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Late in the October vacation the tranquil routine of our household was stirred by news of import to us children. We were to have a tutor of our own, and a school-room under our roof in true Old Virginia style—a fashion transplanted from the mother-country, eight generations before.

Our father “did not believe in boarding-schools,” holding that parents shirked a sacred duty in putting the moral and mental training of their offspring into the hands of hirelings, and sending them away from home at the formative age, just when girls and boys are most in need of the mother’s love and watchful care of their health and principles. Yet he fully appreciated the deficiencies of the small private schools we had attended, and would not hearken for a moment to the suggestion that we should be entered as day-scholars in the “Old-Field School,” which prefigured the Co-educational Institute of to-day. “Nice” girls and well-born boys attended a school of this kind, and lads were prepared for college there. The master was himself a college graduate. And the school was within easy distance of Scottville.

“Too much of an omnium gatherum to suit my taste!” I had overheard my father say to a friend who urged the advantages of this place, adding that B. L. was “a good teacher and fair classical scholar.” “He may be proficient in the classics, but he spells the name of one dead language, ‘Latten.’ I saw it in his own handwriting. I doubt not that he can parse in that tongue. I believe him capable of talking of the ‘three R’s.’ My children may never become accomplished, but they shall be able to write and speak—and spell—their mother-tongue correctly!”

Besides Mea and myself there were to be in the home-class ten other pupils, the daughters of personal friends of like mind with the independent thinker, and my brother Herbert, lately inducted into the integuments distinctive of his sex, was to have his trial taste of schooling. Our mother had taught us all to read and to write before committing our scholastic education to other hands. I fancy we may attribute to her training in the rudiments of learning the gratifying circumstance that one and all of her children have spelled—as did both parents—with absolute correctness.

The big dining-room in the left wing of the rambling house to which we had removed from Bellevue when the owner desired to take possession of it, was to be divided by a partition into school-room and hall; a room opening from the former would be the tutor’s chamber, and an apartment in another wing was to be the dining-room. Among other charming changes in house and family, Dorinda Moody, a ward of my father’s of whom I was particularly fond, was to live with us and attend “our school.”

I trod upon air all day long, and dismissed the fairy and wonder tales, with which I was wont to dream myself to sleep nightly, for visions of the real and present. “Our Tutor”—a title I rolled as a sweet morsel under my restless tongue—was a divinity student from Union Theological Seminary, in Prince Edward County. The widow of the founder of this school of the prophets, and the former pastor of my parents, lived in the immediate neighborhood of the seminary, and was the intermediary in the transaction. Through her my father was put into communication with the faculty—scholars and gentlemen all of them!!—who agreed in recommending the student whom I have dubbed “Mr. Tayloe” in my Old-Field School-Girl. (The significance of the twin exclamation-points will be manifest in the next few pages.)

The sun had shivered out of sight below the horizon on a raw November day when I returned home after a tramp over soaked and sere fields, attended by my young maid and her elder sister—“bright” mulattoes—and was met in the end-porch by their mother, my mother’s personal attendant and the supervisor of nursery-tenants. She was the prettiest mulatto I have ever seen, owing her regular features and long hair, as she was proud of telling, to an Indian ancestor. He had entailed upon her the additional bequest of a peppery temper, and it was on deck now. She was full of bustle and tartly consequential.

“Lordy, Miss Virginny! whar have you been traipsin’ so late with jus’ these chillun to look after you? It’s pretty nigh plum dark, an’ you, a young lady, cavortin’ roun’ the country like a tom-boy!”

She hauled me into the house while she talked, and pulled off my shawl and hood, scolding vehemently at the sight of my muddy shoes, and promising Molly and Paulina a whipping apiece for not bringing me back sooner.

I cared not one whit for her scolding after I heard the news with which she was laden.

Mr. Tayloe had come! My dream-castle had settled into stability upon rock bottom.

Ten minutes afterward the school-room door was pushed open timidly, and a childish figure appeared upon the threshold. I was rather tall for my years, and as lean and lithe as a greyhound. My touzled hair had been wet and sleeked by Mary Anne’s vigorous fingers. I wore a brown “Circassian” frock and a spandy clean white apron. The room was comfortably furnished with desks and chairs, now pushed to the wall, the carpeted area about the hearth being intended as a sitting-room for the tutor. There were a table, a desk, and four or five chairs. The room was bright with lamp and firelight. In front of the red hearth sat my father and a much smaller man.

His diminutive stature was the first of a series of shocks I was destined to receive. I had expected him to be tall and stately. Village wags—with none of whom he was popular—spread the story that he intermitted his studies for a year in the hope that in the interim he might grow tall enough to see over the front of a pulpit.

My father looked over his shoulder and held out his hand.

“Come in, my daughter,” in kindly, hearty accents. And, as I obeyed, “Mr. Tayloe, this is my second daughter—Miss Mary Virginia.”

The hero of my dreams did not rise. There was naught amiss or unusual in the manner of the introduction. I was “Miss Virginia” to men of my father’s age, as to youths and boys. I was used to see them get up from their seats to speak to me, as to a woman of treble my years. I looked, then, almost aghast at the man who let me walk up to him and offer my hand before he made any motion in recognition of the unimportant fact of my presence. His legs were crossed; his hands, the palms laid lightly together, were tucked between his legs. He pulled one out to meet mine, touched my fingers coldly, and tucked both hands back as before.

“How do you do, Mr. Tayloe?” quoth I, primly respectful, as I had been trained to comport myself with strangers.

He grunted something syllabic in response, and, chilled to the backbone of my being, I retreated to the shadow of my father’s broad shoulder. He passed his arm about me and stroked what he used to call my “Shetland pony mane.” He seldom praised any one of us openly, but he was a fond father, and he and the “tom-boy” were close comrades.

“I hope you will not find this young lady stupid, Mr. Tayloe,” he went on, the strong, tender hand still smoothing the rebellious locks. “She is a bit flighty sometimes, but she has packed away a good deal of miscellaneous information in this curly pate. I hope she may become a steady student under your care. What she needs is application.”

Receiving no answer beyond a variation of the grunt, the tutor staring all the time into the heart of the fire, the dear man went on to tell of books that had been read aloud in the family, as a supplementary course to what we had learned in school, referring to me now and then when he did nor recall title or subject. I fancy, now, that he did this to rid us both of the embarrassment of the first interview, and to draw out the taciturn stranger who was to guide my mind in future. Loyal as was my worshipful admiration of my father, I could not but feel, although I could not have formulated the thought, that the trend of talk was not tactful.

Nevertheless, I glowed inwardly with indignation that the third person present never once took his eyes from the roaring fire, and that his face, round, fair, and almost boyish in contour, wore a slight smile, rather supercilious than amused, his brows knitting above the smile in a fashion I was to know more of in the next ten months.

I have drawn Mr. Tayloe’s portrait at full length in An Old-Field School-Girl, and I need not waste time and nervous tissue in repetition of the unlovely picture. He was the Evil Genius of my childhood, and the term of his tutelage may be called the dark underside of an otherwise happy school-life. Looking back from the unclouded heights of mature age, I see that my childish valuation of him was correct. He was, in his association with all without the walls of the school-room—always excepting the servants, who took his measure amazingly soon—a gentleman in bearing and speech. He was, I have heard, well-born. He had gained rank as a student in the university of which he was a graduate.

At heart and in grain he was a coarse, cruel tyrant, beloved by none of his pupils, hated by my brother Herbert and myself with an intensity hardly conceivable in children of our tender years. I owe him one evil debt I can never forget. Up to now I had had my little gusts of temper and fleeting grudges against those who angered me. Save for the episode of the doll-whipping recorded in an earlier chapter, I had never cherished—if I had felt—an emotion of vindictiveness or a desire for revenge. This man—this embryo minister of the gospel of love and peace—aroused in me passions that had slumbered unsuspected by all—most of all, by myself.

From the beginning he disliked me. Perhaps because he chose to assume, from the manner of my introduction to him, that I was a spoiled, conceited child who ought to be “taken down.” Perhaps because, while I flushed up hotly under rebuke and sarcasms that entered lavishly into the process of “taking down,” I never broke down abjectly under these, after the manner of other pupils. Our father had the true masculine dislike for womanish tears. He had drilled us from babyhood to restrain the impulse to cry. Many a time I was sent from the table or room when my eyes filled, with the stern injunction, “Go to your room and stay there until you can control yourself!” I thought it harsh treatment, then. I have thanked and blessed him for the discipline a thousand times since. Our tutor, I verily believed then, and I do not doubt now, gloated in the sight of the sufferings wrought by his brutality. I can give it no milder name. I have seen him smile—a tigerish gleam—when he had scolded the ten outsiders—the “externes,” as the French call them—into convulsive weeping. Mea and I felt the lash of his tongue quite as keenly as the rest, but our home-drill stood us in good stead.

He rarely found fault with her. She was a comely girl, nearly fourteen, and womanly for that age, exemplary in deportment, and an excellent student. It could never be said of her that she “lacked application.” If one thing were more hateful to me than his surliness and sneers to me, it was his cubbish gallantry to my pretty sister. He pronounced her openly the most promising of his scholars, and volunteered to give her private lessons in botany. Such tokens of preference may have been the proof of a nascent attachment on his part, or but another of his honorable ways of amusing himself. It was a genuine comfort to me to see that she met his gallantries with quiet self-possession and cool indifference remarkable in a country girl who knew nothing of “society” and flirtation.

I was the black sheep of the flock, as he took pains to say twice or a dozen times a week, in the hearing of the school. To me he imparted privately the agreeable information that I “would never be anything but a disgrace to my parents; that, in spite of what my father might say to the contrary, I was stupid by nature and incorrigibly lazy.” He rang the changes upon that first unfortunate interview until I was goaded to dumb frenzy. The persecution, begun with the opening day of the term, was never abated. He would overhear from his chamber window snatches of talk between my mates and myself, as we played or sat in the garden below—merry, flippant nothings, as harmless as the twitter of the birds in the trees over our heads. When we were reassembled in the school-room he would make my part in the prattle the text of a lecture ten minutes long, holding the astonished, quivering child up to ridicule, or stinging her to the quick with invectives. When he lost his temper—which happened often—he spared nobody. He went out of his way to attack me. Lest this should read like the exaggeration of fancied slights to the self-willed, pert youngling he believed me to be, let me cull one or two sprigs of rue from the lush growth that embittered ten months of my existence:

I cut my finger to the bone one morning (I carry the scar still). My mother bound it up in haste, for the school-bell was ringing. I got into my seat just in time for the opening exercises. A chapter was read—verse by verse—in turn by the pupils, after which the prospective divine “offered” a prayer. He stood with his eyes shut and his forehead knitted into a frown. We knelt with our backs to him before our chairs around the room. It seems but natural to me, in reflecting upon that perfunctory “exercise,” that our reading “in course” should never, during Mr. Tayloe’s reign, have gone beyond the Old Testament. We read that exactly as it came—word for word. There was nothing of the New Testament in his walk or conversation.

On this day we had a chapter in Kings—First or Second—in which occurred a verse my father would have skipped quietly at our family worship. Sarah L. was the biggest girl in the class—in her sixteenth year, and quite grown up. She dexterously slipped past the bit of Bible history, taking the next verse, as if by accident.

“Go back and read your verse!” thundered the young theologue. “I will have no false modesty in my school.”

My cheeks flamed as redly with anger as Sarah’s had with maiden shame, as I followed suit with the next passage. I resented the coarse insult to a decent girl, and the manner thereof. I was faint with the pain of the wounded finger, and altogether so unnerved that my voice shook and fell below the pitch at which we were taught to read aloud.

Out barked the bulldog again over the top of the open Bible he held:

“What ails Miss High-and-Mighty to-day? In one of your tantrums, I see. Read that verse again, and loud enough to be heard by somebody besides your charming self!”

Where—will be asked by the twentieth-century reader—was parental affection all this while? How could a fearless gentleman like your father submit for an hour to the maltreatment of his young daughter and the daughters of friends who confided in his choice of a tutor?

My answer is direct. We never reported the worst of our wrongs to our parents. To “tell tales out of school” in that generation was an offence the enormity of which I cannot make the modern student comprehend. It was a flagrant misdemeanor, condemned by tradition, by parental admonition, and by a code of honor accepted by us all. I have known pupils to be expelled for daring to report at home the secrets of what was a prison-house for three-fourths of every working-day. And—strangest of all—their mates thenceforward shunned the tale-tellers as sinners against scholastic and social laws.

“If you get a flogging at school, you will get another at home!” was a stock threat that set the seal of silence upon the culprit’s lips. To carry home the tale of unjust punishment meted out to a school-fellow would be a gross breach of honorable usage.

The whole system smacked of inquisitorial methods, and gave the reactionary impetus to the pendulum in the matter of family discipline and school jurisdiction which helped on the coming of the Children’s Age in which we now live.

The despotism of that direful period, full of portents and pain, may have taught me fortitude. It awoke me to the possibilities of evil hitherto undreamed of in my sunny life. I have lain awake late into the night, again and again, smarting in the review of the day’s injuries, and dreading what the morrow might bring of malicious injustice and overt insult, and cudgelling my hot brain to devise some method of revenge upon my tormentor. Childish schemes, all of them, but the noxious seed was one with that which ripens into murder in the first degree.

One absurd device that haunted and tempted me for weeks was that I should steal into the tutor’s room some day, when he had gone to ride or walk, and strew chopped horsehair between the sheets. The one obstacle to the successful prosecution of the scheme was that we had no white horses. Ours were dark bay and “blooded chestnut.” No matter how finely I might chop the hairs, which would prick like pins and bite like fleas, the color would make them visible when the sheets were turned down.

It was a crime!—this initiation of a mere infant into the mysteries of the innate possibilities of evil in human nature. I had learned to hate with all my heart and soul. In all my childish quarrels I had never felt the temptation to lift my hand against a playmate. I understood now that I could smite this tyrant to the earth if I had the power and the opportunity. This lesson I can never forget, or forgive him who taught it to me. It was a new and a soiled page in the book of experience.

Despite the continual discouragement that attended the effort to keep my promise to study diligently, I worked hard in school, partly from love of learning, partly to please my parents—chiefly, it must be confessed, because I shrank, as from the cut of a cowhide, from the pitiless ridicule and abuse that followed upon the least lapse from absolute perfection in recitation.

Mathematics was never my strong point, and the tutor quickly detected this one of many weak joints in my armor. There was meaning in the grin with which he informed me one day, not long after Christmas, that he had set a test-sum for each of the second class in arithmetic.

“If you can do that sum without, any, help, from, anybody,” slowly, the grin widening at each comma, “you may go on with the next chapter in arithmetic. If not, you will be turned back to Simple Division. Of course, you will do yours, if nobody else can work out the answer!”

Sneer and taunt stung and burned, as he meant they should. I took the slate from his hand, and carried it to my desk before glancing at it. It was a horrible sum! I knew it would be, and I forthwith made up my mind not to try to do it. He might turn me back to Addition, for all I cared. The worm had turned and stiffened in stubborn protest.

At recess I discovered that not another girl of the six in our class had an imposition half so severe as my enemy had set for me. The effect was totally unlike what he had anticipated. My spirit leaped to arms. I would do that sum and keep up with my class—or die!

I bore the slate off to my room as soon as school was out that afternoon, and wrought mightily upon the task until the supper-bell rang. My work covered both sides of the slate, and after supper I waylaid my sister in the hall and begged her to look at what I had done. She was the crack arithmetician of the school, and I could trust her decision. She sat down upon the stairs—I standing, wretched and suspenseful, beside her—and went patiently over it all.

Then she said, gently and regretfully: “No, it is not right. I can’t, of course, tell you what is wrong, but you have made a mistake.”

With a hot lump in my throat I would not let break into tears, I rushed off up-stairs, rubbed out every figure of my making, and fell to work anew upon the original example. Except when I obeyed the summons to prayers, I appeared no more below that night. My sister found me bent over the slate when she came up to bed, and said not a word to distract my attention. By ten o’clock the room was so cold that I got an old Scotch plaid of my father’s from the closet, and wrapped myself in it. Still, my limbs were numb and my teeth chattered when, at one o’clock in the morning, I laid the slate by, in the joyous conviction that I had conquered in the fight. I had invented a proof-method of my own—truly ingenious in a child with no turn for mathematics—but this I did not suspect. I honestly believed, instead, that it was an inspiration from Him to whom I had been praying through all the hours of agonized endeavor. I thanked the Author before I slept.

When the class was called upon to show their sums next morning, it appeared, to my unspeakable amazement and rapture, that my example and one other—that done by Sarah L., who was backward in figures, although advanced in years—were right, and all the others wrong.

The gentle shepherd of our fold took up my slate again when the examination was over, and eyed it sourly, his head on one side, his fingers plucking at his lower lip, a trick which I knew prefaced something particularly spiteful. Surely I had nothing to fear now? Having wrung from him the reluctant admission that my work was correct, I might rest upon my laurels.

I had underrated his capacity for evil-doing. When he glared at me over the upper frame of the big slate, the too-familiar heart-nausea got hold upon me.

“You”—he seldom deigned to address me by my proper name—“pretend to tell me that nobody helped you with this sum?”

“Nobody!” I uttered, made bold by innocence.

“Ha-a-a-a!” malevolence triumphant in the drawl waxing into a snarl. “As I happened to see you and your sister last night in the hall, and heard you ask her to show you how to do it, that tale won’t go down, my lady.”

“She didn’t help me—” I began, eagerly.

“Silence!” thumping the slate upon the table, and scowling ferociously. “How dare you lie to me?”

I glanced at Mea in an agony. She arose in her place, pale to the lips, albeit she had never felt his wrath, but her voice was firm:

“I only told her the sum was not right. I did not tell her what part of it was wrong.”

The blending of snarl and smile was something to be recollected for all time. The smile was for her, the snarl for me.

“It is natural that your sister should try to defend you. But will you please tell me, Miss Pert, what more help you could have wanted than to be told by somebody who knew—as your sister did—that your sum was wrong? Of course, you could rub out and begin again. But for her you would not have tried a second time. Bring that sponge here!”

I obeyed.

“Take that slate!”

He made as if he would not contaminate his hand by passing it to me, laying it on the table and pointing a disdainful finger at it.

Again I obeyed.

“Now, Miss Deceitful, wipe every figure off that slate, and never try any such cock-and-bull story upon me again as long as you live! I am too old a bird to be caught with your chaff!”

He laughed aloud in savage glee, dismissed the class with a wave of his hand, and called up the next.

I was turned back to Short Division, with the added stigma of intentional deception and cheating shadowing me.

Nearly fifteen years after our first tutor withdrew his baleful presence from our home, my husband was urging upon my brother Herbert the claims of the ministry of reconciliation as the profession to which the younger man was evidently called by nature and by Providence. Herbert looked up with the frank smile those who knew him will never forget. It was like the clear shining of the sweetest and purest soul ever committed to mortal keeping.

“ ‘Plato! thou reasonest well!’ There is but one argument you have not bowled over. I registered an oath—as bitter as that Hamilcar exacted of Hannibal—when I was a boy, that I would thrash that cur Tayloe within an inch of his life as soon as I should be big enough to do it. And it wouldn’t be quite the thing to flog a brother clergyman. If anything could keep me out of the pulpit, it would be the fact that he is in it. That fellow’s cruelties scarred my memory for life, although I was not seven years old when I knew him.”

In dismissing the disagreeable theme, I offer this bit of testimony to the truth of my story of the reign of terror neither of us ever forgave.