A Christmas Carol | Page 8

spectre's voice disturbed the very marrow in his
bones.
To sit staring at those fixed glazed eyes in silence, for a moment, would
play, Scrooge felt, the very deuce with him. There was something very
awful, too, in the spectre's being provided with an infernal atmosphere
of his own. Scrooge could not feel it himself, but this was clearly the
case; for though the Ghost sat perfectly motionless, its hair, and skirts,
and tassels were still agitated as by the hot vapour from an oven.
"You see this toothpick?" said Scrooge, returning quickly to the charge,
for the reason just assigned; and wishing, though it were only for a
second, to divert the vision's stony gaze from himself.
"I do," replied the Ghost.
"You are not looking at it," said Scrooge.
"But I see it," said the Ghost, "notwithstanding."
"Well!" returned Scrooge, "I have but to swallow this, and be for the

rest of my days persecuted by a legion of goblins, all of my own
creation. Humbug, I tell you; humbug!"
At this the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook its chain with such a
dismal and appalling noise, that Scrooge held on tight to his chair, to
save himself from falling in a swoon. But how much greater was his
horror when the phantom, taking off the bandage round his head, as if it
were too warm to wear indoors, its lower jaw dropped down upon its
breast!
Scrooge fell upon his knees, and clasped his hands before his face.
"Mercy!" he said. "Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?"
"Man of the worldly mind!" replied the Ghost, "do you believe in me or
not?"
"I do," said Scrooge. "I must. But why do spirits walk the earth, and
why do they come to me?"
[Illustration: To sit staring at those fixed glazed eyes in silence, for a
moment, would play, Scrooge felt, the very deuce with him.]
"It is required of every man," the Ghost returned, "that the spirit within
him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide;
and, if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after
death. It is doomed to wander through the world--oh, woe is me!--and
witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and
turned to happiness!"
Again the spectre raised a cry, and shook its chain and wrung its
shadowy hands.
"You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell me why?"
"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by
link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free-will, and of my
own free-will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?"

Scrooge trembled more and more.
"Or would you know," pursued the Ghost, "the weight and length of the
strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this,
seven Christmas-eves ago. You have laboured on it since. It is a
ponderous chain!"
Scrooge glanced about him on the floor, in the expectation of finding
himself surrounded by some fifty or sixty fathoms of iron cable, but he
could see nothing.
"Jacob!" he said imploringly. "Old Jacob Marley, tell me more! Speak
comfort to me, Jacob!"
"I have none to give," the Ghost replied. "It comes from other regions,
Ebenezer Scrooge, and is conveyed by other ministers, to other kinds of
men. Nor can I tell you what I would. A very little more is all permitted
to me. I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I cannot linger anywhere. My spirit
never walked beyond our counting-house--mark me;--in life my spirit
never roved beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing hole; and
weary journeys lie before me!"
It was a habit with Scrooge, whenever he became thoughtful, to put his
hands in his breeches pockets. Pondering on what the Ghost had said,
he did so now, but without lifting up his eyes, or getting off his knees.
"You must have been very slow about it, Jacob," Scrooge observed in a
business-like manner, though with humility and deference.
"Slow!" the Ghost repeated.
"Seven years dead," mused Scrooge. "And travelling all the time?"
"The whole time," said the Ghost. "No rest, no peace. Incessant torture
of remorse."
"You travel fast?" said Scrooge.
"On the wings of the wind," replied the Ghost.

"You might have got over a great quantity of ground in seven years,"
said Scrooge.
The Ghost, on hearing this, set up another cry, and clanked its chain so
hideously in the dead silence of the night, that the Ward would have
been justified in indicting it for a nuisance.
"Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed," cried the phantom, "not to
know that ages of incessant labour, by immortal creatures, for this earth
must pass into