The Mystery of Edwin Drood
living idly on his means, I have had a rather busy afternoon!”
CHAPTER XIX.
SHADOW ON THE SUN-DIAL
Again Miss Twinkleton has delivered her valedictory address, with the
accompaniments of white-wine and pound-cake, and again the young ladies
have departed to their several homes. Helena Landless has left the
Nuns’ House to attend her brother’s fortunes, and pretty Rosa is alone.
Cloisterham is so bright and sunny in these summer days, that the
Cathedral and the monastery-ruin show as if their strong walls were
transparent. A soft glow seems to shine from within them, rather than
upon them from without, such is their mellowness as they look forth on
the hot corn-fields and the smoking roads that distantly wind among
them. The Cloisterham gardens blush with ripening fruit. Time was when
travel-stained pilgrims rode in clattering parties through the city’s
welcome shades; time is when wayfarers, leading a gipsy life between
haymaking time and harvest, and looking as if they were just made of
the dust of the earth, so very dusty are they, lounge about on cool
doorsteps, trying to mend their unmendable shoes, or giving them to
the city kennels as a hopeless job, and seeking others in the bundles
that they carry, along with their yet unused sickles swathed in bands
of straw. At all the more public pumps there is much cooling of bare
feet, together with much bubbling and gurgling of drinking with hand to
spout on the part of these Bedouins; the Cloisterham police meanwhile
looking askant from their beats with suspicion, and manifest impatience
that the intruders should depart from within the civic bounds, and once
more fry themselves on the simmering high-roads.
On the afternoon of such a day, when the last Cathedral service is
done, and when that side of the High Street on which the Nuns’ House
stands is in grateful shade, save where its quaint old garden opens to
the west between the boughs of trees, a servant informs Rosa, to her
terror, that Mr. Jasper desires to see her.
If he had chosen his time for finding her at a disadvantage, he could
have done no better. Perhaps he has chosen it. Helena Landless is gone,
Mrs. Tisher is absent on leave, Miss Twinkleton (in her amateur state
of existence) has contributed herself and a veal pie to a picnic.
“O why, why, why, did you say I was at home!” cried Rosa, helplessly.
The maid replies, that Mr. Jasper never asked the question.
That he said he knew she was at home, and begged she might be told that
he asked to see her.
“What shall I do! what shall I do!” thinks Rosa, clasping her hands.
Possessed by a kind of desperation, she adds in the next breath, that
she will come to Mr. Jasper in the garden. She shudders at the thought
of being shut up with him in the house; but many of its windows command
the garden, and she can be seen as well as heard there, and can shriek
in the free air and run away. Such is the wild idea that flutters
through her mind.
She has never seen him since the fatal night, except when she was
questioned before the Mayor, and then he was present in gloomy
watchfulness, as representing his lost nephew and burning to avenge
him. She hangs her garden-hat on her arm, and goes out. The moment she
sees him from the porch, leaning on the sun-dial, the old horrible
feeling of being compelled by him, asserts its hold upon her. She feels
that she would even then go back, but that he draws her feet towards
him. She cannot resist, and sits down, with her head bent, on the
garden-seat beside the sun-dial. She cannot look up at him for
abhorrence, but she has perceived that he is dressed in deep mourning.
So is she. It was not so at first; but the lost has long been given up,
and mourned for, as dead.
He would begin by touching her hand. She feels the intention, and draws
her hand back. His eyes are then fixed upon her, she knows, though her
own see nothing but the grass.
“I have been waiting,” he begins, “for some time, to be summoned back
to my duty near you.”
After several times forming her lips, which she knows he is closely
watching, into the shape of some other hesitating reply, and then into
none, she answers: “Duty, sir?”
“The duty of teaching you, serving you as your faithful music-master.”
“I have left off that study.”
“Not left off, I think. Discontinued. I was told by your guardian that
you discontinued it under the shock that we have all felt so acutely.
When will you resume?”
“Never, sir.”
“Never? You could have done no more if you had loved my dear boy.”
“I did love him!” cried Rosa, with a flash of anger.
“Yes; but not quite—not quite in the right way, shall I say? Not in the
intended and expected way. Much as my dear boy was, unhappily, too
self-conscious and self-satisfied (I’ll draw no parallel between him
and you in that respect) to love as he should have loved, or as any one
in his place would have loved—must have loved!”
She sits in the same still attitude, but shrinking a little more.
“Then, to be told that you discontinued your study with me, was to be
politely told that you abandoned it altogether?” he suggested.
“Yes,” says Rosa, with sudden spirit, “The politeness was my
guardian’s, not mine. I told him that I was resolved to leave off, and
that I was determined to stand by my resolution.”
“And you still are?”
“I still am, sir. And I beg not to be questioned any more about it. At
all events, I will not answer any more; I have that in my power.”
She is so conscious of his looking at her with a gloating admiration of
the touch of anger on her, and the fire and animation it brings with
it, that even as her spirit rises, it falls again, and she struggles
with a sense of shame, affront, and fear, much as she did that night at
the piano.
“I will not question you any more, since you object to it so much; I
will confess—”
“I do not wish to hear you, sir,” cries Rosa, rising.
This time he does touch her with his outstretched hand. In shrinking
from it, she shrinks into her seat again.
“We must sometimes act in opposition to our wishes,” he tells her in a
low voice. “You must do so now, or do more harm to others than you can
ever set right.”
“What harm?”
“Presently, presently. You question _me_, you see, and surely that’s
not fair when you forbid me to question you. Nevertheless, I will
answer the question presently. Dearest Rosa! Charming Rosa!”
She starts up again.
This time he does not touch her. But his face looks so wicked and
menacing, as he stands leaning against the sun-dial-setting, as it
were, his black mark upon the very face of day—that her flight is
arrested by horror as she looks at him.
“I do not forget how many windows command a view of us,” he says,
glancing towards them. “I will not touch you again; I will come no
nearer to you than I am. Sit down, and there will be no mighty wonder
in your music-master’s leaning idly against a pedestal and speaking
with you, remembering all that has happened, and our shares in it. Sit
down, my beloved.”
She would have gone once more—was all but gone—and once more his face,
darkly threatening what would follow if she went, has stopped her.
Looking at him with the expression of the instant frozen on her face,
she sits down on the seat again.
“Rosa, even when my dear boy was affianced to you, I loved you madly;
even when I thought his happiness in having you for his wife was
certain, I loved you madly; even when I strove to make him more
ardently devoted to you, I loved you madly; even when he gave me the
picture of your lovely face so carelessly traduced by him, which I
feigned to hang always in my sight for his sake, but worshipped in
torment for years, I loved you madly; in the distasteful work of the
day, in the wakeful misery of the night, girded by sordid realities, or
wandering through Paradises and Hells of visions into which I rushed,
carrying your image in my arms, I loved you madly.”
If anything could make his words more hideous to her than they are in
themselves, it would be the contrast between the violence of his look
and delivery, and the composure of his assumed attitude.
“I endured it all in silence. So long as you were his, or so long as I
supposed you to be his, I hid my secret loyally. Did I not?”
This lie, so gross, while the mere words in which it is told are so
true, is more than Rosa can endure. She answers with kindling
indignation: “You were as false throughout, sir, as you are now. You
were false to him, daily and hourly. You know that you made my life
unhappy by your pursuit of me. You know that you made me afraid to open
his generous eyes, and that you forced me, for his own trusting, good,
good sake, to keep the truth from him, that you were a bad, bad man!”
His preservation of his easy attitude rendering his working features
and his convulsive hands absolutely diabolical, he returns, with a
fierce extreme of admiration:
“How beautiful you are! You are more beautiful in anger than in repose.
I don’t ask you for your love; give me yourself and your hatred; give
me yourself and that pretty rage; give me yourself and that enchanting
scorn; it will be enough for me.”
Impatient tears rise to the eyes of the trembling little beauty, and
her face flames; but as she again rises to leave him in indignation,
and seek protection within the house, he stretches out his hand towards
the porch, as though he invited her to enter it.
“I told you, you rare charmer, you sweet witch, that you must stay and
hear me, or do more harm than can ever be undone. You asked me what
harm. Stay, and I will tell you. Go, and I will do it!”
Again Rosa quails before his threatening face, though innocent of its
meaning, and she remains. Her panting breathing comes and goes as if it
would choke her; but with a repressive hand upon her bosom, she
remains.
“I have made my confession that my love is mad. It is so mad, that had
the ties between me and my dear lost boy been one silken thread less
strong, I might have swept even him from your side, when you favoured
him.”
A film comes over the eyes she raises for an instant, as though he had
turned her faint.
“Even him,” he repeats. “Yes, even him! Rosa, you see me and you hear
me. Judge for yourself whether any other admirer shall love you and
live, whose life is in my hand.”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“I mean to show you how mad my love is. It was hawked through the late
inquiries by Mr. Crisparkle, that young Landless had confessed to him
that he was a rival of my lost boy. That is an inexpiable offence in my
eyes. The same Mr. Crisparkle knows under my hand that I have devoted
myself to the murderer’s discovery and destruction, be he whom he
might, and that I determined to discuss the mystery with no one until I
should hold the clue in which to entangle the murderer as in a net. I
have since worked patiently to wind and wind it round him; and it is
slowly winding as I speak.”
“Your belief, if you believe in the criminality of Mr. Landless, is not
Mr. Crisparkle’s belief, and he is a good man,” Rosa retorts.
“My belief is my own; and I reserve it, worshipped of my soul!
Circumstances may accumulate so strongly _even against an innocent
man_, that directed, sharpened, and pointed, they may slay him. One
wanting link discovered by perseverance against a guilty man, proves
his guilt, however slight its evidence before, and he dies. Young
Landless stands in deadly peril either way.”
“If you really suppose,” Rosa pleads with him, turning paler, “that I
favour Mr. Landless, or that Mr. Landless has ever in any way addressed
himself to me, you are wrong.”
He puts that from him with a slighting action of his hand and a curled
lip.