第21章
When he came to that part where it tells how the young gentleman she was engaged to and a friend of his took up the poor girl's bloodless shape and carried it through the street, and how all the women followed, wailing, and asking if that was what their daughters were coming to,--if that was what they were to get for being good girls,--he melted down into his accustomed tears of pity and grief, and, through them all, of delight at the charming Latin of the narrative.
But it was impossible to call his child Virginia.He could never look at her without thinking she had a knife sticking in her bosom.
Dido would be a good name, and a fresh one.She was a queen, and the founder of a great city.Her story had been immortalized by the greatest of poets,--for the old Latin tutor clove to "Virgilius Maro," as he called him, as closely as ever Dante did in his memorable journey.So he took down his Virgil, it was the smooth-leafed, open-lettered quarto of Baskerville,--and began reading the loves and mishaps of Dido.It would n't do.A lady who had not learned discretion by experience, and came to an evil end.He shook his head, as he sadly repeated,"---misera ante diem, subitoque accensa furore;"but when he came to the lines,"Ergo Iris croceis per coelum roscida pennis Mille trahens varios adverso Sole colores,"he jumped up with a great exclamation, which the particular recording angel who heard it pretended not to understand, or it might have gone hard with the Latin tutor some time or other.
"Iris shall be her name!"--he said.So her name was Iris.
--The natural end of a tutor is to perish by starvation.It is only a question of time, just as with the burning of college libraries.
These all burn up sooner or later, provided they are not housed in brick or stone and iron.I don't mean that you will see in the registry of deaths that this or that particular tutor died of well-marked, uncomplicated starvation.They may, even, in extreme cases, be carried off by a thin, watery kind of apoplexy, which sounds very well in the returns, but means little to those who know that it is only debility settling on the head.Generally, however, they fade and waste away under various pretexts,--calling it dyspepsia, consumption, and so on, to put a decent appearance upon the case and keep up the credit of the family and the institution where they have passed through the successive stages of inanition.
In some cases it takes a great many years to kill a tutor by the process in question.You see they do get food and clothes and fuel, in appreciable quantities, such as they are.You will even notice rows of books in their rooms, and a picture or two,--things that look as if they had surplus money; but these superfluities are the water of crystallization to scholars, and you can never get them away till the poor fellows effloresce into dust.Do not be deceived.The tutor breakfasts on coffee made of beans, edulcorated with milk watered to the verge of transparency; his mutton is tough and elastic, up to the moment when it becomes tired out and tasteless;his coal is a sullen, sulphurous anthracite, which rusts into ashes, rather than burns, in the shallow grate; his flimsy broadcloth is too thin for winter and too thick for summer.The greedy lungs of fifty hot-blooded boys suck the oxygen from the air he breathes in his recitation-room.In short, he undergoes a process of gentle and gradual starvation.
--The mother of little Iris was not called Electra, like hers of the old story, neither was her grandfather Oceanus.Her blood-name, which she gave away with her heart to the Latin tutor, was a plain old English one, and her water-name was Hannah, beautiful as recalling the mother of Samuel, and admirable as reading equally well from the initial letter forwards and from the terminal letter backwards.The poor lady, seated with her companion at the chessboard of matrimony, had but just pushed forward her one little white pawn upon an empty square, when the Black Knight, that cares nothing for castles or kings or queens, swooped down upon her and swept her from the larger board of life.
The old Latin tutor put a modest blue stone at the head of his late companion, with her name and age and Eheu! upon it,--a smaller one at her feet, with initials; and left her by herself, to be rained and snowed on,--which is a hard thing to do for those whom we have cherished tenderly.
About the time that the lichens, falling on the stone, like drops of water, had spread into fair, round rosettes, the tutor had starved into a slight cough.Then he began to draw the buckle of his black trousers a little tighter, and took in another reef in his never-ample waistcoat.His temples got a little hollow, and the contrasts of color in his cheeks more vivid than of old.After a while his walks fatigued him, and he was tired, and breathed hard after going up a flight or two of stairs.Then came on other marks of inward trouble and general waste, which he spoke of to his physician as peculiar, and doubtless owing to accidental causes; to all which the doctor listened with deference, as if it had not been the old story that one in five or six of mankind in temperate climates tells, or has told for him, as if it were something new.As the doctor went out, he said to himself,--"On the rail at last.Accommodation train.