The Mystery of Edwin Drood (31 page)

 

  “Again,” repeated Mr. Datchery, “His
Honour the Mayor does me too much credit.”

 

  “Diplomacy is a fine profession,” said
Mr. Sapsea, as a general remark.

 

  “There, I confess, His Honour the Mayor
is too many for me,” said Mr. Datchery, with an ingenious smile and bow; “even
a diplomatic bird must fall to such a gun.”

 

  Now this was very soothing. Here was a
gentleman of a great, not to say a grand, address, accustomed to rank and
dignity, really setting a fine example how to behave to a Mayor. There was
something in that third-person style of being spoken to, that Mr. Sapsea found
particularly recognisant of his merits and position.

 

  “But I crave pardon,” said Mr. Datchery.
“His Honour the Mayor will bear with me, if for a moment I have been deluded
into occupying his time, and have forgotten the humble claims upon my own, of
my hotel, the Crozier.”

 

  “Not at all, sir,” said Mr. Sapsea. “I
am returning home, and if you would like to take the exterior of our Cathedral
in your way, I shall be glad to point it out.”

 

  “His Honour the Mayor,” said Mr.
Datchery, “is more than kind and gracious.”

 

  As Mr. Datchery, when he had made his
acknowledgments to Mr. Jasper, could not be induced to go out of the room
before the Worshipful, the Worshipful led the way down-stairs; Mr. Datchery
following with his hat under his arm, and his shock of white hair streaming in
the evening breeze.

 

  “Might I ask His Honour,” said Mr.
Datchery, “whether that gentleman we have just left is the gentleman of whom I
have heard in the neighbourhood as being much afflicted by the loss of a
nephew, and concentrating his life on avenging the loss?”

 

  “That is the gentleman. John Jasper,
sir.”

 

  “Would His Honour allow me to inquire
whether there are strong suspicions of any one?”

 

  “More than suspicions, sir,” returned
Mr. Sapsea; “all but certainties.”

 

  “Only think now!” cried Mr. Datchery.

 

  “But proof, sir, proof must be built up
stone by stone,” said the Mayor. “As I say, the end crowns the work. It is not
enough that justice should be morally certain; she must be immorally
certain—legally, that is.”

 

  “His Honour,” said Mr. Datchery,
“reminds me of the nature of the law. Immoral. How true!”

 

  “As I say, sir,” pompously went on the
Mayor, “the arm of the law is a strong arm, and a long arm. That is the may I
put it. A strong arm and a long arm.”

 

  “How forcible!—And yet, again, how
true!” murmured Mr. Datchery.

 

  “And without betraying, what I call the
secrets of the prisonhouse,” said Mr. Sapsea; “the secrets of the prison-house
is the term I used on the bench.”

 

  “And what other term than His Honour's
would express it?” said Mr. Datchery.

 

  “Without, I say, betraying them, I
predict to you, knowing the iron will of the gentleman we have just left (I
take the bold step of calling it iron, on account of its strength), that in
this case the long arm will reach, and the strong arm will strike. —This is our
Cathedral, sir. The best judges are pleased to admire it, and the best among
our townsmen own to being a little vain of it.”

 

  All this time Mr. Datchery had walked
with his hat under his arm, and his white hair streaming. He had an odd
momentary appearance upon him of having forgotten his hat, when Mr. Sapsea now
touched it; and he clapped his hand up to his head as if with some vague
expectation of finding another hat upon it.

 

  “Pray be covered, sir,” entreated Mr.
Sapsea; magnificently plying: “I shall not mind it, I assure you.”

 

  “His Honour is very good, but I do it
for coolness,” said Mr. Datchery.

 

  Then Mr. Datchery admired the Cathedral,
and Mr. Sapsea pointed it out as if he himself had invented and built it: there
were a few details indeed of which he did not approve, but those he glossed
over, as if the workmen had made mistakes in his absence. The Cathedral
disposed of, he led the way by the churchyard, and stopped to extol the beauty
of the evening—by chance—in the immediate vicinity of Mrs. Sapsea's epitaph.

 

  “And by the by,” said Mr. Sapsea,
appearing to descend from an elevation to remember it all of a sudden; like
Apollo shooting down from Olympus to pick up his forgotten lyre; “THAT is one
of our small lions. The partiality of our people has made it so, and strangers
have been seen taking a copy of it now and then. I am not a judge of it myself,
for it is a little work of my own. But it was troublesome to turn, sir; I may
say, difficult to turn with elegance.”

 

  Mr. Datchery became so ecstatic over Mr.
Sapsea's composition, that, in spite of his intention to end his days in
Cloisterham, and therefore his probably having in reserve many opportunities of
copying it, he would have transcribed it into his pocket-book on the spot, but
for the slouching towards them of its material producer and perpetuator,
Durdles, whom Mr. Sapsea hailed, not sorry to show him a bright example of
behaviour to superiors.

 

  “Ah, Durdles! This is the mason, sir;
one of our Cloisterham worthies; everybody here knows Durdles. Mr. Datchery,
Durdles a gentleman who is going to settle here.”

 

  “I wouldn't do it if I was him,” growled
Durdles. “We're a heavy lot.”

 

  “You surely don't speak for yourself,
Mr. Durdles,” returned Mr. Datchery, “any more than for His Honour.”

 

  “Who's His Honour?” demanded Durdles.

 

  “His Honour the Mayor.”

 

  “I never was brought afore him,” said
Durdles, with anything but the look of a loyal subject of the mayoralty, “and
it'll be time enough for me to Honour him when I am. Until which, and when, and
where,

 

   

 

  “Mister Sapsea is his name, England is
his nation, Cloisterham's his dwelling-place, Aukshneer's his occupation.”

 

   

 

  Here, Deputy (preceded by a flying
oyster-shell) appeared upon the scene, and requested to have the sum of
threepence instantly “chucked” to him by Mr. Durdles, whom he had been vainly
seeking up and down, as lawful wages overdue. While that gentleman, with his
bundle under his arm, slowly found and counted out the money, Mr. Sapsea
informed the new settler of Durdles's habits, pursuits, abode, and reputation.
“I suppose a curious stranger might come to see you, and your works, Mr.
Durdles, at any odd time?” said Mr. Datchery upon that.

 

  “Any gentleman is welcome to come and
see me any evening if he brings liquor for two with him,” returned Durdles,
with a penny between his teeth and certain halfpence in his hands; “or if he likes
to make it twice two, he'll be doubly welcome.”

 

  “I shall come. Master Deputy, what do
you owe me?”

 

  “A job.”

 

  “Mind you pay me honestly with the job
of showing me Mr. Durdles's house when I want to go there.”

 

  Deputy, with a piercing broadside of
whistle through the whole gap in his mouth, as a receipt in full for all
arrears, vanished.

 

  The Worshipful and the Worshipper then
passed on together until they parted, with many ceremonies, at the Worshipful's
door; even then the Worshipper carried his hat under his arm, and gave his
streaming white hair to the breeze.

 

  Said Mr. Datchery to himself that night,
as he looked at his white hair in the gas-lighted looking-glass over the
coffee-room chimneypiece at the Crozier, and shook it out: “For a single
buffer, of an easy temper, living idly on his means, I have had a rather busy
afternoon!”

 

   

 

   

 

  CHAPTER XIX—SHADOW ON THE SUN-DIAL

 

   

 

  AGAIN Miss Twinkleton has delivered her
valedictory address, with the accompaniments of white-wine and pound-cake, and
again the young ladies have departed to their several homes. Helena Landless
has left the Nuns' House to attend her brother's fortunes, and pretty Rosa is
alone.

 

  Cloisterham is so bright and sunny in
these summer days, that the Cathedral and the monastery-ruin show as if their
strong walls were transparent. A soft glow seems to shine from within them,
rather than upon them from without, such is their mellowness as they look forth
on the hot corn-fields and the smoking roads that distantly wind among them.
The Cloisterham gardens blush with ripening fruit. Time was when travel-stained
pilgrims rode in clattering parties through the city's welcome shades; time is
when wayfarers, leading a gipsy life between haymaking time and harvest, and
looking as if they were just made of the dust of the earth, so very dusty are
they, lounge about on cool door-steps, trying to mend their unmendable shoes,
or giving them to the city kennels as a hopeless job, and seeking others in the
bundles that they carry, along with their yet unused sickles swathed in bands
of straw. At all the more public pumps there is much cooling of bare feet,
together with much bubbling and gurgling of drinking with hand to spout on the
part of these Bedouins; the Cloisterham police meanwhile looking askant from
their beats with suspicion, and manifest impatience that the intruders should
depart from within the civic bounds, and once more fry themselves on the
simmering high-roads.

 

  On the afternoon of such a day, when the
last Cathedral service is done, and when that side of the High Street on which
the Nuns' House stands is in grateful shade, save where its quaint old garden
opens to the west between the boughs of trees, a servant informs Rosa, to her
terror, that Mr. Jasper desires to see her.

 

  If he had chosen his time for finding
her at a disadvantage, he could have done no better. Perhaps he has chosen it.
Helena Landless is gone, Mrs. Tisher is absent on leave, Miss Twinkleton (in
her amateur state of existence) has contributed herself and a veal pie to a
picnic.

 

  “O why, why, why, did you say I was at
home!” cried Rosa, helplessly.

 

  The maid replies, that Mr. Jasper never
asked the question.

 

  That he said he knew she was at home,
and begged she might be told that he asked to see her.

 

  “What shall I do! what shall I do!” thinks
Rosa, clasping her hands.

 

  Possessed by a kind of desperation, she
adds in the next breath, that she will come to Mr. Jasper in the garden. She
shudders at the thought of being shut up with him in the house; but many of its
windows command the garden, and she can be seen as well as heard there, and can
shriek in the free air and run away. Such is the wild idea that flutters
through her mind.

 

  She has never seen him since the fatal
night, except when she was questioned before the Mayor, and then he was present
in gloomy watchfulness, as representing his lost nephew and burning to avenge
him. She hangs her garden-hat on her arm, and goes out. The moment she sees him
from the porch, leaning on the sun-dial, the old horrible feeling of being
compelled by him, asserts its hold upon her. She feels that she would even then
go back, but that he draws her feet towards him. She cannot resist, and sits
down, with her head bent, on the garden-seat beside the sun-dial. She cannot
look up at him for abhorrence, but she has perceived that he is dressed in deep
mourning. So is she. It was not so at first; but the lost has long been given
up, and mourned for, as dead.

 

  He would begin by touching her hand. She
feels the intention, and draws her hand back. His eyes are then fixed upon her,
she knows, though her own see nothing but the grass.

 

  “I have been waiting,” he begins, “for
some time, to be summoned back to my duty near you.”

 

  After several times forming her lips,
which she knows he is closely watching, into the shape of some other hesitating
reply, and then into none, she answers: “Duty, sir?”

 

  “The duty of teaching you, serving you
as your faithful musicmaster.”

 

  “I have left off that study.”

 

  “Not left off, I think. Discontinued. I
was told by your guardian that you discontinued it under the shock that we have
all felt so acutely. When will you resume?”

 

  “Never, sir.”

 

  “Never? You could have done no more if
you had loved my dear boy.”

 

  “I did love him!” cried Rosa, with a
flash of anger.

 

  “Yes; but not quite—not quite in the right
way, shall I say? Not in the intended and expected way. Much as my dear boy
was, unhappily, too self-conscious and self-satisfied (I'll draw no parallel
between him and you in that respect) to love as he should have loved, or as any
one in his place would have loved—must have loved!”

 

  She sits in the same still attitude, but
shrinking a little more.

 

  “Then, to be told that you discontinued
your study with me, was to be politely told that you abandoned it altogether?”
he suggested.

 

  “Yes,” says Rosa, with sudden spirit,
“The politeness was my guardian's, not mine. I told him that I was resolved to
leave off, and that I was determined to stand by my resolution.”

 

  “And you still are?”

 

  “I still am, sir. And I beg not to be
questioned any more about it. At all events, I will not answer any more; I have
that in my power.”

 

  She is so conscious of his looking at
her with a gloating admiration of the touch of anger on her, and the fire and
animation it brings with it, that even as her spirit rises, it falls again, and
she struggles with a sense of shame, affront, and fear, much as she did that
night at the piano.

 

  “I will not question you any more, since
you object to it so much; I will confess—”

 

  “I do not wish to hear you, sir,” cries
Rosa, rising.