Everybody said so.
Far be it from me to assert that what everybody says must betrue. Everybody is, often, as likely to be wrong asright. In the general experience, everybody has been wrongso often, and it has taken, in most instances, such a weary whileto find out how wrong, that the authority is proved to befallible. Everybody may sometimes be right; “butthat’s no rule,” as the ghost of GilesScroggins says in the ballad.
The dread word, Ghost, recallsme.
Everybody said he looked like a haunted man. The extentof my present claim for everybody is, that they were so farright. He did.
Who could have seen his hollow cheek; his sunken brillianteye; his black-attired figure, indefinably grim, althoughwell-knit and well-proportioned; his grizzled hair hanging, liketangled sea-weed, about his face,—as if he had been,through his whole life, a lonely mark for the chafing and beatingof the great deep of humanity,—but might have said helooked like a haunted man?
Who could have observed his manner, taciturn, thoughtful,gloomy, shadowed by habitual reserve, retiring always and jocundnever, with a distraught air of reverting to a bygone place andtime, or of listening to some old echoes in his mind, but mighthave said it was the manner of a haunted man?
Who could have heard his voice, slow-speaking, deep, andgrave, with a natural fulness and melody in it which he seemed toset himself against and stop, but might have said it was thevoice of a haunted man?
Who that had seen him in his inner chamber, part library andpart laboratory,—for he was, as the world knew, far andwide, a learned man in chemistry, and a teacher on whose lips andhands a crowd of aspiring ears and eyes hung daily,—whothat had seen him there, upon a winter night, alone, surroundedby his drugs and instruments and books; the shadow of his shadedlamp a monstrous beetle on the wall, motionless among a crowd ofspectral shapes raised there by the flickering of the fire uponthe quaint objects around him; some of these phantoms (thereflection of glass vessels that held liquids), trembling atheart like things that knew his power to uncombine them, and togive back their component parts to fire and vapour;—whothat had seen him then, his work done, and he pondering in hischair before the rusted grate and red flame, moving his thinmouth as if in speech, but silent as the dead, would not havesaid that the man seemed haunted and the chamber too?
Who might not, by a very easy flight of fancy, have believedthat everything about him took this haunted tone, and that helived on haunted ground?
His dwelling was so solitary and vault-like,—an old,retired part of an ancient endowment for students, once a braveedifice, planted in an open place, but now the obsolete whim offorgotten architects; smoke-age-and-weather-darkened, squeezed onevery side by the overgrowing of the great city, and choked, likean old well, with stones and bricks; its small quadrangles, lyingdown in very pits formed by the streets and buildings, which, incourse of time, had been constructed above its heavy chimneystacks; its old trees, insulted by the neighbouring smoke, whichdeigned to droop so low when it was very feeble and the weathervery moody; its grass-plots, struggling with the mildewed earthto be grass, or to win any show of compromise; its silentpavements, unaccustomed to the tread of feet, and even to theobservation of eyes, except when a stray face looked down fromthe upper world, wondering what nook it was; its sun-dial in alittle bricked-up corner, where no sun had straggled for ahundred years, but where, in compensation for the