Читать книгу The Life and Exploits of the Scarlet Pimpernel - Emmuska Orczy - Страница 17

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During this first dozen years of his life, it was only natural that, as he was constantly passing from pillar to post, Percy should only have received the most elementary education. It is to be feared that he displayed an exaggerated talent for idleness coupled with a total incapacity to master the principles of hard work. With no fixed abode, lessons and discipline had been out of the question or else reduced by fits and starts to the absolute minimum at the kind though somewhat incompetent hands of Anne Derwent, so that the boy learnt to hate school books and took no pleasure in erudition.

On the other hand his early travels had inculcated in him a knowledge of men and affairs far in advance of his years; with that imitative capacity inherent in most children, he had picked up without conscious effort a remarkable fluency in French for one so young, which language he soon spoke not only idiomatically, but without the slightest trace of foreign accent.

Up to his seventh year he had been allowed to gratify his every whim and his chief delight was the pursuit of all sport such as a boy of his age could indulge in. From his earliest days his physique had been above the ordinary. He was broader, taller, and stronger than most boys of his own age. His well-knit little body and his long legs never seemed to tire however great the strain put upon them. He was able to outrun and outbox the country lads. And he hunted with the local hounds, never boggling at fences or refusing the exhausting cross-country runs.

But this freedom was now to come to an abrupt end. In consequence, Blake House saw a succession of tutors, for the most part worthy schoolmasters or clerics who, desirous of increasing their meager stipends, were loath to give up a lucrative post and took the line of least resistance.

One and all were sent away or resigned their duties through sheer inability to make any headway with the boy, though Percy was very far from being stupid. He had a rooted aversion to Latin and Greek and neither threats nor promises of reward induced him to alter his opinion. In mathematics he showed a marked genius for the business side of figures — a genius doubtless inherited from ancestor Blake. At the early age of ten he could keep an account book and ledgers, and computed compound interest. But the higher branches, such as algebra and trigonometry, frankly bored him, so that his teachers soon gave up the attempt of driving those into his head.

Above all, Percy showed a marvelously inventive faculty for getting rid of his tutors and he contrived to play on them some of those mad pranks of which he was so fond. A Mr. Horace Webley suffered very severely at his hands. To him, Percy took an instant dislike and determined to rid himself of his unwanted presence: this he duly effected by the simple expedient of tying Webley up in a disused barn and leaving him there for twenty-four hours. The poor man had to rely on a pile of green apples for his sole substance, thereby enduring such torture of colic that he could hardly walk to the London coach the next day.

“Thank goodness,” Percy exclaimed that same afternoon to Anne, “I hated Webley; he was always so greasily dressed.”