"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.
But Mr. Rigg Featherstone's low characteristics were all of the sober,
water-drinking kind. From the earliest to the latest hour of the day
he was always as sleek, neat, and cool as the frog he resembled, and
old Peter had secretly chuckled over an offshoot almost more
calculating, and far more imperturbable, than himself. I will add that
his finger-nails were scrupulously attended to, and that he meant to
marry a well-educated young lady (as yet unspecified) whose person was
good, and whose connections, in a solid middle-class way, were
undeniable. Thus his nails and modesty were comparable to those of
most gentlemen; though his ambition had been educated only by the
opportunities of a clerk and accountant in the smaller commercial
houses of a seaport. He thought the rural Featherstones very simple
absurd people, and they in their turn regarded his "bringing up" in a
seaport town as an exaggeration of the monstrosity that their brother
Peter, and still more Peter's property, should have had such belongings.