The Mystery of Edwin Drood (66 page)

 

  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.

 

  “Why did I come here!” was his second.

 

  Then, he stood intently listening to the
water. A familiar passage in his reading, about airy tongues that syllable
men's names, rose so unbidden to his ear, that he put it from him with his
hand, as if it were tangible.

 

  It was starlight. The Weir was full two
miles above the spot to which the young men had repaired to watch the storm. No
search had been made up here, for the tide had been running strongly down, at
that time of the night of Christmas Eve, and the likeliest places for the
discovery of a body, if a fatal accident had happened under such circumstances,
all lay—both when the tide ebbed, and when it flowed again—between that spot
and the sea. The water came over the Weir, with its usual sound on a cold
starlight night, and little could be seen of it; yet Mr. Crisparkle had a
strange idea that something unusual hung about the place.

 

  He reasoned with himself: What was it?
Where was it? Put it to the proof. Which sense did it address?

 

  No sense reported anything unusual
there. He listened again, and his sense of hearing again checked the water
coming over the Weir, with its usual sound on a cold starlight night.

 

  Knowing very well that the mystery with
which his mind was occupied, might of itself give the place this haunted air,
he strained those hawk's eyes of his for the correction of his sight. He got
closer to the Weir, and peered at its well-known posts and timbers. Nothing in
the least unusual was remotely shadowed forth. But he resolved that he would
come back early in the morning.

 

  The Weir ran through his broken sleep,
all night, and he was back again at sunrise. It was a bright frosty morning.
The whole composition before him, when he stood where he had stood last night,
was clearly discernible in its minutest details. He had surveyed it closely for
some minutes, and was about to withdraw his eyes, when they were attracted
keenly to one spot.

 

  He turned his back upon the Weir, and
looked far away at the sky, and at the earth, and then looked again at that one
spot. It caught his sight again immediately, and he concentrated his vision
upon it. He could not lose it now, though it was but such a speck in the
landscape. It fascinated his sight. His hands began plucking off his coat. For
it struck him that at that spot—a corner of the Weir—something glistened, which
did not move and come over with the glistening water-drops, but remained
stationary.

 

  He assured himself of this, he threw off
his clothes, he plunged into the icy water, and swam for the spot. Climbing the
timbers, he took from them, caught among their interstices by its chain, a gold
watch, bearing engraved upon its back E. D.

 

  He brought the watch to the bank, swam
to the Weir again, climbed it, and dived off. He knew every hole and corner of
all the depths, and dived and dived and dived, until he could bear the cold no
more. His notion was, that he would find the body; he only found a shirt-pin
sticking in some mud and ooze.

 

  With these discoveries he returned to
Cloisterham, and, taking Neville Landless with him, went straight to the Mayor.
Mr. Jasper was sent for, the watch and shirt-pin were identified, Neville was
detained, and the wildest frenzy and fatuity of evil report rose against him.
He was of that vindictive and violent nature, that but for his poor sister, who
alone had influence over him, and out of whose sight he was never to be trusted,
he would be in the daily commission of murder. Before coming to England he had
caused to be whipped to death sundry “Natives”—nomadic persons, encamping now
in Asia, now in Africa, now in the West Indies, and now at the North
Pole—vaguely supposed in Cloisterham to be always black, always of great
virtue, always calling themselves Me, and everybody else Massa or Missie
(according to sex), and always reading tracts of the obscurest meaning, in
broken English, but always accurately understanding them in the purest mother
tongue. He had nearly brought Mrs. Crisparkle's grey hairs with sorrow to the
grave. (Those original expressions were Mr. Sapsea's.) He had repeatedly said
he would have Mr. Crisparkle's life. He had repeatedly said he would have
everybody's life, and become in effect the last man. He had been brought down
to Cloisterham, from London, by an eminent Philanthropist, and why? Because
that Philanthropist had expressly declared: “I owe it to my fellow-creatures
that he should be, in the words of BENTHAM, where he is the cause of the
greatest danger to the smallest number.”

 

  These dropping shots from the
blunderbusses of blunderheadedness might not have hit him in a vital place. But
he had to stand against a trained and well-directed fire of arms of precision
too. He had notoriously threatened the lost young man, and had, according to
the showing of his own faithful friend and tutor who strove so hard for him, a
cause of bitter animosity (created by himself, and stated by himself), against
that ill-starred fellow. He had armed himself with an offensive weapon for the
fatal night, and he had gone off early in the morning, after making
preparations for departure. He had been found with traces of blood on him;
truly, they might have been wholly caused as he represented, but they might
not, also. On a search-warrant being issued for the examination of his room,
clothes, and so forth, it was discovered that he had destroyed all his papers,
and rearranged all his possessions, on the very afternoon of the disappearance.
The watch found at the Weir was challenged by the jeweller as one he had wound
and set for Edwin Drood, at twenty minutes past two on that same afternoon; and
it had run down, before being cast into the water; and it was the jeweller's
positive opinion that it had never been re-wound. This would justify the
hypothesis that the watch was taken from him not long after he left Mr.
Jasper's house at midnight, in company with the last person seen with him, and
that it had been thrown away after being retained some hours. Why thrown away?
If he had been murdered, and so artfully disfigured, or concealed, or both, as
that the murderer hoped identification to be impossible, except from something
that he wore, assuredly the murderer would seek to remove from the body the
most lasting, the best known, and the most easily recognisable, things upon it.
Those things would be the watch and shirt-pin. As to his opportunities of
casting them into the river; if he were the object of these suspicions, they
were easy. For, he had been seen by many persons, wandering about on that side
of the city—indeed on all sides of it—in a miserable and seemingly
half-distracted manner. As to the choice of the spot, obviously such criminating
evidence had better take its chance of being found anywhere, rather than upon
himself, or in his possession. Concerning the reconciliatory nature of the
appointed meeting between the two young men, very little could be made of that
in young Landless's favour; for it distinctly appeared that the meeting
originated, not with him, but with Mr. Crisparkle, and that it had been urged
on by Mr. Crisparkle; and who could say how unwillingly, or in what
illconditioned mood, his enforced pupil had gone to it? The more his case was
looked into, the weaker it became in every point. Even the broad suggestion
that the lost young man had absconded, was rendered additionally improbable on
the showing of the young lady from whom he had so lately parted; for; what did
she say, with great earnestness and sorrow, when interrogated? That he had,
expressly and enthusiastically, planned with her, that he would await the
arrival of her guardian, Mr. Grewgious. And yet, be it observed, he disappeared
before that gentleman appeared.