The Mystery of Edwin Drood
venturesome glazier than an amateur ordinarily careful of his neck; in
fact, so much more outside the window than inside, as to suggest the
thought that he must have come up by the water-spout instead of the
stairs.
The stranger said nothing until Neville put his key in his door; then,
seeming to make sure of his identity from the action, he spoke:
“I beg your pardon,” he said, coming from the window with a frank and
smiling air, and a prepossessing address; “the beans.”
Neville was quite at a loss.
“Runners,” said the visitor. “Scarlet. Next door at the back.”
“O,” returned Neville. “And the mignonette and wall-flower?”
“The same,” said the visitor.
“Pray walk in.”
“Thank you.”
Neville lighted his candles, and the visitor sat down. A handsome
gentleman, with a young face, but with an older figure in its
robustness and its breadth of shoulder; say a man of eight-and-twenty,
or at the utmost thirty; so extremely sunburnt that the contrast
between his brown visage and the white forehead shaded out of doors by
his hat, and the glimpses of white throat below the neckerchief, would
have been almost ludicrous but for his broad temples, bright blue eyes,
clustering brown hair, and laughing teeth.
“I have noticed,” said he; “—my name is Tartar.”
Neville inclined his head.
“I have noticed (excuse me) that you shut yourself up a good deal, and
that you seem to like my garden aloft here. If you would like a little
more of it, I could throw out a few lines and stays between my windows
and yours, which the runners would take to directly. And I have some
boxes, both of mignonette and wall-flower, that I could shove on along
the gutter (with a boathook I have by me) to your windows, and draw
back again when they wanted watering or gardening, and shove on again
when they were ship-shape; so that they would cause you no trouble. I
couldn’t take this liberty without asking your permission, so I venture
to ask it. Tartar, corresponding set, next door.”
“You are very kind.”
“Not at all. I ought to apologise for looking in so late. But having
noticed (excuse me) that you generally walk out at night, I thought I
should inconvenience you least by awaiting your return. I am always
afraid of inconveniencing busy men, being an idle man.”
“I should not have thought so, from your appearance.”
“No? I take it as a compliment. In fact, I was bred in the Royal Navy,
and was First Lieutenant when I quitted it. But, an uncle disappointed
in the service leaving me his property on condition that I left the
Navy, I accepted the fortune, and resigned my commission.”
“Lately, I presume?”
“Well, I had had twelve or fifteen years of knocking about first. I
came here some nine months before you; I had had one crop before you
came. I chose this place, because, having served last in a little
corvette, I knew I should feel more at home where I had a constant
opportunity of knocking my head against the ceiling. Besides, it would
never do for a man who had been aboard ship from his boyhood to turn
luxurious all at once. Besides, again; having been accustomed to a very
short allowance of land all my life, I thought I’d feel my way to the
command of a landed estate, by beginning in boxes.”
Whimsically as this was said, there was a touch of merry earnestness in
it that made it doubly whimsical.
“However,” said the Lieutenant, “I have talked quite enough about
myself. It is not my way, I hope; it has merely been to present myself
to you naturally. If you will allow me to take the liberty I have
described, it will be a charity, for it will give me something more to
do. And you are not to suppose that it will entail any interruption or
intrusion on you, for that is far from my intention.”
Neville replied that he was greatly obliged, and that he thankfully
accepted the kind proposal.
“I am very glad to take your windows in tow,” said the Lieutenant.
“From what I have seen of you when I have been gardening at mine, and
you have been looking on, I have thought you (excuse me) rather too
studious and delicate. May I ask, is your health at all affected?”
“I have undergone some mental distress,” said Neville, confused, “which
has stood me in the stead of illness.”
“Pardon me,” said Mr. Tartar.
With the greatest delicacy he shifted his ground to the windows again,
and asked if he could look at one of them. On Neville’s opening it, he
immediately sprang out, as if he were going aloft with a whole watch in
an emergency, and were setting a bright example.
“For Heaven’s sake,” cried Neville, “don’t do that! Where are you going
Mr. Tartar? You’ll be dashed to pieces!”
“All well!” said the Lieutenant, coolly looking about him on the
housetop. “All taut and trim here. Those lines and stays shall be
rigged before you turn out in the morning. May I take this short cut
home, and say good-night?”
“Mr. Tartar!” urged Neville. “Pray! It makes me giddy to see you!”
But Mr. Tartar, with a wave of his hand and the deftness of a cat, had
already dipped through his scuttle of scarlet runners without breaking
a leaf, and “gone below.”
Mr. Grewgious, his bedroom window-blind held aside with his hand,
happened at the moment to have Neville’s chambers under his eye for the
last time that night. Fortunately his eye was on the front of the house
and not the back, or this remarkable appearance and disappearance might
have broken his rest as a phenomenon. But Mr. Grewgious seeing nothing
there, not even a light in the windows, his gaze wandered from the
windows to the stars, as if he would have read in them something that
was hidden from him. Many of us would, if we could; but none of us so
much as know our letters in the stars yet—or seem likely to do it, in
this state of existence—and few languages can be read until their
alphabets are mastered.
CHAPTER XVIII.
A SETTLER IN CLOISTERHAM
At about this time a stranger appeared in Cloisterham; a white-haired
personage, with black eyebrows. Being buttoned up in a tightish blue
surtout, with a buff waistcoat and gray trousers, he had something of a
military air, but he announced himself at the Crozier (the orthodox
hotel, where he put up with a portmanteau) as an idle dog who lived
upon his means; and he farther announced that he had a mind to take a
lodging in the picturesque old city for a month or two, with a view of
settling down there altogether. Both announcements were made in the
coffee-room of the Crozier, to all whom it might or might not concern,
by the stranger as he stood with his back to the empty fireplace,
waiting for his fried sole, veal cutlet, and pint of sherry. And the
waiter (business being chronically slack at the Crozier) represented
all whom it might or might not concern, and absorbed the whole of the
information.
This gentleman’s white head was unusually large, and his shock of white
hair was unusually thick and ample. “I suppose, waiter,” he said,
shaking his shock of hair, as a Newfoundland dog might shake his before
sitting down to dinner, “that a fair lodging for a single buffer might
be found in these parts, eh?”
The waiter had no doubt of it.
“Something old,” said the gentleman. “Take my hat down for a moment
from that peg, will you? No, I don’t want it; look into it. What do you
see written there?”
The waiter read: “Datchery.”
“Now you know my name,” said the gentleman; “Dick Datchery. Hang it up
again. I was saying something old is what I should prefer, something
odd and out of the way; something venerable, architectural, and
inconvenient.”
“We have a good choice of inconvenient lodgings in the town, sir, I
think,” replied the waiter, with modest confidence in its resources
that way; “indeed, I have no doubt that we could suit you that far,
however particular you might be. But a architectural lodging!” That
seemed to trouble the waiter’s head, and he shook it.
“Anything Cathedraly, now,” Mr. Datchery suggested.
“Mr. Tope,” said the waiter, brightening, as he rubbed his chin with
his hand, “would be the likeliest party to inform in that line.”
“Who is Mr. Tope?” inquired Dick Datchery.
The waiter explained that he was the Verger, and that Mrs. Tope had
indeed once upon a time let lodgings herself or offered to let them;
but that as nobody had ever taken them, Mrs. Tope’s window-bill, long a
Cloisterham Institution, had disappeared; probably had tumbled down one
day, and never been put up again.
“I’ll call on Mrs. Tope,” said Mr. Datchery, “after dinner.”
So when he had done his dinner, he was duly directed to the spot, and
sallied out for it. But the Crozier being an hotel of a most retiring
disposition, and the waiter’s directions being fatally precise, he soon
became bewildered, and went boggling about and about the Cathedral
Tower, whenever he could catch a glimpse of it, with a general
impression on his mind that Mrs. Tope’s was somewhere very near it, and
that, like the children in the game of hot boiled beans and very good
butter, he was warm in his search when he saw the Tower, and cold when
he didn’t see it.
He was getting very cold indeed when he came upon a fragment of
burial-ground in which an unhappy sheep was grazing. Unhappy, because a
hideous small boy was stoning it through the railings, and had already
lamed it in one leg, and was much excited by the benevolent
sportsmanlike purpose of breaking its other three legs, and bringing it
down.
“’It ’im agin!” cried the boy, as the poor creature leaped; “and made a
dint in his wool.”
“Let him be!” said Mr. Datchery. “Don’t you see you have lamed him?”
“Yer lie,” returned the sportsman. “’E went and lamed isself. I see ’im
do it, and I giv’ ’im a shy as a Widdy-warning to ’im not to go
a-bruisin’ ’is master’s mutton any more.”
“Come here.”
“I won’t; I’ll come when yer can ketch me.”
“Stay there then, and show me which is Mr. Tope’s.”
“Ow can I stay here and show you which is Topeseses, when Topeseses is
t’other side the Kinfreederal, and over the crossings, and round ever
so many comers? Stoo-pid! Ya-a-ah!”
“Show me where it is, and I’ll give you something.”
“Come on, then.”
This brisk dialogue concluded, the boy led the way, and by-and-by
stopped at some distance from an arched passage, pointing.
“Lookie yonder. You see that there winder and door?”
“That’s Tope’s?”
“Yer lie; it ain’t. That’s Jarsper’s.”
“Indeed?” said Mr. Datchery, with a second look of some interest.
“Yes, and I ain’t a-goin’ no nearer ’IM, I tell yer.”
“Why not?”
“’Cos I ain’t a-goin’ to be lifted off my legs and ’ave my braces bust
and be choked; not if I knows it, and not by ’Im. Wait till I set a
jolly good flint a-flyin’ at the back o’ ’is jolly old ’ed some day!
Now look t’other side the harch; not the side where Jarsper’s door is;
t’other side.”
“I see.”
“A little way in, o’ that side, there’s a low door, down two steps.
That’s Topeseses with ’is name on a hoval plate.”
“Good. See here,” said Mr. Datchery, producing a shilling. “You owe me
half of this.”
“Yer lie! I don’t owe yer nothing; I never seen yer.”
“I tell you you owe me half of this, because I have no sixpence in my
pocket. So the next time you meet me you shall do something else for
me, to pay me.”
“All right, give us ’old.”
“What is your name, and where do you live?”
“Deputy. Travellers’ Twopenny, ’cross the green.”
The boy instantly darted off with the shilling, lest Mr. Datchery
should repent, but stopped at a safe distance, on the happy chance of
his being uneasy in his mind about it, to goad him with a demon dance
expressive of its irrevocability.
Mr. Datchery, taking off his hat to give that shock of white hair of
his another shake, seemed quite resigned, and betook himself whither he
had been directed.