‘I saw him in the street, when I was out just now. He looked at me, and stood near me. I am afraid of him.’
‘Afraid of him! Why?’
‘I don’t know why – I – stop! husband!’ for he was going towards the stranger.
She had one hand pressed upon her forehead, and one upon her breast; and there was a peculiar fluttering all over her, and a hurried unsteady motion in her eyes, as if she had lost something.
‘Are you ill, my dear?’
‘What is it that is going from me again?’ she muttered, in a low voice. ‘What is this that is going away?’
Then she abruptly answered: ‘Ill? No, I am quite well,’ and stood looking vacantly at the floor.
Her husband, who had not been altogether free from the infection of her fear at first, and whom the present strangeness of her manner did not tend to reassure, addressed himself to the pale visitor in the black cloak, who stood still, and whose eyes were bent upon the ground.
‘What may be your pleasure, sir,’ he asked, ‘with us?’
‘I fear that my coming in unperceived,’ returned the visitor, ‘has alarmed you; but you were talking and did not hear me.’
‘My little woman says – perhaps you heard her say it,’ returned Mr Tetterby, ‘that it’s not the first time you have alarmed her tonight.’
‘I am sorry for it. I remember to have observed her, for a few moments only, in the street. I had no intention of frightening her.’
As he raised his eyes in speaking, she raised hers. It was extraordinary to see what dread she had of him, and with what dread he observed it – and yet how narrowly and closely.
‘My name,’ he said, ‘is Redlaw. I come from the old college hard by. A young gentleman who is a student there, lodges in your house, does he not?’
‘Mr Denham?’ said Tetterby.
‘Yes.’
It was a natural action, and so slight as to be hardly noticeable; but the little man, before speaking again, passed his hand across his forehead, and looked quickly round the room, as though he were sensible of some change in its atmosphere. The Chemist, instantly transferring to him the look of dread he had directed towards the wife, stepped back, and his face turned paler.
‘The gentleman’s room,’ said Tetterby, ‘is up stairs, sir. There’s a more convenient private entrance; but as you have come in here, it will save your going out into the cold, if you’ll take this little staircase,’ showing one communicating directly with the parlour, ‘and go up to him that way, if you wish to see him.’
‘Yes, I wish to see him,’ said the Chemist. ‘Can you spare a light?’
The watchfulness of his haggard look, and the inexplicable distrust that darkened it, seemed to trouble Mr Tetterby. He paused; and looking fixedly at him in return, stood for a minute or so, like a man stupefied, or fascinated.
At length he said, ‘I’ll light you, sir, if you’ll follow me.’
‘No,’ replied the Chemist, ‘I don’t wish to be attended, or announced to him. He does not expect me. I would rather go alone. Please to give me the light, if you can spare it, and I’ll find the way.’
In the quickness of his expression of this desire, and in taking the candle from the newsman, he touched him on the breast. Withdrawing his hand hastily, almost as though he had wounded him by accident (for he did not know in what part of himself his new power resided, or how it was communicated, or how the manner of its reception varied in different persons), he turned and ascended the stair.
But when he reached the top, he stopped and looked down. The wife was standing in the same place, twisting her ring round and round upon her finger. The husband, with his head bent forward on his breast, was musing heavily and sullenly. The children, still clustering about the mother, gazed timidly after the visitor, and nestled together when they saw him looking down.
‘Come!’ said the father, roughly. ‘There’s enough of this. Get to bed here!’
‘The place is inconvenient and small enough,’ the mother added, ‘without you. Get to bed!’
The whole brood, scared and sad, crept away; little Johnny and the baby lagging last. The mother, glancing contemptuously round the sordid room, and tossing from her the fragments of their meal, stopped on the threshold of her task of clearing the table, and sat down, pondering idly and dejectedly. The father betook himself to the chimney-corner, and impatiently raking the small fire together, bent over it as if he would monopolise it all. They did not interchange a word.
The Chemist, paler than before, stole upward like a thief; looking back upon the change below, and dreading equally to go on or return.
‘What have I done!’ he said, confusedly. ‘What am I going to do!’
‘To be the benefactor of mankind,’ he thought he heard a voice reply.
He looked round, but there was nothing there; and a passage now shutting out the little parlour from his view, he went on, directing his eyes before him at the way he went.
‘It is only since last night,’ he muttered gloomily, ‘that I have remained shut up, and yet all things are strange to me. I am strange to myself. I am here, as in a dream. What interest have I in this place, or in any place that I can bring to my remembrance? My mind is going blind!’
There was a door before him, and he knocked at it. Being invited, by a voice within, to enter, he complied.
‘Is that my kind nurse?’ said the voice. ‘But I need not ask her. There is no one else to come here.’
It spoke cheerfully, though in a languid tone, and attracted his attention to a young man lying on a couch, drawn before the chimney-piece, with the back towards the door. A meagre scanty stove, pinched and hollowed like a sick man’s cheeks, and bricked into the centre of a hearth that it could scarcely warm, contained the fire, to which his face was turned. Being so near the windy house-top, it wasted quickly, and with a busy sound, and the burning ashes dropped down fast.
‘They chink when they shoot out here,’ said the student, smiling, ‘so, according to the gossips, they are not coffins, but purses. I shall be well and rich yet, some day, if it please God, and shall live perhaps to love a daughter Milly, in remembrance of the kindest nature and the gentlest heart in the world.’
He put up his hand as if expecting her to take it, but, being weakened, he lay still, with his face resting on his other hand, and did not turn round.
The Chemist glanced about the room; – at the student’s books and papers, piled upon a table in a corner, where they, and his extinguished reading-lamp, now prohibited and put away, told of the attentive hours that had gone before this illness, and perhaps caused it; – at such signs of his old health and freedom, as the out-of-door attire that hung idle on the wall; – at those remembrances of other and less solitary scenes, the little miniatures upon the chimney-piece, and the drawing of home; – at that token of his emulation, perhaps, in some sort, of his personal attachment too, the framed engraving of himself, the looker-on. The time had been, only yesterday, when not one of these objects, in its remotest association of interest with the living figure before him, would have been lost on Redlaw. Now, they were but objects; or, if any gleam of such connexion shot upon him, it perplexed, and not enlightened him, as he stood looking round with a dull wonder.
The student, recalling the thin hand which had remained so long untouched, raised himself on the couch, and turned his head.
‘Mr Redlaw!’ he exclaimed, and started up.
Redlaw put out his arm.
‘Don’t come nearer to me. I will sit here. Remain you, where you are!’
He sat down on a chair near the door, and having glanced at the young man standing leaning with his hand upon the couch, spoke with his eyes averted towards the ground.
‘I heard, by an accident, by what accident is no matter, that one of my class was ill and solitary. I received no other description of him, than that he lived in this street. Beginning my inquiries at the first house in it, I have found him.’
‘I have been i
ll, sir,’ returned the student, not merely with a modest hesitation, but with a kind of awe of him, ‘but am greatly better. An attack of fever – of the brain, I believe – has weakened me, but I am much better. I cannot say I have been solitary, in my illness, or I should forget the ministering hand that has been near me.’
‘You are speaking of the keeper’s wife,’ said Redlaw.
‘Yes.’ The student bent his head, as if he rendered her some silent homage.
The Chemist, in whom there was a cold, monotonous apathy, which rendered him more like a marble image on the tomb of the man who had started from his dinner yesterday at the first mention of this student’s case, than the breathing man himself, glanced again at the student leaning with his hand upon the couch, and looked upon the ground, and in the air, as if for light for his blinded mind.
‘I remembered your name,’ he said, ‘when it was mentioned to me down stairs, just now; and I recollect your face. We have held but very little personal communication together?’
‘Very little.’
‘You have retired and withdrawn from me, more than any of the rest, I think?’
The student signified assent.
‘And why?’ said the Chemist; not with the least expression of interest, but with a moody, wayward kind of curiosity. ‘Why? How comes it that you have sought to keep especially from me, the knowledge of your remaining here, at this season, when all the rest have dispersed, and of your being ill? I want to know why this is?’
The young man, who had heard him with increasing agitation, raised his downcast eyes to his face, and clasping his hands together, cried with sudden earnestness, and with trembling lips:
‘Mr Redlaw! You have discovered me. You know my secret!’
‘Secret?’ said the Chemist, harshly. ‘I know?’
‘Yes! Your manner, so different from the interest and sympathy which endear you to so many hearts, your altered voice, the constraint there is in everything you say, and in your looks,’ replied the student, ‘warn me that you know me. That you would conceal it, even now, is but a proof to me (God knows I need none!) of your natural kindness, and of the bar there is between us.’
A vacant and contemptuous laugh was all his answer.
‘But, Mr Redlaw,’ said the student, ‘as a just man, and a good man, think how innocent I am, except in name and descent, of participation in any wrong inflicted on you, or in any sorrow you have borne.’
‘Sorrow!’ said Redlaw, laughing. ‘Wrong! What are those to me?’
‘For Heaven’s sake,’ entreated the shrinking student, ‘do not let the mere interchange of a few words with me change you like this, sir! Let me pass again from your knowledge and notice. Let me occupy my old reserved and distant place among those whom you instruct. Know me only by the name I have assumed, and not by that of Longford –’
‘Longford!’ exclaimed the other.
He clasped his head with both his hands, and for a moment turned upon the young man his own intelligent and thoughtful face. But the light passed from it, like the sunbeam of an instant, and it clouded as before.
‘The name my mother bears, sir,’ faltered the young man, ‘the name she took, when she might, perhaps, have taken one more honoured. Mr Redlaw,’ hesitating, ‘I believe I know that history. Where my information halts, my guesses at what is wanting may supply something not remote from the truth. I am the child of a marriage that has not proved itself a well-assorted or a happy one. From infancy, I have heard you spoken of with honour and respect – with something that was almost reverence. I have heard of such devotion, of such fortitude and tenderness, of such rising up against the obstacles which press men down, that my fancy, since I learnt my little lesson from my mother, has shed a lustre on your name. At last, a poor student myself, from whom could I learn but you?’
Redlaw, unmoved, unchanged, and looking at him with a staring frown, answered by no word or sign.
‘I cannot say,’ pursued the other, ‘I should try in vain to say, how much it has impressed me, and affected me, to find the gracious traces of the past, in that certain power of winning gratitude and confidence which is associated among us students (among the humblest of us, most) with Mr Redlaw’s generous name. Our ages and positions are so different, sir, and I am so accustomed to regard you from a distance, that I wonder at my own presumption when I touch, however lightly, on that theme. But to one who – I may say, who felt no common interest in my mother once – it may be something to hear, now that is all past, with what indescribable feelings of affection I have, in my obscurity, regarded him; with what pain and reluctance I have kept aloof from his encouragement, when a word of it would have made me rich; yet how I have left it fit that I should hold my course, content to know him, and to be unknown. Mr Redlaw,’ said the student, faintly, ‘what I would have said, I have said ill, for my strength is strange to me as yet; but for anything unworthy in this fraud of mine, forgive me, and for all the rest forget me!’
The staring frown remained on Redlaw’s face, and yielded to no other expression until the student, with these words, advanced towards him, as if to touch his hand, when he drew back and cried to him:
‘Don’t come nearer to me!’
The young man stopped, shocked by the eagerness of his recoil, and by the sternness of his repulsion; and he passed his hand, thoughtfully, across his forehead.
‘The past is past,’ said the Chemist. ‘It dies like the brutes. Who talks to me of its traces in my life? He raves or lies! What have I to do with your distempered dreams? If you want money, here it is. I came to offer it; and that is all I came for. There can be nothing else that brings me here,’ he muttered, holding his head again, with both his hands. ‘There can be nothing else, and yet—’
He had tossed his purse upon the table. As he fell into this dim cogitation with himself, the student took it up, and held it out to him.
‘Take it back, sir,’ he said proudly, though not angrily. ‘I wish you could take from me, with it, the remembrance of your words and offer.’
‘You do?’ he retorted, with a wild light in his eyes. ‘You do?’
‘I do!’
The Chemist went close to him, for the first time, and took the purse, and turned him by the arm, and looked him in the face.
‘There is sorrow and trouble in sickness, is there not?’ he demanded with a laugh.
The wondering student answered, ‘Yes.’
‘In its unrest, in its anxiety, in its suspense, in all its train of physical and mental miseries?’ said the Chemist, with a wild unearthly exultation. ‘All best forgotten, are they not?’
The student did not answer, but again passed his hand, confusedly, across his forehead. Redlaw still held him by the sleeve, when Milly’s voice was heard outside.
‘I can see very well now,’ she said, ‘thank you, Dolf. Don’t cry, dear. Father and mother will be comfortable again, tomorrow, and home will be comfortable too. A gentleman with him, is there!’
Redlaw released his hold, as he listened.
‘I have feared, from the first moment,’ he murmured to himself, ‘to meet her. There is a steady quality of goodness in her, that I dread to influence. I may be the murderer of what is tenderest and best within her bosom.’
She was knocking at the door.
‘Shall I dismiss it as an idle foreboding, or still avoid her?’ he muttered, looking uneasily around.
She was knocking at the door again.
‘Of all the visitors who could come here,’ he said, in a hoarse alarmed voice, turning to his companion, ‘this is the one I should desire most to avoid. Hide me!’
The student opened a frail door in the wall, communicating, where the garret-roof began to slope towards the floor, with a small inner room. Redlaw passed in hastily, and shut it after him.
The student then resumed his place upon the couch, and called to her to enter.
‘Dear Mr Edmund,’ said Milly, looking round, ‘they told me there was a gentleman here.�
�
‘There is no one here but I.’
‘There has been some one?’
‘Yes, yes, there has been some one.’
She put her little basket on the table, and went up to the back of the couch, as if to take the extended hand – but it was not there. A little surprised, in her quiet way, she leaned over to look at his face, and gently touched him on the brow.
‘Are you quite as well tonight? Your head is not so cool as in the afternoon.’
‘Tut!’ said the student, petulantly, ‘very little ails me.’
A little more surprise, but no reproach, was expressed in her face, as she withdrew to the other side of the table, and took a small packet of needlework from her basket. But she laid it down again, on second thoughts, and going noiselessly about the room, set everything exactly in its place, and in the neatest order; even to the cushions on the couch, which she touched with so light a hand, that he hardly seemed to know it, as he lay looking at the fire. When all this was done, and she had swept the hearth, she sat down, in her modest little bonnet, to her work, and was quietly busy on it directly.
‘It’s the new muslin curtain for the window, Mr Edmund,’ said Milly, stitching away as she talked. ‘It will look very clean and nice, though it costs very little, and will save your eyes, too, from the light. My William says the room should not be too light just now, when you are recovering so well, or the glare might make you giddy.’
He said nothing; but there was something so fretful and impatient in his change of position, that her quick fingers stopped, and she looked at him anxiously.
‘The pillows are not comfortable,’ she said, laying down her work and rising. ‘I will soon put them right.’
‘They are very well,’ he answered. ‘Leave them alone, pray. You make so much of everything.’
He raised his head to say this, and looked at her so thanklessly, that, after he had thrown himself down again, she stood timidly pausing. However, she resumed her seat, and her needle, without having directed even a murmuring look towards him, and was soon as busy as before.
‘I have been thinking, Mr Edmund, that you have been often thinking of late, when I have been sitting by, how true the saying is, that adversity is a good teacher. Health will be more precious to you, after this illness, than it has ever been. And years hence, when this time of year comes round, and you remember the days when you lay here sick, alone, that the knowledge of your illness might not afflict those who are dearest to you, your home will be doubly dear and doubly blest. Now, isn’t that a good, true thing?’
Dickens at Christmas (Vintage Classics) Page 43