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<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 644 ***</div>
<h1>THE HAUNTED MAN AND THE GHOST’S BARGAIN</h1>
<div class="chapter">
<h2>CHAPTER I<br >
The Gift Bestowed</h2>
<p>Everybody said so.</p>
<p>Far be it from me to assert that what everybody says must be
true. Everybody is, often, as likely to be wrong as
right. In the general experience, everybody has been wrong
so often, and it has taken, in most instances, such a weary while
to find out how wrong, that the authority is proved to be
fallible. Everybody may sometimes be right; “but
<i>that’s</i> no rule,” as the ghost of Giles
Scroggins says in the ballad.</p>
<p>The dread word, <span class="smcap">Ghost</span>, recalls
me.</p>
<p>Everybody said he looked like a haunted man. The extent
of my present claim for everybody is, that they were so far
right. He did.</p>
<p>Who could have seen his hollow cheek; his sunken brilliant
eye; his black-attired figure, indefinably grim, although
well-knit and well-proportioned; his grizzled hair hanging, like
tangled sea-weed, about his face,—as if he had been,
through his whole life, a lonely mark for the chafing and beating
of the great deep of humanity,—but might have said he
looked like a haunted man?</p>
<p>Who could have observed his manner, taciturn, thoughtful,
gloomy, shadowed by habitual reserve, retiring always and jocund
never, with a distraught air of reverting to a bygone place and
time, or of listening to some old echoes in his mind, but might
have said it was the manner of a haunted man?</p>
<p>Who could have heard his voice, slow-speaking, deep, and
grave, with a natural fulness and melody in it which he seemed to
set himself against and stop, but might have said it was the
voice of a haunted man?</p>
<p>Who that had seen him in his inner chamber, part library and
part laboratory,—for he was, as the world knew, far and
wide, a learned man in chemistry, and a teacher on whose lips and
hands a crowd of aspiring ears and eyes hung daily,—who
that had seen him there, upon a winter night, alone, surrounded
by his drugs and instruments and books; the shadow of his shaded
lamp a monstrous beetle on the wall, motionless among a crowd of
spectral shapes raised there by the flickering of the fire upon
the quaint objects around him; some of these phantoms (the
reflection of glass vessels that held liquids), trembling at
heart like things that knew his power to uncombine them, and to
give back their component parts to fire and vapour;—who
that had seen him then, his work done, and he pondering in his
chair before the rusted grate and red flame, moving his thin
mouth as if in speech, but silent as the dead, would not have
said that the man seemed haunted and the chamber too?</p>
<p>Who might not, by a very easy flight of fancy, have believed
that everything about him took this haunted tone, and that he
lived on haunted ground?</p>
<p>His dwelling was so solitary and vault-like,—an old,
retired part of an ancient endowment for students, once a brave
edifice, planted in an open place, but now the obsolete whim of
forgotten architects; smoke-age-and-weather-darkened, squeezed on
every side by the overgrowing of the great city, and choked, like
an old well, with stones and bricks; its small quadrangles, lying
down in very pits formed by the streets and buildings, which, in
course of time, had been constructed above its heavy chimney
stacks; its old trees, insulted by the neighbouring smoke, which
deigned to droop so low when it was very feeble and the weather
very moody; its grass-plots, struggling with the mildewed earth
to be grass, or to win any show of compromise; its silent
pavements, unaccustomed to the tread of feet, and even to the
observation of eyes, except when a stray face looked down from
the upper world, wondering what nook it was; its sun-dial in a
little bricked-up corner, where no sun had straggled for a
hundred years, but where, in compensation for the sun’s
neglect, the snow would lie for weeks when it lay nowhere else,
and the black east wind would spin like a huge humming-top, when
in all other places it was silent and still.</p>
<p>His dwelling, at its heart and core—within
doors—at his fireside—was so lowering and old, so
crazy, yet so strong, with its worm-eaten beams of wood in the
ceiling, and its sturdy floor shelving downward to the great oak
chimney-piece; so environed and hemmed in by the pressure of the
town yet so remote in fashion, age, and custom; so quiet, yet so
thundering with echoes when a distant voice was raised or a door
was shut,—echoes, not confined to the many low passages and
empty rooms, but rumbling and grumbling till they were stifled in
the heavy air of the forgotten Crypt where the Norman arches were
half-buried in the earth.</p>
<p>You should have seen him in his dwelling about twilight, in
the dead winter time.</p>
<p>When the wind was blowing, shrill and shrewd, with the going
down of the blurred sun. When it was just so dark, as that
the forms of things were indistinct and big—but not wholly
lost. When sitters by the fire began to see wild faces and
figures, mountains and abysses, ambuscades and armies, in the
coals. When people in the streets bent down their heads and
ran before the weather. When those who were obliged to meet
it, were stopped at angry corners, stung by wandering snow-flakes
alighting on the lashes of their eyes,—which fell too
sparingly, and were blown away too quickly, to leave a trace upon
the frozen ground. When windows of private houses closed up
tight and warm. When lighted gas began to burst forth in
the busy and the quiet streets, fast blackening otherwise.
When stray pedestrians, shivering along the latter, looked down
at the glowing fires in kitchens, and sharpened their sharp
appetites by sniffing up the fragrance of whole miles of
dinners.</p>
<p>When travellers by land were bitter cold, and looked wearily
on gloomy landscapes, rustling and shuddering in the blast.
When mariners at sea, outlying upon icy yards, were tossed and
swung above the howling ocean dreadfully. When lighthouses,
on rocks and headlands, showed solitary and watchful; and
benighted sea-birds breasted on against their ponderous lanterns,
and fell dead. When little readers of story-books, by the
firelight, trembled to think of Cassim Baba cut into quarters,
hanging in the Robbers’ Cave, or had some small misgivings
that the fierce little old woman, with the crutch, who used to
start out of the box in the merchant Abudah’s bedroom,
might, one of these nights, be found upon the stairs, in the
long, cold, dusky journey up to bed.</p>
<p>When, in rustic places, the last glimmering of daylight died
away from the ends of avenues; and the trees, arching overhead,
were sullen and black. When, in parks and woods, the high
wet fern and sodden moss, and beds of fallen leaves, and trunks
of trees, were lost to view, in masses of impenetrable
shade. When mists arose from dyke, and fen, and
river. When lights in old halls and in cottage windows,
were a cheerful sight. When the mill stopped, the
wheelwright and the blacksmith shut their workshops, the
turnpike-gate closed, the plough and harrow were left lonely in
the fields, the labourer and team went home, and the striking of
the church clock had a deeper sound than at noon, and the
churchyard wicket would be swung no more that night.</p>
<p>When twilight everywhere released the shadows, prisoned up all
day, that now closed in and gathered like mustering swarms of
ghosts. When they stood lowering, in corners of rooms, and
frowned out from behind half-opened doors. When they had
full possession of unoccupied apartments. When they danced
upon the floors, and walls, and ceilings of inhabited chambers,
while the fire was low, and withdrew like ebbing waters when it
sprang into a blaze. When they fantastically mocked the
shapes of household objects, making the nurse an ogress, the
rocking-horse a monster, the wondering child, half-scared and
half-amused, a stranger to itself,—the very tongs upon the
hearth, a straddling giant with his arms a-kimbo, evidently
smelling the blood of Englishmen, and wanting to grind
people’s bones to make his bread.</p>
<p>When these shadows brought into the minds of older people,
other thoughts, and showed them different images. When they
stole from their retreats, in the likenesses of forms and faces
from the past, from the grave, from the deep, deep gulf, where
the things that might have been, and never were, are always
wandering.</p>
<p>When he sat, as already mentioned, gazing at the fire.
When, as it rose and fell, the shadows went and came. When
he took no heed of them, with his bodily eyes; but, let them come
or let them go, looked fixedly at the fire. You should have
seen him, then.</p>
<p>When the sounds that had arisen with the shadows, and come out
of their lurking-places at the twilight summons, seemed to make a
deeper stillness all about him. When the wind was rumbling
in the chimney, and sometimes crooning, sometimes howling, in the
house. When the old trees outside were so shaken and
beaten, that one querulous old rook, unable to sleep, protested
now and then, in a feeble, dozy, high-up “Caw!”
When, at intervals, the window trembled, the rusty vane upon the
turret-top complained, the clock beneath it recorded that another
quarter of an hour was gone, or the fire collapsed and fell in
with a rattle.</p>
<p>—When a knock came at his door, in short, as he was
sitting so, and roused him.</p>
<p>“Who’s that?” said he. “Come
in!”</p>
<p>Surely there had been no figure leaning on the back of his
chair; no face looking over it. It is certain that no
gliding footstep touched the floor, as he lifted up his head,
with a start, and spoke. And yet there was no mirror in the
room on whose surface his own form could have cast its shadow for
a moment; and, Something had passed darkly and gone!</p>
<p>“I’m humbly fearful, sir,” said a
fresh-coloured busy man, holding the door open with his foot for
the admission of himself and a wooden tray he carried, and
letting it go again by very gentle and careful degrees, when he
and the tray had got in, lest it should close noisily,
“that it’s a good bit past the time to-night.
But Mrs. William has been taken off her legs so
often”—</p>
<p>“By the wind? Ay! I have heard it
rising.”</p>
<p>“—By the wind, sir—that it’s a mercy
she got home at all. Oh dear, yes. Yes. It was
by the wind, Mr. Redlaw. By the wind.”</p>
<p>He had, by this time, put down the tray for dinner, and was
employed in lighting the lamp, and spreading a cloth on the
table. From this employment he desisted in a hurry, to stir
and feed the fire, and then resumed it; the lamp he had lighted,
and the blaze that rose under his hand, so quickly changing the
appearance of the room, that it seemed as if the mere coming in
of his fresh red face and active manner had made the pleasant
alteration.</p>
<p>“Mrs. William is of course subject at any time, sir, to
be taken off her balance by the elements. She is not formed
superior to <i>that</i>.”</p>
<p>“No,” returned Mr. Redlaw good-naturedly, though
abruptly.</p>
<p>“No, sir. Mrs. William may be taken off her
balance by Earth; as for example, last Sunday week, when sloppy
and greasy, and she going out to tea with her newest
sister-in-law, and having a pride in herself, and wishing to
appear perfectly spotless though pedestrian. Mrs. William
may be taken off her balance by Air; as being once over-persuaded
by a friend to try a swing at Peckham Fair, which acted on her
constitution instantly like a steam-boat. Mrs. William may
be taken off her balance by Fire; as on a false alarm of engines
at her mother’s, when she went two miles in her
nightcap. Mrs. William may be taken off her balance by
Water; as at Battersea, when rowed into the piers by her young
nephew, Charley Swidger junior, aged twelve, which had no idea of
boats whatever. But these are elements. Mrs. William
must be taken out of elements for the strength of <i>her</i>
character to come into play.”</p>
<p>As he stopped for a reply, the reply was “Yes,” in
the same tone as before.</p>
<p>“Yes, sir. Oh dear, yes!” said Mr. Swidger,
still proceeding with his preparations, and checking them off as
he made them. “That’s where it is, sir.
That’s what I always say myself, sir. Such a many of
us Swidgers!—Pepper. Why there’s my father,
sir, superannuated keeper and custodian of this Institution,
eighty-seven year old. He’s a
Swidger!—Spoon.”</p>
<p>“True, William,” was the patient and abstracted
answer, when he stopped again.</p>
<p>“Yes, sir,” said Mr. Swidger.
“That’s what I always say, sir. You may call
him the trunk of the tree!—Bread. Then you come to
his successor, my unworthy self—Salt—and Mrs.
William, Swidgers both.—Knife and fork. Then you come
to all my brothers and their families, Swidgers, man and woman,
boy and girl. Why, what with cousins, uncles, aunts, and
relationships of this, that, and t’other degree, and
whatnot degree, and marriages, and lyings-in, the
Swidgers—Tumbler—might take hold of hands, and make a
ring round England!”</p>
<p>Receiving no reply at all here, from the thoughtful man whom
he addressed, Mr. William approached, him nearer, and made a
feint of accidentally knocking the table with a decanter, to
rouse him. The moment he succeeded, he went on, as if in
great alacrity of acquiescence.</p>
<p>“Yes, sir! That’s just what I say myself,
sir. Mrs. William and me have often said so.
‘There’s Swidgers enough,’ we say,
‘without <i>our</i> voluntary
contributions,’—Butter. In fact, sir, my father
is a family in himself—Castors—to take care of; and
it happens all for the best that we have no child of our own,
though it’s made Mrs. William rather quiet-like, too.
Quite ready for the fowl and mashed potatoes, sir? Mrs.
William said she’d dish in ten minutes when I left the
Lodge.”</p>
<p>“I am quite ready,” said the other, waking as from
a dream, and walking slowly to and fro.</p>
<p>“Mrs. William has been at it again, sir!” said the
keeper, as he stood warming a plate at the fire, and pleasantly
shading his face with it. Mr. Redlaw stopped in his
walking, and an expression of interest appeared in him.</p>
<p>“What I always say myself, sir. She <i>will</i> do
it! There’s a motherly feeling in Mrs.
William’s breast that must and will have went.”</p>
<p>“What has she done?”</p>
<p>“Why, sir, not satisfied with being a sort of mother to
all the young gentlemen that come up from a variety of parts, to
attend your courses of lectures at this ancient
foundation—it’s surprising how stone-chaney catches the heat
this frosty weather, to be sure!” Here he turned the
plate, and cooled his fingers.</p>
<p>“Well?” said Mr. Redlaw.</p>
<p>“That’s just what I say myself, sir,”
returned Mr. William, speaking over his shoulder, as if in ready
and delighted assent. “That’s exactly where it
is, sir! There ain’t one of our students but appears
to regard Mrs. William in that light. Every day, right
through the course, they puts their heads into the Lodge, one
after another, and have all got something to tell her, or
something to ask her. ‘Swidge’ is the
appellation by which they speak of Mrs. William in general, among
themselves, I’m told; but that’s what I say,
sir. Better be called ever so far out of your name, if
it’s done in real liking, than have it made ever so much
of, and not cared about! What’s a name for? To
know a person by. If Mrs. William is known by something
better than her name—I allude to Mrs. William’s
qualities and disposition—never mind her name, though it
<i>is</i> Swidger, by rights. Let ’em call her
Swidge, Widge, Bridge—Lord! London Bridge,
Blackfriars, Chelsea, Putney, Waterloo, or Hammersmith
Suspension—if they like.”</p>
<p>The close of this triumphant oration brought him and the plate
to the table, upon which he half laid and half dropped it, with a
lively sense of its being thoroughly heated, just as the subject
of his praises entered the room, bearing another tray and a
lantern, and followed by a venerable old man with long grey
hair.</p>
<p>Mrs. William, like Mr. William, was a simple, innocent-looking
person, in whose smooth cheeks the cheerful red of her
husband’s official waistcoat was very pleasantly
repeated. But whereas Mr. William’s light hair stood
on end all over his head, and seemed to draw his eyes up with it
in an excess of bustling readiness for anything, the dark brown
hair of Mrs. William was carefully smoothed down, and waved away
under a trim tidy cap, in the most exact and quiet manner
imaginable. Whereas Mr. William’s very trousers
hitched themselves up at the ankles, as if it were not in their
iron-grey nature to rest without looking about them, Mrs.
William’s neatly-flowered skirts—red and white, like
her own pretty face—were as composed and orderly, as if the
very wind that blew so hard out of doors could not disturb one of
their folds. Whereas his coat had something of a fly-away
and half-off appearance about the collar and breast, her little
bodice was so placid and neat, that there should have been
protection for her, in it, had she needed any, with the roughest
people. Who could have had the heart to make so calm a
bosom swell with grief, or throb with fear, or flutter with a
thought of shame! To whom would its repose and peace have
not appealed against disturbance, like the innocent slumber of a
child!</p>
<p>“Punctual, of course, Milly,” said her husband,
relieving her of the tray, “or it wouldn’t be
you. Here’s Mrs. William, sir!—He looks
lonelier than ever to-night,” whispering to his wife, as he
was taking the tray, “and ghostlier altogether.”</p>
<p>Without any show of hurry or noise, or any show of herself
even, she was so calm and quiet, Milly set the dishes she had
brought upon the table,—Mr. William, after much clattering
and running about, having only gained possession of a butter-boat
of gravy, which he stood ready to serve.</p>
<p>“What is that the old man has in his arms?” asked
Mr. Redlaw, as he sat down to his solitary meal.</p>
<p>“Holly, sir,” replied the quiet voice of
Milly.</p>
<p>“That’s what I say myself, sir,” interposed
Mr. William, striking in with the butter-boat.
“Berries is so seasonable to the time of year!—Brown
gravy!”</p>
<p>“Another Christmas come, another year gone!”
murmured the Chemist, with a gloomy sigh. “More
figures in the lengthening sum of recollection that we work and
work at to our torment, till Death idly jumbles all together, and
rubs all out. So, Philip!” breaking off, and raising
his voice as he addressed the old man, standing apart, with his
glistening burden in his arms, from which the quiet Mrs. William
took small branches, which she noiselessly trimmed with her
scissors, and decorated the room with, while her aged
father-in-law looked on much interested in the ceremony.</p>
<p>“My duty to you, sir,” returned the old man.
“Should have spoke before, sir, but know your ways, Mr.
Redlaw—proud to say—and wait till spoke to!
Merry Christmas, sir, and Happy New Year, and many of
’em. Have had a pretty many of ’em
myself—ha, ha!—and may take the liberty of wishing
’em. I’m eighty-seven!”</p>
<p>“Have you had so many that were merry and happy?”
asked the other.</p>
<p>“Ay, sir, ever so many,” returned the old man.</p>
<p>“Is his memory impaired with age? It is to be
expected now,” said Mr. Redlaw, turning to the son, and
speaking lower.</p>
<p>“Not a morsel of it, sir,” replied Mr.
William. “That’s exactly what I say myself,
sir. There never was such a memory as my
father’s. He’s the most wonderful man in the
world. He don’t know what forgetting means.
It’s the very observation I’m always making to Mrs.
William, sir, if you’ll believe me!”</p>
<p>Mr. Swidger, in his polite desire to seem to acquiesce at all
events, delivered this as if there were no iota of contradiction
in it, and it were all said in unbounded and unqualified
assent.</p>
<p>The Chemist pushed his plate away, and, rising from the table,
walked across the room to where the old man stood looking at a
little sprig of holly in his hand.</p>
<p>“It recalls the time when many of those years were old
and new, then?” he said, observing him attentively, and
touching him on the shoulder. “Does it?”</p>
<p>“Oh many, many!” said Philip, half awaking from
his reverie. “I’m eighty-seven!”</p>
<p>“Merry and happy, was it?” asked the Chemist in a
low voice. “Merry and happy, old man?”</p>
<p>“Maybe as high as that, no higher,” said the old
man, holding out his hand a little way above the level of his
knee, and looking retrospectively at his questioner, “when
I first remember ’em! Cold, sunshiny day it was, out
a-walking, when some one—it was my mother as sure as you
stand there, though I don’t know what her blessed face was
like, for she took ill and died that Christmas-time—told me
they were food for birds. The pretty little fellow
thought—that’s me, you understand—that
birds’ eyes were so bright, perhaps, because the berries
that they lived on in the winter were so bright. I
recollect that. And I’m eighty-seven!”</p>
<p>“Merry and happy!” mused the other, bending his
dark eyes upon the stooping figure, with a smile of
compassion. “Merry and happy—and remember
well?”</p>
<p>“Ay, ay, ay!” resumed the old man, catching the
last words. “I remember ’em well in my school
time, year after year, and all the merry-making that used to come
along with them. I was a strong chap then, Mr. Redlaw; and,
if you’ll believe me, hadn’t my match at football
within ten mile. Where’s my son William?
Hadn’t my match at football, William, within ten
mile!”</p>
<p>“That’s what I always say, father!” returned
the son promptly, and with great respect. “You <span
class="GutSmall">ARE</span> a Swidger, if ever there was one of
the family!”</p>
<p>“Dear!” said the old man, shaking his head as he
again looked at the holly. “His mother—my son
William’s my youngest son—and I, have sat among
’em all, boys and girls, little children and babies, many a
year, when the berries like these were not shining half so bright
all round us, as their bright faces. Many of ’em are
gone; she’s gone; and my son George (our eldest, who was
her pride more than all the rest!) is fallen very low: but I can
see them, when I look here, alive and healthy, as they used to be
in those days; and I can see him, thank God, in his
innocence. It’s a blessed thing to me, at
eighty-seven.”</p>
<p>The keen look that had been fixed upon him with so much
earnestness, had gradually sought the ground.</p>
<p>“When my circumstances got to be not so good as
formerly, through not being honestly dealt by, and I first come
here to be custodian,” said the old man,
“—which was upwards of fifty years
ago—where’s my son William? More than half a
century ago, William!”</p>
<p>“That’s what I say, father,” replied the
son, as promptly and dutifully as before, “that’s
exactly where it is. Two times ought’s an ought, and
twice five ten, and there’s a hundred of
’em.”</p>
<p>“It was quite a pleasure to know that one of our
founders—or more correctly speaking,” said the old
man, with a great glory in his subject and his knowledge of it,
“one of the learned gentlemen that helped endow us in Queen
Elizabeth’s time, for we were founded afore her
day—left in his will, among the other bequests he made us,
so much to buy holly, for garnishing the walls and windows, come
Christmas. There was something homely and friendly in
it. Being but strange here, then, and coming at Christmas
time, we took a liking for his very picter that hangs in what
used to be, anciently, afore our ten poor gentlemen commuted for
an annual stipend in money, our great Dinner Hall.—A sedate
gentleman in a peaked beard, with a ruff round his neck, and a
scroll below him, in old English letters, ‘Lord! keep my
memory green!’ You know all about him, Mr.
Redlaw?”</p>
<p>“I know the portrait hangs there, Philip.”</p>
<p>“Yes, sure, it’s the second on the right, above
the panelling. I was going to say—he has helped to
keep <i>my</i> memory green, I thank him; for going round the
building every year, as I’m a doing now, and freshening up
the bare rooms with these branches and berries, freshens up my
bare old brain. One year brings back another, and that year
another, and those others numbers! At last, it seems to me
as if the birth-time of our Lord was the birth-time of all I have
ever had affection for, or mourned for, or delighted
in,—and they’re a pretty many, for I’m
eighty-seven!”</p>
<p>“Merry and happy,” murmured Redlaw to himself.</p>
<p>The room began to darken strangely.</p>
<p>“So you see, sir,” pursued old Philip, whose hale
wintry cheek had warmed into a ruddier glow, and whose blue eyes
had brightened while he spoke, “I have plenty to keep, when
I keep this present season. Now, where’s my quiet
Mouse? Chattering’s the sin of my time of life, and
there’s half the building to do yet, if the cold
don’t freeze us first, or the wind don’t blow us
away, or the darkness don’t swallow us up.”</p>
<p>The quiet Mouse had brought her calm face to his side, and
silently taken his arm, before he finished speaking.</p>
<p>“Come away, my dear,” said the old man.
“Mr. Redlaw won’t settle to his dinner, otherwise,
till it’s cold as the winter. I hope you’ll
excuse me rambling on, sir, and I wish you good night, and, once
again, a merry—”</p>
<p>“Stay!” said Mr. Redlaw, resuming his place at the
table, more, it would have seemed from his manner, to reassure
the old keeper, than in any remembrance of his own
appetite. “Spare me another moment, Philip.
William, you were going to tell me something to your excellent
wife’s honour. It will not be disagreeable to her to
hear you praise her. What was it?”</p>
<p>“Why, that’s where it is, you see, sir,”
returned Mr. William Swidger, looking towards his wife in
considerable embarrassment. “Mrs. William’s got
her eye upon me.”</p>
<p>“But you’re not afraid of Mrs. William’s
eye?”</p>
<p>“Why, no, sir,” returned Mr. Swidger,
“that’s what I say myself. It wasn’t made
to be afraid of. It wouldn’t have been made so mild,
if that was the intention. But I wouldn’t like
to—Milly!—him, you know. Down in the
Buildings.”</p>
<p>Mr. William, standing behind the table, and rummaging
disconcertedly among the objects upon it, directed persuasive
glances at Mrs. William, and secret jerks of his head and thumb
at Mr. Redlaw, as alluring her towards him.</p>
<p>“Him, you know, my love,” said Mr. William.
“Down in the Buildings. Tell, my dear!
You’re the works of Shakespeare in comparison with
myself. Down in the Buildings, you know, my
love.—Student.”</p>
<p>“Student?” repeated Mr. Redlaw, raising his
head.</p>
<p>“That’s what I say, sir!” cried Mr. William,
in the utmost animation of assent. “If it
wasn’t the poor student down in the Buildings, why should
you wish to hear it from Mrs. William’s lips? Mrs.
William, my dear—Buildings.”</p>
<p>“I didn’t know,” said Milly, with a quiet
frankness, free from any haste or confusion, “that William
had said anything about it, or I wouldn’t have come.
I asked him not to. It’s a sick young gentleman,
sir—and very poor, I am afraid—who is too ill to go
home this holiday-time, and lives, unknown to any one, in but a
common kind of lodging for a gentleman, down in Jerusalem
Buildings. That’s all, sir.”</p>
<p>“Why have I never heard of him?” said the Chemist,
rising hurriedly. “Why has he not made his situation
known to me? Sick!—give me my hat and cloak.
Poor!—what house?—what number?”</p>
<p>“Oh, you mustn’t go there, sir,” said Milly,
leaving her father-in-law, and calmly confronting him with her
collected little face and folded hands.</p>
<p>“Not go there?”</p>
<p>“Oh dear, no!” said Milly, shaking her head as at
a most manifest and self-evident impossibility. “It
couldn’t be thought of!”</p>
<p>“What do you mean? Why not?”</p>
<p>“Why, you see, sir,” said Mr. William Swidger,
persuasively and confidentially, “that’s what I
say. Depend upon it, the young gentleman would never have
made his situation known to one of his own sex. Mrs.
Williams has got into his confidence, but that’s quite
different. They all confide in Mrs. William; they all trust
<i>her</i>. A man, sir, couldn’t have got a whisper
out of him; but woman, sir, and Mrs. William
combined—!”</p>
<p>“There is good sense and delicacy in what you say,
William,” returned Mr. Redlaw, observant of the gentle and
composed face at his shoulder. And laying his finger on his
lip, he secretly put his purse into her hand.</p>
<p>“Oh dear no, sir!” cried Milly, giving it back
again. “Worse and worse! Couldn’t be
dreamed of!”</p>
<p>Such a staid matter-of-fact housewife she was, and so
unruffled by the momentary haste of this rejection, that, an
instant afterwards, she was tidily picking up a few leaves which
had strayed from between her scissors and her apron, when she had
arranged the holly.</p>
<p>Finding, when she rose from her stooping posture, that Mr.
Redlaw was still regarding her with doubt and astonishment, she
quietly repeated—looking about, the while, for any other
fragments that might have escaped her observation:</p>
<p>“Oh dear no, sir! He said that of all the world he
would not be known to you, or receive help from you—though
he is a student in your class. I have made no terms of
secrecy with you, but I trust to your honour
completely.”</p>
<p>“Why did he say so?”</p>
<p>“Indeed I can’t tell, sir,” said Milly,
after thinking a little, “because I am not at all clever,
you know; and I wanted to be useful to him in making things neat
and comfortable about him, and employed myself that way.
But I know he is poor, and lonely, and I think he is somehow
neglected too.—How dark it is!”</p>
<p>The room had darkened more and more. There was a very
heavy gloom and shadow gathering behind the Chemist’s
chair.</p>
<p>“What more about him?” he asked.</p>
<p>“He is engaged to be married when he can afford
it,” said Milly, “and is studying, I think, to
qualify himself to earn a living. I have seen, a long time,
that he has studied hard and denied himself much.—How very
dark it is!”</p>
<p>“It’s turned colder, too,” said the old man,
rubbing his hands. “There’s a chill and dismal
feeling in the room. Where’s my son William?
William, my boy, turn the lamp, and rouse the fire!”</p>
<p>Milly’s voice resumed, like quiet music very softly
played:</p>
<p>“He muttered in his broken sleep yesterday afternoon,
after talking to me” (this was to herself) “about
some one dead, and some great wrong done that could never be
forgotten; but whether to him or to another person, I don’t
know. Not <i>by</i> him, I am sure.”</p>
<p>“And, in short, Mrs. William, you see—which she
wouldn’t say herself, Mr. Redlaw, if she was to stop here
till the new year after this next one—” said Mr.
William, coming up to him to speak in his ear, “has done
him worlds of good! Bless you, worlds of good! All at
home just the same as ever—my father made as snug and
comfortable—not a crumb of litter to be found in the house,
if you were to offer fifty pound ready money for it—Mrs.
William apparently never out of the way—yet Mrs. William
backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, up and down, up
and down, a mother to him!”</p>
<p>The room turned darker and colder, and the gloom and shadow
gathering behind the chair was heavier.</p>
<p>“Not content with this, sir, Mrs. William goes and
finds, this very night, when she was coming home (why it’s
not above a couple of hours ago), a creature more like a young
wild beast than a young child, shivering upon a door-step.
What does Mrs. William do, but brings it home to dry it, and feed
it, and keep it till our old Bounty of food and flannel is given
away, on Christmas morning! If it ever felt a fire before,
it’s as much as ever it did; for it’s sitting in the
old Lodge chimney, staring at ours as if its ravenous eyes would
never shut again. It’s sitting there, at
least,” said Mr. William, correcting himself, on
reflection, “unless it’s bolted!”</p>
<p>“Heaven keep her happy!” said the Chemist aloud,
“and you too, Philip! and you, William! I must
consider what to do in this. I may desire to see this
student, I’ll not detain you any longer now.
Good-night!”</p>
<p>“I thank’ee, sir, I thank’ee!” said
the old man, “for Mouse, and for my son William, and for
myself. Where’s my son William? William, you
take the lantern and go on first, through them long dark
passages, as you did last year and the year afore. Ha
ha! <i>I</i> remember—though I’m
eighty-seven! ‘Lord, keep my memory
green!’ It’s a very good prayer, Mr. Redlaw,
that of the learned gentleman in the peaked beard, with a ruff
round his neck—hangs up, second on the right above the
panelling, in what used to be, afore our ten poor gentlemen
commuted, our great Dinner Hall. ‘Lord, keep my
memory green!’ It’s very good and pious,
sir. Amen! Amen!”</p>
<p>As they passed out and shut the heavy door, which, however
carefully withheld, fired a long train of thundering
reverberations when it shut at last, the room turned darker.</p>
<p>As he fell a musing in his chair alone, the healthy holly
withered on the wall, and dropped—dead branches.</p>
<p>As the gloom and shadow thickened behind him, in that place
where it had been gathering so darkly, it took, by slow
degrees,—or out of it there came, by some unreal,
unsubstantial process—not to be traced by any human
sense,—an awful likeness of himself!</p>
<p>Ghastly and cold, colourless in its leaden face and hands, but
with his features, and his bright eyes, and his grizzled hair,
and dressed in the gloomy shadow of his dress, it came into his
terrible appearance of existence, motionless, without a
sound. As <i>he</i> leaned his arm upon the elbow of his
chair, ruminating before the fire, <i>it</i> leaned upon the
chair-back, close above him, with its appalling copy of his face
looking where his face looked, and bearing the expression his
face bore.</p>
<p>This, then, was the Something that had passed and gone
already. This was the dread companion of the haunted
man!</p>
<p>It took, for some moments, no more apparent heed of him, than
he of it. The Christmas Waits were playing somewhere in the
distance, and, through his thoughtfulness, he seemed to listen to
the music. It seemed to listen too.</p>
<p>At length he spoke; without moving or lifting up his face.</p>
<p>“Here again!” he said.</p>
<p>“Here again,” replied the Phantom.</p>
<p>“I see you in the fire,” said the haunted man;
“I hear you in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of
the night.”</p>
<p>The Phantom moved its head, assenting.</p>
<p>“Why do you come, to haunt me thus?”</p>
<p>“I come as I am called,” replied the Ghost.</p>
<p>“No. Unbidden,” exclaimed the Chemist.</p>
<p>“Unbidden be it,” said the Spectre.
“It is enough. I am here.”</p>
<p>Hitherto the light of the fire had shone on the two
faces—if the dread lineaments behind the chair might be
called a face—both addressed towards it, as at first, and
neither looking at the other. But, now, the haunted man
turned, suddenly, and stared upon the Ghost. The Ghost, as
sudden in its motion, passed to before the chair, and stared on
him.</p>
<p>The living man, and the animated image of himself dead, might
so have looked, the one upon the other. An awful survey, in
a lonely and remote part of an empty old pile of building, on a
winter night, with the loud wind going by upon its journey of
mystery—whence or whither, no man knowing since the world
began—and the stars, in unimaginable millions, glittering
through it, from eternal space, where the world’s bulk is
as a grain, and its hoary age is infancy.</p>
<p>“Look upon me!” said the Spectre. “I
am he, neglected in my youth, and miserably poor, who strove and
suffered, and still strove and suffered, until I hewed out
knowledge from the mine where it was buried, and made rugged
steps thereof, for my worn feet to rest and rise on.”</p>
<p>“I <i>am</i> that man,” returned the Chemist.</p>
<p>“No mother’s self-denying love,” pursued the
Phantom, “no father’s counsel, aided <i>me</i>.
A stranger came into my father’s place when I was but a
child, and I was easily an alien from my mother’s
heart. My parents, at the best, were of that sort whose
care soon ends, and whose duty is soon done; who cast their
offspring loose, early, as birds do theirs; and, if they do well,
claim the merit; and, if ill, the pity.”</p>
<p>It paused, and seemed to tempt and goad him with its look, and
with the manner of its speech, and with its smile.</p>
<p>“I am he,” pursued the Phantom, “who, in
this struggle upward, found a friend. I made him—won
him—bound him to me! We worked together, side by
side. All the love and confidence that in my earlier youth
had had no outlet, and found no expression, I bestowed on
him.”</p>
<p>“Not all,” said Redlaw, hoarsely.</p>
<p>“No, not all,” returned the Phantom.
“I had a sister.”</p>
<p>The haunted man, with his head resting on his hands, replied
“I had!” The Phantom, with an evil smile, drew
closer to the chair, and resting its chin upon its folded hands,
its folded hands upon the back, and looking down into his face
with searching eyes, that seemed instinct with fire, went on:</p>
<p>“Such glimpses of the light of home as I had ever known,
had streamed from her. How young she was, how fair, how
loving! I took her to the first poor roof that I was master
of, and made it rich. She came into the darkness of my
life, and made it bright.—She is before me!”</p>
<p>“I saw her, in the fire, but now. I hear her in
music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night,”
returned the haunted man.</p>
<p>“<i>Did</i> he love her?” said the Phantom,
echoing his contemplative tone. “I think he did,
once. I am sure he did. Better had she loved him
less—less secretly, less dearly, from the shallower depths
of a more divided heart!”</p>
<p>“Let me forget it!” said the Chemist, with an
angry motion of his hand. “Let me blot it from my
memory!”</p>
<p>The Spectre, without stirring, and with its unwinking, cruel
eyes still fixed upon his face, went on:</p>
<p>“A dream, like hers, stole upon my own life.”</p>
<p>“It did,” said Redlaw.</p>
<p>“A love, as like hers,” pursued the Phantom,
“as my inferior nature might cherish, arose in my own
heart. I was too poor to bind its object to my fortune
then, by any thread of promise or entreaty. I loved her far
too well, to seek to do it. But, more than ever I had
striven in my life, I strove to climb! Only an inch gained,
brought me something nearer to the height. I toiled
up! In the late pauses of my labour at that time,—my
sister (sweet companion!) still sharing with me the expiring
embers and the cooling hearth,—when day was breaking, what
pictures of the future did I see!”</p>
<p>“I saw them, in the fire, but now,” he
murmured. “They come back to me in music, in the
wind, in the dead stillness of the night, in the revolving
years.”</p>
<p>“—Pictures of my own domestic life, in aftertime,
with her who was the inspiration of my toil. Pictures of my
sister, made the wife of my dear friend, on equal terms—for
he had some inheritance, we none—pictures of our sobered
age and mellowed happiness, and of the golden links, extending
back so far, that should bind us, and our children, in a radiant
garland,” said the Phantom.</p>
<p>“Pictures,” said the haunted man, “that were
delusions. Why is it my doom to remember them too
well!”</p>
<p>“Delusions,” echoed the Phantom in its changeless
voice, and glaring on him with its changeless eyes.
“For my friend (in whose breast my confidence was locked as
in my own), passing between me and the centre of the system of my
hopes and struggles, won her to himself, and shattered my frail
universe. My sister, doubly dear, doubly devoted, doubly
cheerful in my home, lived on to see me famous, and my old
ambition so rewarded when its spring was broken, and
then—”</p>
<p>“Then died,” he interposed. “Died,
gentle as ever; happy; and with no concern but for her
brother. Peace!”</p>
<p>The Phantom watched him silently.</p>
<p>“Remembered!” said the haunted man, after a
pause. “Yes. So well remembered, that even now,
when years have passed, and nothing is more idle or more
visionary to me than the boyish love so long outlived, I think of
it with sympathy, as if it were a younger brother’s or a
son’s. Sometimes I even wonder when her heart first
inclined to him, and how it had been affected towards
me.—Not lightly, once, I think.—But that is
nothing. Early unhappiness, a wound from a hand I loved and
trusted, and a loss that nothing can replace, outlive such
fancies.”</p>
<p>“Thus,” said the Phantom, “I bear within me
a Sorrow and a Wrong. Thus I prey upon myself. Thus,
memory is my curse; and, if I could forget my sorrow and my
wrong, I would!”</p>
<p>“Mocker!” said the Chemist, leaping up, and
making, with a wrathful hand, at the throat of his other
self. “Why have I always that taunt in my
ears?”</p>
<p>“Forbear!” exclaimed the Spectre in an awful
voice. “Lay a hand on Me, and die!”</p>
<p>He stopped midway, as if its words had paralysed him, and
stood looking on it. It had glided from him; it had its arm
raised high in warning; and a smile passed over its unearthly
features, as it reared its dark figure in triumph.</p>
<p>“If I could forget my sorrow and wrong, I would,”
the Ghost repeated. “If I could forget my sorrow and
my wrong, I would!”</p>
<p>“Evil spirit of myself,” returned the haunted man,
in a low, trembling tone, “my life is darkened by that
incessant whisper.”</p>
<p>“It is an echo,” said the Phantom.</p>
<p>“If it be an echo of my thoughts—as now, indeed, I
know it is,” rejoined the haunted man, “why should I,
therefore, be tormented? It is not a selfish thought.
I suffer it to range beyond myself. All men and women have
their sorrows,—most of them their wrongs; ingratitude, and
sordid jealousy, and interest, besetting all degrees of
life. Who would not forget their sorrows and their
wrongs?”</p>
<p>“Who would not, truly, and be happier and better for
it?” said the Phantom.</p>
<p>“These revolutions of years, which we
commemorate,” proceeded Redlaw, “what do <i>they</i>
recall! Are there any minds in which they do not re-awaken
some sorrow, or some trouble? What is the remembrance of
the old man who was here to-night? A tissue of sorrow and
trouble.”</p>
<p>“But common natures,” said the Phantom, with its
evil smile upon its glassy face, “unenlightened minds and
ordinary spirits, do not feel or reason on these things like men
of higher cultivation and profounder thought.”</p>
<p>“Tempter,” answered Redlaw, “whose hollow
look and voice I dread more than words can express, and from whom
some dim foreshadowing of greater fear is stealing over me while
I speak, I hear again an echo of my own mind.”</p>
<p>“Receive it as a proof that I am powerful,”
returned the Ghost. “Hear what I offer! Forget
the sorrow, wrong, and trouble you have known!”</p>
<p>“Forget them!” he repeated.</p>
<p>“I have the power to cancel their remembrance—to
leave but very faint, confused traces of them, that will die out
soon,” returned the Spectre. “Say! Is it
done?”</p>
<p>“Stay!” cried the haunted man, arresting by a
terrified gesture the uplifted hand. “I tremble with
distrust and doubt of you; and the dim fear you cast upon me
deepens into a nameless horror I can hardly bear.—I would
not deprive myself of any kindly recollection, or any sympathy
that is good for me, or others. What shall I lose, if I
assent to this? What else will pass from my
remembrance?”</p>
<p>“No knowledge; no result of study; nothing but the
intertwisted chain of feelings and associations, each in its turn
dependent on, and nourished by, the banished recollections.
Those will go.”</p>
<p>“Are they so many?” said the haunted man,
reflecting in alarm.</p>
<p>“They have been wont to show themselves in the fire, in
music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night, in the
revolving years,” returned the Phantom scornfully.</p>
<p>“In nothing else?”</p>
<p>The Phantom held its peace.</p>
<p>But having stood before him, silent, for a little while, it
moved towards the fire; then stopped.</p>
<p>“Decide!” it said, “before the opportunity
is lost!”</p>
<p>“A moment! I call Heaven to witness,” said
the agitated man, “that I have never been a hater of any
kind,—never morose, indifferent, or hard, to anything
around me. If, living here alone, I have made too much of
all that was and might have been, and too little of what is, the
evil, I believe, has fallen on me, and not on others. But,
if there were poison in my body, should I not, possessed of
antidotes and knowledge how to use them, use them? If there
be poison in my mind, and through this fearful shadow I can cast
it out, shall I not cast it out?”</p>
<p>“Say,” said the Spectre, “is it
done?”</p>
<p>“A moment longer!” he answered hurriedly.
“<i>I would forget it if I could</i>! Have <i>I</i>
thought that, alone, or has it been the thought of thousands upon
thousands, generation after generation? All human memory is
fraught with sorrow and trouble. My memory is as the memory
of other men, but other men have not this choice. Yes, I
close the bargain. Yes! I <span
class="GutSmall">WILL</span> forget my sorrow, wrong, and
trouble!”</p>
<p>“Say,” said the Spectre, “is it
done?”</p>
<p>“It is!”</p>
<p>“<span class="smcap">It is</span>. And take this
with you, man whom I here renounce! The gift that I have
given, you shall give again, go where you will. Without
recovering yourself the power that you have yielded up, you shall
henceforth destroy its like in all whom you approach. Your
wisdom has discovered that the memory of sorrow, wrong, and
trouble is the lot of all mankind, and that mankind would be the
happier, in its other memories, without it. Go! Be
its benefactor! Freed from such remembrance, from this
hour, carry involuntarily the blessing of such freedom with
you. Its diffusion is inseparable and inalienable from
you. Go! Be happy in the good you have won, and in
the good you do!”</p>
<p>The Phantom, which had held its bloodless hand above him while
it spoke, as if in some unholy invocation, or some ban; and which
had gradually advanced its eyes so close to his, that he could
see how they did not participate in the terrible smile upon its
face, but were a fixed, unalterable, steady horror melted before
him and was gone.</p>
<p>As he stood rooted to the spot, possessed by fear and wonder,
and imagining he heard repeated in melancholy echoes, dying away
fainter and fainter, the words, “Destroy its like in all
whom you approach!” a shrill cry reached his ears. It
came, not from the passages beyond the door, but from another
part of the old building, and sounded like the cry of some one in
the dark who had lost the way.</p>
<p>He looked confusedly upon his hands and limbs, as if to be
assured of his identity, and then shouted in reply, loudly and
wildly; for there was a strangeness and terror upon him, as if he
too were lost.</p>
<p>The cry responding, and being nearer, he caught up the lamp,
and raised a heavy curtain in the wall, by which he was
accustomed to pass into and out of the theatre where he
lectured,—which adjoined his room. Associated with
youth and animation, and a high amphitheatre of faces which his
entrance charmed to interest in a moment, it was a ghostly place
when all this life was faded out of it, and stared upon him like
an emblem of Death.</p>
<p>“Halloa!” he cried. “Halloa!
This way! Come to the light!” When, as he held
the curtain with one hand, and with the other raised the lamp and
tried to pierce the gloom that filled the place, something rushed
past him into the room like a wild-cat, and crouched down in a
corner.</p>
<p>“What is it?” he said, hastily.</p>
<p>He might have asked “What is it?” even had he seen
it well, as presently he did when he stood looking at it gathered
up in its corner.</p>
<p>A bundle of tatters, held together by a hand, in size and form
almost an infant’s, but in its greedy, desperate little
clutch, a bad old man’s. A face rounded and smoothed
by some half-dozen years, but pinched and twisted by the
experiences of a life. Bright eyes, but not youthful.
Naked feet, beautiful in their childish delicacy,—ugly in
the blood and dirt that cracked upon them. A baby savage, a
young monster, a child who had never been a child, a creature who
might live to take the outward form of man, but who, within,
would live and perish a mere beast.</p>
<p>Used, already, to be worried and hunted like a beast, the boy
crouched down as he was looked at, and looked back again, and
interposed his arm to ward off the expected blow.</p>
<p>“I’ll bite,” he said, “if you hit
me!”</p>
<p>The time had been, and not many minutes since, when such a
sight as this would have wrung the Chemist’s heart.
He looked upon it now, coldly; but with a heavy effort to
remember something—he did not know what—he asked the
boy what he did there, and whence he came.</p>
<p>“Where’s the woman?” he replied.
“I want to find the woman.”</p>
<p>“Who?”</p>
<p>“The woman. Her that brought me here, and set me
by the large fire. She was so long gone, that I went to
look for her, and lost myself. I don’t want
you. I want the woman.”</p>
<p>He made a spring, so suddenly, to get away, that the dull
sound of his naked feet upon the floor was near the curtain, when
Redlaw caught him by his rags.</p>
<p>“Come! you let me go!” muttered the boy,
struggling, and clenching his teeth. “I’ve done
nothing to you. Let me go, will you, to the
woman!”</p>
<p>“That is not the way. There is a nearer
one,” said Redlaw, detaining him, in the same blank effort
to remember some association that ought, of right, to bear upon
this monstrous object. “What is your name?”</p>
<p>“Got none.”</p>
<p>“Where do you live?</p>
<p>“Live! What’s that?”</p>
<p>The boy shook his hair from his eyes to look at him for a
moment, and then, twisting round his legs and wrestling with him,
broke again into his repetition of “You let me go, will
you? I want to find the woman.”</p>
<p>The Chemist led him to the door. “This way,”
he said, looking at him still confusedly, but with repugnance and
avoidance, growing out of his coldness. “I’ll
take you to her.”</p>
<p>The sharp eyes in the child’s head, wandering round the
room, lighted on the table where the remnants of the dinner
were.</p>
<p>“Give me some of that!” he said, covetously.</p>
<p>“Has she not fed you?”</p>
<p>“I shall be hungry again to-morrow, sha’n’t
I? Ain’t I hungry every day?”</p>
<p>Finding himself released, he bounded at the table like some
small animal of prey, and hugging to his breast bread and meat,
and his own rags, all together, said:</p>
<p>“There! Now take me to the woman!”</p>
<p>As the Chemist, with a new-born dislike to touch him, sternly
motioned him to follow, and was going out of the door, he
trembled and stopped.</p>
<p>“The gift that I have given, you shall give again, go
where you will!”</p>
<p>The Phantom’s words were blowing in the wind, and the
wind blew chill upon him.</p>
<p>“I’ll not go there, to-night,” he murmured
faintly. “I’ll go nowhere to-night. Boy!
straight down this long-arched passage, and past the great dark
door into the yard,—you see the fire shining on the window
there.”</p>
<p>“The woman’s fire?” inquired the boy.</p>
<p>He nodded, and the naked feet had sprung away. He came
back with his lamp, locked his door hastily, and sat down in his
chair, covering his face like one who was frightened at
himself.</p>
<p>For now he was, indeed, alone. Alone, alone.</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2>CHAPTER II<br >
The Gift Diffused</h2>
<p>A small man sat in a small parlour, partitioned off from a
small shop by a small screen, pasted all over with small scraps
of newspapers. In company with the small man, was almost
any amount of small children you may please to name—at
least it seemed so; they made, in that very limited sphere of
action, such an imposing effect, in point of numbers.</p>
<p>Of these small fry, two had, by some strong machinery, been
got into bed in a corner, where they might have reposed snugly
enough in the sleep of innocence, but for a constitutional
propensity to keep awake, and also to scuffle in and out of
bed. The immediate occasion of these predatory dashes at
the waking world, was the construction of an oyster-shell wall in
a corner, by two other youths of tender age; on which
fortification the two in bed made harassing descents (like those
accursed Picts and Scots who beleaguer the early historical
studies of most young Britons), and then withdrew to their own
territory.</p>
<p>In addition to the stir attendant on these inroads, and the
retorts of the invaded, who pursued hotly, and made lunges at the
bed-clothes under which the marauders took refuge, another little
boy, in another little bed, contributed his mite of confusion to
the family stock, by casting his boots upon the waters; in other
words, by launching these and several small objects, inoffensive
in themselves, though of a hard substance considered as missiles,
at the disturbers of his repose,—who were not slow to
return these compliments.</p>
<p>Besides which, another little boy—the biggest there, but
still little—was tottering to and fro, bent on one side,
and considerably affected in his knees by the weight of a large
baby, which he was supposed by a fiction that obtains sometimes
in sanguine families, to be hushing to sleep. But oh! the
inexhaustible regions of contemplation and watchfulness into
which this baby’s eyes were then only beginning to compose
themselves to stare, over his unconscious shoulder!</p>
<p>It was a very Moloch of a baby, on whose insatiate altar the
whole existence of this particular young brother was offered up a
daily sacrifice. Its personality may be said to have
consisted in its never being quiet, in any one place, for five
consecutive minutes, and never going to sleep when
required. “Tetterby’s baby” was as well
known in the neighbourhood as the postman or the pot-boy.
It roved from door-step to door-step, in the arms of little
Johnny Tetterby, and lagged heavily at the rear of troops of
juveniles who followed the Tumblers or the Monkey, and came up,
all on one side, a little too late for everything that was
attractive, from Monday morning until Saturday night.
Wherever childhood congregated to play, there was little Moloch
making Johnny fag and toil. Wherever Johnny desired to
stay, little Moloch became fractious, and would not remain.
Whenever Johnny wanted to go out, Moloch was asleep, and must be
watched. Whenever Johnny wanted to stay at home, Moloch was
awake, and must be taken out. Yet Johnny was verily
persuaded that it was a faultless baby, without its peer in the
realm of England, and was quite content to catch meek glimpses of
things in general from behind its skirts, or over its limp
flapping bonnet, and to go staggering about with it like a very
little porter with a very large parcel, which was not directed to
anybody, and could never be delivered anywhere.</p>
<p>The small man who sat in the small parlour, making fruitless
attempts to read his newspaper peaceably in the midst of this
disturbance, was the father of the family, and the chief of the
firm described in the inscription over the little shop front, by
the name and title of A. <span class="smcap">Tetterby and
Co</span>., <span class="smcap">Newsmen</span>. Indeed,
strictly speaking, he was the only personage answering to that
designation, as Co. was a mere poetical abstraction, altogether
baseless and impersonal.</p>
<p>Tetterby’s was the corner shop in Jerusalem
Buildings. There was a good show of literature in the
window, chiefly consisting of picture-newspapers out of date, and
serial pirates, and footpads. Walking-sticks, likewise, and
marbles, were included in the stock in trade. It had once
extended into the light confectionery line; but it would seem
that those elegancies of life were not in demand about Jerusalem
Buildings, for nothing connected with that branch of commerce
remained in the window, except a sort of small glass lantern
containing a languishing mass of bull’s-eyes, which had
melted in the summer and congealed in the winter until all hope
of ever getting them out, or of eating them without eating the
lantern too, was gone for ever. Tetterby’s had tried
its hand at several things. It had once made a feeble
little dart at the toy business; for, in another lantern, there
was a heap of minute wax dolls, all sticking together upside
down, in the direst confusion, with their feet on one
another’s heads, and a precipitate of broken arms and legs
at the bottom. It had made a move in the millinery
direction, which a few dry, wiry bonnet-shapes remained in a
corner of the window to attest. It had fancied that a
living might lie hidden in the tobacco trade, and had stuck up a
representation of a native of each of the three integral portions
of the British Empire, in the act of consuming that fragrant
weed; with a poetic legend attached, importing that united in one
cause they sat and joked, one chewed tobacco, one took snuff, one
smoked: but nothing seemed to have come of it—except
flies. Time had been when it had put a forlorn trust in
imitative jewellery, for in one pane of glass there was a card of
cheap seals, and another of pencil-cases, and a mysterious black
amulet of inscrutable intention, labelled ninepence. But,
to that hour, Jerusalem Buildings had bought none of them.
In short, Tetterby’s had tried so hard to get a livelihood
out of Jerusalem Buildings in one way or other, and appeared to
have done so indifferently in all, that the best position in the
firm was too evidently Co.’s; Co., as a bodiless creation,
being untroubled with the vulgar inconveniences of hunger and
thirst, being chargeable neither to the poor’s-rates nor
the assessed taxes, and having no young family to provide
for.</p>
<p>Tetterby himself, however, in his little parlour, as already
mentioned, having the presence of a young family impressed upon
his mind in a manner too clamorous to be disregarded, or to
comport with the quiet perusal of a newspaper, laid down his
paper, wheeled, in his distraction, a few times round the
parlour, like an undecided carrier-pigeon, made an ineffectual
rush at one or two flying little figures in bed-gowns that
skimmed past him, and then, bearing suddenly down upon the only
unoffending member of the family, boxed the ears of little
Moloch’s nurse.</p>
<p>“You bad boy!” said Mr. Tetterby,
“haven’t you any feeling for your poor father after
the fatigues and anxieties of a hard winter’s day, since
five o’clock in the morning, but must you wither his rest,
and corrode his latest intelligence, with <i>your</i> wicious
tricks? Isn’t it enough, sir, that your brother
’Dolphus is toiling and moiling in the fog and cold, and
you rolling in the lap of luxury with a—with a baby, and
everything you can wish for,” said Mr. Tetterby, heaping
this up as a great climax of blessings, “but must you make
a wilderness of home, and maniacs of your parents? Must
you, Johnny? Hey?” At each interrogation, Mr.
Tetterby made a feint of boxing his ears again, but thought
better of it, and held his hand.</p>
<p>“Oh, father!” whimpered Johnny, “when I
wasn’t doing anything, I’m sure, but taking such care
of Sally, and getting her to sleep. Oh, father!”</p>
<p>“I wish my little woman would come home!” said Mr.
Tetterby, relenting and repenting, “I only wish my little
woman would come home! I ain’t fit to deal with
’em. They make my head go round, and get the better
of me. Oh, Johnny! Isn’t it enough that your
dear mother has provided you with that sweet sister?”
indicating Moloch; “isn’t it enough that you were
seven boys before without a ray of gal, and that your dear mother
went through what she <i>did</i> go through, on purpose that you
might all of you have a little sister, but must you so behave
yourself as to make my head swim?”</p>
<p>Softening more and more, as his own tender feelings and those
of his injured son were worked on, Mr. Tetterby concluded by
embracing him, and immediately breaking away to catch one of the
real delinquents. A reasonably good start occurring, he
succeeded, after a short but smart run, and some rather severe
cross-country work under and over the bedsteads, and in and out
among the intricacies of the chairs, in capturing this infant,
whom he condignly punished, and bore to bed. This example
had a powerful, and apparently, mesmeric influence on him of the
boots, who instantly fell into a deep sleep, though he had been,
but a moment before, broad awake, and in the highest possible
feather. Nor was it lost upon the two young architects, who
retired to bed, in an adjoining closet, with great privacy and
speed. The comrade of the Intercepted One also shrinking
into his nest with similar discretion, Mr. Tetterby, when he
paused for breath, found himself unexpectedly in a scene of
peace.</p>
<p>“My little woman herself,” said Mr. Tetterby,
wiping his flushed face, “could hardly have done it
better! I only wish my little woman had had it to do, I do
indeed!”</p>
<p>Mr. Tetterby sought upon his screen for a passage appropriate
to be impressed upon his children’s minds on the occasion,
and read the following.</p>
<p>“‘It is an undoubted fact that all remarkable men
have had remarkable mothers, and have respected them in after
life as their best friends.’ Think of your own
remarkable mother, my boys,” said Mr. Tetterby, “and
know her value while she is still among you!”</p>
<p>He sat down again in his chair by the fire, and composed
himself, cross-legged, over his newspaper.</p>
<p>“Let anybody, I don’t care who it is, get out of
bed again,” said Tetterby, as a general proclamation,
delivered in a very soft-hearted manner, “and astonishment
will be the portion of that respected
contemporary!”—which expression Mr. Tetterby selected
from his screen. “Johnny, my child, take care of your
only sister, Sally; for she’s the brightest gem that ever
sparkled on your early brow.”</p>
<p>Johnny sat down on a little stool, and devotedly crushed
himself beneath the weight of Moloch.</p>
<p>“Ah, what a gift that baby is to you, Johnny!”
said his father, “and how thankful you ought to be!
‘It is not generally known, Johnny,’” he was
now referring to the screen again, “‘but it is a fact
ascertained, by accurate calculations, that the following immense
percentage of babies never attain to two years old; that is to
say—’”</p>
<p>“Oh, don’t, father, please!” cried
Johnny. “I can’t bear it, when I think of
Sally.”</p>
<p>Mr. Tetterby desisting, Johnny, with a profound sense of his
trust, wiped his eyes, and hushed his sister.</p>
<p>“Your brother ’Dolphus,” said his father,
poking the fire, “is late to-night, Johnny, and will come
home like a lump of ice. What’s got your precious
mother?”</p>
<p>“Here’s mother, and ’Dolphus too,
father!” exclaimed Johnny, “I think.”</p>
<p>“You’re right!” returned his father,
listening. “Yes, that’s the footstep of my
little woman.”</p>
<p>The process of induction, by which Mr. Tetterby had come to
the conclusion that his wife was a little woman, was his own
secret. She would have made two editions of himself, very
easily. Considered as an individual, she was rather
remarkable for being robust and portly; but considered with
reference to her husband, her dimensions became
magnificent. Nor did they assume a less imposing
proportion, when studied with reference to the size of her seven
sons, who were but diminutive. In the case of Sally,
however, Mrs. Tetterby had asserted herself, at last; as nobody
knew better than the victim Johnny, who weighed and measured that
exacting idol every hour in the day.</p>
<p>Mrs. Tetterby, who had been marketing, and carried a basket,
threw back her bonnet and shawl, and sitting down, fatigued,
commanded Johnny to bring his sweet charge to her straightway,
for a kiss. Johnny having complied, and gone back to his
stool, and again crushed himself, Master Adolphus Tetterby, who
had by this time unwound his torso out of a prismatic comforter,
apparently interminable, requested the same favour. Johnny
having again complied, and again gone back to his stool, and
again crushed himself, Mr. Tetterby, struck by a sudden thought,
preferred the same claim on his own parental part. The
satisfaction of this third desire completely exhausted the
sacrifice, who had hardly breath enough left to get back to his
stool, crush himself again, and pant at his relations.</p>
<p>“Whatever you do, Johnny,” said Mrs. Tetterby,
shaking her head, “take care of her, or never look your
mother in the face again.”</p>
<p>“Nor your brother,” said Adolphus.</p>
<p>“Nor your father, Johnny,” added Mr. Tetterby.</p>
<p>Johnny, much affected by this conditional renunciation of him,
looked down at Moloch’s eyes to see that they were all
right, so far, and skilfully patted her back (which was
uppermost), and rocked her with his foot.</p>
<p>“Are you wet, ’Dolphus, my boy?” said his
father. “Come and take my chair, and dry
yourself.”</p>
<p>“No, father, thank’ee,” said Adolphus,
smoothing himself down with his hands. “I an’t
very wet, I don’t think. Does my face shine much,
father?”</p>
<p>“Well, it <i>does</i> look waxy, my boy,” returned
Mr. Tetterby.</p>
<p>“It’s the weather, father,” said Adolphus,
polishing his cheeks on the worn sleeve of his jacket.
“What with rain, and sleet, and wind, and snow, and fog, my
face gets quite brought out into a rash sometimes. And
shines, it does—oh, don’t it, though!”</p>
<p>Master Adolphus was also in the newspaper line of life, being
employed, by a more thriving firm than his father and Co., to
vend newspapers at a railway station, where his chubby little
person, like a shabbily-disguised Cupid, and his shrill little
voice (he was not much more than ten years old), were as well
known as the hoarse panting of the locomotives, running in and
out. His juvenility might have been at some loss for a
harmless outlet, in this early application to traffic, but for a
fortunate discovery he made of a means of entertaining himself,
and of dividing the long day into stages of interest, without
neglecting business. This ingenious invention, remarkable,
like many great discoveries, for its simplicity, consisted in
varying the first vowel in the word “paper,” and
substituting, in its stead, at different periods of the day, all
the other vowels in grammatical succession. Thus, before
daylight in the winter-time, he went to and fro, in his little
oilskin cap and cape, and his big comforter, piercing the heavy
air with his cry of “Morn-ing Pa-per!” which, about
an hour before noon, changed to “Morn-ing Pepper!”
which, at about two, changed to “Morn-ing Pip-per!”
which in a couple of hours changed to “Morn-ing
Pop-per!” and so declined with the sun into “Eve-ning
Pup-per!” to the great relief and comfort of this young
gentleman’s spirits.</p>
<p>Mrs. Tetterby, his lady-mother, who had been sitting with her
bonnet and shawl thrown back, as aforesaid, thoughtfully turning
her wedding-ring round and round upon her finger, now rose, and
divesting herself of her out-of-door attire, began to lay the
cloth for supper.</p>
<p>“Ah, dear me, dear me, dear me!” said Mrs.
Tetterby. “That’s the way the world
goes!”</p>
<p>“Which is the way the world goes, my dear?” asked
Mr. Tetterby, looking round.</p>
<p>“Oh, nothing,” said Mrs. Tetterby.</p>
<p>Mr. Tetterby elevated his eyebrows, folded his newspaper
afresh, and carried his eyes up it, and down it, and across it,
but was wandering in his attention, and not reading it.</p>
<p>Mrs. Tetterby, at the same time, laid the cloth, but rather as
if she were punishing the table than preparing the family supper;
hitting it unnecessarily hard with the knives and forks, slapping
it with the plates, dinting it with the salt-cellar, and coming
heavily down upon it with the loaf.</p>
<p>“Ah, dear me, dear me, dear me!” said Mrs.
Tetterby. “That’s the way the world
goes!”</p>
<p>“My duck,” returned her husband, looking round
again, “you said that before. Which is the way the
world goes?”</p>
<p>“Oh, nothing!” said Mrs. Tetterby.</p>
<p>“Sophia!” remonstrated her husband, “you
said <i>that</i> before, too.”</p>
<p>“Well, I’ll say it again if you like,”
returned Mrs. Tetterby. “Oh
nothing—there! And again if you like, oh
nothing—there! And again if you like, oh
nothing—now then!”</p>
<p>Mr. Tetterby brought his eye to bear upon the partner of his
bosom, and said, in mild astonishment:</p>
<p>“My little woman, what has put you out?”</p>
<p>“I’m sure <i>I</i> don’t know,” she
retorted. “Don’t ask me. Who said I was
put out at all? <i>I</i> never did.”</p>
<p>Mr. Tetterby gave up the perusal of his newspaper as a bad
job, and, taking a slow walk across the room, with his hands
behind him, and his shoulders raised—his gait according
perfectly with the resignation of his manner—addressed
himself to his two eldest offspring.</p>
<p>“Your supper will be ready in a minute,
’Dolphus,” said Mr. Tetterby. “Your
mother has been out in the wet, to the cook’s shop, to buy
it. It was very good of your mother so to do.
<i>You</i> shall get some supper too, very soon, Johnny.
Your mother’s pleased with you, my man, for being so
attentive to your precious sister.”</p>
<p>Mrs. Tetterby, without any remark, but with a decided
subsidence of her animosity towards the table, finished her
preparations, and took, from her ample basket, a substantial slab
of hot pease pudding wrapped in paper, and a basin covered with a
saucer, which, on being uncovered, sent forth an odour so
agreeable, that the three pair of eyes in the two beds opened
wide and fixed themselves upon the banquet. Mr. Tetterby,
without regarding this tacit invitation to be seated, stood
repeating slowly, “Yes, yes, your supper will be ready in a
minute, ’Dolphus—your mother went out in the wet, to
the cook’s shop, to buy it. It was very good of your
mother so to do”—until Mrs. Tetterby, who had been
exhibiting sundry tokens of contrition behind him, caught him
round the neck, and wept.</p>
<p>“Oh, Dolphus!” said Mrs. Tetterby, “how
could I go and behave so?”</p>
<p>This reconciliation affected Adolphus the younger and Johnny
to that degree, that they both, as with one accord, raised a
dismal cry, which had the effect of immediately shutting up the
round eyes in the beds, and utterly routing the two remaining
little Tetterbys, just then stealing in from the adjoining closet
to see what was going on in the eating way.</p>
<p>“I am sure, ’Dolphus,” sobbed Mrs. Tetterby,
“coming home, I had no more idea than a child
unborn—”</p>
<p>Mr. Tetterby seemed to dislike this figure of speech, and
observed, “Say than the baby, my dear.”</p>
<p>“—Had no more idea than the baby,” said Mrs.
Tetterby.—“Johnny, don’t look at me, but look
at her, or she’ll fall out of your lap and be killed, and
then you’ll die in agonies of a broken heart, and serve you
right.—No more idea I hadn’t than that darling, of
being cross when I came home; but somehow,
’Dolphus—” Mrs. Tetterby paused, and
again turned her wedding-ring round and round upon her
finger.</p>
<p>“I see!” said Mr. Tetterby. “I
understand! My little woman was put out. Hard times,
and hard weather, and hard work, make it trying now and
then. I see, bless your soul! No wonder! Dolf,
my man,” continued Mr. Tetterby, exploring the basin with a
fork, “here’s your mother been and bought, at the
cook’s shop, besides pease pudding, a whole knuckle of a
lovely roast leg of pork, with lots of crackling left upon it,
and with seasoning gravy and mustard quite unlimited. Hand
in your plate, my boy, and begin while it’s
simmering.”</p>
<p>Master Adolphus, needing no second summons, received his
portion with eyes rendered moist by appetite, and withdrawing to
his particular stool, fell upon his supper tooth and nail.
Johnny was not forgotten, but received his rations on bread, lest
he should, in a flush of gravy, trickle any on the baby. He
was required, for similar reasons, to keep his pudding, when not
on active service, in his pocket.</p>
<p>There might have been more pork on the
knucklebone,—which knucklebone the carver at the
cook’s shop had assuredly not forgotten in carving for
previous customers—but there was no stint of seasoning, and
that is an accessory dreamily suggesting pork, and pleasantly
cheating the sense of taste. The pease pudding, too, the
gravy and mustard, like the Eastern rose in respect of the
nightingale, if they were not absolutely pork, had lived near it;
so, upon the whole, there was the flavour of a middle-sized
pig. It was irresistible to the Tetterbys in bed, who,
though professing to slumber peacefully, crawled out when unseen
by their parents, and silently appealed to their brothers for any
gastronomic token of fraternal affection. They, not hard of
heart, presenting scraps in return, it resulted that a party of
light skirmishers in nightgowns were careering about the parlour
all through supper, which harassed Mr. Tetterby exceedingly, and
once or twice imposed upon him the necessity of a charge, before
which these guerilla troops retired in all directions and in
great confusion.</p>
<p>Mrs. Tetterby did not enjoy her supper. There seemed to
be something on Mrs. Tetterby’s mind. At one time she
laughed without reason, and at another time she cried without
reason, and at last she laughed and cried together in a manner so
very unreasonable that her husband was confounded.</p>
<p>“My little woman,” said Mr. Tetterby, “if
the world goes that way, it appears to go the wrong way, and to
choke you.”</p>
<p>“Give me a drop of water,” said Mrs. Tetterby,
struggling with herself, “and don’t speak to me for
the present, or take any notice of me. Don’t do
it!”</p>
<p>Mr. Tetterby having administered the water, turned suddenly on
the unlucky Johnny (who was full of sympathy), and demanded why
he was wallowing there, in gluttony and idleness, instead of
coming forward with the baby, that the sight of her might revive
his mother. Johnny immediately approached, borne down by
its weight; but Mrs. Tetterby holding out her hand to signify
that she was not in a condition to bear that trying appeal to her
feelings, he was interdicted from advancing another inch, on pain
of perpetual hatred from all his dearest connections; and
accordingly retired to his stool again, and crushed himself as
before.</p>
<p>After a pause, Mrs. Tetterby said she was better now, and
began to laugh.</p>
<p>“My little woman,” said her husband, dubiously,
“are you quite sure you’re better? Or are you,
Sophia, about to break out in a fresh direction?”</p>
<p>“No, ’Dolphus, no,” replied his wife.
“I’m quite myself.” With that, settling
her hair, and pressing the palms of her hands upon her eyes, she
laughed again.</p>
<p>“What a wicked fool I was, to think so for a
moment!” said Mrs. Tetterby. “Come nearer,
’Dolphus, and let me ease my mind, and tell you what I
mean. Let me tell you all about it.”</p>
<p>Mr. Tetterby bringing his chair closer, Mrs. Tetterby laughed
again, gave him a hug, and wiped her eyes.</p>
<p>“You know, Dolphus, my dear,” said Mrs. Tetterby,
“that when I was single, I might have given myself away in
several directions. At one time, four after me at once; two
of them were sons of Mars.”</p>
<p>“We’re all sons of Ma’s, my dear,”
said Mr. Tetterby, “jointly with Pa’s.”</p>
<p>“I don’t mean that,” replied his wife,
“I mean soldiers—serjeants.”</p>
<p>“Oh!” said Mr. Tetterby.</p>
<p>“Well, ’Dolphus, I’m sure I never think of
such things now, to regret them; and I’m sure I’ve
got as good a husband, and would do as much to prove that I was
fond of him, as—”</p>
<p>“As any little woman in the world,” said Mr.
Tetterby. “Very good. <i>Very</i>
good.”</p>
<p>If Mr. Tetterby had been ten feet high, he could not have
expressed a gentler consideration for Mrs. Tetterby’s
fairy-like stature; and if Mrs. Tetterby had been two feet high,
she could not have felt it more appropriately her due.</p>
<p>“But you see, ’Dolphus,” said Mrs. Tetterby,
“this being Christmas-time, when all people who can, make
holiday, and when all people who have got money, like to spend
some, I did, somehow, get a little out of sorts when I was in the
streets just now. There were so many things to be
sold—such delicious things to eat, such fine things to look
at, such delightful things to have—and there was so much
calculating and calculating necessary, before I durst lay out a
sixpence for the commonest thing; and the basket was so large,
and wanted so much in it; and my stock of money was so small, and
would go such a little way;—you hate me, don’t you,
’Dolphus?”</p>
<p>“Not quite,” said Mr. Tetterby, “as
yet.”</p>
<p>“Well! I’ll tell you the whole truth,”
pursued his wife, penitently, “and then perhaps you
will. I felt all this, so much, when I was trudging about
in the cold, and when I saw a lot of other calculating faces and
large baskets trudging about, too, that I began to think whether
I mightn’t have done better, and been happier,
if—I—hadn’t—” the wedding-ring went
round again, and Mrs. Tetterby shook her downcast head as she
turned it.</p>
<p>“I see,” said her husband quietly; “if you
hadn’t married at all, or if you had married somebody
else?”</p>
<p>“Yes,” sobbed Mrs. Tetterby.
“That’s really what I thought. Do you hate me
now, ’Dolphus?”</p>
<p>“Why no,” said Mr. Tetterby. “I
don’t find that I do, as yet.”</p>
<p>Mrs. Tetterby gave him a thankful kiss, and went on.</p>
<p>“I begin to hope you won’t, now, ’Dolphus,
though I’m afraid I haven’t told you the worst.
I can’t think what came over me. I don’t know
whether I was ill, or mad, or what I was, but I couldn’t
call up anything that seemed to bind us to each other, or to
reconcile me to my fortune. All the pleasures and
enjoyments we had ever had—<i>they</i> seemed so poor and
insignificant, I hated them. I could have trodden on
them. And I could think of nothing else, except our being
poor, and the number of mouths there were at home.”</p>
<p>“Well, well, my dear,” said Mr. Tetterby, shaking
her hand encouragingly, “that’s truth, after
all. We <i>are</i> poor, and there <i>are</i> a number of
mouths at home here.”</p>
<p>“Ah! but, Dolf, Dolf!” cried his wife, laying her
hands upon his neck, “my good, kind, patient fellow, when I
had been at home a very little while—how different!
Oh, Dolf, dear, how different it was! I felt as if there
was a rush of recollection on me, all at once, that softened my
hard heart, and filled it up till it was bursting. All our
struggles for a livelihood, all our cares and wants since we have
been married, all the times of sickness, all the hours of
watching, we have ever had, by one another, or by the children,
seemed to speak to me, and say that they had made us one, and
that I never might have been, or could have been, or would have
been, any other than the wife and mother I am. Then, the
cheap enjoyments that I could have trodden on so cruelly, got to
be so precious to me—Oh so priceless, and dear!—that
I couldn’t bear to think how much I had wronged them; and I
said, and say again a hundred times, how could I ever behave so,
’Dolphus, how could I ever have the heart to do
it!”</p>
<p>The good woman, quite carried away by her honest tenderness
and remorse, was weeping with all her heart, when she started up
with a scream, and ran behind her husband. Her cry was so
terrified, that the children started from their sleep and from
their beds, and clung about her. Nor did her gaze belie her
voice, as she pointed to a pale man in a black cloak who had come
into the room.</p>
<p>“Look at that man! Look there! What does he
want?”</p>
<p>“My dear,” returned her husband, “I’ll
ask him if you’ll let me go. What’s the
matter! How you shake!”</p>
<p>“I saw him in the street, when I was out just now.
He looked at me, and stood near me. I am afraid of
him.”</p>
<p>“Afraid of him! Why?”</p>
<p>“I don’t know why—I—stop!
husband!” for he was going towards the stranger.</p>
<p>She had one hand pressed upon her forehead, and one upon her
breast; and there was a peculiar fluttering all over her, and a
hurried unsteady motion of her eyes, as if she had lost
something.</p>
<p>“Are you ill, my dear?”</p>
<p>“What is it that is going from me again?” she
muttered, in a low voice. “What <i>is</i> this that
is going away?”</p>
<p>Then she abruptly answered: “Ill? No, I am
quite well,” and stood looking vacantly at the floor.</p>
<p>Her husband, who had not been altogether free from the
infection of her fear at first, and whom the present strangeness
of her manner did not tend to reassure, addressed himself to the
pale visitor in the black cloak, who stood still, and whose eyes
were bent upon the ground.</p>
<p>“What may be your pleasure, sir,” he asked,
“with us?”</p>
<p>“I fear that my coming in unperceived,” returned
the visitor, “has alarmed you; but you were talking and did
not hear me.”</p>
<p>“My little woman says—perhaps you heard her say
it,” returned Mr. Tetterby, “that it’s not the
first time you have alarmed her to-night.”</p>
<p>“I am sorry for it. I remember to have observed
her, for a few moments only, in the street. I had no
intention of frightening her.”</p>
<p>As he raised his eyes in speaking, she raised hers. It
was extraordinary to see what dread she had of him, and with what
dread he observed it—and yet how narrowly and closely.</p>
<p>“My name,” he said, “is Redlaw. I come
from the old college hard by. A young gentleman who is a
student there, lodges in your house, does he not?”</p>
<p>“Mr. Denham?” said Tetterby.</p>
<p>“Yes.”</p>
<p>It was a natural action, and so slight as to be hardly
noticeable; but the little man, before speaking again, passed his
hand across his forehead, and looked quickly round the room, as
though he were sensible of some change in its atmosphere.
The Chemist, instantly transferring to him the look of dread he
had directed towards the wife, stepped back, and his face turned
paler.</p>
<p>“The gentleman’s room,” said Tetterby,
“is upstairs, sir. There’s a more convenient
private entrance; but as you have come in here, it will save your
going out into the cold, if you’ll take this little
staircase,” showing one communicating directly with the
parlour, “and go up to him that way, if you wish to see
him.”</p>
<p>“Yes, I wish to see him,” said the Chemist.
“Can you spare a light?”</p>
<p>The watchfulness of his haggard look, and the inexplicable
distrust that darkened it, seemed to trouble Mr. Tetterby.
He paused; and looking fixedly at him in return, stood for a
minute or so, like a man stupefied, or fascinated.</p>
<p>At length he said, “I’ll light you, sir, if
you’ll follow me.”</p>
<p>“No,” replied the Chemist, “I don’t
wish to be attended, or announced to him. He does not
expect me. I would rather go alone. Please to give me
the light, if you can spare it, and I’ll find the
way.”</p>
<p>In the quickness of his expression of this desire, and in
taking the candle from the newsman, he touched him on the
breast. Withdrawing his hand hastily, almost as though he
had wounded him by accident (for he did not know in what part of
himself his new power resided, or how it was communicated, or how
the manner of its reception varied in different persons), he
turned and ascended the stair.</p>
<p>But when he reached the top, he stopped and looked down.
The wife was standing in the same place, twisting her ring round
and round upon her finger. The husband, with his head bent
forward on his breast, was musing heavily and sullenly. The
children, still clustering about the mother, gazed timidly after
the visitor, and nestled together when they saw him looking
down.</p>
<p>“Come!” said the father, roughly.
“There’s enough of this. Get to bed
here!”</p>
<p>“The place is inconvenient and small enough,” the
mother added, “without you. Get to bed!”</p>
<p>The whole brood, scared and sad, crept away; little Johnny and
the baby lagging last. The mother, glancing contemptuously
round the sordid room, and tossing from her the fragments of
their meal, stopped on the threshold of her task of clearing the
table, and sat down, pondering idly and dejectedly. The
father betook himself to the chimney-corner, and impatiently
raking the small fire together, bent over it as if he would
monopolise it all. They did not interchange a word.</p>
<p>The Chemist, paler than before, stole upward like a thief;
looking back upon the change below, and dreading equally to go on
or return.</p>
<p>“What have I done!” he said, confusedly.
“What am I going to do!”</p>
<p>“To be the benefactor of mankind,” he thought he
heard a voice reply.</p>
<p>He looked round, but there was nothing there; and a passage
now shutting out the little parlour from his view, he went on,
directing his eyes before him at the way he went.</p>
<p>“It is only since last night,” he muttered
gloomily, “that I have remained shut up, and yet all things
are strange to me. I am strange to myself. I am here,
as in a dream. What interest have I in this place, or in
any place that I can bring to my remembrance? My mind is
going blind!”</p>
<p>There was a door before him, and he knocked at it. Being
invited, by a voice within, to enter, he complied.</p>
<p>“Is that my kind nurse?” said the voice.
“But I need not ask her. There is no one else to come
here.”</p>
<p>It spoke cheerfully, though in a languid tone, and attracted
his attention to a young man lying on a couch, drawn before the
chimney-piece, with the back towards the door. A meagre
scanty stove, pinched and hollowed like a sick man’s
cheeks, and bricked into the centre of a hearth that it could
scarcely warm, contained the fire, to which his face was
turned. Being so near the windy house-top, it wasted
quickly, and with a busy sound, and the burning ashes dropped
down fast.</p>
<p>“They chink when they shoot out here,” said the
student, smiling, “so, according to the gossips, they are
not coffins, but purses. I shall be well and rich yet, some
day, if it please God, and shall live perhaps to love a daughter
Milly, in remembrance of the kindest nature and the gentlest
heart in the world.”</p>
<p>He put up his hand as if expecting her to take it, but, being
weakened, he lay still, with his face resting on his other hand,
and did not turn round.</p>
<p>The Chemist glanced about the room;—at the
student’s books and papers, piled upon a table in a corner,
where they, and his extinguished reading-lamp, now prohibited and
put away, told of the attentive hours that had gone before this
illness, and perhaps caused it;—at such signs of his old
health and freedom, as the out-of-door attire that hung idle on
the wall;—at those remembrances of other and less solitary
scenes, the little miniatures upon the chimney-piece, and the
drawing of home;—at that token of his emulation, perhaps,
in some sort, of his personal attachment too, the framed
engraving of himself, the looker-on. The time had been,
only yesterday, when not one of these objects, in its remotest
association of interest with the living figure before him, would
have been lost on Redlaw. Now, they were but objects; or,
if any gleam of such connexion shot upon him, it perplexed, and
not enlightened him, as he stood looking round with a dull
wonder.</p>
<p>The student, recalling the thin hand which had remained so
long untouched, raised himself on the couch, and turned his
head.</p>
<p>“Mr. Redlaw!” he exclaimed, and started up.</p>
<p>Redlaw put out his arm.</p>
<p>“Don’t come nearer to me. I will sit
here. Remain you, where you are!”</p>
<p>He sat down on a chair near the door, and having glanced at
the young man standing leaning with his hand upon the couch,
spoke with his eyes averted towards the ground.</p>
<p>“I heard, by an accident, by what accident is no matter,
that one of my class was ill and solitary. I received no
other description of him, than that he lived in this
street. Beginning my inquiries at the first house in it, I
have found him.”</p>
<p>“I have been ill, sir,” returned the student, not
merely with a modest hesitation, but with a kind of awe of him,
“but am greatly better. An attack of fever—of
the brain, I believe—has weakened me, but I am much
better. I cannot say I have been solitary, in my illness,
or I should forget the ministering hand that has been near
me.”</p>
<p>“You are speaking of the keeper’s wife,”
said Redlaw.</p>
<p>“Yes.” The student bent his head, as if he
rendered her some silent homage.</p>
<p>The Chemist, in whom there was a cold, monotonous apathy,
which rendered him more like a marble image on the tomb of the
man who had started from his dinner yesterday at the first
mention of this student’s case, than the breathing man
himself, glanced again at the student leaning with his hand upon
the couch, and looked upon the ground, and in the air, as if for
light for his blinded mind.</p>
<p>“I remembered your name,” he said, “when it
was mentioned to me down stairs, just now; and I recollect your
face. We have held but very little personal communication
together?”</p>
<p>“Very little.”</p>
<p>“You have retired and withdrawn from me, more than any
of the rest, I think?”</p>
<p>The student signified assent.</p>
<p>“And why?” said the Chemist; not with the least
expression of interest, but with a moody, wayward kind of
curiosity. “Why? How comes it that you have
sought to keep especially from me, the knowledge of your
remaining here, at this season, when all the rest have dispersed,
and of your being ill? I want to know why this
is?”</p>
<p>The young man, who had heard him with increasing agitation,
raised his downcast eyes to his face, and clasping his hands
together, cried with sudden earnestness and with trembling
lips:</p>
<p>“Mr. Redlaw! You have discovered me. You
know my secret!”</p>
<p>“Secret?” said the Chemist, harshly.
“I know?”</p>
<p>“Yes! Your manner, so different from the interest
and sympathy which endear you to so many hearts, your altered
voice, the constraint there is in everything you say, and in your
looks,” replied the student, “warn me that you know
me. That you would conceal it, even now, is but a proof to
me (God knows I need none!) of your natural kindness and of the
bar there is between us.”</p>
<p>A vacant and contemptuous laugh, was all his answer.</p>
<p>“But, Mr. Redlaw,” said the student, “as a
just man, and a good man, think how innocent I am, except in name
and descent, of participation in any wrong inflicted on you or in
any sorrow you have borne.”</p>
<p>“Sorrow!” said Redlaw, laughing.
“Wrong! What are those to me?”</p>
<p>“For Heaven’s sake,” entreated the shrinking
student, “do not let the mere interchange of a few words
with me change you like this, sir! Let me pass again from
your knowledge and notice. Let me occupy my old reserved
and distant place among those whom you instruct. Know me
only by the name I have assumed, and not by that of
Longford—”</p>
<p>“Longford!” exclaimed the other.</p>
<p>He clasped his head with both his hands, and for a moment
turned upon the young man his own intelligent and thoughtful
face. But the light passed from it, like the sun-beam of an
instant, and it clouded as before.</p>
<p>“The name my mother bears, sir,” faltered the
young man, “the name she took, when she might, perhaps,
have taken one more honoured. Mr. Redlaw,”
hesitating, “I believe I know that history. Where my
information halts, my guesses at what is wanting may supply
something not remote from the truth. I am the child of a
marriage that has not proved itself a well-assorted or a happy
one. From infancy, I have heard you spoken of with honour
and respect—with something that was almost reverence.
I have heard of such devotion, of such fortitude and tenderness,
of such rising up against the obstacles which press men down,
that my fancy, since I learnt my little lesson from my mother,
has shed a lustre on your name. At last, a poor student
myself, from whom could I learn but you?”</p>
<p>Redlaw, unmoved, unchanged, and looking at him with a staring
frown, answered by no word or sign.</p>
<p>“I cannot say,” pursued the other, “I should
try in vain to say, how much it has impressed me, and affected
me, to find the gracious traces of the past, in that certain
power of winning gratitude and confidence which is associated
among us students (among the humblest of us, most) with Mr.
Redlaw’s generous name. Our ages and positions are so
different, sir, and I am so accustomed to regard you from a
distance, that I wonder at my own presumption when I touch,
however lightly, on that theme. But to one who—I may
say, who felt no common interest in my mother once—it may
be something to hear, now that all is past, with what
indescribable feelings of affection I have, in my obscurity,
regarded him; with what pain and reluctance I have kept aloof
from his encouragement, when a word of it would have made me
rich; yet how I have felt it fit that I should hold my course,
content to know him, and to be unknown. Mr. Redlaw,”
said the student, faintly, “what I would have said, I have
said ill, for my strength is strange to me as yet; but for
anything unworthy in this fraud of mine, forgive me, and for all
the rest forget me!”</p>
<p>The staring frown remained on Redlaw’s face, and yielded
to no other expression until the student, with these words,
advanced towards him, as if to touch his hand, when he drew back
and cried to him:</p>
<p>“Don’t come nearer to me!”</p>
<p>The young man stopped, shocked by the eagerness of his recoil,
and by the sternness of his repulsion; and he passed his hand,
thoughtfully, across his forehead.</p>
<p>“The past is past,” said the Chemist.
“It dies like the brutes. Who talks to me of its
traces in my life? He raves or lies! What have I to
do with your distempered dreams? If you want money, here it
is. I came to offer it; and that is all I came for.
There can be nothing else that brings me here,” he
muttered, holding his head again, with both his hands.
“There <i>can</i> be nothing else, and
yet—”</p>
<p>He had tossed his purse upon the table. As he fell into
this dim cogitation with himself, the student took it up, and
held it out to him.</p>
<p>“Take it back, sir,” he said proudly, though not
angrily. “I wish you could take from me, with it, the
remembrance of your words and offer.”</p>
<p>“You do?” he retorted, with a wild light in his
eyes. “You do?”</p>
<p>“I do!”</p>
<p>The Chemist went close to him, for the first time, and took
the purse, and turned him by the arm, and looked him in the
face.</p>
<p>“There is sorrow and trouble in sickness, is there
not?” he demanded, with a laugh.</p>
<p>The wondering student answered, “Yes.”</p>
<p>“In its unrest, in its anxiety, in its suspense, in all
its train of physical and mental miseries?” said the
Chemist, with a wild unearthly exultation. “All best
forgotten, are they not?”</p>
<p>The student did not answer, but again passed his hand,
confusedly, across his forehead. Redlaw still held him by
the sleeve, when Milly’s voice was heard outside.</p>
<p>“I can see very well now,” she said, “thank
you, Dolf. Don’t cry, dear. Father and mother
will be comfortable again, to-morrow, and home will be
comfortable too. A gentleman with him, is there!”</p>
<p>Redlaw released his hold, as he listened.</p>
<p>“I have feared, from the first moment,” he
murmured to himself, “to meet her. There is a steady
quality of goodness in her, that I dread to influence. I
may be the murderer of what is tenderest and best within her
bosom.”</p>
<p>She was knocking at the door.</p>
<p>“Shall I dismiss it as an idle foreboding, or still
avoid her?” he muttered, looking uneasily around.</p>
<p>She was knocking at the door again.</p>
<p>“Of all the visitors who could come here,” he
said, in a hoarse alarmed voice, turning to his companion,
“this is the one I should desire most to avoid. Hide
me!”</p>
<p>The student opened a frail door in the wall, communicating
where the garret-roof began to slope towards the floor, with a
small inner room. Redlaw passed in hastily, and shut it
after him.</p>
<p>The student then resumed his place upon the couch, and called
to her to enter.</p>
<p>“Dear Mr. Edmund,” said Milly, looking round,
“they told me there was a gentleman here.”</p>
<p>“There is no one here but I.”</p>
<p>“There has been some one?”</p>
<p>“Yes, yes, there has been some one.”</p>
<p>She put her little basket on the table, and went up to the
back of the couch, as if to take the extended hand—but it
was not there. A little surprised, in her quiet way, she
leaned over to look at his face, and gently touched him on the
brow.</p>
<p>“Are you quite as well to-night? Your head is not
so cool as in the afternoon.”</p>
<p>“Tut!” said the student, petulantly, “very
little ails me.”</p>
<p>A little more surprise, but no reproach, was expressed in her
face, as she withdrew to the other side of the table, and took a
small packet of needlework from her basket. But she laid it
down again, on second thoughts, and going noiselessly about the
room, set everything exactly in its place, and in the neatest
order; even to the cushions on the couch, which she touched with
so light a hand, that he hardly seemed to know it, as he lay
looking at the fire. When all this was done, and she had
swept the hearth, she sat down, in her modest little bonnet, to
her work, and was quietly busy on it directly.</p>
<p>“It’s the new muslin curtain for the window, Mr.
Edmund,” said Milly, stitching away as she talked.
“It will look very clean and nice, though it costs very
little, and will save your eyes, too, from the light. My
William says the room should not be too light just now, when you
are recovering so well, or the glare might make you
giddy.”</p>
<p>He said nothing; but there was something so fretful and
impatient in his change of position, that her quick fingers
stopped, and she looked at him anxiously.</p>
<p>“The pillows are not comfortable,” she said,
laying down her work and rising. “I will soon put
them right.”</p>
<p>“They are very well,” he answered.
“Leave them alone, pray. You make so much of
everything.”</p>
<p>He raised his head to say this, and looked at her so
thanklessly, that, after he had thrown himself down again, she
stood timidly pausing. However, she resumed her seat, and
her needle, without having directed even a murmuring look towards
him, and was soon as busy as before.</p>
<p>“I have been thinking, Mr. Edmund, that <i>you</i> have
been often thinking of late, when I have been sitting by, how
true the saying is, that adversity is a good teacher.
Health will be more precious to you, after this illness, than it
has ever been. And years hence, when this time of year
comes round, and you remember the days when you lay here sick,
alone, that the knowledge of your illness might not afflict those
who are dearest to you, your home will be doubly dear and doubly
blest. Now, isn’t that a good, true thing?”</p>
<p>She was too intent upon her work, and too earnest in what she
said, and too composed and quiet altogether, to be on the watch
for any look he might direct towards her in reply; so the shaft
of his ungrateful glance fell harmless, and did not wound
her.</p>
<p>“Ah!” said Milly, with her pretty head inclining
thoughtfully on one side, as she looked down, following her busy
fingers with her eyes. “Even on me—and I am
very different from you, Mr. Edmund, for I have no learning, and
don’t know how to think properly—this view of such
things has made a great impression, since you have been lying
ill. When I have seen you so touched by the kindness and
attention of the poor people down stairs, I have felt that you
thought even that experience some repayment for the loss of
health, and I have read in your face, as plain as if it was a
book, that but for some trouble and sorrow we should never know
half the good there is about us.”</p>
<p>His getting up from the couch, interrupted her, or she was
going on to say more.</p>
<p>“We needn’t magnify the merit, Mrs.
William,” he rejoined slightingly. “The people
down stairs will be paid in good time I dare say, for any little
extra service they may have rendered me; and perhaps they
anticipate no less. I am much obliged to you,
too.”</p>
<p>Her fingers stopped, and she looked at him.</p>
<p>“I can’t be made to feel the more obliged by your
exaggerating the case,” he said. “I am sensible
that you have been interested in me, and I say I am much obliged
to you. What more would you have?”</p>
<p>Her work fell on her lap, as she still looked at him walking
to and fro with an intolerant air, and stopping now and then.</p>
<p>“I say again, I am much obliged to you. Why weaken
my sense of what is your due in obligation, by preferring
enormous claims upon me? Trouble, sorrow, affliction,
adversity! One might suppose I had been dying a score of
deaths here!”</p>
<p>“Do you believe, Mr. Edmund,” she asked, rising
and going nearer to him, “that I spoke of the poor people
of the house, with any reference to myself? To me?”
laying her hand upon her bosom with a simple and innocent smile
of astonishment.</p>
<p>“Oh! I think nothing about it, my good
creature,” he returned. “I have had an
indisposition, which your solicitude—observe! I say
solicitude—makes a great deal more of, than it merits; and
it’s over, and we can’t perpetuate it.”</p>
<p>He coldly took a book, and sat down at the table.</p>
<p>She watched him for a little while, until her smile was quite
gone, and then, returning to where her basket was, said
gently:</p>
<p>“Mr. Edmund, would you rather be alone?”</p>
<p>“There is no reason why I should detain you here,”
he replied.</p>
<p>“Except—” said Milly, hesitating, and
showing her work.</p>
<p>“Oh! the curtain,” he answered, with a
supercilious laugh. “That’s not worth staying
for.”</p>
<p>She made up the little packet again, and put it in her
basket. Then, standing before him with such an air of
patient entreaty that he could not choose but look at her, she
said:</p>
<p>“If you should want me, I will come back
willingly. When you did want me, I was quite happy to come;
there was no merit in it. I think you must be afraid, that,
now you are getting well, I may be troublesome to you; but I
should not have been, indeed. I should have come no longer
than your weakness and confinement lasted. You owe me
nothing; but it is right that you should deal as justly by me as
if I was a lady—even the very lady that you love; and if
you suspect me of meanly making much of the little I have tried
to do to comfort your sick room, you do yourself more wrong than
ever you can do me. That is why I am sorry. That is
why I am very sorry.”</p>
<p>If she had been as passionate as she was quiet, as indignant
as she was calm, as angry in her look as she was gentle, as loud
of tone as she was low and clear, she might have left no sense of
her departure in the room, compared with that which fell upon the
lonely student when she went away.</p>
<p>He was gazing drearily upon the place where she had been, when
Redlaw came out of his concealment, and came to the door.</p>
<p>“When sickness lays its hand on you again,” he
said, looking fiercely back at him, “—may it be
soon!—Die here! Rot here!”</p>
<p>“What have you done?” returned the other, catching
at his cloak. “What change have you wrought in
me? What curse have you brought upon me? Give me back
<i>my</i>self!”</p>
<p>“Give me back myself!” exclaimed Redlaw like a
madman. “I am infected! I am infectious!
I am charged with poison for my own mind, and the minds of all
mankind. Where I felt interest, compassion, sympathy, I am
turning into stone. Selfishness and ingratitude spring up
in my blighting footsteps. I am only so much less base than
the wretches whom I make so, that in the moment of their
transformation I can hate them.”</p>
<p>As he spoke—the young man still holding to his
cloak—he cast him off, and struck him: then, wildly hurried
out into the night air where the wind was blowing, the snow
falling, the cloud-drift sweeping on, the moon dimly shining; and
where, blowing in the wind, falling with the snow, drifting with
the clouds, shining in the moonlight, and heavily looming in the
darkness, were the Phantom’s words, “The gift that I
have given, you shall give again, go where you will!”</p>
<p>Whither he went, he neither knew nor cared, so that he avoided
company. The change he felt within him made the busy
streets a desert, and himself a desert, and the multitude around
him, in their manifold endurances and ways of life, a mighty
waste of sand, which the winds tossed into unintelligible heaps
and made a ruinous confusion of. Those traces in his breast
which the Phantom had told him would “die out soon,”
were not, as yet, so far upon their way to death, but that he
understood enough of what he was, and what he made of others, to
desire to be alone.</p>
<p>This put it in his mind—he suddenly bethought himself,
as he was going along, of the boy who had rushed into his
room. And then he recollected, that of those with whom he
had communicated since the Phantom’s disappearance, that
boy alone had shown no sign of being changed.</p>
<p>Monstrous and odious as the wild thing was to him, he
determined to seek it out, and prove if this were really so; and
also to seek it with another intention, which came into his
thoughts at the same time.</p>
<p>So, resolving with some difficulty where he was, he directed
his steps back to the old college, and to that part of it where
the general porch was, and where, alone, the pavement was worn by
the tread of the students’ feet.</p>
<p>The keeper’s house stood just within the iron gates,
forming a part of the chief quadrangle. There was a little
cloister outside, and from that sheltered place he knew he could
look in at the window of their ordinary room, and see who was
within. The iron gates were shut, but his hand was familiar
with the fastening, and drawing it back by thrusting in his wrist
between the bars, he passed through softly, shut it again, and
crept up to the window, crumbling the thin crust of snow with his
feet.</p>
<p>The fire, to which he had directed the boy last night, shining
brightly through the glass, made an illuminated place upon the
ground. Instinctively avoiding this, and going round it, he
looked in at the window. At first, he thought that there
was no one there, and that the blaze was reddening only the old
beams in the ceiling and the dark walls; but peering in more
narrowly, he saw the object of his search coiled asleep before it
on the floor. He passed quickly to the door, opened it, and
went in.</p>
<p>The creature lay in such a fiery heat, that, as the Chemist
stooped to rouse him, it scorched his head. So soon as he
was touched, the boy, not half awake, clutching his rags together
with the instinct of flight upon him, half rolled and half ran
into a distant corner of the room, where, heaped upon the ground,
he struck his foot out to defend himself.</p>
<p>“Get up!” said the Chemist. “You have
not forgotten me?”</p>
<p>“You let me alone!” returned the boy.
“This is the woman’s house—not
yours.”</p>
<p>The Chemist’s steady eye controlled him somewhat, or
inspired him with enough submission to be raised upon his feet,
and looked at.</p>
<p>“Who washed them, and put those bandages where they were
bruised and cracked?” asked the Chemist, pointing to their
altered state.</p>
<p>“The woman did.”</p>
<p>“And is it she who has made you cleaner in the face,
too?”</p>
<p>“Yes, the woman.”</p>
<p>Redlaw asked these questions to attract his eyes towards
himself, and with the same intent now held him by the chin, and
threw his wild hair back, though he loathed to touch him.
The boy watched his eyes keenly, as if he thought it needful to
his own defence, not knowing what he might do next; and Redlaw
could see well that no change came over him.</p>
<p>“Where are they?” he inquired.</p>
<p>“The woman’s out.”</p>
<p>“I know she is. Where is the old man with the
white hair, and his son?”</p>
<p>“The woman’s husband, d’ye mean?”
inquired the boy.</p>
<p>“Ay. Where are those two?”</p>
<p>“Out. Something’s the matter,
somewhere. They were fetched out in a hurry, and told me to
stop here.”</p>
<p>“Come with me,” said the Chemist, “and
I’ll give you money.”</p>
<p>“Come where? and how much will you give?”</p>
<p>“I’ll give you more shillings than you ever saw,
and bring you back soon. Do you know your way to where you
came from?”</p>
<p>“You let me go,” returned the boy, suddenly
twisting out of his grasp. “I’m not a going to
take you there. Let me be, or I’ll heave some fire at
you!”</p>
<p>He was down before it, and ready, with his savage little hand,
to pluck the burning coals out.</p>
<p>What the Chemist had felt, in observing the effect of his
charmed influence stealing over those with whom he came in
contact, was not nearly equal to the cold vague terror with which
he saw this baby-monster put it at defiance. It chilled his
blood to look on the immovable impenetrable thing, in the
likeness of a child, with its sharp malignant face turned up to
his, and its almost infant hand, ready at the bars.</p>
<p>“Listen, boy!” he said. “You shall
take me where you please, so that you take me where the people
are very miserable or very wicked. I want to do them good,
and not to harm them. You shall have money, as I have told
you, and I will bring you back. Get up! Come
quickly!” He made a hasty step towards the door,
afraid of her returning.</p>
<p>“Will you let me walk by myself, and never hold me, nor
yet touch me?” said the boy, slowly withdrawing the hand
with which he threatened, and beginning to get up.</p>
<p>“I will!”</p>
<p>“And let me go, before, behind, or anyways I
like?”</p>
<p>“I will!”</p>
<p>“Give me some money first, then, and go.”</p>
<p>The Chemist laid a few shillings, one by one, in his extended
hand. To count them was beyond the boy’s knowledge,
but he said “one,” every time, and avariciously
looked at each as it was given, and at the donor. He had
nowhere to put them, out of his hand, but in his mouth; and he
put them there.</p>
<p>Redlaw then wrote with his pencil on a leaf of his
pocket-book, that the boy was with him; and laying it on the
table, signed to him to follow. Keeping his rags together,
as usual, the boy complied, and went out with his bare head and
naked feet into the winter night.</p>
<p>Preferring not to depart by the iron gate by which he had
entered, where they were in danger of meeting her whom he so
anxiously avoided, the Chemist led the way, through some of those
passages among which the boy had lost himself, and by that
portion of the building where he lived, to a small door of which
he had the key. When they got into the street, he stopped
to ask his guide—who instantly retreated from him—if
he knew where they were.</p>
<p>The savage thing looked here and there, and at length, nodding
his head, pointed in the direction he designed to take.
Redlaw going on at once, he followed, something less
suspiciously; shifting his money from his mouth into his hand,
and back again into his mouth, and stealthily rubbing it bright
upon his shreds of dress, as he went along.</p>
<p>Three times, in their progress, they were side by side.
Three times they stopped, being side by side. Three times
the Chemist glanced down at his face, and shuddered as it forced
upon him one reflection.</p>
<p>The first occasion was when they were crossing an old
churchyard, and Redlaw stopped among the graves, utterly at a
loss how to connect them with any tender, softening, or
consolatory thought.</p>
<p>The second was, when the breaking forth of the moon induced
him to look up at the Heavens, where he saw her in her glory,
surrounded by a host of stars he still knew by the names and
histories which human science has appended to them; but where he
saw nothing else he had been wont to see, felt nothing he had
been wont to feel, in looking up there, on a bright night.</p>
<p>The third was when he stopped to listen to a plaintive strain
of music, but could only hear a tune, made manifest to him by the
dry mechanism of the instruments and his own ears, with no
address to any mystery within him, without a whisper in it of the
past, or of the future, powerless upon him as the sound of last
year’s running water, or the rushing of last year’s
wind.</p>
<p>At each of these three times, he saw with horror that, in
spite of the vast intellectual distance between them, and their
being unlike each other in all physical respects, the expression
on the boy’s face was the expression on his own.</p>
<p>They journeyed on for some time—now through such crowded
places, that he often looked over his shoulder thinking he had
lost his guide, but generally finding him within his shadow on
his other side; now by ways so quiet, that he could have counted
his short, quick, naked footsteps coming on behind—until
they arrived at a ruinous collection of houses, and the boy
touched him and stopped.</p>
<p>“In there!” he said, pointing out one house where
there were scattered lights in the windows, and a dim lantern in
the doorway, with “Lodgings for Travellers” painted
on it.</p>
<p>Redlaw looked about him; from the houses to the waste piece of
ground on which the houses stood, or rather did not altogether
tumble down, unfenced, undrained, unlighted, and bordered by a
sluggish ditch; from that, to the sloping line of arches, part of
some neighbouring viaduct or bridge with which it was surrounded,
and which lessened gradually towards them, until the last but one
was a mere kennel for a dog, the last a plundered little heap of
bricks; from that, to the child, close to him, cowering and
trembling with the cold, and limping on one little foot, while he
coiled the other round his leg to warm it, yet staring at all
these things with that frightful likeness of expression so
apparent in his face, that Redlaw started from him.</p>
<p>“In there!” said the boy, pointing out the house
again. “I’ll wait.”</p>
<p>“Will they let me in?” asked Redlaw.</p>
<p>“Say you’re a doctor,” he answered with a
nod. “There’s plenty ill here.”</p>
<p>Looking back on his way to the house-door, Redlaw saw him
trail himself upon the dust and crawl within the shelter of the
smallest arch, as if he were a rat. He had no pity for the
thing, but he was afraid of it; and when it looked out of its den
at him, he hurried to the house as a retreat.</p>
<p>“Sorrow, wrong, and trouble,” said the Chemist,
with a painful effort at some more distinct remembrance,
“at least haunt this place darkly. He can do no harm,
who brings forgetfulness of such things here!”</p>
<p>With these words, he pushed the yielding door, and went
in.</p>
<p>There was a woman sitting on the stairs, either asleep or
forlorn, whose head was bent down on her hands and knees.
As it was not easy to pass without treading on her, and as she
was perfectly regardless of his near approach, he stopped, and
touched her on the shoulder. Looking up, she showed him
quite a young face, but one whose bloom and promise were all
swept away, as if the haggard winter should unnaturally kill the
spring.</p>
<p>With little or no show of concern on his account, she moved
nearer to the wall to leave him a wider passage.</p>
<p>“What are you?” said Redlaw, pausing, with his
hand upon the broken stair-rail.</p>
<p>“What do you think I am?” she answered, showing
him her face again.</p>
<p>He looked upon the ruined Temple of God, so lately made, so
soon disfigured; and something, which was not
compassion—for the springs in which a true compassion for
such miseries has its rise, were dried up in his breast—but
which was nearer to it, for the moment, than any feeling that had
lately struggled into the darkening, but not yet wholly darkened,
night of his mind—mingled a touch of softness with his next
words.</p>
<p>“I am come here to give relief, if I can,” he
said. “Are you thinking of any wrong?”</p>
<p>She frowned at him, and then laughed; and then her laugh
prolonged itself into a shivering sigh, as she dropped her head
again, and hid her fingers in her hair.</p>
<p>“Are you thinking of a wrong?” he asked once
more.</p>
<p>“I am thinking of my life,” she said, with a
momentary look at him.</p>
<p>He had a perception that she was one of many, and that he saw
the type of thousands, when he saw her, drooping at his feet.</p>
<p>“What are your parents?” he demanded.</p>
<p>“I had a good home once. My father was a gardener,
far away, in the country.”</p>
<p>“Is he dead?”</p>
<p>“He’s dead to me. All such things are dead
to me. You a gentleman, and not know that!” She
raised her eyes again, and laughed at him.</p>
<p>“Girl!” said Redlaw, sternly, “before this
death, of all such things, was brought about, was there no wrong
done to you? In spite of all that you can do, does no
remembrance of wrong cleave to you? Are there not times
upon times when it is misery to you?”</p>
<p>So little of what was womanly was left in her appearance, that
now, when she burst into tears, he stood amazed. But he was
more amazed, and much disquieted, to note that in her awakened
recollection of this wrong, the first trace of her old humanity
and frozen tenderness appeared to show itself.</p>
<p>He drew a little off, and in doing so, observed that her arms
were black, her face cut, and her bosom bruised.</p>
<p>“What brutal hand has hurt you so?” he asked.</p>
<p>“My own. I did it myself!” she answered
quickly.</p>
<p>“It is impossible.”</p>
<p>“I’ll swear I did! He didn’t touch
me. I did it to myself in a passion, and threw myself down
here. He wasn’t near me. He never laid a hand
upon me!”</p>
<p>In the white determination of her face, confronting him with
this untruth, he saw enough of the last perversion and distortion
of good surviving in that miserable breast, to be stricken with
remorse that he had ever come near her.</p>
<p>“Sorrow, wrong, and trouble!” he muttered, turning
his fearful gaze away. “All that connects her with
the state from which she has fallen, has those roots! In
the name of God, let me go by!”</p>
<p>Afraid to look at her again, afraid to touch her, afraid to
think of having sundered the last thread by which she held upon
the mercy of Heaven, he gathered his cloak about him, and glided
swiftly up the stairs.</p>
<p>Opposite to him, on the landing, was a door, which stood
partly open, and which, as he ascended, a man with a candle in
his hand, came forward from within to shut. But this man,
on seeing him, drew back, with much emotion in his manner, and,
as if by a sudden impulse, mentioned his name aloud.</p>
<p>In the surprise of such a recognition there, he stopped,
endeavouring to recollect the wan and startled face. He had
no time to consider it, for, to his yet greater amazement, old
Philip came out of the room, and took him by the hand.</p>
<p>“Mr. Redlaw,” said the old man, “this is
like you, this is like you, sir! you have heard of it, and have
come after us to render any help you can. Ah, too late, too
late!”</p>
<p>Redlaw, with a bewildered look, submitted to be led into the
room. A man lay there, on a truckle-bed, and William
Swidger stood at the bedside.</p>
<p>“Too late!” murmured the old man, looking
wistfully into the Chemist’s face; and the tears stole down
his cheeks.</p>
<p>“That’s what I say, father,” interposed his
son in a low voice. “That’s where it is,
exactly. To keep as quiet as ever we can while he’s a
dozing, is the only thing to do. You’re right,
father!”</p>
<p>Redlaw paused at the bedside, and looked down on the figure
that was stretched upon the mattress. It was that of a man,
who should have been in the vigour of his life, but on whom it
was not likely the sun would ever shine again. The vices of
his forty or fifty years’ career had so branded him, that,
in comparison with their effects upon his face, the heavy hand of
Time upon the old man’s face who watched him had been
merciful and beautifying.</p>
<p>“Who is this?” asked the Chemist, looking
round.</p>
<p>“My son George, Mr. Redlaw,” said the old man,
wringing his hands. “My eldest son, George, who was
more his mother’s pride than all the rest!”</p>
<p>Redlaw’s eyes wandered from the old man’s grey
head, as he laid it down upon the bed, to the person who had
recognised him, and who had kept aloof, in the remotest corner of
the room. He seemed to be about his own age; and although
he knew no such hopeless decay and broken man as he appeared to
be, there was something in the turn of his figure, as he stood
with his back towards him, and now went out at the door, that
made him pass his hand uneasily across his brow.</p>
<p>“William,” he said in a gloomy whisper, “who
is that man?”</p>
<p>“Why you see, sir,” returned Mr. William,
“that’s what I say, myself. Why should a man
ever go and gamble, and the like of that, and let himself down
inch by inch till he can’t let himself down any
lower!”</p>
<p>“Has <i>he</i> done so?” asked Redlaw, glancing
after him with the same uneasy action as before.</p>
<p>“Just exactly that, sir,” returned William
Swidger, “as I’m told. He knows a little about
medicine, sir, it seems; and having been wayfaring towards London
with my unhappy brother that you see here,” Mr. William
passed his coat-sleeve across his eyes, “and being lodging
up stairs for the night—what I say, you see, is that
strange companions come together here sometimes—he looked
in to attend upon him, and came for us at his request. What
a mournful spectacle, sir! But that’s where it
is. It’s enough to kill my father!”</p>
<p>Redlaw looked up, at these words, and, recalling where he was
and with whom, and the spell he carried with him—which his
surprise had obscured—retired a little, hurriedly, debating
with himself whether to shun the house that moment, or
remain.</p>
<p>Yielding to a certain sullen doggedness, which it seemed to be
a part of his condition to struggle with, he argued for
remaining.</p>
<p>“Was it only yesterday,” he said, “when I
observed the memory of this old man to be a tissue of sorrow and
trouble, and shall I be afraid, to-night, to shake it? Are
such remembrances as I can drive away, so precious to this dying
man that I need fear for <i>him</i>? No! I’ll
stay here.”</p>
<p>But he stayed in fear and trembling none the less for these
words; and, shrouded in his black cloak with his face turned from
them, stood away from the bedside, listening to what they said,
as if he felt himself a demon in the place.</p>
<p>“Father!” murmured the sick man, rallying a little
from stupor.</p>
<p>“My boy! My son George!” said old
Philip.</p>
<p>“You spoke, just now, of my being mother’s
favourite, long ago. It’s a dreadful thing to think
now, of long ago!”</p>
<p>“No, no, no;” returned the old man.
“Think of it. Don’t say it’s
dreadful. It’s not dreadful to me, my son.”</p>
<p>“It cuts you to the heart, father.” For the
old man’s tears were falling on him.</p>
<p>“Yes, yes,” said Philip, “so it does; but it
does me good. It’s a heavy sorrow to think of that
time, but it does me good, George. Oh, think of it too,
think of it too, and your heart will be softened more and
more! Where’s my son William? William, my boy,
your mother loved him dearly to the last, and with her latest
breath said, ‘Tell him I forgave him, blessed him, and
prayed for him.’ Those were her words to me. I
have never forgotten them, and I’m eighty-seven!”</p>
<p>“Father!” said the man upon the bed, “I am
dying, I know. I am so far gone, that I can hardly speak,
even of what my mind most runs on. Is there any hope for me
beyond this bed?”</p>
<p>“There is hope,” returned the old man, “for
all who are softened and penitent. There is hope for all
such. Oh!” he exclaimed, clasping his hands and
looking up, “I was thankful, only yesterday, that I could
remember this unhappy son when he was an innocent child.
But what a comfort it is, now, to think that even God himself has
that remembrance of him!”</p>
<p>Redlaw spread his hands upon his face, and shrank, like a
murderer.</p>
<p>“Ah!” feebly moaned the man upon the bed.
“The waste since then, the waste of life since
then!”</p>
<p>“But he was a child once,” said the old man.
“He played with children. Before he lay down on his
bed at night, and fell into his guiltless rest, he said his
prayers at his poor mother’s knee. I have seen him do
it, many a time; and seen her lay his head upon her breast, and
kiss him. Sorrowful as it was to her and me, to think of
this, when he went so wrong, and when our hopes and plans for him
were all broken, this gave him still a hold upon us, that nothing
else could have given. Oh, Father, so much better than the
fathers upon earth! Oh, Father, so much more afflicted by
the errors of Thy children! take this wanderer back! Not as
he is, but as he was then, let him cry to Thee, as he has so
often seemed to cry to us!”</p>
<p>As the old man lifted up his trembling hands, the son, for
whom he made the supplication, laid his sinking head against him
for support and comfort, as if he were indeed the child of whom
he spoke.</p>
<p>When did man ever tremble, as Redlaw trembled, in the silence
that ensued! He knew it must come upon them, knew that it
was coming fast.</p>
<p>“My time is very short, my breath is shorter,”
said the sick man, supporting himself on one arm, and with the
other groping in the air, “and I remember there is
something on my mind concerning the man who was here just now,
Father and William—wait!—is there really anything in
black, out there?”</p>
<p>“Yes, yes, it is real,” said his aged father.</p>
<p>“Is it a man?”</p>
<p>“What I say myself, George,” interposed his
brother, bending kindly over him. “It’s Mr.
Redlaw.”</p>
<p>“I thought I had dreamed of him. Ask him to come
here.”</p>
<p>The Chemist, whiter than the dying man, appeared before
him. Obedient to the motion of his hand, he sat upon the
bed.</p>
<p>“It has been so ripped up, to-night, sir,” said
the sick man, laying his hand upon his heart, with a look in
which the mute, imploring agony of his condition was
concentrated, “by the sight of my poor old father, and the
thought of all the trouble I have been the cause of, and all the
wrong and sorrow lying at my door, that—”</p>
<p>Was it the extremity to which he had come, or was it the
dawning of another change, that made him stop?</p>
<p>“—that what I <i>can</i> do right, with my mind
running on so much, so fast, I’ll try to do. There was
another man here. Did you see him?”</p>
<p>Redlaw could not reply by any word; for when he saw that fatal
sign he knew so well now, of the wandering hand upon the
forehead, his voice died at his lips. But he made some
indication of assent.</p>
<p>“He is penniless, hungry, and destitute. He is
completely beaten down, and has no resource at all. Look
after him! Lose no time! I know he has it in his mind
to kill himself.”</p>
<p>It was working. It was on his face. His face was
changing, hardening, deepening in all its shades, and losing all
its sorrow.</p>
<p>“Don’t you remember? Don’t you know
him?” he pursued.</p>
<p>He shut his face out for a moment, with the hand that again
wandered over his forehead, and then it lowered on Redlaw,
reckless, ruffianly, and callous.</p>
<p>“Why, d-n you!” he said, scowling round,
“what have you been doing to me here! I have lived
bold, and I mean to die bold. To the Devil with
you!”</p>
<p>And so lay down upon his bed, and put his arms up, over his
head and ears, as resolute from that time to keep out all access,
and to die in his indifference.</p>
<p>If Redlaw had been struck by lightning, it could not have
struck him from the bedside with a more tremendous shock.
But the old man, who had left the bed while his son was speaking
to him, now returning, avoided it quickly likewise, and with
abhorrence.</p>
<p>“Where’s my boy William?” said the old man
hurriedly. “William, come away from here.
We’ll go home.”</p>
<p>“Home, father!” returned William. “Are
you going to leave your own son?”</p>
<p>“Where’s my own son?” replied the old
man.</p>
<p>“Where? why, there!”</p>
<p>“That’s no son of mine,” said Philip,
trembling with resentment. “No such wretch as that,
has any claim on me. My children are pleasant to look at,
and they wait upon me, and get my meat and drink ready, and are
useful to me. I’ve a right to it! I’m
eighty-seven!”</p>
<p>“You’re old enough to be no older,” muttered
William, looking at him grudgingly, with his hands in his
pockets. “I don’t know what good you are,
myself. We could have a deal more pleasure without
you.”</p>
<p>“<i>My</i> son, Mr. Redlaw!” said the old
man. “<i>My</i> son, too! The boy talking to me
of <i>my</i> son! Why, what has he ever done to give me any
pleasure, I should like to know?”</p>
<p>“I don’t know what you have ever done to give
<i>me</i> any pleasure,” said William, sulkily.</p>
<p>“Let me think,” said the old man. “For
how many Christmas times running, have I sat in my warm place,
and never had to come out in the cold night air; and have made
good cheer, without being disturbed by any such uncomfortable,
wretched sight as him there? Is it twenty,
William?”</p>
<p>“Nigher forty, it seems,” he muttered.
“Why, when I look at my father, sir, and come to think of
it,” addressing Redlaw, with an impatience and irritation
that were quite new, “I’m whipped if I can see
anything in him but a calendar of ever so many years of eating
and drinking, and making himself comfortable, over and over
again.”</p>
<p>“I—I’m eighty-seven,” said the old
man, rambling on, childishly and weakly, “and I don’t
know as I ever was much put out by anything. I’m not
going to begin now, because of what he calls my son.
He’s not my son. I’ve had a power of pleasant
times. I recollect once—no I don’t—no,
it’s broken off. It was something about a game of
cricket and a friend of mine, but it’s somehow broken
off. I wonder who he was—I suppose I liked him?
And I wonder what became of him—I suppose he died?
But I don’t know. And I don’t care, neither; I
don’t care a bit.”</p>
<p>In his drowsy chuckling, and the shaking of his head, he put
his hands into his waistcoat pockets. In one of them he
found a bit of holly (left there, probably last night), which he
now took out, and looked at.</p>
<p>“Berries, eh?” said the old man.
“Ah! It’s a pity they’re not good to
eat. I recollect, when I was a little chap about as high as
that, and out a walking with—let me see—who was I out
a walking with?—no, I don’t remember how that
was. I don’t remember as I ever walked with any one
particular, or cared for any one, or any one for me.
Berries, eh? There’s good cheer when there’s
berries. Well; I ought to have my share of it, and to be
waited on, and kept warm and comfortable; for I’m
eighty-seven, and a poor old man. I’m
eigh-ty-seven. Eigh-ty-seven!”</p>
<p>The drivelling, pitiable manner in which, as he repeated this,
he nibbled at the leaves, and spat the morsels out; the cold,
uninterested eye with which his youngest son (so changed)
regarded him; the determined apathy with which his eldest son lay
hardened in his sin; impressed themselves no more on
Redlaw’s observation,—for he broke his way from the
spot to which his feet seemed to have been fixed, and ran out of
the house.</p>
<p>His guide came crawling forth from his place of refuge, and
was ready for him before he reached the arches.</p>
<p>“Back to the woman’s?” he inquired.</p>
<p>“Back, quickly!” answered Redlaw.
“Stop nowhere on the way!”</p>
<p>For a short distance the boy went on before; but their return
was more like a flight than a walk, and it was as much as his
bare feet could do, to keep pace with the Chemist’s rapid
strides. Shrinking from all who passed, shrouded in his
cloak, and keeping it drawn closely about him, as though there
were mortal contagion in any fluttering touch of his garments, he
made no pause until they reached the door by which they had come
out. He unlocked it with his key, went in, accompanied by
the boy, and hastened through the dark passages to his own
chamber.</p>
<p>The boy watched him as he made the door fast, and withdrew
behind the table, when he looked round.</p>
<p>“Come!” he said. “Don’t you
touch me! You’ve not brought me here to take my money
away.”</p>
<p>Redlaw threw some more upon the ground. He flung his
body on it immediately, as if to hide it from him, lest the sight
of it should tempt him to reclaim it; and not until he saw him
seated by his lamp, with his face hidden in his hands, began
furtively to pick it up. When he had done so, he crept near
the fire, and, sitting down in a great chair before it, took from
his breast some broken scraps of food, and fell to munching, and
to staring at the blaze, and now and then to glancing at his
shillings, which he kept clenched up in a bunch, in one hand.</p>
<p>“And this,” said Redlaw, gazing on him with
increased repugnance and fear, “is the only one companion I
have left on earth!”</p>
<p>How long it was before he was aroused from his contemplation
of this creature, whom he dreaded so—whether half-an-hour,
or half the night—he knew not. But the stillness of
the room was broken by the boy (whom he had seen listening)
starting up, and running towards the door.</p>
<p>“Here’s the woman coming!” he exclaimed.</p>
<p>The Chemist stopped him on his way, at the moment when she
knocked.</p>
<p>“Let me go to her, will you?” said the boy.</p>
<p>“Not now,” returned the Chemist. “Stay
here. Nobody must pass in or out of the room now.
Who’s that?”</p>
<p>“It’s I, sir,” cried Milly.
“Pray, sir, let me in!”</p>
<p>“No! not for the world!” he said.</p>
<p>“Mr. Redlaw, Mr. Redlaw, pray, sir, let me
in.”</p>
<p>“What is the matter?” he said, holding the
boy.</p>
<p>“The miserable man you saw, is worse, and nothing I can
say will wake him from his terrible infatuation.
William’s father has turned childish in a moment, William
himself is changed. The shock has been too sudden for him;
I cannot understand him; he is not like himself. Oh, Mr.
Redlaw, pray advise me, help me!”</p>
<p>“No! No! No!” he answered.</p>
<p>“Mr. Redlaw! Dear sir! George has been
muttering, in his doze, about the man you saw there, who, he
fears, will kill himself.”</p>
<p>“Better he should do it, than come near me!”</p>
<p>“He says, in his wandering, that you know him; that he
was your friend once, long ago; that he is the ruined father of a
student here—my mind misgives me, of the young gentleman
who has been ill. What is to be done? How is he to be
followed? How is he to be saved? Mr. Redlaw, pray,
oh, pray, advise me! Help me!”</p>
<p>All this time he held the boy, who was half-mad to pass him,
and let her in.</p>
<p>“Phantoms! Punishers of impious thoughts!”
cried Redlaw, gazing round in anguish, “look upon me!
From the darkness of my mind, let the glimmering of contrition
that I know is there, shine up and show my misery! In the
material world as I have long taught, nothing can be spared; no
step or atom in the wondrous structure could be lost, without a
blank being made in the great universe. I know, now, that
it is the same with good and evil, happiness and sorrow, in the
memories of men. Pity me! Relieve me!”</p>
<p>There was no response, but her “Help me, help me, let me
in!” and the boy’s struggling to get to her.</p>
<p>“Shadow of myself! Spirit of my darker
hours!” cried Redlaw, in distraction, “come back, and
haunt me day and night, but take this gift away! Or, if it
must still rest with me, deprive me of the dreadful power of
giving it to others. Undo what I have done. Leave me
benighted, but restore the day to those whom I have cursed.
As I have spared this woman from the first, and as I never will
go forth again, but will die here, with no hand to tend me, save
this creature’s who is proof against me,—hear
me!”</p>
<p>The only reply still was, the boy struggling to get to her,
while he held him back; and the cry, increasing in its energy,
“Help! let me in. He was your friend once, how shall
he be followed, how shall he be saved? They are all
changed, there is no one else to help me, pray, pray, let me
in!”</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2>CHAPTER III<br >
The Gift Reversed</h2>
<p>Night was still heavy in the sky. On open plains, from
hill-tops, and from the decks of solitary ships at sea, a distant
low-lying line, that promised by-and-by to change to light, was
visible in the dim horizon; but its promise was remote and
doubtful, and the moon was striving with the night-clouds
busily.</p>
<p>The shadows upon Redlaw’s mind succeeded thick and fast
to one another, and obscured its light as the night-clouds
hovered between the moon and earth, and kept the latter veiled in
darkness. Fitful and uncertain as the shadows which the
night-clouds cast, were their concealments from him, and
imperfect revelations to him; and, like the night-clouds still,
if the clear light broke forth for a moment, it was only that
they might sweep over it, and make the darkness deeper than
before.</p>
<p>Without, there was a profound and solemn hush upon the ancient
pile of building, and its buttresses and angles made dark shapes
of mystery upon the ground, which now seemed to retire into the
smooth white snow and now seemed to come out of it, as the
moon’s path was more or less beset. Within, the
Chemist’s room was indistinct and murky, by the light of
the expiring lamp; a ghostly silence had succeeded to the
knocking and the voice outside; nothing was audible but, now and
then, a low sound among the whitened ashes of the fire, as of its
yielding up its last breath. Before it on the ground the
boy lay fast asleep. In his chair, the Chemist sat, as he
had sat there since the calling at his door had ceased—like
a man turned to stone.</p>
<p>At such a time, the Christmas music he had heard before, began
to play. He listened to it at first, as he had listened in
the church-yard; but presently—it playing still, and being
borne towards him on the night air, in a low, sweet, melancholy
strain—he rose, and stood stretching his hands about him,
as if there were some friend approaching within his reach, on
whom his desolate touch might rest, yet do no harm. As he
did this, his face became less fixed and wondering; a gentle
trembling came upon him; and at last his eyes filled with tears,
and he put his hands before them, and bowed down his head.</p>
<p>His memory of sorrow, wrong, and trouble, had not come back to
him; he knew that it was not restored; he had no passing belief
or hope that it was. But some dumb stir within him made him
capable, again, of being moved by what was hidden, afar off, in
the music. If it were only that it told him sorrowfully the
value of what he had lost, he thanked Heaven for it with a
fervent gratitude.</p>
<p>As the last chord died upon his ear, he raised his head to
listen to its lingering vibration. Beyond the boy, so that
his sleeping figure lay at its feet, the Phantom stood, immovable
and silent, with its eyes upon him.</p>
<p>Ghastly it was, as it had ever been, but not so cruel and
relentless in its aspect—or he thought or hoped so, as he
looked upon it trembling. It was not alone, but in its
shadowy hand it held another hand.</p>
<p>And whose was that? Was the form that stood beside it
indeed Milly’s, or but her shade and picture? The
quiet head was bent a little, as her manner was, and her eyes
were looking down, as if in pity, on the sleeping child. A
radiant light fell on her face, but did not touch the Phantom;
for, though close beside her, it was dark and colourless as
ever.</p>
<p>“Spectre!” said the Chemist, newly troubled as he
looked, “I have not been stubborn or presumptuous in
respect of her. Oh, do not bring her here. Spare me
that!”</p>
<p>“This is but a shadow,” said the Phantom;
“when the morning shines seek out the reality whose image I
present before you.”</p>
<p>“Is it my inexorable doom to do so?” cried the
Chemist.</p>
<p>“It is,” replied the Phantom.</p>
<p>“To destroy her peace, her goodness; to make her what I
am myself, and what I have made of others!”</p>
<p>“I have said seek her out,” returned the
Phantom. “I have said no more.”</p>
<p>“Oh, tell me,” exclaimed Redlaw, catching at the
hope which he fancied might lie hidden in the words.
“Can I undo what I have done?”</p>
<p>“No,” returned the Phantom.</p>
<p>“I do not ask for restoration to myself,” said
Redlaw. “What I abandoned, I abandoned of my own free
will, and have justly lost. But for those to whom I have
transferred the fatal gift; who never sought it; who unknowingly
received a curse of which they had no warning, and which they had
no power to shun; can I do nothing?”</p>
<p>“Nothing,” said the Phantom.</p>
<p>“If I cannot, can any one?”</p>
<p>The Phantom, standing like a statue, kept its gaze upon him
for a while; then turned its head suddenly, and looked upon the
shadow at its side.</p>
<p>“Ah! Can she?” cried Redlaw, still looking
upon the shade.</p>
<p>The Phantom released the hand it had retained till now, and
softly raised its own with a gesture of dismissal. Upon
that, her shadow, still preserving the same attitude, began to
move or melt away.</p>
<p>“Stay,” cried Redlaw with an earnestness to which
he could not give enough expression. “For a
moment! As an act of mercy! I know that some change
fell upon me, when those sounds were in the air just now.
Tell me, have I lost the power of harming her? May I go
near her without dread? Oh, let her give me any sign of
hope!”</p>
<p>The Phantom looked upon the shade as he did—not at
him—and gave no answer.</p>
<p>“At least, say this—has she, henceforth, the
consciousness of any power to set right what I have
done?”</p>
<p>“She has not,” the Phantom answered.</p>
<p>“Has she the power bestowed on her without the
consciousness?”</p>
<p>The phantom answered: “Seek her out.”</p>
<p>And her shadow slowly vanished.</p>
<p>They were face to face again, and looking on each other, as
intently and awfully as at the time of the bestowal of the gift,
across the boy who still lay on the ground between them, at the
Phantom’s feet.</p>
<p>“Terrible instructor,” said the Chemist, sinking
on his knee before it, in an attitude of supplication, “by
whom I was renounced, but by whom I am revisited (in which, and
in whose milder aspect, I would fain believe I have a gleam of
hope), I will obey without inquiry, praying that the cry I have
sent up in the anguish of my soul has been, or will be, heard, in
behalf of those whom I have injured beyond human
reparation. But there is one thing—”</p>
<p>“You speak to me of what is lying here,” the
phantom interposed, and pointed with its finger to the boy.</p>
<p>“I do,” returned the Chemist. “You
know what I would ask. Why has this child alone been proof
against my influence, and why, why, have I detected in its
thoughts a terrible companionship with mine?”</p>
<p>“This,” said the Phantom, pointing to the boy,
“is the last, completest illustration of a human creature,
utterly bereft of such remembrances as you have yielded up.
No softening memory of sorrow, wrong, or trouble enters here,
because this wretched mortal from his birth has been abandoned to
a worse condition than the beasts, and has, within his knowledge,
no one contrast, no humanising touch, to make a grain of such a
memory spring up in his hardened breast. All within this
desolate creature is barren wilderness. All within the man
bereft of what you have resigned, is the same barren
wilderness. Woe to such a man! Woe, tenfold, to the
nation that shall count its monsters such as this, lying here, by
hundreds and by thousands!”</p>
<p>Redlaw shrank, appalled, from what he heard.</p>
<p>“There is not,” said the Phantom, “one of
these—not one—but sows a harvest that mankind <span
class="GutSmall">MUST</span> reap. From every seed of evil
in this boy, a field of ruin is grown that shall be gathered in,
and garnered up, and sown again in many places in the world,
until regions are overspread with wickedness enough to raise the
waters of another Deluge. Open and unpunished murder in a
city’s streets would be less guilty in its daily
toleration, than one such spectacle as this.”</p>
<p>It seemed to look down upon the boy in his sleep.
Redlaw, too, looked down upon him with a new emotion.</p>
<p>“There is not a father,” said the Phantom,
“by whose side in his daily or his nightly walk, these
creatures pass; there is not a mother among all the ranks of
loving mothers in this land; there is no one risen from the state
of childhood, but shall be responsible in his or her degree for
this enormity. There is not a country throughout the earth
on which it would not bring a curse. There is no religion
upon earth that it would not deny; there is no people upon earth
it would not put to shame.”</p>
<p>The Chemist clasped his hands, and looked, with trembling fear
and pity, from the sleeping boy to the Phantom, standing above
him with his finger pointing down.</p>
<p>“Behold, I say,” pursued the Spectre, “the
perfect type of what it was your choice to be. Your
influence is powerless here, because from this child’s
bosom you can banish nothing. His thoughts have been in
‘terrible companionship’ with yours, because you have
gone down to his unnatural level. He is the growth of
man’s indifference; you are the growth of man’s
presumption. The beneficent design of Heaven is, in each
case, overthrown, and from the two poles of the immaterial world
you come together.”</p>
<p>The Chemist stooped upon the ground beside the boy, and, with
the same kind of compassion for him that he now felt for himself,
covered him as he slept, and no longer shrank from him with
abhorrence or indifference.</p>
<p>Soon, now, the distant line on the horizon brightened, the
darkness faded, the sun rose red and glorious, and the chimney
stacks and gables of the ancient building gleamed in the clear
air, which turned the smoke and vapour of the city into a cloud
of gold. The very sun-dial in his shady corner, where the
wind was used to spin with such unwindy constancy, shook off the
finer particles of snow that had accumulated on his dull old face
in the night, and looked out at the little white wreaths eddying
round and round him. Doubtless some blind groping of the
morning made its way down into the forgotten crypt so cold and
earthy, where the Norman arches were half buried in the ground,
and stirred the dull sap in the lazy vegetation hanging to the
walls, and quickened the slow principle of life within the little
world of wonderful and delicate creation which existed there,
with some faint knowledge that the sun was up.</p>
<p>The Tetterbys were up, and doing. Mr. Tetterby took down
the shutters of the shop, and, strip by strip, revealed the
treasures of the window to the eyes, so proof against their
seductions, of Jerusalem Buildings. Adolphus had been out
so long already, that he was halfway on to “Morning
Pepper.” Five small Tetterbys, whose ten round eyes
were much inflamed by soap and friction, were in the tortures of
a cool wash in the back kitchen; Mrs. Tetterby presiding.
Johnny, who was pushed and hustled through his toilet with great
rapidity when Moloch chanced to be in an exacting frame of mind
(which was always the case), staggered up and down with his
charge before the shop door, under greater difficulties than
usual; the weight of Moloch being much increased by a
complication of defences against the cold, composed of knitted
worsted-work, and forming a complete suit of chain-armour, with a
head-piece and blue gaiters.</p>
<p>It was a peculiarity of this baby to be always cutting
teeth. Whether they never came, or whether they came and
went away again, is not in evidence; but it had certainly cut
enough, on the showing of Mrs. Tetterby, to make a handsome
dental provision for the sign of the Bull and Mouth. All
sorts of objects were impressed for the rubbing of its gums,
notwithstanding that it always carried, dangling at its waist
(which was immediately under its chin), a bone ring, large enough
to have represented the rosary of a young nun.
Knife-handles, umbrella-tops, the heads of walking-sticks
selected from the stock, the fingers of the family in general,
but especially of Johnny, nutmeg-graters, crusts, the handles of
doors, and the cool knobs on the tops of pokers, were among the
commonest instruments indiscriminately applied for this
baby’s relief. The amount of electricity that must
have been rubbed out of it in a week, is not to be
calculated. Still Mrs. Tetterby always said “it was
coming through, and then the child would be herself;” and
still it never did come through, and the child continued to be
somebody else.</p>
<p>The tempers of the little Tetterbys had sadly changed with a
few hours. Mr. and Mrs. Tetterby themselves were not more
altered than their offspring. Usually they were an
unselfish, good-natured, yielding little race, sharing short
commons when it happened (which was pretty often) contentedly and
even generously, and taking a great deal of enjoyment out of a
very little meat. But they were fighting now, not only for
the soap and water, but even for the breakfast which was yet in
perspective. The hand of every little Tetterby was against
the other little Tetterbys; and even Johnny’s
hand—the patient, much-enduring, and devoted
Johnny—rose against the baby! Yes, Mrs. Tetterby,
going to the door by mere accident, saw him viciously pick out a
weak place in the suit of armour where a slap would tell, and
slap that blessed child.</p>
<p>Mrs. Tetterby had him into the parlour by the collar, in that
same flash of time, and repaid him the assault with usury
thereto.</p>
<p>“You brute, you murdering little boy,” said Mrs.
Tetterby. “Had you the heart to do it?”</p>
<p>“Why don’t her teeth come through, then,”
retorted Johnny, in a loud rebellious voice, “instead of
bothering me? How would you like it yourself?”</p>
<p>“Like it, sir!” said Mrs. Tetterby, relieving him
of his dishonoured load.</p>
<p>“Yes, like it,” said Johnny. “How
would you? Not at all. If you was me, you’d go
for a soldier. I will, too. There an’t no
babies in the Army.”</p>
<p>Mr. Tetterby, who had arrived upon the scene of action, rubbed
his chin thoughtfully, instead of correcting the rebel, and
seemed rather struck by this view of a military life.</p>
<p>“I wish I was in the Army myself, if the child’s
in the right,” said Mrs. Tetterby, looking at her husband,
“for I have no peace of my life here. I’m a
slave—a Virginia slave:” some indistinct association
with their weak descent on the tobacco trade perhaps suggested
this aggravated expression to Mrs. Tetterby. “I never
have a holiday, or any pleasure at all, from year’s end to
year’s end! Why, Lord bless and save the
child,” said Mrs. Tetterby, shaking the baby with an
irritability hardly suited to so pious an aspiration,
“what’s the matter with her now?”</p>
<p>Not being able to discover, and not rendering the subject much
clearer by shaking it, Mrs. Tetterby put the baby away in a
cradle, and, folding her arms, sat rocking it angrily with her
foot.</p>
<p>“How you stand there, ’Dolphus,” said Mrs.
Tetterby to her husband. “Why don’t you do
something?”</p>
<p>“Because I don’t care about doing anything,”
Mr. Tetterby replied.</p>
<p>“I am sure <i>I</i> don’t,” said Mrs.
Tetterby.</p>
<p>“I’ll take my oath <i>I</i> don’t,”
said Mr. Tetterby.</p>
<p>A diversion arose here among Johnny and his five younger
brothers, who, in preparing the family breakfast table, had
fallen to skirmishing for the temporary possession of the loaf,
and were buffeting one another with great heartiness; the
smallest boy of all, with precocious discretion, hovering outside
the knot of combatants, and harassing their legs. Into the
midst of this fray, Mr. and Mrs. Tetterby both precipitated
themselves with great ardour, as if such ground were the only
ground on which they could now agree; and having, with no visible
remains of their late soft-heartedness, laid about them without
any lenity, and done much execution, resumed their former
relative positions.</p>
<p>“You had better read your paper than do nothing at
all,” said Mrs. Tetterby.</p>
<p>“What’s there to read in a paper?” returned
Mr. Tetterby, with excessive discontent.</p>
<p>“What?” said Mrs. Tetterby.
“Police.”</p>
<p>“It’s nothing to me,” said Tetterby.
“What do I care what people do, or are done to?”</p>
<p>“Suicides,” suggested Mrs. Tetterby.</p>
<p>“No business of mine,” replied her husband.</p>
<p>“Births, deaths, and marriages, are those nothing to
you?” said Mrs. Tetterby.</p>
<p>“If the births were all over for good, and all to-day;
and the deaths were all to begin to come off to-morrow; I
don’t see why it should interest me, till I thought it was
a coming to my turn,” grumbled Tetterby. “As to
marriages, I’ve done it myself. I know quite enough
about <i>them</i>.”</p>
<p>To judge from the dissatisfied expression of her face and
manner, Mrs. Tetterby appeared to entertain the same opinions as
her husband; but she opposed him, nevertheless, for the
gratification of quarrelling with him.</p>
<p>“Oh, you’re a consistent man,” said Mrs.
Tetterby, “an’t you? You, with the screen of
your own making there, made of nothing else but bits of
newspapers, which you sit and read to the children by the
half-hour together!”</p>
<p>“Say used to, if you please,” returned her
husband. “You won’t find me doing so any
more. I’m wiser now.”</p>
<p>“Bah! wiser, indeed!” said Mrs. Tetterby.
“Are you better?”</p>
<p>The question sounded some discordant note in Mr.
Tetterby’s breast. He ruminated dejectedly, and
passed his hand across and across his forehead.</p>
<p>“Better!” murmured Mr. Tetterby. “I
don’t know as any of us are better, or happier
either. Better, is it?”</p>
<p>He turned to the screen, and traced about it with his finger,
until he found a certain paragraph of which he was in quest.</p>
<p>“This used to be one of the family favourites, I
recollect,” said Tetterby, in a forlorn and stupid way,
“and used to draw tears from the children, and make
’em good, if there was any little bickering or discontent
among ’em, next to the story of the robin redbreasts in the
wood. ‘Melancholy case of destitution.
Yesterday a small man, with a baby in his arms, and surrounded by
half-a-dozen ragged little ones, of various ages between ten and
two, the whole of whom were evidently in a famishing condition,
appeared before the worthy magistrate, and made the following
recital:’—Ha! I don’t understand it,
I’m sure,” said Tetterby; “I don’t see
what it has got to do with us.”</p>
<p>“How old and shabby he looks,” said Mrs. Tetterby,
watching him. “I never saw such a change in a
man. Ah! dear me, dear me, dear me, it was a
sacrifice!”</p>
<p>“What was a sacrifice?” her husband sourly
inquired.</p>
<p>Mrs. Tetterby shook her head; and without replying in words,
raised a complete sea-storm about the baby, by her violent
agitation of the cradle.</p>
<p>“If you mean your marriage was a sacrifice, my good
woman—” said her husband.</p>
<p>“I <i>do</i> mean it,” said his wife.</p>
<p>“Why, then I mean to say,” pursued Mr. Tetterby,
as sulkily and surlily as she, “that there are two sides to
that affair; and that I was the sacrifice; and that I wish the
sacrifice hadn’t been accepted.”</p>
<p>“I wish it hadn’t, Tetterby, with all my heart and
soul I do assure you,” said his wife. “You
can’t wish it more than I do, Tetterby.”</p>
<p>“I don’t know what I saw in her,” muttered
the newsman, “I’m sure;—certainly, if I saw
anything, it’s not there now. I was thinking so, last
night, after supper, by the fire. She’s fat,
she’s ageing, she won’t bear comparison with most
other women.”</p>
<p>“He’s common-looking, he has no air with him,
he’s small, he’s beginning to stoop and he’s
getting bald,” muttered Mrs. Tetterby.</p>
<p>“I must have been half out of my mind when I did
it,” muttered Mr. Tetterby.</p>
<p>“My senses must have forsook me. That’s the
only way in which I can explain it to myself,” said Mrs.
Tetterby with elaboration.</p>
<p>In this mood they sat down to breakfast. The little
Tetterbys were not habituated to regard that meal in the light of
a sedentary occupation, but discussed it as a dance or trot;
rather resembling a savage ceremony, in the occasionally shrill
whoops, and brandishings of bread and butter, with which it was
accompanied, as well as in the intricate filings off into the
street and back again, and the hoppings up and down the
door-steps, which were incidental to the performance. In
the present instance, the contentions between these Tetterby
children for the milk-and-water jug, common to all, which stood
upon the table, presented so lamentable an instance of angry
passions risen very high indeed, that it was an outrage on the
memory of Dr. Watts. It was not until Mr. Tetterby had
driven the whole herd out at the front door, that a
moment’s peace was secured; and even that was broken by the
discovery that Johnny had surreptitiously come back, and was at
that instant choking in the jug like a ventriloquist, in his
indecent and rapacious haste.</p>
<p>“These children will be the death of me at last!”
said Mrs. Tetterby, after banishing the culprit. “And
the sooner the better, I think.”</p>
<p>“Poor people,” said Mr. Tetterby, “ought not
to have children at all. They give <i>us</i> no
pleasure.”</p>
<p>He was at that moment taking up the cup which Mrs. Tetterby
had rudely pushed towards him, and Mrs. Tetterby was lifting her
own cup to her lips, when they both stopped, as if they were
transfixed.</p>
<p>“Here! Mother! Father!” cried Johnny,
running into the room. “Here’s Mrs. William
coming down the street!”</p>
<p>And if ever, since the world began, a young boy took a baby
from a cradle with the care of an old nurse, and hushed and
soothed it tenderly, and tottered away with it cheerfully, Johnny
was that boy, and Moloch was that baby, as they went out
together!</p>
<p>Mr. Tetterby put down his cup; Mrs. Tetterby put down her
cup. Mr. Tetterby rubbed his forehead; Mrs. Tetterby rubbed
hers. Mr. Tetterby’s face began to smooth and
brighten; Mrs. Tetterby’s began to smooth and brighten.</p>
<p>“Why, Lord forgive me,” said Mr. Tetterby to
himself, “what evil tempers have I been giving way
to? What has been the matter here!”</p>
<p>“How could I ever treat him ill again, after all I said
and felt last night!” sobbed Mrs. Tetterby, with her apron
to her eyes.</p>
<p>“Am I a brute,” said Mr. Tetterby, “or is
there any good in me at all? Sophia! My little
woman!”</p>
<p>“’Dolphus dear,” returned his wife.</p>
<p>“I—I’ve been in a state of mind,” said
Mr. Tetterby, “that I can’t abear to think of,
Sophy.”</p>
<p>“Oh! It’s nothing to what I’ve been
in, Dolf,” cried his wife in a great burst of grief.</p>
<p>“My Sophia,” said Mr. Tetterby, “don’t
take on. I never shall forgive myself. I must have
nearly broke your heart, I know.”</p>
<p>“No, Dolf, no. It was me! Me!” cried
Mrs. Tetterby.</p>
<p>“My little woman,” said her husband,
“don’t. You make me reproach myself dreadful,
when you show such a noble spirit. Sophia, my dear, you
don’t know what I thought. I showed it bad enough, no
doubt; but what I thought, my little woman!—”</p>
<p>“Oh, dear Dolf, don’t! Don’t!”
cried his wife.</p>
<p>“Sophia,” said Mr. Tetterby, “I must reveal
it. I couldn’t rest in my conscience unless I
mentioned it. My little woman—”</p>
<p>“Mrs. William’s very nearly here!” screamed
Johnny at the door.</p>
<p>“My little woman, I wondered how,” gasped Mr.
Tetterby, supporting himself by his chair, “I wondered how
I had ever admired you—I forgot the precious children you
have brought about me, and thought you didn’t look as slim
as I could wish. I—I never gave a
recollection,” said Mr. Tetterby, with severe
self-accusation, “to the cares you’ve had as my wife,
and along of me and mine, when you might have had hardly any with
another man, who got on better and was luckier than me (anybody
might have found such a man easily I am sure); and I quarrelled
with you for having aged a little in the rough years you have
lightened for me. Can you believe it, my little
woman? I hardly can myself.”</p>
<p>Mrs. Tetterby, in a whirlwind of laughing and crying, caught
his face within her hands, and held it there.</p>
<p>“Oh, Dolf!” she cried. “I am so happy
that you thought so; I am so grateful that you thought so!
For I thought that you were common-looking, Dolf; and so you are,
my dear, and may you be the commonest of all sights in my eyes,
till you close them with your own good hands. I thought
that you were small; and so you are, and I’ll make much of
you because you are, and more of you because I love my
husband. I thought that you began to stoop; and so you do,
and you shall lean on me, and I’ll do all I can to keep you
up. I thought there was no air about you; but there is, and
it’s the air of home, and that’s the purest and the
best there is, and God bless home once more, and all belonging to
it, Dolf!”</p>
<p>“Hurrah! Here’s Mrs. William!” cried
Johnny.</p>
<p>So she was, and all the children with her; and so she came in,
they kissed her, and kissed one another, and kissed the baby, and
kissed their father and mother, and then ran back and flocked and
danced about her, trooping on with her in triumph.</p>
<p>Mr. and Mrs. Tetterby were not a bit behind-hand in the warmth
of their reception. They were as much attracted to her as
the children were; they ran towards her, kissed her hands,
pressed round her, could not receive her ardently or
enthusiastically enough. She came among them like the
spirit of all goodness, affection, gentle consideration, love,
and domesticity.</p>
<p>“What! are <i>you</i> all so glad to see me, too, this
bright Christmas morning?” said Milly, clapping her hands
in a pleasant wonder. “Oh dear, how delightful this
is!”</p>
<p>More shouting from the children, more kissing, more trooping
round her, more happiness, more love, more joy, more honour, on
all sides, than she could bear.</p>
<p>“Oh dear!” said Milly, “what delicious tears
you make me shed. How can I ever have deserved this!
What have I done to be so loved?”</p>
<p>“Who can help it!” cried Mr. Tetterby.</p>
<p>“Who can help it!” cried Mrs. Tetterby.</p>
<p>“Who can help it!” echoed the children, in a
joyful chorus. And they danced and trooped about her again,
and clung to her, and laid their rosy faces against her dress,
and kissed and fondled it, and could not fondle it, or her,
enough.</p>
<p>“I never was so moved,” said Milly, drying her
eyes, “as I have been this morning. I must tell you,
as soon as I can speak.—Mr. Redlaw came to me at sunrise,
and with a tenderness in his manner, more as if I had been his
darling daughter than myself, implored me to go with him to where
William’s brother George is lying ill. We went
together, and all the way along he was so kind, and so subdued,
and seemed to put such trust and hope in me, that I could not
help crying with pleasure. When we got to the house, we met
a woman at the door (somebody had bruised and hurt her, I am
afraid), who caught me by the hand, and blessed me as I
passed.”</p>
<p>“She was right!” said Mr. Tetterby. Mrs.
Tetterby said she was right. All the children cried out
that she was right.</p>
<p>“Ah, but there’s more than that,” said
Milly. “When we got up stairs, into the room, the
sick man who had lain for hours in a state from which no effort
could rouse him, rose up in his bed, and, bursting into tears,
stretched out his arms to me, and said that he had led a
mis-spent life, but that he was truly repentant now, in his
sorrow for the past, which was all as plain to him as a great
prospect, from which a dense black cloud had cleared away, and
that he entreated me to ask his poor old father for his pardon
and his blessing, and to say a prayer beside his bed. And
when I did so, Mr. Redlaw joined in it so fervently, and then so
thanked and thanked me, and thanked Heaven, that my heart quite
overflowed, and I could have done nothing but sob and cry, if the
sick man had not begged me to sit down by him,—which made
me quiet of course. As I sat there, he held my hand in his
until he sank in a doze; and even then, when I withdrew my hand
to leave him to come here (which Mr. Redlaw was very earnest
indeed in wishing me to do), his hand felt for mine, so that some
one else was obliged to take my place and make believe to give
him my hand back. Oh dear, oh dear,” said Milly,
sobbing. “How thankful and how happy I should feel,
and do feel, for all this!”</p>
<p>While she was speaking, Redlaw had come in, and, after pausing
for a moment to observe the group of which she was the centre,
had silently ascended the stairs. Upon those stairs he now
appeared again; remaining there, while the young student passed
him, and came running down.</p>
<p>“Kind nurse, gentlest, best of creatures,” he
said, falling on his knee to her, and catching at her hand,
“forgive my cruel ingratitude!”</p>
<p>“Oh dear, oh dear!” cried Milly innocently,
“here’s another of them! Oh dear, here’s
somebody else who likes me. What shall I ever
do!”</p>
<p>The guileless, simple way in which she said it, and in which
she put her hands before her eyes and wept for very happiness,
was as touching as it was delightful.</p>
<p>“I was not myself,” he said. “I
don’t know what it was—it was some consequence of my
disorder perhaps—I was mad. But I am so no
longer. Almost as I speak, I am restored. I heard the
children crying out your name, and the shade passed from me at
the very sound of it. Oh, don’t weep! Dear
Milly, if you could read my heart, and only knew with what
affection and what grateful homage it is glowing, you would not
let me see you weep. It is such deep reproach.”</p>
<p>“No, no,” said Milly, “it’s not
that. It’s not indeed. It’s joy.
It’s wonder that you should think it necessary to ask me to
forgive so little, and yet it’s pleasure that you
do.”</p>
<p>“And will you come again? and will you finish the little
curtain?”</p>
<p>“No,” said Milly, drying her eyes, and shaking her
head. “You won’t care for my needlework
now.”</p>
<p>“Is it forgiving me, to say that?”</p>
<p>She beckoned him aside, and whispered in his ear.</p>
<p>“There is news from your home, Mr. Edmund.”</p>
<p>“News? How?”</p>
<p>“Either your not writing when you were very ill, or the
change in your handwriting when you began to be better, created
some suspicion of the truth; however that is—but
you’re sure you’ll not be the worse for any news, if
it’s not bad news?”</p>
<p>“Sure.”</p>
<p>“Then there’s some one come!” said
Milly.</p>
<p>“My mother?” asked the student, glancing round
involuntarily towards Redlaw, who had come down from the
stairs.</p>
<p>“Hush! No,” said Milly.</p>
<p>“It can be no one else.”</p>
<p>“Indeed?” said Milly, “are you
sure?”</p>
<p>“It is not—” Before he could say more,
she put her hand upon his mouth.</p>
<p>“Yes it is!” said Milly. “The young
lady (she is very like the miniature, Mr. Edmund, but she is
prettier) was too unhappy to rest without satisfying her doubts,
and came up, last night, with a little servant-maid. As you
always dated your letters from the college, she came there; and
before I saw Mr. Redlaw this morning, I saw her. <i>She</i>
likes me too!” said Milly. “Oh dear,
that’s another!”</p>
<p>“This morning! Where is she now?”</p>
<p>“Why, she is now,” said Milly, advancing her lips
to his ear, “in my little parlour in the Lodge, and waiting
to see you.”</p>
<p>He pressed her hand, and was darting off, but she detained
him.</p>
<p>“Mr. Redlaw is much altered, and has told me this
morning that his memory is impaired. Be very considerate to
him, Mr. Edmund; he needs that from us all.”</p>
<p>The young man assured her, by a look, that her caution was not
ill-bestowed; and as he passed the Chemist on his way out, bent
respectfully and with an obvious interest before him.</p>
<p>Redlaw returned the salutation courteously and even humbly,
and looked after him as he passed on. He drooped his head
upon his hand too, as trying to reawaken something he had
lost. But it was gone.</p>
<p>The abiding change that had come upon him since the influence
of the music, and the Phantom’s reappearance, was, that now
he truly felt how much he had lost, and could compassionate his
own condition, and contrast it, clearly, with the natural state
of those who were around him. In this, an interest in those
who were around him was revived, and a meek, submissive sense of
his calamity was bred, resembling that which sometimes obtains in
age, when its mental powers are weakened, without insensibility
or sullenness being added to the list of its infirmities.</p>
<p>He was conscious that, as he redeemed, through Milly, more and
more of the evil he had done, and as he was more and more with
her, this change ripened itself within him. Therefore, and
because of the attachment she inspired him with (but without
other hope), he felt that he was quite dependent on her, and that
she was his staff in his affliction.</p>
<p>So, when she asked him whether they should go home now, to
where the old man and her husband were, and he readily replied
“yes”—being anxious in that regard—he put
his arm through hers, and walked beside her; not as if he were
the wise and learned man to whom the wonders of Nature were an
open book, and hers were the uninstructed mind, but as if their
two positions were reversed, and he knew nothing, and she
all.</p>
<p>He saw the children throng about her, and caress her, as he
and she went away together thus, out of the house; he heard the
ringing of their laughter, and their merry voices; he saw their
bright faces, clustering around him like flowers; he witnessed
the renewed contentment and affection of their parents; he
breathed the simple air of their poor home, restored to its
tranquillity; he thought of the unwholesome blight he had shed
upon it, and might, but for her, have been diffusing then; and
perhaps it is no wonder that he walked submissively beside her,
and drew her gentle bosom nearer to his own.</p>
<p>When they arrived at the Lodge, the old man was sitting in his
chair in the chimney-corner, with his eyes fixed on the ground,
and his son was leaning against the opposite side of the
fire-place, looking at him. As she came in at the door,
both started, and turned round towards her, and a radiant change
came upon their faces.</p>
<p>“Oh dear, dear, dear, they are all pleased to see me
like the rest!” cried Milly, clapping her hands in an
ecstasy, and stopping short. “Here are two
more!”</p>
<p>Pleased to see her! Pleasure was no word for it.
She ran into her husband’s arms, thrown wide open to
receive her, and he would have been glad to have her there, with
her head lying on his shoulder, through the short winter’s
day. But the old man couldn’t spare her. He had
arms for her too, and he locked her in them.</p>
<p>“Why, where has my quiet Mouse been all this
time?” said the old man. “She has been a long
while away. I find that it’s impossible for me to get
on without Mouse. I—where’s my son
William?—I fancy I have been dreaming, William.”</p>
<p>“That’s what I say myself, father,” returned
his son. “I have been in an ugly sort of dream, I
think.—How are you, father? Are you pretty
well?”</p>
<p>“Strong and brave, my boy,” returned the old
man.</p>
<p>It was quite a sight to see Mr. William shaking hands with his
father, and patting him on the back, and rubbing him gently down
with his hand, as if he could not possibly do enough to show an
interest in him.</p>
<p>“What a wonderful man you are, father!—How are
you, father? Are you really pretty hearty, though?”
said William, shaking hands with him again, and patting him
again, and rubbing him gently down again.</p>
<p>“I never was fresher or stouter in my life, my
boy.”</p>
<p>“What a wonderful man you are, father! But
that’s exactly where it is,” said Mr. William, with
enthusiasm. “When I think of all that my
father’s gone through, and all the chances and changes, and
sorrows and troubles, that have happened to him in the course of
his long life, and under which his head has grown grey, and years
upon years have gathered on it, I feel as if we couldn’t do
enough to honour the old gentleman, and make his old age
easy.—How are you, father? Are you really pretty
well, though?”</p>
<p>Mr. William might never have left off repeating this inquiry,
and shaking hands with him again, and patting him again, and
rubbing him down again, if the old man had not espied the
Chemist, whom until now he had not seen.</p>
<p>“I ask your pardon, Mr. Redlaw,” said Philip,
“but didn’t know you were here, sir, or should have
made less free. It reminds me, Mr. Redlaw, seeing you here
on a Christmas morning, of the time when you was a student
yourself, and worked so hard that you were backwards and forwards
in our Library even at Christmas time. Ha! ha!
I’m old enough to remember that; and I remember it right
well, I do, though I am eighty-seven. It was after you left
here that my poor wife died. You remember my poor wife, Mr.
Redlaw?”</p>
<p>The Chemist answered yes.</p>
<p>“Yes,” said the old man. “She was a
dear creetur.—I recollect you come here one Christmas
morning with a young lady—I ask your pardon, Mr. Redlaw,
but I think it was a sister you was very much attached
to?”</p>
<p>The Chemist looked at him, and shook his head. “I
had a sister,” he said vacantly. He knew no more.</p>
<p>“One Christmas morning,” pursued the old man,
“that you come here with her—and it began to snow,
and my wife invited the lady to walk in, and sit by the fire that
is always a burning on Christmas Day in what used to be, before
our ten poor gentlemen commuted, our great Dinner Hall. I
was there; and I recollect, as I was stirring up the blaze for
the young lady to warm her pretty feet by, she read the scroll
out loud, that is underneath that pictur, ‘Lord, keep my
memory green!’ She and my poor wife fell a talking
about it; and it’s a strange thing to think of, now, that
they both said (both being so unlike to die) that it was a good
prayer, and that it was one they would put up very earnestly, if
they were called away young, with reference to those who were
dearest to them. ‘My brother,’ says the young
lady—‘My husband,’ says my poor
wife.—‘Lord, keep his memory of me, green, and do not
let me be forgotten!’”</p>
<p>Tears more painful, and more bitter than he had ever shed in
all his life, coursed down Redlaw’s face. Philip,
fully occupied in recalling his story, had not observed him until
now, nor Milly’s anxiety that he should not proceed.</p>
<p>“Philip!” said Redlaw, laying his hand upon his
arm, “I am a stricken man, on whom the hand of Providence
has fallen heavily, although deservedly. You speak to me,
my friend, of what I cannot follow; my memory is gone.”</p>
<p>“Merciful power!” cried the old man.</p>
<p>“I have lost my memory of sorrow, wrong, and
trouble,” said the Chemist, “and with that I have
lost all man would remember!”</p>
<p>To see old Philip’s pity for him, to see him wheel his
own great chair for him to rest in, and look down upon him with a
solemn sense of his bereavement, was to know, in some degree, how
precious to old age such recollections are.</p>
<p>The boy came running in, and ran to Milly.</p>
<p>“Here’s the man,” he said, “in the
other room. I don’t want <i>him</i>.”</p>
<p>“What man does he mean?” asked Mr. William.</p>
<p>“Hush!” said Milly.</p>
<p>Obedient to a sign from her, he and his old father softly
withdrew. As they went out, unnoticed, Redlaw beckoned to
the boy to come to him.</p>
<p>“I like the woman best,” he answered, holding to
her skirts.</p>
<p>“You are right,” said Redlaw, with a faint
smile. “But you needn’t fear to come to
me. I am gentler than I was. Of all the world, to
you, poor child!”</p>
<p>The boy still held back at first, but yielding little by
little to her urging, he consented to approach, and even to sit
down at his feet. As Redlaw laid his hand upon the shoulder
of the child, looking on him with compassion and a
fellow-feeling, he put out his other hand to Milly. She
stooped down on that side of him, so that she could look into his
face, and after silence, said:</p>
<p>“Mr. Redlaw, may I speak to you?”</p>
<p>“Yes,” he answered, fixing his eyes upon
her. “Your voice and music are the same to
me.”</p>
<p>“May I ask you something?”</p>
<p>“What you will.”</p>
<p>“Do you remember what I said, when I knocked at your
door last night? About one who was your friend once, and
who stood on the verge of destruction?”</p>
<p>“Yes. I remember,” he said, with some
hesitation.</p>
<p>“Do you understand it?”</p>
<p>He smoothed the boy’s hair—looking at her fixedly
the while, and shook his head.</p>
<p>“This person,” said Milly, in her clear, soft
voice, which her mild eyes, looking at him, made clearer and
softer, “I found soon afterwards. I went back to the
house, and, with Heaven’s help, traced him. I was not
too soon. A very little and I should have been too
late.”</p>
<p>He took his hand from the boy, and laying it on the back of
that hand of hers, whose timid and yet earnest touch addressed
him no less appealingly than her voice and eyes, looked more
intently on her.</p>
<p>“He <i>is</i> the father of Mr. Edmund, the young
gentleman we saw just now. His real name is
Longford.—You recollect the name?”</p>
<p>“I recollect the name.”</p>
<p>“And the man?”</p>
<p>“No, not the man. Did he ever wrong me?”</p>
<p>“Yes!”</p>
<p>“Ah! Then it’s
hopeless—hopeless.”</p>
<p>He shook his head, and softly beat upon the hand he held, as
though mutely asking her commiseration.</p>
<p>“I did not go to Mr. Edmund last night,” said
Milly,—“You will listen to me just the same as if you
did remember all?”</p>
<p>“To every syllable you say.”</p>
<p>“Both, because I did not know, then, that this really
was his father, and because I was fearful of the effect of such
intelligence upon him, after his illness, if it should be.
Since I have known who this person is, I have not gone either;
but that is for another reason. He has long been separated
from his wife and son—has been a stranger to his home
almost from this son’s infancy, I learn from him—and
has abandoned and deserted what he should have held most
dear. In all that time he has been falling from the state
of a gentleman, more and more, until—” she rose up,
hastily, and going out for a moment, returned, accompanied by the
wreck that Redlaw had beheld last night.</p>
<p>“Do you know me?” asked the Chemist.</p>
<p>“I should be glad,” returned the other, “and
that is an unwonted word for me to use, if I could answer
no.”</p>
<p>The Chemist looked at the man, standing in self-abasement and
degradation before him, and would have looked longer, in an
ineffectual struggle for enlightenment, but that Milly resumed
her late position by his side, and attracted his attentive gaze
to her own face.</p>
<p>“See how low he is sunk, how lost he is!” she
whispered, stretching out her arm towards him, without looking
from the Chemist’s face. “If you could remember
all that is connected with him, do you not think it would move
your pity to reflect that one you ever loved (do not let us mind
how long ago, or in what belief that he has forfeited), should
come to this?”</p>
<p>“I hope it would,” he answered. “I
believe it would.”</p>
<p>His eyes wandered to the figure standing near the door, but
came back speedily to her, on whom he gazed intently, as if he
strove to learn some lesson from every tone of her voice, and
every beam of her eyes.</p>
<p>“I have no learning, and you have much,” said
Milly; “I am not used to think, and you are always
thinking. May I tell you why it seems to me a good thing
for us, to remember wrong that has been done us?”</p>
<p>“Yes.”</p>
<p>“That we may forgive it.”</p>
<p>“Pardon me, great Heaven!” said Redlaw, lifting up
his eyes, “for having thrown away thine own high
attribute!”</p>
<p>“And if,” said Milly, “if your memory should
one day be restored, as we will hope and pray it may be, would it
not be a blessing to you to recall at once a wrong and its
forgiveness?”</p>
<p>He looked at the figure by the door, and fastened his
attentive eyes on her again; a ray of clearer light appeared to
him to shine into his mind, from her bright face.</p>
<p>“He cannot go to his abandoned home. He does not
seek to go there. He knows that he could only carry shame
and trouble to those he has so cruelly neglected; and that the
best reparation he can make them now, is to avoid them. A
very little money carefully bestowed, would remove him to some
distant place, where he might live and do no wrong, and make such
atonement as is left within his power for the wrong he has
done. To the unfortunate lady who is his wife, and to his
son, this would be the best and kindest boon that their best
friend could give them—one too that they need never know
of; and to him, shattered in reputation, mind, and body, it might
be salvation.”</p>
<p>He took her head between her hands, and kissed it, and said:
“It shall be done. I trust to you to do it for me,
now and secretly; and to tell him that I would forgive him, if I
were so happy as to know for what.”</p>
<p>As she rose, and turned her beaming face towards the fallen
man, implying that her mediation had been successful, he advanced
a step, and without raising his eyes, addressed himself to
Redlaw.</p>
<p>“You are so generous,” he said, “—you
ever were—that you will try to banish your rising sense of
retribution in the spectacle that is before you. I do not
try to banish it from myself, Redlaw. If you can, believe
me.”</p>
<p>The Chemist entreated Milly, by a gesture, to come nearer to
him; and, as he listened looked in her face, as if to find in it
the clue to what he heard.</p>
<p>“I am too decayed a wretch to make professions; I
recollect my own career too well, to array any such before
you. But from the day on which I made my first step
downward, in dealing falsely by you, I have gone down with a
certain, steady, doomed progression. That, I
say.”</p>
<p>Redlaw, keeping her close at his side, turned his face towards
the speaker, and there was sorrow in it. Something like
mournful recognition too.</p>
<p>“I might have been another man, my life might have been
another life, if I had avoided that first fatal step. I
don’t know that it would have been. I claim nothing
for the possibility. Your sister is at rest, and better
than she could have been with me, if I had continued even what
you thought me: even what I once supposed myself to
be.”</p>
<p>Redlaw made a hasty motion with his hand, as if he would have
put that subject on one side.</p>
<p>“I speak,” the other went on, “like a man
taken from the grave. I should have made my own grave, last
night, had it not been for this blessed hand.”</p>
<p>“Oh dear, he likes me too!” sobbed Milly, under
her breath. “That’s another!”</p>
<p>“I could not have put myself in your way, last night,
even for bread. But, to-day, my recollection of what has
been is so strongly stirred, and is presented to me, I
don’t know how, so vividly, that I have dared to come at
her suggestion, and to take your bounty, and to thank you for it,
and to beg you, Redlaw, in your dying hour, to be as merciful to
me in your thoughts, as you are in your deeds.”</p>
<p>He turned towards the door, and stopped a moment on his way
forth.</p>
<p>“I hope my son may interest you, for his mother’s
sake. I hope he may deserve to do so. Unless my life
should be preserved a long time, and I should know that I have
not misused your aid, I shall never look upon him
more.”</p>
<p>Going out, he raised his eyes to Redlaw for the first
time. Redlaw, whose steadfast gaze was fixed upon him,
dreamily held out his hand. He returned and touched
it—little more—with both his own; and bending down
his head, went slowly out.</p>
<p>In the few moments that elapsed, while Milly silently took him
to the gate, the Chemist dropped into his chair, and covered his
face with his hands. Seeing him thus, when she came back,
accompanied by her husband and his father (who were both greatly
concerned for him), she avoided disturbing him, or permitting him
to be disturbed; and kneeled down near the chair to put some warm
clothing on the boy.</p>
<p>“That’s exactly where it is. That’s
what I always say, father!” exclaimed her admiring
husband. “There’s a motherly feeling in Mrs.
William’s breast that must and will have went!”</p>
<p>“Ay, ay,” said the old man; “you’re
right. My son William’s right!”</p>
<p>“It happens all for the best, Milly dear, no
doubt,” said Mr. William, tenderly, “that we have no
children of our own; and yet I sometimes wish you had one to love
and cherish. Our little dead child that you built such
hopes upon, and that never breathed the breath of life—it
has made you quiet-like, Milly.”</p>
<p>“I am very happy in the recollection of it, William
dear,” she answered. “I think of it every
day.”</p>
<p>“I was afraid you thought of it a good deal.”</p>
<p>“Don’t say, afraid; it is a comfort to me; it
speaks to me in so many ways. The innocent thing that never
lived on earth, is like an angel to me, William.”</p>
<p>“You are like an angel to father and me,” said Mr.
William, softly. “I know that.”</p>
<p>“When I think of all those hopes I built upon it, and
the many times I sat and pictured to myself the little smiling
face upon my bosom that never lay there, and the sweet eyes
turned up to mine that never opened to the light,” said
Milly, “I can feel a greater tenderness, I think, for all
the disappointed hopes in which there is no harm. When I
see a beautiful child in its fond mother’s arms, I love it
all the better, thinking that my child might have been like that,
and might have made my heart as proud and happy.”</p>
<p>Redlaw raised his head, and looked towards her.</p>
<p>“All through life, it seems by me,” she continued,
“to tell me something. For poor neglected children,
my little child pleads as if it were alive, and had a voice I
knew, with which to speak to me. When I hear of youth in
suffering or shame, I think that my child might have come to
that, perhaps, and that God took it from me in His mercy.
Even in age and grey hair, such as father’s, it is present:
saying that it too might have lived to be old, long and long
after you and I were gone, and to have needed the respect and
love of younger people.”</p>
<p>Her quiet voice was quieter than ever, as she took her
husband’s arm, and laid her head against it.</p>
<p>“Children love me so, that sometimes I half
fancy—it’s a silly fancy, William—they have
some way I don’t know of, of feeling for my little child,
and me, and understanding why their love is precious to me.
If I have been quiet since, I have been more happy, William, in a
hundred ways. Not least happy, dear, in this—that
even when my little child was born and dead but a few days, and I
was weak and sorrowful, and could not help grieving a little, the
thought arose, that if I tried to lead a good life, I should meet
in Heaven a bright creature, who would call me,
Mother!”</p>
<p>Redlaw fell upon his knees, with a loud cry.</p>
<p>“O Thou,” he said, “who through the teaching
of pure love, hast graciously restored me to the memory which was
the memory of Christ upon the Cross, and of all the good who
perished in His cause, receive my thanks, and bless
her!”</p>
<p>Then, he folded her to his heart; and Milly, sobbing more than
ever, cried, as she laughed, “He is come back to
himself! He likes me very much indeed, too! Oh, dear,
dear, dear me, here’s another!”</p>
<p>Then, the student entered, leading by the hand a lovely girl,
who was afraid to come. And Redlaw so changed towards him,
seeing in him and his youthful choice, the softened shadow of
that chastening passage in his own life, to which, as to a shady
tree, the dove so long imprisoned in his solitary ark might fly
for rest and company, fell upon his neck, entreating them to be
his children.</p>
<p>Then, as Christmas is a time in which, of all times in the
year, the memory of every remediable sorrow, wrong, and trouble
in the world around us, should be active with us, not less than
our own experiences, for all good, he laid his hand upon the boy,
and, silently calling Him to witness who laid His hand on
children in old time, rebuking, in the majesty of His prophetic
knowledge, those who kept them from Him, vowed to protect him,
teach him, and reclaim him.</p>
<p>Then, he gave his right hand cheerily to Philip, and said that
they would that day hold a Christmas dinner in what used to be,
before the ten poor gentlemen commuted, their great Dinner Hall;
and that they would bid to it as many of that Swidger family,
who, his son had told him, were so numerous that they might join
hands and make a ring round England, as could be brought together
on so short a notice.</p>
<p>And it was that day done. There were so many Swidgers
there, grown up and children, that an attempt to state them in
round numbers might engender doubts, in the distrustful, of the
veracity of this history. Therefore the attempt shall not
be made. But there they were, by dozens and
scores—and there was good news and good hope there, ready
for them, of George, who had been visited again by his father and
brother, and by Milly, and again left in a quiet sleep.
There, present at the dinner, too, were the Tetterbys, including
young Adolphus, who arrived in his prismatic comforter, in good
time for the beef. Johnny and the baby were too late, of
course, and came in all on one side, the one exhausted, the other
in a supposed state of double-tooth; but that was customary, and
not alarming.</p>
<p>It was sad to see the child who had no name or lineage,
watching the other children as they played, not knowing how to
talk with them, or sport with them, and more strange to the ways
of childhood than a rough dog. It was sad, though in a
different way, to see what an instinctive knowledge the youngest
children there had of his being different from all the rest, and
how they made timid approaches to him with soft words and
touches, and with little presents, that he might not be
unhappy. But he kept by Milly, and began to love
her—that was another, as she said!—and, as they all
liked her dearly, they were glad of that, and when they saw him
peeping at them from behind her chair, they were pleased that he
was so close to it.</p>
<p>All this, the Chemist, sitting with the student and his bride
that was to be, Philip, and the rest, saw.</p>
<p>Some people have said since, that he only thought what has
been herein set down; others, that he read it in the fire, one
winter night about the twilight time; others, that the Ghost was
but the representation of his gloomy thoughts, and Milly the
embodiment of his better wisdom. <i>I</i> say nothing.</p>
<p>—Except this. That as they were assembled in the
old Hall, by no other light than that of a great fire (having
dined early), the shadows once more stole out of their
hiding-places, and danced about the room, showing the children
marvellous shapes and faces on the walls, and gradually changing
what was real and familiar there, to what was wild and
magical. But that there was one thing in the Hall, to which
the eyes of Redlaw, and of Milly and her husband, and of the old
man, and of the student, and his bride that was to be, were often
turned, which the shadows did not obscure or change.
Deepened in its gravity by the fire-light, and gazing from the
darkness of the panelled wall like life, the sedate face in the
portrait, with the beard and ruff, looked down at them from under
its verdant wreath of holly, as they looked up at it; and, clear
and plain below, as if a voice had uttered them, were the
words.</p>
<p style="text-align: center">Lord keep my Memory green.</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 644 ***</div>
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