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71 pages

English

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Another entrant in his astoundingly popular series of Christmas parables, Dickens revisits many of the themes and plot devices he first explored in A Christmas Carol in The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain. This novella recounts the supernatural experiences of Professor Redlaw, who learns several life-changing lessons from a mysterious spirit.

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Publié par	The Floating Press
Date de parution	01 décembre 2009
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781775416852
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0134€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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THE HAUNTED MAN AND THE GHOST'S BARGAIN
* * *
CHARLES DICKENS

*

The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain From a 1907 edition.
ISBN 978-1-775416-85-2
© 2009 THE FLOATING PRESS.
While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike.
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Contents
*
Chapter I - The Gift Bestowed Chapter II - The Gift Diffused Chapter III - The Gift Reversed
Chapter I - The Gift Bestowed
*
Everybody said so.
Far be it from me to assert that what everybody says must be true.Everybody is, often, as likely to be wrong as right. In thegeneral experience, everybody has been wrong so often, and it hastaken, in most instances, such a weary while to find out how wrong,that the authority is proved to be fallible. Everybody maysometimes be right; "but THAT'S no rule," as the ghost of GilesScroggins says in the ballad.
The dread word, GHOST, recalls me.
Everybody said he looked like a haunted man. The extent of mypresent claim for everybody is, that they were so far right. Hedid.
Who could have seen his hollow cheek; his sunken brilliant eye; hisblack-attired figure, indefinably grim, although well-knit andwell-proportioned; his grizzled hair hanging, like tangled sea-weed, about his face,—as if he had been, through his whole life, alonely mark for the chafing and beating of the great deep ofhumanity,—but might have said he looked like a haunted man?
Who could have observed his manner, taciturn, thoughtful, gloomy,shadowed by habitual reserve, retiring always and jocund never,with a distraught air of reverting to a bygone place and time, orof listening to some old echoes in his mind, but might have said itwas the manner of a haunted man?
Who could have heard his voice, slow-speaking, deep, and grave,with a natural fulness and melody in it which he seemed to sethimself against and stop, but might have said it was the voice of ahaunted man?
Who that had seen him in his inner chamber, part library and partlaboratory,—for he was, as the world knew, far and wide, a learnedman in chemistry, and a teacher on whose lips and hands a crowd ofaspiring ears and eyes hung daily,—who that had seen him there,upon a winter night, alone, surrounded by his drugs and instrumentsand books; the shadow of his shaded lamp a monstrous beetle on thewall, motionless among a crowd of spectral shapes raised there bythe flickering of the fire upon the quaint objects around him; someof these phantoms (the reflection of glass vessels that heldliquids), trembling at heart like things that knew his power touncombine them, and to give back their component parts to fire andvapour;—who that had seen him then, his work done, and hepondering in his chair before the rusted grate and red flame,moving his thin mouth as if in speech, but silent as the dead,would not have said that the man seemed haunted and the chambertoo?
Who might not, by a very easy flight of fancy, have believed thateverything about him took this haunted tone, and that he lived onhaunted ground?
His dwelling was so solitary and vault-like,—an old, retired partof an ancient endowment for students, once a brave edifice, plantedin an open place, but now the obsolete whim of forgottenarchitects; smoke-age-and-weather-darkened, squeezed on every sideby the overgrowing of the great city, and choked, like an old well,with stones and bricks; its small quadrangles, lying down in verypits formed by the streets and buildings, which, in course of time,had been constructed above its heavy chimney stalks; its old trees,insulted by the neighbouring smoke, which deigned to droop so lowwhen it was very feeble and the weather very moody; its grass-plots, struggling with the mildewed earth to be grass, or to winany show of compromise; its silent pavements, unaccustomed to thetread of feet, and even to the observation of eyes, except when astray face looked down from the upper world, wondering what nook itwas; its sun-dial in a little bricked-up corner, where no sun hadstraggled for a hundred years, but where, in compensation for thesun's neglect, the snow would lie for weeks when it lay nowhereelse, and the black east wind would spin like a huge humming-top,when in all other places it was silent and still.
His dwelling, at its heart and core—within doors—at his fireside--was so lowering and old, so crazy, yet so strong, with its worn-eaten beams of wood in the ceiling, and its sturdy floor shelvingdownward to the great oak chimney-piece; so environed and hemmed inby the pressure of the town yet so remote in fashion, age, andcustom; so quiet, yet so thundering with echoes when a distantvoice was raised or a door was shut,—echoes, not confined to themany low passages and empty rooms, but rumbling and grumbling tillthey were stifled in the heavy air of the forgotten Crypt where theNorman arches were half-buried in the earth.
You should have seen him in his dwelling about twilight, in thedead winter time.
When the wind was blowing, shrill and shrewd, with the going downof the blurred sun. When it was just so dark, as that the forms ofthings were indistinct and big—but not wholly lost. When sittersby the fire began to see wild faces and figures, mountains andabysses, ambuscades and armies, in the coals. When people in thestreets bent down their heads and ran before the weather. Whenthose who were obliged to meet it, were stopped at angry corners,stung by wandering snow-flakes alighting on the lashes of theireyes,—which fell too sparingly, and were blown away too quickly,to leave a trace upon the frozen ground. When windows of privatehouses closed up tight and warm. When lighted gas began to burstforth in the busy and the quiet streets, fast blackening otherwise.When stray pedestrians, shivering along the latter, looked down atthe glowing fires in kitchens, and sharpened their sharp appetitesby sniffing up the fragrance of whole miles of dinners.
When travellers by land were bitter cold, and looked wearily ongloomy landscapes, rustling and shuddering in the blast. Whenmariners at sea, outlying upon icy yards, were tossed and swungabove the howling ocean dreadfully. When lighthouses, on rocks andheadlands, showed solitary and watchful; and benighted sea-birdsbreasted on against their ponderous lanterns, and fell dead. Whenlittle readers of story-books, by the firelight, trembled to thinkof Cassim Baba cut into quarters, hanging in the Robbers' Cave, orhad some small misgivings that the fierce little old woman, withthe crutch, who used to start out of the box in the merchantAbudah's bedroom, might, one of these nights, be found upon thestairs, in the long, cold, dusky journey up to bed.
When, in rustic places, the last glimmering of daylight died awayfrom the ends of avenues; and the trees, arching overhead, weresullen and black. When, in parks and woods, the high wet fern andsodden moss, and beds of fallen leaves, and trunks of trees, werelost to view, in masses of impenetrable shade. When mists arosefrom dyke, and fen, and river. When lights in old halls and incottage windows, were a cheerful sight. When the mill stopped, thewheelwright and the blacksmith shut their workshops, the turnpike-gate closed, the plough and harrow were left lonely in the fields,the labourer and team went home, and the striking of the churchclock had a deeper sound than at noon, and the churchyard wicketwould be swung no more that night.
When twilight everywhere released the shadows, prisoned up all day,that now closed in and gathered like mustering swarms of ghosts.When they stood lowering, in corners of rooms, and frowned out frombehind half-opened doors. When they had full possession ofunoccupied apartments. When they danced upon the floors, andwalls, and ceilings of inhabited chambers, while the fire was low,and withdrew like ebbing waters when it sprang into a blaze. Whenthey fantastically mocked the shapes of household objects, makingthe nurse an ogress, the rocking-horse a monster, the wonderingchild, half-scared and half-amused, a stranger to itself,—the verytongs upon the hearth, a straddling giant with his arms a-kimbo,evidently smelling the blood of Englishmen, and wanting to grindpeople's bones to make his bread.
When these shadows brought into the minds of older people, otherthoughts, and showed them different images. When they stole fromtheir retreats, in the likenesses of forms and faces from the past,from the grave, from the deep, deep gulf, where the things thatmight have been, and never were, are always wandering.
When he sat, as already mentioned, gazing at the fire. When, as itrose and fell, the shadows went and came. When he took no heed ofthem, with his bodily eyes; but, let them come or let them go,looked fixedly at the fire. You should have seen him, then.
When the sounds that had arisen with the shadows, and come out oftheir lurking-places at the twilight summons, seemed to make adeeper stillness all about him. When the wind was rumbling in thechimney, and sometimes crooning, sometimes howling, in the house.When the old trees outside were so shaken and beaten, that onequerulous old rook, unable to sleep, protested now and then, in afeeble, dozy, high-up "Caw!" When, at intervals, the windowtrembled, the rusty vane upon the turret-top complained, the clockbeneath it recorded that another quarter of an hour was gone, orthe fire collapsed and fell in with a rattle.
- When a knock came at his door, in short, as he was sitting so,and roused him.
"Who's that?" said he. "Come in!"
Surely there had been no figure leaning on the back of his ch