“A small matter,” said the Ghost, “a dead fiddler, to launch such a career.”
“Small!” echoed Scrooge.
The Spirit signed to him to listen to the two apprentices, who were pouring over their options:
“Why! Is it not? The man was nothing to either of us. It has no reason to come back here. What would happen if we let the spirit go?” Marley queried. The younger Scrooge set about explaining, but the older was not listening.
“It isn’t that,” said Scrooge, heated by the remark, and speaking unconsciously like his former, not his latter self. “It isn’t that, Spirit. He has the power to render us or anyone in his path dead, and quite painfully, slowly, most miserably so. To turn our backs and our faces away from such a creature, would invite it and its kind to lurk in our world, to carve out some portion of it for their own. We must dispatch evil as we see it, rather than abide and tolerate it out of fear.”
He felt the Spirit’s glance, and stopped.
“What is the matter?” asked the Ghost.
“Nothing particular,” said Scrooge.
“Something, I think?” the Ghost insisted.
“No,” said Scrooge, feeling about his pocket and finding it empty. “No. I should like had I been able to live up to those standards. That’s all.”
His former self, with Marley’s help, hauled the former fiddler out of doors, and in departure turned down the lamps just as he gave utterance to the wish; and Scrooge and the Ghost again stood side by side in the open air.
“My time grows short,” observed the Spirit. “Quick!”
This was not addressed to Scrooge, or to any one whom he could see, but it produced an immediate effect. For again Scrooge saw himself. He was older now; a man in the prime of life. His face had not the harsh and rigid lines of later years; but it had begun to wear the signs of care and avarice. There was a jaded, suspicious, restless motion in the eye, which showed the passion that had taken root, and where the shadow of the growing tree would fall.
He was not alone, but sat by the side of a fair young girl in a mourning dress: in whose eyes there were tears, which sparkled in the light that shone out of the Ghost of Christmas Past.
“It matters little,” she said softly. “To you, very little. Another idol has displaced me; and, if it can cheer and comfort you in time to come as I would have tried to do, I have no just cause to grieve.”
“What Idol has displaced you?” he rejoined.
“A prideful one.”
“This is the even-handed dealing of the world!” he said. “There is nothing on which it is so hard as the destitute; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of redemption!”
“You fear the world too much,” she answered gently. “All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master passion, Pride, engrosses you. Have I not?”
“What then?” he retorted. “Even if I have grown so much wiser, what then? I am not changed towards you.”
She shook her head. “You and Marley toil night after night, in your ghostly pursuits and give not a glance to the living, never mind the likes of me.”
“Am I?”
“Our contract is an old one. It was made when we were both young and filled with hope for the future. We had a lightness of heart and passion for life, love, and everything that comes with it. You are changed. When it was made you were another man.”
“I was a boy,” he said impatiently.
“Your own feeling tells you that you were not what you are,” she returned. “I am. That which promised happiness when we were one in heart is fraught with misery now that we are two. You surround yourself nightly with death and peril. You look upon me and see not one to love, or one to save. I dare say you would prefer to save me momentarily than to hold me always. How often and how keenly I have thought of this I will not say. It is enough that I have thought of it, and can release you.”
“Have I ever sought release?”
“In words. No. Never.”
“In what, then?”
“In a changed nature; in an altered spirit; in another atmosphere of life; another Hope as its great end. In everything that made my love of any worth or value in your sight. If this had never been between us,” said the girl, looking mildly, but with steadiness, upon him, “tell me, would you seek me out and try to win me now? Ah, no!”
He seemed to yield to the justice of this supposition in spite of himself. But he said, with a struggle, “You think not.”
“I would gladly think otherwise if I could,” she answered. “Heaven knows! When I have learned a Truth like this, I know how strong and irresistible it must be. But if you were free to-day, to-morrow, yesterday, can even I believe that you would choose an independent girl--you who, in your very confidence with her, weigh everything by being her hero: or, choosing her, if for a moment you were false enough to your one guiding principle to do so, do I not know that your repentance and regret would surely follow? That you would be bound to the duties of the living rather than the dead? I do; and I release you. With a full heart, for the love of him you once were.”
He was about to speak; but, with her head turned from him, she resumed.
“You may--the memory of what is past half makes me hope you will--have pain in this. A very, very brief time, and you will dismiss the recollection of it gladly, as a disastrous dream, from which it happened well that you awoke. You only care about the person you save in the moment, discarded upon the next. And for the rest, look down upon us as a liability on the brink of our own peril if you weren’t there to intervene. May you be happy, Hero, in the life you have chosen!”
She left him, and they parted.
“Spirit!” said Scrooge, “show me no more! Conduct me home. Why do you delight to torture me?”
“These are but shadows! Why do they hurt you?” exclaimed the Ghost.
“No more!” cried Scrooge. “No more! I don’t wish to see it. Show me no more!”
But the relentless Ghost pinioned him in both his arms, and Scrooge threw his head back to connect with the Spirit and knock it away. Where the Spirit should have been, Scrooge’s head encountered nothing but vapour. His struggles were soon quelled, as such force was felt upon him and none could be exerted upon the Ghost. Thus pinned, Scrooge was forced to observe what happened next.
They were in a dark alleyway, Scrooge and Marley, hunting a creature that preyed on the living and dead alike. Scrooge felt a chill through his body, this was a scene he remembered above all.
In the fall that year, people had started to go missing. In truth, bodies went missing first. Scrooge hadn’t known it, and if rumour had reached Marley’s ear, he had probably dismissed the vanished cadavers as the over zealous administrations of medical students. It was only after the tragic events of Christmas Eve that Scrooge had hunted down the clues he had missed and found the true trail of the beast.
Marley first brought the case to Scrooge’s attention when a child was found outside of a work house. The torso had been mostly intact, but there were bite marks down to the bone and a significant amount of flesh missing. In a neighbourhood where cold and hungry was common of both children and adults and the inhabitants would as soon step over a wretch than to pro offer help, the mutilation elicited an uncommon outcry. The child was unknown and unclaimed, but the alarm was enough to entice Marley and by turn, Scrooge, to investigate.
They found more victims, though it was unclear if they had been alive or dead at the time of their consumption. The normal pattern for ghosts nor other various ghouls they had encountered failed to fit the indications in the case. Thus, the two were stumped until, after a long day at the count house followed by an equally long night hunting, they stumbled weary and thirsty into a dockside tavern and there
the first whispers of a Wendigo reached their ears.
The Wendigo, being a scourge of the Americas, had rarely been spotted in England. After hearing the tales of the creature’s evil deeds, Scrooge and Marley had pieced together rumour and supposition to create a pattern that seemingly substantiated the evidence. Cannibalism, to be sure. Wendigos, having been human and stooped to consume human flesh, were possessed by a foul spirit who continued this base practice. Sailors were known to turn to cannibalism. In dire circumstances, marooned or shipwrecked survivors were prone to drinking the blood of their companions, and London, being a port town, was a likely place for a possessed cannibal sailor, most certainly of American origin, to appear. Thus assured of their prey, the two confidently made preparations to track and dispatch the creature.
People were scared and unusually free with the slightest evidence to do with the murders. There were plenty of American sailors to follow, but none readily appeared to prefer the taste of human flesh. Frustrated by a plethora of leads and a lack of suspects, the two hunters took to haunting the hunting ground itself in hopes of catching the creature in the act. While the victims were at first regarded to be the sick and infirmed, it appeared the foul spirit had found a liking for young children; the two hunters dreaded finding the remains each morning.
These events had lead Scrooge and Marley here, to this dark alley, tracking a shadow. The dark patch that marked their prey slipped around a corner. Their boots, muffled with rags wrapped round the soles, hardly clicked nor made a sound upon the stones as they hurried to keep the beast in sight. They peeked, one after the other, around the corner just in time to see the shadow lift the sash on a window and slip inside. Marley began to run in pursuit, Scrooge close at his heels.
“No, Spirit! No!” Scrooge begged. “Please, there is no reason to show me this. I live here every night in my dreams.”
The Spirit turned its eyes to Scrooge and seemed to carry sympathy upon its brow. Scrooge squeezed his eyes shut, wishing his ears did not hear the first wail of a child in yonder room. He felt the light brushing of the Spirit’s fingers upon his brow and the wail was silenced. Cautiously, Scrooge opened his eyes.
They were in another scene and place; a room, not very large or handsome, but full of comfort. Near to the winter fire sat a beautiful young girl, so like that last that Scrooge believed it was the same, until he saw her, now a comely matron, sitting opposite her daughter. The noise in this room was perfectly tumultuous, for there were more children there than Scrooge in his agitated state of mind could count; and, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not forty children conducting themselves like one, but every child was conducting itself like forty. The consequences were uproarious beyond belief; but no one seemed to care; on the contrary, the mother and daughter laughed heartily, and enjoyed it very much; and the latter, soon beginning to mingle in the sports, got pillaged by the young brigands most ruthlessly. What would I not have given to be one of them! Though I never could have been so rude, no, no! I wouldn’t for the wealth of all the world have crushed that braided hair, and torn it down; and, for the precious little shoe, I wouldn’t have plucked it off, God bless my soul! to save my life. As to measuring her waist in sport, as they did, bold young brood, I couldn’t have done it; I should have expected my arm to have grown round it for a punishment, and never come straight again. And yet I should have dearly liked, I own, to have touched her lips; to have questioned her, that she might have opened them; to have looked upon the lashes of her downcast eyes, and never raised a blush; to have let loose waves of hair, an inch of which would be a keepsake beyond price: in short, I should have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest licence of a child, and yet to have been man enough to know its value.
But now a knocking at the door was heard, and such a rush immediately ensued that she, with laughing face and plundered dress, was borne towards it in the centre of a flushed and boisterous group, just in time to greet the father, who came home attended by a man laden with Christmas toys and presents. Then the shouting and the struggling, and the onslaught that was made on the defenceless porter! The scaling him, with chairs for ladders, to dive into his pockets, despoil him of brown-paper parcels, hold on tight by his cravat, hug him round the neck, pummel his back, and kick his legs in irrepressible affection! The shouts of wonder and delight with which the development of every package was received! The terrible announcement that the baby had been taken in the act of putting a doll’s frying-pan into his mouth, and was more than suspected of having swallowed a fictitious turkey, glued on a wooden platter! The immense relief of finding this a false alarm! The joy, and gratitude, and ecstasy! They are all indescribable alike. It is enough that by degrees, the children and their emotions got out of the parlour, and, by one stair at a time, up to the top of the house, where they went to bed, and so subsided.
And now Scrooge looked on more attentively than ever, when the master of the house, having his daughter leaning fondly on him, sat down with her and her mother at his own fireside; and when he thought that such another creature, quite as graceful and as full of promise, might have called him father, and been a spring-time in the haggard winter of his life, his sight grew very dim indeed.
“Belle,” said the husband, turning to his wife with a smile, “I saw an old friend of yours this afternoon.”
“Who was it?”
“Guess!”
“How can I? Tut, don’t I know?” she added in the same breath, laughing as he laughed. “Mr. Scrooge.”
“Mr. Scrooge it was. I passed his office window; and as it was not shut up, and he had a candle inside, I could scarcely help seeing him. His partner perished this very night, I hear; and there he sat alone. Quite alone in the world, I do believe.”
“Spirit!” said Scrooge in a broken voice, “remove me from this place.”
“I told you these were shadows of the things that have been,” said the Ghost. “That they are what they are, do not blame me!”
“Remove me!” Scrooge exclaimed. “I cannot bear it!”
He turned upon the Ghost, and seeing that it looked upon him with a face in which in some strange way there were fragments of all the faces it had shown him, Scrooge launched himself at it.
“Leave me! Take me back! Haunt me no longer!”
In the struggle--if that can be called a struggle in which the Ghost, with no visible resistance on its own part, was undisturbed by any effort of its adversary--Scrooge observed that its light was burning high and bright; and dimly connecting that with its influence over him, he seized the extinguisher cap, and by a sudden action pressed it down upon its head.
The Spirit dropped beneath it, so that the extinguisher covered its whole form. Scrooge pressed it down with all his force, intense upon it’s every flicker and twitch as if he was choking the final life out of some good wife. Finally the terrible light, which had streamed from under the cap, flickered and died. All resistance failed and the extinguisher was thrust upon the ground.
He was conscious of being exhausted, and overcome by an irresistible drowsiness; and, further, of being in his own bedroom. He gave the cap a parting squeeze, in which his hand relaxed; and had barely time to reel to bed before he sank into a heavy sleep.
STAVE THREE
THE SECOND OF THE THREE SPIRITS
Awaking in the middle of a prodigiously tough snore, and sitting up in bed to get his thoughts together, Scrooge had no occasion to be told that the bell was again upon the stroke of One. He felt that he was restored to consciousness in the right nick of time, for the especial purpose of holding a conference with the second messenger dispatched to him through Jacob Marley’s intervention. But, finding that he turned uncomfortably cold when he began to wonder which of his curtains this new spectre would draw back, he put them every one aside with his own hands, and, lying down again, established a sharp look-out all round the bed. For he wished to challenge the Spirit
on the moment of its appearance, and did not wish to be taken by surprise and set upon unawares.
Gentlemen of the free-and-easy sort, who plume themselves on being acquainted with a move or two, and being usually equal to the time of day, express the wide range of their capacity for adventure by observing that they are good for anything from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter; between which opposite extremes, no doubt, there lies a tolerably wide and comprehensive range of subjects. Calling into account Scrooge’s experience as well as historical success, I don’t mind calling on you to believe that he was ready for a good broad field of strange appearances, and that nothing between a baby and a rhinoceros would have astonished him very much.
Now, being prepared for almost anything, he was not by any means prepared for nothing; and consequently, when the bell struck One, and no shape appeared, he was taken with a violent fit of trembling. Five minutes, ten minutes, a quarter of an hour went by, yet nothing came. All this time he lay upon his bed, the very core and centre of a blaze of light, which streamed upon it when the clock proclaimed the hour; and which, flickering as if there was a great breeze, was more alarming than a dozen ghosts, as he was powerless to make out what it meant, or would be at; and was sometimes apprehensive that he might be at that very moment an interesting case of spontaneous combustion, without having the consolation of knowing it. At last, however, he began to think--as you or I would have thought at first; for it is always the person not in the predicament who knows what ought to have been done in it, and would unquestionably have done it too--at last, I say, he began to think that the source and secret of this ghostly light might be in the adjoining room, from whence, on further tracing it, it seemed to shine. This idea taking full possession of his mind, he got up softly, fumbling briefly on the nightstand to pocket the fob watch and shuffled in his slippers to the door.
The moment Scrooge’s hand was on the lock, a strange voice called him by his name, and bade him enter. He obeyed.
Ebenezer Scrooge Page 5