The Haunted Man and the Ghost's BargainDickens, Charles
General
The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain
Dickens, Charles
Christmas stories; Ghost stories
“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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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