The Haunted Man and the Ghosts Bargain

The Haunted Man and the
Ghost's Bargain

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Bargin
by Charles Dickens (#6 in our series by Charles Dickens)
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Title: The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin

Author: Charles Dickens
Release Date: September, 1996 [EBook #644] [This file was first
posted on September 11, 1996] [Most recently updated: September 2,
2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE
HAUNTED MAN ***

Transcribed from the 1907 J. M. Dent and Co. edition by David Price,
email [email protected]

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