The Mystery of Edwin Drood (26 page)

 

  “What is it?” demanded Jasper, becoming
upright in his chair.

 

  “To be sure,” said Mr. Grewgious,
provokingly slowly and internally, as he kept his eyes on the fire: “I might
have known it sooner; she gave me the opening; but I am such an exceedingly
Angular man, that it never occurred to me; I took all for granted.”

 

  “What is it?” demanded Jasper once more.

 

  Mr. Grewgious, alternately opening and
shutting the palms of his hands as he warmed them at the fire, and looking
fixedly at him sideways, and never changing either his action or his look in
all that followed, went on to reply.

 

  “This young couple, the lost youth and
Miss Rosa, my ward, though so long betrothed, and so long recognising their
betrothal, and so near being married—”

 

  Mr. Grewgious saw a staring white face,
and two quivering white lips, in the easy-chair, and saw two muddy hands
gripping its sides. But for the hands, he might have thought he had never seen
the face.

 

  “—This young couple came gradually to
the discovery (made on both sides pretty equally, I think), that they would be
happier and better, both in their present and their future lives, as
affectionate friends, or say rather as brother and sister, than as husband and
wife.”

 

  Mr. Grewgious saw a lead-coloured face
in the easy-chair, and on its surface dreadful starting drops or bubbles, as if
of steel.

 

  “This young couple formed at length the
healthy resolution of interchanging their discoveries, openly, sensibly, and
tenderly. They met for that purpose. After some innocent and generous talk,
they agreed to dissolve their existing, and their intended, relations, for ever
and ever.”

 

  Mr. Grewgious saw a ghastly figure rise,
open-mouthed, from the easy-chair, and lift its outspread hands towards its
head.

 

  “One of this young couple, and that one
your nephew, fearful, however, that in the tenderness of your affection for him
you would be bitterly disappointed by so wide a departure from his projected
life, forbore to tell you the secret, for a few days, and left it to be
disclosed by me, when I should come down to speak to you, and he would be gone.
I speak to you, and he is gone.”

 

  Mr. Grewgious saw the ghastly figure
throw back its head, clutch its hair with its hands, and turn with a writhing
action from him.

 

  “I have now said all I have to say:
except that this young couple parted, firmly, though not without tears and
sorrow, on the evening when you last saw them together.”

 

  Mr. Grewgious heard a terrible shriek,
and saw no ghastly figure, sitting or standing; saw nothing but a heap of torn
and miry clothes upon the floor.

 

  Not changing his action even then, he
opened and shut the palms of his hands as he warmed them, and looked down at
it.

 

   

 

   

 

  CHAPTER XVI—DEVOTED

 

   

 

  WHEN John Jasper recovered from his fit
or swoon, he found himself being tended by Mr. and Mrs. Tope, whom his visitor
had summoned for the purpose. His visitor, wooden of aspect, sat stiffly in a
chair, with his hands upon his knees, watching his recovery.

 

  “There! You've come to nicely now, sir,”
said the tearful Mrs. Tope; “you were thoroughly worn out, and no wonder!”

 

  “A man,” said Mr. Grewgious, with his
usual air of repeating a lesson, “cannot have his rest broken, and his mind
cruelly tormented, and his body overtaxed by fatigue, without being thoroughly
worn out.”

 

  “I fear I have alarmed you?” Jasper
apologised faintly, when he was helped into his easy-chair.

 

  “Not at all, I thank you,” answered Mr.
Grewgious.

 

  “You are too considerate.”

 

  “Not at all, I thank you,” answered Mr.
Grewgious again.

 

  “You must take some wine, sir,” said
Mrs. Tope, “and the jelly that I had ready for you, and that you wouldn't put
your lips to at noon, though I warned you what would come of it, you know, and
you not breakfasted; and you must have a wing of the roast fowl that has been
put back twenty times if it's been put back once. It shall all be on table in five
minutes, and this good gentleman belike will stop and see you take it.”

 

  This good gentleman replied with a
snort, which might mean yes, or no, or anything or nothing, and which Mrs. Tope
would have found highly mystifying, but that her attention was divided by the
service of the table.

 

  “You will take something with me?” said
Jasper, as the cloth was laid.

 

  “I couldn't get a morsel down my throat,
I thank you,” answered Mr. Grewgious.

 

  Jasper both ate and drank almost
voraciously. Combined with the hurry in his mode of doing it, was an evident
indifference to the taste of what he took, suggesting that he ate and drank to
fortify himself against any other failure of the spirits, far more than to gratify
his palate. Mr. Grewgious in the meantime sat upright, with no expression in
his face, and a hard kind of imperturbably polite protest all over him: as
though he would have said, in reply to some invitation to discourse; “I
couldn't originate the faintest approach to an observation on any subject
whatever, I thank you.”

 

  “Do you know,” said Jasper, when he had
pushed away his plate and glass, and had sat meditating for a few minutes: “do
you know that I find some crumbs of comfort in the communication with which you
have so much amazed me?”

 

  “DO you?” returned Mr. Grewgious, pretty
plainly adding the unspoken clause: “I don't, I thank you!”

 

  “After recovering from the shock of a
piece of news of my dear boy, so entirely unexpected, and so destructive of all
the castles I had built for him; and after having had time to think of it;
yes.”

 

  “I shall be glad to pick up your
crumbs,” said Mr. Grewgious, dryly.

 

  “Is there not, or is there—if I deceive
myself, tell me so, and shorten my pain—is there not, or is there, hope that,
finding himself in this new position, and becoming sensitively alive to the
awkward burden of explanation, in this quarter, and that, and the other, with
which it would load him, he avoided the awkwardness, and took to flight?”

 

  “Such a thing might be,” said Mr.
Grewgious, pondering.

 

  “Such a thing has been. I have read of
cases in which people, rather than face a seven days” wonder, and have to
account for themselves to the idle and impertinent, have taken themselves away,
and been long unheard of.”

 

  “I believe such things have happened,”
said Mr. Grewgious, pondering still.

 

  “When I had, and could have, no
suspicion,” pursued Jasper, eagerly following the new track, “that the dear
lost boy had withheld anything from me—most of all, such a leading matter as
this—what gleam of light was there for me in the whole black sky? When I
supposed that his intended wife was here, and his marriage close at hand, how
could I entertain the possibility of his voluntarily leaving this place, in a
manner that would be so unaccountable, capricious, and cruel? But now that I
know what you have told me, is there no little chink through which day pierces?
Supposing him to have disappeared of his own act, is not his disappearance more
accountable and less cruel? The fact of his having just parted from your ward,
is in itself a sort of reason for his going away. It does not make his
mysterious departure the less cruel to me, it is true; but it relieves it of
cruelty to her.”

 

  Mr. Grewgious could not but assent to
this.

 

  “And even as to me,” continued Jasper,
still pursuing the new track, with ardour, and, as he did so, brightening with
hope: “he knew that you were coming to me; he knew that you were intrusted to
tell me what you have told me; if your doing so has awakened a new train of
thought in my perplexed mind, it reasonably follows that, from the same
premises, he might have foreseen the inferences that I should draw. Grant that
he did foresee them; and even the cruelty to me—and who am I!—John Jasper,
Music Master, vanishes!” —

 

  Once more, Mr. Grewgious could not but
assent to this.

 

  “I have had my distrusts, and terrible
distrusts they have been,” said Jasper; “but your disclosure, overpowering as
it was at first—showing me that my own dear boy had had a great disappointing
reservation from me, who so fondly loved him, kindles hope within me. You do
not extinguish it when I state it, but admit it to be a reasonable hope. I
begin to believe it possible:” here he clasped his hands: “that he may have
disappeared from among us of his own accord, and that he may yet be alive and
well.”

 

  Mr. Crisparkle came in at the moment. To
whom Mr. Jasper repeated:

 

  “I begin to believe it possible that he
may have disappeared of his own accord, and may yet be alive and well.”

 

  Mr. Crisparkle taking a seat, and
inquiring: “Why so?” Mr. Jasper repeated the arguments he had just set forth.
If they had been less plausible than they were, the good Minor Canon's mind
would have been in a state of preparation to receive them, as exculpatory of
his unfortunate pupil. But he, too, did really attach great importance to the
lost young man's having been, so immediately before his disappearance, placed
in a new and embarrassing relation towards every one acquainted with his
projects and affairs; and the fact seemed to him to present the question in a
new light.

 

  “I stated to Mr. Sapsea, when we waited
on him,” said Jasper: as he really had done: “that there was no quarrel or
difference between the two young men at their last meeting. We all know that
their first meeting was unfortunately very far from amicable; but all went
smoothly and quietly when they were last together at my house. My dear boy was
not in his usual spirits; he was depressed—I noticed that—and I am bound
henceforth to dwell upon the circumstance the more, now that I know there was a
special reason for his being depressed: a reason, moreover, which may possibly
have induced him to absent himself.”

 

  “I pray to Heaven it may turn out so!”
exclaimed Mr. Crisparkle.

 

  “I pray to Heaven it may turn out so!”
repeated Jasper. “You know—and Mr. Grewgious should now know likewise—that I
took a great prepossession against Mr. Neville Landless, arising out of his
furious conduct on that first occasion. You know that I came to you, extremely
apprehensive, on my dear boy's behalf, of his mad violence. You know that I even
entered in my Diary, and showed the entry to you, that I had dark forebodings
against him. Mr. Grewgious ought to be possessed of the whole case. He shall
not, through any suppression of mine, be informed of a part of it, and kept in
ignorance of another part of it. I wish him to be good enough to understand
that the communication he has made to me has hopefully influenced my mind, in
spite of its having been, before this mysterious occurrence took place,
profoundly impressed against young Landless.”

 

  This fairness troubled the Minor Canon
much. He felt that he was not as open in his own dealing. He charged against
himself reproachfully that he had suppressed, so far, the two points of a
second strong outbreak of temper against Edwin Drood on the part of Neville,
and of the passion of jealousy having, to his own certain knowledge, flamed up
in Neville's breast against him. He was convinced of Neville's innocence of any
part in the ugly disappearance; and yet so many little circumstances combined
so wofully against him, that he dreaded to add two more to their cumulative
weight. He was among the truest of men; but he had been balancing in his mind,
much to its distress, whether his volunteering to tell these two fragments of
truth, at this time, would not be tantamount to a piecing together of falsehood
in the place of truth.

 

  However, here was a model before him. He
hesitated no longer. Addressing Mr. Grewgious, as one placed in authority by
the revelation he had brought to bear on the mystery (and surpassingly Angular
Mr. Grewgious became when he found himself in that unexpected position), Mr.
Crisparkle bore his testimony to Mr. Jasper's strict sense of justice, and,
expressing his absolute confidence in the complete clearance of his pupil from
the least taint of suspicion, sooner or later, avowed that his confidence in
that young gentleman had been formed, in spite of his confidential knowledge
that his temper was of the hottest and fiercest, and that it was directly
incensed against Mr. Jasper's nephew, by the circumstance of his romantically
supposing himself to be enamoured of the same young lady. The sanguine reaction
manifest in Mr. Jasper was proof even against this unlooked-for declaration. It
turned him paler; but he repeated that he would cling to the hope he had
derived from Mr. Grewgious; and that if no trace of his dear boy were found,
leading to the dreadful inference that he had been made away with, he would
cherish unto the last stretch of possibility the idea, that he might have
absconded of his own wild will.

 

  Now, it fell out that Mr. Crisparkle,
going away from this conference still very uneasy in his mind, and very much
troubled on behalf of the young man whom he held as a kind of prisoner in his
own house, took a memorable night walk.

 

  He walked to Cloisterham Weir.

 

  He often did so, and consequently there
was nothing remarkable in his footsteps tending that way. But the preoccupation
of his mind so hindered him from planning any walk, or taking heed of the
objects he passed, that his first consciousness of being near the Weir, was
derived from the sound of the falling water close at hand.

 

  “How did I come here!” was his first
thought, as he stopped.