Charles Dickens: Mr. Testator's Visitation

Charles Dickens by William Powell Frith

This was a man who, though not more than thirty, had seen the world in divers irreconcilable capacities—had been an officer in a South American regiment among other odd things—but had not achieved much in any way of life, and was in debt, and in hiding.  He occupied chambers of the dreariest nature in Lyons Inn; his name, however, was not up on the door, or door-post, but in lieu of it stood the name of a friend who had died in the chambers, and had given him the furniture.  The story arose out of the furniture, and was to this effect:- Let the former holder of the chambers, whose name was still upon the door and door-post, be Mr. Testator.

Mr. Testator took a set of chambers in Lyons Inn when he had but very scanty furniture for his bedroom, and none for his sitting-room.  He had lived some wintry months in this condition, and had found it very bare and cold.  One night, past midnight, when he sat writing and still had writing to do that must be done before he went to bed, he found himself out of coals.  He had coals down-stairs, but had never been to his cellar; however the cellar-key was on his mantelshelf, and if he went down and opened the cellar it fitted, he might fairly assume the coals in that cellar to be his.  As to his laundress, she lived among the coal-waggons and Thames watermen—for there were Thames watermen at that time—in some unknown rat-hole by the river, down lanes and alleys on the other side of the Strand.  As to any other person to meet him or obstruct him, Lyons Inn was dreaming, drunk, maudlin, moody, betting, brooding over bill-discounting or renewing—asleep or awake, minding its own affairs.  Mr. Testator took his coal-scuttle in one hand, his candle and key in the other, and descended to the dismallest underground dens of Lyons Inn, where the late vehicles in the streets became thunderous, and all the water-pipes in the neighbourhood seemed to have Macbeth’s Amen sticking in their throats, and to be trying to get it out.  After groping here and there among low doors to no purpose, Mr. Testator at length came to a door with a rusty padlock which his key fitted.  Getting the door open with much trouble, and looking in, he found, no coals, but a confused pile of furniture.  Alarmed by this intrusion on another man’s property, he locked the door again, found his own cellar, filled his scuttle, and returned up-stairs.

But the furniture he had seen, ran on castors across and across Mr. Testator’s mind incessantly, when, in the chill hour of five in the morning, he got to bed.  He particularly wanted a table to write at, and a table expressly made to be written at, had been the piece of furniture in the foreground of the heap.  When his laundress emerged from her burrow in the morning to make his kettle boil, he artfully led up to the subject of cellars and furniture; but the two ideas had evidently no connexion in her mind.  When she left him, and he sat at his breakfast, thinking about the furniture, he recalled the rusty state of the padlock, and inferred that the furniture must have been stored in the cellars for a long time—was perhaps forgotten—owner dead, perhaps?  After thinking it over, a few days, in the course of which he could pump nothing out of Lyons Inn about the furniture, he became desperate, and resolved to borrow that table.  He did so, that night.  He had not had the table long, when he determined to borrow an easy-chair; he had not had that long, when he made up his mind to borrow a bookcase; then, a couch; then, a carpet and rug.  By that time, he felt he was ‘in furniture stepped in so far,’ as that it could be no worse to borrow it all.  Consequently, he borrowed it all, and locked up the cellar for good.  He had always locked it, after every visit.  He had carried up every separate article in the dead of the night, and, at the best, had felt as wicked as a Resurrection Man.  Every article was blue and furry when brought into his rooms, and he had had, in a murderous and guilty sort of way, to polish it up while London slept.

Mr. Testator lived in his furnished chambers two or three years, or more, and gradually lulled himself into the opinion that the furniture was his own.  This was his convenient state of mind when, late one night, a step came up the stairs, and a hand passed over his door feeling for his knocker, and then one deep and solemn rap was rapped that might have been a spring in Mr. Testator’s easy-chair to shoot him out of it; so promptly was it attended with that effect.

With a candle in his hand, Mr. Testator went to the door, and found there, a very pale and very tall man; a man who stooped; a man with very high shoulders, a very narrow chest, and a very red nose; a shabby-genteel man.  He was wrapped in a long thread-bare black coat, fastened up the front with more pins than buttons, and under his arm he squeezed an umbrella without a handle, as if he were playing bagpipes.  He said, ‘I ask your pardon, but can you tell me—’ and stopped; his eyes resting on some object within the chambers.

‘Can I tell you what?’ asked Mr. Testator, noting his stoppage with quick alarm.

‘I ask your pardon,’ said the stranger, ‘but—this is not the inquiry I was going to make—do I see in there, any small article of property belonging to me?’

Mr. Testator was beginning to stammer that he was not aware—when the visitor slipped past him, into the chambers.  There, in a goblin way which froze Mr. Testator to the marrow, he examined, first, the writing-table, and said, ‘Mine;’ then, the easy-chair, and said, ‘Mine;’ then, the bookcase, and said, ‘Mine;’ then, turned up a corner of the carpet, and said, ‘Mine!’ in a word, inspected every item of furniture from the cellar, in succession, and said, ‘Mine!’  Towards the end of this investigation, Mr. Testator perceived that he was sodden with liquor, and that the liquor was gin.  He was not unsteady with gin, either in his speech or carriage; but he was stiff with gin in both particulars.

Mr. Testator was in a dreadful state, for (according to his making out of the story) the possible consequences of what he had done in recklessness and hardihood, flashed upon him in their fulness for the first time.  When they had stood gazing at one another for a little while, he tremulously began:

‘Sir, I am conscious that the fullest explanation, compensation, and restitution, are your due.  They shall be yours.  Allow me to entreat that, without temper, without even natural irritation on your part, we may have a little—’

‘Drop of something to drink,’ interposed the stranger.  ‘I am agreeable.’

Mr. Testator had intended to say, ‘a little quiet conversation,’ but with great relief of mind adopted the amendment.  He produced a decanter of gin, and was bustling about for hot water and sugar, when he found that his visitor had already drunk half of the decanter’s contents.  With hot water and sugar the visitor drank the remainder before he had been an hour in the chambers by the chimes of the church of St. Mary in the Strand; and during the process he frequently whispered to himself, ‘Mine!’

The gin gone, and Mr. Testator wondering what was to follow it, the visitor rose and said, with increased stiffness, ‘At what hour of the morning, sir, will it be convenient?’  Mr. Testator hazarded, ‘At ten?’  ‘Sir,’ said the visitor, ‘at ten, to the moment, I shall be here.’  He then contemplated Mr. Testator somewhat at leisure, and said, ‘God bless you!  How is your wife?’  Mr. Testator (who never had a wife) replied with much feeling, ‘Deeply anxious, poor soul, but otherwise well.’  The visitor thereupon turned and went away, and fell twice in going down-stairs.  From that hour he was never heard of.  Whether he was a ghost, or a spectral illusion of conscience, or a drunken man who had no business there, or the drunken rightful owner of the furniture, with a transitory gleam of memory; whether he got safe home, or had no time to get to; whether he died of liquor on the way, or lived in liquor ever afterwards; he never was heard of more.  This was the story, received with the furniture and held to be as substantial, by its second possessor in an upper set of chambers in grim Lyons Inn.