The Mystery of Edwin Drood
the arches, and pierced the heights of the great tower; and then the
sea was dry, and all was still.
Mr. Grewgious had by that time walked to the chancel-steps, where he
met the living waters coming out.
“Nothing is the matter?” Thus Jasper accosted him, rather quickly. “You
have not been sent for?”
“Not at all, not at all. I came down of my own accord. I have been to
my pretty ward’s, and am now homeward bound again.”
“You found her thriving?”
“Blooming indeed. Most blooming. I merely came to tell her, seriously,
what a betrothal by deceased parents is.”
“And what is it—according to your judgment?”
Mr. Grewgious noticed the whiteness of the lips that asked the
question, and put it down to the chilling account of the Cathedral.
“I merely came to tell her that it could not be considered binding,
against any such reason for its dissolution as a want of affection, or
want of disposition to carry it into effect, on the side of either
party.”
“May I ask, had you any especial reason for telling her that?”
Mr. Grewgious answered somewhat sharply: “The especial reason of doing
my duty, sir. Simply that.” Then he added: “Come, Mr. Jasper; I know
your affection for your nephew, and that you are quick to feel on his
behalf. I assure you that this implies not the least doubt of, or
disrespect to, your nephew.”
“You could not,” returned Jasper, with a friendly pressure of his arm,
as they walked on side by side, “speak more handsomely.”
Mr. Grewgious pulled off his hat to smooth his head, and, having
smoothed it, nodded it contentedly, and put his hat on again.
“I will wager,” said Jasper, smiling—his lips were still so white that
he was conscious of it, and bit and moistened them while speaking: “I
will wager that she hinted no wish to be released from Ned.”
“And you will win your wager, if you do,” retorted Mr. Grewgious. “We
should allow some margin for little maidenly delicacies in a young
motherless creature, under such circumstances, I suppose; it is not in
my line; what do you think?”
“There can be no doubt of it.”
“I am glad you say so. Because,” proceeded Mr. Grewgious, who had all
this time very knowingly felt his way round to action on his
remembrance of what she had said of Jasper himself: “because she seems
to have some little delicate instinct that all preliminary arrangements
had best be made between Mr. Edwin Drood and herself, don’t you see?
She don’t want us, don’t you know?”
Jasper touched himself on the breast, and said, somewhat indistinctly:
“You mean me.”
Mr. Grewgious touched himself on the breast, and said: “I mean us.
Therefore, let them have their little discussions and councils
together, when Mr. Edwin Drood comes back here at Christmas; and then
you and I will step in, and put the final touches to the business.”
“So, you settled with her that you would come back at Christmas?”
observed Jasper. “I see! Mr. Grewgious, as you quite fairly said just
now, there is such an exceptional attachment between my nephew and me,
that I am more sensitive for the dear, fortunate, happy, happy fellow
than for myself. But it is only right that the young lady should be
considered, as you have pointed out, and that I should accept my cue
from you. I accept it. I understand that at Christmas they will
complete their preparations for May, and that their marriage will be
put in final train by themselves, and that nothing will remain for us
but to put ourselves in train also, and have everything ready for our
formal release from our trusts, on Edwin’s birthday.”
“That is my understanding,” assented Mr. Grewgious, as they shook hands
to part. “God bless them both!”
“God save them both!” cried Jasper.
“I said, bless them,” remarked the former, looking back over his
shoulder.
“I said, save them,” returned the latter. “Is there any difference?”
CHAPTER X.
SMOOTHING THE WAY
It has been often enough remarked that women have a curious power of
divining the characters of men, which would seem to be innate and
instinctive; seeing that it is arrived at through no patient process of
reasoning, that it can give no satisfactory or sufficient account of
itself, and that it pronounces in the most confident manner even
against accumulated observation on the part of the other sex. But it
has not been quite so often remarked that this power (fallible, like
every other human attribute) is for the most part absolutely incapable
of self-revision; and that when it has delivered an adverse opinion
which by all human lights is subsequently proved to have failed, it is
undistinguishable from prejudice, in respect of its determination not
to be corrected. Nay, the very possibility of contradiction or
disproof, however remote, communicates to this feminine judgment from
the first, in nine cases out of ten, the weakness attendant on the
testimony of an interested witness; so personally and strongly does the
fair diviner connect herself with her divination.
“Now, don’t you think, Ma dear,” said the Minor Canon to his mother one
day as she sat at her knitting in his little book-room, “that you are
rather hard on Mr. Neville?”
“No, I do _not_, Sept,” returned the old lady.
“Let us discuss it, Ma.”
“I have no objection to discuss it, Sept. I trust, my dear, I am always
open to discussion.” There was a vibration in the old lady’s cap, as
though she internally added: “and I should like to see the discussion
that would change _my_ mind!”
“Very good, Ma,” said her conciliatory son. “There is nothing like
being open to discussion.”
“I hope not, my dear,” returned the old lady, evidently shut to it.
“Well! Mr. Neville, on that unfortunate occasion, commits himself under
provocation.”
“And under mulled wine,” added the old lady.
“I must admit the wine. Though I believe the two young men were much
alike in that regard.”
“I don’t,” said the old lady.
“Why not, Ma?”
“Because I _don’t_,” said the old lady. “Still, I am quite open to
discussion.”
“But, my dear Ma, I cannot see how we are to discuss, if you take that
line.”
“Blame Mr. Neville for it, Sept, and not me,” said the old lady, with
stately severity.
“My dear Ma! why Mr. Neville?”
“Because,” said Mrs. Crisparkle, retiring on first principles, “he came
home intoxicated, and did great discredit to this house, and showed
great disrespect to this family.”
“That is not to be denied, Ma. He was then, and he is now, very sorry
for it.”
“But for Mr. Jasper’s well-bred consideration in coming up to me, next
day, after service, in the Nave itself, with his gown still on, and
expressing his hope that I had not been greatly alarmed or had my rest
violently broken, I believe I might never have heard of that
disgraceful transaction,” said the old lady.
“To be candid, Ma, I think I should have kept it from you if I could:
though I had not decidedly made up my mind. I was following Jasper out,
to confer with him on the subject, and to consider the expediency of
his and my jointly hushing the thing up on all accounts, when I found
him speaking to you. Then it was too late.”
“Too late, indeed, Sept. He was still as pale as gentlemanly ashes at
what had taken place in his rooms overnight.”
“If I _had_ kept it from you, Ma, you may be sure it would have been
for your peace and quiet, and for the good of the young men, and in my
best discharge of my duty according to my lights.”
The old lady immediately walked across the room and kissed him: saying,
“Of course, my dear Sept, I am sure of that.”
“However, it became the town-talk,” said Mr. Crisparkle, rubbing his
ear, as his mother resumed her seat, and her knitting, “and passed out
of my power.”
“And I said then, Sept,” returned the old lady, “that I thought ill of
Mr. Neville. And I say now, that I think ill of Mr. Neville. And I said
then, and I say now, that I hope Mr. Neville may come to good, but I
don’t believe he will.” Here the cap vibrated again considerably.
“I am sorry to hear you say so, Ma—”
“I am sorry to say so, my dear,” interposed the old lady, knitting on
firmly, “but I can’t help it.”
“—For,” pursued the Minor Canon, “it is undeniable that Mr. Neville is
exceedingly industrious and attentive, and that he improves apace, and
that he has—I hope I may say—an attachment to me.”
“There is no merit in the last article, my dear,” said the old lady,
quickly; “and if he says there is, I think the worse of him for the
boast.”
“But, my dear Ma, he never said there was.”
“Perhaps not,” returned the old lady; “still, I don’t see that it
greatly signifies.”
There was no impatience in the pleasant look with which Mr. Crisparkle
contemplated the pretty old piece of china as it knitted; but there
was, certainly, a humorous sense of its not being a piece of china to
argue with very closely.
“Besides, Sept, ask yourself what he would be without his sister. You
know what an influence she has over him; you know what a capacity she
has; you know that whatever he reads with you, he reads with her. Give
her her fair share of your praise, and how much do you leave for him?”
At these words Mr. Crisparkle fell into a little reverie, in which he
thought of several things. He thought of the times he had seen the
brother and sister together in deep converse over one of his own old
college books; now, in the rimy mornings, when he made those sharpening
pilgrimages to Cloisterham Weir; now, in the sombre evenings, when he
faced the wind at sunset, having climbed his favourite outlook, a
beetling fragment of monastery ruin; and the two studious figures
passed below him along the margin of the river, in which the town fires
and lights already shone, making the landscape bleaker. He thought how
the consciousness had stolen upon him that in teaching one, he was
teaching two; and how he had almost insensibly adapted his explanations
to both minds—that with which his own was daily in contact, and that
which he only approached through it. He thought of the gossip that had
reached him from the Nuns’ House, to the effect that Helena, whom he
had mistrusted as so proud and fierce, submitted herself to the
fairy-bride (as he called her), and learnt from her what she knew. He
thought of the picturesque alliance between those two, externally so
very different. He thought—perhaps most of all—could it be that these
things were yet but so many weeks old, and had become an integral part
of his life?
As, whenever the Reverend Septimus fell a-musing, his good mother took
it to be an infallible sign that he “wanted support,” the blooming old
lady made all haste to the dining-room closet, to produce from it the
support embodied in a glass of Constantia and a home-made biscuit. It
was a most wonderful closet, worthy of Cloisterham and of Minor Canon
Corner. Above it, a portrait of Handel in a flowing wig beamed down at
the spectator, with a knowing air of being up to the contents of the
closet, and a musical air of intending to combine all its harmonies in
one delicious fugue. No common closet with a vulgar door on hinges,
openable all at once, and leaving nothing to be disclosed by degrees,
this rare closet had a lock in mid-air, where two perpendicular slides
met; the one falling down, and the other pushing up. The upper slide,
on being pulled down (leaving the lower a double mystery), revealed
deep shelves of pickle-jars, jam-pots, tin canisters, spice-boxes, and
agreeably outlandish vessels of blue and white, the luscious lodgings
of preserved tamarinds and ginger. Every benevolent inhabitant of this
retreat had his name inscribed upon his stomach. The pickles, in a
uniform of rich brown double-breasted buttoned coat, and yellow or
sombre drab continuations, announced their portly forms, in printed