The Mystery of Edwin Drood
cracked their hearts and souls in pining for the country.
Her jingling conveyance stopped at last at a fast-closed gateway, which
appeared to belong to somebody who had gone to bed very early, and was
much afraid of housebreakers; Rosa, discharging her conveyance, timidly
knocked at this gateway, and was let in, very little bag and all, by a
watchman.
“Does Mr. Grewgious live here?”
“Mr. Grewgious lives there, Miss,” said the watchman, pointing further
in.
So Rosa went further in, and, when the clocks were striking ten, stood
on P. J. T.’s doorsteps, wondering what P. J. T. had done with his
street-door.
Guided by the painted name of Mr. Grewgious, she went up-stairs and
softly tapped and tapped several times. But no one answering, and Mr.
Grewgious’s door-handle yielding to her touch, she went in, and saw her
guardian sitting on a window-seat at an open window, with a shaded lamp
placed far from him on a table in a corner.
Rosa drew nearer to him in the twilight of the room. He saw her, and he
said, in an undertone: “Good Heaven!”
Rosa fell upon his neck, with tears, and then he said, returning her
embrace:
“My child, my child! I thought you were your mother!—But what, what,
what,” he added, soothingly, “has happened? My dear, what has brought
you here? Who has brought you here?”
“No one. I came alone.”
“Lord bless me!” ejaculated Mr. Grewgious. “Came alone! Why didn’t you
write to me to come and fetch you?”
“I had no time. I took a sudden resolution. Poor, poor Eddy!”
“Ah, poor fellow, poor fellow!”
“His uncle has made love to me. I cannot bear it,” said Rosa, at once
with a burst of tears, and a stamp of her little foot; “I shudder with
horror of him, and I have come to you to protect me and all of us from
him, if you will?”
“I will,” cried Mr. Grewgious, with a sudden rush of amazing energy.
“Damn him!
‘Confound his politics!
Frustrate his knavish tricks!
On Thee his hopes to fix?
Damn him again!’”
After this most extraordinary outburst, Mr. Grewgious, quite beside
himself, plunged about the room, to all appearance undecided whether he
was in a fit of loyal enthusiasm, or combative denunciation.
He stopped and said, wiping his face: “I beg your pardon, my dear, but
you will be glad to know I feel better. Tell me no more just now, or I
might do it again. You must be refreshed and cheered. What did you take
last? Was it breakfast, lunch, dinner, tea, or supper? And what will
you take next? Shall it be breakfast, lunch, dinner, tea, or supper?”
The respectful tenderness with which, on one knee before her, he helped
her to remove her hat, and disentangle her pretty hair from it, was
quite a chivalrous sight. Yet who, knowing him only on the surface,
would have expected chivalry—and of the true sort, too; not the
spurious—from Mr. Grewgious?
“Your rest too must be provided for,” he went on; “and you shall have
the prettiest chamber in Furnival’s. Your toilet must be provided for,
and you shall have everything that an unlimited head chambermaid—by
which expression I mean a head chambermaid not limited as to outlay—can
procure. Is that a bag?” he looked hard at it; sooth to say, it
required hard looking at to be seen at all in a dimly lighted room:
“and is it your property, my dear?”
“Yes, sir. I brought it with me.”
“It is not an extensive bag,” said Mr. Grewgious, candidly, “though
admirably calculated to contain a day’s provision for a canary-bird.
Perhaps you brought a canary-bird?”
Rosa smiled and shook her head.
“If you had, he should have been made welcome,” said Mr. Grewgious,
“and I think he would have been pleased to be hung upon a nail outside
and pit himself against our Staple sparrows; whose execution must be
admitted to be not quite equal to their intention. Which is the case
with so many of us! You didn’t say what meal, my dear. Have a nice
jumble of all meals.”
Rosa thanked him, but said she could only take a cup of tea. Mr.
Grewgious, after several times running out, and in again, to mention
such supplementary items as marmalade, eggs, watercresses, salted fish,
and frizzled ham, ran across to Furnival’s without his hat, to give his
various directions. And soon afterwards they were realised in practice,
and the board was spread.
“Lord bless my soul,” cried Mr. Grewgious, putting the lamp upon it,
and taking his seat opposite Rosa; “what a new sensation for a poor old
Angular bachelor, to be sure!”
Rosa’s expressive little eyebrows asked him what he meant?
“The sensation of having a sweet young presence in the place, that
whitewashes it, paints it, papers it, decorates it with gilding, and
makes it Glorious!” said Mr. Grewgious. “Ah me! Ah me!”
As there was something mournful in his sigh, Rosa, in touching him with
her tea-cup, ventured to touch him with her small hand too.
“Thank you, my dear,” said Mr. Grewgious. “Ahem! Let’s talk!”
“Do you always live here, sir?” asked Rosa.
“Yes, my dear.”
“And always alone?”
“Always alone; except that I have daily company in a gentleman by the
name of Bazzard, my clerk.”
“_He_ doesn’t live here?”
“No, he goes his way, after office hours. In fact, he is off duty here,
altogether, just at present; and a firm down-stairs, with which I have
business relations, lend me a substitute. But it would be extremely
difficult to replace Mr. Bazzard.”
“He must be very fond of you,” said Rosa.
“He bears up against it with commendable fortitude if he is,” returned
Mr. Grewgious, after considering the matter. “But I doubt if he is. Not
particularly so. You see, he is discontented, poor fellow.”
“Why isn’t he contented?” was the natural inquiry.
“Misplaced,” said Mr. Grewgious, with great mystery.
Rosa’s eyebrows resumed their inquisitive and perplexed expression.
“So misplaced,” Mr. Grewgious went on, “that I feel constantly
apologetic towards him. And he feels (though he doesn’t mention it)
that I have reason to be.”
Mr. Grewgious had by this time grown so very mysterious, that Rosa did
not know how to go on. While she was thinking about it Mr. Grewgious
suddenly jerked out of himself for the second time:
“Let’s talk. We were speaking of Mr. Bazzard. It’s a secret, and
moreover it is Mr. Bazzard’s secret; but the sweet presence at my table
makes me so unusually expansive, that I feel I must impart it in
inviolable confidence. What do you think Mr. Bazzard has done?”
“O dear!” cried Rosa, drawing her chair a little nearer, and her mind
reverting to Jasper, “nothing dreadful, I hope?”
“He has written a play,” said Mr. Grewgious, in a solemn whisper. “A
tragedy.”
Rosa seemed much relieved.
“And nobody,” pursued Mr. Grewgious in the same tone, “will hear, on
any account whatever, of bringing it out.”
Rosa looked reflective, and nodded her head slowly; as who should say,
“Such things are, and why are they!”
“Now, you know,” said Mr. Grewgious, “_I_ couldn’t write a play.”
“Not a bad one, sir?” said Rosa, innocently, with her eyebrows again in
action.
“No. If I was under sentence of decapitation, and was about to be
instantly decapitated, and an express arrived with a pardon for the
condemned convict Grewgious if he wrote a play, I should be under the
necessity of resuming the block, and begging the executioner to proceed
to extremities,—meaning,” said Mr. Grewgious, passing his hand under
his chin, “the singular number, and this extremity.”
Rosa appeared to consider what she would do if the awkward
supposititious case were hers.
“Consequently,” said Mr. Grewgious, “Mr. Bazzard would have a sense of
my inferiority to himself under any circumstances; but when I am his
master, you know, the case is greatly aggravated.”
Mr. Grewgious shook his head seriously, as if he felt the offence to be
a little too much, though of his own committing.
“How came you to be his master, sir?” asked Rosa.
“A question that naturally follows,” said Mr. Grewgious. “Let’s talk.
Mr. Bazzard’s father, being a Norfolk farmer, would have furiously laid
about him with a flail, a pitch-fork, and every agricultural implement
available for assaulting purposes, on the slightest hint of his son’s
having written a play. So the son, bringing to me the father’s rent
(which I receive), imparted his secret, and pointed out that he was
determined to pursue his genius, and that it would put him in peril of
starvation, and that he was not formed for it.”
“For pursuing his genius, sir?”
“No, my dear,” said Mr. Grewgious, “for starvation. It was impossible
to deny the position, that Mr. Bazzard was not formed to be starved,
and Mr. Bazzard then pointed out that it was desirable that I should
stand between him and a fate so perfectly unsuited to his formation. In
that way Mr. Bazzard became my clerk, and he feels it very much.”
“I am glad he is grateful,” said Rosa.
“I didn’t quite mean that, my dear. I mean, that he feels the
degradation. There are some other geniuses that Mr. Bazzard has become
acquainted with, who have also written tragedies, which likewise nobody
will on any account whatever hear of bringing out, and these choice
spirits dedicate their plays to one another in a highly panegyrical
manner. Mr. Bazzard has been the subject of one of these dedications.
Now, you know, I never had a play dedicated to _me_!”
Rosa looked at him as if she would have liked him to be the recipient
of a thousand dedications.
“Which again, naturally, rubs against the grain of Mr. Bazzard,” said
Mr. Grewgious. “He is very short with me sometimes, and then I feel
that he is meditating, ‘This blockhead is my master! A fellow who
couldn’t write a tragedy on pain of death, and who will never have one
dedicated to him with the most complimentary congratulations on the
high position he has taken in the eyes of posterity!’ Very trying, very
trying. However, in giving him directions, I reflect beforehand:
‘Perhaps he may not like this,’ or ‘He might take it ill if I asked
that;’ and so we get on very well. Indeed, better than I could have
expected.”
“Is the tragedy named, sir?” asked Rosa.
“Strictly between ourselves,” answered Mr. Grewgious, “it has a
dreadfully appropriate name. It is called The Thorn of Anxiety. But Mr.
Bazzard hopes—and I hope—that it will come out at last.”
It was not hard to divine that Mr. Grewgious had related the Bazzard
history thus fully, at least quite as much for the recreation of his
ward’s mind from the subject that had driven her there, as for the
gratification of his own tendency to be social and communicative.
“And now, my dear,” he said at this point, “if you are not too tired to
tell me more of what passed to-day—but only if you feel quite able—I
should be glad to hear it. I may digest it the better, if I sleep on it
to-night.”
Rosa, composed now, gave him a faithful account of the interview. Mr.
Grewgious often smoothed his head while it was in progress, and begged
to be told a second time those parts which bore on Helena and Neville.
When Rosa had finished, he sat grave, silent, and meditative for a
while.
“Clearly narrated,” was his only remark at last, “and, I hope, clearly
put away here,” smoothing his head again. “See, my dear,” taking her to
the open window, “where they live! The dark windows over yonder.”
“I may go to Helena to-morrow?” asked Rosa.
“I should like to sleep on that question to-night,” he answered
doubtfully. “But let me take you to your own rest, for you must need
it.”
With that Mr. Grewgious helped her to get her hat on again, and hung
upon his arm the very little bag that was of no earthly use, and led
her by the hand (with a certain stately awkwardness, as if he were