The Mystery of Edwin Drood
“Say it again.”
“I said that in the part of the world I come from, you would be called
to account for it.”
“Only there?” cries Edwin Drood, with a contemptuous laugh. “A long way
off, I believe? Yes; I see! That part of the world is at a safe
distance.”
“Say here, then,” rejoins the other, rising in a fury. “Say anywhere!
Your vanity is intolerable, your conceit is beyond endurance; you talk
as if you were some rare and precious prize, instead of a common
boaster. You are a common fellow, and a common boaster.”
“Pooh, pooh,” says Edwin Drood, equally furious, but more collected;
“how should you know? You may know a black common fellow, or a black
common boaster, when you see him (and no doubt you have a large
acquaintance that way); but you are no judge of white men.”
This insulting allusion to his dark skin infuriates Neville to that
violent degree, that he flings the dregs of his wine at Edwin Drood,
and is in the act of flinging the goblet after it, when his arm is
caught in the nick of time by Jasper.
“Ned, my dear fellow!” he cries in a loud voice; “I entreat you, I
command you, to be still!” There has been a rush of all the three, and
a clattering of glasses and overturning of chairs. “Mr. Neville, for
shame! Give this glass to me. Open your hand, sir. I WILL have it!”
But Neville throws him off, and pauses for an instant, in a raging
passion, with the goblet yet in his uplifted hand. Then, he dashes it
down under the grate, with such force that the broken splinters fly out
again in a shower; and he leaves the house.
When he first emerges into the night air, nothing around him is still
or steady; nothing around him shows like what it is; he only knows that
he stands with a bare head in the midst of a blood-red whirl, waiting
to be struggled with, and to struggle to the death.
But, nothing happening, and the moon looking down upon him as if he
were dead after a fit of wrath, he holds his steam-hammer beating head
and heart, and staggers away. Then, he becomes half-conscious of having
heard himself bolted and barred out, like a dangerous animal; and
thinks what shall he do?
Some wildly passionate ideas of the river dissolve under the spell of
the moonlight on the Cathedral and the graves, and the remembrance of
his sister, and the thought of what he owes to the good man who has but
that very day won his confidence and given him his pledge. He repairs
to Minor Canon Corner, and knocks softly at the door.
It is Mr. Crisparkle’s custom to sit up last of the early household,
very softly touching his piano and practising his favourite parts in
concerted vocal music. The south wind that goes where it lists, by way
of Minor Canon Corner on a still night, is not more subdued than Mr.
Crisparkle at such times, regardful of the slumbers of the china
shepherdess.
His knock is immediately answered by Mr. Crisparkle himself. When he
opens the door, candle in hand, his cheerful face falls, and
disappointed amazement is in it.
“Mr. Neville! In this disorder! Where have you been?”
“I have been to Mr. Jasper’s, sir. With his nephew.”
“Come in.”
The Minor Canon props him by the elbow with a strong hand (in a
strictly scientific manner, worthy of his morning trainings), and turns
him into his own little book-room, and shuts the door.
“I have begun ill, sir. I have begun dreadfully ill.”
“Too true. You are not sober, Mr. Neville.”
“I am afraid I am not, sir, though I can satisfy you at another time
that I have had a very little indeed to drink, and that it overcame me
in the strangest and most sudden manner.”
“Mr. Neville, Mr. Neville,” says the Minor Canon, shaking his head with
a sorrowful smile; “I have heard that said before.”
“I think—my mind is much confused, but I think—it is equally true of
Mr. Jasper’s nephew, sir.”
“Very likely,” is the dry rejoinder.
“We quarrelled, sir. He insulted me most grossly. He had heated that
tigerish blood I told you of to-day, before then.”
“Mr. Neville,” rejoins the Minor Canon, mildly, but firmly: “I request
you not to speak to me with that clenched right hand. Unclench it, if
you please.”
“He goaded me, sir,” pursues the young man, instantly obeying, “beyond
my power of endurance. I cannot say whether or no he meant it at first,
but he did it. He certainly meant it at last. In short, sir,” with an
irrepressible outburst, “in the passion into which he lashed me, I
would have cut him down if I could, and I tried to do it.”
“You have clenched that hand again,” is Mr. Crisparkle’s quiet
commentary.
“I beg your pardon, sir.”
“You know your room, for I showed it you before dinner; but I will
accompany you to it once more. Your arm, if you please. Softly, for the
house is all a-bed.”
Scooping his hand into the same scientific elbow-rest as before, and
backing it up with the inert strength of his arm, as skilfully as a
Police Expert, and with an apparent repose quite unattainable by
novices, Mr. Crisparkle conducts his pupil to the pleasant and orderly
old room prepared for him. Arrived there, the young man throws himself
into a chair, and, flinging his arms upon his reading-table, rests his
head upon them with an air of wretched self-reproach.
The gentle Minor Canon has had it in his thoughts to leave the room,
without a word. But looking round at the door, and seeing this dejected
figure, he turns back to it, touches it with a mild hand, says “Good
night!” A sob is his only acknowledgment. He might have had many a
worse; perhaps, could have had few better.
Another soft knock at the outer door attracts his attention as he goes
down-stairs. He opens it to Mr. Jasper, holding in his hand the pupil’s
hat.
“We have had an awful scene with him,” says Jasper, in a low voice.
“Has it been so bad as that?”
“Murderous!”
Mr. Crisparkle remonstrates: “No, no, no. Do not use such strong
words.”
“He might have laid my dear boy dead at my feet. It is no fault of his,
that he did not. But that I was, through the mercy of God, swift and
strong with him, he would have cut him down on my hearth.”
The phrase smites home. “Ah!” thinks Mr. Crisparkle, “his own words!”
“Seeing what I have seen to-night, and hearing what I have heard,” adds
Jasper, with great earnestness, “I shall never know peace of mind when
there is danger of those two coming together, with no one else to
interfere. It was horrible. There is something of the tiger in his dark
blood.”
“Ah!” thinks Mr. Crisparkle, “so he said!”
“You, my dear sir,” pursues Jasper, taking his hand, “even you, have
accepted a dangerous charge.”
“You need have no fear for me, Jasper,” returns Mr. Crisparkle, with a
quiet smile. “I have none for myself.”
“I have none for myself,” returns Jasper, with an emphasis on the last
pronoun, “because I am not, nor am I in the way of being, the object of
his hostility. But you may be, and my dear boy has been. Good night!”
Mr. Crisparkle goes in, with the hat that has so easily, so almost
imperceptibly, acquired the right to be hung up in his hall; hangs it
up; and goes thoughtfully to bed.
CHAPTER IX.
BIRDS IN THE BUSH
Rosa, having no relation that she knew of in the world, had, from the
seventh year of her age, known no home but the Nuns’ House, and no
mother but Miss Twinkleton. Her remembrance of her own mother was of a
pretty little creature like herself (not much older than herself it
seemed to her), who had been brought home in her father’s arms,
drowned. The fatal accident had happened at a party of pleasure. Every
fold and colour in the pretty summer dress, and even the long wet hair,
with scattered petals of ruined flowers still clinging to it, as the
dead young figure, in its sad, sad beauty lay upon the bed, were fixed
indelibly in Rosa’s recollection. So were the wild despair and the
subsequent bowed-down grief of her poor young father, who died
broken-hearted on the first anniversary of that hard day.
The betrothal of Rosa grew out of the soothing of his year of mental
distress by his fast friend and old college companion, Drood: who
likewise had been left a widower in his youth. But he, too, went the
silent road into which all earthly pilgrimages merge, some sooner, and
some later; and thus the young couple had come to be as they were.
The atmosphere of pity surrounding the little orphan girl when she
first came to Cloisterham, had never cleared away. It had taken
brighter hues as she grew older, happier, prettier; now it had been
golden, now roseate, and now azure; but it had always adorned her with
some soft light of its own. The general desire to console and caress
her, had caused her to be treated in the beginning as a child much
younger than her years; the same desire had caused her to be still
petted when she was a child no longer. Who should be her favourite, who
should anticipate this or that small present, or do her this or that
small service; who should take her home for the holidays; who should
write to her the oftenest when they were separated, and whom she would
most rejoice to see again when they were reunited; even these gentle
rivalries were not without their slight dashes of bitterness in the
Nuns’ House. Well for the poor Nuns in their day, if they hid no harder
strife under their veils and rosaries!
Thus Rosa had grown to be an amiable, giddy, wilful, winning little
creature; spoilt, in the sense of counting upon kindness from all
around her; but not in the sense of repaying it with indifference.
Possessing an exhaustless well of affection in her nature, its
sparkling waters had freshened and brightened the Nuns’ House for
years, and yet its depths had never yet been moved: what might betide
when that came to pass; what developing changes might fall upon the
heedless head, and light heart, then; remained to be seen.
By what means the news that there had been a quarrel between the two
young men overnight, involving even some kind of onslaught by Mr.
Neville upon Edwin Drood, got into Miss Twinkleton’s establishment
before breakfast, it is impossible to say. Whether it was brought in by
the birds of the air, or came blowing in with the very air itself, when
the casement windows were set open; whether the baker brought it
kneaded into the bread, or the milkman delivered it as part of the
adulteration of his milk; or the housemaids, beating the dust out of
their mats against the gateposts, received it in exchange deposited on
the mats by the town atmosphere; certain it is that the news permeated
every gable of the old building before Miss Twinkleton was down, and
that Miss Twinkleton herself received it through Mrs. Tisher, while yet
in the act of dressing; or (as she might have expressed the phrase to a
parent or guardian of a mythological turn) of sacrificing to the
Graces.
Miss Landless’s brother had thrown a bottle at Mr. Edwin Drood.
Miss Landless’s brother had thrown a knife at Mr. Edwin Drood.
A knife became suggestive of a fork; and Miss Landless’s brother had
thrown a fork at Mr. Edwin Drood.
As in the governing precedence of Peter Piper, alleged to have picked
the peck of pickled pepper, it was held physically desirable to have
evidence of the existence of the peck of pickled pepper which Peter
Piper was alleged to have picked; so, in this case, it was held
psychologically important to know why Miss Landless’s brother threw a
bottle, knife, or fork—or bottle, knife, _and_ fork—for the cook had
been given to understand it was all three—at Mr. Edwin Drood?
Well, then. Miss Landless’s brother had said he admired Miss Bud. Mr.
Edwin Drood had said to Miss Landless’s brother that he had no business
to admire Miss Bud. Miss Landless’s brother had then “up’d” (this was
the cook’s exact information) with the bottle, knife, fork, and