So it shall happen surely, through many years to come,
that ghostly stories shall be told of the stain upon
the floor, so easy to be covered, so hard to be got
out, and that the Roman, pointing from the ceiling
shall point, so long as dust and damp and spiders spare
him, with far greater significance than he ever had
in Mr. Tulkinghorn’s time, and with a deadly
meaning. For Mr. Tulkinghorn’s time is
over for evermore, and the Roman pointed at the murderous
hand uplifted against his life, and pointed helplessly
at him, from night to morning, lying face downward
on the floor, shot through the heart.
Dutiful Friendship
A great annual occasion has come round in the establishment
of Mr. Matthew Bagnet, otherwise Lignum Vitae, ex-artilleryman
and present bassoon-player. An occasion of feasting
and festival. The celebration of a birthday
in the family.
It is not Mr. Bagnet’s birthday. Mr. Bagnet
merely distinguishes that epoch in the musical instrument
business by kissing the children with an extra smack
before breakfast, smoking an additional pipe after
dinner, and wondering towards evening what his poor
old mother is thinking about it—a subject
of infinite speculation, and rendered so by his mother
having departed this life twenty years. Some
men rarely revert to their father, but seem, in the
bank-books of their remembrance, to have transferred
all the stock of filial affection into their mother’s
name. Mr. Bagnet is one of like his trade the
better for that. If I had kept clear of his
old girl causes him usually to make the noun-substantive
“goodness” of the feminine gender.
It is not the birthday of one of the three children.
Those occasions are kept with some marks of distinction,
but they rarely overleap the bounds of happy returns
and a pudding. On young Woolwich’s last
birthday, Mr. Bagnet certainly did, after observing
on his growth and general advancement, proceed, in
a moment of profound reflection on the changes wrought
by time, to examine him in the catechism, accomplishing
with extreme accuracy the questions number one and
two, “What is your name?” and “Who
gave you that name?” but there failing in the
exact precision of his memory and substituting for
number three the question “And how do you like
that name?” which he propounded with a sense
of its importance, in itself so edifying and improving
as to give it quite an orthodox air. This, however,
was a speciality on that particular birthday, and
not a general solemnity.
It is the old girl’s birthday, and that is the
greatest holiday and reddest-letter day in Mr. Bagnet’s
calendar. The auspicious event is always commemorated
according to certain forms settled and prescribed
by Mr. Bagnet some years since. Mr. Bagnet, being
deeply convinced that to have a pair of fowls for dinner
is to attain the highest pitch of imperial luxury,
invariably goes forth himself very early in the morning
