Complete Novels of Maria Edgeworth

by Maria Edgeworth

  “After repaying all my expenses for my journey and machinery, I found I had six guineas and a crown to spare. So I thought myself a rich man; and, having never seen so much money together in my life before, as six golden guineas and a crown, I should, most probably, like the generality of people who come into the possession of unexpected wealth, have become extravagant, had it not been for the timely advice of my kind monitor, Mr. Y —— . When I showed him a pair of Chinese tumblers, which I had bought from a pedlar for twice as much as they were worth, merely because they pleased my fancy, he shook his head, and observed that I might, before my death, want this very money to buy a loaf of bread. ‘If you spend your money as fast as you get it, Jervas,’ said he, ‘no matter how ingenious or industrious you are, you will always be poor. Remember the good proverb that says, Industry is Fortune’s right hand, and Frugality her left;’ a proverb which has been worth ten times more to me than all my little purse contained: so true it is, that those do not always give most who give money.”

  CHAPTER III.

  “I had soon reason to rejoice at having thrown away no more money on baubles, as I had occasion for my whole stock to fit myself out for a new way of life. ‘Jervas,’ said Mr. Y —— to me, ‘I have at last found an occupation, which I hope will suit you.’ — Unknown to me, he had been, ever since he first saw my little model, intent upon turning it to my lasting advantage. Among the gentlemen of the society which I have before mentioned, there was one who had formed a design of sending some well-informed lecturer through England, to exhibit models of the machines used in manufactories: Mr. Y —— purposely invited this gentleman the evening that I exhibited my tin-mine, and proposed to him that I should be permitted to accompany his lecturer. To this he agreed. Mr. Y —— told me that although the person who was fixed upon as lecturer was not exactly the sort of man he should have chosen, yet as he was a relation of the gentleman who set the business on foot, no objection could well be made to him.

  “I was rather daunted by the cold and haughty look with which my new master, the lecturer, received me when I was presented to him. Mr. Y —— , observing this, whispered to me at parting. ‘Make yourself useful, and you will soon be agreeable to him. We must not expect to find friends ready made wherever we go in the world: we often have to make friends for ourselves with great pains and care.’ It cost me both pains and care, I know, to make this lecturer my friend. He was what is called born a gentleman; and he began by treating me as a low-born upstart, who, being perfectly ignorant, wanted to pass for a self-taught genius. That I was low-born, I did not attempt to conceal; nor did I perceive that I had any reason to be ashamed of my birth, or of having raised myself by honest means to a station above that in which I was born. I was proud of this circumstance, and therefore it was no torment to me to hear the continual hints which my well-born master threw out upon this subject. I moreover never pretended to any knowledge which I had not; so that, by degrees, notwithstanding his prejudices, he began to feel that I had neither the presumption of an upstart, nor of a self-taught genius. I kept in mind the counsel given to me by Mr. Y —— , to endeavour to make myself useful to my employer; but it was no easy matter to do this at first, because he had such a dread of my awkwardness that he would never let me touch any of his apparatus. I was always left to stand like a cipher beside him whilst he lectured; and I had regularly the mortification of hearing him conclude his lecture with, ‘Now, gentlemen and ladies, I will not detain you any longer from what, I am sensible, is much better worth your attention than any thing I can offer — Mr. Jervas’s puppet-show.’

  “It happened one day that he sent me with a shilling, as he thought, to pay a hostler for the feeding of his horse; as I rubbed the money between my finger and thumb, I perceived that the white surface came off, and the piece looked yellow: I recollected that my master had the day before been showing some experiments with quicksilver and gold, and that he had covered a guinea with quicksilver: so I immediately took the money back, and my master, for the first time in his life, thanked me very cordially; for this was in reality a guinea, and not a shilling. He was also surprised at my directly mentioning the experiment he had shown.

  “The next day that he lectured, he omitted the offensive conclusion about Mr. Jervas’s puppet-show. I observed, farther, to my infinite satisfaction, that after this affair of the guinea, he was not so suspicious of my honesty as he used to appear to be: he now yielded more to his natural indolence, and suffered me to pack up his things for him, and to do a hundred little services which formerly he used roughly to refuse at my hands; saying, ‘I had rather do it myself, sir,’ or, ‘I don’t like to have any body meddle with my things, Mr. Jervas.’ But his tone changed, and it was now, ‘Jervas, I’ll leave you to put up these things, whilst I go and read;’ — or, ‘Jervas, will you see that I leave none of my goods behind me, there’s a good lad?’ — In truth, he was rather apt to leave his goods behind him: he was the most absent and forgetful man alive. During the first half year we travelled together, whilst he attempted to take care of his own things, I counted that he lost two pair and a half of slippers, one boot, three night-caps, one shirt, and fifteen pocket-handkerchiefs. Many of these losses, I make no doubt, were set down in his imagination to my account whilst he had no opinion of my honesty; but I am satisfied that he was afterwards thoroughly convinced of the injustice of his suspicions, as, from the time that I had the charge of his goods, as he called them, to the day we parted, including a space of above four years and a half, he never lost any thing but one red nightcap, which, to the best of my belief, he sent in his wig one Sunday morning to the barber’s, but which never came back again, and an old ragged blue pocket-handkerchief, which he said he put under his pillow, or into his boot, when he went to bed at night. He had an odd way of sticking his pocket-handkerchief into his boot, ‘that he might be sure to find it in the morning.’ I suspect the handkerchief was carried down in the boot when it was taken to be cleaned. He was, however, perfectly certain that these two losses were not to be imputed to any carelessness of mine. He often said he was obliged to me for the attention I paid to his interests; he treated me now very civilly, and would sometimes condescend to explain to me in private what I did not understand in his public lectures.

  “I was presently advanced to the dignity of his secretary. He wrote a miserably bad hand: and his manuscripts were so scratched and interlined, that it was with the utmost difficulty he could decipher his own writing, when he was obliged to have recourse to his notes in lecturing. He was, moreover, extremely near-sighted; and he had a strange trick of wrinkling up the skin on the bridge of his nose when he was perplexed: altogether, his look was so comical when he began to pore over these papers of his, that few of the younger part of our audiences could resist their inclination to laugh. This disconcerted him beyond measure; and he was truly glad to accept my offer of copying out his scrawls fairly in a good bold round hand. I could now write, if I may say it without vanity, an excellent hand, and could go over his calculations as far as the first four rules of arithmetic were concerned; so that I became quite his factotum: and I thought myself rewarded for all my pains, by having opportunities of gaining every day some fresh piece of knowledge from the perusal of the notes which I transcribed.

  “It was now that I felt most thoroughly the advantage of having learned to read and write: stores of useful information were opened to me, and my curiosity and desire to inform myself were insatiable. I often sat up half the night reading and writing: I had free access now to all my fellow-traveller’s books, and I thought I could never study them enough.

  “At the commencement of my studies, my master often praised my diligence, and would show me where to look for what I wanted in his books, or explain difficulties: I looked up to him as a miracle of science and learning; nay, I was actually growing fond of him, but this did not last long. In process of time, he grew shy of explaining things to me; he scolded me for thumbing his books, though, God knows, my th
umbs were always cleaner than his own, and he thwarted me continually upon some pretence or other. I could not for some time conceive the cause of this change in my master’s behaviour: indeed it was hard for me to guess or believe that he was become jealous of the talents and knowledge of a poor lad, whose ignorance he, but a few years before, had so much despised and derided. I was the more surprised at this new turn of his mind, because I was conscious that, instead of becoming more conceited, I had of late become more humble; but this humility was, by my suspicious master, attributed to artifice, and tended more than any thing to confirm him in his notion that I had formed a plan to supplant him in his office of lecturer, a scheme which had never entered into my head. I was thunderstruck when he one day said to me, ‘You need not study so hard, Mr. Jervas; for I promise you that, even with Mr. Y — —’s assistance, and all your art, you will not be able to supplant me, clever as, with all affected humility, you think yourself.’

  “The truth lightened upon me at once. Had he been a judge of the human countenance, he must have seen my innocence in my looks: but he was so fixed in his opinion, that I knew any protestations I could make of my never having thought of the scheme he imputed to me, would serve only to confirm him in his idea of my dissimulation. I contented myself with returning to him his books and his manuscripts, and thenceforward withdrew my attention from his lectures, to which I had always till now been one of the most eager auditors; by these proceedings I hoped to quiet his suspicions. I no longer applied myself to any studies in which he was engaged, to show him that all competition with him was far from my thoughts; and I have since reflected that this fit of jealousy of his, which I at the time looked upon as a misfortune, because it stopped me short in pursuits which were highly agreeable to my taste, was in fact of essential service to me. My reading had been too general; and I had endeavoured to master so many things, that I was not likely to make myself thoroughly skilled in any. As a blacksmith said once to me, when he was asked why he was not both blacksmith and whitesmith, ‘The smith that will meddle with all things may go shoe the goslings;’ an old proverb, which, from its mixture of drollery and good sense, became ever after a favourite of mine.

  “Having returned my master’s books, I had only such to read as I could purchase or borrow for myself, and I became very careful in my choice: I also took every opportunity of learning all I could from the conversation of sensible people, wherever we went; and I found that one piece of knowledge helped me to another often when I least expected it. And this I may add, for the encouragement of others, that every thing which I learned accurately was, at some time or other of my life, of use to me.

  “After having made a progress through England, my fellow-traveller determined to try his fortune in the metropolis, and to give lectures there to young people during the winter season. Accordingly, we proceeded towards London, taking Woolwich in our way, where we exhibited before the young gentlemen of the military academy. My master, who, since he had withdrawn his notes from my hands, had no one to copy them fairly, found himself, during his lecture, in some perplexity; and, as he exhibited his usual odd contortions upon this occasion, the young gentlemen could not restrain their laughter: he also prolonged his lecture more than his audience liked, and several yawned terribly, and made signs of an impatient desire to see what was in my box, as a relief from their fatigue. This my master quickly perceived, and, being extremely provoked, he spoke to me with a degree of harshness and insolence which, as I bore it with temper, prepossessed the young company in my favour. He concluded his lecture with the old sentence: ‘Gentlemen, I shall no longer detain you from what I am sure is much better worthy of your attention than any thing I can offer, viz. Mr. Jervas’s puppet-show.’ This was an unlucky speech on the present occasion, for it happened that every body, after having seen what he called my puppet-show, was precisely of this opinion. My master grew more and more impatient, and wanted to hurry me away, but one spirited young man most warmly took me and my tin-mine under his protection: I stood my ground, insisting upon my right to finish my exhibition, as my master had been allowed full time to finish his. The young gentleman who supported me was as well pleased by my present firmness as he had been by my former patience. At parting he made a handsome collection for me, which I refused to accept, taking only the regular price. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘you shall be no loser by this. You are going to town; my father is in London; here is his direction. I’ll mention you to him the next time I write home, and you’ll not be the worse for that.’

  “As soon as we got to London, I went according to my direction. The young gentleman had been more punctual in writing home than young gentlemen sometimes are. I was appointed to come with my models the next evening, when a number of young people were collected, beside the children of the family. The young spectators gathered round me at one end of a large saloon, asking me innumerable questions after the exhibition was over; whilst the master of the house, who was an East India director, was walking up and down the room, conversing with a gentleman in an officer’s uniform. They were, as I afterwards understood, talking about the casting of some guns at Woolwich for the East India Company. ‘Charles,’ said the director, coming to the place where we were standing, and tapping one of his sons on the shoulder, ‘do you recollect what your brother told us about the proportion of tin which is used in casting brass cannon at Woolwich?’ The young gentleman answered that he could not recollect, but referred his father to me; adding, that his brother told him I was the person from whom he had the information. My memory served me exactly; and I had reason to rejoice that I had not neglected the opportunity of gaining this knowledge, during our short stay at Woolwich. The East India director, pleased with my answering his first question accurately, condescended, in compliance with his children’s entreaties, to examine my models, and questioned me upon a variety of subjects: at length he observed to the gentleman with whom he had been conversing, that I explained myself well, that I knew all I did know accurately, and that I had the art of captivating the attention of young people. ‘I do think,’ concluded he, ‘that he would answer Dr. Bell’s description better than any person I have seen.’ He then inquired particularly into my history and connexions, all of which I told him exactly. He took down the direction to Mr. Y —— , and my good master (as I shall always call Mr. R —— ), and to several other gentlemen, at whose houses I had been during the last three or four years, telling me that he would write to them about me; and that if he found my accounts of myself were as exact as my knowledge upon other subjects, he thought he could place me in a very eligible situation. The answers to these letters were all perfectly satisfactory: he gave me the letter from Mr. R —— , saying ‘you had better keep this letter, and take care of it; for it will be a recommendation to you in any part of the world where courage and fidelity are held in esteem.’ Upon looking into this letter, I found that my good master had related, in the handsomest manner, the whole of my conduct about the discovery of the vein in his mine.

  “The director now informed me that, if I had no objection to go to India, I should be appointed to go out to Madras as an assistant to Dr. Bell, one of the directors of the asylum for the instruction of orphans; an establishment which is immediately under the auspices of the East India Company, and which does them honour {Footnote: Vide a small pamphlet, printed for Cadell and Davies, entitled, “An Experiment in Education, made at the Male Asylum of Madras, by the Rev. Dr. A. Bell.”}.

  “The salary which was offered me was munificent beyond my utmost expectations; and the account of the institution, which was put into my hands, charmed me. I speedily settled all my concerns with the lecturer, who was in great astonishment that this appointment had not fallen upon him. To console him for the last time, I showed him a passage in Dr. Bell’s pamphlet, in which it is said that the doctor prefers to all others, for teaching at his school, youths who have no fixed habits as tutors, and who will implicitly follow his directions. I was at this time but nineteen: my mas
ter was somewhat appeased by this view of the affair, and we parted, as I wished, upon civil terms; though I could not feel much regret at leaving him. I had no pleasure in living with one who would not let me become attached to him; for, having early met with two excellent friends and masters, the agreeable feelings of gratitude and affection were in a manner necessary to my happiness.

  “Before I left England, I received new proofs of Mr. R — —’s goodness: he wrote to me to say that, as I was going to a distant country, to which a small annuity of ten guineas a year could not easily be remitted, he had determined to lay out a sum equal to the value of the annuity he had promised me, in a manner which he hoped would be advantageous: he further said, that as the vein of the mine with which I had made him acquainted turned out better than he expected, he had added the value of fifty guineas more than my annuity; and that if I would go to Mr. Ramsden’s, mathematical instrument maker, in Piccadilly, I should receive all he had ordered to be ready for me. At Mr. Ramsden’s I found ready to be packed up for me two small globes, siphons, prisms, an air-gun and an air-pump, a speaking trumpet, a small apparatus for showing the gases, and an apparatus for freezing water. Mr. Ramsden informed me that these were not all the things Mr. R —— had bespoken; that he had ordered a small balloon, and a portable telegraph, in form of an umbrella, which would be sent home, as he expected, in the course of the next week. Mr. Ramsden also had directions to furnish me with a set of mathematical instruments of his own making. ‘But,’ added he with a smile, ‘you will be lucky if you get them soon enough out of my hands.’ In fact, I believe I called a hundred times in the course of a fortnight upon Ramsden, and it was only the day before the fleet sailed that they were finished and delivered to me.