She was too intent upon her work, and too earnest in what she said, and too composed and quiet altogether, to be on the watch for any look he might direct towards her in reply; so the shaft of his ungrateful glance fell harmless, and did not wound her.
‘Ah!’ said Milly, with her pretty head inclining thoughtfully on one side, as she looked down, following her busy fingers with her eyes. ‘Even on me – and I am very different from you, Mr Edmund, for I have no learning, and don’t know how to think properly – this view of such things has made a great impression, since you have been lying ill. When I have seen you so touched by the kindness and attention of the poor people down stairs, I have felt that you thought even that experience some repayment for the loss of health, and I have read in your face, as plain as if it was a book, that but for some trouble and sorrow we should never know half the good there is about us.’
His getting up from the couch, interrupted her, or she was going on to say more.
‘We needn’t magnify the merit, Mrs William,’ he rejoined slightingly. ‘The people down stairs will be paid in good time, I dare say, for any little extra service they may have rendered me; and perhaps they anticipate no less. I am much obliged to you, too.’
Her fingers stopped, and she looked at him.
‘I can’t be made to feel the more obliged by your exaggerating the case,’ he said. ‘I am sensible that you have been interested in me, and I say I am much obliged to you. What more would you have?’
Her work fell on her lap, as she still looked at him walking to and fro with an intolerant air, and stopping now and then.
‘I say again, I am much obliged to you. Why weaken my sense of what is your due in obligation, by preferring enormous claims upon me? Trouble, sorrow, affliction, adversity! One might suppose I had been dying a score of deaths here!’
‘Do you believe, Mr Edmund,’ she asked, rising and going nearer to him, ‘that I spoke of the poor people of the house, with any reference to myself? To me?’ laying her hand upon her bosom with a simple and innocent smile of astonishment.
‘Oh! I think nothing about it, my good creature,’ he returned. ‘I have had an indisposition, which your solicitude – observe! I say solicitude – makes a great deal more of, than it merits; and it’s over, and we can’t perpetuate it.’
He coldly took a book, and sat down at the table.
She watched him for a little while, until her smile was quite gone, and then, returning to where her basket was, said gently:
‘Mr Edmund, would you rather be alone?’
‘There is no reason why I should detain you here,’ he replied.
‘Except –’ said Milly, hesitating, and showing her work.
‘Oh! the curtain,’ he answered, with a supercilious laugh. ‘That’s not worth staying for.’
She made up the little packet again, and put it in her basket. Then, standing before him with such an air of patient entreaty that he could not choose but look at her, she said:
‘If you should want me, I will come back willingly. When you did want me, I was quite happy to come; there was no merit in it. I think you must be afraid, that, now you are getting well, I may be troublesome to you; but I should not have been, indeed. I should have come no longer than your weakness and confinement lasted. You owe me nothing; but it is right that you should deal as justly by me as if I was a lady – even the very lady that you love; and if you suspect me of meanly making much of the little I have tried to do to comfort your sick room, you do yourself more wrong than ever you can do me. That is why I am sorry. That is why I am very sorry.’
If she had been as passionate as she was quiet, as indignant as she was calm, as angry in her look as she was gentle, as loud of tone as she was low and clear, she might have left no sense of her departure in the room, compared with that which fell upon the lonely student when she went away.
He was gazing drearily upon the place where she had been, when Redlaw came out of his concealment, and came to the door.
‘When sickness lays its hand on you again,’ he said, looking fiercely back at him, ‘– may it be soon! – Die here! Rot here!’
‘What have you done?’ returned the other, catching at his cloak. ‘What change have you wrought in me? What curse have you brought upon me? Give me back myself!’
‘Give me back myself!’ exclaimed Redlaw like a madman. ‘I am infected! I am infectious! I am charged with poison for my own mind, and the minds of all mankind. Where I felt interest, compassion, sympathy, I am turning into stone. Selfishness and ingratitude spring up in my blighting footsteps. I am only so much less base than the wretches whom I make so, that in the moment of their transformation I can hate them.’
As he spoke – the young man still holding to his cloak – he cast him off, and struck him: then, wildly hurried out into the night air where the wind was blowing, the snow falling, the cloud-drift sweeping on, the moon dimly shining; and where, blowing in the wind, falling with the snow, drifting with the clouds, shining in the moonlight, and heavily looming in the darkness, were the Phantom’s words, ‘The gift that I have given, you shall give again, go where you will!’
Whither he went, he neither knew nor cared, so that he avoided company. The change he felt within him made the busy streets a desert, and himself a desert, and the multitude around him, in their manifold endurances and ways of life, a mighty waste of sand, which the winds tossed into unintelligible heaps and made a ruinous confusion of. Those traces in his breast which the Phantom had told him would ‘die out soon,’ were not, as yet, so far upon their way to death, but that he understood enough of what he was, and what he made of others, to desire to be alone.
This put it in his mind – he suddenly bethought himself, as he was going along, of the boy who had rushed into his room. And then he recollected, that of those with whom he had communicated since the Phantom’s disappearance, that boy alone had shown no sign of being changed.
Monstrous and odious as the wild thing was to him, he determined to seek it out, and prove if this were really so; and also to seek it with another intention, which came into his thoughts at the same time.
So, resolving with some difficulty where he was, he directed his steps back to the old college, and to that part of it where the general porch was, and where, alone, the pavement was worn by the tread of the students’ feet.
The keeper’s house stood just within the iron gates, forming a part of the chief quadrangle. There was a little cloister outside, and from that sheltered place he knew he could look in at the window of their ordinary room, and see who was within. The iron gates were shut, but his hand was familiar with the fastening, and drawing it back by thrusting in his wrist between the bars, he passed through softly, shut it again, and crept up to the window, crumbling the thin crust of snow with his feet.
The fire, to which he had directed the boy last night, shining brightly through the glass, made an illuminated place upon the ground. Instinctively avoiding this, and going round it, he looked in at the window. At first, he thought that there was no one there, and that the blaze was reddening only the old beams in the ceiling and the dark walls; but peering in more narrowly, he saw the object of his search coiled asleep before it on the floor. He passed quickly to the door, opened it, and went in.
The creature lay in such a fiery heat, that, as the Chemist stooped to rouse him, it scorched his head. So soon as he was touched, the boy, not half awake, clutching his rags together with the instinct of flight upon him, half rolled and half ran into a distant corner of the room, where, heaped upon the ground, he struck his foot out to defend himself.
‘Get up!’ said the Chemist. ‘You have not forgotten me?’
‘You let me alone!’ returned the boy. ‘This is the woman’s house – not yours.’
The Chemist’s steady eye controlled him somewhat, or inspired him with enough submission to be raised upon his feet, and looked at.
‘Who washed them, and put those bandages where they were bruised and c
racked?’ asked the Chemist, pointing to their altered state.
‘The woman did.’
‘And is it she who has made you cleaner in the face, too?’
‘Yes. The woman.’
Redlaw asked these questions to attract his eyes towards himself, and with the same intent now held him by the chin, and threw his wild hair back, though he loathed to touch him. The boy watched his eyes keenly, as if he thought it needful to his own defence, not knowing what he might do next; and Redlaw could see well, that no change came over him.
‘Where are they?’ he inquired.
‘The woman’s out.’
‘I know she is. Where is the old man with the white hair, and his son?’
‘The woman’s husband, d’ye mean?’ inquired the boy.
‘Aye. Where are those two?’
‘Out. Something’s the matter, somewhere. They were fetched out in a hurry, and told me to stop here.’
‘Come with me,’ said the Chemist, ‘and I’ll give you money.’
‘Come where? and how much will you give?’
‘I’ll give you more shillings than you ever saw, and bring you back soon. Do you know your way to where you came from?’
‘You let me go,’ returned the boy, suddenly twisting out of his grasp. ‘I’m not a going to take you there. Let me be, or I’ll heave some fire at you!’
He was down before it, and ready, with his savage little hand, to pluck the burning coals out.
What the Chemist had felt, in observing the effect of his charmed influence stealing over those with whom he came in contact, was not nearly equal to the cold vague terror with which he saw this baby-monster put it at defiance. It chilled his blood to look on the immovable impenetrable thing, in the likeness of a child, with its sharp malignant face turned up to his, and its almost infant hand, ready at the bars.
‘Listen, boy!’ he said. ‘You shall take me where you please, so that you take me where the people are very miserable or very wicked. I want to do them good, and not to harm them. You shall have money, as I have told you, and I will bring you back. Get up! Come quickly!’ He made a hasty step towards the door, afraid of her returning.
‘Will you let me walk by myself, and never hold me, nor yet touch me?’ said the boy, slowly withdrawing the hand with which he threatened, and beginning to get up.
‘I will!’
‘And let me go before, behind, or anyways I like?’
‘I will!’
‘Give me some money first then, and I’ll go.’
The Chemist laid a few shillings, one by one, in his extended hand. To count them was beyond the boy’s knowledge, but he said ‘one,’ every time, and avariciously looked at each as it was given, and at the donor. He had nowhere to put them, out of his hand, but in his mouth; and he put them there.
Redlaw then wrote with his pencil on a leaf of his pocket-book, that the boy was with him; and laying it on the table, signed to him to follow. Keeping his rags together, as usual, the boy complied, and went out with his bare head and his naked feet into the winter night.
Preferring not to depart by the iron gate by which he had entered, where they were in danger of meeting her whom he so anxiously avoided, the Chemist led the way, through some of those passages among which the boy had lost himself, and by that portion of the building where he lived, to a small door of which he had the key. When they got into the street, he stopped to ask his guide – who instantly retreated from him – if he knew where they were.
The savage thing looked here and there, and at length, nodding his head, pointed in the direction he designed to take. Redlaw going on at once, he followed, something less suspiciously; shifting his money from his mouth into his hand, and back again into his mouth, and stealthily rubbing it bright upon his shreds of dress, as he went along.
Three times, in their progress, they were side by side. Three times they stopped, being side by side. Three times the Chemist glanced down at his face, and shuddered as it forced upon him one reflection.
The first occasion was when they were crossing an old churchyard, and Redlaw stopped among the graves, utterly at a loss how to connect them with any tender, softening, or consolatory thought.
The second was, when the breaking forth of the moon induced him to look up at the Heavens, where he saw her in her glory, surrounded by a host of stars he still knew by the names and histories which human science has appended to them; but where he saw nothing else he had been wont to see, felt nothing he had been wont to feel, in looking up there, on a bright night.
The third was when he stopped to listen to a plaintive strain of music, but could only hear a tune, made manifest to him by the dry mechanism of the instruments and his own ears, with no address to any mystery within him, without a whisper in it of the past, or of the future, powerless upon him as the sound of last year’s running water, or the rushing of last year’s wind.
At each of these three times, he saw with horror that, in spite of the vast intellectual distance between them, and their being unlike each other in all physical respects, the expression on the boy’s face was the expression on his own.
They journeyed on for some time – now through such crowded places, that he often looked over his shoulder thinking he had lost his guide, but generally finding him within his shadow on his other side; now by ways so quiet, that he could have counted his short, quick, naked footsteps coming on behind – until they arrived at a ruinous collection of houses, and the boy touched him and stopped.
‘In there!’ he said, pointing out one house where there were scattered lights in the windows, and a dim lantern in the doorway, with ‘Lodgings for Travellers’ painted on it.
Redlaw looked about him; from the houses, to the waste piece of ground on which the houses stood, or rather did not altogether tumble down, unfenced, undrained, unlighted, and bordered by a sluggish ditch; from that, to the sloping line of arches, part of some neighbouring viaduct or bridge with which it was surrounded, and which lessened gradually, towards them, until the last but one was a mere kennel for a dog, the last a plundered little heap of bricks; from that, to the child, close to him, cowering and trembling with the cold, and limping on one little foot, while he coiled the other round his leg to warm it, yet staring at all these things with that frightful likeness of expression so apparent in his face, that Redlaw started from him.
‘In there!’ said the boy, pointing out the house again. ‘I’ll wait.’
‘Will they let me in?’ asked Redlaw.
‘Say you’re a doctor,’ he answered with a nod. ‘There’s plenty ill here.’
Looking back on his way to the house-door, Redlaw saw him trail himself upon the dust and crawl within the shelter of the smallest arch, as if he were a rat. He had no pity for the thing, but he was afraid of it; and when it looked out of its den at him, he hurried to the house as a retreat.
‘Sorrow, wrong, and trouble,’ said the Chemist, with a painful effort at some more distinct remembrance, ‘at least haunt this place, darkly. He can do no harm, who brings forgetfulness of such things here!’
With these words, he pushed the yielding door, and went in.
There was a woman sitting on the stairs, either asleep or forlorn, whose head was bent down on her hands and knees. As it was not easy to pass without treading on her, and as she was perfectly regardless of his near approach, he stopped, and touched her on the shoulder. Looking up, she showed him quite a young face, but one whose bloom and promise were all swept away, as if the haggard winter should unnaturally kill the spring.
With little or no show of concern on his account, she moved nearer to the wall to leave him a wider passage.
‘What are you?’ said Redlaw, pausing, with his hand upon the broken stair-rail.
‘What do you think I am?’ she answered, showing him her face again.
He looked upon the ruined Temple of God, so lately made, so soon disfigured; and something, which was not compassion – for the springs in which a true compassion
for such miseries has its rise, were dried up in his breast – but which was nearer to it, for the moment, than any feeling that had lately struggled into the darkening, but not yet wholly darkened, night of his mind, mingled a touch of softness with his next words.
‘I am come here to give relief, if I can,’ he said. ‘Are you thinking of any wrong?’
She frowned at him, and then laughed; and then her laugh prolonged itself into a shivering sigh, as she dropped her head again, and hid her fingers in her hair.
‘Are you thinking of a wrong?’ he asked, once more.
‘I am thinking of my life,’ she said, with a momentary look at him.
He had a perception that she was one of many, and that he saw the type of thousands, when he saw her, drooping at his feet.
‘What are your parents?’ he demanded.
‘I had a good home once. My father was a gardener, far away, in the country.’
‘Is he dead?’
‘He’s dead to me. All such things are dead to me. You a gentleman, and not know that!’ She raised her eyes again, and laughed at him.
‘Girl!’ said Redlaw, sternly, ‘before this death, of all such things, was brought about, was there no wrong done to you? In spite of all that you can do, does no remembrance of wrong cleave to you? Are there not times upon times when it is misery to you?’
So little of what was womanly was left in her appearance, that now, when she burst into tears, he stood amazed. But he was more amazed, and much disquieted, to note that in her awakened recollection of this wrong, the first trace of her old humanity and frozen tenderness appeared to show itself.
He drew a little off, and in doing so, observed that her arms were black, her face cut, and her bosom bruised.
Dickens at Christmas (Vintage Classics) Page 44