Part 11

‘I’m in an uncommon ill humour, if that’s it,’ rejoined the Model, with great indignation. ‘As if it warn’t bad enough for a bob a-hour, for a man to be mixing himself up with that there jolly old furniter that one ‘ud think the public know’d the wery nails in by this time—or to be putting on greasy old ‘ats and cloaks, and playing tambourines in the Bay o’ Naples, with Wesuvius a smokin’ according to pattern in the background, and the wines a bearing wonderful in the middle distance—or to be unpolitely kicking up his legs among a lot o’ gals, with no reason whatever in his mind but to show ’em—as if this warn’t bad enough, I’m to go and be thrown out of employment too!’

‘Surely no!’ said I.

‘Surely yes,’ said the indignant Model. ‘BUT I’LL GROW ONE.’

The gloomy and threatening manner in which he muttered the last words, can never be effaced from my remembrance. My blood ran cold.

I asked of myself, what was it that this desperate Being was resolved to grow. My breast made no response.

I ventured to implore him to explain his meaning. With a scornful laugh, he uttered this dark prophecy:

‘I’LL GROW ONE. AND, MARK MY WORDS, IT SHALL HAUNT YOU!’

We parted in the storm, after I had forced half-a-crown on his acceptance, with a trembling hand. I conclude that something supernatural happened to the steamboat, as it bore his reeking figure down the river; but it never got into the papers.

Two years elapsed, during which I followed my profession without any vicissitudes; never holding so much as a motion, of course. At the expiration of that period, I found myself making my way home to the Temple, one night, in precisely such another storm of thunder and lightning as that by which I had been overtaken on board the steamboat—except that this storm, bursting over the town at midnight, was rendered much more awful by the darkness and the hour.

As I turned into my court, I really thought a thunderbolt would fall, and plough the pavement up. Every brick and stone in the place seemed to have an echo of its own for the thunder. The waterspouts were overcharged, and the rain came tearing down from the house-tops as if they had been mountain-tops.

Mrs. Parkins, my laundress—wife of Parkins the porter, then newly dead of a dropsy—had particular instructions to place a bedroom candle and a match under the staircase lamp on my landing, in order that I might light my candle there, whenever I came home. Mrs. Parkins invariably disregarding all instructions, they were never there. Thus it happened that on this occasion I groped my way into my sitting-room to find the candle, and came out to light it.

What were my emotions when, underneath the staircase lamp, shining with wet as if he had never been dry since our last meeting, stood the mysterious Being whom I had encountered on the steamboat in a thunderstorm, two years before! His prediction rushed upon my mind, and I turned faint.

‘I said I’d do it,’ he observed, in a hollow voice, ‘and I have done it. May I come in?’

‘Misguided creature, what have you done?’ I returned.

‘I’ll let you know,’ was his reply, ‘if you’ll let me in.’

Could it be murder that he had done? And had he been so successful that he wanted to do it again, at my expense?

I hesitated.

‘May I come in?’ said he.

I inclined my head, with as much presence of mind as I could command, and he followed me into my chambers. There, I saw that the lower part of his face was tied up, in what is commonly called a Belcher handkerchief. He slowly removed this bandage, and exposed to view a long dark beard, curling over his upper lip, twisting about the corners of his mouth, and hanging down upon his breast.

‘What is this?’ I exclaimed involuntarily, ‘and what have you become?’

‘I am the Ghost of Art!’ said he.

The effect of these words, slowly uttered in the thunder-storm at midnight, was appalling in the last degree. More dead than alive, I surveyed him in silence.

‘The German taste came up,’ said he, ‘and threw me out of bread. I am ready for the taste now.’

He made his beard a little jagged with his hands, folded his arms, and said,

‘Severity!’

I shuddered. It was so severe.

He made his beard flowing on his breast, and, leaning both hands on the staff of a carpet-broom which Mrs. Parkins had left among my books, said:

‘Benevolence.’