Last night, I believe.’
‘Why, what was the matter with him?’ asked a
third, taking a vast quantity of snuff out of a very large snuffbox. ‘I thought
he’d never die.’
‘God knows,’ said the first, with a yawn.
‘What has he done with his money?’ asked a
red-faced gentleman with a pendulous excrescence on the end of his nose, that
shook like the gills of a turkey-cock.
‘I haven’t heard,’ said the man with the large
chin, yawning again. ‘Left it to his company, perhaps. He hasn’t left it to me.
That’s all I know.’
This pleasantry was received with a general
laugh.
‘It’s likely to be a very cheap funeral,’ said
the same speaker; ‘for, upon my life, I don’t know of anybody to go to it.
Suppose we make up a party, and volunteer?’
‘I don’t mind going if a lunch is provided,’
observed the gentleman with the excrescence on his nose. ‘But I must be fed if
I make one.’
Another laugh.
‘Well, I am the most disinterested among you,
after all,’ said the first speaker, ‘for I never wear black gloves, and I never
eat lunch. But I’ll offer to go if anybody else will. When I come to think of
it, I’m not at all sure that I wasn’t his most particular friend; for we used
to stop and speak whenever we met. Bye, bye!’
Speakers and listeners strolled away, and mixed
with other groups. Scrooge knew the men, and looked towards the Spirit for an
explanation.
The phantom glided on into a street. Its finger
pointed to two persons meeting. Scrooge listened again, thinking that the
explanation might lie here.
He knew these men, also, perfectly. They were
men of business: very wealthy, and of great importance. He had made a point
always of standing well in their esteem in a business point of view, that is;
strictly in a business point of view.
‘How are you?’ said one.
‘How are you?’ returned the other.
‘Well!’ said the first, ‘old Scratch has got
his own at last, hey?’
‘So I am told,’ returned the second. ‘Cold,
isn’t it?’
‘Seasonable for Christmastime. You are not a
skater, I suppose?’
‘No, no. Something else to think of.
Good-morning!’
Not another word. That was their meeting, their
conversation, and their parting.
Scrooge was at first inclined to be surprised
that the Spirit should attach importance to conversations apparently so
trivial; but feeling assured that they must have some hidden purpose, he set
himself to consider what it was likely to be. They could scarcely be supposed
to have any bearing on the death of Jacob, his old partner, for that was Past,
and this Ghost’s province was the Future. Nor could he think of anyone
immediately connected with himself to whom he could apply them. But nothing
doubting that, to whomsoever they applied, they had some latent moral for his
own improvement, he resolved to treasure up every word he heard, and everything
he saw; and especially to observe the shadow of himself when it appeared. For
he had an expectation that the conduct of his future self would give him the
clue he missed, and would render the solution of these riddles easy.
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