The overwhelming factor in Jeremy Wendover's life was the appalling,
inconceivable hideousness of his face. The refined, cultivated, pious
gentleman was cursed with a visage which it would have pleased Dante to
ascribe to a White Guelph whom he particularly disliked, and would have
made Orcagna shudder in the midst of his dreams of shapes of hell. As
a child of six, in a successful effort to rescue a baby sister, he had
fallen headforemost into a great wood fire, and when they picked him up
his face "was like unto a charred log that had long smouldered."
Almost the semblance of humanity had been wiped from him, and to all
beholders he became a thing of horror. Men turned their heads away,
women shivered and children screamed at his approach. He was a pariah,
condemned from early boyhood to an awful loneliness. His parents, a
certain Sir Julius Wendover, Baronet, and his wife, his elder brother
and his sisters--they must have been a compassionless family--turned
from him as from an evil and pestilential thing. Love never touched
him with its consoling feather, and for love the poor wretch pined his
whole youth long. Human companionship, even, was denied him. He seems
to have lived alone in a wing of a great house, seldom straying beyond
the bounds of the park, under the tutorship of a reverend but scholarly
sot who was too drunken and obese and unbuttoned to be admitted into
the family circle. This fellow, one Doctor Tubbs, of St. Catherine's
College, Cambridge, seems to have shown Jeremy some semblance of
affection, but chiefly while in his cups, "when," as Jeremy puts it
bitterly, "he was too much like unto the beasts that perish to
distinguish between me and a human being." When sober he railed at the
boy for a monster, and frequently chastised him for his lack of beauty.
But, in some strange way, in alternate fits of slobbering and
castigating, he managed to lay the groundwork of a fine education,
teaching Jeremy the classics, Italian and French, some mathematics, and
the elements of philosophy and theology; he also discoursed much to him
on the great world, of which, till his misfortunes came upon him, he
boasted of having been a distinguished ornament; and when he had three
bottles of wine inside him he told his charge very curious and
instructive things indeed.
So Jeremy grew to man's estate, sensitive, shy, living in the world of
books and knowing little, save at second-hand, of the ways of men and
women. But with all the secrets of the birds and beasts in the
far-stretching Warwickshire park he was intimately acquainted. He
became part of the woodland life. Squirrels would come to him and
munch their acorns on his shoulder.
"So intimate was I in this innocent community," says he, not without
quiet humour, "that I have been a wet-nurse to weasels and called in as
physician to a family of moles."
When Sir Julius died, Jeremy received his younger son's portion
(fortunately, it was a goodly one) and was turned neck and crop out of
the house by his ill-conditioned brother. Tubbs, having also suffered
ignominious expulsion, persuaded him to go on the grand tour. They
started. But they only got as far as Abbeville on the road to Paris,
where Tubbs was struck down by an apoplexy of which he died. Up to
that point the sot's company had enabled Jeremy to endure the insult,
ribaldry and terror that attended his unspeakable deformity; but, left
alone, he lost heart; mankind rejected him as a pack of wolves rejects
a maimed cub. Stricken with shame and humiliation he crept back to
England and established himself in the maltster's house at Bullingford,
guided thither by no other consideration than that it had been the
birthplace of the dissolute Tubbs. He took up his lonely abode there
as a boy of three-and-twenty, and there he spent the long remainder of
his life.