The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices

He had come in and shut the door, and he now sat down.  He did not bend himself to sit, as other people do, but seemed to sink bolt upright, as if in water, until the chair stopped him.

‘My friend, Mr. Idle,’ said Goodchild, extremely anxious to introduce a third person into the conversation.

‘I am,’ said the old man, without looking at him, ‘at Mr. Idle’s service.’

‘If you are an old inhabitant of this place,’ Francis Goodchild resumed.

‘Yes.’

‘Perhaps you can decide a point my friend and I were in doubt upon, this morning.  They hang condemned criminals at the Castle, I believe?’

‘I believe so,’ said the old man.

‘Are their faces turned towards that noble prospect?’

‘Your face is turned,’ replied the old man, ‘to the Castle wall.  When you are tied up, you see its stones expanding and contracting violently, and a similar expansion and contraction seem to take place in your own head and breast.  Then, there is a rush of fire and an earthquake, and the Castle springs into the air, and you tumble down a precipice.’

His cravat appeared to trouble him.  He put his hand to his throat, and moved his neck from side to side.  He was an old man of a swollen character of face, and his nose was immoveably hitched up on one side, as if by a little hook inserted in that nostril.  Mr. Goodchild felt exceedingly uncomfortable, and began to think the night was hot, and not cold.

‘A strong description, sir,’ he observed.

‘A strong sensation,’ the old man rejoined.

Again, Mr. Goodchild looked to Mr. Thomas Idle; but Thomas lay on his back with his face attentively turned towards the One old man, and made no sign.  At this time Mr. Goodchild believed that he saw threads of fire stretch from the old man’s eyes to his own, and there attach themselves.  (Mr.  Goodchild writes the present account of his experience, and, with the utmost solemnity, protests that he had the strongest sensation upon him of being forced to look at the old man along those two fiery films, from that moment.)

‘I must tell it to you,’ said the old man, with a ghastly and a stony stare.

‘What?’ asked Francis Goodchild.

‘You know where it took place.  Yonder!’

Whether he pointed to the room above, or to the room below, or to any room in that old house, or to a room in some other old house in that old town, Mr. Goodchild was not, nor is, nor ever can be, sure.  He was confused by the circumstance that the right forefinger of the One old man seemed to dip itself in one of the threads of fire, light itself, and make a fiery start in the air, as it pointed somewhere.  Having pointed somewhere, it went out.

‘You know she was a Bride,’ said the old man.

‘I know they still send up Bride-cake,’ Mr. Goodchild faltered.  ‘This is a very oppressive air.’

‘She was a Bride,’ said the old man.  ‘She was a fair, flaxen-haired, large-eyed girl, who had no character, no purpose.  A weak, credulous, incapable, helpless nothing.  Not like her mother.  No, no.  It was her father whose character she reflected.

‘Her mother had taken care to secure everything to herself, for her own life, when the father of this girl (a child at that time) died—of sheer helplessness; no other disorder—and then He renewed the acquaintance that had once subsisted between the mother and Him.  He had been put aside for the flaxen-haired, large-eyed man (or nonentity) with Money.  He could overlook that for Money.  He wanted compensation in Money.

‘So, he returned to the side of that woman the mother, made love to her again, danced attendance on her, and submitted himself to her whims.  She wreaked upon him every whim she had, or could invent.  He bore it.  And the more he bore, the more he wanted compensation in Money, and the more he was resolved to have it.

‘But, lo!  Before he got it, she cheated him.  In one of her imperious states, she froze, and never thawed again.  She put her hands to her head one night, uttered a cry, stiffened, lay in that attitude certain hours, and died.  And he had got no compensation from her in Money, yet.  Blight and Murrain on her!  Not a penny.

‘He had hated her throughout that second pursuit, and had longed for retaliation on her.  He now counterfeited her signature to an instrument, leaving all she had to leave, to her daughter—ten years old then—to whom the property passed absolutely, and appointing himself the daughter’s Guardian.  When He slid it under the pillow of the bed on which she lay, He bent down in the deaf ear of Death, and whispered: “Mistress Pride, I have determined a long time that, dead or alive, you must make me compensation in Money.’

‘So, now there were only two left.  Which two were, He, and the fair flaxen-haired, large-eyed foolish daughter, who afterwards became the Bride.