The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain by Charles Dickens

Scanned and proofed by David Price
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain

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 the 
general experience, everybody has been wrong so often, and it has 
taken, in most instances, such a weary while to find out how wrong, 
that the authority is proved to be fallible.  Everybody may 
sometimes be right; "but THAT'S no rule," as the ghost of Giles 
Scroggins says in the ballad.

The dread word, GHOST, recalls me.

Everybody said he looked like a haunted man.  The extent of my 
present claim for everybody is, that they were so far right.  He 
did.

Who could have seen his hollow cheek; his sunken brilliant eye; his 
black-attired figure, indefinably grim, although well-knit and 
well-proportioned; his grizzled hair hanging, like tangled sea-
weed, about his face, - as if he had been, through his whole life, 
a lonely mark for the chafing and beating of the great deep of 
humanity, - 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, or 
of listening to some old echoes in his mind, but might have said it 
was 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 set 
himself against and stop, but might have said it was the voice of a 
haunted man?

Who that had seen him in his inner chamber, part library and part 
laboratory, - for he was, as the world knew, far and wide, a 
learned man in chemistry, and a teacher on whose lips and hands a 
crowd of aspiring ears and eyes hung daily, - who that had seen him 
there, upon a winter night, alone, surrounded by his drugs and 
instruments and books; the shadow of his shaded lamp a monstrous 
beetle on the wall, motionless among a crowd of spectral shapes 
raised there by the flickering of the fire upon the quaint objects 
around him; some of these phantoms (the reflection of glass vessels 
that held liquids), trembling at heart like things that knew his 
power to uncombine them, and to give back their component parts to 
fire and vapour; - who that had seen him then, his work done, and 
he pondering 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 chamber 
too?

Who might not, by a very easy flight of fancy, have believed that 
everything about him took this haunted tone, and that he lived on 
haunted ground?

His dwelling was so solitary and vault-like, - an old, retired part 
of an ancient endowment for students, once a brave edifice, planted 
in an open place, but now the obsolete whim of forgotten 
architects; smoke-age-and-weather-darkened, squeezed on every side 
by the overgrowing of the great city, and choked, like an old well, 
with stones and bricks; its small quadrangles, lying down in very 
pits 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 low 
when it was very feeble and the weather very moody; its grass-
plots, struggling with the mildewed earth to be grass, or to win 
any show of compromise; its silent pavements, unaccustomed to the 
tread of feet, and even to the observation of eyes, except when a 
stray face looked down from the upper world, wondering what nook it 
was; its sun-dial in a little bricked-up corner, where no sun had 
straggled for a hundred years, but where, in compensation for the 
sun's neglect, the snow would lie for weeks when it lay nowhere 
else, 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 
shelving downward to the great oak chimney-piece; so environed and 
hemmed in by the pressure of the town yet so remote in fashion, 
age, and custom; so quiet, yet so thundering with echoes when a 
distant voice was raised or a door was shut, - echoes, not confined 
to the many low passages and empty rooms, but rumbling and 
grumbling till they were stifled in the heavy air of the forgotten 
Crypt where the Norman arches were half-buried in the earth.

You should have seen him in his dwelling about twilight, in the 
dead winter time.

When the wind was blowing, shrill and shrewd, with the going down