A CHRISTMAS TREE
I have been looking on, this evening, at a merry company of children assembled round
that pretty German toy, a Christmas Tree. The tree was planted in the middle of a great
round table and towered high above their heads. It was brilliantly lighted by a multitude
of little tapers, and everywhere sparkled and glittered with bright objects.
There were rosy-cheeked dolls hiding behind the green leaves, and there were real
watches (with movable hands, at least, and an endless capacity of being wound up)
dangling from innumerable twigs; there were French-polished tables, chairs, bedsteads,
wardrobes, eight-day clocks, and various other articles of domestic furniture
(wonderfully made, in tin, at Wolverhampton), perched among the boughs as if
in preparation for some fairy housekeeping; there were jolly, broad-faced little men,
much more agreeable in appearance than many real men—and no wonder, for there
heads took off and showed them to be full of sugar plums; there were fiddles
and drums; there were tambourines, books, work-boxes, paint-boxes,
sweetmeat- boxes, peep-show boxes, and all kinds of boxes; there were trinkets
for the elder girls, far brighter than any grown-up gold and jewels; there were baskets
and pincushions in all devices; there were guns, swords, and banners; there were
witches standing in enchanted rings of pasteboard to tell fortunes; there were
teetotums, humming tops, needle cases, pen wipers, smelling bottles,
conversation cards, bouquet-holders; real fruit, made artificially dazzling with gold leaf;
imitation apples, pears, and walnuts, crammed with surprises; in short, as a pretty
child before me delightedly whispered to another pretty child, her bosom friend,
“There was everything and more.”
This motley collection of odd objects clustering on the tree like a magic fruit
and flashing back the bright looks directed towards it from every side—some
of the diamond-eyes admiring it was hardly on a level with the table, and a few
were languishing in timid wonder on the bosoms of pretty mothers, aunts, and nurses
— made a lively realization of the fancies of childhood; and set me thinking about how
all the trees that grow and all the things that come into existence on the Earth have
their wild adornments at that well-remembered time.
Being now at home again and alone, the only person in the house awake, my thoughts
are drawn back by a fascination that I did not care to resist in my own childhood.
I begin to consider what we all remember best about the branches of the Christmas
Tree of our own young Christmas days, by which we climbed to real life.
Straight in the middle of the room, cramped in the freedom of its growth by no
encircling walls or soon-reached ceiling, a shadowy tree arises; and, looking up into
the dreamy brightness of its top—for I observe in this tree the singular property that
it appears to grow downward towards the earth—I look into my youngest Christmas
recollections!
All toys at first, I find. Up yonder, among the green holly and red berries, is the Tumbler
with his hands in his pockets, who wouldn’t lie down, but whenever he was put upon
the floor, persisted in rolling his fat body about until he rolled himself still and brought
those lobster eyes of his to bear upon me—when I affected to laugh very much,
but in my heart of hearts, was extremely doubtful of him.
Close beside him is that infernal snuff box, out of which there sprang a demoniacal
Counselor in a black gown, with an obnoxious head of hair and a red cloth mouth
wide open, who was not to be endured on any terms but could not be put away
either; for he used suddenly, in a highly magnified state, to fly out of Mammoth
Snuff-boxes in dreams, when least expected. Nor is the frog with cobbler’s wax
on his tail, far off; for there was no knowing where he wouldn’t jump; and when
he flew over the candle and came upon one’s hand with that spotted back—red
on a green ground—he was horrible. The cardboard lady in a blue-silk skirt was
stood up against the candlestick to dance, and whom I see on the same branch,
was milder and was beautiful, but I can’t say as much for the larger cardboard man,
who used to be hung against the wall and pulled by a string; there was a sinister
expression in that nose of his; and when he got his legs around his neck
(which he very often did), he was ghastly and not a creature to be alone with.
When did that dreadful Mask first look at me? Who put it on, and why was I
so frightened that the sight of it is an era in my life? It is not a hideous visage in itself;
it is even meant to be droll; why, then, were its stolid features so intolerable?
Surely not because it hid the wearer’s face. An apron would have done as much;
and though I should have preferred even the apron away, it would not have been
absolutely insupportable, like the mask. Was it the immovability of the mask?
The doll’s face was immovable, but I was not afraid of her. Perhaps that fixed and set
change coming over a real face infused into my quickened heart some remote
suggestion and dread of the universal change that is to come on every face and make
it still? Nothing reconciled me to it. No drummers, from whom proceeded a melancholy
chirping on the turning of a handle; no regiment of soldiers, with a mute band,
taken out of a box and fitted, one by one, upon a stiff and lazy little set of lazy- tongs;
no old woman, made of wires and a brown-paper composition, cutting up a pie for two
small children; could give me permanent comfort for a long time. Nor was it any
satisfaction to be shown the Mask and see that it was made of paper or to have it
locked up and be assured that no one wore it. The mere recollection of that fixed face,
the mere knowledge of its existence anywhere, was sufficient to awake me in the night
all perspiration and horror, with, “O, I know it’s coming! O, the mask!”
I never wondered what the dear old donkey with the panniers was—there he is!
Was made of, then! His hide was real to the touch, I recollect. And the great black
horse with the round red spots all over him—the horse that I could even get upon—
I never wondered what had brought him to that strange condition or thought
that such a horse was not commonly seen at Newmarket. The four horses
of no color next to him went into the wagon of cheeses and could be taken out
and stable under the piano; appear to have bits of fur tippet for their tails
and other bits for their manes and to stand on pegs instead of legs, but it was not
so when they were brought home for a Christmas present. They were all right, then;
neither was their harness unceremoniously nailed into their chests, as appears to be
the case now. The tinkling works of the music cart, I did find out, to be made of quill
tooth-picks and wire, and I always thought that little tumbler in his shirt sleeves,
perpetually swarming up one side of a wooden frame and coming down,
head foremost, on the other, rather a weak-minded person—though good-natured;
but the Jacob’s Ladder, next to him, was made of little squares of redwood that went
flapping and clattering over one another, each developing a different picture,
and the whole, enlivened by small bells, was a mighty marvel and a great delight.
Ah! The Doll’s house!—of which I was not proprietor, but where I visited. I don’t admire
the Houses of Parliament half so much as that stone-fronted mansion with real glass
windows and doorsteps and a real balcony—greener than I ever see now, except
at watering places, and even they afford but a poor imitation. And though it did open
all at once, the entire house front (which was a blow, I admit, as canceling the fiction
of a staircase), it was but to shut it up again, and I could believe.
Even open, there were three distinct rooms in it: a sitting room and bedroom,
elegantly furnished, and best of all, a kitchen with uncommonly soft fire- irons,
a plentiful assortment of diminutive utensils—oh, the warming pan!—and a tin man-
cook in profile, who was always going to fry two fish. What Barmecide justice have I
done to the noble feasts wherein the set of wooden platters figured, each with its own
peculiar delicacy, as a ham or turkey, glued tight onto it and garnished with
something green, which I recollect as moss! Could all the Temperance Societies
of these later days, united, give me such a tea-drinking as I have had through
the means of yonder little set of blue crockery, which really would hold liquid
(it ran out of the small wooden cask, I recollect and tasted of matches), and which
made tea and nectar. And if the two legs of the ineffectual little sugar tongs did
tumble over one another and want purpose, like Punch’s hands; what does it matter?
And if I did once shriek out, as a poisoned child, and strike the fashionable company
with consternation, by reason of having drunk a little teaspoon, inadvertently
dissolved in too hot tea, I was never the worse for it, except by a powder!
Upon the next branches of the tree, lower down, hard by the green roller and miniature
gardening tools, how thick the books begin to hang. Thin books, in themselves, at first,
but many of them, and with deliciously smooth covers of bright red or green.
What fat black letters to begin with! “A was an archer and shot at a frog.”
Of course, he was. He was an apple pie also, and there he is! He was a good many
things in his time, was A, and so were most of his friends, except X, who had so little
versatility that I never knew him to get beyond Xerxes or Xantippe—like Y, who was
always confined to a Yacht or a Yew Tree, and Z condemned forever to be a Zebra
or a Zany. But, now, the very tree itself changes and becomes a beanstalk—
the marvelous bean stalk up which Jack climbed to the Giant’s house! And now,
those dreadfully interesting, double-headed giants, with their clubs over
their shoulders, begin to stride along the boughs in a perfect throng, dragging knights
and ladies home for dinner by the hair of their heads. And Jack—how noble,
with his sword of sharpness and his shoes of swiftness! Again those old meditations
come upon me as I gaze up at him, and I debate within myself whether there was more
than one Jack (which I am loth to believe possible) or only one genuine original
admirable Jack who achieved all the recorded exploits.
Good for Christmas time is the ruddy color of the cloak, in which—the tree making
a forest of itself for her to trip through with her basket—Little Red Riding Hood comes
to me one Christmas Eve to give me information about the cruelty and treachery
of that dissembling Wolf who ate her grandmother without making any impression
on his appetite and then ate her after making that ferocious joke about his teeth.
She was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding- Hood, I should
have known perfect bliss. But, it was not to be; and there was nothing for it but to look
out the Wolf in Noah’s Ark there and put him late in the procession on the table
as a monster who was to be degraded. O, the wonderful Noah’s Ark! It was not found
seaworthy when put in a washing tub, and the animals were crammed in at the roof
and needed to have their legs well shaken down before they could be got in, even
there—and then, ten to one, but they began to tumble out at the door, which was
but imperfectly fastened with a wire latch—but what was that against it? Consider
the noble fly, a size or two smaller than the elephant.
The ladybird, the butterfly—all triumphs of art! Consider the goose, whose feet were
so small and whose balance was so indifferent that he usually tumbled forward
and knocked down all the animal creation. Consider Noah and his family, like idiotic
tobacco-stoppers; and how the leopard stuck to warm little fingers; and how the tails
of the larger animals used gradually to resolve themselves into frayed bits of string!
Hush! Again a forest and somebody up in a tree—not Robin Hood, not Valentine,
not the Yellow Dwarf (I have passed him and all Mother Bunch’s wonders, without
mention), but an Eastern King with a glittering scimitar and turban. By Allah!
Two Eastern Kings, for I see another looking over his shoulder! Down upon the grass,
at the tree’s foot, lies the full length of a coal-black Giant, stretched asleep, with his
head in a lady’s lap; and near them is a glass box, fastened with four locks of shining
steel, in which he keeps the lady prisoner when he is awake. I see the four keys on his
girdle now. The lady makes signs to the two kings in the tree, who softly descend.
It is the setting-in of the bright Arabian Nights.
Oh, now all common things become uncommon and enchanted to me. All lamps are
wonderful; all rings are talismans. Common flower pots are full of treasure, with a little
earth scattered on the top; trees are for Ali Baba to hide in; beef steaks are to throw
down into the Valley of Diamonds, that the precious stones may stick to them
and be carried by the eagles to their nests, whence the traders, with loud cries,
will scare them. Tarts are made according to the recipe of the Vizier’s son of Bussorah,
who turned pastrycook after he was set down in his drawers at the gate of Damascus;
cobblers are all Mustaphas and in the habit of sewing up people cut into four pieces,
to whom they are taken blindfolded.
Any iron ring let into stone is the entrance to a cave which only waits for the magician,
and the little fire, and the necromancy, that will make the earth shake. All the dates
imported come from the same tree as that unlucky date, with whose shell
the merchant knocked out the eye of the genie’s invisible son. All olives are
of the stock of that fresh fruit, concerning which the Commander of the Faithful
overheard the boy conduct the fictitious trial of the fraudulent olive merchant;
all apples are akin to the apple purchased (with two others) from Sultan’s gardener
for three sequins and which the tall black slave stole from the child. All dogs
are associated with the dog, really a transformed man who jumped upon the baker’s
counter and put his paw on the piece of bad money. All rice recalls the rice which
the awful lady, who was a ghoul, could only peck with grains because of her nightly
feasts in the burial place. My very rocking horse—there he is, with his nostrils turned
completely inside-out, indicative of Blood!—should have a peg in his neck, by virtue
thereof, to fly away with me, as the wooden horse did with the Prince of Persia,
in the sight of all his father’s Court.
Yes, on every object that I recognize among those upper branches of my Christmas
Tree, I see this fairy light! When I wake in bed, at daybreak, on cold, dark winter
mornings, the white snow dimly beheld outside through the frost on the window pane,
I hear Dinarzade.
“Sister, sister, if you are yet awake, I pray you finish the history of the Young King
of the Black Islands.” Scheherazade replies, “If my lord the Sultan will suffer me to live another day, sister, I will not only finish that but tell you a more wonderful story yet.”
Then, the gracious Sultan goes out, giving no orders for the execution, and we all three
breathe again.
At this height of my tree, I begin to see, cowering among the leaves—it may be born
of turkey, or of pudding, or mince pie, or of these many fancies jumbled with Robinson
Crusoe on his desert island, Philip Quarll among the monkeys, Sandford, and Merton
with Mr. Barlow, Mother Bunch, and the Mask—or it may be the result of indigestion,
assisted by imagination and over-doctoring—a prodigious nightmare. It is so
exceedingly indistinct that I don’t know why it’s frightful—but I know it is.
I can only make out that it is an immense array of shapeless things which appear to be
planted on a vast exaggeration of the lazy tongs that used to bear the toy soldiers
and to be slowly coming close to my eyes and receding to an immeasurable
distance. When it comes closest, it is worse. In connection with it, I descry
remembrances of winter nights incredibly long; of being sent early to bed
as a punishment for some small offense and waking in two hours with a sensation
of having been asleep two nights, of the laden hopelessness of morning ever dawning,
and the oppression of a weight of remorse.
And now, I see a wonderful row of little lights rise smoothly out of the ground before
a vast green curtain. Now, a bell rings—a magic bell, which still sounds in my ears
unlike all other bells—and music plays amidst a buzz of voices and a fragrant smell
of orange peel and oil.
Anon, the magic bell commands the music to cease, and the great green curtain rolls
itself up majestically, and The Play begins! The devoted dog of Montargis avenges
the death of his master, foully murdered in the Forest of Bondy; and a humorous
Peasant with a red nose and a very little hat, whom I take from this hour forth
to my bosom as a friend (I think he was a Waiter or a Hostler at a village Inn,
but many years have passed since he and I have met), remarks that the sassigasity
of that dog is indeed surprising, and evermore this jocular conceit will live in
my remembrance fresh and unfading, overtopping all possible jokes, unto the end
of time. Or now, I learn with bitter tears how poor Jane Shore, dressed all in white,
and with her brown hair hanging down, went starving through the streets; or how
George Barnwell killed the worthiest uncle that ever man had and was afterward
so sorry for it that he ought to have been let off. Comes swiftly to comfort me,
the Pantomime—a stupendous Phenomenon!—when clowns are shot from loaded
mortars into the great chandelier, the bright constellation that it is; when Harlequins,
covered all over with scales of pure gold, twist and sparkle like amazing fish;
when Pantaloon (whom I deem it no irreverence to compare in my own mind
to my grandfather) puts red-hot pokers in his pocket and cries,
“Here’s somebody coming!” or taxes the Clown with petty larceny by saying,
“Now, I sawed you do it!” when Everything is capable, with the greatest ease, of being
changed into Anything, and “Nothing is, but thinking makes it so.”
Now, too, I perceive my first experience of the dreary sensation—often to return in
the after-life—of being unable, the next day, to get back to the dull, settled world,
of wanting to live forever in the bright atmosphere I have quitted; of doting
on the little Fairy, with the wand like a celestial Barber’s Pole and pining for a Fairy
immortality along with her. Ah, she comes back in many shapes, as my eye wanders
down the branches of my Christmas Tree, and goes as often, and has never yet
stayed by me!
Out of this delight springs the toy theatre—there it is, with its familiar proscenium,
and ladies in feathers, in the boxes!—and all its attendant occupation with paste
and glue, and gum, and watercolors, in the getting-up of The Miller and his Men,
and Elizabeth, or the Exile of Siberia. In spite of a few besetting accidents and failures
(particularly an unreasonable disposition in the respectable Kelmar and some others,
to become faint in the legs and double up at exciting points of the drama), a teeming
world of fancies so suggestive and all-embracing that, far below it on my Christmas
Tree, I see dark, dirty, real Theatres in the day-time, adorned with these associations
as with the freshest garlands of the rarest flowers and charming me yet.
But hark! The Waits are playing, and they break my childish sleep! What images do I
associate with the Christmas music as I see them set forth on Christmas?
Tree? Known before all the others, keeping far apart from all the others, they gather
around my little bed. An angel speaking to a group of shepherds in a field;
some travelers, with eyes uplifted, following a star; a baby in a manger; a child in
a spacious temple, talking with grave men; a solemn figure with a mild and beautiful
face, raising a dead girl by the hand; again, near a city gate, calling back the son
of a widow, on his bier, to life; a crowd of people looking through the opened roof
of a chamber where he sits and lets down a sick person on a bed with ropes;
the same, in a tempest, walking on the water to a ship; again, on a sea-shore, teaching
a great multitude; again, with a child upon his knee and other children round; again,
restoring sight to the blind, speech to the dumb, hearing to the deaf, health to the sick,
strength to the lame, knowledge to the ignorant; again, dying upon a Cross, watched
by armed soldiers, thick darkness coming on, the earth beginning to shake,
and only one voice heard, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Still, on the lower and maturer branches of the Tree, Christmas associations cluster
thick. School books shut up; Ovid and Virgil silenced; the Rule of Three, with its cool
impertinent inquiries, long disposed of; Terence and Plautus acted no more in an arena
of huddled desks and forms, all chipped, notched, and inked; cricket bats, stumps,
and balls left higher up, with the smell of trodden grass and the softened noise
of shouts in the evening air; the tree is still fresh, still gay. If I no more come home
at Christmas time, there will be boys and girls (thank Heaven!) while the World lasts;
and they do! Yonder they dance and play upon the branches of my Tree, God bless
them, merrily, and my heart dances and plays too!
And I do come home at Christmas. We all do, or we all should. We all come home,
or ought to come home for a short holiday—the longer, the better—from the great
boarding school, where we are forever working at our arithmetical slates to take
and give a rest. As to going for a visit, where can we not go, if we will; where have
we not been, when we would; starting our fancy from our Christmas Tree!
Away into the winter prospect. There are many such upon the tree! On, by low-lying,
misty grounds, through fens and fogs, up long hills, winding dark as caverns between
thick plantations, almost shutting out the sparkling stars; so, out on broad heights,
until we stop at last, with sudden silence, at an avenue. The gate-bell has a deep,
half-awful sound in the frosty air; the gate swings open on its hinges; and, as we drive
up to a great house, the glancing lights grow larger in the windows and the opposing
rows of trees seem to fall solemnly back on either side to give us a place.
At intervals, all day, a frightened hare has shot across this whitened turf; or the distant
clatter of a herd of deer trampling the hard frost has, for the minute, crushed
the silence too. Their watchful eyes beneath the fern may be shining now if we could
see them, like the icy dewdrops on the leaves, but they are still, and all is still.
And so, the lights growing larger, and the trees falling back before us and closing up
again behind us as if to forbid retreat, we come to the house.
There is probably a smell of roasted chestnuts and other good comfortable things all
the time, for we are telling Winter Stories—Ghost Stories, or more shame for us— round
the Christmas fire, and we have never stirred, except to draw a little nearer to it.
But no matter that. We came to the house, and it is an old house, full of great
chimneys where wood is burnt on ancient dogs upon the hearth, and grim portraits
(some of them with grim legends, too) lower distrustfully from the oaken panels
of the walls. We are middle-aged noblemen, and we make a generous supper with
our host and hostess and their guests—it being Christmas time and the old house full
of company—and then we go to bed. Our room is a very old room.
It is hung with a tapestry. We don’t like the portrait of a cavalier in green over
the fireplace. There are great black beams in the ceiling, and there is a great
black bedstead supported at the foot by two great black figures who seem to have
come off a couple of tombs in the old baronial church in the park for our particular
accommodation. But we are not superstitious noblemen, and we don’t mind.
Well! We dismiss our servant, lock the door, and sit before the fire in our dressing
gown, musing about a great many things. At length, we go to bed.
Well! We can’t sleep. We toss and tumble and can’t sleep. The embers on the hearth
burn fitfully and make the room look ghostly. We can’t help peeping out over
the counterpane at the two black figures and the cavalier—that wicked
-looking cavalier—in green. In the flickering light, they seem to advance and retire:
Which, though we are not by any means a superstitious nobleman, is not agreeable.
Well! We get nervous—more and more nervous.
We say, “This is very foolish, but we can’t stand this; we’ll pretend to be ill and knock up somebody.”
Well! We are just going to do it when the locked door opens, and there comes
in a young woman, deadly pale and with long fair hair, who glides to the fire and sits
down in the chair; we have left there, wringing her hands. Then, we notice that
her clothes are wet. Our tongue cleaves to the roof of our mouth, and we can’t speak,
but we observe her accurately. Her clothes are wet; her long hair is dabbled with
moist mud; she is dressed in the fashion of two hundred years ago, and she has at her
girdle a bunch of rusty keys. Well! There she sits, and we can’t even faint;
we are in such a state about it. Presently she gets up and tries all the locks
in the room with the rusty keys, which won’t fit one of them; then, she fixes her eyes
on the portrait of the cavalier in green and says, in a low, terrible voice,
“The stags know it!” After that, she wrings her hands again, passes the bedside,
and goes out at the door. We hurry on our dressing gowns, seize our pistols
(we always travel with pistols), and follow when we find the door locked.
We turn the key and look out into the dark gallery; no one is there. We wander away
and try to find our servant. Can’t be done. We pace the gallery till daybreak,
then return to our deserted room, fall asleep, and are awakened by our servant.
(nothing ever haunts him) and the shining sun. Well! We make a wretched breakfast,
and all the company says we look queer. After breakfast, we go over to the house with
our host, and then we take him to the portrait of the cavalier in green, and then it all
comes out. He was false to a young housekeeper once attached to that family
and famous for her beauty, she drowned herself in a pond, and her body was
discovered, after a long time, because the stags refused to drink the water.
Since which, it has been whispered that she traverses the house at midnight
(but goes especially to that room where the cavalier in green was wont to sleep),
trying the old locks with the rusty keys. Well! We tell our host what we have seen,
and a shade comes over his features, and he begs it may be hushed up, and so it is.
But, it’s all true, and we said so before we died (we are dead now) to many
responsible people.
There is no end to the old houses, with resounding galleries, dismal
state- bed-chambers and haunted wings shut up for many years, through which
we may ramble, with an agreeable creeping up our back, and encounter any number
of ghosts, but (it is worthy of remark perhaps) reducible to a very few general types
and classes; for ghosts have little originality and “walk” on a beaten track.
Thus, it comes to pass that a certain room in a certain old hall, where a certain bad
lord, baronet, knight, or gentleman, shot himself, has certain planks on the floor from
which the blood will not be taken out. You may scrape and scrape, as the present
owner has done, or plane and plane, as his father did, or scrub and scrub,
as his grandfather did, or burn and burn with strong acids, as his great-grandfather
did, but there the blood will still be—no redder and no paler—no more and no less—
always just the same. Thus, in another house, there is a haunted door that never
will keep open, or another door that never will keep shut, or a haunted sound
of a spinning- wheel, or a hammer, or a footstep, or a cry, or a sigh, or a horse’s tramp,
or the rattling of a chain. Or else, there is a turret clock, which, at the midnight hour,
strikes thirteen when the head of the family is going to die, or a shadowy, immovable
black carriage, which at such a time is always seen by somebody waiting near
the great gates in the stable yard. Or thus, it came to pass how Lady Mary went
to pay a visit at a large wild house in the Scottish Highlands and, being fatigued
with her long journey, retired to bed early and innocently said the next morning,
at the breakfast- table,
“How odd to have so late a party last night in this remote place and not to tell me of it before I went to bed!”
Then, every one asked Lady Mary what she meant. Then, Lady Mary replied,
“Why, all night long, the carriages were driving round and round the terrace, underneath my window!”
Then, the owner of the house turned pale, and so did his Lady and Charles.
Macdoodle of Macdoodle signed to Lady Mary to say no more, and everyone was
silent. After breakfast, Charles Macdoodle told Lady Mary that it was a tradition
in the family that those rumbling carriages on the terrace betokened death.
And so it proved, for two months afterward, the Lady of the mansion died.
And Lady Mary, who was a Maid of Honour at Court, often told this story to the old
Queen Charlotte; by this token that the old King always said,
“Eh, eh? What, what? Ghosts, ghosts? No such thing, no such thing!”
And never left off saying so until he went to bed.
Or, a friend of somebody’s whom most of us know, when he was a young man
at college, had a particular friend with whom he made the compact that
if it were possible for the Spirit to return to this earth after its separation from the body,
he of the twain who first died should reappear to the other. In the course of time,
this compact was forgotten by our friend; the two young men had progressed in life
and taken diverging paths that were wide asunder. But, one night, many years
afterward, our friend being in the North of England and staying for the night in an inn
on the Yorkshire Moors, happened to look out of bed; and there, in the moonlight,
leaning on a bureau near the window, steadfastly regarding him, saw his old college
friend! The appearance being solemnly addressed replied, in a kind of whisper, but very
audibly, “Do not come near me. I am dead. I am here to redeem my promise. I come from another world but may not disclose its secrets!”
Then, the whole form became paler, melted, as it were, into the moonlight, and faded
away.
Or, there was the daughter of the first occupier of the picturesque Elizabethan house
so famous in our neighborhood. Have you heard about her? No! Why, She went out one
summer evening at twilight, when she was a beautiful girl, just seventeen years of age,
to gather flowers in the garden; and presently came running, terrified, into the hall
to her father, saying, “Oh, dear father, I have met myself!” He took her in his arms
and told her it was fancy, but she said,
“Oh no! I met myself in the broad walk, and I was pale and gathering withered flowers, and I turned my head and held them up!”
And, that night, she died; and a picture of her story was begun, though never finished,
and they say it is somewhere in the house to this day, with its face to the wall.
Or, the uncle of my brother’s wife was riding home on horseback one mellow evening
at sunset when, in a green lane close to his own house, he saw a man standing before
him in the very center of a narrow way. “Why does that man in the cloak stand there!”
he thought. “Does he want me to ride over him?” But the figure never moved.
He felt a strange sensation at seeing it so still but slackened his trot and rode
forward. When he was so close to it, as almost to touch it with his stirrup, his horse
shied, and the figure glided up the bank in a curious, unearthly manner— backward
and without seeming to use its feet—and was gone. The uncle of my brother’s wife,
exclaiming, “Good Heaven! It’s my cousin Harry, from Bombay!” put spurs to his
horse, which was suddenly in a profuse sweat, and, wondering at such strange
behavior, dashed round to the front of his house. There, he saw the same figure,
just passing in at the long French window of the drawing room, opening
on the ground. He threw his bridle to a servant and hastened in after it. His sister
was sitting there, alone. “Alice, where’s my cousin Harry?”
“Your cousin Harry, John?”
“Yes. From Bombay. I met him in the lane just now and saw him enter here this instant.”
Not a creature had been seen by anyone, and in that hour and minute, as it afterward
appeared, this cousin died in India.
Or, it was a certain sensible old maiden lady, who died at ninety-nine and retained
her faculties to the last, who really did see the Orphan Boy; a story which has often
been incorrectly told, but, of which the real truth is this—because it is, in fact, a story
belonging to our family—and she was a connexion of our family. When she was about
forty years of age and still an uncommonly fine woman (her lover died young,
which was the reason why she never married, though she had many offers),
she went to stay at a place in Kent, which her brother, an Indian-Merchant, had newly
bought. There was a story that this place had once been held in trust by the guardian
of a young boy, who was himself the next heir, and who killed the young boy by harsh
and cruel treatment. She knew nothing of that. It has been said that there was a Cage
in her bedroom in which the guardian used to put the boy. There was no such thing.
There was only a closet. She went to bed, made no alarm whatever in the night,
and in the morning said composedly to her maid when she came in,
“Who is the pretty, forlorn-looking child who has been peeping out of that closet all night?”
The maid replied by giving a loud scream and instantly decamping. She was surprised,
but she was a woman of remarkable strength of mind, and she dressed herself
and went downstairs and closeted herself with her brother.
“Now, Walter,” she said, “I have been disturbed all night by a pretty, forlorn-looking boy, who has been constantly peeping out of that closet in my room, which I can’t open. This is some trick.”
“I am afraid not, Charlotte,” said he, “for it is the legend of the house. It is the Orphan Boy. What did he do?”
“He opened the door softly,” said she, “and peeped out. Sometimes, he came a step or two into the room. Then, I called to him to encourage him, and he shrunk, shuddered, and crept in again and shut the door.”
“The closet has no communication, Charlotte,” said her brother, “with any other part of the house, and it’s nailed up.”
This was undeniably true, and it took two carpenters a whole forenoon to get it open
for examination. Then, she was satisfied that she had seen the Orphan Boy.
But, the wild and terrible part of the story is that he was also seen by three
of her brother’s sons in succession, who all died young. On the occasion of each child
being taken ill, he came home in the heat twelve hours before and said, “Oh, Mamma, he had been playing under a particular oak tree, in a certain meadow, with a strange boy—a pretty, forlorn-looking boy, who was very timid, and made signs!”
From the fatal experience, the parents came to know that this was the Orphan Boy
and that the course of that child whom he chose for his little playmate was surely run.
The End