The Mystery of Edwin Drood (42 page)

 

  “With her music? Fairly.”

 

  “What a dreadfully conscientious fellow
you are, Jack! But I know, Lord bless you! Inattentive, isn't she?”

 

  “She can learn anything, if she will.”

 

  “IF she will! Egad, that's it. But if
she won't?”

 

  Crack!—on Mr. Jasper's part.

 

  “How's she looking, Jack?”

 

  Mr. Jasper's concentrated face again
includes the portrait as he returns: “Very like your sketch indeed.”

 

  “I AM a little proud of it,” says the
young fellow, glancing up at the sketch with complacency, and then shutting one
eye, and taking a corrected prospect of it over a level bridge of nut-crackers
in the air: “Not badly hit off from memory. But I ought to have caught that
expression pretty well, for I have seen it often enough.”

 

  Crack!—on Edwin Drood's part.

 

  Crack!—on Mr. Jasper's part.

 

  “In point of fact,” the former resumes,
after some silent dipping among his fragments of walnut with an air of pique,
“I see it whenever I go to see Pussy. If I don't find it on her face, I leave
it there. —You know I do, Miss Scornful Pert. Booh!” With a twirl of the
nut-crackers at the portrait.

 

  Crack! crack! crack. Slowly, on Mr.
Jasper's part.

 

  Crack. Sharply on the part of Edwin
Drood.

 

  Silence on both sides.

 

  “Have you lost your tongue, Jack?”

 

  “Have you found yours, Ned?”

 

  “No, but really;—isn't it, you know,
after all—”

 

  Mr. Jasper lifts his dark eyebrows
inquiringly.

 

  “Isn't it unsatisfactory to be cut off
from choice in such a matter? There, Jack! I tell you! If I could choose, I
would choose Pussy from all the pretty girls in the world.”

 

  “But you have not got to choose.”

 

  “That's what I complain of. My dead and
gone father and Pussy's dead and gone father must needs marry us together by
anticipation. Why the—Devil, I was going to say, if it had been respectful to
their memory—couldn't they leave us alone?”

 

  “Tut, tut, dear boy,” Mr. Jasper
remonstrates, in a tone of gentle deprecation.

 

  “Tut, tut? Yes, Jack, it's all very well
for YOU. YOU can take it easily. YOUR life is not laid down to scale, and lined
and dotted out for you, like a surveyor's plan. YOU have no uncomfortable
suspicion that you are forced upon anybody, nor has anybody an uncomfortable
suspicion that she is forced upon you, or that you are forced upon her. YOU can
choose for yourself. Life, for YOU, is a plum with the natural bloom on; it
hasn't been over-carefully wiped off for YOU—”

 

  “Don't stop, dear fellow. Go on.”

 

  “Can I anyhow have hurt your feelings,
Jack?”

 

  “How can you have hurt my feelings?”

 

  “Good Heaven, Jack, you look frightfully
ill! There's a strange film come over your eyes.”

 

  Mr. Jasper, with a forced smile,
stretches out his right hand, as if at once to disarm apprehension and gain time
to get better. After a while he says faintly:

 

  “I have been taking opium for a pain—an
agony—that sometimes overcomes me. The effects of the medicine steal over me
like a blight or a cloud, and pass. You see them in the act of passing; they
will be gone directly. Look away from me. They will go all the sooner.”

 

  With a scared face the younger man
complies by casting his eyes downward at the ashes on the hearth. Not relaxing
his own gaze on the fire, but rather strengthening it with a fierce, firm grip
upon his elbow-chair, the elder sits for a few moments rigid, and then, with
thick drops standing on his forehead, and a sharp catch of his breath, becomes
as he was before. On his so subsiding in his chair, his nephew gently and assiduously
tends him while he quite recovers. When Jasper is restored, he lays a tender
hand upon his nephew's shoulder, and, in a tone of voice less troubled than the
purport of his words—indeed with something of raillery or banter in it—thus
addresses him:

 

  “There is said to be a hidden skeleton
in every house; but you thought there was none in mine, dear Ned.”

 

  “Upon my life, Jack, I did think so.
However, when I come to consider that even in Pussy's house—if she had one—and
in mine—if I had one—”

 

  “You were going to say (but that I interrupted
you in spite of myself) what a quiet life mine is. No whirl and uproar around
me, no distracting commerce or calculation, no risk, no change of place, myself
devoted to the art I pursue, my business my pleasure.”

 

  “I really was going to say something of
the kind, Jack; but you see, you, speaking of yourself, almost necessarily
leave out much that I should have put in. For instance: I should have put in
the foreground your being so much respected as Lay Precentor, or Lay Clerk, or
whatever you call it, of this Cathedral; your enjoying the reputation of having
done such wonders with the choir; your choosing your society, and holding such
an independent position in this queer old place; your gift of teaching (why,
even Pussy, who don't like being taught, says there never was such a Master as
you are!), and your connexion.”

 

  “Yes; I saw what you were tending to. I
hate it.”

 

  “Hate it, Jack?” (Much bewildered.)

 

  “I hate it. The cramped monotony of my
existence grinds me away by the grain. How does our service sound to you?”

 

  “Beautiful! Quite celestial!”

 

  “It often sounds to me quite devilish. I
am so weary of it. The echoes of my own voice among the arches seem to mock me
with my daily drudging round. No wretched monk who droned his life away in that
gloomy place, before me, can have been more tired of it than I am. He could
take for relief (and did take) to carving demons out of the stalls and seats
and desks. What shall I do? Must I take to carving them out of my heart?”

 

   

 

  “I thought you had so exactly found your
niche in life, Jack,” Edwin Drood returns, astonished, bending forward in his
chair to lay a sympathetic hand on Jasper's knee, and looking at him with an
anxious face.

 

  “I know you thought so. They all think
so.”

 

  “Well, I suppose they do,” says Edwin, meditating
aloud. “Pussy thinks so.”

 

  “When did she tell you that?”

 

  “The last time I was here. You remember
when. Three months ago.”

 

  “How did she phrase it?”

 

  “O, she only said that she had become
your pupil, and that you were made for your vocation.”

 

  The younger man glances at the portrait.
The elder sees it in him.

 

  “Anyhow, my dear Ned,” Jasper resumes,
as he shakes his head with a grave cheerfulness, “I must subdue myself to my
vocation: which is much the same thing outwardly. It's too late to find another
now. This is a confidence between us.”

 

  “It shall be sacredly preserved, Jack.”

 

  “I have reposed it in you, because—”

 

  “I feel it, I assure you. Because we are
fast friends, and because you love and trust me, as I love and trust you. Both
hands, Jack.”

 

  As each stands looking into the other's
eyes, and as the uncle holds the nephew's hands, the uncle thus proceeds:

 

  “You know now, don't you, that even a
poor monotonous chorister and grinder of music—in his niche—may be troubled
with some stray sort of ambition, aspiration, restlessness, dissatisfaction,
what shall we call it?”

 

  “Yes, dear Jack.”

 

  “And you will remember?”

 

  “My dear Jack, I only ask you, am I
likely to forget what you have said with so much feeling?”

 

  “Take it as a warning, then.”

 

  In the act of having his hands released,
and of moving a step back, Edwin pauses for an instant to consider the
application of these last words. The instant over, he says, sensibly touched:

 

  “I am afraid I am but a shallow, surface
kind of fellow, Jack, and that my headpiece is none of the best. But I needn't
say I am young; and perhaps I shall not grow worse as I grow older. At all
events, I hope I have something impressible within me, which feels—deeply
feels—the disinterestedness of your painfully laying your inner self bare, as a
warning to me.”

 

  Mr. Jasper's steadiness of face and
figure becomes so marvellous that his breathing seems to have stopped.

 

  “I couldn't fail to notice, Jack, that
it cost you a great effort, and that you were very much moved, and very unlike
your usual self. Of course I knew that you were extremely fond of me, but I
really was not prepared for your, as I may say, sacrificing yourself to me in
that way.”

 

  Mr. Jasper, becoming a breathing man
again without the smallest stage of transition between the two extreme states,
lifts his shoulders, laughs, and waves his right arm.

 

  “No; don't put the sentiment away, Jack;
please don't; for I am very much in earnest. I have no doubt that that
unhealthy state of mind which you have so powerfully described is attended with
some real suffering, and is hard to bear. But let me reassure you, Jack, as to
the chances of its overcoming me. I don't think I am in the way of it. In some
few months less than another year, you know, I shall carry Pussy off from
school as Mrs. Edwin Drood. I shall then go engineering into the East, and
Pussy with me. And although we have our little tiffs now, arising out of a
certain unavoidable flatness that attends our love-making, owing to its end
being all settled beforehand, still I have no doubt of our getting on capitally
then, when it's done and can't be helped. In short, Jack, to go back to the old
song I was freely quoting at dinner (and who knows old songs better than you?),
my wife shall dance, and I will sing, so merrily pass the day. Of Pussy's being
beautiful there cannot be a doubt;—and when you are good besides, Little Miss
Impudence,” once more apostrophising the portrait, “I'll burn your comic
likeness, and paint your music-master another.”

 

  Mr. Jasper, with his hand to his chin, and
with an expression of musing benevolence on his face, has attentively watched
every animated look and gesture attending the delivery of these words. He
remains in that attitude after they, are spoken, as if in a kind of fascination
attendant on his strong interest in the youthful spirit that he loves so well.
Then he says with a quiet smile:

 

  “You won't be warned, then?”

 

  “No, Jack.”

 

  “You can't be warned, then?”

 

  “No, Jack, not by you. Besides that I
don't really consider myself in danger, I don't like your putting yourself in
that position.”

 

  “Shall we go and walk in the
churchyard?”

 

  “By all means. You won't mind my
slipping out of it for half a moment to the Nuns' House, and leaving a parcel
there? Only gloves for Pussy; as many pairs of gloves as she is years old
to-day. Rather poetical, Jack?”

 

  Mr. Jasper, still in the same attitude,
murmurs: “Nothing half so sweet in life,” Ned!”

 

  “Here's the parcel in my
greatcoat-pocket. They must be presented to-night, or the poetry is gone. It's
against regulations for me to call at night, but not to leave a packet. I am
ready, Jack!”

 

  Mr. Jasper dissolves his attitude, and
they go out together.

 

   

 

   

 

  CHAPTER III—THE NUNS' HOUSE

 

   

 

  FOR sufficient reasons, which this
narrative will itself unfold as it advances, a fictitious name must be bestowed
upon the old Cathedral town. Let it stand in these pages as Cloisterham. It was
once possibly known to the Druids by another name, and certainly to the Romans
by another, and to the Saxons by another, and to the Normans by another; and a name
more or less in the course of many centuries can be of little moment to its
dusty chronicles.

 

  An ancient city, Cloisterham, and no
meet dwelling-place for any one with hankerings after the noisy world. A
monotonous, silent city, deriving an earthy flavour throughout from its
Cathedral crypt, and so abounding in vestiges of monastic graves, that the Cloisterham
children grow small salad in the dust of abbots and abbesses, and make
dirt-pies of nuns and friars; while every ploughman in its outlying fields
renders to once puissant Lord Treasurers, Archbishops, Bishops, and such-like,
the attention which the Ogre in the story-book desired to render to his
unbidden visitor, and grinds their bones to make his bread.

 

  A drowsy city, Cloisterham, whose
inhabitants seem to suppose, with an inconsistency more strange than rare, that
all its changes lie behind it, and that there are no more to come. A queer
moral to derive from antiquity, yet older than any traceable antiquity. So
silent are the streets of Cloisterham (though prone to echo on the smallest
provocation), that of a summer-day the sunblinds of its shops scarce dare to
flap in the south wind; while the sun-browned tramps, who pass along and stare,
quicken their limp a little, that they may the sooner get beyond the confines
of its oppressive respectability. This is a feat not difficult of achievement,
seeing that the streets of Cloisterham city are little more than one narrow
street by which you get into it and get out of it: the rest being mostly disappointing
yards with pumps in them and no thoroughfare—exception made of the
Cathedral-close, and a paved Quaker settlement, in colour and general
confirmation very like a Quakeress's bonnet, up in a shady corner.

 

  In a word, a city of another and a
bygone time is Cloisterham, with its hoarse Cathedral-bell, its hoarse rooks
hovering about the Cathedral tower, its hoarser and less distinct rooks in the
stalls far beneath. Fragments of old wall, saint's chapel, chapter-house,
convent and monastery, have got incongruously or obstructively built into many
of its houses and gardens, much as kindred jumbled notions have become
incorporated into many of its citizens” minds. All things in it are of the
past. Even its single pawnbroker takes in no pledges, nor has he for a long
time, but offers vainly an unredeemed stock for sale, of which the costlier
articles are dim and pale old watches apparently in a slow perspiration,
tarnished sugar-tongs with ineffectual legs, and odd volumes of dismal books.
The most abundant and the most agreeable evidences of progressing life in Cloisterham
are the evidences of vegetable life in many gardens; even its drooping and despondent
little theatre has its poor strip of garden, receiving the foul fiend, when he
ducks from its stage into the infernal regions, among scarlet-beans or
oystershells, according to the season of the year.