The Mystery of Edwin Drood (48 page)

 

  “Is this Cloisterham?” demanded the
passenger, in a tremendous voice.

 

  “It is,” replied the driver, rubbing
himself as if he ached, after throwing the reins to the ostler. “And I never
was so glad to see it.”

 

  “Tell your master to make his box-seat
wider, then,” returned the passenger. “Your master is morally bound—and ought
to be legally, under ruinous penalties—to provide for the comfort of his
fellow-man.”

 

  The driver instituted, with the palms of
his hands, a superficial perquisition into the state of his skeleton; which
seemed to make him anxious.

 

  “Have I sat upon you?” asked the
passenger.

 

  “You have,” said the driver, as if he
didn't like it at all.

 

  “Take that card, my friend.”

 

  “I think I won't deprive you on it,”
returned the driver, casting his eyes over it with no great favour, without
taking it. “What's the good of it to me?”

 

  “Be a Member of that Society,” said the
passenger.

 

  “What shall I get by it?” asked the
driver.

 

  “Brotherhood,” returned the passenger,
in a ferocious voice.

 

  “Thankee,” said the driver, very
deliberately, as he got down; “my mother was contented with myself, and so am
I. I don't want no brothers.”

 

  “But you must have them,” replied the
passenger, also descending, “whether you like it or not. I am your brother.”

 

  “ I say!” expostulated the driver,
becoming more chafed in temper, “not too fur! The worm WILL, when—”

 

  But here, Mr. Crisparkle interposed,
remonstrating aside, in a friendly voice: “Joe, Joe, Joe! don't forget
yourself, Joe, my good fellow!” and then, when Joe peaceably touched his hat,
accosting the passenger with: “Mr. Honeythunder?”

 

  “That is my name, sir.”

 

  “My name is Crisparkle.”

 

  “Reverend Mr. Septimus? Glad to see you,
sir. Neville and Helena are inside. Having a little succumbed of late, under
the pressure of my public labours, I thought I would take a mouthful of fresh
air, and come down with them, and return at night. So you are the Reverend Mr.
Septimus, are you?” surveying him on the whole with disappointment, and
twisting a double eyeglass by its ribbon, as if he were roasting it, but not
otherwise using it. “Hah! I expected to see you older, sir.”

 

  “I hope you will,” was the good-humoured
reply.

 

  “Eh?” demanded Mr. Honeythunder.

 

  “Only a poor little joke. Not worth
repeating.”

 

  “Joke? Ay; I never see a joke,” Mr.
Honeythunder frowningly retorted. “A joke is wasted upon me, sir. Where are
they? Helena and Neville, come here! Mr. Crisparkle has come down to meet you.”

 

  An unusually handsome lithe young
fellow, and an unusually handsome lithe girl; much alike; both very dark, and
very rich in colour; she of almost the gipsy type; something untamed about them
both; a certain air upon them of hunter and huntress; yet withal a certain air
of being the objects of the chase, rather than the followers. Slender, supple,
quick of eye and limb; half shy, half defiant; fierce of look; an indefinable
kind of pause coming and going on their whole expression, both of face and
form, which might be equally likened to the pause before a crouch or a bound.
The rough mental notes made in the first five minutes by Mr. Crisparkle would
have read thus, VERBATIM.

 

  He invited Mr. Honeythunder to dinner,
with a troubled mind (for the discomfiture of the dear old china shepherdess
lay heavy on it), and gave his arm to Helena Landless. Both she and her
brother, as they walked all together through the ancient streets, took great delight
in what he pointed out of the Cathedral and the Monastery ruin, and wondered—so
his notes ran on—much as if they were beautiful barbaric captives brought from
some wild tropical dominion. Mr. Honeythunder walked in the middle of the road,
shouldering the natives out of his way, and loudly developing a scheme he had,
for making a raid on all the unemployed persons in the United Kingdom, laying
them every one by the heels in jail, and forcing them, on pain of prompt
extermination, to become philanthropists.

 

  Mrs. Crisparkle had need of her own
share of philanthropy when she beheld this very large and very loud excrescence
on the little party. Always something in the nature of a Boil upon the face of
society, Mr. Honeythunder expanded into an inflammatory Wen in Minor Canon
Corner. Though it was not literally true, as was facetiously charged against
him by public unbelievers, that he called aloud to his fellow-creatures: “Curse
your souls and bodies, come here and be blessed!” still his philanthropy was of
that gunpowderous sort that the difference between it and animosity was hard to
determine. You were to abolish military force, but you were first to bring all
commanding officers who had done their duty, to trial by court-martial for that
offence, and shoot them. You were to abolish war, but were to make converts by
making war upon them, and charging them with loving war as the apple of their
eye. You were to have no capital punishment, but were first to sweep off the
face of the earth all legislators, jurists, and judges, who were of the contrary
opinion. You were to have universal concord, and were to get it by eliminating
all the people who wouldn't, or conscientiously couldn't, be concordant. You
were to love your brother as yourself, but after an indefinite interval of
maligning him (very much as if you hated him), and calling him all manner of
names. Above all things, you were to do nothing in private, or on your own
account. You were to go to the offices of the Haven of Philanthropy, and put
your name down as a Member and a Professing Philanthropist. Then, you were to
pay up your subscription, get your card of membership and your riband and
medal, and were evermore to live upon a platform, and evermore to say what Mr.
Honeythunder said, and what the Treasurer said, and what the sub-Treasurer
said, and what the Committee said, and what the sub-Committee said, and what
the Secretary said, and what the Vice-Secretary said. And this was usually said
in the unanimouslycarried resolution under hand and seal, to the effect: “That
this assembled Body of Professing Philanthropists views, with indignant scorn
and contempt, not unmixed with utter detestation and loathing abhorrence”—in
short, the baseness of all those who do not belong to it, and pledges itself to
make as many obnoxious statements as possible about them, without being at all
particular as to facts.

 

  The dinner was a most doleful breakdown.
The philanthropist deranged the symmetry of the table, sat himself in the way
of the waiting, blocked up the thoroughfare, and drove Mr. Tope (who assisted
the parlour-maid) to the verge of distraction by passing plates and dishes on,
over his own head. Nobody could talk to anybody, because he held forth to
everybody at once, as if the company had no individual existence, but were a
Meeting. He impounded the Reverend Mr. Septimus, as an official personage to be
addressed, or kind of human peg to hang his oratorical hat on, and fell into
the exasperating habit, common among such orators, of impersonating him as a
wicked and weak opponent. Thus, he would ask: “And will you, sir, now stultify
yourself by telling me”—and so forth, when the innocent man had not opened his
lips, nor meant to open them. Or he would say: “Now see, sir, to what a
position you are reduced. I will leave you no escape. After exhausting all the
resources of fraud and falsehood, during years upon years; after exhibiting a
combination of dastardly meanness with ensanguined daring, such as the world
has not often witnessed; you have now the hypocrisy to bend the knee before the
most degraded of mankind, and to sue and whine and howl for mercy!” Whereat the
unfortunate Minor Canon would look, in part indignant and in part perplexed;
while his worthy mother sat bridling, with tears in her eyes, and the remainder
of the party lapsed into a sort of gelatinous state, in which there was no
flavour or solidity, and very little resistance.

 

  But the gush of philanthropy that burst
forth when the departure of Mr. Honeythunder began to impend, must have been
highly gratifying to the feelings of that distinguished man. His coffee was
produced, by the special activity of Mr. Tope, a full hour before he wanted it.
Mr. Crisparkle sat with his watch in his hand for about the same period, lest
he should overstay his time. The four young people were unanimous in believing
that the Cathedral clock struck three-quarters, when it actually struck but
one. Miss Twinkleton estimated the distance to the omnibus at five-and-twenty
minutes” walk, when it was really five. The affectionate kindness of the whole
circle hustled him into his greatcoat, and shoved him out into the moonlight,
as if he were a fugitive traitor with whom they sympathised, and a troop of
horse were at the back door. Mr. Crisparkle and his new charge, who took him to
the omnibus, were so fervent in their apprehensions of his catching cold, that
they shut him up in it instantly and left him, with still half-an-hour to
spare.

 

   

 

   

 

  CHAPTER VII—MORE CONFIDENCES THAN ONE

 

   

 

  “I KNOW very little of that gentleman,
sir,” said Neville to the Minor Canon as they turned back.

 

  “You know very little of your guardian?”
the Minor Canon repeated.

 

  “Almost nothing!”

 

  “How came he—”

 

  “To BE my guardian? I'll tell you, sir.
I suppose you know that we come (my sister and I) from Ceylon?”

 

  “Indeed, no.”

 

  “I wonder at that. We lived with a
stepfather there. Our mother died there, when we were little children. We have
had a wretched existence. She made him our guardian, and he was a miserly
wretch who grudged us food to eat, and clothes to wear. At his death, he passed
us over to this man; for no better reason that I know of, than his being a
friend or connexion of his, whose name was always in print and catching his
attention.”

 

  “That was lately, I suppose?”

 

  “Quite lately, sir. This stepfather of ours
was a cruel brute as well as a grinding one. It is well he died when he did, or
I might have killed him.”

 

  Mr. Crisparkle stopped short in the
moonlight and looked at his hopeful pupil in consternation.

 

  “I surprise you, sir?” he said, with a
quick change to a submissive manner.

 

  “You shock me; unspeakably shock me.”

 

  The pupil hung his head for a little
while, as they walked on, and then said: “You never saw him beat your sister. I
have seen him beat mine, more than once or twice, and I never forgot it.”

 

  “Nothing,” said Mr. Crisparkle, “not
even a beloved and beautiful sister's tears under dastardly ill-usage;” he
became less severe, in spite of himself, as his indignation rose; “could
justify those horrible expressions that you used.”

 

  “I am sorry I used them, and especially
to you, sir. I beg to recall them. But permit me to set you right on one point.
You spoke of my sister's tears. My sister would have let him tear her to
pieces, before she would have let him believe that he could make her shed a
tear.”

 

  Mr. Crisparkle reviewed those mental
notes of his, and was neither at all surprised to hear it, nor at all disposed
to question it.

 

  “Perhaps you will think it strange,
sir,”—this was said in a hesitating voice—“that I should so soon ask you to
allow me to confide in you, and to have the kindness to hear a word or two from
me in my defence?”

 

  “Defence?” Mr. Crisparkle repeated. “You
are not on your defence, Mr. Neville.”

 

  “I think I am, sir. At least I know I
should be, if you were better acquainted with my character.”

 

  “Well, Mr. Neville,” was the rejoinder.
“What if you leave me to find it out?”

 

  “Since it is your pleasure, sir,”
answered the young man, with a quick change in his manner to sullen
disappointment: “since it is your pleasure to check me in my impulse, I must
submit.”

 

  There was that in the tone of this short
speech which made the conscientious man to whom it was addressed uneasy. It
hinted to him that he might, without meaning it, turn aside a trustfulness
beneficial to a mis-shapen young mind and perhaps to his own power of directing
and improving it. They were within sight of the lights in his windows, and he
stopped.

 

  “Let us turn back and take a turn or two
up and down, Mr. Neville, or you may not have time to finish what you wish to
say to me. You are hasty in thinking that I mean to check you. Quite the
contrary. I invite your confidence.”

 

  “You have invited it, sir, without
knowing it, ever since I came here. I say “ever since,” as if I had been here a
week. The truth is, we came here (my sister and I) to quarrel with you, and
affront you, and break away again.”

 

  “Really?” said Mr. Crisparkle, at a dead
loss for anything else to say.

 

  “You see, we could not know what you
were beforehand, sir; could we?”

 

  “Clearly not,” said Mr. Crisparkle.

 

  “And having liked no one else with whom
we have ever been brought into contact, we had made up our minds not to like
you.”

 

  “Really?” said Mr. Crisparkle again.

 

  “But we do like you, sir, and we see an
unmistakable difference between your house and your reception of us, and
anything else we have ever known. This—and my happening to be alone with
you—and everything around us seeming so quiet and peaceful after Mr.
Honeythunder's departure—and Cloisterham being so old and grave and beautiful,
with the moon shining on it—these things inclined me to open my heart.”