The Mystery of Edwin Drood (19 page)

 

  “You are evidently going to write a book
about us, Mr. Jasper,” quoth the Dean; “to write a book about us. Well! We are
very ancient, and we ought to make a good book. We are not so richly endowed in
possessions as in age; but perhaps you will put THAT in your book, among other
things, and call attention to our wrongs.”

 

  Mr. Tope, as in duty bound, is greatly
entertained by this.

 

  “I really have no intention at all,
sir,” replies Jasper, “of turning author or archaeologist. It is but a whim of
mine. And even for my whim, Mr. Sapsea here is more accountable than I am.”

 

  “How so, Mr. Mayor?” says the Dean, with
a nod of good-natured recognition of his Fetch. “How is that, Mr. Mayor?”

 

  “I am not aware,” Mr. Sapsea remarks,
looking about him for information, “to what the Very Reverend the Dean does me
the honour of referring.” And then falls to studying his original in minute
points of detail.

 

  “Durdles,” Mr. Tope hints.

 

  “Ay!” the Dean echoes; “Durdles,
Durdles!”

 

  “The truth is, sir,” explains Jasper,
“that my curiosity in the man was first really stimulated by Mr. Sapsea. Mr.
Sapsea's knowledge of mankind and power of drawing out whatever is recluse or
odd around him, first led to my bestowing a second thought upon the man: though
of course I had met him constantly about. You would not be surprised by this,
Mr. Dean, if you had seen Mr. Sapsea deal with him in his own parlour, as I
did.”

 

  “O!” cries Sapsea, picking up the ball
thrown to him with ineffable complacency and pomposity; “yes, yes. The Very
Reverend the Dean refers to that? Yes. I happened to bring Durdles and Mr. Jasper
together. I regard Durdles as a Character.”

 

  “A character, Mr. Sapsea, that with a
few skilful touches you turn inside out,” says Jasper.

 

  “Nay, not quite that,” returns the
lumbering auctioneer. “I may have a little influence over him, perhaps; and a little
insight into his character, perhaps. The Very Reverend the Dean will please to
bear in mind that I have seen the world.” Here Mr. Sapsea gets a little behind
the Dean, to inspect his coat-buttons.

 

  “Well!” says the Dean, looking about him
to see what has become of his copyist: “I hope, Mr. Mayor, you will use your
study and knowledge of Durdles to the good purpose of exhorting him not to
break our worthy and respected Choir-Master's neck; we cannot afford it; his
head and voice are much too valuable to us.”

 

  Mr. Tope is again highly entertained,
and, having fallen into respectful convulsions of laughter, subsides into a
deferential murmur, importing that surely any gentleman would deem it a
pleasure and an honour to have his neck broken, in return for such a compliment
from such a source.

 

  “I will take it upon myself, sir,”
observes Sapsea loftily, “to answer for Mr. Jasper's neck. I will tell Durdles
to be careful of it. He will mind what I say. How is it at present endangered?”
he inquires, looking about him with magnificent patronage.

 

  “Only by my making a moonlight
expedition with Durdles among the tombs, vaults, towers, and ruins,” returns
Jasper. “You remember suggesting, when you brought us together, that, as a
lover of the picturesque, it might be worth my while?”

 

  “I remember!” replies the auctioneer.
And the solemn idiot really believes that he does remember.

 

  “Profiting by your hint,” pursues
Jasper, “I have had some dayrambles with the extraordinary old fellow, and we
are to make a moonlight hole-and-corner exploration to-night.”

 

  “And here he is,” says the Dean.

 

  Durdles with his dinner-bundle in his
hand, is indeed beheld slouching towards them. Slouching nearer, and perceiving
the Dean, he pulls off his hat, and is slouching away with it under his arm,
when Mr. Sapsea stops him.

 

  “Mind you take care of my friend,” is
the injunction Mr. Sapsea lays upon him.

 

  “What friend o” yourn is dead?” asks
Durdles. “No orders has come in for any friend o” yourn.”

 

  “I mean my live friend there.”

 

  “O! him?” says Durdles. “He can take
care of himself, can Mister Jarsper.”

 

  “But do you take care of him too,” says
Sapsea.

 

  Whom Durdles (there being command in his
tone) surlily surveys from head to foot.

 

  “With submission to his Reverence the
Dean, if you'll mind what concerns you, Mr. Sapsea, Durdles he'll mind what
concerns him.”

 

  “You're out of temper,” says Mr. Sapsea,
winking to the company to observe how smoothly he will manage him. “My friend
concerns me, and Mr. Jasper is my friend. And you are my friend.”

 

  “Don't you get into a bad habit of
boasting,” retorts Durdles, with a grave cautionary nod. “It'll grow upon you.”

 

  “You are out of temper,” says Sapsea
again; reddening, but again sinking to the company.

 

  “I own to it,” returns Durdles; “I don't
like liberties.”

 

  Mr. Sapsea winks a third wink to the
company, as who should say: “I think you will agree with me that I have settled
HIS business;” and stalks out of the controversy.

 

  Durdles then gives the Dean a good
evening, and adding, as he puts his hat on, “You'll find me at home, Mister
Jarsper, as agreed, when you want me; I'm a-going home to clean myself,” soon
slouches out of sight. This going home to clean himself is one of the man's
incomprehensible compromises with inexorable facts; he, and his hat, and his
boots, and his clothes, never showing any trace of cleaning, but being
uniformly in one condition of dust and grit.

 

  The lamplighter now dotting the quiet
Close with specks of light, and running at a great rate up and down his little
ladder with that object—his little ladder under the sacred shadow of whose
inconvenience generations had grown up, and which all Cloisterham would have
stood aghast at the idea of abolishing—the Dean withdraws to his dinner, Mr.
Tope to his tea, and Mr. Jasper to his piano. There, with no light but that of
the fire, he sits chanting choir-music in a low and beautiful voice, for two or
three hours; in short, until it has been for some time dark, and the moon is
about to rise.

 

  Then he closes his piano softly, softly
changes his coat for a peajacket, with a goodly wicker-cased bottle in its
largest pocket, and putting on a low-crowned, flap-brimmed hat, goes softly
out. Why does he move so softly to-night? No outward reason is apparent for it.
Can there be any sympathetic reason crouching darkly within him?

 

  Repairing to Durdles's unfinished house,
or hole in the city wall, and seeing a light within it, he softly picks his
course among the gravestones, monuments, and stony lumber of the yard, already
touched here and there, sidewise, by the rising moon. The two journeymen have
left their two great saws sticking in their blocks of stone; and two skeleton
journeymen out of the Dance of Death might be grinning in the shadow of their
sheltering sentry-boxes, about to slash away at cutting out the gravestones of
the next two people destined to die in Cloisterham. Likely enough, the two
think little of that now, being alive, and perhaps merry. Curious, to make a
guess at the two;—or say one of the two!

 

  “Ho! Durdles!”

 

  The light moves, and he appears with it
at the door. He would seem to have been “cleaning himself” with the aid of a
bottle, jug, and tumbler; for no other cleansing instruments are visible in the
bare brick room with rafters overhead and no plastered ceiling, into which he
shows his visitor.

 

  “Are you ready?”

 

  “I am ready, Mister Jarsper. Let the old
uns come out if they dare, when we go among their tombs. My spirit is ready for
“em.”

 

  “Do you mean animal spirits, or ardent?”

 

  “The one's the t'other,” answers
Durdles, “and I mean “em both.”

 

  He takes a lantern from a hook, puts a
match or two in his pocket wherewith to light it, should there be need; and
they go out together, dinner-bundle and all.

 

  Surely an unaccountable sort of
expedition! That Durdles himself, who is always prowling among old graves, and
ruins, like a Ghoul—that he should be stealing forth to climb, and dive, and
wander without an object, is nothing extraordinary; but that the ChoirMaster or
any one else should hold it worth his while to be with him, and to study
moonlight effects in such company is another affair. Surely an unaccountable
sort of expedition, therefore!

 

  “'Ware that there mound by the
yard-gate, Mister Jarsper.”

 

  “I see it. What is it?”

 

  “Lime.”

 

  Mr. Jasper stops, and waits for him to
come up, for he lags behind. “What you call quick-lime?”

 

  “Ay!” says Durdles; “quick enough to eat
your boots. With a little handy stirring, quick enough to eat your bones.”

 

  They go on, presently passing the red
windows of the Travellers” Twopenny, and emerging into the clear moonlight of
the Monks” Vineyard. This crossed, they come to Minor Canon Corner: of which
the greater part lies in shadow until the moon shall rise higher in the sky.

 

  The sound of a closing house-door
strikes their ears, and two men come out. These are Mr. Crisparkle and Neville.
Jasper, with a strange and sudden smile upon his face, lays the palm of his
hand upon the breast of Durdles, stopping him where he stands.

 

  At that end of Minor Canon Corner the
shadow is profound in the existing state of the light: at that end, too, there
is a piece of old dwarf wall, breast high, the only remaining boundary of what
was once a garden, but is now the thoroughfare. Jasper and Durdles would have
turned this wall in another instant; but, stopping so short, stand behind it.

 

  “Those two are only sauntering,” Jasper
whispers; “they will go out into the moonlight soon. Let us keep quiet here, or
they will detain us, or want to join us, or what not.”

 

  Durdles nods assent, and falls to
munching some fragments from his bundle. Jasper folds his arms upon the top of
the wall, and, with his chin resting on them, watches. He takes no note
whatever of the Minor Canon, but watches Neville, as though his eye were at the
trigger of a loaded rifle, and he had covered him, and were going to fire. A sense
of destructive power is so expressed in his face, that even Durdles pauses in
his munching, and looks at him, with an unmunched something in his cheek.

 

  Meanwhile Mr. Crisparkle and Neville
walk to and fro, quietly talking together. What they say, cannot be heard
consecutively; but Mr. Jasper has already distinguished his own name more than
once.

 

  “This is the first day of the week,” Mr.
Crisparkle can be distinctly heard to observe, as they turn back; “and the last
day of the week is Christmas Eve.”

 

  “You may be certain of me, sir.”

 

  The echoes were favourable at those
points, but as the two approach, the sound of their talking becomes confused
again. The word “confidence,” shattered by the echoes, but still capable of
being pieced together, is uttered by Mr. Crisparkle. As they draw still nearer,
this fragment of a reply is heard: “Not deserved yet, but shall be, sir.” As
they turn away again, Jasper again hears his own name, in connection with the
words from Mr. Crisparkle: “Remember that I said I answered for you
confidently.” Then the sound of their talk becomes confused again; they halting
for a little while, and some earnest action on the part of Neville succeeding.
When they move once more, Mr. Crisparkle is seen to look up at the sky, and to
point before him. They then slowly disappear; passing out into the moonlight at
the opposite end of the Corner.

 

  It is not until they are gone, that Mr.
Jasper moves. But then he turns to Durdles, and bursts into a fit of laughter.
Durdles, who still has that suspended something in his cheek, and who sees
nothing to laugh at, stares at him until Mr. Jasper lays his face down on his
arms to have his laugh out. Then Durdles bolts the something, as if desperately
resigning himself to indigestion.

 

  Among those secluded nooks there is very
little stir or movement after dark. There is little enough in the high tide of
the day, but there is next to none at night. Besides that the cheerfully
frequented High Street lies nearly parallel to the spot (the old Cathedral
rising between the two), and is the natural channel in which the Cloisterham
traffic flows, a certain awful hush pervades the ancient pile, the cloisters,
and the churchyard, after dark, which not many people care to encounter. Ask
the first hundred citizens of Cloisterham, met at random in the streets at
noon, if they believed in Ghosts, they would tell you no; but put them to
choose at night between these eerie Precincts and the thoroughfare of shops,
and you would find that ninety-nine declared for the longer round and the more
frequented way. The cause of this is not to be found in any local superstition
that attaches to the Precincts—albeit a mysterious lady, with a child in her
arms and a rope dangling from her neck, has been seen flitting about there by
sundry witnesses as intangible as herself—but it is to be sought in the innate
shrinking of dust with the breath of life in it from dust out of which the
breath of life has passed; also, in the widely diffused, and almost as widely
unacknowledged, reflection: “If the dead do, under any circumstances, become
visible to the living, these are such likely surroundings for the purpose that
I, the living, will get out of them as soon as I can.” Hence, when Mr. Jasper
and Durdles pause to glance around them, before descending into the crypt by a
small side door, of which the latter has a key, the whole expanse of moonlight
in their view is utterly deserted. One might fancy that the tide of life was
stemmed by Mr. Jasper's own gatehouse. The murmur of the tide is heard beyond;
but no wave passes the archway, over which his lamp burns red behind his
curtain, as if the building were a Lighthouse.