Page 86 - agnes-grey

I’m so glad!’ or, ‘Well! I can’t help it; papa shouldn’t have
taught me: I learned it all from him; and maybe a bit from
the coachman.’
Her brother John, alias Master Murray, was about eleven
when I came: a fine, stout, healthy boy, frank and good-na-
tured in the main, and might have been a decent lad had
he been properly educated; but now he was as rough as a
young bear, boisterous, unruly, unprincipled, untaught, un-
teachable—at least, for a governess under his mother’s eye.
His masters at school might be able to manage him better—
for to school he was sent, greatly to my relief, in the course
of a year; in a state, it is true, of scandalous ignorance as
to Latin, as well as the more useful though more neglected
things: and this, doubtless, would all be laid to the account
of his education having been entrusted to an ignorant fe-
male teacher, who had presumed to take in hand what she
was wholly incompetent to perform. I was not delivered
from his brother till full twelve months after, when he also
was despatched in the same state of disgraceful ignorance
as the former.
Master Charles was his mother’s peculiar darling. He
was little more than a year younger than John, but much
smaller, paler, and less active and robust; a pettish, cow-
ardly, capricious, selfish little fellow, only active in doing
mischief, and only clever in inventing falsehoods: not sim-
ply to hide his faults, but, in mere malicious wantonness,
to bring odium upon others. In fact, Master Charles was a
very great nuisance to me: it was a trial of patience to live
with him peaceably; to watch over him was worse; and to

86 Agnes Grey