Blyth's Drawing Academy, open every evening--with light refreshment for industrious students. What do you say to it?"
"Say? by George, sir, I'll come every night, and get through acres of chalk and miles of drawing paper!" cried Zack, catching all Valentine's enthusiasm on the instant. "Let's go up stairs and tell Mrs. Blyth about it directly."
"Stop a minute, Zack," interposed Mr. Blyth. "What time ought you to be back in the City? it's close on two o'clock now."
"Oh! three o'clock will do. I've got lots of time, yet--I can walk it in half-an-hour."
"You have got about ten minutes more to stay," said Valentine in his firmest manner. "Occupy them if you like, in going up stairs to Mrs. Blyth, and take Madonna with you. I'll follow as soon as I've put away my brushes."
Saying those words, Mr. Blyth walked to the place where Madonna was still at work. She was so deeply engaged over her drawing that she had never once looked up from it, for the last quarter-of-an-hour, or more; and when Valentine patted her shoulder approvingly, and made her a sign to leave off, she answered by a gesture of entreaty, which eloquently enough implored him to let her proceed a little longer with her employment. She had never at other times claimed an indulgence of this kind, when she was drawing from the Antique--but then, she had never, at other times, been occupied in making a copy which was secretly intended as a present for Zack.
Valentine, however, easily induced her to relinquish her port-crayon. He laid his hand on his heart, which was the sign that had been adopted to indicate Mrs. Blyth. Madonna started up, and put her drawing materials aside immediately.
Zack, having thrown away the end of his cigar, gallantly advanced and offered her his arm. As she approached, rather shyly, to take it, he also laid his hand on his heart, and pointed up stairs. The gesture was quite enough for her. She understood at once that they were going together to see Mrs. Blyth.
"Whether Zack really turns out a painter or not," said Valentine to himself, as the door closed on the two young people, "I believe I have hit on the best plan that ever was devised for keeping him steady. As long as he comes to me regularly, he can't break out at night, and get into mischief. Upon my word, the more I think of that notion of mine the better I like it. I shouldn't at all wonder if my evening Academy doesn't end in working the reformation of Zack!"
When Mr. Blyth pronounced those last words, if he could only have looked a little way into the future--if he could only have suspected how strangely the home-interests dearest to his heart were connected with his success in working the reformation of Zack--the smile which was now on his face would have left it in a moment; and, for the first time in his life, he would have sat before one of his own pictures in the character of an unhappy man.
CHAPTER IX.
THE TRIBULATIONS OF ZACK.
A week elapsed before Mrs. Blyth's wavering health permitted her husband to open the sittings of his evening drawing-academy in the invalid room.
During every day of that week, the chances of taming down Zack into a reformed character grew steadily more and more hopeless. The lad's home-position, at this period, claims a moment's serious attention. Zack's resistance to his father's infatuated severity was now shortly to end in results of the last importance to himself, to his family, and to his friends.
A specimen has already been presented of Mr. Thorpe's method of religiously educating his son, at six years old, by making him attend a church service of two hours in length; as, also, of the manner in which he sought to drill the child into premature discipline by dint of Sabbath restrictions and Select Bible Texts. When that child grew to a boy, and when the boy developed to a young man, Mr. Thorpe's educational system still resolutely persisted in being what it had always been from the first. His idea of Religion defined it to be a system of prohibitions; and, by a natural consequence, his idea of Education defined that to be a system of prohibitions also.
His method of bringing up his son once settled, no earthly consideration could move him from it an inch, one way or the other. He had two favorite phrases to answer every form of objection, every variety of reasoning, every citation of examples. No matter with what arguments the surviving members of Mrs. Thorpe's family from time to time assailed him, the same two replies were invariably shot back at them in turn from the parental quiver. Mr. Thorpe calmly--always calmly--said, first, that he "would never compound with vice" (which was what nobody asked him to do), and, secondly, that he would, in no instance, great or small, "consent to act from a principle of expediency:" this last assertion, in the case of Zack, being about equivalent to saying that if he set out to walk due north, and met a lively young bull galloping with his head down, due south, he would not consent to save his own bones, or yield the animal space enough to run on, by stepping aside a single inch in a lateral direction, east or west.
"My son requires the most unremitting parental discipline and control," Mr. Thorpe remarked, in explanation of his motives for forcing Zack to adopt a commercial career. "When he is not under my own eye at home, he must be under the eyes of devout friends, in whom I can place unlimited confidence. One of these devout friends is ready to receive him into his counting-house; to keep him industriously occupied from nine in the morning till six in the evening; to surround him with estimable examples; and, in short, to share with me the solemn responsibility of managing his moral and religious training. Persons who ask me to allow motives of this awfully important nature to be modified in the smallest degree by any considerations connected with the lad's natural disposition (which has been a source of grief to me from his childhood) with his bodily gifts of the flesh (which have hitherto only served to keep him from the cultivation of the gifts of the spirit); or with his own desires (which I know by bitter experience to be all of the world, worldly);--persons, I say, who ask me to do any of these things, ask me also to act from a godless principle of expediency, and to violate moral rectitude by impiously compounding with vice."
Acting on such principles of parental discipline as these, Mr. Thorpe conscientiously believed that he had done his duty, when he had at last forced his son into the merchant's office. He had, in truth, perpetrated one of the most serious mistakes which it is possible for a wrong-headed father to commit. For once, Zack had not exaggerated in saying that his aversion to employment in a counting-house amounted to absolute horror. His physical peculiarities, and the habits which they had entailed on him from boyhood, made life in the open air, and the constant use of his hardy thews and sinews a constitutional necessity. He felt--and there was no self-delusion in the feeling--that he should mope and pine, like a wild animal in a cage, under confinement in an office, only varied from morning to evening by commercial walking expeditions of a miserable mile or two in close and crowded streets. These forebodings--to say nothing of his natural yearning towards adventure, change of scene, and exhilarating bodily exertion--would have been sufficient of themselves to have decided him to leave his home, and battle his way through the world (he cared not where or how, so long as he battled it freely), but for one consideration.