‘I know the portrait hangs there, Philip.’
‘Yes, sure, it’s the second on the right, above the panelling. I was going to say – he has helped to keep my memory green, I thank him; for going round the building every year, as I’m a doing now, and freshening up the bare rooms with these branches and berries, freshens up my bare old brain. One year brings back another, and that year another, and those others numbers! At last, it seems to me as if the birth-time of our Lord was the birth-time of all I have ever had affection for, or mourned for, or delighted in – and they’re a pretty many, for I’m eighty-seven!’
‘Merry and happy,’ murmured Redlaw to himself.
The room began to darken strangely.
‘So you see, sir,’ pursued old Philip, whose hale wintry cheek had warmed into a ruddier glow, and whose blue eyes had brightened, while he spoke, ‘I have plenty to keep, when I keep this present season. Now, where’s my quiet Mouse? Chattering’s the sin of my time of life, and there’s half the building to do yet, if the cold don’t freeze us first, or the wind don’t blow us away, or the darkness don’t swallow us up.’
The quiet Mouse had brought her calm face to his side, and silently taken his arm, before he finished speaking.
‘Come away, my dear,’ said the old man. ‘Mr Redlaw won’t settle to his dinner, otherwise, till it’s cold as the winter. I hope you’ll excuse me rambling on, sir, and I wish you good night, and, once again, a merry –’
‘Stay!’ said Mr Redlaw, resuming his place at the table, more, it would have seemed from his manner, to reassure the old keeper, than in any remembrance of his own appetite. ‘Spare me another moment, Philip. William, you were going to tell me something to your excellent wife’s honour. It will not be disagreeable to her to hear you praise her. What was it?’
‘Why, that’s where it is, you see, sir,’ returned Mr William Swidger, looking towards his wife in considerable embarrassment. ‘Mrs William’s got her eye upon me.’
‘But you’re not afraid of Mrs William’s eye?’
‘Why, no, sir,’ returned Mr Swidger, ‘that’s what I say myself. It wasn’t made to be afraid of. It wouldn’t have been made so mild, if that was the intention. But I wouldn’t like to – Milly! – him, you know. Down in the Buildings.’
Mr William, standing behind the table, and rummaging disconcertedly among the objects upon it, directed persuasive glances at Mrs William, and secret jerks of his head and thumb at Mr Redlaw, as alluring her towards him.
‘Him, you know, my love,’ said Mr William. ‘Down in the Buildings. Tell, my dear! You’re the works of Shakespeare in comparison with myself. Down in the Buildings, you know, my love. – Student.’
‘Student?’ repeated Mr Redlaw, raising his head.
‘That’s what I say, sir!’ cried Mr William, in the utmost animation of assent. ‘If it wasn’t the poor student down in the Buildings, why should you wish to hear it from Mrs William’s lips? Mrs William, my dear – Buildings.’
‘I didn’t know,’ said Milly, with a quiet frankness, free from any haste or confusion, ‘that William had said anything about it, or I wouldn’t have come. I asked him not to. It’s a sick young gentleman, sir – and very poor, I am afraid – who is too ill to go home this holiday-time, and lives, unknown to any one, in but a common kind of lodging for a gentleman, down in Jerusalem Buildings. That’s all, sir.’
‘Why have I never heard of him?’ said the Chemist, rising hurriedly. ‘Why has he not made his situation known to me? Sick! – give me my hat and cloak. Poor! – what house? – what number?’
‘Oh, you mustn’t go there, sir,’ said Milly, leaving her father-in-law, and calmly confronting him with her collected little face and folded hands.
‘Not go there?’
‘Oh dear, no!’ said Milly, shaking her head as at a most manifest and self-evident impossibility. ‘It couldn’t be thought of!’
‘What do you mean? Why not?’
‘Why, you see, sir,’ said Mr William Swidger, persuasively and confidentially, ‘that’s what I say. Depend upon it, the young gentleman would never have made his situation known to one of his own sex. Mrs William has got into his confidence, but that’s quite different. They all confide in Mrs William; they all trust her. A man, sir, couldn’t have got a whisper out of him; but woman, sir, and Mrs William combined –!’
‘There is good sense and delicacy in what you say, William,’ returned Mr Redlaw, observant of the gentle and composed face at his shoulder. And laying his finger on his lip, he secretly put his purse into her hand.
‘Oh dear no, sir!’ cried Milly, giving it back again. ‘Worse and worse! Couldn’t be dreamed of!’
Such a staid matter-of-fact housewife she was, and so unruffled by the momentary haste of this rejection, that, an instant afterwards, she was tidily picking up a few leaves which had strayed from between her scissors and her apron, when she had arranged the holly.
Finding, when she rose from her stooping posture, that Mr Redlaw was still regarding her with doubt and astonishment, she quietly repeated – looking about, the while, for any other fragments that might have escaped her observation:
‘Oh dear no, sir! He said that of all the world he would not be known to you, or receive help from you – though he is a student in your class. I have made no terms of secresy with you, but I trust to your honour completely.’
‘Why did he say so?’
‘Indeed I can’t tell, sir,’ said Milly, after thinking a little, ‘because I am not at all clever, you know; and I wanted to be useful to him in making things neat and comfortable about him, and employed myself that way. But I know he is poor, and lonely, and I think he is somehow neglected too. – How dark it is!’
The room had darkened more and more. There was a very heavy gloom and shadow gathering behind the Chemist’s chair.
‘What more about him?’ he asked.
‘He is engaged to be married when he can afford it,’ said Milly, ‘and is studying, I think, to qualify himself to earn a living. I have seen, a long time, that he has studied hard and denied himself much. – How very dark it is!’
‘It’s turned colder, too,’ said the old man, rubbing his hands. ‘There’s a chill and dismal feeling in the room. Where’s my son William? William, my boy, turn the lamp, and rouse the fire!’
Milly’s voice resumed, like quiet music very softly played:
‘He muttered in his broken sleep yesterday afternoon, after talking to me’ (this was to herself) ‘about some one dead, and some great wrong done that could never be forgotten; but whether to him or to another person, I don’t know. Not by him, I am sure.’
‘And, in short, Mrs William, you see – which she wouldn’t say herself, Mr Redlaw, if she was to stop here till the new year after this next one –’ said Mr William, coming up to him to speak in his ear, ‘has done him worlds of good. Bless you, worlds of good! All at home just the same as ever – my father made as snug and comfortable – not a crumb of litter to be found in the house, if you were to offer fifty pound ready money for it – Mrs William apparently never out of the way – yet Mrs William backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, up and down, up and down, a mother to him!’
The room turned darker and colder, and the gloom and shadow gathering behind the chair was heavier.
‘Not content with this, sir, Mrs William goes and finds, this very night, when she was coming home (why it’s not above a couple of hours ago), a creature more like a young wild beast than a young child, shivering upon a door-step. What does Mrs William do, but brings it home to dry it, and feed it, and keep it till our old Bounty of food and flannel is given away, on Christmas morning! If it ever felt a fire before, it’s as much as ever it did; for it’s sitting in the old Lodge chimney, staring at ours as if its ravenous eyes would never shut again. It’s sitting there, at least,’ said Mr William, correcting himself, on reflection, ‘unless it’s bolted!’
‘Heaven keep her happy!’ said the Chemist
aloud, ‘and you too, Philip! and you, William. I must consider what to do in this. I may desire to see this student, I’ll not detain you longer now. Good night!’
‘I thankee, sir, I thankee!’ said the old man, ‘for Mouse, and for my son William, and for myself. Where’s my son William? William, you take the lantern and go on first, through them long dark passages, as you did last year and the year afore. Ha, ha! I remember – though I’m eighty-seven! “Lord keep my memory green!” It’s a very good prayer, Mr Redlaw, that of the learned gentleman in the peaked beard, with a ruff round his neck – hangs up, second on the right above the panelling, in what used to be, afore our ten poor gentlemen commuted, our great Dinner Hall. “Lord keep my memory green!” It’s very good and pious, sir. Amen! Amen!’
As they passed out and shut the heavy door, which, however carefully withheld, fired a long train of thundering reverberations when it shut at last, the room turned darker.
As he fell a-musing in his chair alone, the healthy holly withered on the wall, and dropped – dead branches.
As the gloom and shadow thickened behind him, in that place where it had been gathering so darkly, it took, by slow degrees, – or out of it there came, by some unreal, unsubstantial process, not to be traced by any human sense, – an awful likeness of himself!
Ghastly and cold, colourless in its leaden face and hands, but with his features, and his bright eyes, and his grizzled hair, and dressed in the gloomy shadow of his dress, it came into its terrible appearance of existence, motionless, without a sound. As he leaned his arm upon the elbow of his chair, ruminating before the fire, it leaned upon the chair-back, close above him, with its appalling copy of his face looking where his face looked, and bearing the expression his face bore.
This, then, was the Something that had passed and gone already. This was the dread companion of the haunted man!
It took, for some moments, no more apparent heed of him, than he of it. The Christmas Waits were playing somewhere in the distance, and, through his thoughtfulness, he seemed to listen to the music. It seemed to listen too.
At length he spoke; without moving or lifting up his face.
‘Here again!’ he said.
‘Here again!’ replied the Phantom.
‘I see you in the fire,’ said the haunted man; ‘I hear you in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night.’
The Phantom moved its head, assenting.
‘Why do you come, to haunt me thus?’
‘I come as I am called,’ replied the Ghost.
‘No. Unbidden,’ exclaimed the Chemist.
‘Unbidden be it,’ said the Spectre. ‘It is enough. I am here.’
Hitherto the light of the fire had shone on the two faces – if the dread lineaments behind the chair might be called a face – both addressed towards it, as at first, and neither, looking at the other. But, now, the haunted man turned, suddenly, and stared upon the Ghost. The Ghost, as sudden in its motion, passed to before the chair, and stared on him.
The living man, and the animated image of himself dead, might so have looked, the one upon the other. An awful survey, in a lonely and remote part of an empty old pile of building, on a winter night, with the loud wind going by upon its journey of mystery – whence, or whither, no man knowing since the world began – and the stars, in unimaginable millions, glittering through it, from eternal space, where the world’s bulk is as a grain, and its hoary age is infancy.
‘Look upon me!’ said the Spectre. ‘I am he, neglected in my youth, and miserably poor, who strove and suffered, and still strove and suffered, until I hewed out knowledge from the mine where it was buried, and made rugged steps thereof, for my worn feet to rest and rise on.’
‘I am that man,’ returned the Chemist.
‘No mother’s self-dying love,’ pursued the Phantom, ‘no father’s counsel, aided me. A stranger came into my father’s place when I was but a child, and I was easily an alien from my mother’s heart. My parents, at the best, were of that sort whose care soon ends, and whose duty is soon done; who cast their offspring loose, early, as birds do theirs; and, if they do well, claim the merit; and, if ill, the pity.’
It paused, and seemed to tempt and goad him with its look, and with the manner of its speech, and with its smile.
‘I am he,’ pursued the Phantom, ‘who, in this struggle upward, found a friend. I made him – won him – bound him to me! We worked together, side by side. All the love and confidence that in my earlier youth had had no outlet, and found no expression, I bestowed on him.’
‘Not all,’ said Redlaw, hoarsely.
‘No, not all,’ returned the Phantom. ‘I had a sister.’
The haunted man, with his head resting on his hands, replied ‘I had!’ The Phantom, with an evil smile, drew closer to the chair, and resting its chin upon its folded hands, its folded hands upon the back, and looking down into his face with searching eyes, that seemed instinct with fire, went on:
‘Such glimpses of the light of home as I had ever known, had streamed from her. How young she was, how fair, how loving! I took her to the first poor roof that I was master of, and made it rich. She came into the darkness of my life, and made it bright. – She is before me!’
‘I saw her, in the fire, but now. I hear her in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night,’ returned the haunted man.
‘Did he love her?’ said the Phantom, echoing his contemplative tone. ‘I think he did, once. I am sure he did. Better had she loved him less – less secretly, less dearly, from the shallower depths of a more divided heart!’
‘Let me forget it,’ said the Chemist, with an angry motion of his hand. ‘Let me blot it from my memory!’
The Spectre, without stirring, and with its unwinking, cruel eyes still fixed upon his face, went on:
‘A dream, like hers, stole upon my own life.’
‘It did,’ said Redlaw.
‘A love, as like hers,’ pursued the Phantom, ‘as my inferior nature might cherish, arose in my own heart. I was too poor to bind its object to my fortune then, by any thread of promise or entreaty. I loved her far too well, to seek to do it. But, more than ever I had striven in my life, I strove to climb! Only an inch gained, brought me something nearer to the height. I toiled up! In the late pauses of my labour at that time, – my sister (sweet companion!) still sharing with me the expiring embers and the cooling hearth, – when day was breaking, what pictures of the future did I see!’
‘I saw them, in the fire, but now,’ he murmured. ‘They come back to me in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night, in the revolving years.’
‘– Pictures of my own domestic life, in after-time, with her who was the inspiration of my toil. Pictures of my sister, made the wife of my dear friend, on equal terms – for he had some inheritance, we none – pictures of our sobered age and mellowed happiness, and of the golden links, extending back so far, that should bind us, and our children, in a radiant garland,’ said the Phantom.
‘Pictures,’ said the haunted man, ‘that were delusions. Why is it my doom to remember them too well!’
‘Delusions,’ echoed the Phantom in its changeless voice, and glaring on him with its changeless eyes. ‘For my friend (in whose breast my confidence was locked as in my own), passing between me and the centre of the system of my hopes and struggles, won her to himself, and shattered my frail universe. My sister, doubly dear, doubly devoted, doubly cheerful in my home, lived on to see me famous, and my old ambition so rewarded when its spring was broken, and then –’
‘Then died,’ he interposed. ‘Died, gentle as ever; happy; and with no concern but for her brother. Peace!’
The Phantom watched him silently.
‘Remembered!’ said the haunted man, after a pause. ‘Yes. So well remembered, that even now, when years have passed, and nothing is more idle or more visionary to me than the boyish love so long outlived, I think of it with sympathy, as if it were a younger brother’s or a son
’s. Sometimes I even wonder when her heart first inclined to him, and how it had been affected towards me. – Not lightly, once, I think. – But that is nothing. Early unhappiness, a wound from a hand I loved and trusted, and a loss that nothing can replace, outlive such fancies.’
‘Thus,’ said the Phantom, ‘I bear within me a Sorrow and a Wrong. Thus I prey upon myself. Thus, memory is my curse; and, if I could forget my sorrow and my wrong, I would!’
‘Mocker!’ said the Chemist, leaping up, and making, with a wrathful hand, at the throat of his other self. ‘Why have I always that taunt in my ears?’
‘Forbear!’ exclaimed the Spectre in an awful voice. ‘Lay a hand on Me, and die!’
He stopped midway, as if its words had paralysed him, and stood looking on it. It had glided from him; it had its arm raised high in warning; and a smile passed over its unearthly features as it reared its dark figure in triumph.
‘If I could forget my sorrow and wrong, I would,’ the Ghost repeated. ‘If I could forget my sorrow and wrong, I would!’
‘Evil spirit of myself,’ returned the haunted man, in a low, trembling tone, ‘my life is darkened by that incessant whisper.’
‘It is an echo,’ said the Phantom.
‘If it be an echo of my thoughts – as now, indeed, I know it is,’ rejoined the haunted man, ‘why should I, therefore, be tormented? It is not a selfish thought. I suffer it to range beyond myself. All men and women have their sorrows, – most of them their wrongs; ingratitude, and sordid jealousy, and interest, besetting all degrees of life. Who would not forget their sorrows and their wrongs?’
Dickens at Christmas (Vintage Classics) Page 40