Tears more painful, and more bitter than he had ever shed in all his life, coursed down Redlaw’s face. Philip, fully occupied in recalling his story, had not observed him until now, nor Milly’s anxiety that he should not proceed.
‘Philip!’ said Redlaw, laying his hand upon his arm, ‘I am a stricken man, on whom the hand of Providence has fallen heavily, although deservedly. You speak to me, my friend, of what I cannot follow; my memory is gone.’
‘Merciful Power!’ cried the old man.
‘I have lost my memory of sorrow, wrong, and trouble,’ said the Chemist, ‘and with that I have lost all, man would remember!’
To see old Philip’s pity for him, to see him wheel his own great chair for him to rest in, and look down upon him with a solemn sense of his bereavement, was to know, in some degree, how precious to old age such recollections are.
The boy came running in, and ran to Milly.
‘Here’s the man,’ he said, ‘in the other room. I don’t want him.’
‘What man does he mean?’ asked Mr William.
‘Hush!’ said Milly.
Obedient to a sign from her, he and his old father softly withdrew. As they went out, unnoticed, Redlaw beckoned to the boy to come to him.
‘I like the woman best,’ he answered, holding to her skirts.
‘You are right,’ said Redlaw, with a faint smile. ‘But you needn’t fear to come to me. I am gentler than I was. Of all the world, to you, poor child!’
The boy still held back at first; but yielding little by little to her urging, he consented to approach, and even to sit down at his feet. As Redlaw laid his hand upon the shoulder of the child, looking on him with compassion and a fellow-feeling, he put out his other hand to Milly. She stooped down on that side of him, so that she could look into his face, and after silence, said:
‘Mr Redlaw, may I speak to you?’
‘Yes,’ he answered, fixing his eyes upon her. ‘Your voice and music are the same to me.’
‘May I ask you something?’
‘What you will.’
‘Do you remember what I said, when I knocked at your door last night? About one who was your friend once, and who stood on the verge of destruction?’
‘Yes. I remember,’ he said, with some hesitation.
‘Do you understand it?’
He smoothed the boy’s hair – looking at her fixedly the while – and shook his head.
‘This person,’ said Milly, in her clear, soft voice, which her mild eyes, looking at him, made clearer and softer, ‘I found soon afterwards. I went back to the house, and, with Heaven’s help, traced him. I was not too soon. A very little, and I should have been too late.’
He took his hand from the boy, and laying it on the back of that hand of hers, whose timid and yet earnest touch addressed him no less appealingly than her voice and eyes, looked more intently on her.
‘He is the father of Mr Edmund, the young gentleman we saw just now. His real name is Longford. – You recollect the name?’
‘I recollect the name.’
‘And the man?’
‘No, not the man. Did he ever wrong me?’
‘Yes!’
‘Ah! Then it’s hopeless – hopeless.’
He shook his head, and softly beat upon the hand he held, as though mutely asking her commiseration.
‘I did not go to Mr Edmund last night,’ said Milly. – ‘You will listen to me just the same as if you did remember all?’
‘To every syllable you say.’
‘Both, because I did not know, then, that this really was his father, and because I was fearful of the effect of such intelligence upon him, after his illness, if it should be. Since I have known who this person is, I have not gone either; but that is for another reason. He has long been separated from his wife and son – has been a stranger to his home almost from this son’s infancy, I learn from him – and has abandoned and deserted what he should have held most dear. In all that time, he has been falling from the state of a gentleman, more and more, until –’ she rose up, hastily, and going out for a moment, returned, accompanied by the wreck that Redlaw had beheld last night.
‘Do you know me?’ asked the Chemist.
‘I should be glad,’ returned the other, ‘and that is an unwonted word for me to use, if I could answer no.’
The Chemist looked at the man, standing in self-abasement and degradation before him, and would have looked longer, in an ineffectual struggle for enlightenment, but that Milly resumed her late position by his side, and attracted his attentive gaze to her own face.
‘See how low he is sunk, how lost he is!’ she whispered, stretching out her arm towards him, without looking from the Chemist’s face. ‘If you could remember all that is connected with him, do you not think it would move your pity to reflect that one you ever loved (do not let us mind how long ago, or in what belief that he has forfeited), should come to this?’
‘I hope it would,’ he answered. ‘I believe it would.’
His eyes wandered to the figure standing near the door, but came back speedily to her, on whom he gazed intently, as if he strove to learn some lesson from every tone of her voice, and every beam of her eyes.
‘I have no learning, and you have much,’ said Milly: ‘I am not used to think, and you are always thinking. May I tell you why it seems to me a good thing for us, to remember wrong that has been done us?’
‘Yes.’
‘That we may forgive it.’
‘Pardon me, great Heaven!’ said Redlaw, lifting up his eyes, ‘for having thrown away thine own high attribute!’
‘And if,’ said Milly, ‘if your memory should one day be restored, as we will hope and pray it may be, would it not be a blessing to you to recall at once a wrong and its forgiveness?’
He looked at the figure by the door, and fastened his attentive eyes on her again; a ray of clearer light appeared to him to shine into his mind, from her bright face.
‘He cannot go to his abandoned home. He does not seek to go there. He knows that he could only carry shame and trouble to those he has so cruelly neglected; and that the best reparation he can make them now, is to avoid them. A very little money carefully bestowed, would remove him to some distant place, where he might live and do no wrong, and make such atonement as is left within his power for the wrong he has done. To the unfortunate lady who is his wife, and to his son, this would be the best and kindest boon that their best friend could give them – one too that they need never know of; and to him, shattered in reputation, mind, and body, it might be salvation.’
He took her head between his hands, and kissed it, and said: ‘It shall be done. I trust to you to do it for me, now and secretly; and to tell him that I would forgive him, if I were so happy as to know for what.’
As she rose, and turned her beaming face towards the fallen man, implying that her mediation had been successful, he advanced a step, and without raising his eyes, addressed himself to Redlaw.
‘You are so generous,’ he said, ‘– you ever were – that you will try to banish your rising sense of retribution in the spectacle that is before you. I do not try to banish it from myself, Redlaw. If you can, believe me.’
The Chemist entreated Milly, by a gesture, to come nearer to him; and, as he listened, looked in her face, as if to find in it the clue to what he heard.
‘I am too decayed a wretch to make professions; I recollect my own career too well, to array any such before you. But from the day on which I made my first step downward, in dealing falsely by you, I have gone down with a certain, steady, doomed progression. That, I say.’
Redlaw, keeping her close at his side, turned his face towards the speaker, and there was sorrow in it. Something like mournful recognition too.
‘I might have been another man, my life might have been another life, if I had avoided that first fatal step. I don’t know that it would have been. I claim nothing for the possibility. Your sister is at rest, and better than she could have
been with me, if I had continued even what you thought me: even what I once supposed myself to be.’
Redlaw made a hasty motion with his hand, as if he would have put that subject on one side.
‘I speak,’ the other went on, ‘like a man taken from the grave. I should have made my own grave, last night, had it not been for this blessed hand.’
‘Oh dear, he likes me too!’ sobbed Milly, under her breath. ‘That’s another!’
‘I could not have put myself in your way, last night, even for bread. But, today, my recollection of what has been between us is so strongly stirred, and is presented to me, I don’t know how, so vividly, that I have dared to come at her suggestion, and to take your bounty, and to thank you for it, and to beg you, Redlaw, in your dying hour, to be as merciful to me in your thoughts, as you are in your deeds.’
He turned towards the door, and stopped a moment on his way forth.
‘I hope my son may interest you, for his mother’s sake. I hope he may deserve to do so. Unless my life should be preserved a long time, and I should know that I have not misused your aid, I shall never look upon him more.’
Going out, he raised his eyes to Redlaw for the first time. Redlaw, whose steadfast gaze was fixed upon him, dreamily held out his hand. He returned and touched it – little more – with both his own; and bending down his head, went slowly out.
In the few moments that elapsed, while Milly silently took him to the gate, the Chemist dropped into his chair, and covered his face with his hands. Seeing him thus, when she came back, accompanied by her husband and his father (who were both greatly concerned for him), she avoided disturbing him, or permitting him to be disturbed; and kneeled down near the chair to put some warm clothing on the boy.
‘That’s exactly where it is. That’s what I always say, father!’ exclaimed her admiring husband. ‘There’s a motherly feeling in Mrs William’s breast that must and will have went!’
‘Ay, ay,’ said the old man; ‘you’re right. My son William’s right!’
‘It happens all for the best, Milly dear, no doubt,’ said Mr William, tenderly, ‘that we have no children of our own; and yet I sometimes wish you had one to love and cherish. Our little dead child that you built such hopes upon, and that never breathed the breath of life – it has made you quiet-like, Milly.’
‘I am very happy in the recollection of it, William dear,’ she answered. ‘I think of it every day.’
‘I was afraid you thought of it a good deal.’
‘Don’t say, afraid; it is a comfort to me; it speaks to me in so many ways. The innocent thing that never lived on earth, is like an angel to me, William.’
‘You are like an angel to father and me,’ said Mr William, softly. ‘I know that.’
‘When I think of all those hopes I built upon it, and the many times I sat and pictured to myself the little smiling face upon my bosom that never lay there, and the sweet eyes turned up to mine that never opened to the light,’ said Milly, ‘I can feel a greater tenderness, I think, for all the disappointed hopes in which there is no harm. When I see a beautiful child in its fond mother’s arms, I love it all the better, thinking that my child might have been like that, and might have made my heart as proud and happy.’
Redlaw raised his head, and looked towards her.
‘All through life, it seems by me,’ she continued, ‘to tell me something. For poor neglected children, my little child pleads as if it were alive, and had a voice I knew, with which to speak to me. When I hear of youth in suffering or shame, I think that my child might have come to that, perhaps, and that God took it from me in His mercy. Even in age and grey hair, such as father’s, it is present: saying that it too might have lived to be old, long and long after you and I were gone, and to have needed the respect and love of younger people.’
Her quiet voice was quieter than ever, as she took her husband’s arm, and laid her head against it.
‘Children love me so, that sometimes I half fancy – it’s a silly fancy, William – they have some way I don’t know of, of feeling for my little child, and me, and understanding why their love is precious to me. If I have been quiet since, I have been more happy, William, in a hundred ways. Not least happy, dear, in this – that even when my little child was born and dead but a few days, and I was weak and sorrowful, and could not help grieving a little, the thought arose, that if I tried to lead a good life, I should meet in Heaven a bright creature, who would call me, Mother!’
Redlaw fell upon his knees, with a loud cry.
‘O Thou,’ he said, ‘who, through the teaching of pure love, has graciously restored me to the memory which was the memory of Christ upon the cross, and of all the good who perished in His cause, receive my thanks, and bless her!’
Then, he folded her to his heart; and Milly, sobbing more than ever, cried, as she laughed, ‘He is come back to himself! He likes me very much indeed, too! Oh, dear, dear, dear me, here’s another!’
Then, the student entered, leading by the hand a lovely girl, who was afraid to come. And Redlaw so changed towards him, seeing in him and his youthful choice, the softened shadow of that chastening passage in his own life, to which, as to a shady tree, the dove so long imprisoned in his solitary ark might fly for rest and company, fell upon his neck, entreating them to be his children.
Then, as Christmas is a time in which, of all times in the year, the memory of every remediable sorrow, wrong, and trouble in the world around us, should be active with us, not less than our own experiences, for all good, he laid his hand upon the boy, and, silently calling Him to witness who laid His hand on children in old time, rebuking, in the majesty of His prophetic knowledge, those who kept them from Him, vowed to protect him, teach him, and reclaim him.
Then, he gave his right hand cheerily to Philip, and said that they would that day hold a Christmas dinner in what used to be, before the ten poor gentlemen commuted, their great Dinner Hall; and that they would bid to it as many of that Swidger family, who, his son had told him, were so numerous that they might join hands and make a ring round England, as could be brought together on so short a notice.
And it was that day done. There were so many Swidgers there, grown up and children, that an attempt to state them in round numbers might engender doubts, in the distrustful, of the veracity of this history. Therefore the attempt shall not be made. But there they were, by dozens and scores – and there was good news and good hope there, ready for them, of George, who had been visited again by his father and brother, and by Milly, and again left in a quiet sleep. There, present at the dinner, too, were the Tetterbys, including young Adolphus, who arrived in his prismatic comforter, in good time for the beef. Johnny and the baby were too late, of course, and came in all on one side, the one exhausted, the other in a supposed state of double-tooth; but that was customary, and not alarming.
It was sad to see the child who had no name or lineage, watching the other children as they played, not knowing how to talk with them, or sport with them, and more strange to the ways of childhood than a rough dog. It was sad, though in a different way, to see what an instinctive knowledge the youngest children there, had of his being different from all the rest, and how they made timid approaches to him with soft words and touches, and with little presents, that he might not be unhappy. But he kept by Milly, and began to love her – that was another, as she said! – and, as they all liked her dearly, they were glad of that, and when they saw him peeping at them from behind her chair, they were pleased that he was so close to it.
All this, the Chemist, sitting with the student and his bride that was to be, and Philip, and the rest, saw.
Some people have said since, that he only thought what has been herein set down; others, that he read it in the fire, one winter night about the twilight time; others, that the Ghost was but the representation of his gloomy thoughts, and Milly the embodiment of his better wisdom. I say nothing.
– Except this. That as they were assembled in the old Hall, by no
other light than that of a great fire (having dined early), the shadows once more stole out of their hiding-places, and danced about the room, showing the children marvellous shapes and faces on the walls, and gradually changing what was real and familiar there, to what was wild and magical. But that there was one thing in the Hall, to which the eyes of Redlaw, and of Milly and her husband, and of the old man, and of the student, and his bride that was to be, were often turned, which the shadows did not obscure or change. Deepened in its gravity by the firelight, and gazing from the darkness of the panelled wall like life, the sedate face in the portrait, with the beard and ruff, looked down at them from under its verdant wreath of holly, as they looked up at it; and, clear and plain below, as if a voice had uttered them, were the words
LORD KEEP MY MEMORY GREEN.
FROM HOUSEHOLD WORDS
A CHRISTMAS TREE
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.
Dickens at Christmas (Vintage Classics) Page 48