Transcribed from the 1911 Chapman and Hall Christmas Stories edition,
Volume 1, by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
SOME SHORT CHRISTMAS STORIES
by
CHARLES DICKENS
CONTENTS.
PAGE
A Christmas Tree 1
What Christmas is as we Grow Older 23
The Poor Relation’s Story 31
The Child’s Story 47
The Schoolboy’s Story 55
Nobody’s Story 69
A CHRISTMAS TREE.
[1850]
I HAVE been looking on, this evening, at a merry company of children
assembled round that pretty German toy, a Christmas Tree. The tree was
planted in the middle of a great round table, and towered high above
their heads. It was brilliantly lighted by a multitude of little tapers;
and everywhere sparkled and glittered with bright objects. There were
rosy-cheeked dolls, hiding behind the green leaves; and there were real
watches (with movable hands, at least, and an endless capacity of being
wound up) dangling from innumerable twigs; there were French-polished
tables, chairs, bedsteads, wardrobes, eight-day clocks, and various other
articles of domestic furniture (wonderfully made, in tin, at
Wolverhampton), perched among the boughs, as if in preparation for some
fairy housekeeping; there were jolly, broad-faced little men, much more
agreeable in appearance than many real men—and no wonder, for their heads
took off, and showed them to be full of sugar-plums; there were fiddles
and drums; there were tambourines, books, work-boxes, paint-boxes,
sweetmeat-boxes, peep-show boxes, and all kinds of boxes; there were
trinkets for the elder girls, far brighter than any grown-up gold and
jewels; there were baskets and pincushions in all devices; there were
guns, swords, and banners; there were witches standing in enchanted rings
of pasteboard, to tell fortunes; there were teetotums, humming-tops,
needle-cases, pen-wipers, smelling-bottles, conversation-cards,
bouquet-holders; real fruit, made artificially dazzling with gold leaf;
imitation apples, pears, and walnuts, crammed with surprises; in short,
as a pretty child, before me, delightedly whispered to another pretty
child, her bosom friend, “There was everything, and more.” This motley
collection of odd objects, clustering on the tree like magic fruit, and
flashing back the bright looks directed towards it from every side—some
of the diamond-eyes admiring it were hardly on a level with the table,
and a few were languishing in timid wonder on the bosoms of pretty
mothers, aunts, and nurses—made a lively realisation of the fancies of
childhood; and set me thinking how all the trees that grow and all the
things that come into existence on the earth, have their wild adornments
at that well-remembered time.
Being now at home again, and alone, the only person in the house awake,
my thoughts are drawn back, by a fascination which I do not care to
resist, to my own childhood. I begin to consider, what do we all
remember best upon the branches of the Christmas Tree of our own young
Christmas days, by which we climbed to real life.
Straight, in the middle of the room, cramped in the freedom of its growth
by no encircling walls or soon-reached ceiling, a shadowy tree arises;
and, looking up into the dreamy brightness of its top—for I observe in
this tree the singular property that it appears to grow downward towards
the earth—I look into my youngest Christmas recollections!
All toys at first, I find. Up yonder, among the green holly and red
berries, is the Tumbler with his hands in his pockets, who wouldn’t lie
down, but whenever he was put upon the floor, persisted in rolling his
fat body about, until he rolled himself still, and brought those lobster
eyes of his to bear upon me—when I affected to laugh very much, but in my
heart of hearts was extremely doubtful of him. Close beside him is that
infernal snuff-box, out of which there sprang a demoniacal Counsellor in
a black gown, with an obnoxious head of hair, and a red cloth mouth, wide
open, who was not to be endured on any terms, but could not be put away
either; for he used suddenly, in a highly magnified state, to fly out of
Mammoth Snuff-boxes in dreams, when least expected. Nor is the frog with
cobbler’s wax on his tail, far off; for there was no knowing where he
wouldn’t jump; and when he flew over the candle, and came upon one’s hand
with that spotted back—red on a green ground—he was horrible. The
cardboard lady in a blue-silk skirt, who was stood up against the
candlestick to dance, and whom I see on the same branch, was milder, and
was beautiful; but I can’t say as much for the larger cardboard man, who
used to be hung against the wall and pulled by a string; there was a
sinister expression in that nose of his; and when he got his legs round
his neck (which he very often did), he was ghastly, and not a creature to
be alone with.
When did that dreadful Mask first look at me? Who put it on, and why was
I so frightened that the sight of it is an era in my life? It is not a
hideous visage in itself; it is even meant to be droll, why then were its
stolid features so intolerable? Surely not because it hid the wearer’s
face. An apron would have done as much; and though I should have
preferred even the apron away, it would not have been absolutely
insupportable, like the mask. Was it the immovability of the mask? The
doll’s face was immovable, but I was not afraid of _her_. Perhaps that
fixed and set change coming over a real face, infused into my quickened
heart some remote suggestion and dread of the universal change that is to
come on every face, and make it still? Nothing reconciled me to it. No
drummers, from whom proceeded a melancholy chirping on the turning of a
handle; no regiment of soldiers, with a mute band, taken out of a box,
and fitted, one by one, upon a stiff and lazy little set of lazy-tongs;
no old woman, made of wires and a brown-paper composition, cutting up a
pie for two small children; could give me a permanent comfort, for a long
time. Nor was it any satisfaction to be shown the Mask, and see that it
was made of paper, or to have it locked up and be assured that no one
wore it. The mere recollection of that fixed face, the mere knowledge of
its existence anywhere, was sufficient to awake me in the night all
perspiration and horror, with, “O I know it’s coming! O the mask!”
I never wondered what the dear old donkey with the panniers—there he is!
was made of, then! His hide was real to the touch, I recollect. And the
great black horse with the round red spots all over him—the horse that I
could even get upon—I never wondered what had brought him to that strange
condition, or thought that such a horse was not commonly seen at
Newmarket. The four horses of no colour, next to him, that went into the
waggon of cheeses, and could be taken out and stabled under the piano,
appear to have bits of fur-tippet for their tails, and other bits for
their manes, and to stand on pegs instead of legs, but it was not so when
they were brought home for a Christmas present. They were all right,
then; neither was their harness unceremoniously nailed into their chests,
as appears to be the case now. The tinkling works of the music-cart, I
_did_ find out, to be made of quill tooth-picks and wire; and I always
thought that little tumbler in his shirt sleeves, perpetually swarming up
one side of a wooden frame, and coming down, head foremost, on the other,
rather a weak-minded person—though good-natured; but the Jacob’s Ladder,
next him, made of little squares of red wood, that went flapping and
clattering over one another, each developing a different picture, and the
whole enlivened by small bells, was a mighty marvel and a great delight.
Ah! The Doll’s house!—of which I was not proprietor, but where I
visited. I don’t admire the Houses of Parliament half so much as that
stone-fronted mansion with real glass windows, and door-steps, and a real
balcony—greener than I ever see now, except at watering places; and even
they afford but a poor imitation. And though it _did_ open all at once,
the entire house-front (which was a blow, I admit, as cancelling the
fiction of a staircase), it was but to shut it up again, and I could
believe. Even open, there were three distinct rooms in it: a
sitting-room and bed-room, elegantly furnished, and best of all, a
kitchen, with uncommonly soft fire-irons, a plentiful assortment of
diminutive utensils—oh, the warming-pan!—and a tin man-cook in profile,
who was always going to fry two fish. What Barmecide justice have I done
to the noble feasts wherein the set of wooden platters figured, each with
its own peculiar delicacy, as a ham or turkey, glued tight on to it, and
garnished with something green, which I recollect as moss! Could all the
Temperance Societies of these later days, united, give me such a
tea-drinking as I have had through the means of yonder little set of blue
crockery, which really would hold liquid (it ran out of the small wooden
cask, I recollect, and tasted of matches), and which made tea, nectar.
And if the two legs of the ineffectual little sugar-tongs did tumble over
one another, and want purpose, like Punch’s hands, what does it matter?
And if I did once shriek out, as a poisoned child, and strike the
fashionable company with consternation, by reason of having drunk a
little teaspoon, inadvertently dissolved in too hot tea, I was never the
worse for it, except by a powder!
Upon the next branches of the tree, lower down, hard by the green roller
and miniature gardening-tools, how thick the books begin to hang. Thin
books, in themselves, at first, but many of them, and with deliciously
smooth covers of bright red or green. What fat black letters to begin
with! “A was an archer, and shot at a frog.” Of course he was. He was
an apple-pie also, and there he is! He was a good many things in his
time, was A, and so were most of his friends, except X, who had so little
versatility, that I never knew him to get beyond Xerxes or Xantippe—like
Y, who was always confined to a Yacht or a Yew Tree; and Z condemned for
ever to be a Zebra or a Zany. But, now, the very tree itself changes,
and becomes a bean-stalk—the marvellous bean-stalk up which Jack climbed
to the Giant’s house! And now, those dreadfully interesting,
double-headed giants, with their clubs over their shoulders, begin to
stride along the boughs in a perfect throng, dragging knights and ladies
home for dinner by the hair of their heads. And Jack—how noble, with his
sword of sharpness, and his shoes of swiftness! Again those old
meditations come upon me as I gaze up at him; and I debate within myself
whether there was more than one Jack (which I am loth to believe
possible), or only one genuine original admirable Jack, who achieved all
the recorded exploits.
Good for Christmas-time is the ruddy colour of the cloak, in which—the
tree making a forest of itself for her to trip through, with her
basket—Little Red Riding-Hood comes to me one Christmas Eve to give me
information of the cruelty and treachery of that dissembling Wolf who ate
her grandmother, without making any impression on his appetite, and then
ate her, after making that ferocious joke about his teeth. She was my
first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding-Hood,
I should have known perfect bliss. But, it was not to be; and there was
nothing for it but to look out the Wolf in the Noah’s Ark there, and put
him late in the procession on the table, as a monster who was to be
degraded. O the wonderful Noah’s Ark! It was not found seaworthy when
put in a washing-tub, and the animals were crammed in at the roof, and
needed to have their legs well shaken down before they could be got in,
even there—and then, ten to one but they began to tumble out at the door,
which was but imperfectly fastened with a wire latch—but what was _that_
against it! Consider the noble fly, a size or two smaller than the
elephant: the lady-bird, the butterfly—all triumphs of art! Consider the
goose, whose feet were so small, and whose balance was so indifferent,
that he usually tumbled forward, and knocked down all the animal
creation. Consider Noah and his family, like idiotic tobacco-stoppers;
and how the leopard stuck to warm little fingers; and how the tails of
the larger animals used gradually to resolve themselves into frayed bits
of string!
Hush! Again a forest, and somebody up in a tree—not Robin Hood, not
Valentine, not the Yellow Dwarf (I have passed him and all Mother Bunch’s
wonders, without mention), but an Eastern King with a glittering scimitar
and turban. By Allah! two Eastern Kings, for I see another, looking over
his shoulder! Down upon the grass, at the tree’s foot, lies the full
length of a coal-black Giant, stretched asleep, with his head in a lady’s
lap; and near them is a glass box, fastened with four locks of shining
steel, in which he keeps the lady prisoner when he is awake. I see the
four keys at his girdle now. The lady makes signs to the two kings in
the tree, who softly descend. It is the setting-in of the bright Arabian
Nights.
Oh, now all common things become uncommon and enchanted to me. All lamps
are wonderful; all rings are talismans. Common flower-pots are full of
treasure, with a little earth scattered on the top; trees are for Ali
Baba to hide in; beef-steaks are to throw down into the Valley of
Diamonds, that the precious stones may stick to them, and be carried by
the eagles to their nests, whence the traders, with loud cries, will
scare them. Tarts are made, according to the recipe of the Vizier’s son
of Bussorah, who turned pastrycook after he was set down in his drawers
at the gate of Damascus; cobblers are all Mustaphas, and in the habit of
sewing up people cut into four pieces, to whom they are taken blind-fold.
Any iron ring let into stone is the entrance to a cave which only waits
for the magician, and the little fire, and the necromancy, that will make
the earth shake. All the dates imported come from the same tree as that
unlucky date, with whose shell the merchant knocked out the eye of the
genie’s invisible son. All olives are of the stock of that fresh fruit,
concerning which the Commander of the Faithful overheard the boy conduct
the fictitious trial of the fraudulent olive merchant; all apples are
akin to the apple purchased (with two others) from the Sultan’s gardener
for three sequins, and which the tall black slave stole from the child.
All dogs are associated with the dog, really a transformed man, who
jumped upon the baker’s counter, and put his paw on the piece of bad
money. All rice recalls the rice which the awful lady, who was a ghoule,
could only peck by grains, because of her nightly feasts in the
burial-place. My very rocking-horse,—there he is, with his nostrils
turned completely inside-out, indicative of Blood!—should have a peg in
his neck, by virtue thereof to fly away with me, as the wooden horse did
with the Prince of Persia, in the sight of all his father’s Court.
Yes, on every object that I recognise among those upper branches of my
Christmas Tree, I see this fairy light! When I wake in bed, at daybreak,
on the cold, dark, winter mornings, the white snow dimly beheld, outside,
through the frost on the window-pane, I hear Dinarzade. “Sister, sister,
if you are yet awake, I pray you finish the history of the Young King of
the Black Islands.” Scheherazade replies, “If my lord the Sultan will
suffer me to live another day, sister, I will not only finish that, but
tell you a more wonderful story yet.” Then, the gracious Sultan goes
out, giving no orders for the execution, and we all three breathe again.
At this height of my tree I begin to see, cowering among the leaves—it
may be born of turkey, or of pudding, or mince pie, or of these many
fancies, jumbled with Robinson Crusoe on his desert island, Philip Quarll
among the monkeys, Sandford and Merton with Mr. Barlow, Mother Bunch, and
the Mask—or it may be the result of indigestion, assisted by imagination
and over-doctoring—a prodigious nightmare. It is so exceedingly
indistinct, that I don’t know why it’s frightful—but I know it is. I can
only make out that it is an immense array of shapeless things, which
appear to be planted on a vast exaggeration of the lazy-tongs that used
to bear the toy soldiers, and to be slowly coming close to my eyes, and
receding to an immeasurable distance. When it comes closest, it is
worse. In connection with it I descry remembrances of winter nights
incredibly long; of being sent early to bed, as a punishment for some
small offence, and waking in two hours, with a sensation of having been
asleep two nights; of the laden hopelessness of morning ever dawning; and
the oppression of a weight of remorse.
And now, I see a wonderful row of little lights rise smoothly out of the
ground, before a vast green curtain. Now, a bell rings—a magic bell,
which still sounds in my ears unlike all other bells—and music plays,
amidst a buzz of voices, and a fragrant smell of orange-peel and oil.
Anon, the magic bell commands the music to cease, and the great green
curtain rolls itself up majestically, and The Play begins! The devoted
dog of Montargis avenges the death of his master, foully murdered in the
Forest of Bondy; and a humorous Peasant with a red nose and a very little
hat, whom I take from this hour forth to my bosom as a friend (I think he
was a Waiter or an Hostler at a village Inn, but many years have passed
since he and I have met), remarks that the sassigassity of that dog is
indeed surprising; and evermore this jocular conceit will live in my
remembrance fresh and unfading, overtopping all possible jokes, unto the
end of time. Or now, I learn with bitter tears how poor Jane Shore,
dressed all in white, and with her brown hair hanging down, went starving
through the streets; or how George Barnwell killed the worthiest uncle
that ever man had, and was afterwards so sorry for it that he ought to
have been let off. Comes swift to comfort me, the Pantomime—stupendous
Phenomenon!—when clowns are shot from loaded mortars into the great
chandelier, bright constellation that it is; when Harlequins, covered all
over with scales of pure gold, twist and sparkle, like amazing fish; when
Pantaloon (whom I deem it no irreverence to compare in my own mind to my
grandfather) puts red-hot pokers in his pocket, and cries “Here’s
somebody coming!” or taxes the Clown with petty larceny, by saying, “Now,
I sawed you do it!” when Everything is capable, with the greatest ease,
of being changed into Anything; and “Nothing is, but thinking makes it
so.” Now, too, I perceive my first experience of the dreary
sensation—often to return in after-life—of being unable, next day, to get
back to the dull, settled world; of wanting to live for ever in the
bright atmosphere I have quitted; of doting on the little Fairy, with the
wand like a celestial Barber’s Pole, and pining for a Fairy immortality
along with her. Ah, she comes back, in many shapes, as my eye wanders
down the branches of my Christmas Tree, and goes as often, and has never
yet stayed by me!
Out of this delight springs the toy-theatre,—there it is, with its
familiar proscenium, and ladies in feathers, in the boxes!—and all its
attendant occupation with paste and glue, and gum, and water colours, in
the getting-up of The Miller and his Men, and Elizabeth, or the Exile of
Siberia. In spite of a few besetting accidents and failures
(particularly an unreasonable disposition in the respectable Kelmar, and
some others, to become faint in the legs, and double up, at exciting
points of the drama), a teeming world of fancies so suggestive and
all-embracing, that, far below it on my Christmas Tree, I see dark,
dirty, real Theatres in the day-time, adorned with these associations as
with the freshest garlands of the rarest flowers, and charming me yet.
But hark! The Waits are playing, and they break my childish sleep! What
images do I associate with the Christmas music as I see them set forth on
the Christmas Tree? Known before all the others, keeping far apart from
all the others, they gather round my little bed. An angel, speaking to a
group of shepherds in a field; some travellers, with eyes uplifted,
following a star; a baby in a manger; a child in a spacious temple,
talking with grave men; a solemn figure, with a mild and beautiful face,
raising a dead girl by the hand; again, near a city gate, calling back
the son of a widow, on his bier, to life; a crowd of people looking
through the opened roof of a chamber where he sits, and letting down a
sick person on a bed, with ropes; the same, in a tempest, walking on the
water to a ship; again, on a sea-shore, teaching a great multitude;
again, with a child upon his knee, and other children round; again,
restoring sight to the blind, speech to the dumb, hearing to the deaf,
health to the sick, strength to the lame, knowledge to the ignorant;
again, dying upon a Cross, watched by armed soldiers, a thick darkness
coming on, the earth beginning to shake, and only one voice heard,
“Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Still, on the lower and maturer branches of the Tree, Christmas
associations cluster thick. School-books shut up; Ovid and Virgil
silenced; the Rule of Three, with its cool impertinent inquiries, long
disposed of; Terence and Plautus acted no more, in an arena of huddled
desks and forms, all chipped, and notched, and inked; cricket-bats,
stumps, and balls, left higher up, with the smell of trodden grass and
the softened noise of shouts in the evening air; the tree is still fresh,
still gay. If I no more come home at Christmas-time, there will be boys
and girls (thank Heaven!) while the World lasts; and they do! Yonder
they dance and play upon the branches of my Tree, God bless them,
merrily, and my heart dances and plays too!
And I do come home at Christmas. We all do, or we all should. We all
come home, or ought to come home, for a short holiday—the longer, the
better—from the great boarding-school, where we are for ever working at
our arithmetical slates, to take, and give a rest. As to going a
visiting, where can we not go, if we will; where have we not been, when
we would; starting our fancy from our Christmas Tree!
Away into the winter prospect. There are many such upon the tree! On,
by low-lying, misty grounds, through fens and fogs, up long hills,
winding dark as caverns between thick plantations, almost shutting out
the sparkling stars; so, out on broad heights, until we stop at last,
with sudden silence, at an avenue. The gate-bell has a deep, half-awful
sound in the frosty air; the gate swings open on its hinges; and, as we
drive up to a great house, the glancing lights grow larger in the
windows, and the opposing rows of trees seem to fall solemnly back on
either side, to give us place. At intervals, all day, a frightened hare
has shot across this whitened turf; or the distant clatter of a herd of
deer trampling the hard frost, has, for the minute, crushed the silence
too. Their watchful eyes beneath the fern may be shining now, if we
could see them, like the icy dewdrops on the leaves; but they are still,
and all is still. And so, the lights growing larger, and the trees
falling back before us, and closing up again behind us, as if to forbid
retreat, we come to the house.
There is probably a smell of roasted chestnuts and other good comfortable
things all the time, for we are telling Winter Stories—Ghost Stories, or
more shame for us—round the Christmas fire; and we have never stirred,
except to draw a little nearer to it. But, no matter for that. We came
to the house, and it is an old house, full of great chimneys where wood
is burnt on ancient dogs upon the hearth, and grim portraits (some of
them with grim legends, too) lower distrustfully from the oaken panels of
the walls. We are a middle-aged nobleman, and we make a generous supper
with our host and hostess and their guests—it being Christmas-time, and
the old house full of company—and then we go to bed. Our room is a very
old room. It is hung with tapestry. We don’t like the portrait of a
cavalier in green, over the fireplace. There are great black beams in
the ceiling, and there is a great black bedstead, supported at the foot
by two great black figures, who seem to have come off a couple of tombs
in the old baronial church in the park, for our particular accommodation.
But, we are not a superstitious nobleman, and we don’t mind. Well! we
dismiss our servant, lock the door, and sit before the fire in our
dressing-gown, musing about a great many things. At length we go to bed.
Well! we can’t sleep. We toss and tumble, and can’t sleep. The embers
on the hearth burn fitfully and make the room look ghostly. We can’t
help peeping out over the counterpane, at the two black figures and the
cavalier—that wicked-looking cavalier—in green. In the flickering light
they seem to advance and retire: which, though we are not by any means a
superstitious nobleman, is not agreeable. Well! we get nervous—more and
more nervous. We say “This is very foolish, but we can’t stand this;
we’ll pretend to be ill, and knock up somebody.” Well! we are just going
to do it, when the locked door opens, and there comes in a young woman,
deadly pale, and with long fair hair, who glides to the fire, and sits
down in the chair we have left there, wringing her hands. Then, we
notice that her clothes are wet. Our tongue cleaves to the roof of our
mouth, and we can’t speak; but, we observe her accurately. Her clothes
are wet; her long hair is dabbled with moist mud; she is dressed in the
fashion of two hundred years ago; and she has at her girdle a bunch of
rusty keys. Well! there she sits, and we can’t even faint, we are in
such a state about it. Presently she gets up, and tries all the locks in
the room with the rusty keys, which won’t fit one of them; then, she
fixes her eyes on the portrait of the cavalier in green, and says, in a
low, terrible voice, “The stags know it!” After that, she wrings her
hands again, passes the bedside, and goes out at the door. We hurry on
our dressing-gown, seize our pistols (we always travel with pistols), and
are following, when we find the door locked. We turn the key, look out
into the dark gallery; no one there. We wander away, and try to find our
servant. Can’t be done. We pace the gallery till daybreak; then return
to our deserted room, fall asleep, and are awakened by our servant
(nothing ever haunts him) and the shining sun. Well! we make a wretched
breakfast, and all the company say we look queer. After breakfast, we go
over the house with our host, and then we take him to the portrait of the
cavalier in green, and then it all comes out. He was false to a young
housekeeper once attached to that family, and famous for her beauty, who
drowned herself in a pond, and whose body was discovered, after a long
time, because the stags refused to drink of the water. Since which, it
has been whispered that she traverses the house at midnight (but goes
especially to that room where the cavalier in green was wont to sleep),
trying the old locks with the rusty keys. Well! we tell our host of what
we have seen, and a shade comes over his features, and he begs it may be
hushed up; and so it is. But, it’s all true; and we said so, before we
died (we are dead now) to many responsible people.
There is no end to the old houses, with resounding galleries, and dismal
state-bedchambers, and haunted wings shut up for many years, through
which we may ramble, with an agreeable creeping up our back, and
encounter any number of ghosts, but (it is worthy of remark perhaps)
reducible to a very few general types and classes; for, ghosts have
little originality, and “walk” in a beaten track. Thus, it comes to
pass, that a certain room in a certain old hall, where a certain bad
lord, baronet, knight, or gentleman, shot himself, has certain planks in
the floor from which the blood _will not_ be taken out. You may scrape
and scrape, as the present owner has done, or plane and plane, as his
father did, or scrub and scrub, as his grandfather did, or burn and burn
with strong acids, as his great-grandfather did, but, there the blood
will still be—no redder and no paler—no more and no less—always just the
same. Thus, in such another house there is a haunted door, that never
will keep open; or another door that never will keep shut, or a haunted
sound of a spinning-wheel, or a hammer, or a footstep, or a cry, or a
sigh, or a horse’s tramp, or the rattling of a chain. Or else, there is
a turret-clock, which, at the midnight hour, strikes thirteen when the
head of the family is going to die; or a shadowy, immovable black
carriage which at such a time is always seen by somebody, waiting near
the great gates in the stable-yard. Or thus, it came to pass how Lady
Mary went to pay a visit at a large wild house in the Scottish Highlands,
and, being fatigued with her long journey, retired to bed early, and
innocently said, next morning, at the breakfast-table, “How odd, to have
so late a party last night, in this remote place, and not to tell me of
it, before I went to bed!” Then, every one asked Lady Mary what she
meant? Then, Lady Mary replied, “Why, all night long, the carriages were
driving round and round the terrace, underneath my window!” Then, the
owner of the house turned pale, and so did his Lady, and Charles
Macdoodle of Macdoodle signed to Lady Mary to say no more, and every one
was silent. After breakfast, Charles Macdoodle told Lady Mary that it
was a tradition in the family that those rumbling carriages on the
terrace betokened death. And so it proved, for, two months afterwards,
the Lady of the mansion died. And Lady Mary, who was a Maid of Honour at
Court, often told this story to the old Queen Charlotte; by this token
that the old King always said, “Eh, eh? What, what? Ghosts, ghosts? No
such thing, no such thing!” And never left off saying so, until he went
to bed.
Or, a friend of somebody’s whom most of us know, when he was a young man
at college, had a particular friend, with whom he made the compact that,
if it were possible for the Spirit to return to this earth after its
separation from the body, he of the twain who first died, should reappear
to the other. In course of time, this compact was forgotten by our
friend; the two young men having progressed in life, and taken diverging
paths that were wide asunder. But, one night, many years afterwards, our
friend being in the North of England, and staying for the night in an
inn, on the Yorkshire Moors, happened to look out of bed; and there, in
the moonlight, leaning on a bureau near the window, steadfastly regarding
him, saw his old college friend! The appearance being solemnly
addressed, replied, in a kind of whisper, but very audibly, “Do not come
near me. I am dead. I am here to redeem my promise. I come from
another world, but may not disclose its secrets!” Then, the whole form
becoming paler, melted, as it were, into the moonlight, and faded away.
Or, there was the daughter of the first occupier of the picturesque
Elizabethan house, so famous in our neighbourhood. You have heard about
her? No! Why, _She_ went out one summer evening at twilight, when she
was a beautiful girl, just seventeen years of age, to gather flowers in
the garden; and presently came running, terrified, into the hall to her
father, saying, “Oh, dear father, I have met myself!” He took her in his
arms, and told her it was fancy, but she said, “Oh no! I met myself in
the broad walk, and I was pale and gathering withered flowers, and I
turned my head, and held them up!” And, that night, she died; and a
picture of her story was begun, though never finished, and they say it is
somewhere in the house to this day, with its face to the wall.
Or, the uncle of my brother’s wife was riding home on horseback, one
mellow evening at sunset, when, in a green lane close to his own house,
he saw a man standing before him, in the very centre of a narrow way.
“Why does that man in the cloak stand there!” he thought. “Does he want
me to ride over him?” But the figure never moved. He felt a strange
sensation at seeing it so still, but slackened his trot and rode forward.
When he was so close to it, as almost to touch it with his stirrup, his
horse shied, and the figure glided up the bank, in a curious, unearthly
manner—backward, and without seeming to use its feet—and was gone. The
uncle of my brother’s wife, exclaiming, “Good Heaven! It’s my cousin
Harry, from Bombay!” put spurs to his horse, which was suddenly in a
profuse sweat, and, wondering at such strange behaviour, dashed round to
the front of his house. There, he saw the same figure, just passing in
at the long French window of the drawing-room, opening on the ground. He
threw his bridle to a servant, and hastened in after it. His sister was
sitting there, alone. “Alice, where’s my cousin Harry?” “Your cousin
Harry, John?” “Yes. From Bombay. I met him in the lane just now, and
saw him enter here, this instant.” Not a creature had been seen by any
one; and in that hour and minute, as it afterwards appeared, this cousin
died in India.
Or, it was a certain sensible old maiden lady, who died at ninety-nine,
and retained her faculties to the last, who really did see the Orphan
Boy; a story which has often been incorrectly told, but, of which the
real truth is this—because it is, in fact, a story belonging to our
family—and she was a connexion of our family. When she was about forty
years of age, and still an uncommonly fine woman (her lover died young,
which was the reason why she never married, though she had many offers),
she went to stay at a place in Kent, which her brother, an
Indian-Merchant, had newly bought. There was a story that this place had
once been held in trust by the guardian of a young boy; who was himself
the next heir, and who killed the young boy by harsh and cruel treatment.
She knew nothing of that. It has been said that there was a Cage in her
bedroom in which the guardian used to put the boy. There was no such
thing. There was only a closet. She went to bed, made no alarm whatever
in the night, and in the morning said composedly to her maid when she
came in, “Who is the pretty forlorn-looking child who has been peeping
out of that closet all night?” The maid replied by giving a loud scream,
and instantly decamping. She was surprised; but she was a woman of
remarkable strength of mind, and she dressed herself and went downstairs,
and closeted herself with her brother. “Now, Walter,” she said, “I have
been disturbed all night by a pretty, forlorn-looking boy, who has been
constantly peeping out of that closet in my room, which I can’t open.
This is some trick.” “I am afraid not, Charlotte,” said he, “for it is
the legend of the house. It is the Orphan Boy. What did he do?” “He
opened the door softly,” said she, “and peeped out. Sometimes, he came a
step or two into the room. Then, I called to him, to encourage him, and
he shrunk, and shuddered, and crept in again, and shut the door.” “The
closet has no communication, Charlotte,” said her brother, “with any
other part of the house, and it’s nailed up.” This was undeniably true,
and it took two carpenters a whole forenoon to get it open, for
examination. Then, she was satisfied that she had seen the Orphan Boy.
But, the wild and terrible part of the story is, that he was also seen by
three of her brother’s sons, in succession, who all died young. On the
occasion of each child being taken ill, he came home in a heat, twelve
hours before, and said, Oh, Mamma, he had been playing under a particular
oak-tree, in a certain meadow, with a strange boy—a pretty,
forlorn-looking boy, who was very timid, and made signs! From fatal
experience, the parents came to know that this was the Orphan Boy, and
that the course of that child whom he chose for his little playmate was
surely run.
Legion is the name of the German castles, where we sit up alone to wait
for the Spectre—where we are shown into a room, made comparatively
cheerful for our reception—where we glance round at the shadows, thrown
on the blank walls by the crackling fire—where we feel very lonely when
the village innkeeper and his pretty daughter have retired, after laying
down a fresh store of wood upon the hearth, and setting forth on the
small table such supper-cheer as a cold roast capon, bread, grapes, and a
flask of old Rhine wine—where the reverberating doors close on their
retreat, one after another, like so many peals of sullen thunder—and
where, about the small hours of the night, we come into the knowledge of
divers supernatural mysteries. Legion is the name of the haunted German
students, in whose society we draw yet nearer to the fire, while the
schoolboy in the corner opens his eyes wide and round, and flies off the
footstool he has chosen for his seat, when the door accidentally blows
open. Vast is the crop of such fruit, shining on our Christmas Tree; in
blossom, almost at the very top; ripening all down the boughs!
Among the later toys and fancies hanging there—as idle often and less
pure—be the images once associated with the sweet old Waits, the softened
music in the night, ever unalterable! Encircled by the social thoughts
of Christmas-time, still let the benignant figure of my childhood stand
unchanged! In every cheerful image and suggestion that the season
brings, may the bright star that rested above the poor roof, be the star
of all the Christian World! A moment’s pause, O vanishing tree, of which
the lower boughs are dark to me as yet, and let me look once more! I
know there are blank spaces on thy branches, where eyes that I have loved
have shone and smiled; from which they are departed. But, far above, I
see the raiser of the dead girl, and the Widow’s Son; and God is good!
If Age be hiding for me in the unseen portion of thy downward growth, O
may I, with a grey head, turn a child’s heart to that figure yet, and a
child’s trustfulness and confidence!
Now, the tree is decorated with bright merriment, and song, and dance,
and cheerfulness. And they are welcome. Innocent and welcome be they
ever held, beneath the branches of the Christmas Tree, which cast no
gloomy shadow! But, as it sinks into the ground, I hear a whisper going
through the leaves. “This, in commemoration of the law of love and
kindness, mercy and compassion. This, in remembrance of Me!”
WHAT CHRISTMAS IS AS WE GROW OLDER.
[1851]
TIME was, with most of us, when Christmas Day encircling all our limited
world like a magic ring, left nothing out for us to miss or seek; bound
together all our home enjoyments, affections, and hopes; grouped
everything and every one around the Christmas fire; and made the little
picture shining in our bright young eyes, complete.
Time came, perhaps, all so soon, when our thoughts over-leaped that
narrow boundary; when there was some one (very dear, we thought then,
very beautiful, and absolutely perfect) wanting to the fulness of our
happiness; when we were wanting too (or we thought so, which did just as
well) at the Christmas hearth by which that some one sat; and when we
intertwined with every wreath and garland of our life that some one’s
name.
That was the time for the bright visionary Christmases which have long
arisen from us to show faintly, after summer rain, in the palest edges of
the rainbow! That was the time for the beatified enjoyment of the things
that were to be, and never were, and yet the things that were so real in
our resolute hope that it would be hard to say, now, what realities
achieved since, have been stronger!
What! Did that Christmas never really come when we and the priceless
pearl who was our young choice were received, after the happiest of
totally impossible marriages, by the two united families previously at
daggers—drawn on our account? When brothers and sisters-in-law who had
always been rather cool to us before our relationship was effected,
perfectly doted on us, and when fathers and mothers overwhelmed us with
unlimited incomes? Was that Christmas dinner never really eaten, after
which we arose, and generously and eloquently rendered honour to our late
rival, present in the company, then and there exchanging friendship and
forgiveness, and founding an attachment, not to be surpassed in Greek or
Roman story, which subsisted until death? Has that same rival long
ceased to care for that same priceless pearl, and married for money, and
become usurious? Above all, do we really know, now, that we should
probably have been miserable if we had won and worn the pearl, and that
we are better without her?
That Christmas when we had recently achieved so much fame; when we had
been carried in triumph somewhere, for doing something great and good;
when we had won an honoured and ennobled name, and arrived and were
received at home in a shower of tears of joy; is it possible that _that_
Christmas has not come yet?
And is our life here, at the best, so constituted that, pausing as we
advance at such a noticeable mile-stone in the track as this great
birthday, we look back on the things that never were, as naturally and
full as gravely as on the things that have been and are gone, or have
been and still are? If it be so, and so it seems to be, must we come to
the conclusion that life is little better than a dream, and little worth
the loves and strivings that we crowd into it?
No! Far be such miscalled philosophy from us, dear Reader, on Christmas
Day! Nearer and closer to our hearts be the Christmas spirit, which is
the spirit of active usefulness, perseverance, cheerful discharge of
duty, kindness and forbearance! It is in the last virtues especially,
that we are, or should be, strengthened by the unaccomplished visions of
our youth; for, who shall say that they are not our teachers to deal
gently even with the impalpable nothings of the earth!
Therefore, as we grow older, let us be more thankful that the circle of
our Christmas associations and of the lessons that they bring, expands!
Let us welcome every one of them, and summon them to take their places by
the Christmas hearth.
Welcome, old aspirations, glittering creatures of an ardent fancy, to
your shelter underneath the holly! We know you, and have not outlived
you yet. Welcome, old projects and old loves, however fleeting, to your
nooks among the steadier lights that burn around us. Welcome, all that
was ever real to our hearts; and for the earnestness that made you real,
thanks to Heaven! Do we build no Christmas castles in the clouds now?
Let our thoughts, fluttering like butterflies among these flowers of
children, bear witness! Before this boy, there stretches out a Future,
brighter than we ever looked on in our old romantic time, but bright with
honour and with truth. Around this little head on which the sunny curls
lie heaped, the graces sport, as prettily, as airily, as when there was
no scythe within the reach of Time to shear away the curls of our
first-love. Upon another girl’s face near it—placider but smiling
bright—a quiet and contented little face, we see Home fairly written.
Shining from the word, as rays shine from a star, we see how, when our
graves are old, other hopes than ours are young, other hearts than ours
are moved; how other ways are smoothed; how other happiness blooms,
ripens, and decays—no, not decays, for other homes and other bands of
children, not yet in being nor for ages yet to be, arise, and bloom and
ripen to the end of all!
Welcome, everything! Welcome, alike what has been, and what never was,
and what we hope may be, to your shelter underneath the holly, to your
places round the Christmas fire, where what is sits open-hearted! In
yonder shadow, do we see obtruding furtively upon the blaze, an enemy’s
face? By Christmas Day we do forgive him! If the injury he has done us
may admit of such companionship, let him come here and take his place.
If otherwise, unhappily, let him go hence, assured that we will never
injure nor accuse him.
On this day we shut out Nothing!
“Pause,” says a low voice. “Nothing? Think!”
“On Christmas Day, we will shut out from our fireside, Nothing.”
“Not the shadow of a vast City where the withered leaves are lying deep?”
the voice replies. “Not the shadow that darkens the whole globe? Not
the shadow of the City of the Dead?”
Not even that. Of all days in the year, we will turn our faces towards
that City upon Christmas Day, and from its silent hosts bring those we
loved, among us. City of the Dead, in the blessed name wherein we are
gathered together at this time, and in the Presence that is here among us
according to the promise, we will receive, and not dismiss, thy people
who are dear to us!
Yes. We can look upon these children angels that alight, so solemnly, so
beautifully among the living children by the fire, and can bear to think
how they departed from us. Entertaining angels unawares, as the
Patriarchs did, the playful children are unconscious of their guests; but
we can see them—can see a radiant arm around one favourite neck, as if
there were a tempting of that child away. Among the celestial figures
there is one, a poor misshapen boy on earth, of a glorious beauty now, of
whom his dying mother said it grieved her much to leave him here, alone,
for so many years as it was likely would elapse before he came to
her—being such a little child. But he went quickly, and was laid upon
her breast, and in her hand she leads him.
There was a gallant boy, who fell, far away, upon a burning sand beneath
a burning sun, and said, “Tell them at home, with my last love, how much
I could have wished to kiss them once, but that I died contented and had
done my duty!” Or there was another, over whom they read the words,
“Therefore we commit his body to the deep,” and so consigned him to the
lonely ocean and sailed on. Or there was another, who lay down to his
rest in the dark shadow of great forests, and, on earth, awoke no more.
O shall they not, from sand and sea and forest, be brought home at such a
time!
There was a dear girl—almost a woman—never to be one—who made a mourning
Christmas in a house of joy, and went her trackless way to the silent
City. Do we recollect her, worn out, faintly whispering what could not
be heard, and falling into that last sleep for weariness? O look upon
her now! O look upon her beauty, her serenity, her changeless youth, her
happiness! The daughter of Jairus was recalled to life, to die; but she,
more blest, has heard the same voice, saying unto her, “Arise for ever!”
We had a friend who was our friend from early days, with whom we often
pictured the changes that were to come upon our lives, and merrily
imagined how we would speak, and walk, and think, and talk, when we came
to be old. His destined habitation in the City of the Dead received him
in his prime. Shall he be shut out from our Christmas remembrance?
Would his love have so excluded us? Lost friend, lost child, lost
parent, sister, brother, husband, wife, we will not so discard you! You
shall hold your cherished places in our Christmas hearts, and by our
Christmas fires; and in the season of immortal hope, and on the birthday
of immortal mercy, we will shut out Nothing!
The winter sun goes down over town and village; on the sea it makes a
rosy path, as if the Sacred tread were fresh upon the water. A few more
moments, and it sinks, and night comes on, and lights begin to sparkle in
the prospect. On the hill-side beyond the shapelessly-diffused town, and
in the quiet keeping of the trees that gird the village-steeple,
remembrances are cut in stone, planted in common flowers, growing in
grass, entwined with lowly brambles around many a mound of earth. In
town and village, there are doors and windows closed against the weather,
there are flaming logs heaped high, there are joyful faces, there is
healthy music of voices. Be all ungentleness and harm excluded from the
temples of the Household Gods, but be those remembrances admitted with
tender encouragement! They are of the time and all its comforting and
peaceful reassurances; and of the history that re-united even upon earth
the living and the dead; and of the broad beneficence and goodness that
too many men have tried to tear to narrow shreds.
THE POOR RELATION’S STORY.
[1852]