Dickens at Christmas (Vintage Classics)

by Charles Dickens

  ‘Shot himself.’

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘Put a double-barrelled pistol to his mouth, in his own counting-house,’ said Mr Fish, ‘and blew his brains out. No motive. Princely circumstances!’

  ‘Circumstances!’ exclaimed the Alderman. ‘A man of noble fortune. One of the most respectable of men. Suicide, Mr Fish! By his own hand!’

  ‘This very morning,’ returned Mr Fish.

  ‘Oh the brain, the brain!’ exclaimed the pious Alderman, lifting up his hands. ‘Oh the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this machine called Man! Oh the little that unhinges it: poor creatures that we are! Perhaps a dinner, Mr Fish. Perhaps the conduct of his son, who, I have heard, ran very wild, and was in the habit of drawing bills upon him without the least authority! A most respectable man. One of the most respectable men I ever knew! A lamentable instance, Mr Fish. A public calamity! I shall make a point of wearing the deepest mourning. A most respectable man! But there is One above. We must submit, Mr Fish. We must submit!’

  What, Alderman! No word of Putting Down? Remember, Justice, your high moral boast and pride. Come, Alderman! Balance those scales. Throw me into this, the empty one, No Dinner, and Nature’s Founts in some poor woman, dried by starving misery and rendered obdurate to claims for which her offspring has authority in holy mother Eve. Weigh me the two: you Daniel, going to judgment, when your day shall come! Weigh them, in the eyes of suffering thousands, audience (not unmindful) of the grim farce you play. Or supposing that you strayed from your five wits – it’s not so far to go, but that it might be – and laid hands upon that throat of yours, warning your fellows (if you have a fellow) how they croak their comfortable wickedness to raving heads and stricken hearts. What then?

  The words rose up in Trotty’s breast, as if they had been spoken by some other voice within him. Alderman Cute pledged himself to Mr Fish that he would assist him in breaking the melancholy catastrophe to Sir Joseph, when the day was over. Then, before they parted, wringing Mr Fish’s hand in bitterness of soul, he said, ‘The most respectable of men!’ And added that he hardly knew: not even he: why such afflictions were allowed on earth.

  ‘It’s almost enough to make one think, if one didn’t know better,’ said Alderman Cute, ‘that at times some motion of a capsizing nature was going on in things, which affected the general economy of the social fabric. Deedles Brothers!’

  The skittle-playing came off with immense success. Sir Joseph knocked the pins about quite skilfully; Master Bowley took an innings at a shorter distance also; and everybody said that now, when a Baronet and the Son of a Baronet played at skittles, the country was coming round again, as fast as it could come.

  At its proper time, the Banquet was served up. Trotty involuntarily repaired to the Hall with the rest, for he felt himself conducted thither by some stronger impulse than his own free will. The sight was gay in the extreme; the ladies were very handsome; the visitors delighted, cheerful, and good-tempered. When the lower doors were opened, and the people flocked in, in their rustic dresses, the beauty of the spectacle was at its height; but Trotty only murmured more and more, ‘Where is Richard? He should help and comfort her! I can’t see Richard!’

  There had been some speeches made; and Lady Bowley’s health had been proposed; and Sir Joseph Bowley had returned thanks, and had made his great speech, showing by various pieces of evidence that he was the born Friend and Father, and so forth; and had given as a Toast, his Friends and Children, and the Dignity of Labour; when a slight disturbance at the bottom of the Hall attracted Toby’s notice. After some confusion, noise, and opposition, one man broke through the rest, and stood forward by himself.

  Not Richard. No. But one whom he had thought of, and had looked for, many times. In a scantier supply of light, he might have doubted the identity of that worn man, so old, and grey, and bent; but with a blaze of lamps upon his gnarled and knotted head, he knew Will Fern as soon as he stepped forth.

  ‘What is this!’ exclaimed Sir Joseph, rising. ‘Who gave this man admittance? This is a criminal from prison! Mr Fish, Sir, will you have the goodness –’

  ‘A minute!’ said Will Fern. ‘A minute! My Lady, you was born on this day along with a New Year. Get me a minute’s leave to speak.’

  She made some intercession for him and Sir Joseph took his seat again, with native dignity.

  The ragged visitor – for he was miserably dressed – looked round upon the company, and made his homage to them with a humble bow.

  ‘Gentlefolks!’ he said. ‘You’ve drunk the Labourer. Look at me!’

  ‘Just come from jail,’ said Mr Fish.

  ‘Just come from jail,’ said Will. ‘And neither for the first time, nor the second, not the third, nor yet the fourth.’

  Mr Filer was heard to remark testily, that four times was over the average; and he ought to be ashamed of himself.

  ‘Gentlefolks!’ repeated Will Fern. ‘Look at me! You see I’m at the worst. Beyond all hurt or harm; beyond your help; for the time when your kind words or kind actions could have done ME good,’ – he struck his hand upon his breast, and shook his head, ‘is gone, with the scent of last year’s beans or clover on the air. Let me say a word for these,’ pointing to the labouring people in the hall; ‘and when you’re met together, hear the real Truth spoke out for once.’

  ‘There’s not a man here,’ said the host, ‘who would have him for a spokesman.’

  ‘Like enough, Sir Joseph. I believe it. Not the less true, perhaps, is what I say. Perhaps that’s a proof on it. Gentlefolks, I’ve lived many a year in this place. You may see the cottage from the sunk fence over yonder. I’ve seen the ladies draw it in their books a hundred times. It looks well in a picter, I’ve heerd say; but there an’t weather in picters, and may-be ’tis fitter for that, than for a place to live in. Well! I lived there. How hard – how bitter hard, I lived there, I won’t say. Any day in the year, and every day, you can judge for your own selves.’

  He spoke as he had spoken on the night when Trotty found him in the street. His voice was deeper and more husky, and had a trembling in it now and then; but he never raised it, passionately, and seldom lifted it above the firm stern level of the homely facts he stated.

  ‘’Tis harder than you think for, gentlefolks, to grow up decent: commonly decent: in such a place. That I growed up a man and not a brute, says something for me – as I was then. As I am now, there’s nothing can be said for me or done for me. I’m past it.’

  ‘I am glad this man has entered,’ observed Sir Joseph, looking round serenely. ‘Don’t disturb him. It appears to be Ordained. He is an Example: a living example. I hope and trust, and confidently expect, that it will not be lost upon my Friends here.’

  ‘I dragged on,’ said Fern, after a moment’s silence, ‘somehow. Neither me nor any other man knows how; but so heavy, that I couldn’t put a cheerful face upon it, or make believe that I was anything but what I was. Now, gentlemen – you gentlemen that sits at Sessions – when you see a man with discontent writ on his face, you says to one another, “he’s suspicious. I has my doubts,” says you, “about Will Fern. Watch that fellow!” I don’t say, gentlemen, it ain’t quite nat’ral, but I say ’tis so; and from that hour, whatever Will Fern does, or lets alone – all one – it goes against him.’

  Alderman Cute stuck his thumbs in his waistcoat-pockets, and leaning back in his chair, and smiling, winked at a neighbouring chandelier. As much as to say, ‘Of course! I told you so. The common cry! Lord bless you, we are up to all this sort of thing – myself and human nature.’

  ‘Now, gentlemen,’ said Will Fern, holding out his hands, and flushing for an instant in his haggard face. ‘See how your laws are made to trap and hunt us when we’re brought to this. I tries to live elsewhere. And I’m a vagabond. To jail with him! I comes back here. I goes a-nutting in your woods, and breaks – who don’t? – a limber branch or two. To jail with him! One of your keepers sees me in the broad day, near my own patch of
garden, with a gun. To jail with him! I has a nat’ral angry word with that man, when I’m free again. To jail with him! I cuts a stick. To jail with him! I eats a rotten apple or a turnip. To jail with him! It’s twenty mile away; and coming back, I begs a trifle on the road. To jail with him! At last, the constable, the keeper – anybody – finds me anywhere, a doing anything. To jail with him, for he’s a vagrant, and a jail-bird known; and jail’s the only home he’s got.’

  The Alderman nodded sagaciously, as who should say, ‘A very good home too!’

  ‘Do I say this to serve MY cause!’ cried Fern. ‘Who can give me back my liberty, who can give me back my good name, who can give me back my innocent niece? Not all the Lords and Ladies in wide England. But, gentlemen, gentlemen, dealing with other men like me, begin at the right end. Give us, in mercy, better homes when we’re a lying in our cradles; give us better food when we’re a working for our lives; give us kinder laws to bring us back when we’re a going wrong; and don’t set Jail, Jail, Jail, afore us, everywhere we turn. There an’t a condescension you can show the Labourer then, that he won’t take, as ready and as grateful as a man can be; for he has a patient, peaceful, willing heart. But you must put his rightful spirit in him first; for whether he’s a wreck and ruin such as me, or is like one of them that stand here now, his spirit is divided from you at this time. Bring it back, gentlefolks, bring it back! Bring it back, afore the day comes when even his Bible changes in his altered mind, and the words seem to him to read, as they have sometimes read in my own eyes – in Jail: “Whither thou goest, I can Not go; where thou lodgest, I do Not lodge; thy people are Not my people; Nor thy God my God!”’

  A sudden stir and agitation took place in the Hall. Trotty thought at first, that several had risen to eject the man; and hence this change in its appearance. But another moment showed him that the room and all the company had vanished from his sight, and that his daughter was again before him, seated at her work. But in a poorer, meaner garret than before; and with no Lilian by her side.

  The frame at which she had worked, was put away upon a shelf and covered up. The chair in which she had sat, was turned against the wall. A history was written in these little things, and in Meg’s grief-worn face. Oh! who could fail to read it!

  Meg strained her eyes upon her work until it was too dark to see the threads; and when the night closed in, she lighted her feeble candle and worked on. Still her old father was invisible about her; looking down upon her; loving her – how dearly loving her! – and talking to her in a tender voice about the old times, and the Bells. Though he knew, poor Trotty, though he knew she could not hear him.

  A great part of the evening had worn away, when a knock came at her door. She opened it. A man was on the threshold. A slouching, moody, drunken sloven: wasted by intemperance and vice: and with his matted hair and unshorn beard in wild disorder: but with some traces on him, too, of having been a man of good proportion and good features in his youth.

  He stopped until he had her leave to enter; and she, retiring a pace or two from the open door, silently and sorrowfully looked upon him. Trotty had his wish. He saw Richard.

  ‘May I come in, Margaret?’

  ‘Yes! Come in. Come in!’

  It was well that Trotty knew him before he spoke; for with any doubt remaining on his mind, the harsh discordant voice would have persuaded him that it was not Richard but some other man.

  There were but two chairs in the room. She gave him hers, and stood at some short distance from him, waiting to hear what he had to say.

  He sat, however, staring vacantly at the floor; with a lustreless and stupid smile. A spectacle of such deep degradation, of such abject hopelessness, of such a miserable downfall, that she put her hands before her face and turned away, lest he should see how much it moved her.

  Roused by the rustling of her dress, or some such trifling sound, he lifted his head, and began to speak as if there had been no pause since he entered.

  ‘Still at work, Margaret? You work late.’

  ‘I generally do.’

  ‘And early?’

  ‘And early.’

  ‘So she said. She said you never tired; or never owned that you tired. Not all the time you lived together. Not even when you fainted, between work and fasting. But I told you that, the last time I came.’

  ‘You did,’ she answered. ‘Again I implored you to tell me nothing more; and you made me a solemn promise, Richard, that you never would.’

  ‘A solemn promise,’ he repeated, with a drivelling laugh and vacant stare. ‘A solemn promise. To be sure. A solemn promise!’ Awakening, as it were, after a time; in the same manner as before; he said with sudden animation,

  ‘How can I help it, Margaret? What am I to do? She has been to me again!’

  ‘Again!’ cried Meg, clasping her hands. ‘Oh, does she think of me so often! Has she been again!’

  ‘Twenty times again,’ said Richard. ‘Margaret, she haunts me. She comes behind me in the streets, and thrusts it in my hand. I hear her foot upon the ashes when I’m at my work (ha, ha! that an’t often), and before I can turn my head, her voice is in my ear, saying, “Richard, don’t look round. For heaven’s love, give her this!” She brings it where I live; she sends it in letters; she taps at the window and lays it on the sill. What can I do? Look at it!’

  He held out in his hand a little purse, and clinked the money it enclosed.

  ‘Hide it,’ said Meg. ‘Hide it! When she comes again, tell her, Richard, that I love her in my soul. That I never lie down to sleep, but I bless her, and pray for her. That in my solitary work, I never cease to have her in my thoughts. That she is with me, night and day. That if I died tomorrow, I would remember her with my last breath. But that I cannot look upon it!’

  He slowly recalled his hand, and crushing the purse together, said with a kind of drowsy thoughtfulness:

  ‘I told her so. I told her so, as plain as words could speak. I’ve taken this gift back and left it at her door, a dozen times since then. But when she came at last, and stood before me, face to face, what could I do?’

  ‘You saw her!’ exclaimed Meg. ‘You saw her! Oh, Lilian, my sweet girl! Oh, Lilian, Lilian!’

  ‘I saw her,’ he went on to say, not answering, but engaged in the same slow pursuit of his own thoughts. ‘There she stood: trembling! “How does she look, Richard? Does she ever speak of me? Is she thinner? My old place at the table: what’s in my old place? And the frame she taught me our old work on – has she burnt it, Richard?” There she was. I heard her say it.’

  Meg checked her sobs, and with the tears streaming from her eyes, bent over him to listen. Not to lose a breath.

  With his arms resting on his knees; and stooping forward in his chair, as if what he said were written on the ground in some half legible character, which it was his occupation to decipher and connect; he went on.

  ‘“Richard, I have fallen very low; and you may guess how much I have suffered in having this sent back, when I can bear to bring it in my hand to you. But you loved her once, even in my memory, dearly. Others stepped in between you; fears, and jealousies, and doubts, and vanities, estranged you from her; but you did love her, even in my memory!” I suppose I did,’ he said, interrupting himself for a moment. ‘I did! That’s neither here nor there. “Oh Richard, if you ever did; if you have any memory for what is gone and lost, take it to her once more. Once more! Tell her how I begged and prayed. Tell her how I laid my head upon your shoulder, where her own head might have lain, and was so humble to you, Richard. Tell her that you looked into my face, and saw the beauty which she used to praise, all gone: all gone: and in its place, a poor, wan, hollow cheek, that she would weep to see. Tell her everything, and take it back, and she will not refuse again. She will not have the heart!”’

  So he sat musing, and repeating the last words, until he woke again, and rose.

  ‘You won’t take it, Margaret?’

  She shook her head, and motioned an entreaty t
o him to leave her.

  ‘Good night, Margaret.’

  ‘Good night!’

  He turned to look upon her; struck by her sorrow, and perhaps by the pity for himself which trembled in her voice. It was a quick and rapid action; and for the moment some flash of his old bearing kindled in his form. In the next he went as he had come. Nor did this glimmer of a quenched fire seem to light him to a quicker sense of his debasement.

  In any mood, in any grief, in any torture of the mind or body, Meg’s work must be done. She sat down to her task, and plied it. Night, midnight. Still she worked.

  She had a meagre fire, the night being very cold; and rose at intervals to mend it. The Chimes rang half-past twelve while she was thus engaged; and when they ceased she heard a gentle knocking at the door. Before she could so much as wonder who was there, at that unusual hour, it opened.

  Oh Youth and Beauty, happy as ye should be, look at this! Oh Youth and Beauty, blest and blessing all within your reach, and working out the ends of your Beneficent Creator, look at this!

  She saw the entering figure; screamed its name; cried ‘Lilian!’

  It was swift, and fell upon its knees before her: clinging to her dress.

  ‘Up, dear! Up! Lilian! My own dearest!’

  ‘Never more, Meg; never more! Here! Here! Close to you, holding to you, feeling your dear breath upon my face!’

  ‘Sweet Lilian! Darling Lilian! Child of my heart – no mother’s love can be more tender – lay your head upon my breast!’

  ‘Never more, Meg. Never more! When I first looked into your face, you knelt before me. On my knees before you, let me die. Let it be here!’

  ‘You have come back. My Treasure! We will live together, work together, hope together, die together!’

  ‘Ah! Kiss my lips, Meg; fold your arms about me; press me to your bosom; look kindly on me; but don’t raise me. Let it be here. Let me see the last of your dear face upon my knees!’

  Oh Youth and Beauty, happy as ye should be, look at this! Oh Youth and Beauty, working out the ends of your Beneficent Creator, look at this!