The truth
is, that he tried to be smart, as a means of distracting his own attention, and
keeping down his terror; for the spectre’s voice disturbed the very marrow in
his bones.
To sit, staring at those fixed, glazed
eyes, in silence for a moment, would play, Scrooge felt, the very deuce with him.
There was something very awful, too, in the spectre’s being provided with an
infernal atmosphere of its own. Scrooge could not feel it himself, but this was
clearly the case; for though the Ghost sat perfectly motionless, its hair, and
skirts, and tassels, were still agitated as by the hot vapour from an oven.
‘You see this toothpick?’
said Scrooge, returning quickly to the charge, for the reason just assigned; and
wishing, though it were only for a second, to divert the vision’s stony gaze
from himself.
‘I do,’ replied the
Ghost.
‘You are not looking at it,’
said Scrooge.
‘But I see it,’ said the
Ghost, ‘notwithstanding.’
‘Well!’ returned Scrooge.
‘I have but to swallow this, and be for the rest of my days
persecuted by a legion of goblins, all of my own creation. Humbug, I tell you
— humbug!’
At this, the spirit raised a frightful
cry, and shook its chain with such a dismal and appalling noise, that Scrooge held
on tight to his chair, to save himself from falling in a swoon. But how much greater
was his horror, when the phantom taking off the bandage round its head, as if it
were too warm to wear in-doors, its lower jaw dropped down upon its breast!
Scrooge fell upon his knees, and clasped
his hands before his face.
‘Mercy!’ he said.
‘Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?’
‘Man of the worldly mind!’
replied the Ghost, ‘do you believe in me or not?’
‘I do,’ said Scrooge.
‘I must. But why do spirits walk the earth, and why do they come to
me?’
‘It is required of every
man,’ the Ghost returned, ‘that the spirit within him should walk abroad
among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in
life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world
— oh, woe is me! —and witness what it cannot share, but might have
shared on earth, and turned to happiness!’
Again the spectre raised a cry, and
shook its chain and wrung its shadowy hands.
‘You are
fettered,’ said Scrooge, trembling. ‘Tell me why?’
‘I wear the chain I forged in
life,’ replied the Ghost. ‘I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I
girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern
strange to you?’
Scrooge trembled more and more.
‘Or would you know,’ pursued
the Ghost, ‘the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was
full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on
it, since. It is a ponderous chain!’
Scrooge glanced about him on the floor,
in the expectation of finding himself surrounded by some fifty or sixty fathoms of
iron cable: but he could see nothing.
‘Jacob,’ he said,
imploringly. ‘Old Jacob Marley, tell me more. Speak comfort to me,
Jacob.’
‘I have none to give,’ the
Ghost replied. ‘It comes from other regions, Ebenezer Scrooge, and is conveyed
by other ministers, to other kinds of men. Nor can I tell you what I would. A very
little more is all permitted to me. I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I cannot linger
anywhere. My spirit never walked beyond our counting-house — mark me!
—in life my spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing
hole; and weary journeys lie before me!’
It was a habit with Scrooge, whenever he
became thoughtful, to put his hands in his breeches pockets. Pondering on what the Ghost had said, he did so now, but without lifting up his
eyes, or getting off his knees.
‘You must have been very slow
about it, Jacob,’ Scrooge observed, in a business-like manner, though with
humility and deference.
‘Slow!’ the Ghost
repeated.
‘Seven years dead,’ mused
Scrooge. ‘And travelling all the time?’
‘The whole time,’ said the
Ghost. ‘No rest, no peace. Incessant torture of remorse.’
‘You travel fast?’ said
Scrooge.
‘On the wings of the wind,’
replied the Ghost.
‘You might have got over a great
quantity of ground in seven years,’ said Scrooge.
The Ghost, on hearing this, set up
another cry, and clanked its chain so hideously in the dead silence of the night,
that the Ward would have been justified in indicting it for a nuisance.
‘Oh!