Dickens at Christmas (Vintage Classics)

by Charles Dickens

  3 THE GIFT REVERSED

  NIGHT WAS STILL heavy in the sky. On open plains, from hill-tops, and from the decks of solitary ships at sea, a distant low-lying line, that promised bye and bye to change to light, was visible in the dim horizon; but its promise was remote and doubtful, and the moon was striving with the night-clouds busily.

  The shadows upon Redlaw’s mind succeeded thick and fast to one another, and obscured its light as the night-clouds hovered between the moon and earth, and kept the latter veiled in darkness. Fitful and uncertain as the shadows which the night-clouds cast, were their concealments from him, and imperfect revelations to him; and, like the night-clouds still, if the clear light broke forth for a moment, it was only that they might sweep over it, and make the darkness deeper than before.

  Without, there was a profound and solemn hush upon the ancient pile of buildings, and its buttresses and angles made dark shapes of mystery upon the ground, which now seemed to retire into the smooth white snow and now seemed to come out of it, as the moon’s path was more or less beset. Within, the Chemist’s room was indistinct and murky, by the light of the expiring lamp; a ghostly silence had succeeded to the knocking and the voice outside; nothing was audible but, now and then, a low sound among the whitened ashes of the fire, as of its yielding up its last breath. Before it on the ground the boy lay fast asleep. In his chair, the Chemist sat, as he had sat there since the calling at his door had ceased – like a man turned to stone.

  At such a time, the Christmas music he had heard before, began to play. He listened to it at first, as he had listened in the churchyard; but presently – it playing still, and being borne towards him on the night-air, in a low, sweet, melancholy strain – he rose, and stood stretching his hands about him as if there were some friend approaching within his reach, on whom his desolate touch might rest, yet do no harm. As he did this, his face became less fixed and wondering; a gentle trembling came upon him; and at last his eyes filled with tears, and he put his hands before them, and bowed down his head.

  His memory of sorrow, wrong, and trouble, had not come back to him; he knew that it was not restored; he had no passing belief or hope that it was. But some dumb stir within him made him capable, again, of being moved by what was hidden, afar off, in the music. If it were only that it told him sorrowfully the value of what he had lost, he thanked Heaven for it with a fervent gratitude.

  As the last chord died upon his ear, he raised his head to listen to its lingering vibration. Beyond the boy, so that his sleeping figure lay at its feet, the Phantom stood, immovable and silent, with its eyes upon him.

  Ghastly it was, as it had ever been, but not so cruel and relentless in its aspect – or he thought or hoped so, as he looked upon it, trembling. It was not alone, but in its shadowy hand it held another hand.

  And whose was that? Was the form that stood beside it indeed Milly’s, or but her shade and picture? The quiet head was bent a little, as her manner was, and her eyes were looking down, as if in pity, on the sleeping child. A radiant light fell on her face, but did not touch the Phantom; for, though close beside her, it was dark and colourless as ever.

  ‘Spectre!’ said the Chemist, newly troubled as he looked, ‘I have not been stubborn or presumptuous in respect of her. Oh, do not bring her here. Spare me that!’

  ‘This is but a shadow,’ said the Phantom; ‘when the morning shines, seek out the reality whose image I present before you.’

  ‘Is it my inexorable doom to do so?’ cried the Chemist.

  ‘It is,’ replied the Phantom.

  ‘To destroy her peace, her goodness; to make her what I am myself, and what I have made of others!’

  ‘I have said, “seek her out,”’ returned the Phantom. ‘I have said no more.’

  ‘Oh, tell me,’ exclaimed Redlaw, catching at the hope which he fancied might lie hidden in the words. ‘Can I undo what I have done?’

  ‘No,’ returned the Phantom.

  ‘I do not ask for restoration to myself,’ said Redlaw. ‘What I abandoned, I abandoned of my own will, and have justly lost. But for those to whom I have transferred the fatal gift; who never sought it; who unknowingly received a curse of which they had no warning, and which they had no power to shun; can I do nothing?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said the Phantom.

  ‘If I cannot, can any one?’

  The Phantom, standing like a statue, kept his gaze upon him for a while; then turned its head suddenly, and looked upon the shadow at its side.

  ‘Ah! Can she?’ cried Redlaw, still looking upon the shade.

  The Phantom released the hand it had retained till now, and softly raised its own with a gesture of dismissal. Upon that, her shadow, still preserving the same attitude, began to move or melt away.

  ‘Stay,’ cried Redlaw, with an earnestness to which he could not give enough expression. ‘For a moment! As an act of mercy! I know that some change fell upon me, when those sounds were in the air just now. Tell me, have I lost the power of harming her? May I go near her without dread? Oh, let her give me any sign of hope!’

  The Phantom looked upon the shade as he did – not at him – and gave no answer.

  ‘At least, say this – has she, henceforth, the consciousness of any power to set right what I have done?’

  ‘She has not,’ the Phantom answered.

  ‘Has she the power bestowed on her without the consciousness?’

  The Phantom answered: ‘Seek her out.’ And her shadow slowly vanished.

  They were face to face again, and looking on each other, as intently and awfully as at the time of the bestowal of the gift, across the boy who still lay on the ground between them, at the Phantom’s feet.

  ‘Terrible instructor,’ said the Chemist, sinking on his knee before it, in an attitude of supplication, ‘by whom I was renounced, but by whom I am revisited (in which, and in whose milder aspect, I would fain believe I have a gleam of hope), I will obey without inquiry, praying that the cry I have sent up in the anguish of my soul has been, or will be, heard, in behalf of those whom I have injured beyond human reparation. But there is one thing –’

  ‘You speak to me of what is lying here,’ the Phantom interposed, and pointed with its finger to the boy.

  ‘I do,’ returned the Chemist. ‘You know what I would ask. Why has this child alone been proof against my influence, and why, why have I detected in its thoughts a terrible companionship with mine?’

  ‘This,’ said the Phantom, pointing to the boy, ‘is the last, completest illustration of a human creature, utterly bereft of such remembrances as you have yielded up. No softening memory of sorrow, wrong, or trouble enters here, because this wretched mortal from his birth has been abandoned to a worse condition than the beasts, and has, within his knowledge, no one contrast, no humanising touch, to make a grain of such a memory spring up in his hardened breast. All within this desolate creature is barren wilderness. All within the man bereft of what you have resigned, is the same barren wilderness. Woe to such a man! Woe, tenfold, to the nation that shall count its monsters such as this, lying here, by hundreds and by thousands!’

  Redlaw shrunk, appalled, from what he heard.

  ‘There is not,’ said the Phantom, ‘one of these – not one – but sows a harvest that mankind MUST reap. From every seed of evil in this boy, a field of ruin is grown that shall be gathered in, and garnered up, and sown again in many places in the world, until regions are overspread with wickedness enough to raise the waters of another Deluge. Open and unpunished murder in a city’s streets would be less guilty in its daily toleration, than one such spectacle as this.’

  It seemed to look down upon the boy in his sleep. Redlaw, too, looked down upon him with a new emotion.

  ‘There is not a father,’ said the Phantom, ‘by whose side in his daily or his nightly walk, these creatures pass; there is not a mother among all the ranks of loving mothers in this land; there is no one risen from the state of childhood, but shall be responsible in his or
her degree for this enormity. There is not a country throughout the earth on which it would not bring a curse. There is no religion upon earth that it would not deny; there is no people upon earth it would not put to shame.’

  The Chemist clasped his hands, and looked, with trembling fear and pity, from the sleeping boy to the Phantom, standing above him with its finger pointing down.

  ‘Behold, I say,’ pursued the Spectre, ‘the perfect type of what it was your choice to be. Your influence is powerless here, because from this child’s bosom you can banish nothing. His thoughts have been in “terrible companionship” with yours, because you have gone down to his unnatural level. He is the growth of man’s indifference; you are the growth of man’s presumption. The beneficent design of Heaven is, in each case, overthrown, and from the two poles of the immaterial world you come together.’

  The Chemist stooped upon the ground beside the boy, and, with the same kind of compassion for him that he now felt for himself, covered him as he slept, and no longer shrunk from him with abhorrence or indifference.

  Soon, now, the distant line on the horizon brightened, the darkness faded, the sun rose red and glorious, and the chimney stacks and gables of the ancient building gleamed in the clear air, which turned the smoke and vapour of the city into a cloud of gold. The very sundial in his shady corner, where the wind was used to spin with such un-windy constancy, shook off the finer particles of snow that had accumulated on his dull old face in the night, and looked out at the little white wreaths eddying round and round him. Doubtless some blind groping of the morning made its way down into the forgotten crypt so cold and earthy, where the Norman arches were half buried in the ground, and stirred the dull sap in the lazy vegetation hanging to the walls, and quickened the slow principle of life within the little world of wonderful and delicate creation which existed there, with some faint knowledge that the sun was up.

  The Tetterbys were up, and doing. Mr Tetterby took down the shutters of the shop, and, strip by strip, revealed the treasures of the window to the eyes, so proof against their seductions, of Jerusalem Buildings. Adolphus had been out so long already, that he was half way on to Morning Pepper. Five small Tetterbys, whose ten round eyes were much inflamed by soap and friction, were in the tortures of a cool wash in the back kitchen; Mrs Tetterby presiding. Johnny, who was pushed and hustled through his toilet with great rapidity when Moloch chanced to be in an exacting frame of mind (which was always the case), staggered up and down with his charge before the shop door, under greater difficulties than usual; the weight of Moloch being much increased by a complication of defences against the cold, composed of knitted worsted-work, and forming a complete suit of chain-armour, with a head-piece and blue gaiters.

  It was a peculiarity of this baby to be always cutting teeth. Whether they never came, or whether they came and went away again, is not in evidence; but it had certainly cut enough, on the showing of Mrs Tetterby, to make a handsome dental provision for the sign of the Bull and Mouth. All sorts of objects were impressed for the rubbing of its gums, notwithstanding that it always carried, dangling at its waist (which was immediately under its chin), a bone ring, large enough to have represented the rosary of a young nun. Knife-handles, umbrella-tops, the heads of walking-sticks selected from the stock, the fingers of the family in general, but especially of Johnny, nutmeg-graters, crusts, the handles of doors, and the cool knobs on the tops of pokers, were among the commonest instruments indiscriminately applied for this baby’s relief. The amount of electricity that must have been rubbed out of it in a week, is not to be calculated. Still Mrs Tetterby always said ‘it was coming through, and then the child would be herself’; and still it never did come through, and the child continued to be somebody else.

  The tempers of the little Tetterbys had sadly changed with a few hours. Mr and Mrs Tetterby themselves were not more altered than their offspring. Usually they were an unselfish, good-natured, yielding little race, sharing short-commons when it happened (which was pretty often) contentedly and even generously, and taking a great deal of enjoyment out of a very little meat. But they were fighting now, not only for the soap and water, but even for the breakfast which was yet in perspective. The hand of every little Tetterby was against the other little Tetterbys; and even Johnny’s hand – the patient, much-enduring, and devoted Johnny – rose against the baby! Yes. Mrs Tetterby, going to the door by a mere accident, saw him viciously pick out a weak place in the suit of armour where a slap would tell, and slap that blessed child.

  Mrs Tetterby had him into the parlour, by the collar, in that same flash of time, and repaid him the assault with usury thereto.

  ‘You brute, you murdering little boy,’ said Mrs Tetterby. ‘Had you the heart to do it?’

  ‘Why don’t her teeth come through, then,’ retorted Johnny, in a loud rebellious voice, ‘instead of bothering me? How would you like it yourself?’

  ‘Like it, sir!’ said Mrs Tetterby, relieving him of his dishonoured load.

  ‘Yes, like it,’ said Johnny. ‘How would you? Not at all. If you was me, you’d go for a soldier. I will, too. There an’t no babies in the army.’

  Mr Tetterby, who had arrived upon the scene of action, rubbed his chin thoughtfully, instead of correcting the rebel, and seemed rather struck by this view of a military life.

  ‘I wish I was in the army myself, if the child’s in the right,’ said Mrs Tetterby, looking at her husband, ‘for I have no peace of my life here. I’m a slave – a Virginia slave:’ some indistinct association with their weak descent on the tobacco trade perhaps suggested this aggravated expression to Mrs Tetterby. ‘I never have a holiday, or any pleasure at all, from year’s end to year’s end! Why, Lord bless and save the child,’ said Mrs Tetterby, shaking the baby with an irritability hardly suited to so pious an aspiration, ‘what’s the matter with her now?’

  Not being able to discover, and not rendering the subject much clearer by shaking it, Mrs Tetterby put the baby away in a cradle, and, folding her arms, sat rocking it angrily with her foot.

  ‘How you stand there, ’Dolphus,’ said Mrs Tetterby to her husband. ‘Why don’t you do something?’

  ‘Because I don’t care about doing anything,’ Mr Tetterby replied.

  ‘I am sure I don’t,’ said Mrs Tetterby.

  ‘I’ll take my oath I don’t,’ said Mr Tetterby.

  A diversion arose here among Johnny and his five younger brothers, who, in preparing the family breakfast table, had fallen to skirmishing for the temporary possession of the loaf, and were buffeting one another with great heartiness; the smallest boy of all, with precocious discretion, hovering outside the knot of combatant, and harassing their legs. Into the midst of this fray, Mr and Mrs Tetterby both precipitated themselves with great ardour, as if such ground were the only ground on which they could now agree; and having, with no visible remains of their late soft-heartedness, laid about them without any lenity, and done much execution, resumed their former relative positions.

  ‘You had better read your paper than do nothing at all,’ said Mrs Tetterby.

  ‘What’s there to read in a paper?’ returned Mr Tetterby, with excessive discontent.

  ‘What?’ said Mrs Tetterby. ‘Police.’

  ‘It’s nothing to me,’ said Tetterby. ‘What do I care what people do, or are done to.’

  ‘Suicides,’ suggested Mrs Tetterby.

  ‘No business of mine,’ replied her husband.

  ‘Births, deaths, and marriages, are those nothing to you?’ said Mrs Tetterby.

  ‘If the births were all over for good and all today; and the deaths were all to begin to come off tomorrow; I don’t see why it should interest me, till I thought it was a-coming to my turn,’ grumbled Tetterby. ‘As to marriages, I’ve done it myself. I know quite enough about them.’

  To judge from the dissatisfied expression of her face and manner, Mrs Tetterby appeared to entertain the same opinions as her husband; but she opposed him, nevertheless, for the gratifi
cation of quarrelling with him.

  ‘Oh, you’re a consistent man,’ said Mrs Tetterby, ‘an’t you? You, with the screen of your own making there, made of nothing else but bits of newspapers, which you sit and read to the children by the half-hour together!’

  ‘Say used to, if you please,’ returned her husband. ‘You won’t find me doing so any more. I’m wiser, now.’

  ‘Bah! wiser, indeed!’ said Mrs Tetterby. ‘Are you better?’

  The question sounded some discordant note in Mr Tetterby’s breast. He ruminated dejectedly, and passed his hand across and across his forehead.

  ‘Better!’ murmured Mr Tetterby. ‘I don’t know as any of us are better, or happier either. Better, is it?’

  He turned to the screen, and traced about it with his finger, until he found a certain paragraph of which he was in quest.

  ‘This used to be one of the family favourites, I recollect,’ said Tetterby, in a forlorn and stupid way, ‘and used to draw tears from the children, and make ’em good, if there was any little bickering or discontent among ’em, next to the story of the robin redbreasts in the wood. “Melancolly case of destitution. Yesterday a small man, with a baby in his arms, and surrounded by half-a-dozen ragged little ones, of various ages between ten and two, the whole of whom were evidently in a famishing condition, appeared before the worthy magistrate, and made the following recital:” – Ha! I don’t understand it, I’m sure,’ said Tetterby; ‘I don’t see what it has got to do with us.’

  ‘How old and shabby he looks,’ said Mrs Tetterby, watching him. ‘I never saw such a change in a man. Ah! dear me, dear me, dear me, it was a sacrifice!’

  ‘What was a sacrifice?’ her husband sourly inquired.

  Mrs Tetterby shook her head; and without replying in words, raised a complete sea-storm about the baby, by her violent agitation of the cradle.