The Mystery of Edwin Drood
“I was going to show you how madly I love you. More madly now than
ever, for I am willing to renounce the second object that has arisen in
my life to divide it with you; and henceforth to have no object in
existence but you only. Miss Landless has become your bosom friend. You
care for her peace of mind?”
“I love her dearly.”
“You care for her good name?”
“I have said, sir, I love her dearly.”
“I am unconsciously,” he observes with a smile, as he folds his hands
upon the sun-dial and leans his chin upon them, so that his talk would
seem from the windows (faces occasionally come and go there) to be of
the airiest and playfullest—“I am unconsciously giving offence by
questioning again. I will simply make statements, therefore, and not
put questions. You do care for your bosom friend’s good name, and you
do care for her peace of mind. Then remove the shadow of the gallows
from her, dear one!”
“You dare propose to me to—”
“Darling, I dare propose to you. Stop there. If it be bad to idolise
you, I am the worst of men; if it be good, I am the best. My love for
you is above all other love, and my truth to you is above all other
truth. Let me have hope and favour, and I am a forsworn man for your
sake.”
Rosa puts her hands to her temples, and, pushing back her hair, looks
wildly and abhorrently at him, as though she were trying to piece
together what it is his deep purpose to present to her only in
fragments.
“Reckon up nothing at this moment, angel, but the sacrifices that I lay
at those dear feet, which I could fall down among the vilest ashes and
kiss, and put upon my head as a poor savage might. There is my fidelity
to my dear boy after death. Tread upon it!”
With an action of his hands, as though he cast down something precious.
“There is the inexpiable offence against my adoration of you. Spurn
it!”
With a similar action.
“There are my labours in the cause of a just vengeance for six toiling
months. Crush them!”
With another repetition of the action.
“There is my past and my present wasted life. There is the desolation
of my heart and my soul. There is my peace; there is my despair. Stamp
them into the dust; so that you take me, were it even mortally hating
me!”
The frightful vehemence of the man, now reaching its full height, so
additionally terrifies her as to break the spell that has held her to
the spot. She swiftly moves towards the porch; but in an instant he is
at her side, and speaking in her ear.
“Rosa, I am self-repressed again. I am walking calmly beside you to the
house. I shall wait for some encouragement and hope. I shall not strike
too soon. Give me a sign that you attend to me.”
She slightly and constrainedly moves her hand.
“Not a word of this to any one, or it will bring down the blow, as
certainly as night follows day. Another sign that you attend to me.”
She moves her hand once more.
“I love you, love you, love you! If you were to cast me off now—but you
will not—you would never be rid of me. No one should come between us. I
would pursue you to the death.”
The handmaid coming out to open the gate for him, he quietly pulls off
his hat as a parting salute, and goes away with no greater show of
agitation than is visible in the effigy of Mr. Sapsea’s father
opposite. Rosa faints in going up-stairs, and is carefully carried to
her room and laid down on her bed. A thunderstorm is coming on, the
maids say, and the hot and stifling air has overset the pretty dear: no
wonder; they have felt their own knees all of a tremble all day long.
CHAPTER XX.
A FLIGHT
Rosa no sooner came to herself than the whole of the late interview was
before her. It even seemed as if it had pursued her into her
insensibility, and she had not had a moment’s unconsciousness of it.
What to do, she was at a frightened loss to know: the only one clear
thought in her mind was, that she must fly from this terrible man.
But where could she take refuge, and how could she go? She had never
breathed her dread of him to any one but Helena. If she went to Helena,
and told her what had passed, that very act might bring down the
irreparable mischief that he threatened he had the power, and that she
knew he had the will, to do. The more fearful he appeared to her
excited memory and imagination, the more alarming her responsibility
appeared; seeing that a slight mistake on her part, either in action or
delay, might let his malevolence loose on Helena’s brother.
Rosa’s mind throughout the last six months had been stormily confused.
A half-formed, wholly unexpressed suspicion tossed in it, now heaving
itself up, and now sinking into the deep; now gaining palpability, and
now losing it. Jasper’s self-absorption in his nephew when he was
alive, and his unceasing pursuit of the inquiry how he came by his
death, if he were dead, were themes so rife in the place, that no one
appeared able to suspect the possibility of foul play at his hands. She
had asked herself the question, “Am I so wicked in my thoughts as to
conceive a wickedness that others cannot imagine?” Then she had
considered, Did the suspicion come of her previous recoiling from him
before the fact? And if so, was not that a proof of its baselessness?
Then she had reflected, “What motive could he have, according to my
accusation?” She was ashamed to answer in her mind, “The motive of
gaining _me_!” And covered her face, as if the lightest shadow of the
idea of founding murder on such an idle vanity were a crime almost as
great.
She ran over in her mind again, all that he had said by the sun-dial in
the garden. He had persisted in treating the disappearance as murder,
consistently with his whole public course since the finding of the
watch and shirt-pin. If he were afraid of the crime being traced out,
would he not rather encourage the idea of a voluntary disappearance? He
had even declared that if the ties between him and his nephew had been
less strong, he might have swept “even him” away from her side. Was
that like his having really done so? He had spoken of laying his six
months’ labours in the cause of a just vengeance at her feet. Would he
have done that, with that violence of passion, if they were a pretence?
Would he have ranged them with his desolate heart and soul, his wasted
life, his peace and his despair? The very first sacrifice that he
represented himself as making for her, was his fidelity to his dear boy
after death. Surely these facts were strong against a fancy that
scarcely dared to hint itself. And yet he was so terrible a man! In
short, the poor girl (for what could she know of the criminal
intellect, which its own professed students perpetually misread,
because they persist in trying to reconcile it with the average
intellect of average men, instead of identifying it as a horrible
wonder apart) could get by no road to any other conclusion than that he
_was_ a terrible man, and must be fled from.
She had been Helena’s stay and comfort during the whole time. She had
constantly assured her of her full belief in her brother’s innocence,
and of her sympathy with him in his misery. But she had never seen him
since the disappearance, nor had Helena ever spoken one word of his
avowal to Mr. Crisparkle in regard of Rosa, though as a part of the
interest of the case it was well known far and wide. He was Helena’s
unfortunate brother, to her, and nothing more. The assurance she had
given her odious suitor was strictly true, though it would have been
better (she considered now) if she could have restrained herself from
so giving it. Afraid of him as the bright and delicate little creature
was, her spirit swelled at the thought of his knowing it from her own
lips.
But where was she to go? Anywhere beyond his reach, was no reply to the
question. Somewhere must be thought of. She determined to go to her
guardian, and to go immediately. The feeling she had imparted to Helena
on the night of their first confidence, was so strong upon her—the
feeling of not being safe from him, and of the solid walls of the old
convent being powerless to keep out his ghostly following of her—that
no reasoning of her own could calm her terrors. The fascination of
repulsion had been upon her so long, and now culminated so darkly, that
she felt as if he had power to bind her by a spell. Glancing out at
window, even now, as she rose to dress, the sight of the sun-dial on
which he had leaned when he declared himself, turned her cold, and made
her shrink from it, as though he had invested it with some awful
quality from his own nature.
She wrote a hurried note to Miss Twinkleton, saying that she had sudden
reason for wishing to see her guardian promptly, and had gone to him;
also, entreating the good lady not to be uneasy, for all was well with
her. She hurried a few quite useless articles into a very little bag,
left the note in a conspicuous place, and went out, softly closing the
gate after her.
It was the first time she had ever been even in Cloisterham High Street
alone. But knowing all its ways and windings very well, she hurried
straight to the corner from which the omnibus departed. It was, at that
very moment, going off.
“Stop and take me, if you please, Joe. I am obliged to go to London.”
In less than another minute she was on her road to the railway, under
Joe’s protection. Joe waited on her when she got there, put her safely
into the railway carriage, and handed in the very little bag after her,
as though it were some enormous trunk, hundredweights heavy, which she
must on no account endeavour to lift.
“Can you go round when you get back, and tell Miss Twinkleton that you
saw me safely off, Joe?”
“It shall be done, Miss.”
“With my love, please, Joe.”
“Yes, Miss—and I wouldn’t mind having it myself!” But Joe did not
articulate the last clause; only thought it.
Now that she was whirling away for London in real earnest, Rosa was at
leisure to resume the thoughts which her personal hurry had checked.
The indignant thought that his declaration of love soiled her; that she
could only be cleansed from the stain of its impurity by appealing to
the honest and true; supported her for a time against her fears, and
confirmed her in her hasty resolution. But as the evening grew darker
and darker, and the great city impended nearer and nearer, the doubts
usual in such cases began to arise. Whether this was not a wild
proceeding, after all; how Mr. Grewgious might regard it; whether she
should find him at the journey’s end; how she would act if he were
absent; what might become of her, alone, in a place so strange and
crowded; how if she had but waited and taken counsel first; whether, if
she could now go back, she would not do it thankfully; a multitude of
such uneasy speculations disturbed her, more and more as they
accumulated. At length the train came into London over the housetops;
and down below lay the gritty streets with their yet un-needed lamps
a-glow, on a hot, light, summer night.
“Hiram Grewgious, Esquire, Staple Inn, London.” This was all Rosa knew
of her destination; but it was enough to send her rattling away again
in a cab, through deserts of gritty streets, where many people crowded
at the corner of courts and byways to get some air, and where many
other people walked with a miserably monotonous noise of shuffling of
feet on hot paving-stones, and where all the people and all their
surroundings were so gritty and so shabby!
There was music playing here and there, but it did not enliven the
case. No barrel-organ mended the matter, and no big drum beat dull care
away. Like the chapel bells that were also going here and there, they
only seemed to evoke echoes from brick surfaces, and dust from
everything. As to the flat wind-instruments, they seemed to have