Chapter 2

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 _my_self!”

“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 scattered
lights in the windows, and a dim lantern in the doorway, with “Lodgings
for Travellers” painted on it.

Redlaw looked about him; from the houses to the waste piece of ground on
which the houses stood, or rather did not altogether tumble down,
unfenced, undrained, unlighted, and bordered by a sluggish ditch; from
that, to the sloping line of arches, part of some neighbouring viaduct or
bridge with which it was surrounded, and which lessened gradually towards
them, until the last but one was a mere kennel for a dog, the last a
plundered little heap of bricks; from that, to the child, close to him,
cowering and trembling with the cold, and limping on one little foot,
while he coiled the other round his leg to warm it, yet staring at all
these things with that frightful likeness of expression so apparent in
his face, that Redlaw started from him.

“In there!” said the boy, pointing out the house again. “I’ll wait.”

“Will they let me in?” asked Redlaw.

“Say you’re a doctor,” he answered with a nod. “There’s plenty ill
here.”

Looking back on his way to the house-door, Redlaw saw him trail himself
upon the dust and crawl within the shelter of the smallest arch, as if he
were a rat. He had no pity for the thing, but he was afraid of it; and
when it looked out of its den at him, he hurried to the house as a
retreat.

“Sorrow, wrong, and trouble,” said the Chemist, with a painful effort at
some more distinct remembrance, “at least haunt this place darkly. He
can do no harm, who brings forgetfulness of such things here!”

With these words, he pushed the yielding door, and went in.

There was a woman sitting on the stairs, either asleep or forlorn, whose
head was bent down on her hands and knees. As it was not easy to pass
without treading on her, and as she was perfectly regardless of his near
approach, he stopped, and touched her on the shoulder. Looking up, she
showed him quite a young face, but one whose bloom and promise were all
swept away, as if the haggard winter should unnaturally kill the spring.

With little or no show of concern on his account, she moved nearer to the
wall to leave him a wider passage.

“What are you?” said Redlaw, pausing, with his hand upon the broken
stair-rail.

“What do you think I am?” she answered, showing him her face again.

He looked upon the ruined Temple of God, so lately made, so soon
disfigured; and something, which was not compassion—for the springs in
which a true compassion for such miseries has its rise, were dried up in
his breast—but which was nearer to it, for the moment, than any feeling
that had lately struggled into the darkening, but not yet wholly
darkened, night of his mind—mingled a touch of softness with his next
words.

“I am come here to give relief, if I can,” he said. “Are you thinking of
any wrong?”

She frowned at him, and then laughed; and then her laugh prolonged itself
into a shivering sigh, as she dropped her head again, and hid her fingers
in her hair.

“Are you thinking of a wrong?” he asked once more.

“I am thinking of my life,” she said, with a momentary look at him.

He had a perception that she was one of many, and that he saw the type of
thousands, when he saw her, drooping at his feet.

“What are your parents?” he demanded.

“I had a good home once. My father was a gardener, far away, in the
country.”

“Is he dead?”

“He’s dead to me. All such things are dead to me. You a gentleman, and
not know that!” She raised her eyes again, and laughed at him.

“Girl!” said Redlaw, sternly, “before this death, of all such things, was
brought about, was there no wrong done to you? In spite of all that you
can do, does no remembrance of wrong cleave to you? Are there not times
upon times when it is misery to you?”

So little of what was womanly was left in her appearance, that now, when
she burst into tears, he stood amazed. But he was more amazed, and much
disquieted, to note that in her awakened recollection of this wrong, the
first trace of her old humanity and frozen tenderness appeared to show
itself.

He drew a little off, and in doing so, observed that her arms were black,
her face cut, and her bosom bruised.

“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 strange companions come together
here sometimes—he looked in to attend upon him, and came for us at his
request. What a mournful spectacle, sir! But that’s where it is. It’s
enough to kill my father!”

Redlaw looked up, at these words, and, recalling where he was and with
whom, and the spell he carried with him—which his surprise had
obscured—retired a little, hurriedly, debating with himself whether to
shun the house that moment, or remain.

Yielding to a certain sullen doggedness, which it seemed to be a part of
his condition to struggle with, he argued for remaining.

“Was it only yesterday,” he said, “when I observed the memory of this old
man to be a tissue of sorrow and trouble, and shall I be afraid,
to-night, to shake it? Are such remembrances as I can drive away, so
precious to this dying man that I need fear for _him_? No! I’ll stay
here.”

But he stayed in fear and trembling none the less for these words; and,
shrouded in his black cloak with his face turned from them, stood away
from the bedside, listening to what they said, as if he felt himself a
demon in the place.

“Father!” murmured the sick man, rallying a little from stupor.

“My boy! My son George!” said old Philip.

“You spoke, just now, of my being mother’s favourite, long ago. It’s a
dreadful thing to think now, of long ago!”

“No, no, no;” returned the old man. “Think of it. Don’t say it’s
dreadful. It’s not dreadful to me, my son.”

“It cuts you to the heart, father.” For the old man’s tears were falling
on him.

“Yes, yes,” said Philip, “so it does; but it does me good. It’s a heavy
sorrow to think of that time, but it does me good, George. Oh, think of
it too, think of it too, and your heart will be softened more and more!
Where’s my son William? William, my boy, your mother loved him dearly to
the last, and with her latest breath said, ‘Tell him I forgave him,
blessed him, and prayed for him.’ Those were her words to me. I have
never forgotten them, and I’m eighty-seven!”

“Father!” said the man upon the bed, “I am dying, I know. I am so far
gone, that I can hardly speak, even of what my mind most runs on. Is
there any hope for me beyond this bed?”

“There is hope,” returned the old man, “for all who are softened and
penitent. There is hope for all such. Oh!” he exclaimed, clasping his
hands and looking up, “I was thankful, only yesterday, that I could
remember this unhappy son when he was an innocent child. But what a
comfort it is, now, to think that even God himself has that remembrance
of him!”

Redlaw spread his hands upon his face, and shrank, like a murderer.

“Ah!” feebly moaned the man upon the bed. “The waste since then, the
waste of life since then!”

“But he was a child once,” said the old man. “He played with children.
Before he lay down on his bed at night, and fell into his guiltless rest,
he said his prayers at his poor mother’s knee. I have seen him do it,
many a time; and seen her lay his head upon her breast, and kiss him.
Sorrowful as it was to her and me, to think of this, when he went so
wrong, and when our hopes and plans for him were all broken, this gave
him still a hold upon us, that nothing else could have given. Oh,
Father, so much better than the fathers upon earth! Oh, Father, so much
more afflicted by the errors of Thy children! take this wanderer back!
Not as he is, but as he was then, let him cry to Thee, as he has so often
seemed to cry to us!”

As the old man lifted up his trembling hands, the son, for whom he made
the supplication, laid his sinking head against him for support and
comfort, as if he were indeed the child of whom he spoke.

When did man ever tremble, as Redlaw trembled, in the silence that
ensued! He knew it must come upon them, knew that it was coming fast.

“My time is very short, my breath is shorter,” said the sick man,
supporting himself on one arm, and with the other groping in the air,
“and I remember there is something on my mind concerning the man who was
here just now, Father and William—wait!—is there really anything in
black, out there?”

“Yes, yes, it is real,” said his aged father.

“Is it a man?”

“What I say myself, George,” interposed his brother, bending kindly over
him. “It’s Mr. Redlaw.”

“I thought I had dreamed of him. Ask him to come here.”

The Chemist, whiter than the dying man, appeared before him. Obedient to
the motion of his hand, he sat upon the bed.

“It has been so ripped up, to-night, sir,” said the sick man, laying his
hand upon his heart, with a look in which the mute, imploring agony of
his condition was concentrated, “by the sight of my poor old father, and
the thought of all the trouble I have been the cause of, and all the
wrong and sorrow lying at my door, that—”

Was it the extremity to which he had come, or was it the dawning of
another change, that made him stop?

“—that what I _can_ do right, with my mind running on so much, so fast,
I’ll try to do. There was another man here. Did you see him?”

Redlaw could not reply by any word; for when he saw that fatal sign he
knew so well now, of the wandering hand upon the forehead, his voice died
at his lips. But he made some indication of assent.

“He is penniless, hungry, and destitute. He is completely beaten down,
and has no resource at all. Look after him! Lose no time! I know he
has it in his mind to kill himself.”

It was working. It was on his face. His face was changing, hardening,
deepening in all its shades, and losing all its sorrow.

“Don’t you remember? Don’t you know him?” he pursued.

He shut his face out for a moment, with the hand that again wandered over
his forehead, and then it lowered on Redlaw, reckless, ruffianly, and
callous.

“Why, d-n you!” he said, scowling round, “what have you been doing to me
here! I have lived bold, and I mean to die bold. To the Devil with
you!”

And so lay down upon his bed, and put his arms up, over his head and
ears, as resolute from that time to keep out all access, and to die in
his indifference.

If Redlaw had been struck by lightning, it could not have struck him from
the bedside with a more tremendous shock. But the old man, who had left
the bed while his son was speaking to him, now returning, avoided it
quickly likewise, and with abhorrence.

“Where’s my boy William?” said the old man hurriedly. “William, come
away from here. We’ll go home.”

“Home, father!” returned William. “Are you going to leave your own son?”

“Where’s my own son?” replied the old man.

“Where? why, there!”

“That’s no son of mine,” said Philip, trembling with resentment. “No
such wretch as that, has any claim on me. My children are pleasant to
look at, and they wait upon me, and get my meat and drink ready, and are
useful to me. I’ve a right to it! I’m eighty-seven!”

“You’re old enough to be no older,” muttered William, looking at him
grudgingly, with his hands in his pockets. “I don’t know what good you
are, myself. We could have a deal more pleasure without you.”

“_My_ son, Mr. Redlaw!” said the old man. “_My_ son, too! The boy
talking to me of _my_ son! Why, what has he ever done to give me any
pleasure, I should like to know?”

“I don’t know what you have ever done to give _me_ any pleasure,” said
William, sulkily.

“Let me think,” said the old man. “For how many Christmas times running,
have I sat in my warm place, and never had to come out in the cold night
air; and have made good cheer, without being disturbed by any such
uncomfortable, wretched sight as him there? Is it twenty, William?”

“Nigher forty, it seems,” he muttered. “Why, when I look at my father,
sir, and come to think of it,” addressing Redlaw, with an impatience and
irritation that were quite new, “I’m whipped if I can see anything in him
but a calendar of ever so many years of eating and drinking, and making
himself comfortable, over and over again.”

“I—I’m eighty-seven,” said the old man, rambling on, childishly and
weakly, “and I don’t know as I ever was much put out by anything. I’m
not going to begin now, because of what he calls my son. He’s not my
son. I’ve had a power of pleasant times. I recollect once—no I
don’t—no, it’s broken off. It was something about a game of cricket and
a friend of mine, but it’s somehow broken off. I wonder who he was—I
suppose I liked him? And I wonder what became of him—I suppose he died?
But I don’t know. And I don’t care, neither; I don’t care a bit.”

In his drowsy chuckling, and the shaking of his head, he put his hands
into his waistcoat pockets. In one of them he found a bit of holly (left
there, probably last night), which he now took out, and looked at.

“Berries, eh?” said the old man. “Ah! It’s a pity they’re not good to
eat. I recollect, when I was a little chap about as high as that, and
out a walking with—let me see—who was I out a walking with?—no, I don’t
remember how that was. I don’t remember as I ever walked with any one
particular, or cared for any one, or any one for me. Berries, eh?
There’s good cheer when there’s berries. Well; I ought to have my share
of it, and to be waited on, and kept warm and comfortable; for I’m
eighty-seven, and a poor old man. I’m eigh-ty-seven. Eigh-ty-seven!”

The drivelling, pitiable manner in which, as he repeated this, he nibbled
at the leaves, and spat the morsels out; the cold, uninterested eye with
which his youngest son (so changed) regarded him; the determined apathy
with which his eldest son lay hardened in his sin; impressed themselves
no more on Redlaw’s observation,—for he broke his way from the spot to
which his feet seemed to have been fixed, and ran out of the house.

His guide came crawling forth from his place of refuge, and was ready for
him before he reached the arches.

“Back to the woman’s?” he inquired.

“Back, quickly!” answered Redlaw. “Stop nowhere on the way!”

For a short distance the boy went on before; but their return was more
like a flight than a walk, and it was as much as his bare feet could do,
to keep pace with the Chemist’s rapid strides. Shrinking from all who
passed, shrouded in his cloak, and keeping it drawn closely about him, as
though there were mortal contagion in any fluttering touch of his
garments, he made no pause until they reached the door by which they had
come out. He unlocked it with his key, went in, accompanied by the boy,
and hastened through the dark passages to his own chamber.

The boy watched him as he made the door fast, and withdrew behind the
table, when he looked round.

“Come!” he said. “Don’t you touch me! You’ve not brought me here to
take my money away.”

Redlaw threw some more upon the ground. He flung his body on it
immediately, as if to hide it from him, lest the sight of it should tempt
him to reclaim it; and not until he saw him seated by his lamp, with his
face hidden in his hands, began furtively to pick it up. When he had
done so, he crept near the fire, and, sitting down in a great chair
before it, took from his breast some broken scraps of food, and fell to
munching, and to staring at the blaze, and now and then to glancing at
his shillings, which he kept clenched up in a bunch, in one hand.

“And this,” said Redlaw, gazing on him with increased repugnance and
fear, “is the only one companion I have left on earth!”

How long it was before he was aroused from his contemplation of this
creature, whom he dreaded so—whether half-an-hour, or half the night—he
knew not. But the stillness of the room was broken by the boy (whom he
had seen listening) starting up, and running towards the door.

“Here’s the woman coming!” he exclaimed.

The Chemist stopped him on his way, at the moment when she knocked.

“Let me go to her, will you?” said the boy.

“Not now,” returned the Chemist. “Stay here. Nobody must pass in or out
of the room now. Who’s that?”

“It’s I, sir,” cried Milly. “Pray, sir, let me in!”

“No! not for the world!” he said.

“Mr. Redlaw, Mr. Redlaw, pray, sir, let me in.”

“What is the matter?” he said, holding the boy.

“The miserable man you saw, is worse, and nothing I can say will wake him
from his terrible infatuation. William’s father has turned childish in a
moment, William himself is changed. The shock has been too sudden for
him; I cannot understand him; he is not like himself. Oh, Mr. Redlaw,
pray advise me, help me!”

“No! No! No!” he answered.

“Mr. Redlaw! Dear sir! George has been muttering, in his doze, about
the man you saw there, who, he fears, will kill himself.”

“Better he should do it, than come near me!”

“He says, in his wandering, that you know him; that he was your friend
once, long ago; that he is the ruined father of a student here—my mind
misgives me, of the young gentleman who has been ill. What is to be
done? How is he to be followed? How is he to be saved? Mr. Redlaw,
pray, oh, pray, advise me! Help me!”

All this time he held the boy, who was half-mad to pass him, and let her
in.

“Phantoms! Punishers of impious thoughts!” cried Redlaw, gazing round in
anguish, “look upon me! From the darkness of my mind, let the glimmering
of contrition that I know is there, shine up and show my misery! In the
material world as I have long taught, nothing can be spared; no step or
atom in the wondrous structure could be lost, without a blank being made
in the great universe. I know, now, that it is the same with good and
evil, happiness and sorrow, in the memories of men. Pity me! Relieve
me!”

There was no response, but her “Help me, help me, let me in!” and the
boy’s struggling to get to her.

“Shadow of myself! Spirit of my darker hours!” cried Redlaw, in
distraction, “come back, and haunt me day and night, but take this gift
away! Or, if it must still rest with me, deprive me of the dreadful
power of giving it to others. Undo what I have done. Leave me
benighted, but restore the day to those whom I have cursed. As I have
spared this woman from the first, and as I never will go forth again, but
will die here, with no hand to tend me, save this creature’s who is proof
against me,—hear me!”

The only reply still was, the boy struggling to get to her, while he held
him back; and the cry, increasing in its energy, “Help! let me in. He
was your friend once, how shall he be followed, how shall he be saved?
They are all changed, there is no one else to help me, pray, pray, let me
in!”