The Phantom, which had held its bloodless hand above him while it spoke, as if in some unholy invocation, or some ban; and which had gradually advanced its eyes so close to his, that he could see how they did not partic.i.p.ate in the terrible smile upon its face, but were a fixed, unalterable, steady horror melted before him and was gone.
As he stood rooted to the spot, possessed by fear and wonder, and imagining he heard repeated in melancholy echoes, dying away fainter and fainter, the words, "Destroy its like in all whom you approach!" a shrill cry reached his ears. It came, not from the pa.s.sages beyond the door, but from another part of the old building, and sounded like the cry of some one in the dark who had lost the way.
He looked confusedly upon his hands and limbs, as if to be a.s.sured of his ident.i.ty, and then shouted in reply, loudly and wildly; for there was a strangeness and terror upon him, as if he too were lost.
The cry responding, and being nearer, he caught up the lamp, and raised a heavy curtain in the wall, by which he was accustomed to pa.s.s into and out of the theatre where he lectured,--which adjoined his room. a.s.sociated with youth and animation, and a high amphitheatre of faces which his entrance charmed to interest in a moment, it was a ghostly place when all this life was faded out of it, and stared upon him like an emblem of Death.
"Halloa!" he cried. "Halloa! This way! Come to the light!"
When, as he held the curtain with one hand, and with the other raised the lamp and tried to pierce the gloom that filled the place, something rushed past him into the room like a wild-cat, and crouched down in a corner.
"What is it?" he said, hastily.
He might have asked "What is it?" even had he seen it well, as presently he did when he stood looking at it gathered up in its corner.
A bundle of tatters, held together by a hand, in size and form almost an infant"s, but in its greedy, desperate little clutch, a bad old man"s. A face rounded and smoothed by some half-dozen years, but pinched and twisted by the experiences of a life.
Bright eyes, but not youthful. Naked feet, beautiful in their childish delicacy,--ugly in the blood and dirt that cracked upon them. A baby savage, a young monster, a child who had never been a child, a creature who might live to take the outward form of man, but who, within, would live and perish a mere beast.
Used, already, to be worried and hunted like a beast, the boy crouched down as he was looked at, and looked back again, and interposed his arm to ward off the expected blow.
"I"ll bite," he said, "if you hit me!"
The time had been, and not many minutes since, when such a sight as this would have wrung the Chemist"s heart. He looked upon it now, coldly; but with a heavy effort to remember something--he did not know what--he asked the boy what he did there, and whence he came.
"Where"s the woman?" he replied. "I want to find the woman."
"Who?"
"The woman. Her that brought me here, and set me by the large fire. She was so long gone, that I went to look for her, and lost myself. I don"t want you. I want the woman."
He made a spring, so suddenly, to get away, that the dull sound of his naked feet upon the floor was near the curtain, when Redlaw caught him by his rags.
"Come! you let me go!" muttered the boy, struggling, and clenching his teeth. "I"ve done nothing to you. Let me go, will you, to the woman!"
"That is not the way. There is a nearer one," said Redlaw, detaining him, in the same blank effort to remember some a.s.sociation that ought, of right, to bear upon this monstrous object. "What is your name?"
"Got none."
"Where do you live?
"Live! What"s that?"
The boy shook his hair from his eyes to look at him for a moment, and then, twisting round his legs and wrestling with him, broke again into his repet.i.tion of "You let me go, will you? I want to find the woman."
The Chemist led him to the door. "This way," he said, looking at him still confusedly, but with repugnance and avoidance, growing out of his coldness. "I"ll take you to her."
The sharp eyes in the child"s head, wandering round the room, lighted on the table where the remnants of the dinner were.
"Give me some of that!" he said, covetously.
"Has she not fed you?"
"I shall be hungry again to-morrow, sha"n"t I? Ain"t I hungry every day?"
Finding himself released, he bounded at the table like some small animal of prey, and hugging to his breast bread and meat, and his own rags, all together, said:
"There! Now take me to the woman!"
As the Chemist, with a new-born dislike to touch him, sternly motioned him to follow, and was going out of the door, he trembled and stopped.
"The gift that I have given, you shall give again, go where you will!"
The Phantom"s words were blowing in the wind, and the wind blew chill upon him.
"I"ll not go there, to-night," he murmured faintly. "I"ll go nowhere to-night. Boy! straight down this long-arched pa.s.sage, and past the great dark door into the yard,--you see the fire shining on the window there."
"The woman"s fire?" inquired the boy.
He nodded, and the naked feet had sprung away. He came back with his lamp, locked his door hastily, and sat down in his chair, covering his face like one who was frightened at himself.
For now he was, indeed, alone. Alone, alone.
CHAPTER II--The Gift Diffused
A small man sat in a small parlour, part.i.tioned off from a small shop by a small screen, pasted all over with small sc.r.a.ps of newspapers. In company with the small man, was almost any amount of small children you may please to name--at least it seemed so; they made, in that very limited sphere of action, such an imposing effect, in point of numbers.
Of these small fry, two had, by some strong machinery, been got into bed in a corner, where they might have reposed snugly enough in the sleep of innocence, but for a const.i.tutional propensity to keep awake, and also to scuffle in and out of bed. The immediate occasion of these predatory dashes at the waking world, was the construction of an oyster-sh.e.l.l wall in a corner, by two other youths of tender age; on which fortification the two in bed made hara.s.sing descents (like those accursed Picts and Scots who beleaguer the early historical studies of most young Britons), and then withdrew to their own territory.
In addition to the stir attendant on these inroads, and the retorts of the invaded, who pursued hotly, and made lunges at the bed- clothes under which the marauders took refuge, another little boy, in another little bed, contributed his mite of confusion to the family stock, by casting his boots upon the waters; in other words, by launching these and several small objects, inoffensive in themselves, though of a hard substance considered as missiles, at the disturbers of his repose,--who were not slow to return these compliments.
Besides which, another little boy--the biggest there, but still little--was tottering to and fro, bent on one side, and considerably affected in his knees by the weight of a large baby, which he was supposed by a fiction that obtains sometimes in sanguine families, to be hushing to sleep. But oh! the inexhaustible regions of contemplation and watchfulness into which this baby"s eyes were then only beginning to compose themselves to stare, over his unconscious shoulder!
It was a very Moloch of a baby, on whose insatiate altar the whole existence of this particular young brother was offered up a daily sacrifice. Its personality may be said to have consisted in its never being quiet, in any one place, for five consecutive minutes, and never going to sleep when required. "Tetterby"s baby" was as well known in the neighbourhood as the postman or the pot-boy. It roved from door-step to door-step, in the arms of little Johnny Tetterby, and lagged heavily at the rear of troops of juveniles who followed the Tumblers or the Monkey, and came up, all on one side, a little too late for everything that was attractive, from Monday morning until Sat.u.r.day night. Wherever childhood congregated to play, there was little Moloch making Johnny f.a.g and toil. Wherever Johnny desired to stay, little Moloch became fractious, and would not remain. Whenever Johnny wanted to go out, Moloch was asleep, and must be watched. Whenever Johnny wanted to stay at home, Moloch was awake, and must be taken out. Yet Johnny was verily persuaded that it was a faultless baby, without its peer in the realm of England, and was quite content to catch meek glimpses of things in general from behind its skirts, or over its limp flapping bonnet, and to go staggering about with it like a very little porter with a very large parcel, which was not directed to anybody, and could never be delivered anywhere.
The small man who sat in the small parlour, making fruitless attempts to read his newspaper peaceably in the midst of this disturbance, was the father of the family, and the chief of the firm described in the inscription over the little shop front, by the name and t.i.tle of A. TETTERBY AND CO., NEWSMEN. Indeed, strictly speaking, he was the only personage answering to that designation, as Co. was a mere poetical abstraction, altogether baseless and impersonal.
Tetterby"s was the corner shop in Jerusalem Buildings. There was a good show of literature in the window, chiefly consisting of picture-newspapers out of date, and serial pirates, and footpads.
Walking-sticks, likewise, and marbles, were included in the stock in trade. It had once extended into the light confectionery line; but it would seem that those elegancies of life were not in demand about Jerusalem Buildings, for nothing connected with that branch of commerce remained in the window, except a sort of small gla.s.s lantern containing a languishing ma.s.s of bull"s-eyes, which had melted in the summer and congealed in the winter until all hope of ever getting them out, or of eating them without eating the lantern too, was gone for ever. Tetterby"s had tried its hand at several things. It had once made a feeble little dart at the toy business; for, in another lantern, there was a heap of minute wax dolls, all sticking together upside down, in the direst confusion, with their feet on one another"s heads, and a precipitate of broken arms and legs at the bottom. It had made a move in the millinery direction, which a few dry, wiry bonnet-shapes remained in a corner of the window to attest. It had fancied that a living might lie hidden in the tobacco trade, and had stuck up a representation of a native of each of the three integral portions of the British Empire, in the act of consuming that fragrant weed; with a poetic legend attached, importing that united in one cause they sat and joked, one chewed tobacco, one took snuff, one smoked: but nothing seemed to have come of it--except flies. Time had been when it had put a forlorn trust in imitative jewellery, for in one pane of gla.s.s there was a card of cheap seals, and another of pencil-cases, and a mysterious black amulet of inscrutable intention, labelled ninepence. But, to that hour, Jerusalem Buildings had bought none of them. In short, Tetterby"s had tried so hard to get a livelihood out of Jerusalem Buildings in one way or other, and appeared to have done so indifferently in all, that the best position in the firm was too evidently Co."s; Co., as a bodiless creation, being untroubled with the vulgar inconveniences of hunger and thirst, being chargeable neither to the poor"s-rates nor the a.s.sessed taxes, and having no young family to provide for.
Tetterby himself, however, in his little parlour, as already mentioned, having the presence of a young family impressed upon his mind in a manner too clamorous to be disregarded, or to comport with the quiet perusal of a newspaper, laid down his paper, wheeled, in his distraction, a few times round the parlour, like an undecided carrier-pigeon, made an ineffectual rush at one or two flying little figures in bed-gowns that skimmed past him, and then, bearing suddenly down upon the only unoffending member of the family, boxed the ears of little Moloch"s nurse.
"You bad boy!" said Mr. Tetterby, "haven"t you any feeling for your poor father after the fatigues and anxieties of a hard winter"s day, since five o"clock in the morning, but must you wither his rest, and corrode his latest intelligence, with YOUR wicious tricks? Isn"t it enough, sir, that your brother "Dolphus is toiling and moiling in the fog and cold, and you rolling in the lap of luxury with a--with a baby, and everything you can wish for,"
said Mr. Tetterby, heaping this up as a great climax of blessings, "but must you make a wilderness of home, and maniacs of your parents? Must you, Johnny? Hey?" At each interrogation, Mr.
Tetterby made a feint of boxing his ears again, but thought better of it, and held his hand.
"Oh, father!" whimpered Johnny, "when I wasn"t doing anything, I"m sure, but taking such care of Sally, and getting her to sleep. Oh, father!"