The bouquet vanished, as Sylvie had predicted; and when, a day or two afterwards, Arthur and I once more visited the Hall, we found the Earl and his daughter, with the old housekeeper, out in the garden, examining the fastenings of the drawing-room window.
“We are holding an Inquest,” Lady Muriel said, advancing to meet us: “and we admit you, as Accessories before the Fact, to tell us all you know about those flowers.”
“The Accessories before the Fact decline to answer any questions,” I gravely replied. “And they reserve their defence.”
“Well then, turn Queen’s Evidence, please! The flowers have disappeared in the night,” she went on, turning to Arthur, “and we are quite sure no one in the house has meddled with them. Somebody must have entered by the window—”
“But the fastenings have not been tampered with,” said the Earl.
“It must have been while you were dining, my Lady,” said the housekeeper.
“That was it,” said the Earl. “The thief must have seen you bring the flowers,” turning to me, “and have noticed that you did not take them away. And he must have known their great value—they are simply priceless!” he exclaimed, in sudden excitement.
“And you never told us how you got them!” said Lady Muriel.
“Some day,” I stammered, “I may be free to tell you. Just now, would you excuse me?”
The Earl looked disappointed, but kindly said “Very well, we will ask no questions.”
“But we consider you a very bad Queen’s Evidence,” Lady Muriel added playfully, as we entered the arbour. “We pronounce you to be an accomplice: and we sentence you to solitary confinement, and to be fed on bread and—butter. Do you take sugar?”
“It is disquieting, certainly,” she resumed, when all “creature-comforts” had been duly supplied, “to find that the house has been entered by a thief—in this out-of-the-way place. If only the flowers had been eatables, one might have suspected a thief of quite another shape—”
“You mean that universal explanation for all mysterious disappearances, ‘the cat did it’?” said Arthur.
“Yes,” she replied. “What a convenient thing it would be if all thieves had the same shape! It’s so confusing to have some of them quadrupeds and others bipeds!”
“It has occurred to me,” said Arthur, “as a curious problem in Teleology—the Science of Final Causes,” he added, in answer to an enquiring look from Lady Muriel.
“And a Final Cause is—?”
“Well, suppose we say—the last of a series of connected events—each of the series being the cause of the next—for whose sake the first event takes place.”
“But the last event is practically an effect of the first, isn’t it? And yet you call it a cause of it!”
Arthur pondered a moment. “The words are rather confusing, I grant you,” he said. “Will this do? The last event is an effect of the first: but the necessity for that event is a cause of the necessity for the first.”
“That seems clear enough,” said Lady Muriel. “Now let us have the problem.”
“It’s merely this. What object can we imagine in the arrangement by which each different size (roughly speaking) of living creatures has its special shape? For instance, the human race has one kind of shape—bipeds. Another set, ranging from the lion to the mouse, are quadrupeds. Go down a step or two further, and you come to insects with six legs—hexapods—a beautiful name, is it not? But beauty, in our sense of the word, seems to diminish as we go down: the creature becomes more—I won’t say ‘ugly’ of any of God’s creatures—more uncouth. And, when we take the microscope, and go a few steps lower still, we come upon animalculae, terribly uncouth, and with a terrible number of legs!”
“The other alternative,” said the Earl, “would be a diminuendo series of repetitions of the same type. Never mind the monotony of it: let’s see how it would work in other ways. Begin with the race of men, and the creatures they require: let us say horses, cattle, sheep, and dogs—we don’t exactly require frogs and spiders, do we, Muriel?”
Lady Muriel shuddered perceptibly: it was evidently a painful subject. “We can dispense with them,” she said gravely.
“Well, then we’ll have a second race of men, half-a-yard high—”
“—who would have one source of exquisite enjoyment, not possessed by ordinary men!” Arthur interrupted.
“What source?” said the Earl.
“Why, the grandeur of scenery! Surely the grandeur of a mountain, to me, depends on its size, relative to me? Double the height of the mountain, and of course it’s twice as grand. Halve my height, and you produce the same effect.”
“Happy, happy, happy Small!” Lady Muriel murmured rapturously. “None but the Short, none but the Short, none but the Short enjoy the Tall!”
“But let me go on,” said the Earl. “We’ll have a third race of men, five inches high; a fourth race, an inch high—”
“They couldn’t eat common beef and mutton, I’m sure!” Lady Muriel interrupted.
“True, my child, I was forgetting. Each set must have its own cattle and sheep.”
“And its own vegetation,” I added. “What could a cow, an inch high, do with grass that waved far above its head?”
“That is true. We must have a pasture within a pasture, so to speak. The common grass would serve our inch-high cows as a green forest of palms, while round the root of each tall stem would stretch a tiny carpet of microscopic grass. Yes, I think our scheme will work fairly well. And it would be very interesting, coming into contact with the races below us. What sweet little things the inch-high bulldogs would be! I doubt if even Muriel would run away from one of them!”
“Don’t you think we ought to have a crescendo series,
