Page:The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.djvu/194

140 140 POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF

at last arrived at the satisfactory conclusion that he was a very ill-used and persecuted individual, and had better go to bed.

" Up a wide and ancient staircase the smart girl preceded Tom, shading" the chamber candle with her hand, to protect it from the currents of air which in such a rambling" old place might have found plenty of room to disport themselves in, without blowing the candle out, but which did blow it out nevertheless ; thus affording Tom's enemies an opportunity of asserting that it was he, and not the wind, who extin- guished the candle, and that while he pretended to be blowing it a-light again, he was in fact kissing the girl. Be this as it may, another light was obtained, and Tom was conducted through a maze of rooms, and a labyrinth of passages, to the apartment which had been prepared for his reception, where the girl bid him good night, and left him alone.

" It was a good large room with big closets, and a bed which might have served for a whole boarding-school, to say nothing of a couple of oaken presses that would have held the baggage of a small army : but what struck Tom's fancy most, was a strange, grim-looking, high-backed chair, carved in the most fantastic manner, with a flowered damask cushion, and the round knobs at the bottom of the legs carefully tied up in red cloth, as if it had got the gout in its toes. Of any other queer chair, Tom would only have thought it was a queer chair, and there v/ould have been an end of the matter ; but there was something about this particular chair, and yet he couldn't tell what it was, so odd and so unlike any other piece of furniture he had ever seen, that it seemed to fascinate him. He sat down before the fire, and stared at the old chair for half an hour ; — Damn the chair, it was such a strange old thing, he couldn't take his eyes off it.

" * Well,' said Tom, slowly undressing himself, and staring at the old chair all the while, which stood with a mysterious aspect by the bed- side, * I never saw such a rum concern as that in my days. Very odd,' said Tom, who had got rather sage with the hot punch, * Very odd/ Tom shook his head with an air of yjrofound wisdom, and looked at the chair again. He couldn't make anything of it though, so he got into bed, covered himself up warm, and fell asleep.

" In about half an hour, Tom woke up with a start, from a confused dream of tall men and tumblers of punch : and the first object that pre- sented itself to his waking imagination was the queer chair.

" * I won't look at it any more,' said Tom to himself, and he squeezed his eyelids together, and tried to persuade himself he was going to sleep again. No use ; nothing but queer chairs danced before his eyes, kick- ing up their legs, jumping over each other's backs, and playing all kinds of antics.

" * I may as well see one real chair, as two or three complete sets of false ones,' said Tom, bringing out his head from under the bed-clothes. There it was, plainly discernible by the light of the fire, looking as pro- voking as ever.

" Tom gazed at the chair ; and, suddenly as he looked at it, a most extraordinary change seemed to come over it. The carving of the back gradually assumed the lineaments and expression of an old, shrivelled