The Haunted Man and the Ghosts Bargain | Page 8

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