Read Ebook: Lois psychologiques de l'évolution des peuples by Le Bon Gustave

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THE CRIPPLE; OR, EBENEZER THE DISOWNED 1

THE LEGEND OF FAIR HELEN OF KIRCONNEL 23

TOM DUNCAN'S YARN 55

THE PROFESSOR'S TALES

THE THREE BRETHREN 87

THE MISTAKE RECTIFIED 97

DURA DEN; OR, SECOND THOUGHTS ARE BEST 106

THE LAIRD OF LUCKY'S HOW 119

THE ABDUCTION 151

SIR PATRICK HUME: A TALE OF THE HOUSE OF MARCHMONT 167

THE SERJEANT'S TALES

THE PACKMAN'S JOURNEY TO LONDON 178

CHARLES LAWSON 210

BON GAULTIER'S TALES

MRS. HUMPHREY GREENWOOD'S TEA-PARTY 217

THE RECLUSE OF THE HEBRIDES 230

ELLEN ARUNDEL 238

CHATELARD 243

CHRISTIE OF THE CLEEK 275

WILSON'S

TALES OF THE BORDERS,

AND OF SCOTLAND.

THE CRIPPLE; OR, EBENEZER THE DISOWNED.

"Twitters from the straw-built shed."

Now, it was before sunrise on such a morning in May as I have described, that a traveller left the Black Bull in Wooler, and proceeded to the Cheviots. He took his route by way of Earle and Langleeford; and, at the latter place, leaving the long and beautiful glen, began to ascend the mountain. On the cairn, which is perhaps about five hundred yards from what is called the extreme summit of the mountain, he met an old and intelligent shepherd, from whom he heard many tales, the legends of the mountains--and amongst others, the following story:--

Near the banks of one of the romantic streams which take their rise among the Cheviots, stood a small and pleasant, and what might be termed respectable or genteel-looking building. It stood like the home of solitude, excluded by mountains from the world. Beneath it, the rivulet wandered over its rugged bed; to the east rose Cheviot, the giant of the hills; to the west, lesser mountains reared their fantastic forms, thinly studded here and there with dwarf alders, which the birds of heaven had planted, and their progeny had nestled in their branches; to the north and the south stretched a long and secluded glen, where beauty blushed in the arms of wildness--and thick woods, where the young fir and the oak of the ancient forest grew together, flourished beneath the shelter of the hills. Fertility also smiled by the sides of the rivulet, though the rising and setting sun threw the shadows of barrenness over it. Around the cottage stood a clump of solitary firs, and behind it an enclosure of alders, twisted together, sheltered a garden from the storms that swept down the hills.

Now, many years ago, a stranger woman, who brought with her a female domestic and a male infant, became the occupant of this house among the hills. She lived more luxuriously than the sheep-farmers in the neighbourhood, and her accent was not that of the Borders. She was between forty and fifty years of age, and her stature and strength were beyond the ordinary stature and strength of women. Her manners were repulsive, and her bearing haughty; but it seemed the haughtiness of a weak and uneducated mind. Her few neighbours, simple though they were, and little as they saw or knew of the world, its inhabitants and its manners, perceived that the stranger who had come amongst them had not been habituated to the affluence or easy circumstances with which she was then surrounded. The child also was hard-favoured, and of a disagreeable countenance; his back was strangely deformed; his feet were distorted, and his limbs of unequal length. No one could look upon the child without a feeling of compassion, save the woman who was his mother, his nurse, or his keeper , and she treated him as a persecutor, who hated his sight, and was weary of his existence.

"A man severe he was, and stern to view;"

Scarce, however, had he mastered the alphabet, until the faculties of the deformed began to expand. He now both understood and felt what it was to learn. He passed from class to class with a rapidity that astonished his teacher. He could not join in the boisterous sports of his schoolfellows, and while they were engaged in their pastime, he sought solitude, and his task accompanied him. He possessed strong natural talents, and his infirmities gave them the assistance of industry. His teacher noted these things in the cripple, and he was gratified with them; but he hesitated to express his feelings openly, lest the charge of partiality should be brought against him. Ebenezer, however, had entered the academy as the butt of his schoolfellows--they mocked, they mimicked, they tormented, they despised, or affected to despise him; and his talents and progress, instead of abating their persecutions, augmented them. His teacher was afraid to show him more kindness than he showed to others; and his schoolfellows gloried in annoying the cripple--they persecuted, they shunned, they hated him more than even his mother did. He began to hate the world, for he had found none that would love him. His teacher was the only human being that had ever whispered to him words of praise or of kindness, and that had always been in cold, guarded, and measured terms.

Before he was eighteen, he had acquired all the knowledge that his teacher could impart, and he returned to the cottage among the mountains. There, however, he was again subjected to a persecution more barbarous than that which he had met with from his schoolfellows. Mrs Baird mocked, insulted, and drove him from her presence; and her domestic showed him neither kindness nor respect. In stature, he scarcely exceeded five feet; and his body was feeble as well as deformed. The cruelty with which he had been treated had given an asperity to his temper, and made him almost a hater of the human race; and these feelings had lent their character to his countenance, marking its naturally harsh expression with suspicion and melancholy.

He was about five-and-twenty when the pangs and the terrors of death fell upon her whom he regarded as his parent. She died--as a sinner dies--with insulted eternity frowning to receive her. A few minutes before her death, she desired the cripple to approach her bedside. She fixed her closing eyes, which affection had never lighted, upon his. She informed him that he was not her son.

"Oh, tell me, then, whose son I am! Who are my parents?" he exclaimed, eagerly. "Speak! speak!"

"Your parents!" she muttered; and remorse and ignorance held her departing soul in their grasp. She struggled; she again continued: "Your parents! no, Ebenezer, no! I dare not name them! I have sworn--I have sworn! and a death-bed is no time to break an oath!"

"Speak! speak! Tell me, as you hope for heaven!" cried the cripple, with his thin, bony fingers grasping the wrists of the dying woman.

"Monster! monster!" she screamed, wildly, and in terror, "leave me--leave me! You are provided for--open that chest--the chest--the chest!"

Ebenezer loosed his grasp; he sprang towards a strong chest which stood in the room. "The keys! the keys!" he exclaimed, wildly; and again hurrying to the bed, he violently pulled a bunch of keys from beneath her pillow. But while he applied them to the chest, the herald of death rattled in the throat of its victim; and, with one agonising throe and a deep groan, her spirit escaped, and her body lay a corpse upon the bed.

He opened the chest, and in it he found securities, which settled upon him, under the name of Ebenezer Baird, five thousand pounds. But there was nothing which threw light on his parentage--nothing to inform who he was, or why he was there.

The body of her who had never shed a tear over him he accompanied to the grave. But now a deeper gloom fell upon him. He met but few men, and the few he met shunned him, for there was a wildness and a bitterness in his words--a railing against the world--which they wished not to hear. He fancied, too, that they despised him--that their eyes were ever examining the form of his deformities; and he returned their glance with a scowl, and their words with the accents of hatred. Even as he passed the solitary farmhouse, the younger children fled in terror, and the elder laughed, or pointed towards him the finger of curiosity. All these things fell upon the heart of the cripple, and turned the human kindness of his bosom into gall. His companions became the solitude of the mountains, and the silence of the woods. They heard his bitter soliloquies without reviling him, or echo answered him in tones of sympathy more mournful than his own. He sought a thing that he might love, that might unlock his prisoned heart, or give life to its blighted feelings. He loved the very primrose, because it was a thing of beauty, and shrank not from his deformity as man did. To him it gave forth its sweetness, and its leaves withered not at his touch; and he bent and kissed the flower that smiled upon him whom his kind avoided. He courted the very storms of winter, for they shunned him not, but spent their fury on his person, unconscious of its form. The only living thing that regarded him, or that had ever evinced affection towards him, was a dog, of the mastiff kind, which ever followed at his side, licked his hand, and received its food from it. And on this living thing all the affections that his heart ever felt were expended. He loved it as a companion, a friend, and protector; and he knew it was not ungrateful--it never avoided him; but, when mockery or insult was offered to its master, it growled, and looked in his face, as if asking permission to punish the offender.

Such was the life that he had passed until he was between thirty and forty years of age. Still he continued his solitary rambles, having a feeling for everything around him but man. Man only was his persecutor--man only despised him. His own kind and his own kindred had shut him out from them and disowned him--his sight had been hateful to them, and his form loathsome. He avoided the very sun, for it revealed his shadow; but he wandered in rapture, gazing on the midnight heavens, calling the stars by name, while his soul was lifted up with their glory, and his deformity lost and overshadowed in the depth of their magnificence. He loved the flowers of day, the song of morning birds, and the wildness or beauty of the landscape; but these dwindled, and drew not forth his soul as did the awful gorgeousness of night, with its ten thousand worlds lighted up, burning, sparkling, glimmering in immensity--the gems that studded the throne of the Eternal. While others slept, the deformed wandered on the mountains, holding communion with the heavens.

About the period we refer to, a gay party came upon a visit to a gentleman whose mansion was situated about three miles from the cottage of the cripple. As they rode out, they frequently passed him in his wanderings. And when they did so, some turned to gaze on him with a look of prying curiosity, others laughed and called to their companions--and the indignation of Ebenezer was excited, and the frown grew black upon his face.

He was wandering in a wood in the glen, visiting his favourite wild-flowers , when a scream of distress burst upon his ear. His faithful mastiff started, and answered to the sound. He hurried from the wood to whence the sound proceeded as rapidly as his lameness would admit. The mastiff followed by his side, and, by its signs of impatience, seemed eager to increase its speed, though it would not forsake him. The cries of distress continued, and became louder. On emerging from the wood, he perceived a young lady rushing wildly towards it, and behind her, within ten yards, followed an infuriated bull. A few moments more, and she must have fallen its victim. With an eager howl, the dog sprang from the side of its master, and stood between the lady and her pursuer. Ebenezer forgot his lameness and the feebleness of his frame, and he hastened at his utmost speed to the rescue of a human being. Even at that moment a glow of delight passed through his heart, that the despised cripple would save the life of a fellow-mortal--of one of the race that shunned him. Ere he approached, the lady had fallen, exhausted and in terror, on the ground. The mastiff kept the enraged animal at bay, and, with a strength such as he had never before exhibited, Ebenezer raised the lady in his arms, and bore her to the wood. He placed her against a tree: the stream passed by within a few yards, and he brought water in the palms of his hands, and knelt over her, to bathe her temples and her fair brow. Her brow was indeed fair, and her face beautiful beyond all that he had looked upon. Her golden hair in wavy ringlets fell upon her shoulders--but her deep blue eyes were closed. Her years did not appear to be more than twenty.

"Beautiful!--beautiful!" exclaimed the cripple, as he dropped the water on her face, and gazed on it as he spoke--"it is wondrous beautiful! But she will open her eyes--she will turn from me as doth her race!--as from the animal that pursued her!--yet, sure she is beautiful!" and again, as he spoke, Ebenezer sighed.

She informed him that her name was Maria Bradbury, and that she was one of the party then on a visit to the gentleman in his neighbourhood. He offered to accompany her to the house, and she accepted his offer. But it was necessary to pass near the spot where he had rescued her from the fury of the enraged bull. As they drew towards the side of the wood, they perceived that the bull was gone, but the noble mastiff, the friend, companion, and defender of the cripple, lay dead before them. Ebenezer wrung his hands, he mourned over his faithful guardian.

"Friend! poor Friend!" he cried , "hast thou, too, left me? Thou, of all the things that lived, alone didst love thy master! Pardon me, lady, pardon an outcast; but until this hour I have never experienced friendship from man nor kindness from woman. The human race have treated me as a thing that belonged not to the same family with themselves; they have persecuted or mocked me, and I have hated them. Start not--hatred is an alien to my soul--it was not born there, it was forced upon it--but I hate not you--no! no! You have spoken kindly to me, you have smiled on me!--the despised, the disowned Ebenezer will remember you. That poor dog alone, of all living things, showed affection for me. But he died in a good cause! Poor Friend! poor Friend!--where shall I find a companion now?" and the tears of the cripple ran down his cheeks as he spoke.

Maria wept also, partly for the fate of the noble animal that had died in her deliverance, and partly from the sorrow of her companion; for there is a sympathy in tears.

"Ha! you weep!" cried the cripple; "you weep for poor Friend and for me. Bless thee--bless thee, fair one! they are the first that were ever shed for my sake! I thought there was not a tear on earth for me."

He accompanied her to the lodge of the mansion where she was then residing, and there he left her, though she invited him to accompany her, that he might also receive the congratulations of her friends.

She related to them her deliverance. "Ha! little Ebenezer turned a hero!" cried one; "Ebenezer the cripple become a knight-errant!" said another. But they resolved to visit him in a body, and return him their thanks.

Pour ?lucider les causes de ces changements, nous rappellerons tout d'abord que l'esp?ce psychologique est, comme l'esp?ce anatomique, form?e d'un tr?s petit nombre de caract?res fondamentaux irr?ductibles, autour desquels se groupent des caract?res accessoires modifiables et changeants. L'?leveur qui transforme la structure apparente d'un animal, le jardinier qui modifie l'aspect d'une plante, au point qu'un oeil non exerc? ne la reconna?t pas, n'ont en aucune fa?on touch? aux caract?res fondamentaux de l'esp?ce ; ils n'ont agi que sur ses caract?res accessoires. Malgr? tous les artifices, les caract?res fondamentaux tendent toujours ? repara?tre ? chaque nouvelle g?n?ration.

La constitution mentale, elle aussi, a des caract?res fondamentaux, immuables comme les caract?res anatomiques des esp?ces ; mais elle poss?de ?galement des caract?res accessoires ais?ment modifiables. Ce sont ces derniers que les milieux, les circonstances, l'?ducation et divers facteurs peuvent ais?ment changer.

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