The Mystery of Edwin Drood (16 page)

 

  “Who but you, sir?” replied Helena.
“What is my influence, or my weak wisdom, compared with yours!”

 

  “You have the wisdom of Love,” returned
the Minor Canon, “and it was the highest wisdom ever known upon this earth,
remember. As to mine—but the less said of that commonplace commodity the
better. Good night!”

 

  She took the hand he offered her, and
gratefully and almost reverently raised it to her lips.

 

  “Tut!” said the Minor Canon softly, “I
am much overpaid!” and turned away.

 

  Retracing his steps towards the
Cathedral Close, he tried, as he went along in the dark, to think out the best
means of bringing to pass what he had promised to effect, and what must somehow
be done. “I shall probably be asked to marry them,” he reflected, “and I would
they were married and gone! But this presses first.”

 

  He debated principally whether he should
write to young Drood, or whether he should speak to Jasper. The consciousness
of being popular with the whole Cathedral establishment inclined him to the
latter course, and the well-timed sight of the lighted gatehouse decided him to
take it. “I will strike while the iron is hot,” he said, “and see him now.”

 

  Jasper was lying asleep on a couch
before the fire, when, having ascended the postern-stair, and received no
answer to his knock at the door, Mr. Crisparkle gently turned the handle and
looked in. Long afterwards he had cause to remember how Jasper sprang from the
couch in a delirious state between sleeping and waking, and crying out: “What
is the matter? Who did it?”

 

  “It is only I, Jasper. I am sorry to
have disturbed you.”

 

  The glare of his eyes settled down into
a look of recognition, and he moved a chair or two, to make a way to the
fireside.

 

  “I was dreaming at a great rate, and am
glad to be disturbed from an indigestive after-dinner sleep. Not to mention
that you are always welcome.”

 

  “Thank you. I am not confident,”
returned Mr. Crisparkle, as he sat himself down in the easy-chair placed for
him, “that my subject will at first sight be quite as welcome as myself; but I
am a minister of peace, and I pursue my subject in the interests of peace. In a
word, Jasper, I want to establish peace between these two young fellows.”

 

  A very perplexed expression took hold of
Mr. Jasper's face; a very perplexing expression too, for Mr. Crisparkle could
make nothing of it.

 

  “How?” was Jasper's inquiry, in a low
and slow voice, after a silence.

 

  “For the “How” I come to you. I want to
ask you to do me the great favour and service of interposing with your nephew
(I have already interposed with Mr. Neville), and getting him to write you a
short note, in his lively way, saying that he is willing to shake hands. I know
what a good-natured fellow he is, and what influence you have with him. And without
in the least defending Mr. Neville, we must all admit that he was bitterly
stung.”

 

  Jasper turned that perplexed face
towards the fire. Mr. Crisparkle continuing to observe it, found it even more
perplexing than before, inasmuch as it seemed to denote (which could hardly be)
some close internal calculation.

 

  “I know that you are not prepossessed in
Mr. Neville's favour,” the Minor Canon was going on, when Jasper stopped him:

 

  “You have cause to say so. I am not,
indeed.”

 

  “Undoubtedly; and I admit his lamentable
violence of temper, though I hope he and I will get the better of it between
us. But I have exacted a very solemn promise from him as to his future
demeanour towards your nephew, if you do kindly interpose; and I am sure he
will keep it.”

 

  “You are always responsible and
trustworthy, Mr. Crisparkle. Do you really feel sure that you can answer for
him so confidently?”

 

  “I do.”

 

  The perplexed and perplexing look
vanished.

 

  “Then you relieve my mind of a great
dread, and a heavy weight,” said Jasper; “I will do it.”

 

  Mr. Crisparkle, delighted by the
swiftness and completeness of his success, acknowledged it in the handsomest
terms.

 

  “I will do it,” repeated Jasper, “for
the comfort of having your guarantee against my vague and unfounded fears. You
will laugh—but do you keep a Diary?”

 

  “A line for a day; not more.”

 

  “A line for a day would be quite as much
as my uneventful life would need, Heaven knows,” said Jasper, taking a book
from a desk, “but that my Diary is, in fact, a Diary of Ned's life too. You
will laugh at this entry; you will guess when it was made:

 

   

 

  “Past midnight. —After what I have just
now seen, I have a morbid dread upon me of some horrible consequences resulting
to my dear boy, that I cannot reason with or in any way contend against. All my
efforts are vain. The demoniacal passion of this Neville Landless, his strength
in his fury, and his savage rage for the destruction of its object, appal me.
So profound is the impression, that twice since I have gone into my dear boy's
room, to assure myself of his sleeping safely, and not lying dead in his
blood.”

 

   

 

  “Here is another entry next morning:

 

   

 

  “Ned up and away. Light-hearted and
unsuspicious as ever. He laughed when I cautioned him, and said he was as good
a man as Neville Landless any day. I told him that might be, but he was not as
bad a man. He continued to make light of it, but I travelled with him as far as
I could, and left him most unwillingly. I am unable to shake off these dark
intangible presentiments of evil—if feelings founded upon staring facts are to
be so called.”

 

   

 

  “Again and again,” said Jasper, in
conclusion, twirling the leaves of the book before putting it by, “I have
relapsed into these moods, as other entries show. But I have now your assurance
at my back, and shall put it in my book, and make it an antidote to my black
humours.”

 

  “Such an antidote, I hope,” returned Mr.
Crisparkle, “as will induce you before long to consign the black humours to the
flames. I ought to be the last to find any fault with you this evening, when
you have met my wishes so freely; but I must say, Jasper, that your devotion to
your nephew has made you exaggerative here.”

 

  “You are my witness,” said Jasper,
shrugging his shoulders, “what my state of mind honestly was, that night,
before I sat down to write, and in what words I expressed it. You remember
objecting to a word I used, as being too strong? It was a stronger word than
any in my Diary.”

 

  “Well, well. Try the antidote,” rejoined
Mr. Crisparkle; “and may it give you a brighter and better view of the case! We
will discuss it no more now. I have to thank you for myself, thank you
sincerely.”

 

  “You shall find,” said Jasper, as they
shook hands, “that I will not do the thing you wish me to do, by halves. I will
take care that Ned, giving way at all, shall give way thoroughly.”

 

  On the third day after this
conversation, he called on Mr. Crisparkle with the following letter:

 

   

 

  “MY DEAR JACK,

 

  “I am touched by your account of your
interview with Mr. Crisparkle, whom I much respect and esteem. At once I openly
say that I forgot myself on that occasion quite as much as Mr. Landless did,
and that I wish that bygone to be a bygone, and all to be right again.

 

  “Look here, dear old boy. Ask Mr.
Landless to dinner on Christmas Eve (the better the day the better the deed),
and let there be only we three, and let us shake hands all round there and
then, and say no more about it.

 

  “My dear Jack, “Ever your most
affectionate, “EDWIN DROOD.

 

  “P. S. Love to Miss Pussy at the next
music-lesson.”

 

   

 

  “You expect Mr. Neville, then?” said Mr.
Crisparkle.

 

  “I count upon his coming,” said Mr.
Jasper.

 

   

 

   

 

  CHAPTER XI—A PICTURE AND A RING

 

   

 

  BEHIND the most ancient part of Holborn,
London, where certain gabled houses some centuries of age still stand looking
on the public way, as if disconsolately looking for the Old Bourne that has
long run dry, is a little nook composed of two irregular quadrangles, called
Staple Inn. It is one of those nooks, the turning into which out of the
clashing street, imparts to the relieved pedestrian the sensation of having put
cotton in his ears, and velvet soles on his boots. It is one of those nooks
where a few smoky sparrows twitter in smoky trees, as though they called to one
another, “Let us play at country,” and where a few feet of garden-mould and a
few yards of gravel enable them to do that refreshing violence to their tiny
understandings. Moreover, it is one of those nooks which are legal nooks; and
it contains a little Hall, with a little lantern in its roof: to what obstructive
purposes devoted, and at whose expense, this history knoweth not.

 

  In the days when Cloisterham took
offence at the existence of a railroad afar off, as menacing that sensitive
constitution, the property of us Britons: the odd fortune of which sacred
institution it is to be in exactly equal degrees croaked about, trembled for,
and boasted of, whatever happens to anything, anywhere in the world: in those
days no neighbouring architecture of lofty proportions had arisen to overshadow
Staple Inn. The westering sun bestowed bright glances on it, and the south-west
wind blew into it unimpeded.

 

  Neither wind nor sun, however, favoured
Staple Inn one December afternoon towards six o'clock, when it was filled with
fog, and candles shed murky and blurred rays through the windows of all its
then-occupied sets of chambers; notably from a set of chambers in a corner
house in the little inner quadrangle, presenting in black and white over its
ugly portal the mysterious inscription:

 

  P

 

  J T

 

  1747

 

   

 

  In which set of chambers, never having
troubled his head about the inscription, unless to bethink himself at odd times
on glancing up at it, that haply it might mean Perhaps John Thomas, or Perhaps
Joe Tyler, sat Mr. Grewgious writing by his fire.

 

  Who could have told, by looking at Mr.
Grewgious, whether he had ever known ambition or disappointment? He had been
bred to the Bar, and had laid himself out for chamber practice; to draw deeds;
“convey the wise it call,” as Pistol says. But Conveyancing and he had made such
a very indifferent marriage of it that they had separated by consent—if there
can be said to be separation where there has never been coming together.

 

  No. Coy Conveyancing would not come to
Mr. Grewgious. She was wooed, not won, and they went their several ways. But an
Arbitration being blown towards him by some unaccountable wind, and he gaining
great credit in it as one indefatigable in seeking out right and doing right, a
pretty fat Receivership was next blown into his pocket by a wind more traceable
to its source. So, by chance, he had found his niche. Receiver and Agent now,
to two rich estates, and deputing their legal business, in an amount worth
having, to a firm of solicitors on the floor below, he had snuffed out his
ambition (supposing him to have ever lighted it), and had settled down with his
snuffers for the rest of his life under the dry vine and fig-tree of P. J. T.,
who planted in seventeen-fortyseven.

 

  Many accounts and account-books, many
files of correspondence, and several strong boxes, garnished Mr. Grewgious's
room. They can scarcely be represented as having lumbered it, so conscientious
and precise was their orderly arrangement. The apprehension of dying suddenly,
and leaving one fact or one figure with any incompleteness or obscurity
attaching to it, would have stretched Mr. Grewgious stone-dead any day. The
largest fidelity to a trust was the life-blood of the man. There are sorts of
life-blood that course more quickly, more gaily, more attractively; but there
is no better sort in circulation.

 

  There was no luxury in his room. Even
its comforts were limited to its being dry and warm, and having a snug though
faded fireside. What may be called its private life was confined to the hearth,
and all easy-chair, and an old-fashioned occasional round table that was
brought out upon the rug after business hours, from a corner where it elsewise
remained turned up like a shining mahogany shield. Behind it, when standing
thus on the defensive, was a closet, usually containing something good to drink.
An outer room was the clerk's room; Mr. Grewgious's sleeping-room was across
the common stair; and he held some not empty cellarage at the bottom of the
common stair. Three hundred days in the year, at least, he crossed over to the
hotel in Furnival's Inn for his dinner, and after dinner crossed back again, to
make the most of these simplicities until it should become broad business day
once more, with P. J. T., date seventeen-forty-seven.

 

  As Mr. Grewgious sat and wrote by his
fire that afternoon, so did the clerk of Mr. Grewgious sit and write by HIS
fire. A pale, puffy-faced, dark-haired person of thirty, with big dark eyes
that wholly wanted lustre, and a dissatisfied doughy complexion, that seemed to
ask to be sent to the baker's, this attendant was a mysterious being, possessed
of some strange power over Mr. Grewgious. As though he had been called into
existence, like a fabulous Familiar, by a magic spell which had failed when
required to dismiss him, he stuck tight to Mr. Grewgious's stool, although Mr.
Grewgious's comfort and convenience would manifestly have been advanced by
dispossessing him. A gloomy person with tangled locks, and a general air of
having been reared under the shadow of that baleful tree of Java which has
given shelter to more lies than the whole botanical kingdom, Mr. Grewgious,
nevertheless, treated him with unaccountable consideration.