“What reason could the miserable creature have
for hating a man whom he had nothing to do with?”
said Mrs. Garth.
“Pooh! where’s the use of asking for such
fellows’ reasons? The soul of man,”
said Caleb, with the deep tone and grave shake of the
head which always came when he used this phrase—“The
soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear
you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools, and no eye
can see whence came the seed thereof.”
It was one of Caleb’s quaintnesses, that in
his difficulty of finding speech for his thought,
he caught, as it were, snatches of diction which he
associated with various points of view or states of
mind; and whenever he had a feeling of awe, he was
haunted by a sense of Biblical phraseology, though
he could hardly have given a strict quotation.
“By swaggering could I never
thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.
—Twelfth Night
The transactions referred to by Caleb Garth as having
gone forward between Mr. Bulstrode and Mr. Joshua
Rigg Featherstone concerning the land attached to
Stone Court, had occasioned the interchange of a letter
or two between these personages.
Who shall tell what may be the effect of writing?
If it happens to have been cut in stone, though it
lie face down-most for ages on a forsaken beach, or
“rest quietly under the drums and tramplings
of many conquests,” it may end by letting us
into the secret of usurpations and other scandals
gossiped about long empires ago:— this
world being apparently a huge whispering-gallery.
Such conditions are often minutely represented in
our petty lifetimes. As the stone which has
been kicked by generations of clowns may come by curious
little links of effect under the eyes of a scholar,
through whose labors it may at last fix the date of
invasions and unlock religions, so a bit of ink and
paper which has long been an innocent wrapping or
stop-gap may at last be laid open under the one pair
of eyes which have knowledge enough to turn it into
the opening of a catastrophe. To Uriel watching
the progress of planetary history from the sun, the
one result would be just as much of a coincidence as
the other.
Having made this rather lofty comparison I am less
uneasy in calling attention to the existence of low
people by whose interference, however little we may
like it, the course of the world is very much determined.
It would be well, certainly, if we could help to
reduce their number, and something might perhaps be
done by not lightly giving occasion to their existence.
Socially speaking, Joshua Rigg would have been generally
pronounced a superfluity. But those who like
Peter Featherstone never had a copy of themselves
demanded, are the very last to wait for such a request
either in prose or verse. The copy in this case
bore more of outside resemblance to the mother, in
whose sex frog-features, accompanied with fresh-colored
cheeks and a well-rounded figure, are compatible with
much charm for a certain order of admirers. The
result is sometimes a frog-faced male, desirable, surely,
to no order of intelligent beings. Especially
when he is suddenly brought into evidence to frustrate
other people’s expectations— the
very lowest aspect in which a social superfluity can
present himself.
