family; they were not well dressed; their shoes were far from being
waterproof; their clothes were scanty; and Peter might have known, and
very likely did, the inside of a pawnbroker's. But they were happy,
grateful, pleased with one another, and contented with the time; and
when they faded and looked happier yet in the bright sprinklings of the
Spirit's torch at parting, Scrooge had his eye upon them, and
especially on Tiny Tim, until the last.
By this time it was getting dark and snowing pretty heavily, and as
Scrooge and the Spirit went along the streets, the brightness of the
roaring fires in kitchens, parlors, and all sorts of rooms was
wonderful. Here the flickering of the blaze showed preparations for a
cozy dinner, with hot plates baking through and through before the
fire, and deep red curtains, ready to be drawn to shut out cold and
darkness. There all the children of the house were running out into the
snow to meet their married sisters, brothers, cousins, uncles, aunts,
and be the first to greet them. Here, again, were shadows on the
windowblind of guests assembling; and there a group of handsome girls,
all hooded and fur-booted, and all chattering at once, tripped lightly
off to some near neighbor's house, where, woe upon the single man who
saw them enter--artful witches, well they knew it--in a glow!
But if you had judged from the numbers of people on their way to
friendly gatherings, you might have thought that no one was at home to
give them welcome when they got there, instead of every house expecting
company, and piling up its fires half-chimney high. Blessings on it,
how the Ghost exulted. How it bared its breadth of breast, and opened
its capacious palm, and floated on, outpouring, with a generous hand,
its bright and harmless mirth on everything within its reach! The very
lamplighter, who ran on before, dotting the dusky street with specks of
light, and who was dressed to spend the evening somewhere, laughed out
loudly as the Spirit passed, though little kenned the lamplighter that
he had any company but Christmas!
And now, without a word of warning from the Ghost, they stood upon a
bleak and desert moor, where monstrous masses of rude stone were cast
about, as though it were the burial-place of giants, and water spread
itself wheresoever it listed, or would have done so, but for the frost
that held it prisoner; and nothing grew but moss and furze, and coarse,
rank grass. Down in the west the setting sun had left a streak of fiery
red, which glared upon the desolation for an instant like a sullen eye,
and frowning lower, lower, lower yet, was lost in the thick gloom of
darkest night.
"What place is this?" asked Scrooge.
"A place where miners live, who labor in the bowels of the earth,"
returned the Spirit. "But they know me. See!"
A light shone from the window of a hut, and swiftly they advanced
towards it. Passing through the wall of mud and stone, they found a
cheerful company assembled round a glowing fire. An old, old man and
woman, with their children and their children's children, and another
generation beyond that, all decked out gayly in their holiday attire.
The old man, in a voice that seldom rose above the howling of the wind
upon the barren waste, was singing them a Christmas song--it had been a
very old song when he was a boy--and from time to time they all joined
in the chorus. So surely as they raised their voices, the old man got
quite blithe and loud, and so surely as they stopped, his vigor sank
again.
The Spirit did not tarry here, but bade Scrooge hold his robe, and
passing on above the moor, sped--whither? Not to sea? To sea. To
Scrooge's horror, looking back, he saw the last of the land, a
frightful range of rocks behind them, and his ears were deafened by the
thundering of water, as it rolled and roared, and raged among the
dreadful caverns it had worn, and fiercely tried to undermine the
earth.
Built upon a dismal reef of sunken rocks, some league or so from shore,
on which the waters chafed and dashed, the wild year through, there
stood a solitary lighthouse. Great heaps of seaweed clung to its base,
and storm birds--born of the wind one might suppose, as seaweed of the
water--rose and fell about it, like the waves they skimmed.
But even here, two men who watched the light had made a fire, that
through the loophole in the thick stone wall shed out a ray of
brightness on the awful sea. Joining their horny hands over the rough
table at which they sat, they wished each other Merry Christmas in
their can of grog; and one of them--the elder, too, with his face all
damaged and scarred with hard weather, as the figurehead of an old ship
might be--struck up a sturdy song that was like a gale in itself.
Again the Ghost sped on, above the black and heaving sea--on,
on--until, being far away, as he told Scrooge, from any shore, they
lighted on a ship. They stood beside the helmsman at the wheel, the
lookout in the bow, the officers who had the watch--dark, ghostly
figures in their several stations; but every man among them hummed a
Christmas tune, or had a Christmas thought, or spoke below his breath
to his companion of some bygone Christmas Day, with homeward hopes
belonging to it. And every man on board, waking or sleeping, good or
bad, had had a kinder word for another on that day than on any day in
the year; and had shared to some extent in its festivities; and had
remembered those he cared for at a distance; and had known that they
delighted to remember him.
It was a great surprise to Scrooge, while listening to the moaning of
the wind, and thinking what a solemn thing it was to move on through
the lonely darkness over an unknown abyss, whose depths were secrets as
profound as death, it was a great surprise to Scrooge, while thus
engaged to hear a hearty laugh. It was a much greater surprise to
Scrooge to recognize it as his own nephew's and to find himself in a
bright, dry, gleaming room, with the Spirit standing smiling by his
side, and looking at that same nephew with approving affability!
"Ha, ha!" laughed Scrooge's nephew. "Ha, ha, ha!"
If you should happen, by any unlikely chance, to know a man more blest
in a laugh than Scrooge's nephew, all I can say is, I should like to
know him, too. Introduce him to me, and I'll cultivate his
acquaintance.
It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there
is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so
irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor. When Scrooge's
nephew laughed in this way--holding his sides, rolling his head, and
twisting his face into the most extravagant contortions--Scrooge's
niece, by marriage, laughed as heartily as he, and their assembled
friends being not a bit behindhand, roared out lustily.
"Ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha!"
"He said that Christmas was a humbug, as I live!" cried Scrooge's
nephew. "He believed it, too!"
"More shame for him, Fred!" said Scrooge's niece, indignantly. Bless
those women; they never do anything by halves, they are always in
earnest.
She was very pretty, exceedingly pretty. With a dimpled,
surprised-looking, capital face; a ripe little mouth that seemed made
to be kissed, as no doubt it was; all kinds of good little dots about
her chin that melted into one another when she laughed; and the
sunniest pair of eyes you ever saw in any little creature's head.
Altogether she was what you would have called provoking, you know; but
satisfactory, too. Oh, perfectly satisfactory.
"He's a comical old fellow," said Scrooge's nephew, "that's the truth,
and not so pleasant as he might be. However, his offenses carry their
own punishment, and I have nothing to say against him."
"I'm sure he is very rich, Fred," hinted Scrooge's niece. "At least you
always tell _me_ so."
"What of that, my dear!" said Scrooge's nephew. "His wealth is of no
use to him. He don't do any good with it. He don't make himself
comfortable with it. He hasn't the satisfaction of thinking--ha, ha,
ha!--that he is ever going to benefit us with it."
"I have no patience with him," observed Scrooge's niece. Scrooge's
niece's sisters and all the other ladies, expressed the same opinion.
"Oh, I have!" said Scrooge's nephew. "I am sorry for him; I couldn't be
angry with him if I tried. Who suffers by his ill whims! Himself,
always. Here, he takes it into his head to dislike us, and he won't
come and dine with us. What's the consequence? He don't lose much of a
dinner."
"Indeed, I think he loses a very good dinner," interrupted Scrooge's
niece. Everybody else said the same, and they must be allowed to have
been competent judges, because they had just had dinner, and with the
dessert upon the table, were clustered round the fire, by lamplight.
"Well, I'm very glad to hear it," said Scrooge's nephew, "because I
haven't great faith in these young housekeepers. What do _you_ say,
Topper?"
Topper had clearly got his eye upon one of Scrooge's niece's sisters,
for he answered that a bachelor was a wretched outcast, who had no
right to express an opinion on the subject. Whereas Scrooge's niece's
sister--the plump one with the lace tucker; not the one with the
roses--blushed.
"Do go on, Fred," said Scrooge's niece, clapping her hands. "He never
finishes what he begins to say; he is such a ridiculous fellow!"
Scrooge's nephew reveled in another laugh, and as it was impossible to
keep the infection off--though the plump sister tried hard to do it
with aromatic vinegar--his example was unanimously followed.
"I was only going to say," said Scrooge's nephew, "that the consequence
of his taking a dislike to us, and not making merry with us, is, as I
think, that he loses some pleasant moments which could do him no harm.
I am sure he loses pleasanter companions than he can find in his own
thoughts, either in his moldy old office or his dusty chambers. I mean
to give him the same chance every year, whether he likes it or not, for
I pity him. He may rail at Christmas till he dies, but he can't help
thinking better of it--I defy him--if he finds me going there, in good
temper, year after year, and saying, Uncle Scrooge, how are you? If it
only puts him in the vein to leave his poor clerk fifty pounds,
_that's_ something, and I think I shook him yesterday."
It was their turn to laugh now, at the notion of his shaking Scrooge.
But being thoroughly good-natured, and not much caring what they
laughed at so that they laughed at any rate, he encouraged them in
their merriment and passed the bottle joyously.
After tea, they had some music, for they were a musical family, and
knew what they were about, when they sung a Glee or Catch, I can assure
you, especially Topper, who could growl away in the bass like a good
one, and never swell the large veins in his forehead, or get red in the
face over it. Scrooge's niece played well upon the harp, and played
among other tunes a simple little air (a mere nothing--you might learn
to whistle it in two minutes), which had been familiar to the child who
fetched Scrooge from the boarding-school, as he had been reminded by
the Ghost of Christmas Past. When the strain of music sounded, all the
things that Ghost had shown him came upon his mind, he softened more
and more, and thought that if he could have listened to it often years
ago, he might have cultivated the kindness of life for his own
happiness with his own hands, without resorting to the sexton's spade
that buried Jacob Marley.
But they didn't devote the whole evening to music. After a while they
played at forfeits, for it is good to be children sometimes, and never
better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself.
Stop! There was first a game at blind-man's buff. Of course there was.
And I no more believe that Topper was really blind than I believe he
had eyes in his boots. My opinion is that it was a done thing between
him and Scrooge's nephew, and that the Ghost of Christmas Present knew
it. The way he went after that plump sister in the lace tucker was an
outrage on the credulity of human nature. Knocking down the fire-irons,
tumbling over the chairs, bumping against the piano, smothering himself
among the curtains, wherever she went, there went he! He always knew
where the plump sister was. He wouldn't catch anybody else. If you had
fallen up against him (as some of them did on purpose), he would have
made a feint of endeavoring to seize you, which would have been an
affront to your understanding, and would instantly have sidled off in
the direction of the plump sister. She often cried out that it wasn't
fair, and it really was not. But when at last he caught her; when, in
spite of all her silken rustlings, and her rapid flutterings past him,
he got her into a corner whence there was no escape; then his conduct
was the most execrable. For his pretending not to know her, his
pretending that it was necessary to touch her head-dress, and further
to assure himself of her identity by pressing a certain ring upon her
finger, and a certain chain about her neck, was vile, monstrous! No
doubt she told him her opinion of it, when, another blind man being in
office, they were so very confidential together behind the curtains.
Scrooge's niece was not one of the blind-man's buff party, but was made
comfortable with a large chair and a footstool, in a snug corner, where
the Ghost and Scrooge were close behind her. But she joined in the
forfeits and loved her love to admiration with all the letters of the
alphabet. Likewise at the game of How, When, and Where, she was very
great, and to the secret joy of Scrooge's nephew, beat her sisters
hollow, though they were sharp girls, too, as Topper could have told
you. There might have been twenty people there, young and old, but they
all played, and so did Scrooge, for wholly forgetting, in the interest
he had in what was going on, that his voice made no sound in their
ears, he sometimes came out with his guess quite loud, and very often
guessed quite right, too; for the sharpest needle, best Whitechapel,
warranted not to cut in the eye, was not sharper than Scrooge; blunt as
he took it in his head to be.
The Ghost was greatly pleased to find him in this mood, and looked upon
him with such favor that he begged like a boy to be allowed to stay
until the guests departed. But this the Spirit said could not be done.
"Here is a new game," said Scrooge. "One half-hour, Spirit, only one!"
It was a game called Yes and No, where Scrooge's nephew had to think of
something, and the rest must find out what; he only answering to their
questions yes or no, as the case was. The brisk fire of questioning to
which he was exposed elicited from him that he was thinking of an
animal, a live animal, rather a disagreeable animal, a savage animal,
an animal that growled and grunted sometimes, and talked sometimes, and
lived in London, and walked about the streets, and wasn't made a show
of, and wasn't led by anybody, and didn't live in a menagerie, and was
never killed in a market, and was not a horse, or an ass, or a cow, or
a bull, or a tiger, or a dog, or a pig, or a cat, or a bear. At every
fresh question that was put to him, this nephew burst into a fresh roar
of laughter, and was so inexpressibly tickled that he was obliged to
get up off the sofa and stamp. At last the plump sister, falling into a
similar state, cried out, "I have found it out! I know what it is,
Fred! I know what it is!"
"What is it?" cried Fred.
"It's your Uncle Scro-o-o-o-oge!"
Which it certainly was. Admiration was the universal sentiment, though
some objected that the reply to "Is it a bear?" ought to have been
"Yes," inasmuch as an answer in the negative was sufficient to have
diverted their thoughts from Mr. Scrooge, supposing they had ever had
any tendency that way.
"He has given us plenty of merriment, I am sure," said Fred, "and it
would be ungrateful not to drink his health. Here is a glass of mulled
wine ready to our hand at the moment; and I say, 'Uncle Scrooge!'"
"Well! Uncle Scrooge!" they cried.
"A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to the old man, whatever he
is!" said Scrooge's nephew. "He wouldn't take it from me, but may he
have it, nevertheless. Uncle Scrooge!"
Uncle Scrooge had imperceptibly become so gay and light of heart that
he would have pledged the unconscious company in return, and thanked
them in an inaudible speech if the Ghost had given him time. But the
whole scene passed off in the breath of the last word spoken by his
nephew, and he and the Spirit were again upon their travels.
Much they saw, and far they went, and many homes they visited, but
always with a happy end. The Spirit stood beside sick beds, and they
were cheerful; on foreign lands, and they were close at home; by
struggling men, and they were patient in their greater hope; by
poverty, and it was rich. In almshouse, hospital, and jail, in misery's
every refuge, where vain man in his little brief authority had not made
fast the door and barred the Spirit out, he left his blessing and
taught Scrooge his precepts.
It was a long night, if it were only a night; but Scrooge had his
doubts of this, because the Christmas holidays appeared to be condensed
into the space of time they passed together. It was strange, too, that
while Scrooge remained unaltered in his outward form, the Ghost grew
older, clearly older. Scrooge had observed this change, but never spoke
of it until they left a children's Twelfth-Night party, when, looking
at the Spirit as they stood together in an open place, he noticed that
its hair was gray.
"Are spirits' lives so short?" asked Scrooge.
"My life upon this globe is very brief," replied the Ghost. "It ends
to-night."
"To-night!" cried Scrooge.
"To-night at midnight. Hark! The time is drawing near."
The chimes were ringing the three-quarters past eleven at that moment.
"Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask," said Scrooge, looking
intently at the Spirit's robe, "but I see something strange, and not
belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a
claw?"
"It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it," was the Spirit's
sorrowful reply. "Look here."
From the foldings of its robe it brought two children, wretched,
abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and
clung upon the outside of its garment.
"Oh, man! look here. Look, look down here!" exclaimed the Ghost.
They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meager, ragged, scowling, wolfish,
but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have
filled their features out and touched them with its freshest tints, a
stale and shriveled hand, like that of age, had pinched and twisted
them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat
enthroned, devils lurked and glared out menacing. No change, no
degradation, no perversion of humanity in any grade, through all the
mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and
dread.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way,
he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked
themselves rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
"Spirit, are they yours?" Scrooge could say no more.
"They are man's," said the Spirit, looking down upon them, "and they
cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This
girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of
all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom,
unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching
out its hand towards the city. "Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it
for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end!"
"Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.
"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last
time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"
The bell struck twelve.
Scrooge looked about him for the Ghost, and saw it not. As the last
stroke ceased to vibrate, he remembered the prediction of old Jacob
Marley, and lifting up his eyes, beheld a solemn Phantom, draped and
hooded, coming like a mist along the ground towards him.
STAVE FOUR.
THE LAST OF THE SPIRITS.
The Phantom slowly, gravely, silently approached. When it came near
him, Scrooge bent down upon his knee; for in the very air through which
this Spirit moved it seemed to scatter gloom and mystery.
It was shrouded in a deep, black garment, which concealed its head, its
face, its form, and left nothing of it visible save one outstretched
hand. But for this it would have been difficult to detach its figure
from the night, and separate it from the darkness by which it was
surrounded.
He felt that it was tall and stately when it came beside him, and that
its mysterious presence filled him with a solemn dread. He knew no
more, for the Spirit neither spoke nor moved.
"I am in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come?" said
Scrooge.
The Spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its hand.
"You are about to show me shadows of the things that have not happened,
but will happen in the time before us," Scrooge pursued. "Is that so,
Spirit?"
The upper portion of the garment was contracted for an instant in its
folds, as if the Spirit had inclined its head. That was the only answer
he received.
Although well used to ghostly company by this time, Scrooge feared the
silent shape so much that his legs trembled beneath him, and he found
that he could hardly stand when he prepared to follow it. The Spirit
paused a moment, as observing his condition, and giving him time to
recover.
But Scrooge was all the worse for this. It thrilled him with a vague
uncertain horror to know that behind the dusky shroud there were
ghostly eyes intently fixed upon him, while he, though he stretched his
own to the utmost, could see nothing but a spectral hand and one great
heap of black.
"Ghost of the Future!" he exclaimed, "I fear you more than any specter
I have seen. But as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope
to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you
company, and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak to me?"
It gave him no reply. The hand was pointed straight before them.
"Lead on!" said Scrooge. "Lead on! The night is waning fast, and it is
precious time to me, I know. Lead on, Spirit!"
The Phantom moved away as it had come towards him. Scrooge followed in
the shadow of its dress, which bore him up, he thought, and carried him
along.
They scarcely seemed to enter the city, for the city rather seemed to
spring up about them and encompass them of its own act. But there they
were in the heart of it, on 'Change, amongst the merchants, who hurried
up and down, and chinked the money in their pockets, and conversed in
groups, and looked at their watches, and trifled thoughtfully with
their great gold seals, and so forth, as Scrooge had seen them often.
The Spirit stopped beside one little knot of business men. Observing
that the hand was pointed to them, Scrooge advanced to listen to their
talk.
"No," said a great fat man with a monstrous chin, "I don't know much
about it, either way. I only know he's dead."
"When did he die?" inquired another.
"Last night, I believe."
"Why, what was the matter with him?" asked a third, taking a vast
quantity of snuff out of a very large snuff-box. "I thought he'd never
die."
"God knows," said the first, with a yawn.
"What has he done with his money?" asked a red-faced gentleman with a
pendulous excrescence on the end of his nose, that shook like the gills
of a turkey-cock.
"I haven't heard," said the man with the large chin, yawning again.
"Left it to his company, perhaps. He hasn't left it to _me_.
That's all I know."
This pleasantry was received with a general laugh.
"It's likely to be a very cheap funeral," said the same speaker; "for
upon my life I don't know of anybody to go to it. Suppose we make up a
party and volunteer?"
"I don't mind going if a lunch is provided," observed the gentleman
with the excrescence on his nose. "But I must be fed, if I make one."
Another laugh.
"Well, I am the most disinterested among you, after all," said the
first speaker, "for I never wear black gloves, and I never eat lunch.
But I'll offer to go, if anybody else will. When I come to think of it,
I'm not at all sure that I wasn't his most particular friend, for we
used to stop and speak whenever we met. By-by!"
Speakers and listeners strolled away and mixed with other groups.
Scrooge knew the men, and looked towards the Spirit for an explanation.