“Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask,” said Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit’s robe, “but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw?”
“It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it,” was the Spirit’s sorrowful reply.
“Look here.” From the foldings of its robe it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.
“Oh, Man! look here! Look, look, down here!” exclaimed the Ghost.
They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude. “Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.
“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware of them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And bide the end!”
Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol
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Previously:
- …and taught Scrooge his precepts
- His offenses carry their own punishment
- There was nothing of high mark in this.
- Bob Cratchit’s house
- Come in and know me better man!
- …shadows of the things that have been.
- What Idol has displaced you?
- He has the power to render us happy or unhappy…
- …tuned like fifty stomachaches.
- It’s old Fezziwig alive again!
- Too much getting up by candlelight…
- The school is not quite deserted…
- “What”, exclaimed the Ghost…
- The First Ghost
- Mankind was my business…
- Speak comfort to me
- It is a ponderous chain!
- There’s more of gravy than of grave about you…
- Ask me who I was…
- The chain Marley drew…
- …double locked himself in…
- Darkness is cheap…
- Marley’s Face
- He lived in chambers…
- …even more congenial frost.
- …decrease the surplus population…
- …open their shut-up hearts freely…
- Boiled with his own pudding…
- …not being a man of strong imagination, he failed…
- Even the blind men’s dogs
- A tight-fisted hand at the grindstone
- Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.