by giving my sergeant a shilling, I conquered. Every day that our muskets were examined on parade, mine would be found with a touch-hole drilled in it; as certainly as it was found, so certainly was I hoisted. In that fever of patriotism, I, of all the school, though denied powder and shot, was the only one that bled for my country.

However, I at length had the supreme felicity of blowing powder in the face of vacancy, in high defiance of Buonaparte and his a.s.sembled legions on the coast of Boulogne. Thus I had military ardour added to my other ardencies. Moreover, I had learned to swim in the New River, and, altogether, began to fancy myself a hero.

I began now to appreciate and to avail myself of the mystery of my birth. I did not read romances and novels for nothing. So I began my mendacious career. Oh! the improbable and the impossible lies that I told, and that were retold, and all believed. I was a prince incognito; my father had coined money--and I gave my deluded listeners glimpses at pocket-pieces as proof; if I was doubted I fought. The elder boys shook their heads, and could make nothing of it. The ushers made what inquiries they dared, and found nothing which they could contradict positively, but much upon which to found conjecture.

Still, notwithstanding my success, my life began to grow burthensome.

The lies became too manifold, too palpable, and, to me, too onerous.

They had been extremely inconsistent--ridicule began to raise her hissing head. Shame became my constant companion--yet I lied on. I think I may safely say, that I would, at the time that I was giving myself out as a future king, have scorned the least violation of the truth, to have saved myself from the most bitter punishment, or to injure, in the least, my worst enemy; my lies were only those of a most inordinate vanity, begun in order to make a grand impression of myself, and persevered in through obstinacy and pride. But I was crushed beneath the stupendous magnificence of my own creations. I had been so circ.u.mstantial--described palaces, reviews, battles, my own charges, and now--oh! how sick all these fabrications made me! It was time I left the school, or that life left me, for it had become intolerable. And yet this state of misery, the misery of the convicted, yet obstinately persevering liar, lasted nearly a year. Let me hurry over it; but, at the same time, let me hold it up as a picture to youth, upon the same principle as the Spartans showed drunken slaves to their children.

Could the young but conceive a t.i.the of the misery I endured, they would never after swerve from the truth.

I have not time to expatiate on several droll mishaps that occurred to Mr Root; how he was once b.u.mped in all the glowing panoply of equine war; how, when one night, with his head well powdered, he crept upon all-fours, as was his wont, into one of the boys' bedrooms, to listen to their nightly conversations; and how such visit being expected, as his head lay on the side of the bedstead, it was there immovably fixed, by the application of a half-pound of warm cobbler's wax, and release could only be obtained by the Jason-like operation of shearing the fleecy locks. We must rapidly pa.s.s on. I was eager to get away from this school, and my desire was accomplished in the following very singular manner:--

One fine sunshiny Sunday morning, as we were all arranged in goodly fashion, two by two, round the play-ground, preparatory to issuing through the house to go to church, the unusual cry was heard of "Master Rattlin wanted," which was always understood to be the joyful signal that some parent or friend had arrived as a visitor. I was immediately hurried into the house, a whispering took place between Mr and Mrs Root, and the consequence was, that I was bustled up into the bedroom, and my second-best clothes, which I then had on, were changed for the best, and, with a supererogatory dab with a wet towel over my face, I was brought down, and, my little heart playing like a pair of castanets against my ribs, I was delivered into the tender keeping of the pedagogue.

Having taken me by the hand, whilst he was practising all the amenities with his countenance, he opened the parlour-door, where the supposit.i.tious visitor was expected to be found, and lo! the room was empty. Mrs Root and the servants were summoned, and they all positively declared, and were willing to swear to the fact, that a gentleman had gone into the room, who had never gone out. It was a front parlour, on the ground-floor, and from the window he could not have emerged, as the area intervened between that and the foot pavement; and to see a gentleman scrambling through by that orifice into the princ.i.p.al street of, and from one of the princ.i.p.al houses of the town, whilst all the people were going to church, was a little too preposterous even for Mr Root's matter-of-fact imagination. However, they all peeped up the chimney one after the other, as if an elderly, military-looking gentleman, enc.u.mbered with a surtout, for thus he was described, would have been so generous as to save my schoolmaster a shilling, by bustling up his chimney, and bringing down the soot. The person was not to be found; Root began to grow alarmed--a constable was sent for, and the house was searched from the attics to the cellar. The dwelling was not, however, robbed, nor any of its inmates murdered, notwithstanding the absconder could not be found.

Now, Mr Root was a wise man in his own generation, yet was he, notwithstanding, a great fool. He was one of that cla.s.s who can sometimes overreach a neighbour, yet, in doing so, inevitably loses his own balance, and tumbles into the mire. A sagacious ninny, who had an "_I told you so_," for every possible event after it had happened.

Instead of taking the common-sense view of the affair of the missed gentleman, and supposing that the footman had been bribed to let him quietly out at the street-door, who, perhaps, had found his feelings too little under his control to go through the interview with me that he sought, Root set about making a miracle of the matter. It was astounding--nay, superhuman! It boded some misfortune to him; and so it really did, by the manner in which he treated it. I verily believe, that had the servants or Mrs Root, who had seen the gentleman, averred to a cloven foot as peeping out from his military surtout, he would have given the a.s.sertion not only unlimited credence, but unlimited circulation also. However, as it was, he made himself most egregiously busy; there was his brother church-wardens and the curates summoned to a.s.sist him in a court of inquiry; evidence was taken in form, and a sort of _proces verbal_ drawn out and duly attested. Mr Root was a miracle-monger, and gloried in being able to make himself the hero of his own miracles.

Well, after he had solaced himself by going about to all his neighbours with this surprising paper in hand, for about the s.p.a.ce of a fortnight, he thought to put the climax to his policy and his vainglory, by taking it and himself up to the banker's in town, where he always got the full amount of his bills for my board and education paid without either examination or hesitation. The worthy money-changer looked grimly polite at the long and wonderful account of the schoolmaster, received a copy of the account of the mysterious visitor with most emphatic silence, and then bowed the communicant out of his private room with all imaginable etiquette.

Mr Root came home on excellent terms with himself; he imposed silence upon his good lady, his attentive masters and ushers, and then wiping the perspiration from his brow, proceeded to tell his admiring audience of his great, his very great exertions, and how manfully through the whole awful business he had done his duty. Alas! he soon found to his cost that he had done something more. In c.o.c.kney language, he had done himself out of a good pupil. A fortnight after, I was again "wanted."

There was a gla.s.s coach at the door. A very reserved sort of gentleman alighted, paid all demands up to the end of the ensuing half-year, answered no questions, but merely producing a doc.u.ment, handed me and all my worldly wealth into his vehicle, and off we drove.

To the best of my recollection, all the conversation that I heard from this taciturn person, was that sentence, so much the more remarkable for verity than originality, "Ask no questions, and I shall tell you no stories." Having nothing else to do in this my enforced _tete-a-tete_, I began to conjecture what next was to become of me. At first, I built no castles in the air; I had got quite sick of doing that aloud with my late school-fellows, and pa.s.sing them all off as facts. Still, it must be confessed that my feelings were altogether pleasurable. It was a soul-cheering relief to have escaped from out of that vast labyrinth of lies that I had planted around me, and no longer to dread the rod-bearing Root; even novelty, under whatever form it may present itself, is always grateful to the young.

In the midst of these agitations I again found myself in town; and I began to hope that I should once more see my foster-parents. I began to rally up my "little Latin and less Greek," in order to surprise the worthy sawyer and his wife; and I had fully determined to work out for him what the amount of his daily wages came to in a week, first by simple arithmetic, secondly by fractions, thirdly by decimals, and fourthly by duodecimals; and then to prove the whole correct by an algebraical equation. But all these triumphs of learning were not destined for me. I found, at length, that the gla.s.s coach drove up the inn-yard of some large coachmaster; but few words were said, and I was consigned to the coachman of one of the country stages, with as little remorse and as little ceremony as if I had been an ugly blear-eyed pug, forwarded in a basket, labelled "this side uppermost," to an old maiden aunt, or a superannuated grandmother.

This was certainly unhandsome treatment to one who had been lately seriously telling his companions that he was a disguised prince of the blood, forced, for state reasons, to keep a strict incognito. It is true, that I travelled with four horses, and was attended by a guard; nay, that a flourish of music preceded my arrival at various points of my journey; but all these little less than royal honours I shared with a plebeian butcher, a wheezing and attenuated plumber and glazier, and other of his lieges, all very useful, but hardly deemed ornamental members of the body politic.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

A CHAPTER OF DISAPPOINTMENTS, WHICH RALPH HOPES THE READER WILL NOT SHARE--SOME COMPARISONS WHICH HE HOPES WILL NOT BE FOUND ODIOUS, AND SOME REFLECTIONS WHICH HE THINKS CANNOT BE RESENTED.

My friends will perceive, that at the time of which I am speaking, the stage-coach contained, if not actually a bad character, I a person on the very verge of being one--that I was that graceless, yet tolerated being, a scamp, was very certain--yet my gentle demeanour, my smooth, bright countenance, and never-ceasing placid smile, would have given a very different impression of my qualities. I have been thus liberal in my confessions, in order that parents may see that their duties do not terminate where those of the schoolmaster begin; that the schoolmaster himself must be taken to task, and the watcher watched. I had been placed in one of the first boarding-schools near town; a most liberal stipend had been paid with me; I had every description of master; yet, after all this outlay of money, which is not dross--and waste of time, which is beyond price precious, what was I at leaving this academy? Let the good folks withinside of the Stickenham stage testify; by one trick or another I had contrived to make them all tolerably uncomfortable before the journey was half over.

But where am I going? Caesar and his fortunes are embarked in a stage-coach. An hour and a half had elapsed when I perceived that the horses were dragging the vehicle slowly up a steep hill. The full-leaved trees are arching for us, overhead, a verdant canopy; the air becomes more bracing and elastic: and even I feel its invigorating influence, and cease to drop slily the gravelly dirt I had collected from my shoes, down the neck and back of a very pretty girl, who sat blushing furiously on my left. Now the summit is gained and, in another moment, the coach thunders down the other side of the hill. But what a beautiful view is spread before my fascinated eyes! and then rose up in my young heart the long sleeping emotions of love, and kindred affection. Into whose arms was I to be received? whose were to be the beautiful lips that were now longing to kiss me with parental, perhaps fraternal rapture? Had I a sister? Could I doubt it at that ecstatic moment? How I would love her! The fatted calf was not only killed, but cooked, to welcome the long lost. Nor Latin, nor French, nor Greek, nor Mathematics, should embitter the pa.s.sing moments. This young summer, that breathed such aromatic joy around me, had put on its best smile to welcome me to my paternal abode. "No doubt," said I to myself--"no doubt, but that some one of the strange stories that I told of myself at Root's, is going to be realised."

In the midst of these rapturous antic.i.p.ations, each later one becoming more wild and more glorious than the previous one that begot it, it wanting still an hour of sundown, all at once the coach stopped before a house, upon a gentle elevation--stopped with a jerk, too, as if it were going to usher in some glorious event. I looked out, and behold! in hated gold letters, upon the hated blue board, the bitterly hated word "Academy" met my agonised sight.

I burst into tears. I needed no voice to tell me that I was the person to alight. I knew my doom. Farewell to all my glorious visions! I could have hurled back into the face of the laughing sun, my hate, and called him deceiver and traitor; for had he not, with other causes conspired to smile me, five minutes ago, into a fool's paradise?

"Master Rattlin, won't you please to alight?" said one of those under-toned, gerund-singing voices, that my instinct told me to be an usher's.

"No, thank'ee, sir," said I, amidst my sobbings, "I want to go home."

"But you are to get down here, however," said my evil-omened inviter.

"Your boxes are all off the coach, and the coachman wants to go forward."

"So do I."

"It's excessively droll this--hi, hi, hi as sure as my name's Saltseller, it is excessively droll. So you want to get forward, Master Rattlin? why come to school then, that's the way--droll, isn't it? Why, you've been riding backwards all the way, too--time to change--droll that--hi, hi!"

"It's no change," said I, getting out, sulkily, "from one school to another--and do you call this a school?" I continued, looking round contemptuously, for I found about twenty little boys playing upon a green knoll before the house, and over which we were compelled to walk to reach it, as the road did not come near the habitation. "Do you call this a school? Well, if you catch me being flogged here, I'm a sop, that's all--a school! And I suppose you're the usher--I don't think those little boys b.u.mped you last half-year."

"I don't think they did," said Mr Saltseller, which was actually the wretch's name, and with whom I fell desperately in hate at first sight.

"b.u.mp me!" he exclaimed soliloquising--and with that air of astonishment, as if he had heard the most monstrous impossibility spoken of imaginable. "b.u.mp me? droll, isn't it--excessively? Where have you been brought up, Master Rattlin?"

"Where they bar out tyrannical masters, and b.u.mp sneaking ushers," said I. "That's where I was brought up."

"Then that's what I call very bad bringing up."

"Not so bad as being brought down here, anyhow."

His next "excessively droll, isn't it?" brought us to the door of the academy; but, in pa.s.sing over the play-ground, I could see, at once, that I was with quite another cla.s.s of beings than those who composed my late school-fellows. They were evidently more delicately nurtured; they had not the air of schoolboy daring to which I had been so much accustomed, and they called each other "Master." Everything, too, seemed to be upon a miniature scale. The house was much smaller, yet there was an air of comfort and of health around, that at first I did not appreciate, though I could not help remarking it.

No sooner was I conducted into the pa.s.sage, than I heard a voice which I thought I remembered, exclaim, "Show Master Rattlin in here, and shut the door."

I entered; and the next moment I was in the arms of the mysterious and very beautiful lady that had called to see me the few times that I have recorded; and who, I conceived, was intimately connected with my existence. I think that I have before said that she never avowed herself, either to my nurse or to myself, as more than my G.o.dmother.

She evinced a brief, but violent emotion; and then controlled her features to a very staid and matronly expression. For myself I wept most bitterly; from many mingled emotions; but, to the shame of human nature, and of my own, wounded pride was the most intolerable pang that I felt. In all my day-dreams, I had made this lady the presiding genius. I gave her, in my inmost heart, all the reverence and the filial affection of a son; but it was the implied understanding between my love and my vanity, that in joining herself to me as a mother, she was to bestow upon me a d.u.c.h.ess at least; though I should not have thought myself over-well used had it been a princess. And here were all these glorious antic.i.p.ations merged, sunk, destroyed, in the person of a boarding-school mistress of about twenty boys, myself the biggest. It was no use that I said to myself, over and over again, she is not less lovely--her voice less musical, her manner less endearing, or her apparel less rich. The startling truth was ever in my ear--she "keeps a school," and consequently, she cannot be my mother.

She could not know what was pa.s.sing in my mind; but it was evident that my grief was of that intensity that nearly approached to misery. She took me by the hand, showed me my nice little bed, the large garden, the river that ran at the bottom of it, and placed before me fruit and cakes; I would not be consoled; what business had she to be a schoolmistress? I had a thousand times rather have had Mrs Brandon for a mother again--she had never deceived me. But I was soon aware that this lady, whom I now, for the first time, heard named, as Mrs Cherfeuil, was as little disposed to grant me the honour of calling her mother, as I was to bestow it. I was introduced to her husband as the son of a female friend of hers of early life; that she had stood G.o.dmother to me, that my parentage was respectable; and, as she before had sufficient references to satisfy him from the agent, who had called a week before my arrival, the good man thought there was nothing singular in the affair.

But let us describe this good man, my new pedagogue. In all things he was the ant.i.thesis of Mr Root. The latter was large, florid, and decidedly handsome--Mr Cherfeuil was little, sallow, and more than decidedly ugly. Mr Root was worldly wise, and very ignorant; Mr Cherfeuil, a fool in the world, and very learned. The mind of Mr Root was so empty, that he found no trouble in arranging his one idea and a half; Mr Cherfeuil's was so full that there was no room for any arrangement at all. Mr Root would have thought himself a fool if he condescended to write poetry; but he supposed he could, for he never tried. Mr Cherfeuil would have thought any man a fool that did not perceive at once that he, Cherfeuil, was born a great poet. Shall I carry, after the manner of Plutarch, the comparison any further? No; let us bring it to an abrupt conclusion, by saying, in a few words, that Mr Root was English, Mr Cherfeuil French; that the one had a large school, and the other a little one and that both were immeasurably great men in their own estimation--though not universally so in that of others.

Mr Cherfeuil was ambitious to be thought five feet high, his att.i.tude, therefore, was always erect; and, to give himself an air of consequence, he bridled and strutted like a full-breasted pigeon, with his head thrown back, and was continually in the act of wriggling his long chin into his ample neckerchief. He could not ask you how do you do, or say in answer to that question, "I thank you, sare, very well," without stamping prettily with his foot, as if cracking a snail, and tossing his chin into the air as if he were going to balance a ladder upon it.

Then, though his features were compressed into a small, monkeyfied compa.s.s, they were themselves, individually, upon a magnificent scale.

It was as if there had been crowded half a dozen gigantic specimens of human ugliness into my lady's china closet, all of which were elbowing each other for room. The eyes would have been called large, had it not been for the vast proportions of the nose, and the nose would have been thought preposterous, had it not been for the horrible dimensions of the mouth. Yet the expression of all these anomalies, though very grotesque, was not unpleasing. You smiled with satisfaction when you saw how great the improvement was that baboonery had made toward manhood. You might call him, in a word, a queer, little, ugly-looking box of yellow mortality, that contained some amiable qualities, and a great many valuable attainments. Of good sense, or of common sense, he was never known to show, during the whole period of his life, but one instance; and that was a most important one--a complete deference, in all things, to his stately and beautiful wife. Her dominion was undivided, complete, and unremitting. How she came to marry him was one of those human riddles that will never be satisfactorily resolved. He had been a French _emigre_, had had a most superior education, played on several instruments without taste, understood everything connected with the cla.s.sics but their beauty, and was deeply versed in mathematics, without comprehending their utility.

At this school my progress was rapid. All the care and attention that the most maternal of hearts could bestow upon me were mine; yet there was no approach to anything like familiarity on the part of Mrs Cherfeuil. There lay a large wild common before the house; there was a n.o.ble collection of deep water in the vicinity, in which I perfected my natatory studies (affected phraseology is the fashion), and my body strengthened, my mind improved, and I began to taste of real happiness.

It would be amusing work to write a biography of some of the most remarkable ushers. They seem to be the bats of the social scale.

Gentlemen will not own them, and the cla.s.ses beneath reject them. They are generally self-sufficient; the dependency of their situation makes them mean, and the exercise of delegated power tyrannical. If they have either spirit or talent, they lift themselves above their situation; but when they cannot do this, they are, in my estimation, the most abject of all cla.s.ses--gipsies and beggars not excepted. Mr Cherfeuil was, in himself, a mine of learning; but he delivered it out from the dark cavities of his mind, enc.u.mbered with so much ore, and in such misshaped ma.s.ses, that it required another person to arrange for use what he was so lavish in producing. A good usher or a.s.sistant was therefore necessary; but I do not recollect more than one, out of the thirty or forty that came and went during the three years I was at the school.

This cla.s.s of people are, alas! fatally susceptible of the tender impulses. They always find the rosy cheeks of the housemaid or the _en bon point_ of the cook irresistible. And they have themselves such delicate soft hands, so white and so ashy. On Sundays, too, their linen is generally clean! so, altogether, the maid-servants find them killing.

Mr Saltseller, who found everything droll, and who used to paint his cheeks, lost his situation just at the precise moment that the housemaid lost her character. Two losses together were not of very great moment; then we had another, and another, and another; and more characters were lost--till at last there did come a man:--