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 presumption that we are no disgrace to Nature's handicraft."
Helen was not sensitive. She neither blushed nor cast down her eyes.
But his tenets, thus expounded, had nothing very repulsive in them
so far as she saw, and she made no further objection to them.
As they walked up the garden again, through the many lingering signs
of a more stately if less luxurious existence than that of their
generation, she was calmly listening to a lecture on the ground of
law, namely, the resignation of certain personal rights for the
securing of other and more important ones: she understood, was
mildly interested, and entirely satisfied.
They seated themselves in the summer-house, a little wooden room
under the down-sloping boughs of a huge cedar, and pursued their
conversation--or rather Bascombe pursued his monologue. A lively
girl would in all probability have been bored to death by him, but
Helen was not a lively girl, and was not bored at all. Ere they went
into the house she had heard, amongst a hundred other things of
wisdom, his views concerning crime and punishment--with which, good
and bad, true and false, I shall not trouble my reader, except in
regard to one point--that of the obligation to punish. Upon this
point he was severe.
No person, he said, ought to allow any weakness of pity to prevent
him from bringing to punishment the person who broke the laws upon
which the well-being of the community depended. A man must remember
that the good of the whole, and not the fate of the individual, was
to be regarded.
It was altogether a notable sort of tête-à-tête between two such
perfect specimens of the race, and as at length they entered the
house, they professed to each other to have much enjoyed their walk.
Holding the opinions he did, Bascombe was in one thing inconsistent:
he went to "divine service" on the Sunday with his aunt and
cousin--not to humour Helen's prejudices, but those of Mrs.
Ramshorn, who, belonging, as I have said, to the profession, had
strong opinions as to the wickedness of not going to church. It was
of no use, he said to himself, trying to upset her ideas, for to
succeed would only be to make her miserable, and his design was to
make the race happy. In the grand old Abbey, therefore, they heard
together morning prayers, the Litany, and the Communion, all in one,
after a weariful and lazy modern custom not yet extinct, and then a
dull, sensible sermon, short, and tolerably well read, on the duty
of forgiveness of injuries.
I dare say it did most of the people present a little good,
undefinable as the faint influences of starlight, to sit under that
"high embowed roof," within that vast artistic isolation, through
whose mighty limiting the boundless is embodied, and we learn to
feel the awful infinitude of the parent space out of which it is
scooped. I dare also say that the tones of the mellow old organ
spoke to something in many of the listeners that lay deeper far than
the plummet of their self-knowledge had ever sounded. I think also
that the prayers, the reading of which, in respect of intelligence,
was admirable, were not only regarded as sacred utterances, but felt
to be soothing influences by not a few of those who made not the
slightest effort to follow them with their hearts; and I trust that
on the whole their church-going tended rather to make them better
than to harden them. But as to the main point, the stirring up of
the children of the Highest to lay hold of the skirts of their
Father's robe, the waking of the individual conscience to say I WILL
ARISE, and the strengthening of the captive Will to break its bonds
and stand free in the name of the eternal creating Freedom--for
nothing of that was there any special provision. This belonged, in
the nature of things, to the sermon, in which, if anywhere, the
voice of the indwelling Spirit might surely be heard--out of his
holy temple, if indeed that be the living soul of man, as St. Paul
believed; but there was no sign that the preacher regarded his
office as having any such end, although in his sermon lingered the
rudimentary tokens that such must have been the original intent of
pulpit-utterance.
On the way home, Bascombe made some objections to the discourse,
partly to show his aunt that he had been attending. He admitted that
one might forgive and forget what did not come within the scope of
the law, but, as he had said to Helen before, a man was bound, he
said, to punish the wrong which through him affected the community.
"George," said his aunt, "I differ from you there. Nobody ought to
go to the law to punish an injury. I would forgive ever so many
before I would run the risk of the law. But as to FORGETTING an
injury--some injuries at least--no, that I never would!--And I don't
believe, let the young man say what he will, that that is required
of anyone."
Helen said nothing. She had no enemies to forgive, no wrongs worth
remembering, and was not interested in the question. She thought it
a very good sermon indeed.
When Bascombe left for London in the morning, he carried with him
the lingering rustle of silk, the odour of lavender, and a certain
blueness, not of the sky, which seemed to have something behind it,
as never did the sky to him. He had never met woman so worthy of
being his mate, either as regarded the perfection of her form, or
the hidden development of her brain--evident in her capacity for the
reception of truth, as his own cousin, Helen Lingard. Might not the
relationship account for the fact?
Helen thought nothing to correspond. She considered George a fine
manly fellow. What bold and original ideas he had about everything!
Her brother was a baby to him! But then Leopold was such a love of a
boy! Such eyes and such a smile were not to be seen on this side the
world. Helen liked her cousin, was attached to her aunt, but loved
her brother Leopold, and loved nobody else. His Hindoo mother, high
of caste, had given him her lustrous eyes and pearly smile, which,
the first moment she saw him, won his sister's heart. He was then
but eight years old, and she but eleven. Since then, he had been
brought up by his father's elder brother, who had the family estate
in Yorkshire, but he had spent part of all his holidays with her,
and they often wrote to each other. Of late indeed his letters had
not been many, and a rumour had reached her that he was not doing
quite satisfactorily at Cambridge, but she explained it away to the
full contentment of her own heart, and went on building such castles
as her poor aerolithic skill could command, with Leopold ever and
always as the sharer of her self-expansion.