The Gift Reversed
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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!”
“This is but a shadow,” said the Phantom; “when the morning shines seek
out the reality whose image I present before you.”
“Is it my inexorable doom to do so?” cried the Chemist.
“It is,” replied the Phantom.
“To destroy her peace, her goodness; to make her what I am myself, and
what I have made of others!”
“I have said seek her out,” returned the Phantom. “I have said no more.”
“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?”
“No,” returned the Phantom.
“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?”
“Nothing,” said the Phantom.
“If I cannot, can any one?”
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.
“Ah! Can she?” cried Redlaw, still looking upon the shade.
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.
“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!”
The Phantom looked upon the shade as he did—not at him—and gave no
answer.
“At least, say this—has she, henceforth, the consciousness of any power
to set right what I have done?”
“She has not,” the Phantom answered.
“Has she the power bestowed on her without the consciousness?”
The phantom answered: “Seek her out.”
And her shadow slowly vanished.
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.
“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—”
“You speak to me of what is lying here,” the phantom interposed, and
pointed with its finger to the boy.
“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?”
“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!”
Redlaw shrank, appalled, from what he heard.
“There is not,” said the Phantom, “one of these—not one—but sows a
harvest that mankind MUST 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.”
It seemed to look down upon the boy in his sleep. Redlaw, too, looked
down upon him with a new emotion.
“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.”
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mrs. Tetterby had him into the parlour by the collar, in that same flash
of time, and repaid him the assault with usury thereto.
“You brute, you murdering little boy,” said Mrs. Tetterby. “Had you the
heart to do it?”
“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?”
“Like it, sir!” said Mrs. Tetterby, relieving him of his dishonoured
load.
“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.”
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.
“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?”
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.
“How you stand there, ’Dolphus,” said Mrs. Tetterby to her husband. “Why
don’t you do something?”
“Because I don’t care about doing anything,” Mr. Tetterby replied.
“I am sure _I_ don’t,” said Mrs. Tetterby.
“I’ll take my oath _I_ don’t,” said Mr. Tetterby.
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.
“You had better read your paper than do nothing at all,” said Mrs.
Tetterby.
“What’s there to read in a paper?” returned Mr. Tetterby, with excessive
discontent.
“What?” said Mrs. Tetterby. “Police.”
“It’s nothing to me,” said Tetterby. “What do I care what people do, or
are done to?”
“Suicides,” suggested Mrs. Tetterby.
“No business of mine,” replied her husband.
“Births, deaths, and marriages, are those nothing to you?” said Mrs.
Tetterby.
“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 _them_.”
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.
“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!”
“Say used to, if you please,” returned her husband. “You won’t find me
doing so any more. I’m wiser now.”
“Bah! wiser, indeed!” said Mrs. Tetterby. “Are you better?”
The question sounded some discordant note in Mr. Tetterby’s breast. He
ruminated dejectedly, and passed his hand across and across his forehead.
“Better!” murmured Mr. Tetterby. “I don’t know as any of us are better,
or happier either. Better, is it?”
He turned to the screen, and traced about it with his finger, until he
found a certain paragraph of which he was in quest.
“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.”
“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!”
“What was a sacrifice?” her husband sourly inquired.
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.
“If you mean your marriage was a sacrifice, my good woman—” said her
husband.
“I _do_ mean it,” said his wife.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.
“I must have been half out of my mind when I did it,” muttered Mr.
Tetterby.
“My senses must have forsook me. That’s the only way in which I can
explain it to myself,” said Mrs. Tetterby with elaboration.
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.
“These children will be the death of me at last!” said Mrs. Tetterby,
after banishing the culprit. “And the sooner the better, I think.”
“Poor people,” said Mr. Tetterby, “ought not to have children at all.
They give _us_ no pleasure.”
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.
“Here! Mother! Father!” cried Johnny, running into the room. “Here’s
Mrs. William coming down the street!”
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!
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.
“Why, Lord forgive me,” said Mr. Tetterby to himself, “what evil tempers
have I been giving way to? What has been the matter here!”
“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.
“Am I a brute,” said Mr. Tetterby, “or is there any good in me at all?
Sophia! My little woman!”
“’Dolphus dear,” returned his wife.
“I—I’ve been in a state of mind,” said Mr. Tetterby, “that I can’t abear
to think of, Sophy.”
“Oh! It’s nothing to what I’ve been in, Dolf,” cried his wife in a great
burst of grief.
“My Sophia,” said Mr. Tetterby, “don’t take on. I never shall forgive
myself. I must have nearly broke your heart, I know.”
“No, Dolf, no. It was me! Me!” cried Mrs. Tetterby.
“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!—”
“Oh, dear Dolf, don’t! Don’t!” cried his wife.
“Sophia,” said Mr. Tetterby, “I must reveal it. I couldn’t rest in my
conscience unless I mentioned it. My little woman—”
“Mrs. William’s very nearly here!” screamed Johnny at the door.
“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.”
Mrs. Tetterby, in a whirlwind of laughing and crying, caught his face
within her hands, and held it there.
“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!”
“Hurrah! Here’s Mrs. William!” cried Johnny.
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.
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.
“What! are _you_ 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!”
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.
“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?”
“Who can help it!” cried Mr. Tetterby.
“Who can help it!” cried Mrs. Tetterby.
“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.
“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.”
“She was right!” said Mr. Tetterby. Mrs. Tetterby said she was right.
All the children cried out that she was right.
“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!”
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.
“Kind nurse, gentlest, best of creatures,” he said, falling on his knee
to her, and catching at her hand, “forgive my cruel ingratitude!”
“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!”
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.
“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.”
“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.”
“And will you come again? and will you finish the little curtain?”
“No,” said Milly, drying her eyes, and shaking her head. “You won’t care
for my needlework now.”
“Is it forgiving me, to say that?”
She beckoned him aside, and whispered in his ear.
“There is news from your home, Mr. Edmund.”
“News? How?”
“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?”
“Sure.”
“Then there’s some one come!” said Milly.
“My mother?” asked the student, glancing round involuntarily towards
Redlaw, who had come down from the stairs.
“Hush! No,” said Milly.
“It can be no one else.”
“Indeed?” said Milly, “are you sure?”
“It is not—” Before he could say more, she put her hand upon his mouth.
“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. _She_
likes me too!” said Milly. “Oh dear, that’s another!”
“This morning! Where is she now?”
“Why, she is now,” said Milly, advancing her lips to his ear, “in my
little parlour in the Lodge, and waiting to see you.”
He pressed her hand, and was darting off, but she detained him.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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!”
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.
“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.”
“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?”
“Strong and brave, my boy,” returned the old man.
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.
“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.
“I never was fresher or stouter in my life, my boy.”
“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?”
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.
“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?”
The Chemist answered yes.
“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?”
The Chemist looked at him, and shook his head. “I had a sister,” he said
vacantly. He knew no more.
“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!’”
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.
“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.”
“Merciful power!” cried the old man.
“I have lost my memory of sorrow, wrong, and trouble,” said the Chemist,
“and with that I have lost all man would remember!”
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.
The boy came running in, and ran to Milly.
“Here’s the man,” he said, “in the other room. I don’t want _him_.”
“What man does he mean?” asked Mr. William.
“Hush!” said Milly.
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.
“I like the woman best,” he answered, holding to her skirts.
“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!”
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:
“Mr. Redlaw, may I speak to you?”
“Yes,” he answered, fixing his eyes upon her. “Your voice and music are
the same to me.”
“May I ask you something?”
“What you will.”
“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?”
“Yes. I remember,” he said, with some hesitation.
“Do you understand it?”
He smoothed the boy’s hair—looking at her fixedly the while, and shook
his head.
“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.”
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.
“He _is_ the father of Mr. Edmund, the young gentleman we saw just now.
His real name is Longford.—You recollect the name?”
“I recollect the name.”
“And the man?”
“No, not the man. Did he ever wrong me?”
“Yes!”
“Ah! Then it’s hopeless—hopeless.”
He shook his head, and softly beat upon the hand he held, as though
mutely asking her commiseration.
“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?”
“To every syllable you say.”
“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.
“Do you know me?” asked the Chemist.
“I should be glad,” returned the other, “and that is an unwonted word for
me to use, if I could answer no.”
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.
“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?”
“I hope it would,” he answered. “I believe it would.”
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.
“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?”
“Yes.”
“That we may forgive it.”
“Pardon me, great Heaven!” said Redlaw, lifting up his eyes, “for having
thrown away thine own high attribute!”
“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?”
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.
“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.”
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.”
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.
“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.”
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.
“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.”
Redlaw, keeping her close at his side, turned his face towards the
speaker, and there was sorrow in it. Something like mournful recognition
too.
“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.”
Redlaw made a hasty motion with his hand, as if he would have put that
subject on one side.
“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.”
“Oh dear, he likes me too!” sobbed Milly, under her breath. “That’s
another!”
“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.”
He turned towards the door, and stopped a moment on his way forth.
“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.”
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.
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.
“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!”
“Ay, ay,” said the old man; “you’re right. My son William’s right!”
“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.”
“I am very happy in the recollection of it, William dear,” she answered.
“I think of it every day.”
“I was afraid you thought of it a good deal.”
“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.”
“You are like an angel to father and me,” said Mr. William, softly. “I
know that.”
“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.”
Redlaw raised his head, and looked towards her.
“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.”
Her quiet voice was quieter than ever, as she took her husband’s arm, and
laid her head against it.
“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!”
Redlaw fell upon his knees, with a loud cry.
“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!”
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!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All this, the Chemist, sitting with the student and his bride that was to
be, Philip, and the rest, saw.
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_ say
nothing.
—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.
* * * * *
Lord keep my Memory green.