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The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain

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The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain by Charles Dickens





Scanned and proofed by David Price
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain




CHAPTER I - The Gift Bestowed



EVERYBODY said so.

Far be it from me to assert that what everybody says must be true.  
Everybody is, often, as likely to be wrong as right.  In the 
general experience, everybody has been wrong so often, and it has 
taken, in most instances, such a weary while to find out how wrong, 
that the authority is proved to be fallible.  Everybody may 
sometimes be right; "but THAT'S no rule," as the ghost of Giles 
Scroggins says in the ballad.

The dread word, GHOST, recalls me.

Everybody said he looked like a haunted man.  The extent of my 
present claim for everybody is, that they were so far right.  He 
did.

Who could have seen his hollow cheek; his sunken brilliant eye; his 
black-attired figure, indefinably grim, although well-knit and 
well-proportioned; his grizzled hair hanging, like tangled sea-
weed, about his face, - as if he had been, through his whole life, 
a lonely mark for the chafing and beating of the great deep of 
humanity, - but might have said he looked like a haunted man?

Who could have observed his manner, taciturn, thoughtful, gloomy, 
shadowed by habitual reserve, retiring always and jocund never, 
with a distraught air of reverting to a bygone place and time, or 
of listening to some old echoes in his mind, but might have said it 
was the manner of a haunted man?

Who could have heard his voice, slow-speaking, deep, and grave, 
with a natural fulness and melody in it which he seemed to set 
himself against and stop, but might have said it was the voice of a 
haunted man?

Who that had seen him in his inner chamber, part library and part 
laboratory, - for he was, as the world knew, far and wide, a 
learned man in chemistry, and a teacher on whose lips and hands a 
crowd of aspiring ears and eyes hung daily, - who that had seen him 
there, upon a winter night, alone, surrounded by his drugs and 
instruments and books; the shadow of his shaded lamp a monstrous 
beetle on the wall, motionless among a crowd of spectral shapes 
raised there by the flickering of the fire upon the quaint objects 
around him; some of these phantoms (the reflection of glass vessels 
that held liquids), trembling at heart like things that knew his 
power to uncombine them, and to give back their component parts to 
fire and vapour; - who that had seen him then, his work done, and 
he pondering in his chair before the rusted grate and red flame, 
moving his thin mouth as if in speech, but silent as the dead, 
would not have said that the man seemed haunted and the chamber 
too?

Who might not, by a very easy flight of fancy, have believed that 
everything about him took this haunted tone, and that he lived on 
haunted ground?

His dwelling was so solitary and vault-like, - an old, retired part 
of an ancient endowment for students, once a brave edifice, planted 
in an open place, but now the obsolete whim of forgotten 
architects; smoke-age-and-weather-darkened, squeezed on every side 
by the overgrowing of the great city, and choked, like an old well, 
with stones and bricks; its small quadrangles, lying down in very 
pits formed by the streets and buildings, which, in course of time, 
had been constructed above its heavy chimney stalks; its old trees, 
insulted by the neighbouring smoke, which deigned to droop so low 
when it was very feeble and the weather very moody; its grass-
plots, struggling with the mildewed earth to be grass, or to win 
any show of compromise; its silent pavements, unaccustomed to the 
tread of feet, and even to the observation of eyes, except when a 
stray face looked down from the upper world, wondering what nook it 
was; its sun-dial in a little bricked-up corner, where no sun had 
straggled for a hundred years, but where, in compensation for the 
sun's neglect, the snow would lie for weeks when it lay nowhere 
else, and the black east wind would spin like a huge humming-top, 
when in all other places it was silent and still.

His dwelling, at its heart and core - within doors - at his 
fireside - was so lowering and old, so crazy, yet so strong, with 
its worn-eaten beams of wood in the ceiling, and its sturdy floor 
shelving downward to the great oak chimney-piece; so environed and 
hemmed in by the pressure of the town yet so remote in fashion, 
age, and custom; so quiet, yet so thundering with echoes when a 
distant voice was raised or a door was shut, - echoes, not confined 
to the many low passages and empty rooms, but rumbling and 
grumbling till they were stifled in the heavy air of the forgotten 
Crypt where the Norman arches were half-buried in the earth.

You should have seen him in his dwelling about twilight, in the 
dead winter time.

When the wind was blowing, shrill and shrewd, with the going down 
of the blurred sun.  When it was just so dark, as that the forms of 
things were indistinct and big - but not wholly lost.  When sitters 
by the fire began to see wild faces and figures, mountains and 
abysses, ambuscades and armies, in the coals.  When people in the 
streets bent down their heads and ran before the weather.  When 
those who were obliged to meet it, were stopped at angry corners, 
stung by wandering snow-flakes alighting on the lashes of their 
eyes, - which fell too sparingly, and were blown away too quickly, 
to leave a trace upon the frozen ground.  When windows of private 
houses closed up tight and warm.  When lighted gas began to burst 
forth in the busy and the quiet streets, fast blackening otherwise.  
When stray pedestrians, shivering along the latter, looked down at 
the glowing fires in kitchens, and sharpened their sharp appetites 
by sniffing up the fragrance of whole miles of dinners.

When travellers by land were bitter cold, and looked wearily on 
gloomy landscapes, rustling and shuddering in the blast.  When 
mariners at sea, outlying upon icy yards, were tossed and swung 
above the howling ocean dreadfully.  When lighthouses, on rocks and 
headlands, showed solitary and watchful; and benighted sea-birds 
breasted on against their ponderous lanterns, and fell dead.  When 
little readers of story-books, by the firelight, trembled to think 
of Cassim Baba cut into quarters, hanging in the Robbers' Cave, or 
had some small misgivings that the fierce little old woman, with 
the crutch, who used to start out of the box in the merchant 
Abudah's bedroom, might, one of these nights, be found upon the 
stairs, in the long, cold, dusky journey up to bed.

When, in rustic places, the last glimmering of daylight died away 
from the ends of avenues; and the trees, arching overhead, were 
sullen and black.  When, in parks and woods, the high wet fern and 
sodden moss, and beds of fallen leaves, and trunks of trees, were 
lost to view, in masses of impenetrable shade.  When mists arose 
from dyke, and fen, and river.  When lights in old halls and in 
cottage windows, were a cheerful sight.  When the mill stopped, the 
wheelwright and the blacksmith shut their workshops, the turnpike-
gate closed, the plough and harrow were left lonely in the fields, 
the labourer and team went home, and the striking of the church 
clock had a deeper sound than at noon, and the churchyard wicket 
would be swung no more that night.

When twilight everywhere released the shadows, prisoned up all day, 
that now closed in and gathered like mustering swarms of ghosts.  
When they stood lowering, in corners of rooms, and frowned out from 
behind half-opened doors.  When they had full possession of 
unoccupied apartments.  When they danced upon the floors, and 
walls, and ceilings of inhabited chambers, while the fire was low, 
and withdrew like ebbing waters when it sprang into a blaze.  When 
they fantastically mocked the shapes of household objects, making 
the nurse an ogress, the rocking-horse a monster, the wondering 
child, half-scared and half-amused, a stranger to itself, - the 
very tongs upon the hearth, a straddling giant with his arms a-
kimbo, evidently smelling the blood of Englishmen, and wanting to 
grind people's bones to make his bread.

When these shadows brought into the minds of older people, other 
thoughts, and showed them different images.  When they stole from 
their retreats, in the likenesses of forms and faces from the past, 
from the grave, from the deep, deep gulf, where the things that 
might have been, and never were, are always wandering.

When he sat, as already mentioned, gazing at the fire.  When, as it 
rose and fell, the shadows went and came.  When he took no heed of 
them, with his bodily eyes; but, let them come or let them go, 
looked fixedly at the fire.  You should have seen him, then.

When the sounds that had arisen with the shadows, and come out of 
their lurking-places at the twilight summons, seemed to make a 
deeper stillness all about him.  When the wind was rumbling in the 
chimney, and sometimes crooning, sometimes howling, in the house.  
When the old trees outside were so shaken and beaten, that one 
querulous old rook, unable to sleep, protested now and then, in a 
feeble, dozy, high-up "Caw!"  When, at intervals, the window 
trembled, the rusty vane upon the turret-top complained, the clock 
beneath it recorded that another quarter of an hour was gone, or 
the fire collapsed and fell in with a rattle.

- When a knock came at his door, in short, as he was sitting so, 
and roused him.

"Who's that?" said he.  "Come in!"

Surely there had been no figure leaning on the back of his chair; 
no face looking over it.  It is certain that no gliding footstep 
touched the floor, as he lifted up his head, with a start, and 
spoke.  And yet there was no mirror in the room on whose surface 
his own form could have cast its shadow for a moment; and, 
Something had passed darkly and gone!

"I'm humbly fearful, sir," said a fresh-coloured busy man, holding 
the door open with his foot for the admission of himself and a 
wooden tray he carried, and letting it go again by very gentle and 
careful degrees, when he and the tray had got in, lest it should 
close noisily, "that it's a good bit past the time to-night.  But 
Mrs. William has been taken off her legs so often" -

"By the wind?  Ay!  I have heard it rising."

" - By the wind, sir - that it's a mercy she got home at all.  Oh 
dear, yes.  Yes.  It was by the wind, Mr. Redlaw.  By the wind."

He had, by this time, put down the tray for dinner, and was 
employed in lighting the lamp, and spreading a cloth on the table.  
From this employment he desisted in a hurry, to stir and feed the 
fire, and then resumed it; the lamp he had lighted, and the blaze 
that rose under his hand, so quickly changing the appearance of the 
room, that it seemed as if the mere coming in of his fresh red face 
and active manner had made the pleasant alteration.

"Mrs. William is of course subject at any time, sir, to be taken 
off her balance by the elements.  She is not formed superior to 
THAT."

"No," returned Mr. Redlaw good-naturedly, though abruptly.

"No, sir.  Mrs. William may be taken off her balance by Earth; as 
for example, last Sunday week, when sloppy and greasy, and she 
going out to tea with her newest sister-in-law, and having a pride 
in herself, and wishing to appear perfectly spotless though 
pedestrian.  Mrs. William may be taken off her balance by Air; as 
being once over-persuaded by a friend to try a swing at Peckham 
Fair, which acted on her constitution instantly like a steam-boat.  
Mrs. William may be taken off her balance by Fire; as on a false 
alarm of engines at her mother's, when she went two miles in her 
nightcap.  Mrs. William may be taken off her balance by Water; as 
at Battersea, when rowed into the piers by her young nephew, 
Charley Swidger junior, aged twelve, which had no idea of boats 
whatever.  But these are elements.  Mrs. William must be taken out 
of elements for the strength of HER character to come into play."

As he stopped for a reply, the reply was "Yes," in the same tone as 
before.

"Yes, sir.  Oh dear, yes!" said Mr. Swidger, still proceeding with 
his preparations, and checking them off as he made them.  "That's 
where it is, sir.  That's what I always say myself, sir.  Such a 
many of us Swidgers! - Pepper.  Why there's my father, sir, 
superannuated keeper and custodian of this Institution, eighty-
seven year old.  He's a Swidger! - Spoon."

"True, William," was the patient and abstracted answer, when he 
stopped again.

"Yes, sir," said Mr. Swidger.  "That's what I always say, sir.  You 
may call him the trunk of the tree! - Bread.  Then you come to his 
successor, my unworthy self - Salt - and Mrs. William, Swidgers 
both. - Knife and fork.  Then you come to all my brothers and their 
families, Swidgers, man and woman, boy and girl.  Why, what with 
cousins, uncles, aunts, and relationships of this, that, and 
t'other degree, and whatnot degree, and marriages, and lyings-in, 
the Swidgers - Tumbler - might take hold of hands, and make a ring 
round England!

Receiving no reply at all here, from the thoughtful man whom he 
addressed, Mr. William approached, him nearer, and made a feint of 
accidentally knocking the table with a decanter, to rouse him.  The 
moment he succeeded, he went on, as if in great alacrity of 
acquiescence.

"Yes, sir!  That's just what I say myself, sir.  Mrs. William and 
me have often said so.  'There's Swidgers enough,' we say, 'without 
OUR voluntary contributions,' - Butter.  In fact, sir, my father is 
a family in himself - Castors - to take care of; and it happens all 
for the best that we have no child of our own, though it's made 
Mrs. William rather quiet-like, too.  Quite ready for the fowl and 
mashed potatoes, sir?  Mrs. William said she'd dish in ten minutes 
when I left the Lodge."

"I am quite ready," said the other, waking as from a dream, and 
walking slowly to and fro.

"Mrs. William has been at it again, sir!" said the keeper, as he 
stood warming a plate at the fire, and pleasantly shading his face 
with it.  Mr. Redlaw stopped in his walking, and an expression of 
interest appeared in him.

"What I always say myself, sir.  She WILL do it!  There's a 
motherly feeling in Mrs. William's breast that must and will have 
went."

"What has she done?"

"Why, sir, not satisfied with being a sort of mother to all the 
young gentlemen that come up from a variety of parts, to attend 
your courses of lectures at this ancient foundation - its 
surprising how stone-chaney catches the heat this frosty weather, 
to be sure!"  Here he turned the plate, and cooled his fingers.

"Well?" said Mr. Redlaw.

"That's just what I say myself, sir," returned Mr. William, 
speaking over his shoulder, as if in ready and delighted assent.  
"That's exactly where it is, sir!  There ain't one of our students 
but appears to regard Mrs. William in that light.  Every day, right 
through the course, they puts their heads into the Lodge, one after 
another, and have all got something to tell her, or something to 
ask her.  'Swidge' is the appellation by which they speak of Mrs. 
William in general, among themselves, I'm told; but that's what I 
say, sir.  Better be called ever so far out of your name, if it's 
done in real liking, than have it made ever so much of, and not 
cared about!  What's a name for?  To know a person by.  If Mrs. 
William is known by something better than her name - I allude to 
Mrs. William's qualities and disposition - never mind her name, 
though it IS Swidger, by rights.  Let 'em call her Swidge, Widge, 
Bridge - Lord!  London Bridge, Blackfriars, Chelsea, Putney, 
Waterloo, or Hammersmith Suspension - if they like."

The close of this triumphant oration brought him and the plate to 
the table, upon which he half laid and half dropped it, with a 
lively sense of its being thoroughly heated, just as the subject of 
his praises entered the room, bearing another tray and a lantern, 
and followed by a venerable old man with long grey hair.

Mrs. William, like Mr. William, was a simple, innocent-looking 
person, in whose smooth cheeks the cheerful red of her husband's 
official waistcoat was very pleasantly repeated.  But whereas Mr. 
William's light hair stood on end all over his head, and seemed to 
draw his eyes up with it in an excess of bustling readiness for 
anything, the dark brown hair of Mrs. William was carefully 
smoothed down, and waved away under a trim tidy cap, in the most 
exact and quiet manner imaginable.  Whereas Mr. William's very 
trousers hitched themselves up at the ankles, as if it were not in 
their iron-grey nature to rest without looking about them, Mrs. 
William's neatly-flowered skirts - red and white, like her own 
pretty face - were as composed and orderly, as if the very wind 
that blew so hard out of doors could not disturb one of their 
folds.  Whereas his coat had something of a fly-away and half-off 
appearance about the collar and breast, her little bodice was so 
placid and neat, that there should have been protection for her, in 
it, had she needed any, with the roughest people.  Who could have 
had the heart to make so calm a bosom swell with grief, or throb 
with fear, or flutter with a thought of shame!  To whom would its 
repose and peace have not appealed against disturbance, like the 
innocent slumber of a child!

"Punctual, of course, Milly," said her husband, relieving her of 
the tray, "or it wouldn't be you.  Here's Mrs. William, sir! - He 
looks lonelier than ever to-night," whispering to his wife, as he 
was taking the tray, "and ghostlier altogether."

Without any show of hurry or noise, or any show of herself even, 
she was so calm and quiet, Milly set the dishes she had brought 
upon the table, - Mr. William, after much clattering and running 
about, having only gained possession of a butter-boat of gravy, 
which he stood ready to serve.

"What is that the old man has in his arms?" asked Mr. Redlaw, as he 
sat down to his solitary meal.

"Holly, sir," replied the quiet voice of Milly.

"That's what I say myself, sir," interposed Mr. William, striking 
in with the butter-boat.  "Berries is so seasonable to the time of 
year! - Brown gravy!"

"Another Christmas come, another year gone!" murmured the Chemist, 
with a gloomy sigh.  "More figures in the lengthening sum of 
recollection that we work and work at to our torment, till Death 
idly jumbles all together, and rubs all out.  So, Philip!" breaking 
off, and raising his voice as he addressed the old man, standing 
apart, with his glistening burden in his arms, from which the quiet 
Mrs. William took small branches, which she noiselessly trimmed 
with her scissors, and decorated the room with, while her aged 
father-in-law looked on much interested in the ceremony.

"My duty to you, sir," returned the old man.  "Should have spoke 
before, sir, but know your ways, Mr. Redlaw - proud to say - and 
wait till spoke to!  Merry Christmas, sir, and Happy New Year, and 
many of 'em.  Have had a pretty many of 'em myself - ha, ha! - and 
may take the liberty of wishing 'em.  I'm eighty-seven!"

"Have you had so many that were merry and happy?" asked the other.

"Ay, sir, ever so many," returned the old man.

"Is his memory impaired with age?  It is to be expected now," said 
Mr. Redlaw, turning to the son, and speaking lower.

"Not a morsel of it, sir," replied Mr. William.  "That's exactly 
what I say myself, sir.  There never was such a memory as my 
father's.  He's the most wonderful man in the world.  He don't know 
what forgetting means.  It's the very observation I'm always making 
to Mrs. William, sir, if you'll believe me!"

Mr. Swidger, in his polite desire to seem to acquiesce at all 
events, delivered this as if there were no iota of contradiction in 
it, and it were all said in unbounded and unqualified assent.

The Chemist pushed his plate away, and, rising from the table, 
walked across the room to where the old man stood looking at a 
little sprig of holly in his hand.

"It recalls the time when many of those years were old and new, 
then?" he said, observing him attentively, and touching him on the 
shoulder.  "Does it?"

"Oh many, many!" said Philip, half awaking from his reverie.  "I'm 
eighty-seven!"

"Merry and happy, was it?" asked the Chemist in a low voice.  
"Merry and happy, old man?"

"Maybe as high as that, no higher," said the old man, holding out 
his hand a little way above the level of his knee, and looking 
retrospectively at his questioner, "when I first remember 'em!  
Cold, sunshiny day it was, out a-walking, when some one - it was my 
mother as sure as you stand there, though I don't know what her 
blessed face was like, for she took ill and died that Christmas-
time - told me they were food for birds.  The pretty little fellow 
thought - that's me, you understand - that birds' eyes were so 
bright, perhaps, because the berries that they lived on in the 
winter were so bright.  I recollect that.  And I'm eighty-seven!"

"Merry and happy!" mused the other, bending his dark eyes upon the 
stooping figure, with a smile of compassion.  "Merry and happy - 
and remember well?"

"Ay, ay, ay!" resumed the old man, catching the last words.  "I 
remember 'em well in my school time, year after year, and all the 
merry-making that used to come along with them.  I was a strong 
chap then, Mr. Redlaw; and, if you'll believe me, hadn't my match 
at football within ten mile.  Where's my son William?  Hadn't my 
match at football, William, within ten mile!"

That's what I always say, father!" returned the son promptly, and 
with great respect.  "You ARE a Swidger, if ever there was one of 
the family!"

"Dear!" said the old man, shaking his head as he again looked at 
the holly.  "His mother - my son William's my youngest son - and I, 
have sat among em' all, boys and girls, little children and babies, 
many a year, when the berries like these were not shining half so 
bright all round us, as their bright faces.  Many of 'em are gone; 
she's gone; and my son George (our eldest, who was her pride more 
than all the rest!) is fallen very low:  but I can see them, when I 
look here, alive and healthy, as they used to be in those days; and 
I can see him, thank God, in his innocence.  It's a blessed thing 
to me, at eighty-seven."

The keen look that had been fixed upon him with so much 
earnestness, had gradually sought the ground.

"When my circumstances got to be not so good as formerly, through 
not being honestly dealt by, and I first come here to be 
custodian," said the old man, " - which was upwards of fifty years 
ago - where's my son William?  More than half a century ago, 
William!"

"That's what I say, father," replied the son, as promptly and 
dutifully as before, "that's exactly where it is.  Two times 
ought's an ought, and twice five ten, and there's a hundred of 
'em."

"It was quite a pleasure to know that one of our founders - or more 
correctly speaking," said the old man, with a great glory in his 
subject and his knowledge of it, "one of the learned gentlemen that 
helped endow us in Queen Elizabeth's time, for we were founded 
afore her day - left in his will, among the other bequests he made 
us, so much to buy holly, for garnishing the walls and windows, 
come Christmas.  There was something homely and friendly in it.  
Being but strange here, then, and coming at Christmas time, we took 
a liking for his very picter that hangs in what used to be, 
anciently, afore our ten poor gentlemen commuted for an annual 
stipend in money, our great Dinner Hall. - A sedate gentleman in a 
peaked beard, with a ruff round his neck, and a scroll below him, 
in old English letters, 'Lord! keep my memory green!'  You know all 
about him, Mr. Redlaw?"

"I know the portrait hangs there, Philip."

"Yes, sure, it's the second on the right, above the panelling.  I 
was going to say - he has helped to keep MY memory green, I thank 
him; for going round the building every year, as I'm a doing now, 
and freshening up the bare rooms with these branches and berries, 
freshens up my bare old brain.  One year brings back another, and 
that year another, and those others numbers!  At last, it seems to 
me as if the birth-time of our Lord was the birth-time of all I 
have ever had affection for, or mourned for, or delighted in, - and 
they're a pretty many, for I'm eighty-seven!"

"Merry and happy," murmured Redlaw to himself.

The room began to darken strangely.

"So you see, sir," pursued old Philip, whose hale wintry cheek had 
warmed into a ruddier glow, and whose blue eyes had brightened 
while he spoke, "I have plenty to keep, when I keep this present 
season.  Now, where's my quiet Mouse?  Chattering's the sin of my 
time of life, and there's half the building to do yet, if the cold 
don't freeze us first, or the wind don't blow us away, or the 
darkness don't swallow us up."

The quiet Mouse had brought her calm face to his side, and silently 
taken his arm, before he finished speaking.

"Come away, my dear," said the old man.  "Mr. Redlaw won't settle 
to his dinner, otherwise, till it's cold as the winter.  I hope 
you'll excuse me rambling on, sir, and I wish you good night, and, 
once again, a merry - "

"Stay!" said Mr. Redlaw, resuming his place at the table, more, it 
would have seemed from his manner, to reassure the old keeper, than 
in any remembrance of his own appetite.  "Spare me another moment, 
Philip.  William, you were going to tell me something to your 
excellent wife's honour.  It will not be disagreeable to her to 
hear you praise her.  What was it?"

"Why, that's where it is, you see, sir," returned Mr. William 
Swidger, looking towards his wife in considerable embarrassment.  
"Mrs. William's got her eye upon me."

"But you're not afraid of Mrs. William's eye?"

"Why, no, sir," returned Mr. Swidger, "that's what I say myself.  
It wasn't made to be afraid of.  It wouldn't have been made so 
mild, if that was the intention.  But I wouldn't like to - Milly! - 
him, you know.  Down in the Buildings."

Mr. William, standing behind the table, and rummaging 
disconcertedly among the objects upon it, directed persuasive 
glances at Mrs. William, and secret jerks of his head and thumb at 
Mr. Redlaw, as alluring her towards him.

"Him, you know, my love," said Mr. William.  "Down in the 
Buildings.  Tell, my dear!  You're the works of Shakespeare in 
comparison with myself.  Down in the Buildings, you know, my love. 
- Student."

"Student?" repeated Mr. Redlaw, raising his head.

"That's what I say, sir!" cried Mr. William, in the utmost 
animation of assent.  "If it wasn't the poor student down in the 
Buildings, why should you wish to hear it from Mrs. William's lips?  
Mrs. William, my dear - Buildings."

"I didn't know," said Milly, with a quiet frankness, free from any 
haste or confusion, "that William had said anything about it, or I 
wouldn't have come.  I asked him not to.  It's a sick young 
gentleman, sir - and very poor, I am afraid - who is too ill to go 
home this holiday-time, and lives, unknown to any one, in but a 
common kind of lodging for a gentleman, down in Jerusalem 
Buildings.  That's all, sir."

"Why have I never heard of him?" said the Chemist, rising 
hurriedly.  "Why has he not made his situation known to me?  Sick! 
- give me my hat and cloak.  Poor! - what house? - what number?"

"Oh, you mustn't go there, sir," said Milly, leaving her father-in-
law, and calmly confronting him with her collected little face and 
folded hands.

"Not go there?"

"Oh dear, no!" said Milly, shaking her head as at a most manifest 
and self-evident impossibility.  "It couldn't be thought of!"

"What do you mean?  Why not?"

"Why, you see, sir," said Mr. William Swidger, persuasively and 
confidentially, "that's what I say.  Depend upon it, the young 
gentleman would never have made his situation known to one of his 
own sex.  Mrs. Williams has got into his confidence, but that's 
quite different.  They all confide in Mrs. William; they all trust 
HER.  A man, sir, couldn't have got a whisper out of him; but 
woman, sir, and Mrs. William combined - !"

"There is good sense and delicacy in what you say, William," 
returned Mr. Redlaw, observant of the gentle and composed face at 
his shoulder.  And laying his finger on his lip, he secretly put 
his purse into her hand.

"Oh dear no, sir!" cried Milly, giving it back again.  "Worse and 
worse!  Couldn't be dreamed of!"

Such a staid matter-of-fact housewife she was, and so unruffled by 
the momentary haste of this rejection, that, an instant afterwards, 
she was tidily picking up a few leaves which had strayed from 
between her scissors and her apron, when she had arranged the 
holly.

Finding, when she rose from her stooping posture, that Mr. Redlaw 
was still regarding her with doubt and astonishment, she quietly 
repeated - looking about, the while, for any other fragments that 
might have escaped her observation:

"Oh dear no, sir!  He said that of all the world he would not be 
known to you, or receive help from you - though he is a student in 
your class.  I have made no terms of secrecy with you, but I trust 
to your honour completely."

"Why did he say so?"

"Indeed I can't tell, sir," said Milly, after thinking a little, 
"because I am not at all clever, you know; and I wanted to be 
useful to him in making things neat and comfortable about him, and 
employed myself that way.  But I know he is poor, and lonely, and I 
think he is somehow neglected too. - How dark it is!"

The room had darkened more and more.  There was a very heavy gloom 
and shadow gathering behind the Chemist's chair.

"What more about him?" he asked.

"He is engaged to be married when he can afford it," said Milly, 
"and is studying, I think, to qualify himself to earn a living.  I 
have seen, a long time, that he has studied hard and denied himself 
much. - How very dark it is!"

"It's turned colder, too," said the old man, rubbing his hands.  
"There's a chill and dismal feeling in the room.  Where's my son 
William?  William, my boy, turn the lamp, and rouse the fire!"

Milly's voice resumed, like quiet music very softly played:

"He muttered in his broken sleep yesterday afternoon, after talking 
to me" (this was to herself) "about some one dead, and some great 
wrong done that could never be forgotten; but whether to him or to 
another person, I don't know.  Not BY him, I am sure."

"And, in short, Mrs. William, you see - which she wouldn't say 
herself, Mr. Redlaw, if she was to stop here till the new year 
after this next one - " said Mr. William, coming up to him to speak 
in his ear, "has done him worlds of good!  Bless you, worlds of 
good!  All at home just the same as ever - my father made as snug 
and comfortable - not a crumb of litter to be found in the house, 
if you were to offer fifty pound ready money for it - Mrs. William 
apparently never out of the way - yet Mrs. William backwards and 
forwards, backwards and forwards, up and down, up and down, a 
mother to him!"

The room turned darker and colder, and the gloom and shadow 
gathering behind the chair was heavier.

"Not content with this, sir, Mrs. William goes and finds, this very 
night, when she was coming home (why it's not above a couple of 
hours ago), a creature more like a young wild beast than a young 
child, shivering upon a door-step.  What does Mrs. William do, but 
brings it home to dry it, and feed it, and keep it till our old 
Bounty of food and flannel is given away, on Christmas morning!  If 
it ever felt a fire before, it's as much as ever it did; for it's 
sitting in the old Lodge chimney, staring at ours as if its 
ravenous eyes would never shut again.  It's sitting there, at 
least," said Mr. William, correcting himself, on reflection, 
"unless it's bolted!"

"Heaven keep her happy!" said the Chemist aloud, "and you too, 
Philip! and you, William!  I must consider what to do in this.  I 
may desire to see this student, I'll not detain you any longer now.  
Good-night!"

"I thank'ee, sir, I thank'ee!" said the old man, "for Mouse, and 
for my son William, and for myself.  Where's my son William?  
William, you take the lantern and go on first, through them long 
dark passages, as you did last year and the year afore.  Ha ha!  I 
remember - though I'm eighty-seven!  'Lord, keep my memory green!'  
It's a very good prayer, Mr. Redlaw, that of the learned gentleman 
in the peaked beard, with a ruff round his neck - hangs up, second 
on the right above the panelling, in what used to be, afore our ten 
poor gentlemen commuted, our great Dinner Hall.  'Lord, keep my 
memory green!'  It's very good and pious, sir.  Amen!  Amen!"

As they passed out and shut the heavy door, which, however 
carefully withheld, fired a long train of thundering reverberations 
when it shut at last, the room turned darker.

As he fell a musing in his chair alone, the healthy holly withered 
on the wall, and dropped - dead branches.

As the gloom and shadow thickened behind him, in that place where 
it had been gathering so darkly, it took, by slow degrees, - or out 
of it there came, by some unreal, unsubstantial process - not to be 
traced by any human sense, - an awful likeness of himself!

Ghastly and cold, colourless in its leaden face and hands, but with 
his features, and his bright eyes, and his grizzled hair, and 
dressed in the gloomy shadow of his dress, it came into his 
terrible appearance of existence, motionless, without a sound.  As 
HE leaned his arm upon the elbow of his chair, ruminating before 
the fire, IT leaned upon the chair-back, close above him, with its 
appalling copy of his face looking where his face looked, and 
bearing the expression his face bore.

This, then, was the Something that had passed and gone already.  
This was the dread companion of the haunted man!

It took, for some moments, no more apparent heed of him, than he of 
it.  The Christmas Waits were playing somewhere in the distance, 
and, through his thoughtfulness, he seemed to listen to the music.  
It seemed to listen too.

At length he spoke; without moving or lifting up his face.

"Here again!" he said.

"Here again," replied the Phantom.

"I see you in the fire," said the haunted man; "I hear you in 
music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night."

The Phantom moved its head, assenting.

"Why do you come, to haunt me thus?"

"I come as I am called," replied the Ghost.

"No.  Unbidden," exclaimed the Chemist.

"Unbidden be it," said the Spectre.  "It is enough.  I am here."

Hitherto the light of the fire had shone on the two faces - if the 
dread lineaments behind the chair might be called a face - both 
addressed towards it, as at first, and neither looking at the 
other.  But, now, the haunted man turned, suddenly, and stared upon 
the Ghost.  The Ghost, as sudden in its motion, passed to before 
the chair, and stared on him.

The living man, and the animated image of himself dead, might so 
have looked, the one upon the other.  An awful survey, in a lonely 
and remote part of an empty old pile of building, on a winter 
night, with the loud wind going by upon its journey of mystery - 
whence or whither, no man knowing since the world began - and the 
stars, in unimaginable millions, glittering through it, from 
eternal space, where the world's bulk is as a grain, and its hoary 
age is infancy.

"Look upon me!" said the Spectre.  "I am he, neglected in my youth, 
and miserably poor, who strove and suffered, and still strove and 
suffered, until I hewed out knowledge from the mine where it was 
buried, and made rugged steps thereof, for my worn feet to rest and 
rise on."

"I AM that man," returned the Chemist.

"No mother's self-denying love," pursued the Phantom, "no father's 
counsel, aided ME.  A stranger came into my father's place when I 
was but a child, and I was easily an alien from my mother's heart.  
My parents, at the best, were of that sort whose care soon ends, 
and whose duty is soon done; who cast their offspring loose, early, 
as birds do theirs; and, if they do well, claim the merit; and, if 
ill, the pity."

It paused, and seemed to tempt and goad him with its look, and with 
the manner of its speech, and with its smile.

"I am he," pursued the Phantom, "who, in this struggle upward, 
found a friend.  I made him - won him - bound him to me!  We worked 
together, side by side.  All the love and confidence that in my 
earlier youth had had no outlet, and found no expression, I 
bestowed on him."

"Not all," said Redlaw, hoarsely.

"No, not all," returned the Phantom.  "I had a sister."

The haunted man, with his head resting on his hands, replied "I 
had!"  The Phantom, with an evil smile, drew closer to the chair, 
and resting its chin upon its folded hands, its folded hands upon 
the back, and looking down into his face with searching eyes, that 
seemed instinct with fire, went on:

"Such glimpses of the light of home as I had ever known, had 
streamed from her.  How young she was, how fair, how loving!  I 
took her to the first poor roof that I was master of, and made it 
rich.  She came into the darkness of my life, and made it bright. - 
She is before me!"

"I saw her, in the fire, but now.  I hear her in music, in the 
wind, in the dead stillness of the night," returned the haunted 
man.

"DID he love her?" said the Phantom, echoing his contemplative 
tone.  "I think he did, once.  I am sure he did.  Better had she 
loved him less - less secretly, less dearly, from the shallower 
depths of a more divided heart!"

"Let me forget it!" said the Chemist, with an angry motion of his 
hand.  "Let me blot it from my memory!"

The Spectre, without stirring, and with its unwinking, cruel eyes 
still fixed upon his face, went on:

"A dream, like hers, stole upon my own life."

"It did," said Redlaw.

" A love, as like hers," pursued the  Phantom, "as my inferior 
nature might cherish, arose in my own heart.  I was too poor to 
bind its object to my fortune then, by any thread of promise or 
entreaty.  I loved her far too well, to seek to do it.  But, more 
than ever I had striven in my life, I strove to climb!  Only an 
inch gained, brought me something nearer to the height.  I toiled 
up!  In the late pauses of my labour at that time, - my sister 
(sweet companion!) still sharing with me the expiring embers and 
the cooling hearth, - when day was breaking, what pictures of the 
future did I see!"

"I saw them, in the fire, but now," he murmured.  "They come back 
to me in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night, in 
the revolving years."

" - Pictures of my own domestic life, in aftertime, with her who 
was the inspiration of my toil.  Pictures of my sister, made the 
wife of my dear friend, on equal terms - for he had some 
inheritance, we none - pictures of our sobered age and mellowed 
happiness, and of the golden links, extending back so far, that 
should bind us, and our children, in a radiant garland," said the 
Phantom.

"Pictures," said the haunted man, "that were delusions.  Why is it 
my doom to remember them too well!"

"Delusions," echoed the Phantom in its changeless voice, and 
glaring on him with its changeless eyes.  "For my friend (in whose 
breast my confidence was locked as in my own), passing between me 
and the centre of the system of my hopes and struggles, won her to 
himself, and shattered my frail universe.  My sister, doubly dear, 
doubly devoted, doubly cheerful in my home, lived on to see me 
famous, and my old ambition so rewarded when its spring was broken, 
and then - "

"Then died," he interposed.  "Died, gentle as ever; happy; and with 
no concern but for her brother.  Peace!"

The Phantom watched him silently.

"Remembered!" said the haunted man, after a pause.  "Yes.  So well 
remembered, that even now, when years have passed, and nothing is 
more idle or more visionary to me than the boyish love so long 
outlived, I think of it with sympathy, as if it were a younger 
brother's or a son's.  Sometimes I even wonder when her heart first 
inclined to him, and how it had been affected towards me. - Not 
lightly, once, I think. - But that is nothing.  Early unhappiness, 
a wound from a hand I loved and trusted, and a loss that nothing 
can replace, outlive such fancies."

"Thus," said the Phantom, "I bear within me a Sorrow and a Wrong.  
Thus I prey upon myself.  Thus, memory is my curse; and, if I could 
forget my sorrow and my wrong, I would!"

"Mocker!" said the Chemist, leaping up, and making, with a wrathful 
hand, at the throat of his other self.  "Why have I always that 
taunt in my ears?"

"Forbear!" exclaimed the Spectre in an awful voice.  "Lay a hand on 
Me, and die!"

He stopped midway, as if its words had paralysed him, and stood 
looking on it.  It had glided from him; it had its arm raised high 
in warning; and a smile passed over its unearthly features, as it 
reared its dark figure in triumph.

"If I could forget my sorrow and wrong, I would," the Ghost 
repeated.  "If I could forget my sorrow and my wrong, I would!"

"Evil spirit of myself," returned the haunted man, in a low, 
trembling tone, "my life is darkened by that incessant whisper."

"It is an echo," said the Phantom.

"If it be an echo of my thoughts - as now, indeed, I know it is," 
rejoined the haunted man, "why should I, therefore, be tormented?  
It is not a selfish thought.  I suffer it to range beyond myself.  
All men and women have their sorrows, - most of them their wrongs; 
ingratitude, and sordid jealousy, and interest, besetting all 
degrees of life.  Who would not forget their sorrows and their 
wrongs?"

"Who would not, truly, and be happier and better for it?" said the 
Phantom.

"These revolutions of years, which we commemorate," proceeded 
Redlaw, "what do THEY recall!  Are there any minds in which they do 
not re-awaken some sorrow, or some trouble?  What is the 
remembrance of the old man who was here to-night?  A tissue of 
sorrow and trouble."

"But common natures," said the Phantom, with its evil smile upon 
its glassy face, "unenlightened minds and ordinary spirits, do not 
feel or reason on these things like men of higher cultivation and 
profounder thought."

"Tempter," answered Redlaw, "whose hollow look and voice I dread 
more than words can express, and from whom some dim foreshadowing 
of greater fear is stealing over me while I speak, I hear again an 
echo of my own mind."

"Receive it as a proof that I am powerful," returned the Ghost.  
"Hear what I offer!  Forget the sorrow, wrong, and trouble you have 
known!"

"Forget them!" he repeated.

"I have the power to cancel their remembrance - to leave but very 
faint, confused traces of them, that will die out soon," returned 
the Spectre.  "Say!  Is it done?"

"Stay!" cried the haunted man, arresting by a terrified gesture the 
uplifted hand.  "I tremble with distrust and doubt of you; and the 
dim fear you cast upon me deepens into a nameless horror I can 
hardly bear. - I would not deprive myself of any kindly 
recollection, or any sympathy that is good for me, or others.  What 
shall I lose, if I assent to this?  What else will pass from my 
remembrance?"

"No knowledge; no result of study; nothing but the intertwisted 
chain of feelings and associations, each in its turn dependent on, 
and nourished by, the banished recollections.  Those will go."

"Are they so many?" said the haunted man, reflecting in alarm.

"They have been wont to show themselves in the fire, in music, in 
the wind, in the dead stillness of the night, in the revolving 
years," returned the Phantom scornfully.

"In nothing else?"

The Phantom held its peace.

But having stood before him, silent, for a little while, it moved 
towards the fire; then stopped.

"Decide!" it said, "before the opportunity is lost!"

"A moment!  I call Heaven to witness," said the agitated man, "that 
I have never been a hater of any kind, - never morose, indifferent, 
or hard, to anything around me.  If, living here alone, I have made 
too much of all that was and might have been, and too little of 
what is, the evil, I believe, has fallen on me, and not on others.  
But, if there were poison in my body, should I not, possessed of 
antidotes and knowledge how to use them, use them?  If there be 
poison in my mind, and through this fearful shadow I can cast it 
out, shall I not cast it out?"

"Say," said the Spectre, "is it done?"

"A moment longer!" he answered hurriedly.  "I WOULD FORGET IT IF I 
COULD!  Have I thought that, alone, or has it been the thought of 
thousands upon thousands, generation after generation?  All human 
memory is fraught with sorrow and trouble.  My memory is as the 
memory of other men, but other men have not this choice.  Yes, I 
close the bargain.  Yes!  I WILL forget my sorrow, wrong, and 
trouble!"

"Say," said the Spectre, "is it done?"

"It is!"

"IT IS.  And take this with you, man whom I here renounce!  The 
gift that I have given, you shall give again, go where you will.  
Without recovering yourself the power that you have yielded up, you 
shall henceforth destroy its like in all whom you approach.  Your 
wisdom has discovered that the memory of sorrow, wrong, and trouble 
is the lot of all mankind, and that mankind would be the happier, 
in its other memories, without it.  Go!  Be its benefactor!  Freed 
from such remembrance, from this hour, carry involuntarily the 
blessing of such freedom with you.  Its diffusion is inseparable 
and inalienable from you.  Go!  Be happy in the good you have won, 
and in the good you do!"

The Phantom, which had held its bloodless hand above him while it 
spoke, as if in some unholy invocation, or some ban; and which had 
gradually advanced its eyes so close to his, that he could see how 
they did not participate in the terrible smile upon its face, but 
were a fixed, unalterable, steady horror melted before him and was 
gone.

As he stood rooted to the spot, possessed by fear and wonder, and 
imagining he heard repeated in melancholy echoes, dying away 
fainter and fainter, the words, "Destroy its like in all whom you 
approach!" a shrill cry reached his ears.  It came, not from the 
passages beyond the door, but from another part of the old 
building, and sounded like the cry of some one in the dark who had 
lost the way.

He looked confusedly upon his hands and limbs, as if to be assured 
of his identity, and then shouted in reply, loudly and wildly; for 
there was a strangeness and terror upon him, as if he too were 
lost.

The cry responding, and being nearer, he caught up the lamp, and 
raised a heavy curtain in the wall, by which he was accustomed to 
pass into and out of the theatre where he lectured, - which 
adjoined his room.  Associated with youth and animation, and a high 
amphitheatre of faces which his entrance charmed to interest in a 
moment, it was a ghostly place when all this life was faded out of 
it, and stared upon him like an emblem of Death.

"Halloa!" he cried.  "Halloa!  This way!  Come to the light!"  
When, as he held the curtain with one hand, and with the other 
raised the lamp and tried to pierce the gloom that filled the 
place, something rushed past him into the room like a wild-cat, and 
crouched down in a corner.

"What is it?" he said, hastily.

He might have asked "What is it?" even had he seen it well, as 
presently he did when he stood looking at it gathered up in its 
corner.

A bundle of tatters, held together by a hand, in size and form 
almost an infant's, but in its greedy, desperate little clutch, a 
bad old man's.  A face rounded and smoothed by some half-dozen 
years, but pinched and twisted by the experiences of a life.  
Bright eyes, but not youthful.  Naked feet, beautiful in their 
childish delicacy, - ugly in the blood and dirt that cracked upon 
them.  A baby savage, a young monster, a child who had never been a 
child, a creature who might live to take the outward form of man, 
but who, within, would live and perish a mere beast.

Used, already, to be worried and hunted like a beast, the boy 
crouched down as he was looked at, and looked back again, and 
interposed his arm to ward off the expected blow.

"I'll bite," he said, "if you hit me!"

The time had been, and not many minutes since, when such a sight as 
this would have wrung the Chemist's heart.  He looked upon it now, 
coldly; but with a heavy effort to remember something - he did not 
know what - he asked the boy what he did there, and whence he came.

"Where's the woman?" he replied.  "I want to find the woman."

"Who?"

"The woman.  Her that brought me here, and set me by the large 
fire.  She was so long gone, that I went to look for her, and lost 
myself.  I don't want you.  I want the woman."

He made a spring, so suddenly, to get away, that the dull sound of 
his naked feet upon the floor was near the curtain, when Redlaw 
caught him by his rags.

"Come! you let me go!" muttered the boy, struggling, and clenching 
his teeth.  "I've done nothing to you.  Let me go, will you, to the 
woman!"

"That is not the way.  There is a nearer one," said Redlaw, 
detaining him, in the same blank effort to remember some 
association that ought, of right, to bear upon this monstrous 
object.  "What is your name?"

"Got none."

"Where do you live?

"Live!  What's that?"

The boy shook his hair from his eyes to look at him for a moment, 
and then, twisting round his legs and wrestling with him, broke 
again into his repetition of "You let me go, will you?  I want to 
find the woman."

The Chemist led him to the door.  "This way," he said, looking at 
him still confusedly, but with repugnance and avoidance, growing 
out of his coldness.  "I'll take you to her."

The sharp eyes in the child's head, wandering round the room, 
lighted on the table where the remnants of the dinner were.

"Give me some of that!" he said, covetously.

"Has she not fed you?"

"I shall be hungry again to-morrow, sha'n't I?  Ain't I hungry 
every day?"

Finding himself released, he bounded at the table like some small 
animal of prey, and hugging to his breast bread and meat, and his 
own rags, all together, said:

"There!  Now take me to the woman!"

As the Chemist, with a new-born dislike to touch him, sternly 
motioned him to follow, and was going out of the door, he trembled 
and stopped.

"The gift that I have given, you shall give again, go where you 
will!"

The Phantom's words were blowing in the wind, and the wind blew 
chill upon him.

"I'll not go there, to-night," he murmured faintly.  "I'll go 
nowhere to-night.  Boy! straight down this long-arched passage, and 
past the great dark door into the yard, - you see the fire shining 
on the window there."

"The woman's fire?" inquired the boy.

He nodded, and the naked feet had sprung away.  He came back with 
his lamp, locked his door hastily, and sat down in his chair, 
covering his face like one who was frightened at himself.

For now he was, indeed, alone.  Alone, alone.



CHAPTER II - The Gift Diffused



A SMALL man sat in a small parlour, partitioned off from a small 
shop by a small screen, pasted all over with small scraps of 
newspapers.  In company with the small man, was almost any amount 
of small children you may please to name - at least it seemed so; 
they made, in that very limited sphere of action, such an imposing 
effect, in point of numbers.

Of these small fry, two had, by some strong machinery, been got 
into bed in a corner, where they might have reposed snugly enough 
in the sleep of innocence, but for a constitutional propensity to 
keep awake, and also to scuffle in and out of bed.  The immediate 
occasion of these predatory dashes at the waking world, was the 
construction of an oyster-shell wall in a corner, by two other 
youths of tender age; on which fortification the two in bed made 
harassing descents (like those accursed Picts and Scots who 
beleaguer the early historical studies of most young Britons), and 
then withdrew to their own territory.

In addition to the stir attendant on these inroads, and the retorts 
of the invaded, who pursued hotly, and made lunges at the bed-
clothes under which the marauders took refuge, another little boy, 
in another little bed, contributed his mite of confusion to the 
family stock, by casting his boots upon the waters; in other words, 
by launching these and several small objects, inoffensive in 
themselves, though of a hard substance considered as missiles, at 
the disturbers of his repose, - who were not slow to return these 
compliments.

Besides which, another little boy - the biggest there, but still 
little - was tottering to and fro, bent on one side, and 
considerably affected in his knees by the weight of a large baby, 
which he was supposed by a fiction that obtains sometimes in 
sanguine families, to be hushing to sleep.  But oh! the 
inexhaustible regions of contemplation and watchfulness into which 
this baby's eyes were then only beginning to compose themselves to 
stare, over his unconscious shoulder!

It was a very Moloch of a baby, on whose insatiate altar the whole 
existence of this particular young brother was offered up a daily 
sacrifice.  Its personality may be said to have consisted in its 
never being quiet, in any one place, for five consecutive minutes, 
and never going to sleep when required.  "Tetterby's baby" was as 
well known in the neighbourhood as the postman or the pot-boy.  It 
roved from door-step to door-step, in the arms of little Johnny 
Tetterby, and lagged heavily at the rear of troops of juveniles who 
followed the Tumblers or the Monkey, and came up, all on one side, 
a little too late for everything that was attractive, from Monday 
morning until Saturday night.  Wherever childhood congregated to 
play, there was little Moloch making Johnny fag and toil.  Wherever 
Johnny desired to stay, little Moloch became fractious, and would 
not remain.  Whenever Johnny wanted to go out, Moloch was asleep, 
and must be watched.  Whenever Johnny wanted to stay at home, 
Moloch was awake, and must be taken out.  Yet Johnny was verily 
persuaded that it was a faultless baby, without its peer in the 
realm of England, and was quite content to catch meek glimpses of 
things in general from behind its skirts, or over its limp flapping 
bonnet, and to go staggering about with it like a very little 
porter with a very large parcel, which was not directed to anybody, 
and could never be delivered anywhere.

The small man who sat in the small parlour, making fruitless 
attempts to read his newspaper peaceably in the midst of this 
disturbance, was the father of the family, and the chief of the 
firm described in the inscription over the little shop front, by 
the name and title of A. TETTERBY AND CO., NEWSMEN.  Indeed, 
strictly speaking, he was the only personage answering to that 
designation, as Co. was a mere poetical abstraction, altogether 
baseless and impersonal.

Tetterby's was the corner shop in Jerusalem Buildings.  There was a 
good show of literature in the window, chiefly consisting of 
picture-newspapers out of date, and serial pirates, and footpads.  
Walking-sticks, likewise, and marbles, were included in the stock 
in trade.  It had once extended into the light confectionery line; 
but it would seem that those elegancies of life were not in demand 
about Jerusalem Buildings, for nothing connected with that branch 
of commerce remained in the window, except a sort of small glass 
lantern containing a languishing mass of bull's-eyes, which had 
melted in the summer and congealed in the winter until all hope of 
ever getting them out, or of eating them without eating the lantern 
too, was gone for ever.  Tetterby's had tried its hand at several 
things.  It had once made a feeble little dart at the toy business; 
for, in another lantern, there was a heap of minute wax dolls, all 
sticking together upside down, in the direst confusion, with their 
feet on one another's heads, and a precipitate of broken arms and 
legs at the bottom.  It had made a move in the millinery direction, 
which a few dry, wiry bonnet-shapes remained in a corner of the 
window to attest.  It had fancied that a living might lie hidden in 
the tobacco trade, and had stuck up a representation of a native of 
each of the three integral portions of the British Empire, in the 
act of consuming that fragrant weed; with a poetic legend attached, 
importing that united in one cause they sat and joked, one chewed 
tobacco, one took snuff, one smoked:  but nothing seemed to have 
come of it - except flies.  Time had been when it had put a forlorn 
trust in imitative jewellery, for in one pane of glass there was a 
card of cheap seals, and another of pencil-cases, and a mysterious 
black amulet of inscrutable intention, labelled ninepence.  But, to 
that hour, Jerusalem Buildings had bought none of them.  In short, 
Tetterby's had tried so hard to get a livelihood out of Jerusalem 
Buildings in one way or other, and appeared to have done so 
indifferently in all, that the best position in the firm was too 
evidently Co.'s; Co., as a bodiless creation, being untroubled with 
the vulgar inconveniences of hunger and thirst, being chargeable 
neither to the poor's-rates nor the assessed taxes, and having no 
young family to provide for.

Tetterby himself, however, in his little parlour, as already 
mentioned, having the presence of a young family impressed upon his 
mind in a manner too clamorous to be disregarded, or to comport 
with the quiet perusal of a newspaper, laid down his paper, 
wheeled, in his distraction, a few times round the parlour, like an 
undecided carrier-pigeon, made an ineffectual rush at one or two 
flying little figures in bed-gowns that skimmed past him, and then, 
bearing suddenly down upon the only unoffending member of the 
family, boxed the ears of little Moloch's nurse.

"You bad boy!" said Mr. Tetterby, "haven't you any feeling for your 
poor father after the fatigues and anxieties of a hard winter's 
day, since five o'clock in the morning, but must you wither his 
rest, and corrode his latest intelligence, with YOUR wicious 
tricks?  Isn't it enough, sir, that your brother 'Dolphus is 
toiling and moiling in the fog and cold, and you rolling in the lap 
of luxury with a - with a baby, and everything you can wish for," 
said Mr. Tetterby, heaping this up as a great climax of blessings, 
"but must you make a wilderness of home, and maniacs of your 
parents?  Must you, Johnny?  Hey?"  At each interrogation, Mr. 
Tetterby made a feint of boxing his ears again, but thought better 
of it, and held his hand.

"Oh, father!" whimpered Johnny, "when I wasn't doing anything, I'm 
sure, but taking such care of Sally, and getting her to sleep.  Oh, 
father!"

"I wish my little woman would come home!" said Mr. Tetterby, 
relenting and repenting, "I only wish my little woman would come 
home!  I ain't fit to deal with 'em.  They make my head go round, 
and get the better of me.  Oh, Johnny!  Isn't it enough that your 
dear mother has provided you with that sweet sister?" indicating 
Moloch; "isn't it enough that you were seven boys before without a 
ray of gal, and that your dear mother went through what she DID go 
through, on purpose that you might all of you have a little sister, 
but must you so behave yourself as to make my head swim?"

Softening more and more, as his own tender feelings and those of 
his injured son were worked on, Mr. Tetterby concluded by embracing 
him, and immediately breaking away to catch one of the real 
delinquents.  A reasonably good start occurring, he succeeded, 
after a short but smart run, and some rather severe cross-country 
work under and over the bedsteads, and in and out among the 
intricacies of the chairs, in capturing this infant, whom he 
condignly punished, and bore to bed.  This example had a powerful, 
and apparently, mesmeric influence on him of the boots, who 
instantly fell into a deep sleep, though he had been, but a moment 
before, broad awake, and in the highest possible feather.  Nor was 
it lost upon the two young architects, who retired to bed, in an 
adjoining closet, with great privacy and speed.  The comrade of the 
Intercepted One also shrinking into his nest with similar 
discretion, Mr. Tetterby, when he paused for breath, found himself 
unexpectedly in a scene of peace.

"My little woman herself," said Mr. Tetterby, wiping his flushed 
face, "could hardly have done it better!  I only wish my little 
woman had had it to do, I do indeed!"

Mr. Tetterby sought upon his screen for a passage appropriate to be 
impressed upon his children's minds on the occasion, and read the 
following.

"'It is an undoubted fact that all remarkable men have had 
remarkable mothers, and have respected them in after life as their 
best friends.'  Think of your own remarkable mother, my boys," said 
Mr. Tetterby, "and know her value while she is still among you!"

He sat down again in his chair by the fire, and composed himself, 
cross-legged, over his newspaper.

"Let anybody, I don't care who it is, get out of bed again," said 
Tetterby, as a general proclamation, delivered in a very soft-
hearted manner, "and astonishment will be the portion of that 
respected contemporary!" - which expression Mr. Tetterby selected 
from his screen.  "Johnny, my child, take care of your only sister, 
Sally; for she's the brightest gem that ever sparkled on your early 
brow."

Johnny sat down on a little stool, and devotedly crushed himself 
beneath the weight of Moloch.

"Ah, what a gift that baby is to you, Johnny!" said his father, 
"and how thankful you ought to be!  'It is not generally known, 
Johnny,'" he was now referring to the screen again, "'but it is a 
fact ascertained, by accurate calculations, that the following 
immense percentage of babies never attain to two years old; that is 
to say - '"

"Oh, don't, father, please!" cried Johnny.  "I can't bear it, when 
I think of Sally."

Mr. Tetterby desisting, Johnny, with a profound sense of his trust, 
wiped his eyes, and hushed his sister.

"Your brother 'Dolphus," said his father, poking the fire, "is late 
to-night, Johnny, and will come home like a lump of ice.  What's 
got your precious mother?"

"Here's mother, and 'Dolphus too, father!" exclaimed Johnny, "I 
think."

"You're right!" returned his father, listening.  "Yes, that's the 
footstep of my little woman."

The process of induction, by which Mr Tetterby had come to the 
conclusion that his wife was a little woman, was his own secret.  
She would have made two editions of himself, very easily.  
Considered as an individual, she was rather remarkable for being 
robust and portly; but considered with reference to her husband, 
her dimensions became magnificent.  Nor did they assume a less 
imposing proportion, when studied with reference to the size of her 
seven sons, who were but diminutive.  In the case of Sally, 
however, Mrs. Tetterby had asserted herself, at last; as nobody 
knew better than the victim Johnny, who weighed and measured that 
exacting idol every hour in the day.

Mrs. Tetterby, who had been marketing, and carried a basket, threw 
back her bonnet and shawl, and sitting down, fatigued, commanded 
Johnny to bring his sweet charge to her straightway, for a kiss.  
Johnny having complied, and gone back to his stool, and again 
crushed himself, Master Adolphus Tetterby, who had by this time 
unwound his torso out of a prismatic comforter, apparently 
interminable, requested the same favour.  Johnny having again 
complied, and again gone back to his stool, and again crushed 
himself, Mr. Tetterby, struck by a sudden thought, preferred the 
same claim on his own parental part.  The satisfaction of this 
third desire completely exhausted the sacrifice, who had hardly 
breath enough left to get back to his stool, crush himself again, 
and pant at his relations.

"Whatever you do, Johnny," said Mrs. Tetterby, shaking her head, 
"take care of her, or never look your mother in the face again."

"Nor your brother," said Adolphus.

"Nor your father, Johnny," added Mr. Tetterby.

Johnny, much affected by this conditional renunciation of him, 
looked down at Moloch's eyes to see that they were all right, so 
far, and skilfully patted her back (which was uppermost), and 
rocked her with his foot.

"Are you wet, 'Dolphus, my boy?" said his father.  "Come and take 
my chair, and dry yourself."

"No, father, thank'ee," said Adolphus, smoothing himself down with 
his hands.  "I an't very wet, I don't think.  Does my face shine 
much, father?"

"Well, it DOES look waxy, my boy," returned Mr. Tetterby.

"It's the weather, father," said Adolphus, polishing his cheeks on 
the worn sleeve of his jacket.  "What with rain, and sleet, and 
wind, and snow, and fog, my face gets quite brought out into a rash 
sometimes.  And shines, it does - oh, don't it, though!"

Master Adolphus was also in the newspaper line of life, being 
employed, by a more thriving firm than his father and Co., to vend 
newspapers at a railway station, where his chubby little person, 
like a shabbily-disguised Cupid, and his shrill little voice (he 
was not much more than ten years old), were as well known as the 
hoarse panting of the locomotives, running in and out.  His 
juvenility might have been at some loss for a harmless outlet, in 
this early application to traffic, but for a fortunate discovery he 
made of a means of entertaining himself, and of dividing the long 
day into stages of interest, without neglecting business.  This 
ingenious invention, remarkable, like many great discoveries, for 
its simplicity, consisted in varying the first vowel in the word 
"paper," and substituting, in its stead, at different periods of 
the day, all the other vowels in grammatical succession.  Thus, 
before daylight in the winter-time, he went to and fro, in his 
little oilskin cap and cape, and his big comforter, piercing the 
heavy air with his cry of "Morn-ing Pa-per!" which, about an hour 
before noon, changed to "Morn-ing Pepper!" which, at about two, 
changed to "Morn-ing Pip-per!" which in a couple of hours changed 
to "Morn-ing Pop-per!" and so declined with the sun into "Eve-ning 
Pup-per!" to the great relief and comfort of this young gentleman's 
spirits.

Mrs. Tetterby, his lady-mother, who had been sitting with her 
bonnet and shawl thrown back, as aforesaid, thoughtfully turning 
her wedding-ring round and round upon her finger, now rose, and 
divesting herself of her out-of-door attire, began to lay the cloth 
for supper.

"Ah, dear me, dear me, dear me!" said Mrs. Tetterby.  "That's the 
way the world goes!"

"Which is the way the world goes, my dear?" asked Mr. Tetterby, 
looking round.

"Oh, nothing," said Mrs. Tetterby.

Mr. Tetterby elevated his eyebrows, folded his newspaper afresh, 
and carried his eyes up it, and down it, and across it, but was 
wandering in his attention, and not reading it.

Mrs. Tetterby, at the same time, laid the cloth, but rather as if 
she were punishing the table than preparing the family supper; 
hitting it unnecessarily hard with the knives and forks, slapping 
it with the plates, dinting it with the salt-cellar, and coming 
heavily down upon it with the loaf.

"Ah, dear me, dear me, dear me!" said Mrs. Tetterby.  "That's the 
way the world goes!"

"My duck," returned her husband, looking round again, "you said 
that before.  Which is the way the world goes?"

"Oh, nothing!" said Mrs. Tetterby.

"Sophia!" remonstrated her husband, "you said THAT before, too."

"Well, I'll say it again if you like," returned Mrs. Tetterby.  "Oh 
nothing - there!  And again if you like, oh nothing - there!  And 
again if you like, oh nothing - now then!"

Mr. Tetterby brought his eye to bear upon the partner of his bosom, 
and said, in mild astonishment:

"My little woman, what has put you out?"

"I'm sure I don't know," she retorted.  "Don't ask me.  Who said I 
was put out at all?  I never did."

Mr. Tetterby gave up the perusal of his newspaper as a bad job, 
and, taking a slow walk across the room, with his hands behind him, 
and his shoulders raised - his gait according perfectly with the 
resignation of his manner - addressed himself to his two eldest 
offspring.

"Your supper will be ready in a minute, 'Dolphus," said Mr. 
Tetterby.  "Your mother has been out in the wet, to the cook's 
shop, to buy it.  It was very good of your mother so to do.  YOU 
shall get some supper too, very soon, Johnny.  Your mother's 
pleased with you, my man, for being so attentive to your precious 
sister."

Mrs. Tetterby, without any remark, but with a decided subsidence of 
her animosity towards the table, finished her preparations, and 
took, from her ample basket, a substantial slab of hot pease 
pudding wrapped in paper, and a basin covered with a saucer, which, 
on being uncovered, sent forth an odour so agreeable, that the 
three pair of eyes in the two beds opened wide and fixed themselves 
upon the banquet.  Mr. Tetterby, without regarding this tacit 
invitation to be seated, stood repeating slowly, "Yes, yes, your 
supper will be ready in a minute, 'Dolphus - your mother went out 
in the wet, to the cook's shop, to buy it.  It was very good of 
your mother so to do" - until Mrs. Tetterby, who had been 
exhibiting sundry tokens of contrition behind him, caught him round 
the neck, and wept.

"Oh, Dolphus!" said Mrs. Tetterby, "how could I go and behave so?"

This reconciliation affected Adolphus the younger and Johnny to 
that degree, that they both, as with one accord, raised a dismal 
cry, which had the effect of immediately shutting up the round eyes 
in the beds, and utterly routing the two remaining little 
Tetterbys, just then stealing in from the adjoining closet to see 
what was going on in the eating way.

"I am sure, 'Dolphus," sobbed Mrs. Tetterby, "coming home, I had no 
more idea than a child unborn - "

Mr. Tetterby seemed to dislike this figure of speech, and observed, 
"Say than the baby, my dear."

" - Had no more idea than the baby," said Mrs. Tetterby. - "Johnny, 
don't look at me, but look at her, or she'll fall out of your lap 
and be killed, and then you'll die in agonies of a broken heart, 
and serve you right. - No more idea I hadn't than that darling, of 
being cross when I came home; but somehow, 'Dolphus - "  Mrs. 
Tetterby paused, and again turned her wedding-ring round and round 
upon her finger.

"I see!" said Mr. Tetterby.  "I understand!  My little woman was 
put out.  Hard times, and hard weather, and hard work, make it 
trying now and then.  I see, bless your soul!  No wonder!  Dolf, my 
man," continued Mr. Tetterby, exploring the basin with a fork, 
"here's your mother been and bought, at the cook's shop, besides 
pease pudding, a whole knuckle of a lovely roast leg of pork, with 
lots of crackling left upon it, and with seasoning gravy and 
mustard quite unlimited.  Hand in your plate, my boy, and begin 
while it's simmering."

Master Adolphus, needing no second summons, received his portion 
with eyes rendered moist by appetite, and withdrawing to his 
particular stool, fell upon his supper tooth and nail.  Johnny was 
not forgotten, but received his rations on bread, lest he should, 
in a flush of gravy, trickle any on the baby.  He was required, for 
similar reasons, to keep his pudding, when not on active service, 
in his pocket.

There might have been more pork on the knucklebone, - which 
knucklebone the carver at the cook's shop had assuredly not 
forgotten in carving for previous customers - but there was no 
stint of seasoning, and that is an accessory dreamily suggesting 
pork, and pleasantly cheating the sense of taste.  The pease 
pudding, too, the gravy and mustard, like the Eastern rose in 
respect of the nightingale, if they were not absolutely pork, had 
lived near it; so, upon the whole, there was the flavour of a 
middle-sized pig.  It was irresistible to the Tetterbys in bed, 
who, though professing to slumber peacefully, crawled out when 
unseen by their parents, and silently appealed to their brothers 
for any gastronomic token of fraternal affection.  They, not hard 
of heart, presenting scraps in return, it resulted that a party of 
light skirmishers in nightgowns were careering about the parlour 
all through supper, which harassed Mr. Tetterby exceedingly, and 
once or twice imposed upon him the necessity of a charge, before 
which these guerilla troops retired in all directions and in great 
confusion.

Mrs. Tetterby did not enjoy her supper.  There seemed to be 
something on Mrs. Tetterby's mind.  At one time she laughed without 
reason, and at another time she cried without reason, and at last 
she laughed and cried together in a manner so very unreasonable 
that her husband was confounded.

"My little woman," said Mr. Tetterby, "if the world goes that way, 
it appears to go the wrong way, and to choke you."

"Give me a drop of water," said Mrs. Tetterby, struggling with 
herself, "and don't speak to me for the present, or take any notice 
of me.  Don't do it!"

Mr. Tetterby having administered the water, turned suddenly on the 
unlucky Johnny (who was full of sympathy), and demanded why he was 
wallowing there, in gluttony and idleness, instead of coming 
forward with the baby, that the sight of her might revive his 
mother.  Johnny immediately approached, borne down by its weight; 
but Mrs. Tetterby holding out her hand to signify that she was not 
in a condition to bear that trying appeal to her feelings, he was 
interdicted from advancing another inch, on pain of perpetual 
hatred from all his dearest connections; and accordingly retired to 
his stool again, and crushed himself as before.

After a pause, Mrs. Tetterby said she was better now, and began to 
laugh.

"My little woman," said her husband, dubiously, "are you quite sure 
you're better?  Or are you, Sophia, about to break out in a fresh 
direction?"

"No, 'Dolphus, no," replied his wife.  "I'm quite myself."  With 
that, settling her hair, and pressing the palms of her hands upon 
her eyes, she laughed again.

"What a wicked fool I was, to think so for a moment!" said Mrs. 
Tetterby.  "Come nearer, 'Dolphus, and let me ease my mind, and 
tell you what I mean.  Let me tell you all about it."

Mr. Tetterby bringing his chair closer, Mrs. Tetterby laughed 
again, gave him a hug, and wiped her eyes.

"You know, Dolphus, my dear," said Mrs. Tetterby, "that when I was 
single, I might have given myself away in several directions.  At 
one time, four after me at once; two of them were sons of Mars."

"We're all sons of Ma's, my dear," said Mr. Tetterby, "jointly with 
Pa's."

"I don't mean that," replied his wife, "I mean soldiers - 
serjeants."

"Oh!" said Mr. Tetterby.

"Well, 'Dolphus, I'm sure I never think of such things now, to 
regret them; and I'm sure I've got as good a husband, and would do 
as much to prove that I was fond of him, as - "

"As any little woman in the world," said Mr. Tetterby.  "Very good.  
VERY good."

If Mr. Tetterby had been ten feet high, he could not have expressed 
a gentler consideration for Mrs. Tetterby's fairy-like stature; and 
if Mrs. Tetterby had been two feet high, she could not have felt it 
more appropriately her due.

"But you see, 'Dolphus," said Mrs. Tetterby, "this being Christmas-
time, when all people who can, make holiday, and when all people 
who have got money, like to spend some, I did, somehow, get a 
little out of sorts when I was in the streets just now.  There were 
so many things to be sold - such delicious things to eat, such fine 
things to look at, such delightful things to have - and there was 
so much calculating and calculating necessary, before I durst lay 
out a sixpence for the commonest thing; and the basket was so 
large, and wanted so much in it; and my stock of money was so 
small, and would go such a little way; - you hate me, don't you, 
'Dolphus?"

"Not quite," said Mr. Tetterby, "as yet."

"Well!  I'll tell you the whole truth," pursued his wife, 
penitently, "and then perhaps you will.  I felt all this, so much, 
when I was trudging about in the cold, and when I saw a lot of 
other calculating faces and large baskets trudging about, too, that 
I began to think whether I mightn't have done better, and been 
happier, if - I - hadn't - " the wedding-ring went round again, and 
Mrs. Tetterby shook her downcast head as she turned it.

"I see," said her husband quietly; "if you hadn't married at all, 
or if you had married somebody else?"

"Yes," sobbed Mrs. Tetterby.  "That's really what I thought.  Do 
you hate me now, 'Dolphus?"

"Why no," said Mr. Tetterby.  "I don't find that I do, as yet."

Mrs. Tetterby gave him a thankful kiss, and went on.

"I begin to hope you won't, now, 'Dolphus, though I'm afraid I 
haven't told you the worst.  I can't think what came over me.  I 
don't know whether I was ill, or mad, or what I was, but I couldn't 
call up anything that seemed to bind us to each other, or to 
reconcile me to my fortune.  All the pleasures and enjoyments we 
had ever had - THEY seemed so poor and insignificant, I hated them.  
I could have trodden on them.  And I could think of nothing else, 
except our being poor, and the number of mouths there were at 
home."

"Well, well, my dear," said Mr. Tetterby, shaking her hand 
encouragingly, "that's truth, after all.  We ARE poor, and there 
ARE a number of mouths at home here."

"Ah! but, Dolf, Dolf!" cried his wife, laying her hands upon his 
neck, "my good, kind, patient fellow, when I had been at home a 
very little while - how different!  Oh, Dolf, dear, how different 
it was!  I felt as if there was a rush of recollection on me, all 
at once, that softened my hard heart, and filled it up till it was 
bursting.  All our struggles for a livelihood, all our cares and 
wants since we have been married, all the times of sickness, all 
the hours of watching, we have ever had, by one another, or by the 
children, seemed to speak to me, and say that they had made us one, 
and that I never might have been, or could have been, or would have 
been, any other than the wife and mother I am.  Then, the cheap 
enjoyments that I could have trodden on so cruelly, got to be so 
precious to me - Oh so priceless, and dear! - that I couldn't bear 
to think how much I had wronged them; and I said, and say again a 
hundred times, how could I ever behave so, 'Dolphus, how could I 
ever have the heart to do it!"

The good woman, quite carried away by her honest tenderness and 
remorse, was weeping with all her heart, when she started up with a 
scream, and ran behind her husband.  Her cry was so terrified, that 
the children started from their sleep and from their beds, and 
clung about her.  Nor did her gaze belie her voice, as she pointed 
to a pale man in a black cloak who had come into the room.

"Look at that man!  Look there!  What does he want?"

"My dear," returned her husband, "I'll ask him if you'll let me go.  
What's the matter!  How you shake!"

"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 of 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 to-
night."

"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 upstairs, 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 ill, 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 sun-beam 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 all is 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 felt 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, to-morrow, 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 to-night?  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?"

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 cracked?" 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.

"Ay.  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 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 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 
shattered 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 monetary 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.

"What brutal hand has hurt you so?" he asked.

"My own.  I did it myself!" she answered quickly.

"It is impossible."

"I'll swear I did!  He didn't touch me.  I did it to myself in a 
passion, and threw myself down here.  He wasn't near me.  He never 
laid a hand upon me!"

In the white determination of her face, confronting him with this 
untruth, he saw enough of the last perversion and distortion of 
good surviving in that miserable breast, to be stricken with 
remorse that he had ever come near her.

"Sorrow, wrong, and trouble!" he muttered, turning his fearful gaze 
away.  "All that connects her with the state from which she has 
fallen, has those roots!  In the name of God, let me go by!"

Afraid to look at her again, afraid to touch her, afraid to think 
of having sundered the last thread by which she held upon the mercy 
of Heaven, he gathered his cloak about him, and glided swiftly up 
the stairs.

Opposite to him, on the landing, was a door, which stood partly 
open, and which, as he ascended, a man with a candle in his hand, 
came forward from within to shut.  But this man, on seeing him, 
drew back, with much emotion in his manner, and, as if by a sudden 
impulse, mentioned his name aloud.

In the surprise of such a recognition there, he stopped, 
endeavouring to recollect the wan and startled face.  He had no 
time to consider it, for, to his yet greater amazement, old Philip 
came out of the room, and took him by the hand.

"Mr. Redlaw," said the old man, "this is like you, this is like 
you, sir! you have heard of it, and have come after us to render 
any help you can.  Ah, too late, too late!"

Redlaw, with a bewildered look, submitted to be led into the room.  
A man lay there, on a truckle-bed, and William Swidger stood at the 
bedside.

"Too late!" murmured the old man, looking wistfully into the 
Chemist's face; and the tears stole down his cheeks.

"That's what I say, father," interposed his son in a low voice.  
"That's where it is, exactly.  To keep as quiet as ever we can 
while he's a dozing, is the only thing to do.  You're right, 
father!"

Redlaw paused at the bedside, and looked down on the figure that 
was stretched upon the mattress.  It was that of a man, who should 
have been in the vigour of his life, but on whom it was not likely 
the sun would ever shine again.  The vices of his forty or fifty 
years' career had so branded him, that, in comparison with their 
effects upon his face, the heavy hand of Time upon the old man's 
face who watched him had been merciful and beautifying.

"Who is this?" asked the Chemist, looking round.

"My son George, Mr. Redlaw," said the old man, wringing his hands.  
"My eldest son, George, who was more his mother's pride than all 
the rest!"

Redlaw's eyes wandered from the old man's grey head, as he laid it 
down upon the bed, to the person who had recognised him, and who 
had kept aloof, in the remotest corner of the room.  He seemed to 
be about his own age; and although he knew no such hopeless decay 
and broken man as he appeared to be, there was something in the 
turn of his figure, as he stood with his back towards him, and now 
went out at the door, that made him pass his hand uneasily across 
his brow.

"William," he said in a gloomy whisper, "who is that man?"

"Why you see, sir," returned Mr. William, "that's what I say, 
myself.  Why should a man ever go and gamble, and the like of that, 
and let himself down inch by inch till he can't let himself down 
any lower!"

"Has HE done so?" asked Redlaw, glancing after him with the same 
uneasy action as before.

"Just exactly that, sir," returned William Swidger, "as I'm told.  
He knows a little about medicine, sir, it seems; and having been 
wayfaring towards London with my unhappy brother that you see 
here," Mr. William passed his coat-sleeve across his eyes, "and 
being lodging up stairs for the night - what I say, you see, is 
that