After this little ebullition of spleen, she opened her budget. "First of all, I find that these villages all belong to one person; so does the soil. n.o.body can build cottages on a better model, nor make any other improvement. You are an absolute monarch. This is a piece of Russia, not England. They are all serfs, and you are the czar."
"It is true," said Vizard, "and it sounds horrid, but it works benignly.
Every sn.o.b who can grind the poor does grind them; but a gentleman never, and he hinders others. Now, for instance, an English farmer is generally a tyrant; but my power limits his tyranny. He may discharge his laborer, but he can"t drive him out of the village, nor rob him of parish relief, for poor Hodge is _my_ tenant, not a sn.o.b"s. n.o.body can build a beershop in Islip. That is true. But if they could, they would sell bad beer, give credit in the ardor of compet.i.tion, poison the villagers, and demoralize them. Believe me, republican inst.i.tutions are beautiful on paper; but they would not work well in Barfordshire villages. However, you profess to go by experience in everything. There are open villages within five miles. I"ll give you a list. Visit them. You will find that liberty can be the father of tyranny. Petty tradesmen have come in and built cottages, and ground the poor down with rents unknown in Islip; farmers have built cottages, and turned their laborers into slaves. Drunkenness, dissipation, poverty, disaffection, and misery--that is what you will find in the open villages. Now, in Islip you have an omnipotent squire, and that is an abomination in theory, a mediaeval monster, a blot on modern civilization; but practically the poor monster is a softener of poverty, an incarnate buffer between the poor and tyranny, the poor and misery."
"I"ll inspect the open villages, and suspend my opinion till then," said Miss Gale, heartily; "but, in the meantime, you must admit that where there is great power there is great responsibility."
"Oh, of course."
"Well, then, your little outlying province of Hillstoke is full of rheumatic adults and putty-faced children. The two phenomena arise from one cause--the water. No lime in it, and too many reptiles. It was the children gave me the clew. I suspected the cherry stones at first: but when I came to look into it, I found they eat just as many cherry stones in the valley, and are as rosy as apples; but, then, there is well water in the valleys. So I put this and that together, and I examined the water they drink at Hillstoke. Sir, it is full of animalcula. Some of these cannot withstand the heat of the human stomach; but others can, for I tried them in mud artificially heated. [A giggle from f.a.n.n.y Dover.]
Thanks to your microscope, I have made sketches of several amphibia who live in those boys" stomachs, and irritate their membranes, and share their scanty nourishment, besides other injuries." Thereupon she produced some drawings.
They were handed round, and struck terror in gentle bosoms. "Oh, gracious!" cried f.a.n.n.y, "one ought to drink nothing but champagne."
Uxmoor looked grave. Vizard affected to doubt their authenticity. He said, "You may not know it, but I am a zoologist, and these are antediluvian eccentricities that have long ceased to embellish the world we live in. Fie! Miss Gale. Down with anachronisms."
Miss Gale smiled, and admitted that one or two of the prodigies resembled antediluvian monsters, but said oracularly that nature was fond of producing the same thing on a large scale and a small scale, and it was quite possible the small type of antediluvian monster might have survived the large.
"That is most ingenious," said Vizard; "but it does not account for this fellow. He is not an antediluvian; he is a barefaced modern, for he is A STEAM ENGINE."
This caused a laugh, for the creature had a perpendicular neck, like a funnel, that rose out of a body like a horizontal cylinder.
"At any rate," said Miss Gale, "the little monster was in the world first; so he is not an imitation of man"s work."
"Well," said Vizard, "after all, we have had enough of the monsters of the deep. Now we can vary the monotony, and say the monsters of the shallow. But I don"t see how they can cause rheumatism."
"I never said they did," retorted Miss Gale, sharply: "but the water which contains them is soft water. There is no lime in it, and that is bad for the bones in every way. Only the children drink it as it is: the wives boil it, and so drink soft water and dead reptiles in their tea.
The men instinctively avoid it and drink nothing but beer. Thus, for want of a pure diluent with lime in solution, an acid is created in the blood which produces gout in the rich, and rheumatism in the poor, thanks to their meager food and exposure to the weather."
"Poor things!" said womanly Zoe. "What is to be done?"
"La!" said f.a.n.n.y, "throw lime into the ponds. That will kill the monsters, and cure the old people"s bones into the bargain."
This compendious scheme struck the imagination, but did not satisfy the judgment of the a.s.sembly.
"f.a.n.n.y!" said Zoe, reproachfully.
"That _would_ be killing two birds with one stone," suggested Uxmoor, satirically.
"The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel," explained Vizard, composedly.
Zoe reiterated her question, What was to be done?
Miss Gale turned to her with a smile. _"We_ have got nothing to do but to point out these abominations. The person to act is the Russian autocrat, the paternal dictator, the monarch of all he surveys, and advocate of monarchial inst.i.tutions. He is the buffer between the poor and all their ills, especially poison: he must dig a well."
Every eye being turned on Vizard to see how he took this, he said, a little satirically, "What! does Science bid me bore for water at the top of a hill?"
"She does _so,"_ said the virago. "Now look here, good people."
And although they were not all good people, yet they all did look there, she shone so with intelligence, being now quite on her mettle.
"Half-civilized man makes blunders that both the savage and the civilized avoid. The savage builds his hut by a running stream. The civilized man draws good water to his door, though he must lay down pipes from a highland lake to a lowland city. It is only half-civilized man that builds a village on a hill, and drinks worms, and snakes, and efts, and antediluvian monsters in limeless water. Then I say, if great but half civilized monarchs would consult Science _before_ they built their serf huts, Science would say, "Don"t you go and put down human habitations far from pure water--the universal diluent, the only cheap diluent, and the only liquid which does not require digestion, and therefore must always a.s.sist, and never chemically resist, the digestion of solids." But when the mischief is done, and the cottages are built on a hill three miles from water, then all that Science can do is to show the remedy, and the remedy is--boring."
"Then the remedy is like the discussion," said f.a.n.n.y Dover, very pertly.
Zoe was amused, but shocked. Miss Gale turned her head on the offender as sharp as a bird. "Of course it is, to _children,"_ said she; "and that is why I wished to confine it to mature minds. It is to you I speak, sir.
Are your subjects to drink poison, or will you bore me a well?--Oh, please!"
"Do you hear that?" said Vizard, piteously, to Uxmoor. "Threatened and cajoled in one breath. Who can resist this fatal s.e.x?--Miss Gale, I will bore a well on Hillstoke common. Any idea how deep we must go--to the antipodes, or only to the center?"
"Three hundred and thirty feet, or thereabouts."
"No more? Any idea what it will cost?"
"Of course I have. The well, the double windla.s.s, the iron chain, the two buckets, a cupola over the well, and twenty-three keys--one for every head of a house in the hamlet--will cost you about 315 pounds."
"Why, this is Detail made woman. How do you know all this?"
"From Tom Wilder."
"Who is he?"
"What, don"t you know? He is the eldest son of the Islip blacksmith, and a man that will make his mark. He casts every Thursday night. He is the only village blacksmith in all the county who _casts._ You know that, I suppose."
"No, I had not the honor."
"Well, he is, then: and I thought you would consent, because you are so good: and so I thought there could be no harm in sounding Tom Wilder. He offers to take the whole contract, if squire"s agreeable; bore the well; brick it fifty yards down: he says that ought to be done, if she is to have justice. "She" is the well: and he will also construct the gear; he says there must be two iron chains and two buckets going together; so then the empty bucket descending will help the man or woman at the windla.s.s to draw the full bucket up. 315 pounds: one week"s income, your Majesty."
"She has inspected our rent-roll, now," said Vizard, pathetically: "and knows nothing about the matter."
"Except that it is a mere flea-bite to you to bore through a hill for water. For all that, I hope you will leave me to battle it with Tom Wilder. Then you won"t be cheated, for once. _You always are,_ and it is abominable. It would have been five hundred if you had opened the business."
"I am sure that is true," said Zoe. She added this would please Mrs.
Judge: she was full of the superiority of Islip to Hillstoke.
"Stop a bit," said Vizard. "Miss Gale has not reported on Islip yet."
"No, dear; but she has looked into everything, for Mrs. Judge told me.
You have been into the cottages?"
"Yes."
"Into Marks"s?"
"Yes, I have been into Marks"s."
She did not seem inclined to be very communicative; so f.a.n.n.y, out of mischief, said, pertly, "And what did you see there, with your Argus eye?"
"I saw--three generations."
"Ha! ha! La! did you now? And what were they all doing?"