HOW JACK BUILT HIS HOUSE
J
Jacktold a lie.
That was the beginning of the foundation of his House.
There was no necessity for him to tell the lie. There never is really any necessity for telling a Lie, and no good ever comes of it. Yet Jack told it. He lied to those who loved him best,—to those who had given him all he had in the world,—to those who had done everything for him, and who had set their hearts on his turning out a true-hearted lad, and an honest man. Well,—he didn’t think about those folks at all;—he simply thought about Himself. He wished to protect Himself from the consequences of an act of folly. And he thought the best way to do that was to tell a good, thumping Lie, and put it up as a sort of brazen shield between Himself and a disagreeable half-hour. So he told it, quite cheerfully, and with a delightfully candid air of truth, chuckling secretly to himself when he saw thatthe people who loved him were foolish enough to believe him and trust to his honour.
He had, however, missed one awkward point in the matter. He did not know that the telling of one Lie would necessitate the telling of another to keep the first one up. But it was so. The first Lie was terribly unsafe at certain moments, and he was afraid that the foundation of his House would give in. However, the second Lie was easily invented, and the two false bricks in the human building were successfully set together with a little mortar of hypocrisy, and so steadied each other.
After that, things progressed quickly, and the House grew up so rapidly, and to such a size, that it seemed as if a whole army of little demon bricklayers and plasterers from the lower regions of the wicked had come of their own accord to assist Jack in carrying out his design. One on top of the other the Lies were set in order, till Jack became so delighted with the showy appearance of his building that he altogether forgot there was such a thing as Truth in the world. Lies became so much a part of his existence that he told them on every occasion.
From a Boy he grew, with his House, into aMan, and went on lying. With an air of the most ingenuous candour he looked his neighbours smilingly in the face and lied to them all day long. He lied in business, he lied at home. He lied to friends, he lied to foes. Nobody knew where to have him, his lies were so cunningly and cleverly adjusted. When through dint of cheating, corruption, and fraud, he had managed to amass a large fortune through the ruin of others, he lied to Himself and said he was a good man. Thus you see he had nearly reached the top of the House he was building. Still entirely satisfied with his palatial Residence, he kept on adding a brick or two here, an archway there, an additional column or extra ornamental pinnacle in various directions, till at last, when he was getting on in life, and was beginning to be rather fat and pursy, he decided to put the Roof on. He went down to a great Money-market to do that, and floated a large company on a big Lie.
And so the Roof, all sparkling with gold and silver, was put on the splendid House that Jack built, and Jack went home to eat a gorgeous dinner within its walls, and take his ease for the remainder of his days.
But just as he arrived at the door of his grand Establishment, he saw a little beggar-lad, about as young as he had been himself when he first began to build. And this little beggar-lad, ragged and dirty and foot-sore, was actually presuming to stand in Jack’s great entrance-hall as if he had every right to be there!—in fact, as if the house belonged to him! Jack was furious.
“What are you doing here, you rascal?” he spluttered. “How dare you come here? Who the devil are you?”
The little beggar-lad looked him full in the face, and did not budge an inch.
“My name is Truth,” he said; “and I am here to knock down your House of Lies!”
Whereupon he raised his little child’s hand—and lo! without any sound at all, but as rapidly as a heap of snow melting away in hot sunshine, the house that Jack built with so much care and concern crumbled to atoms and disappeared, leaving no trace of itself but a faint bad smell like the passing of an open dust-cart.
Now some people passing by looked at the blank space where it had once stood, and said: “Dear me! There used to be a House ofLies here, and everybody thought it would last for ever!”
“Not everybody,” said the little beggar-lad, as he stepped out among them: “only the Jack that built it!”
And with that he also disappeared.
And where was Jack? What had become of him? Well, he had fallen with the ruin of his House—and he must have died in a very strange and awful fashion; for just near the dust of the two first Lies he had set together in boyhood as a foundation for the after-building of his life there was seen a crawling Worm, writhing itself in and out through the wet mould. And the Worm was the coward Soul of a false lad who never became a true Man!