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Updated: June 23, 2025
The fading light of the winter day was gray at the window. The curtained bed was a mass of gloom; a white Christ on a cross of ebony gleamed above the narrow chimney-shelf, between two candlesticks of dull brass; the floor, with its few rough mats, was as cold as the frozen snow outside. The skipper felt the chill of the place in his sturdy bones. He shot a glance at the crucifix.
He now remembered a little miniature portrait he had seen formerly in Paris, on the drawing-room chimney-shelf, and which had since disappeared. Where was it? Lost, or hidden away? Oh, if he could but have it in his hand for one minute! His mother kept it perhaps in the unconfessed drawer where love-tokens were treasured.
There he encountered a gentleman, dressed one would say rather beyond the merits of the establishment, who was taking his ease at full length on Fanny's sofa, and drinking some hot compound which was to be seen in a tumbler on the chimney-shelf just above his head. It was now six o'clock in the evening, and the gentleman no doubt had dined.
And with this she unrolled the deed, crumpled it up, and threw it on the red blaze of the fire. There was a flash of flame and a roar in the chimney. It was gone in a moment, and our Welsh lands were so much smoke and cinders. My aunt made a wild rush to rescue them, but struck her head against the chimney-shelf, and fell back into a chair, crying, "You idiot! you fool! You shall never marry him!"
She just stood up there by the fireplace, as proud as Queen Victory, I don't blame her, Johnny, O no, I don't blame her; she had the right of it there, I ought to have been ashamed of myself; but a man never likes to hear that from other folks, and I put my pipe down on the chimney-shelf so hard I heard it snap like ice, and I stood up too, and said but no matter what I said, I guess.
"Hah!" said I to myself, "fifteen francs," and I was right to a sou. Juste gravely laid five francs on the chimney-shelf. There are immeasurable differences between the gregarious man and the man who lives closest to nature. Toussaint Louverture, after he was caught, died without speaking a word. Napoleon, transplanted to a rock, talked like a magpie he wanted to account for himself.
"The Captains' Room," he announced, passing in and steering for the chimney-shelf, on which stood a pair of silver sconces each carrying three wax candles. These he took down, lit and replaced. "Ah, sir! Many's the time I've showed Lord Nelson himself into this room, in the days before Sir Horatio, and even after. And you were sayin' " "I said nothing."
Vincent," he said, "it seems to me you're extraordinarily er extraordinarily plausible. But I'm even now not quite sure whether I'm not going mad. It's like a perfectly mad dream all these things one on the top of the other." He paused, looking sharply at the elder man, and away again. "Yes?" Laurie began to finger a pencil that lay on the chimney-shelf. "You see what I mean, don't you?" he said.
On the chimney-shelf was an Empire clock between two vases, and from these rose the faded stems of some dried grasses stuck upright into sand. "Come to the fire," said the Abbé, "for in spite of the brazier it is fearfully cold." And in answer to Durtal, who spoke of his rheumatism, he resignedly shrugged his shoulders. "All the residence is the same," said he.
There was but one side left to that depraved man's mind; his bloody, base life had smothered the rest under the growing heap of his horrible deeds. Thorn had killed twenty-eight human beings for hire, of whom he had tally, but there was one to be included of whom he had not taken count himself. As he stood here against the chimney-shelf he was only the outside husk of a man.
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