not distinguished by beauty and gentle birth. The dwarfish daughter of
Lord Bemboro he refused on the ground that besides being a pigmy she
was hunchbacked; while another young lady, an orphan belonging to a
very good family in Hampshire, was rejected by him because her face, like
that of so many dwarfs, was wizened and repulsive. Finally, when he
was almost despairing of success, he heard from a reliable source that
Count Titimalo, a Venetian nobleman, possessed a daughter of exquisite
beauty and great accomplishments, who was by three feet in height.
Setting out at once for Venice, he went immediately on his arrival to pay
his respects to the count, whom he found living with his wife and five
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children in a very mean apartment in one of the poorer quarters of the
town. Indeed, the count was so far reduced in his circumstances that he
was even then negotiating (so it was rumoured) with a travelling company
of clowns and acrobats, who had had the misfortune to lose their
performing dwarf, for the sale of his diminutive daughter Filomena. Sir
Hercules arrived in time to save her from this untoward fate, for he was so
much charmed by Filomena's grace and beauty, that at the end of three
days' courtship he made her a formal offer of marriage, which was
accepted by her no less joyfully than by her father, who perceived in an
English son-in-law a rich and unfailing source of revenue. After an
unostentatious marriage, at which the English ambassador acted as one of
the witnesses, Sir Hercules and his bride returned by sea to England,
where they settled down, as it proved, to a life of uneventful happiness.
"Crome and its household of dwarfs delighted Filomena, who felt
herself now for the first time to be a free woman living among her equals
in a friendly world. She had many tastes in common with her husband,
especially that of music. She had a beautiful voice, of a power surprising
in one so small, and could touch A in alt without effort. Accompanied by
her husband on his fine Cremona fiddle, which he played, as we have
noted before, as one plays a bass viol, she would sing all the liveliest and
tenderest airs from the operas and cantatas of her native country. Seated
together at the harpsichord, they found that they could with their four
hands play all the music written for two hands of ordinary size, a
circumstance which gave Sir Hercules unfailing pleasure.
"When they were not making music or reading together, which they
often did, both in English and Italian, they spent their time in healthful
outdoor exercises, sometimes rowing in a little boat on the lake, but more
often riding or driving, occupations in which, because they were entirely
new to her, Filomena especially delighted. When she had become a
perfectly proficient rider, Filomena and her husband used often to go
hunting in the park, at that time very much more extensive than it is now.
They hunted not foxes nor hares, but rabbits, using a pack of about thirty
black and fawn-coloured pugs, a kind of dog which, when not overfed, can
course a rabbit as well as any of the smaller breeds. Four dwarf grooms,
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dressed in scarlet liveries and mounted on white Exmoor ponies, hunted
the pack, while their master and mistress, in green habits, followed either
on the black Shetlands or on the piebald New Forest ponies. A picture of
the whole hunt--dogs, horses, grooms, and masters--was painted by
William Stubbs, whose work Sir Hercules admired so much that he invited
him, though a man of ordinary stature, to come and stay at the mansion for
the purpose of executing this picture. Stubbs likewise painted a portrait of
Sir Hercules and his lady driving in their green enamelled calash drawn by
four black Shetlands. Sir Hercules wears a plum-coloured velvet coat
and white breeches; Filomena is dressed in flowered muslin and a very
large hat with pink feathers. The two figures in their gay carriage stand
out sharply against a dark background of trees; but to the left of the picture
the trees fall away and disappear, so that the four black ponies are seen
against a pale and strangely lurid sky that has the golden-brown colour of
thunder- clouds lighted up by the sun.
"In this way four years passed happily by. At the end of that time
Filomena found herself great with child. Sir Hercules was overjoyed.
'If God is good,' he wrote in his day-book, 'the name of Lapith will be
preserved and our rarer and more delicate race transmitted through the
generations until in the fullness of time the world shall recognise the
superiority of those beings whom now it uses to make mock of.' On his
wife's being brought to bed of a son he wrote a poem to the same effect.
The child was christened Ferdinando in memory of the builder of the
house.
"With the passage of the months a certain sense of disquiet began to
invade the minds of Sir Hercules and his lady. For the child was growing
with an extraordinary rapidity. At a year he weighed as much as
Hercules had weighed when he was three. 'Ferdinando goes crescendo,'
wrote Filomena in her diary. 'It seems not natural.' At eighteen months
the baby was almost as tall as their smallest jockey, who was a man of
thirty-six. Could it be that Ferdinando was destined to become a man of
the normal, gigantic dimensions? It was a thought to which neither of his
parents dared yet give open utterance, but in the secrecy of their respective
diaries they brooded over it in terror and dismay.
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"On his third birthday Ferdinando was taller than his mother and not
more than a couple of inches short of his father's height. 'To-day for the
first time' wrote Sir Hercules, 'we discussed the situation. The hideous
truth can be concealed no longer: Ferdinando is not one of us. On this,
his third birthday, a day when we should have been rejoicing at the health,
the strength, and beauty of our child, we wept together over the ruin of our
happiness. God give us strength to bear this cross.'
"At the age of eight Ferdinando was so large and so exuberantly
healthy that his parents decided, though reluctantly, to send him to school.
He was packed off to Eton at the beginning of the next half. A profound
peace settled upon the house. Ferdinando returned for the summer
holidays larger and stronger than ever. One day he knocked down the
butler and broke his arm. 'He is rough, inconsiderate, unamenable to
persuasion,' wrote his father. 'The only thing that will teach him manners
is corporal chastisement.' Ferdinando, who at this age was already
seventeen inches taller than his father, received no corporal chastisement.
"One summer holidays about three years later Ferdinando returned to
Crome accompanied by a very large mastiff dog. He had bought it from
an old man at Windsor who had found the beast too expensive to feed. It
was a savage, unreliable animal; hardly had it entered the house when it
attacked one of Sir Hercules's favourite pugs, seizing the creature in its
jaws and shaking it till it was nearly dead. Extremely put out by this
occurrence, Sir Hercules ordered that the beast should be chained up in the
stable-yard. Ferdinando sullenly answered that the dog was his, and he
would keep it where he pleased. His father, growing angry, bade him
take the animal out of the house at once, on pain of his utmost displeasure.
Ferdinando refused to move. His mother at this moment coming into the
room, the dog flew at her, knocked her down, and in a twinkling had very
severely mauled her arm and shoulder; in another instant it must infallibly
have had her by the throat, had not Sir Hercules drawn his sword and
stabbed the animal to the heart. Turning on his son, he ordered him to
leave the room immediately, as being unfit to remain in the same place
with the mother whom he had nearly murdered. So awe-inspiring was
the spectacle of Sir Hercules standing with one foot on the carcase of the
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gigantic dog, his sword drawn and still bloody, so commanding were his
voice, his gestures, and the expression of his face that Ferdinando slunk
out of the room in terror and behaved himself for all the rest of the
vacation in an entirely exemplary fashion. His mother soon recovered
from the bites of the mastiff, but the effect on her mind of this adventure
was ineradicable; from that time forth she lived always among imaginary
terrors.
"The two years which Ferdinando spent on the Continent, making the
Grand Tour, were a period of happy repose for his parents. But even now
the thought of the future haunted them; nor were they able to solace
themselves with all the diversions of their younger days. The Lady
Filomena had lost her voice and Sir Hercules was grown too rheumatical
to play the violin. He, it is true, still rode after his pugs, but his wife felt
herself too old and, since the episode of the mastiff, too nervous for such
sports. At most, to please her husband, she would follow the hunt at a
distance in a little gig drawn by the safest and oldest of the Shetlands.
"The day fixed for Ferdinando's return came round. Filomena, sick
with vague dreads and presentiments, retired to her chamber and her bed.
Sir Hercules received his son alone. A giant in a brown travelling-suit
entered the room. 'Welcome home, my son,' said Sir Hercules in a voice
that trembled a little.
"'I hope I see you well, sir.' Ferdinando bent down to shake hands,
then straightened himself up again. The top of his father's head reached
to the level of his hip.
"Ferdinando had not come alone. Two friends of his own age
accompanied him, and each of the young men had brought a servant. Not
for thirty years had Crome been desecrated by the presence of so many
members of the common race of men. Sir Hercules was appalled and
indignant, but the laws of hospitality had to be obeyed. He received the
young gentlemen with grave politeness and sent the servants to the kitchen,
with orders that they should be well cared for.
"The old family dining-table was dragged out into the light and dusted
(Sir Hercules and his lady were accustomed to dine at a small table twenty
inches high). Simon, the aged butler, who could only just look over the
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edge of the big table, was helped at supper by the three servants brought
by Ferdinando and his guests.
"Sir Hercules presided, and with his usual grace supported a
conversation on the pleasures of foreign travel, the beauties of art and
nature to be met with abroad, the opera at Venice, the singing of the
orphans in the churches of the same city, and on other topics of a similar
nature. The young men were not particularly attentive to his discourses;
they were occupied in watching the efforts of the butler to change the
plates and replenish the glasses. They covered their laughter by violent
and repeated fits of coughing or choking. Sir Hercules affected not to
notice, but changed the subject of the conversation to sport. Upon this
one of the young men asked whether it was true, as he had heard, that he
used to hunt the rabbit with a pack of pug dogs. Sir Hercules replied that
it was, and proceeded to describe the chase in some detail. The young
men roared with laughter.
"When supper was over, Sir Hercules climbed down from his chair and,
giving as his excuse that he must see how his lady did, bade them goodnight.
The sound of laughter followed him up the stairs. Filomena was
not asleep; she had been lying on her bed listening to the sound of
enormous laughter and the tread of strangely heavy feet on the stairs and
along the corridors. Sir Hercules drew a chair to her bedside and sat
there for a long time in silence, holding his wife's hand and sometimes
gently squeezing it. At about ten o'clock they were startled by a violent
noise. There was a breaking of glass, a stamping of feet, with an outburst
of shouts and laughter. The uproar continuing for several minutes, Sir
Hercules rose to his feet and, in spite of his wife's entreaties, prepared to
go and see what was happening. There was no light on the staircase, and
Sir Hercules groped his way down cautiously, lowering himself from stair
to stair and standing for a moment on each tread before adventuring on a
new step. The noise was louder here; the shouting articulated itself into
recognisable words and phrases. A line of light was visible under the
dining-room door. Sir Hercules tiptoed across the hall towards it. Just
as he approached the door there was another terrific crash of breaking
glass and jangled metal. What could they be doing? Standing on tiptoe
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he managed to look through the keyhole. In the middle of the ravaged
table old Simon, the butler, so primed with drink that he could scarcely
keep his balance, was dancing a jig. His feet crunched and tinkled
among the broken glass, and his shoes were wet with spilt wine. The
three young men sat round, thumping the table with their hands or with the
empty wine bottles, shouting and laughing encouragement. The three
servants leaning against the wall laughed too. Ferdinando suddenly
threw a handful of walnuts at the dancer's head, which so dazed and
surprised the little man that he staggered and fell down on his back,
upsetting a decanter and several glasses. They raised him up, gave him
some brandy to drink, thumped him on the back. The old man smiled
and hiccoughed. 'To-morrow,' said Ferdinando, 'we'll have a concerted
ballet of the whole household.' 'With father Hercules wearing his club
and lion-skin,' added one of his companions, and all three roared with
laughter.
"Sir Hercules would look and listen no further. He crossed the hall
once more and began to climb the stairs, lifting his knees painfully high at
each degree. This was the end; there was no place for him now in the
