The Mystery of Edwin Drood (44 page)

 

  So he is gloomily borne off to the
Lumps-of-Delight shop, where Rosa makes her purchase, and, after offering some
to him (which he rather indignantly declines), begins to partake of it with
great zest: previously taking off and rolling up a pair of little pink gloves,
like rose-leaves, and occasionally putting her little pink fingers to her rosy
lips, to cleanse them from the Dust of Delight that comes off the Lumps.

 

  “Now, be a good-tempered Eddy, and
pretend. And so you are engaged?”

 

  “And so I am engaged.”

 

  “Is she nice?”

 

  “Charming.”

 

  “Tall?”

 

  “Immensely tall!” Rosa being short.

 

  “Must be gawky, I should think,” is
Rosa's quiet commentary.

 

  “I beg your pardon; not at all,”
contradiction rising in him.

 

  “What is termed a fine woman; a splendid
woman.”

 

  “Big nose, no doubt,” is the quiet
commentary again.

 

  “Not a little one, certainly,” is the
quick reply, (Rosa's being a little one.)

 

  “Long pale nose, with a red knob in the
middle. I know the sort of nose,” says Rosa, with a satisfied nod, and
tranquilly enjoying the Lumps.

 

  “You DON'T know the sort of nose, Rosa,”
with some warmth; “because it's nothing of the kind.”

 

  “Not a pale nose, Eddy?”

 

  “No.” Determined not to assent.

 

  “A red nose? O! I don't like red noses.
However; to be sure she can always powder it.”

 

  “She would scorn to powder it,” says
Edwin, becoming heated.

 

  “Would she? What a stupid thing she must
be! Is she stupid in everything?”

 

  “No; in nothing.”

 

  After a pause, in which the whimsically
wicked face has not been unobservant of him, Rosa says:

 

  “And this most sensible of creatures
likes the idea of being carried off to Egypt; does she, Eddy?”

 

  “Yes. She takes a sensible interest in
triumphs of engineering skill: especially when they are to change the whole
condition of an undeveloped country.”

 

  “Lor!” says Rosa, shrugging her
shoulders, with a little laugh of wonder.

 

  “Do you object,” Edwin inquires, with a
majestic turn of his eyes downward upon the fairy figure: “do you object, Rosa,
to her feeling that interest?”

 

  “Object? my dear Eddy! But really,
doesn't she hate boilers and things?”

 

  “I can answer for her not being so
idiotic as to hate Boilers,” he returns with angry emphasis; “though I cannot
answer for her views about Things; really not understanding what Things are
meant.”

 

  “But don't she hate Arabs, and Turks,
and Fellahs, and people?”

 

  “Certainly not.” Very firmly.

 

  “At least she MUST hate the Pyramids?
Come, Eddy?”

 

  “Why should she be such a little—tall, I
mean—goose, as to hate the Pyramids, Rosa?”

 

  “Ah! you should hear Miss Twinkleton,”
often nodding her head, and much enjoying the Lumps, “bore about them, and then
you wouldn't ask. Tiresome old burying-grounds! Isises, and Ibises, and
Cheopses, and Pharaohses; who cares about them? And then there was Belzoni, or
somebody, dragged out by the legs, half-choked with bats and dust. All the
girls say: Serve him right, and hope it hurt him, and wish he had been quite
choked.”

 

  The two youthful figures, side by side,
but not now arm-in-arm, wander discontentedly about the old Close; and each
sometimes stops and slowly imprints a deeper footstep in the fallen leaves.

 

  “Well!” says Edwin, after a lengthy
silence. “According to custom. We can't get on, Rosa.”

 

  Rosa tosses her head, and says she don't
want to get on.

 

  “That's a pretty sentiment, Rosa,
considering.”

 

  “Considering what?”

 

  “If I say what, you'll go wrong again.”

 

  “YOU'LL go wrong, you mean, Eddy. Don't
be ungenerous.”

 

  “Ungenerous! I like that!”

 

  “Then I DON'T like that, and so I tell
you plainly,” Rosa pouts.

 

  “Now, Rosa, I put it to you. Who
disparaged my profession, my destination—”

 

  “You are not going to be buried in the
Pyramids, I hope?” she interrupts, arching her delicate eyebrows. “You never
said you were. If you are, why haven't you mentioned it to me? I can't find out
your plans by instinct.”

 

  “Now, Rosa, you know very well what I
mean, my dear.”

 

  “Well then, why did you begin with your
detestable red-nosed giantesses? And she would, she would, she would, she
would, she WOULD powder it!” cries Rosa, in a little burst of comical
contradictory spleen.

 

  “Somehow or other, I never can come
right in these discussions,” says Edwin, sighing and becoming resigned.

 

  “How is it possible, sir, that you ever
can come right when you're always wrong? And as to Belzoni, I suppose he's
dead;—I'm sure I hope he is—and how can his legs or his chokes concern you?”

 

  “It is nearly time for your return,
Rosa. We have not had a very happy walk, have we?”

 

  “A happy walk? A detestably unhappy
walk, sir. If I go up-stairs the moment I get in and cry till I can't take my
dancing lesson, you are responsible, mind!”

 

  “Let us be friends, Rosa.”

 

  “Ah!” cries Rosa, shaking her head and
bursting into real tears, “I wish we COULD be friends! It's because we can't be
friends, that we try one another so. I am a young little thing, Eddy, to have
an old heartache; but I really, really have, sometimes. Don't be angry. I know
you have one yourself too often. We should both of us have done better, if What
is to be had been left What might have been. I am quite a little serious thing
now, and not teasing you. Let each of us forbear, this one time, on our own
account, and on the other's!”

 

  Disarmed by this glimpse of a woman's
nature in the spoilt child, though for an instant disposed to resent it as seeming
to involve the enforced infliction of himself upon her, Edwin Drood stands
watching her as she childishly cries and sobs, with both hands to the
handkerchief at her eyes, and then—she becoming more composed, and indeed beginning
in her young inconstancy to laugh at herself for having been so moved—leads her
to a seat hard by, under the elm-trees.

 

  “One clear word of understanding, Pussy
dear. I am not clever out of my own line—now I come to think of it, I don't
know that I am particularly clever in it—but I want to do right. There is
not—there may be—I really don't see my way to what I want to say, but I must
say it before we part—there is not any other young—”

 

  “O no, Eddy! It's generous of you to ask
me; but no, no, no!”

 

  They have come very near to the
Cathedral windows, and at this moment the organ and the choir sound out
sublimely. As they sit listening to the solemn swell, the confidence of last
night rises in young Edwin Drood's mind, and he thinks how unlike this music is
to that discordance.

 

  “I fancy I can distinguish Jack's
voice,” is his remark in a low tone in connection with the train of thought.

 

  “Take me back at once, please,” urges
his Affianced, quickly laying her light hand upon his wrist. “They will all be
coming out directly; let us get away. O, what a resounding chord! But don't let
us stop to listen to it; let us get away!”

 

  Her hurry is over as soon as they have
passed out of the Close. They go arm-in-arm now, gravely and deliberately
enough, along the old High-street, to the Nuns' House. At the gate, the street
being within sight empty, Edwin bends down his face to Rosebud's.

 

  She remonstrates, laughing, and is a
childish schoolgirl again.

 

  “Eddy, no! I'm too sticky to be kissed.
But give me your hand, and I'll blow a kiss into that.”

 

  He does so. She breathes a light breath
into it and asks, retaining it and looking into it:—

 

  “Now say, what do you see?”

 

  “See, Rosa?”

 

  “Why, I thought you Egyptian boys could
look into a hand and see all sorts of phantoms. Can't you see a happy Future?”

 

  For certain, neither of them sees a
happy Present, as the gate opens and closes, and one goes in, and the other
goes away.

 

   

 

   

 

  CHAPTER IV—MR. SAPSEA

 

   

 

  ACCEPTING the Jackass as the type of
self-sufficient stupidity and conceit—a custom, perhaps, like some few other customs,
more conventional than fair—then the purest jackass in Cloisterham is Mr.
Thomas Sapsea, Auctioneer.

 

  Mr. Sapsea “dresses at” the Dean; has
been bowed to for the Dean, in mistake; has even been spoken to in the street
as My Lord, under the impression that he was the Bishop come down unexpectedly,
without his chaplain. Mr. Sapsea is very proud of this, and of his voice, and
of his style. He has even (in selling landed property) tried the experiment of
slightly intoning in his pulpit, to make himself more like what he takes to be
the genuine ecclesiastical article. So, in ending a Sale by Public Auction, Mr.
Sapsea finishes off with an air of bestowing a benediction on the assembled
brokers, which leaves the real Dean—a modest and worthy gentleman—far behind.

 

  Mr. Sapsea has many admirers; indeed,
the proposition is carried by a large local majority, even including
non-believers in his wisdom, that he is a credit to Cloisterham. He possesses
the great qualities of being portentous and dull, and of having a roll in his
speech, and another roll in his gait; not to mention a certain gravely flowing
action with his hands, as if he were presently going to Confirm the individual
with whom he holds discourse. Much nearer sixty years of age than fifty, with a
flowing outline of stomach, and horizontal creases in his waistcoat; reputed to
be rich; voting at elections in the strictly respectable interest; morally
satisfied that nothing but he himself has grown since he was a baby; how can
dunder-headed Mr. Sapsea be otherwise than a credit to Cloisterham, and
society?

 

  Mr. Sapsea's premises are in the
High-street, over against the Nuns' House. They are of about the period of the
Nuns' House, irregularly modernised here and there, as steadily deteriorating
generations found, more and more, that they preferred air and light to Fever
and the Plague. Over the doorway is a wooden effigy, about half life-size, representing
Mr. Sapsea's father, in a curly wig and toga, in the act of selling. The
chastity of the idea, and the natural appearance of the little finger, hammer,
and pulpit, have been much admired.

 

  Mr. Sapsea sits in his dull ground-floor
sitting-room, giving first on his paved back yard; and then on his railed-off
garden. Mr. Sapsea has a bottle of port wine on a table before the fire—the
fire is an early luxury, but pleasant on the cool, chilly autumn evening—and is
characteristically attended by his portrait, his eight-day clock, and his
weather-glass. Characteristically, because he would uphold himself against mankind,
his weather-glass against weather, and his clock against time.

 

  By Mr. Sapsea's side on the table are a
writing-desk and writing materials. Glancing at a scrap of manuscript, Mr.
Sapsea reads it to himself with a lofty air, and then, slowly pacing the room
with his thumbs in the arm-holes of his waistcoat, repeats it from memory: so
internally, though with much dignity, that the word “Ethelinda” is alone
audible.

 

  There are three clean wineglasses in a
tray on the table. His serving-maid entering, and announcing “Mr. Jasper is
come, sir,” Mr. Sapsea waves “Admit him,” and draws two wineglasses from the
rank, as being claimed.

 

  “Glad to see you, sir. I congratulate
myself on having the honour of receiving you here for the first time.” Mr.
Sapsea does the honours of his house in this wise.

 

  “You are very good. The honour is mine
and the self-congratulation is mine.”

 

  “You are pleased to say so, sir. But I
do assure you that it is a satisfaction to me to receive you in my humble home.
And that is what I would not say to everybody.” Ineffable loftiness on Mr.
Sapsea's part accompanies these words, as leaving the sentence to be
understood: “You will not easily believe that your society can be a
satisfaction to a man like myself; nevertheless, it is.”

 

  “I have for some time desired to know
you, Mr. Sapsea.”

 

  “And I, sir, have long known you by
reputation as a man of taste. Let me fill your glass. I will give you, sir,”
says Mr. Sapsea, filling his own:

 

   

 

  “When the French come over, May we meet
them at Dover!”

 

   

 

  This was a patriotic toast in Mr.
Sapsea's infancy, and he is therefore fully convinced of its being appropriate
to any subsequent era.

 

  “You can scarcely be ignorant, Mr.
Sapsea,” observes Jasper, watching the auctioneer with a smile as the latter
stretches out his legs before the fire, “that you know the world.”

 

  “Well, sir,” is the chuckling reply, “I
think I know something of it; something of it.”

 

  “Your reputation for that knowledge has
always interested and surprised me, and made me wish to know you. For Cloisterham
is a little place. Cooped up in it myself, I know nothing beyond it, and feel
it to be a very little place.”

 

  “If I have not gone to foreign
countries, young man,” Mr. Sapsea begins, and then stops:'You will excuse me
calling you young man, Mr. Jasper? You are much my junior.”

 

  “By all means.”

 

  “If I have not gone to foreign
countries, young man, foreign countries have come to me. They have come to me
in the way of business, and I have improved upon my opportunities. Put it that
I take an inventory, or make a catalogue. I see a French clock. I never saw him
before, in my life, but I instantly lay my finger on him and say “Paris!” I see
some cups and saucers of Chinese make, equally strangers to me personally: I
put my finger on them, then and there, and I say “Pekin, Nankin, and Canton.”
It is the same with Japan, with Egypt, and with bamboo and sandalwood from the
East Indies; I put my finger on them all. I have put my finger on the North
Pole before now, and said “Spear of Esquimaux make, for half a pint of pale
sherry!"”