The Mystery of Edwin Drood
mystifying, but that her attention was divided by the service of the
table.
“You will take something with me?” said Jasper, as the cloth was laid.
“I couldn’t get a morsel down my throat, I thank you,” answered Mr.
Grewgious.
Jasper both ate and drank almost voraciously. Combined with the hurry
in his mode of doing it, was an evident indifference to the taste of
what he took, suggesting that he ate and drank to fortify himself
against any other failure of the spirits, far more than to gratify his
palate. Mr. Grewgious in the meantime sat upright, with no expression
in his face, and a hard kind of imperturbably polite protest all over
him: as though he would have said, in reply to some invitation to
discourse; “I couldn’t originate the faintest approach to an
observation on any subject whatever, I thank you.”
“Do you know,” said Jasper, when he had pushed away his plate and
glass, and had sat meditating for a few minutes: “do you know that I
find some crumbs of comfort in the communication with which you have so
much amazed me?”
“_Do_ you?” returned Mr. Grewgious, pretty plainly adding the unspoken
clause: “I don’t, I thank you!”
“After recovering from the shock of a piece of news of my dear boy, so
entirely unexpected, and so destructive of all the castles I had built
for him; and after having had time to think of it; yes.”
“I shall be glad to pick up your crumbs,” said Mr. Grewgious, dryly.
“Is there not, or is there—if I deceive myself, tell me so, and shorten
my pain—is there not, or is there, hope that, finding himself in this
new position, and becoming sensitively alive to the awkward burden of
explanation, in this quarter, and that, and the other, with which it
would load him, he avoided the awkwardness, and took to flight?”
“Such a thing might be,” said Mr. Grewgious, pondering.
“Such a thing has been. I have read of cases in which people, rather
than face a seven days’ wonder, and have to account for themselves to
the idle and impertinent, have taken themselves away, and been long
unheard of.”
“I believe such things have happened,” said Mr. Grewgious, pondering
still.
“When I had, and could have, no suspicion,” pursued Jasper, eagerly
following the new track, “that the dear lost boy had withheld anything
from me—most of all, such a leading matter as this—what gleam of light
was there for me in the whole black sky? When I supposed that his
intended wife was here, and his marriage close at hand, how could I
entertain the possibility of his voluntarily leaving this place, in a
manner that would be so unaccountable, capricious, and cruel? But now
that I know what you have told me, is there no little chink through
which day pierces? Supposing him to have disappeared of his own act, is
not his disappearance more accountable and less cruel? The fact of his
having just parted from your ward, is in itself a sort of reason for
his going away. It does not make his mysterious departure the less
cruel to me, it is true; but it relieves it of cruelty to her.”
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