The Gift Bestowed
Everybody said so.
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
_that’s_ no rule,” as the ghost of Giles Scroggins says in the ballad.
The dread word, GHOST, recalls me.
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.
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?
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?
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?
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?
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?
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.
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.
You should have seen him in his dwelling about twilight, in the dead
winter time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
—When a knock came at his door, in short, as he was sitting so, and
roused him.
“Who’s that?” said he. “Come in!”
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!
“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”—
“By the wind? Ay! I have heard it rising.”
“—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.”
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.
“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 _that_.”
“No,” returned Mr. Redlaw good-naturedly, though abruptly.
“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
_her_ character to come into play.”
As he stopped for a reply, the reply was “Yes,” in the same tone as
before.
“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.”
“True, William,” was the patient and abstracted answer, when he stopped
again.
“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!”
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.
“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 _our_
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.”
“I am quite ready,” said the other, waking as from a dream, and walking
slowly to and fro.
“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.
“What I always say myself, sir. She _will_ do it! There’s a motherly
feeling in Mrs. William’s breast that must and will have went.”
“What has she done?”
“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.
“Well?” said Mr. Redlaw.
“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 _is_
Swidger, by rights. Let ’em call her Swidge, Widge, Bridge—Lord! London
Bridge, Blackfriars, Chelsea, Putney, Waterloo, or Hammersmith
Suspension—if they like.”
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.
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!
“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.”
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.
“What is that the old man has in his arms?” asked Mr. Redlaw, as he sat
down to his solitary meal.
“Holly, sir,” replied the quiet voice of Milly.
“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!”
“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.
“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!”
“Have you had so many that were merry and happy?” asked the other.
“Ay, sir, ever so many,” returned the old man.
“Is his memory impaired with age? It is to be expected now,” said Mr.
Redlaw, turning to the son, and speaking lower.
“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!”
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.
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.
“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?”
“Oh many, many!” said Philip, half awaking from his reverie. “I’m
eighty-seven!”
“Merry and happy, was it?” asked the Chemist in a low voice. “Merry and
happy, old man?”
“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!”
“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?”
“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!”
“That’s what I always say, father!” returned the son promptly, and with
great respect. “You ARE a Swidger, if ever there was one of the family!”
“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.”
The keen look that had been fixed upon him with so much earnestness, had
gradually sought the ground.
“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!”
“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.”
“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?”
“I know the portrait hangs there, Philip.”
“Yes, sure, it’s the second on the right, above the panelling. I was
going to say—he has helped to keep _my_ 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!”
“Merry and happy,” murmured Redlaw to himself.
The room began to darken strangely.
“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.”
The quiet Mouse had brought her calm face to his side, and silently taken
his arm, before he finished speaking.
“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—”
“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?”
“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.”
“But you’re not afraid of Mrs. William’s eye?”
“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.”
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.
“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.”
“Student?” repeated Mr. Redlaw, raising his head.
“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.”
“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.”
“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?”
“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.
“Not go there?”
“Oh dear, no!” said Milly, shaking her head as at a most manifest and
self-evident impossibility. “It couldn’t be thought of!”
“What do you mean? Why not?”
“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 _her_. A man, sir, couldn’t
have got a whisper out of him; but woman, sir, and Mrs. William
combined—!”
“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.
“Oh dear no, sir!” cried Milly, giving it back again. “Worse and worse!
Couldn’t be dreamed of!”
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.
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:
“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.”
“Why did he say so?”
“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!”
The room had darkened more and more. There was a very heavy gloom and
shadow gathering behind the Chemist’s chair.
“What more about him?” he asked.
“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!”
“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!”
Milly’s voice resumed, like quiet music very softly played:
“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 _by_ him, I am sure.”
“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!”
The room turned darker and colder, and the gloom and shadow gathering
behind the chair was heavier.
“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!”
“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!”
“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_ 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!”
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.
As he fell a musing in his chair alone, the healthy holly withered on the
wall, and dropped—dead branches.
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!
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 _he_ leaned his arm upon the
elbow of his chair, ruminating before the fire, _it_ 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.
This, then, was the Something that had passed and gone already. This was
the dread companion of the haunted man!
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.
At length he spoke; without moving or lifting up his face.
“Here again!” he said.
“Here again,” replied the Phantom.
“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.”
The Phantom moved its head, assenting.
“Why do you come, to haunt me thus?”
“I come as I am called,” replied the Ghost.
“No. Unbidden,” exclaimed the Chemist.
“Unbidden be it,” said the Spectre. “It is enough. I am here.”
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.
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.
“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.”
“I _am_ that man,” returned the Chemist.
“No mother’s self-denying love,” pursued the Phantom, “no father’s
counsel, aided _me_. 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.”
It paused, and seemed to tempt and goad him with its look, and with the
manner of its speech, and with its smile.
“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.”
“Not all,” said Redlaw, hoarsely.
“No, not all,” returned the Phantom. “I had a sister.”
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:
“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!”
“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.
“_Did_ 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!”
“Let me forget it!” said the Chemist, with an angry motion of his hand.
“Let me blot it from my memory!”
The Spectre, without stirring, and with its unwinking, cruel eyes still
fixed upon his face, went on:
“A dream, like hers, stole upon my own life.”
“It did,” said Redlaw.
“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!”
“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.”
“—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.
“Pictures,” said the haunted man, “that were delusions. Why is it my
doom to remember them too well!”
“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—”
“Then died,” he interposed. “Died, gentle as ever; happy; and with no
concern but for her brother. Peace!”
The Phantom watched him silently.
“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.”
“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!”
“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?”
“Forbear!” exclaimed the Spectre in an awful voice. “Lay a hand on Me,
and die!”
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.
“If I could forget my sorrow and wrong, I would,” the Ghost repeated.
“If I could forget my sorrow and my wrong, I would!”
“Evil spirit of myself,” returned the haunted man, in a low, trembling
tone, “my life is darkened by that incessant whisper.”
“It is an echo,” said the Phantom.
“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?”
“Who would not, truly, and be happier and better for it?” said the
Phantom.
“These revolutions of years, which we commemorate,” proceeded Redlaw,
“what do _they_ 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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!”
“Forget them!” he repeated.
“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?”
“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?”
“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.”
“Are they so many?” said the haunted man, reflecting in alarm.
“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.
“In nothing else?”
The Phantom held its peace.
But having stood before him, silent, for a little while, it moved towards
the fire; then stopped.
“Decide!” it said, “before the opportunity is lost!”
“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?”
“Say,” said the Spectre, “is it done?”
“A moment longer!” he answered hurriedly. “_I would forget it if I
could_! Have _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 WILL forget my sorrow, wrong, and trouble!”
“Say,” said the Spectre, “is it done?”
“It is!”
“IT IS. 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!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
“What is it?” he said, hastily.
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.
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.
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.
“I’ll bite,” he said, “if you hit me!”
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.
“Where’s the woman?” he replied. “I want to find the woman.”
“Who?”
“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.”
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.
“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!”
“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?”
“Got none.”
“Where do you live?
“Live! What’s that?”
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.”
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.”
The sharp eyes in the child’s head, wandering round the room, lighted on
the table where the remnants of the dinner were.
“Give me some of that!” he said, covetously.
“Has she not fed you?”
“I shall be hungry again to-morrow, sha’n’t I? Ain’t I hungry every
day?”
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:
“There! Now take me to the woman!”
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.
“The gift that I have given, you shall give again, go where you will!”
The Phantom’s words were blowing in the wind, and the wind blew chill
upon him.
“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.”
“The woman’s fire?” inquired the boy.
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.
For now he was, indeed, alone. Alone, alone.