Thomas Wingfold, Curate. George MacDonald
teeth of her machinery, don’t she mangle him finely—with her fevers and her agues and her convulsions and consumptions and what not? But still, barring her own necessities, and the consequences of man’s ignorance and foolhardiness, she is on the whole rather a good-natured old woman, and scatters a deal of tolerably fair enjoyment around her.”
“One WOULD think the birds must be happy in summer, at least, to hear them sing,” corroborated Helen.
“Yes, or to see them stripping a hawthorn bush in winter—always provided the cat or the hawk don’t get hold of them. With that nature does not trouble herself. Well, it’s soon over—with all of us, and that’s a comfort. If men would only get rid of their cats and hawks,—such as the fancy for instance, that all their suffering comes of the will of a malignant power! That is the kind of thing that makes the misery of the world!”
“I don’t quite see–” began Helen.
“We were talking about the birds in winter,” interrupted George, careful not to swell too suddenly any of the air-bags with which he would float Helen’s belief. He knew wisely, and he knew how, to leave a hint to work while it was yet not half understood. By the time it was understood, it would have grown a little familiar: the supposed pup when it turned out a cub, would not be so terrible as if it had presented itself at once as leonate.
And so they wandered across the park, talking easily.
“They’ve got on a good way since I was here last,” said George, as they came in sight of the new house the new earl was building. “But they don’t seem much in a hurry with it either.”
“Aunt says it is twenty years since the foundations were laid by the uncle of the present earl,” said Helen; “and then for some reason or other the thing was dropped.”
“Was there no house on the place before?”
“Oh! yes—not much of a house, though.”
“And they pulled it down, I suppose.”
“No; it stands there still.”
“Where?”
“Down in the hollow there—over those trees—about the worst place they could have built in. Surely you have seen it! Poldie and I used to run all over it.”
“No, I never saw it. Was it empty then?”
“Yes, or almost. I can remember some little attention paid to the garden, but none to the house. It is just falling slowly to pieces. Would you like to see it?”
“That I should,” returned Bascombe, who was always ready for any new impression on his sensorium, and away they went to look at the old house of Glaston as it was called, after some greatly older and probably fortified place.
In the hollow all the water of the park gathered to a lake before finding its way to the river Lythe. This lake was at the bottom of the old garden, and the house at the top of it. The garden was walled on the two sides, and the walls ran right down to the lake. There were wonderful legends current amongst the children of Glaston concerning that lake, its depth, and the creatures in it; and one terrible story, which had been made a ballad of, about a lady drowned in a sack, whose ghost might still be seen when the moon was old, haunting the gardens and the house. Hence it came that none of them went near it, except those few whose appetites for adventure now and then grew keen enough to prevent their imaginations from rousing more fear than supplied the proper relish of danger. The house itself even those few never dared to enter.
Not so had it been with Helen and Leopold. The latter had imagination enough to receive everything offered, but Helen was the leader, and she had next to none. In her childhood she had heard the tales alluded to from her nurses, but she had been to school since, and had learned not to believe them; and certainly she was not one to be frightened at what she did not believe. So when Leopold came in the holidays, the place was one of their favoured haunts, and they knew every cubic yard in the house.
“Here,” said Helen to her cousin, as she opened the door in a little closet, and showed a dusky room which had no window but a small one high up in the wall of a back staircase, “here is one room into which I never could get Poldie without the greatest trouble. I gave it up at last, he always trembled so till he got out again. I will show you such a curious place at the other end of it.”
She led the way to a closet similar to that by which they had entered, and directed Bascombe how to raise a trap which filled all the floor of it so that it did not show. Under the trap was a sort of well, big enough to hold three upon emergency.
“If only they could contrive to breathe,” said George. “It looks ugly. If it had but a brain and a tongue it could tell tales.”
“Come,” said Helen. “I don’t know how it is, but I don’t like the look of it myself now. Let us get into the open air again.”
Ascending from the hollow, and passing through a deep belt of trees that surrounded it, they came again to the open park, and by-and-by reached the road that led from the lodge to the new building, upon which they presently encountered a strange couple.
CHAPTER X. THE DWARFS
The moment they had passed them, George turned to his cousin with a countenance which bore moral indignation mingled with disgust. The healthy instincts of the elect of his race were offended by the sight of such physical failures, such mockeries of humanity as those.
The woman was little if anything over four feet in height. She was crooked, had a high shoulder, and walked like a crab, one leg being shorter than the other. Her companion walked quite straight, with a certain appearance of dignity which he neither assumed nor could have avoided, and which gave his gait the air of a march. He was not an inch taller than the woman, had broad, square shoulders, pigeon-breast, and invisible neck. He was twice her age, and they seemed father and daughter. They heard his breathing, loud with asthma, as they went by.
“Poor things!” said Helen, with cold kindness.
“It is shameful!” said George, in a tone of righteous anger. “Such creatures have no right to existence. The horrid manakin!”
“But, George!” said Helen, in expostulation, “the poor wretch can’t help his deformity.”
“No; but what right had he to marry and perpetuate such odious misery!”
“You are too hasty: the young woman is his niece.”
“She ought to have been strangled the moment she was born—for the sake of humanity. Monsters ought not to live.”
“Unfortunately they have all got mothers,” said Helen; and something in her face made him fear he had gone too far.
“Don’t mistake me, dear Helen,” he said. “I would neither starve nor drown them after they had reached the faculty of resenting such treatment—of the justice of which,” he added, smiling, “I am afraid it would be hard to convince them. But such people actually marry—I have known cases,—and that ought to be provided against by suitable enactments and penalties.”
“And so,” rejoined Helen, “because they are unhappy already, you would heap unhappiness upon them?”
“Now, Helen, you must not be unfair to me any more than to your hunchbacks. It is the good of the many I seek, and surely that is better than the good of the few.”
“What I object to is, that it should be at the expense of the few—who are least able to bear it.”
“The expense is trifling,” said Bascombe. “Grant that it would be better for society that no such—or rather put it this way: grant that it would be well for each individual that goes to make up society that he were neither deformed, sickly, nor idiotic, and you mean the same that I do. A given space of territory under given conditions will always maintain a certain number of human beings; therefore such a law as I propose would not mean that the number drawing the breath of heaven should, to take the instance before us in illustration, be two less, but that a certain two of them should not be such as he or she who passed now, creatures whose existence is a burden to them, but such as you and I, Helen, who may say without