A Good Fight.
BY CHARLES READE.
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CHAPTER VI.
It was near four o’clock in the afternoon. Gerard was in the shop. His eldest and youngest sons were abroad. Catherine and her little crippled daughter had long been anxious about Gerard, and now they were gone a little way down the road, to see if by good luck he might be visible in the distance; and Giles was alone in the sitting-room, which I will sketch, furniture and dwarf included.
The Hollanders were always an original and leading people. At different epochs they invented printing (wooden type), oil-painting, liberty, banking, gardening, &c.; above all, years before my tale, they invented cleanliness. So, while the English gentry, in velvet jerkins and chicken-toed shoes, trode floors of stale rushes, foul receptacle of bones, decomposing morsels, spittle, dogs’ eggs, and all abominations, this hosier’s sitting-room at Tergou was floored with Dutch tiles, so highly glazed and constantly washed, that you could eat off them. There was one large window; the cross stone-work in the centre of it was very massive, and stood in relief, looking like an actual cross to the inmates, and was eyed as such in their devotions. The panes were very small and lozenge-shaped, and soldered to one another with strips of lead: the like you may see to this day in some of our rural cottages. The chairs were rude and primitive, all but the arm-chair, whose back, at right angles with its seat, was so high that the sitter’s head stopped two feet short of the top. This chair was of oak, and carved at the summit. There was a copper pail, that went in at the waist, holding holy water; and a little hand-besom to sprinkle it far and wide; and a long, narrow, but massive oak table, with a dwarf sticking to the rim by his teeth, his eyes glaring, and his claws in the air like a pouncing vampire. Nature, it would seem, did not make Giles a dwarf out of malice prepense: she constructed a head and torso with her usual care, but just then her attention was distracted, and she left the rest to chance; the result was a human wedge, an inverted cone. He might with justice have taken her to task in the terms of Horace:
Institui: currenteamphora cœpit
Institui: currente rotâ cur urceus exit?
His centre was anything but his centre of gravity. Bisected, upper Giles would have outweighed three lower Giles’s. But this very disproportion enabled him to do feats that would have baffled Milo. His brawny arms had no weight to draw after them; so he could go up a vertical pole like a squirrel, and hang for hours from a bough by one hand like a cherry by its stalk. If he could have made a vacuum with his hands, as the lizard is said to do with its feet, he would have gone along a ceiling. Now, this pocket athlete was insanely fond of griping the dinner-table with both hands, and so swinging an hour at a time; and then—climax of delight!—he would seize it with his teeth, and, taking off his hands, hold on like grim death by his huge ivories.
But all our joys, however elevating, suffer interruption. Little Kate caught Sampsonet in this posture, and stood aghast. She was her mother’s daughter, and her heart beat with the furniture, not with the l2mo. gymnast.
“Oh, Giles! how can you? Mother would be vexed. It dents the table.”
“Go and tell her, little tale-bearer,” snarled Giles. “You are the one for making mischief.”
“Am I?” inquired Kate, calmly; “that is news to me.”
