The Mystery of Edwin Drood
directly. Look away from me. They will go all the sooner.”
With a scared face the younger man complies by casting his eyes
downward at the ashes on the hearth. Not relaxing his own gaze on the
fire, but rather strengthening it with a fierce, firm grip upon his
elbow-chair, the elder sits for a few moments rigid, and then, with
thick drops standing on his forehead, and a sharp catch of his breath,
becomes as he was before. On his so subsiding in his chair, his nephew
gently and assiduously tends him while he quite recovers. When Jasper
is restored, he lays a tender hand upon his nephew’s shoulder, and, in
a tone of voice less troubled than the purport of his words—indeed with
something of raillery or banter in it—thus addresses him:
“There is said to be a hidden skeleton in every house; but you thought
there was none in mine, dear Ned.”
“Upon my life, Jack, I did think so. However, when I come to consider
that even in Pussy’s house—if she had one—and in mine—if I had one—”
“You were going to say (but that I interrupted you in spite of myself)
what a quiet life mine is. No whirl and uproar around me, no
distracting commerce or calculation, no risk, no change of place,
myself devoted to the art I pursue, my business my pleasure.”
“I really was going to say something of the kind, Jack; but you see,
you, speaking of yourself, almost necessarily leave out much that I
should have put in. For instance: I should have put in the foreground
your being so much respected as Lay Precentor, or Lay Clerk, or
whatever you call it, of this Cathedral; your enjoying the reputation
of having done such wonders with the choir; your choosing your society,
and holding such an independent position in this queer old place; your
gift of teaching (why, even Pussy, who don’t like being taught, says
there never was such a Master as you are!), and your connexion.”
“Yes; I saw what you were tending to. I hate it.”
“Hate it, Jack?” (Much bewildered.)
“I hate it. The cramped monotony of my existence grinds me away by the
grain. How does our service sound to you?”
“Beautiful! Quite celestial!”
“It often sounds to me quite devilish. I am so weary of it. The echoes
of my own voice among the arches seem to mock me with my daily drudging
round. No wretched monk who droned his life away in that gloomy place,
before me, can have been more tired of it than I am. He could take for
relief (and did take) to carving demons out of the stalls and seats and
desks. What shall I do? Must I take to carving them out of my heart?”
“I thought you had so exactly found your niche in life, Jack,” Edwin
Drood returns, astonished, bending forward in his chair to lay a
sympathetic hand on Jasper’s knee, and looking at him with an anxious
face.
“I know you thought so. They all think so.”
“Well, I suppose they do,” says Edwin, meditating aloud. “Pussy thinks
so.”
“When did she tell you that?”
“The last time I was here. You remember when. Three months ago.”
“How did she phrase it?”
“O, she only said that she had become your pupil, and that you were
made for your vocation.”
The younger man glances at the portrait. The elder sees it in him.
“Anyhow, my dear Ned,” Jasper resumes, as he shakes his head with a
grave cheerfulness, “I must subdue myself to my vocation: which is much
the same thing outwardly. It’s too late to find another now. This is a
confidence between us.”
“It shall be sacredly preserved, Jack.”
“I have reposed it in you, because—”
“I feel it, I assure you. Because we are fast friends, and because you
love and trust me, as I love and trust you. Both hands, Jack.”
As each stands looking into the other’s eyes, and as the uncle holds
the nephew’s hands, the uncle thus proceeds:
“You know now, don’t you, that even a poor monotonous chorister and
grinder of music—in his niche—may be troubled with some stray sort of
ambition, aspiration, restlessness, dissatisfaction, what shall we call
it?”
“Yes, dear Jack.”
“And you will remember?”
“My dear Jack, I only ask you, am I likely to forget what you have said
with so much feeling?”
“Take it as a warning, then.”
In the act of having his hands released, and of moving a step back,
Edwin pauses for an instant to consider the application of these last
words. The instant over, he says, sensibly touched:
“I am afraid I am but a shallow, surface kind of fellow, Jack, and that
my headpiece is none of the best. But I needn’t say I am young; and
perhaps I shall not grow worse as I grow older. At all events, I hope I
have something impressible within me, which feels—deeply feels—the
disinterestedness of your painfully laying your inner self bare, as a
warning to me.”
Mr. Jasper’s steadiness of face and figure becomes so marvellous that
his breathing seems to have stopped.
“I couldn’t fail to notice, Jack, that it cost you a great effort, and
that you were very much moved, and very unlike your usual self. Of
course I knew that you were extremely fond of me, but I really was not
prepared for your, as I may say, sacrificing yourself to me in that
way.”
Mr. Jasper, becoming a breathing man again without the smallest stage
of transition between the two extreme states, lifts his shoulders,
laughs, and waves his right arm.
“No; don’t put the sentiment away, Jack; please don’t; for I am very
much in earnest. I have no doubt that that unhealthy state of mind
which you have so powerfully described is attended with some real
suffering, and is hard to bear. But let me reassure you, Jack, as to
the chances of its overcoming me. I don’t think I am in the way of it.
In some few months less than another year, you know, I shall carry
Pussy off from school as Mrs. Edwin Drood. I shall then go engineering
into the East, and Pussy with me. And although we have our little tiffs
now, arising out of a certain unavoidable flatness that attends our
love-making, owing to its end being all settled beforehand, still I
have no doubt of our getting on capitally then, when it’s done and
can’t be helped. In short, Jack, to go back to the old song I was
freely quoting at dinner (and who knows old songs better than you?), my
wife shall dance, and I will sing, so merrily pass the day. Of Pussy’s
being beautiful there cannot be a doubt;—and when you are good besides,
Little Miss Impudence,” once more apostrophising the portrait, “I’ll
burn your comic likeness, and paint your music-master another.”
Mr. Jasper, with his hand to his chin, and with an expression of musing
benevolence on his face, has attentively watched every animated look
and gesture attending the delivery of these words. He remains in that
attitude after they are spoken, as if in a kind of fascination
attendant on his strong interest in the youthful spirit that he loves
so well. Then he says with a quiet smile:
“You won’t be warned, then?”
“No, Jack.”
“You can’t be warned, then?”
“No, Jack, not by you. Besides that I don’t really consider myself in
danger, I don’t like your putting yourself in that position.”
“Shall we go and walk in the churchyard?”
“By all means. You won’t mind my slipping out of it for half a moment
to the Nuns’ House, and leaving a parcel there? Only gloves for Pussy;
as many pairs of gloves as she is years old to-day. Rather poetical,
Jack?”
Mr. Jasper, still in the same attitude, murmurs: “‘Nothing half so
sweet in life,’ Ned!”
“Here’s the parcel in my greatcoat-pocket. They must be presented
to-night, or the poetry is gone. It’s against regulations for me to
call at night, but not to leave a packet. I am ready, Jack!”
Mr. Jasper dissolves his attitude, and they go out together.
CHAPTER III.
THE NUNS’ HOUSE
For sufficient reasons, which this narrative will itself unfold as it
advances, a fictitious name must be bestowed upon the old Cathedral
town. Let it stand in these pages as Cloisterham. It was once possibly
known to the Druids by another name, and certainly to the Romans by
another, and to the Saxons by another, and to the Normans by another;
and a name more or less in the course of many centuries can be of
little moment to its dusty chronicles.
An ancient city, Cloisterham, and no meet dwelling-place for any one
with hankerings after the noisy world. A monotonous, silent city,
deriving an earthy flavour throughout from its Cathedral crypt, and so
abounding in vestiges of monastic graves, that the Cloisterham children
grow small salad in the dust of abbots and abbesses, and make dirt-pies
of nuns and friars; while every ploughman in its outlying fields
renders to once puissant Lord Treasurers, Archbishops, Bishops, and
such-like, the attention which the Ogre in the story-book desired to
render to his unbidden visitor, and grinds their bones to make his
bread.
A drowsy city, Cloisterham, whose inhabitants seem to suppose, with an
inconsistency more strange than rare, that all its changes lie behind
it, and that there are no more to come. A queer moral to derive from
antiquity, yet older than any traceable antiquity. So silent are the
streets of Cloisterham (though prone to echo on the smallest
provocation), that of a summer-day the sunblinds of its shops scarce
dare to flap in the south wind; while the sun-browned tramps, who pass
along and stare, quicken their limp a little, that they may the sooner
get beyond the confines of its oppressive respectability. This is a
feat not difficult of achievement, seeing that the streets of
Cloisterham city are little more than one narrow street by which you
get into it and get out of it: the rest being mostly disappointing
yards with pumps in them and no thoroughfare—exception made of the
Cathedral-close, and a paved Quaker settlement, in colour and general
confirmation very like a Quakeress’s bonnet, up in a shady corner.
In a word, a city of another and a bygone time is Cloisterham, with its
hoarse Cathedral-bell, its hoarse rooks hovering about the Cathedral
tower, its hoarser and less distinct rooks in the stalls far beneath.
Fragments of old wall, saint’s chapel, chapter-house, convent and
monastery, have got incongruously or obstructively built into many of
its houses and gardens, much as kindred jumbled notions have become
incorporated into many of its citizens’ minds. All things in it are of
the past. Even its single pawnbroker takes in no pledges, nor has he
for a long time, but offers vainly an unredeemed stock for sale, of
which the costlier articles are dim and pale old watches apparently in
a slow perspiration, tarnished sugar-tongs with ineffectual legs, and
odd volumes of dismal books. The most abundant and the most agreeable
evidences of progressing life in Cloisterham are the evidences of
vegetable life in many gardens; even its drooping and despondent little
theatre has its poor strip of garden, receiving the foul fiend, when he
ducks from its stage into the infernal regions, among scarlet-beans or
oyster-shells, according to the season of the year.
In the midst of Cloisterham stands the Nuns’ House: a venerable brick
edifice, whose present appellation is doubtless derived from the legend
of its conventual uses. On the trim gate enclosing its old courtyard is
a resplendent brass plate flashing forth the legend: “Seminary for
Young Ladies. Miss Twinkleton.” The house-front is so old and worn, and
the brass plate is so shining and staring, that the general result has
reminded imaginative strangers of a battered old beau with a large
modern eye-glass stuck in his blind eye.
Whether the nuns of yore, being of a submissive rather than a
stiff-necked generation, habitually bent their contemplative heads to
avoid collision with the beams in the low ceilings of the many chambers
of their House; whether they sat in its long low windows telling their