Christmas Stories

“I have!” said Trotty. “Oh forgive me!”

“Who hears us echo the dull vermin of the earth: the Putters Down of crushed and broken natures, formed to be raised up higher than such maggots of the time can crawl or can conceive,” pursued the Goblin of the Bell; “who does so, does us wrong. And you have done us wrong!”

“Not meaning it,” said Trotty. “In my ignorance. Not meaning it!”

“Lastly, and most of all,” pursued the Bell. “Who turns his back upon the fallen and disfigured of his kind; abandons them as vile; and does not trace and track with pitying eyes the unfenced precipice by which they fell from good—grasping in their fall some tufts and shreds of that lost soil, and clinging to them still when bruised and dying in the gulf below; does wrong to Heaven and man, to time and to eternity. And you have done that wrong!”

“Spare me!” cried Trotty, falling on his knees; “for Mercy’s sake!”

“Listen!” said the Shadow.

“Listen!” cried the other Shadows.

“Listen!” said a clear and childlike voice, which Trotty thought he recognised as having heard before.

The organ sounded faintly in the church below. Swelling by degrees, the melody ascended to the roof, and filled the choir and nave. Expanding more and more, it rose up, up; up, up; higher, higher, higher up; awakening agitated hearts within the burly piles of oak: the hollow bells, the iron-bound doors, the stairs of solid stone; until the tower walls were insufficient to contain it, and it soared into the sky.

No wonder that an old man’s breast could not contain a sound so vast and mighty. It broke from that weak prison in a rush of tears; and Trotty put his hands before his face.

“Listen!” said the Shadow.

“Listen!” said the other Shadows.

“Listen!” said the child’s voice.

A solemn strain of blended voices, rose into the tower.

It was a very low and mournful strain—a Dirge—and as he listened, Trotty heard his child among the singers.

“She is dead!” exclaimed the old man. “Meg is dead! Her Spirit calls to me. I hear it!”

“The Spirit of your child bewails the dead, and mingles with the dead—dead hopes, dead fancies, dead imaginings of youth,” returned the Bell, “but she is living. Learn from her life, a living truth. Learn from the creature dearest to your heart, how bad the bad are born. See every bud and leaf plucked one by one from off the fairest stem, and know how bare and wretched it may be. Follow her! To desperation!”

Each of the shadowy figures stretched its right arm forth, and pointed downward.

“The Spirit of the Chimes is your companion,” said the figure.

“Go! It stands behind you!”

Trotty turned, and saw—the child! The child Will Fern had carried in the street; the child whom Meg had watched, but now, asleep!

“I carried her myself, to-night,” said Trotty. “In these arms!”

“Show him what he calls himself,” said the dark figures, one and all.

The tower opened at his feet. He looked down, and beheld his own form, lying at the bottom, on the outside: crushed and motionless.

“No more a living man!” cried Trotty. “Dead!”

“Dead!” said the figures all together.

“Gracious Heaven! And the New Year—”

“Past,” said the figures.

“What!” he cried, shuddering. “I missed my way, and coming on the outside of this tower in the dark, fell down—a year ago?”

“Nine years ago!” replied the figures.

As they gave the answer, they recalled their outstretched hands; and where their figures had been, there the Bells were.

And they rung; their time being come again. And once again, vast multitudes of phantoms sprung into existence; once again, were incoherently engaged, as they had been before; once again, faded on the stopping of the Chimes; and dwindled into nothing.

“What are these?” he asked his guide. “If I am not mad, what are these?”

“Spirits of the Bells. Their sound upon the air,” returned the child. “They take such shapes and occupations as the hopes and thoughts of mortals, and the recollections they have stored up, give them.”

“And you,” said Trotty wildly. “What are you?”

“Hush, hush!” returned the child. “Look here!”

In a poor, mean room; working at the same kind of embroidery which he had often, often seen before her; Meg, his own dear daughter, was presented to his view. He made no effort to imprint his kisses on her face; he did not strive to clasp her to his loving heart; he knew that such endearments were, for him, no more. But, he held his trembling breath, and brushed away the blinding tears, that he might look upon her; that he might only see her.

Ah! Changed. Changed. The light of the clear eye, how dimmed. The bloom, how faded from the cheek. Beautiful she was, as she had ever been, but Hope, Hope, Hope, oh where was the fresh Hope that had spoken to him like a voice!

She looked up from her work, at a companion. Following her eyes, the old man started back.

In the woman grown, he recognised her at a glance. In the long silken hair, he saw the self-same curls; around the lips, the child’s expression lingering still. See! In the eyes, now turned inquiringly on Meg, there shone the very look that scanned those features when he brought her home!

Then what was this, beside him!

Looking with awe into its face, he saw a something reigning there: a lofty something, undefined and indistinct, which made it hardly more than a remembrance of that child—as yonder figure might be—yet it was the same: the same: and wore the dress.

Hark. They were speaking!

“Meg,” said Lilian, hesitating. “How often you raise your head from your work to look at me!”

“Are my looks so altered, that they frighten you?” asked Meg.

“Nay, dear! But you smile at that, yourself! Why not smile, when you look at me, Meg?”

“I do so. Do I not?” she answered: smiling on her.

“Now you do,” said Lilian, “but not usually. When you think I’m busy, and don’t see you, you look so anxious and so doubtful, that I hardly like to raise my eyes. There is little cause for smiling in this hard and toilsome life, but you were once so cheerful.”

“Am I not now!” cried Meg, speaking in a tone of strange alarm, and rising to embrace her. “Do I make our weary life more weary to you, Lilian!”

“You have been the only thing that made it life,” said Lilian, fervently kissing her; “sometimes the only thing that made me care to live so, Meg. Such work, such work! So many hours, so many days, so many long, long nights of hopeless, cheerless, never-ending work—not to heap up riches, not to live grandly or gaily, not to live upon enough, however coarse; but to earn bare bread; to scrape together just enough to toil upon, and want upon, and keep alive in us the consciousness of our hard fate! Oh Meg, Meg!” she raised her voice and twined her arms about her as she spoke, like one in pain. “How can the cruel world go round, and bear to look upon such lives!”