The Mystery of Edwin Drood
entertain the idea of a lamb’s fry. Firstly, because lambs has long
been sheep, and secondly, because there is such things as killing-days,
and there is not. As to roast fowls, Miss, why you must be quite
surfeited with roast fowls, letting alone your buying, when you market
for yourself, the agedest of poultry with the scaliest of legs, quite
as if you was accustomed to picking ’em out for cheapness. Try a little
inwention, Miss. Use yourself to ’ousekeeping a bit. Come now, think of
somethink else.”
To this encouragement, offered with the indulgent toleration of a wise
and liberal expert, Miss Twinkleton would rejoin, reddening:
“Or, my dear, you might propose to the person of the house a duck.”
“Well, Miss!” the Billickin would exclaim (still no word being spoken
by Rosa), “you do surprise me when you speak of ducks! Not to mention
that they’re getting out of season and very dear, it really strikes to
my heart to see you have a duck; for the breast, which is the only
delicate cuts in a duck, always goes in a direction which I cannot
imagine where, and your own plate comes down so miserably
skin-and-bony! Try again, Miss. Think more of yourself, and less of
others. A dish of sweetbreads now, or a bit of mutton. Something at
which you can get your equal chance.”
Occasionally the game would wax very brisk indeed, and would be kept up
with a smartness rendering such an encounter as this quite tame. But
the Billickin almost invariably made by far the higher score; and would
come in with side hits of the most unexpected and extraordinary
description, when she seemed without a chance.
All this did not improve the gritty state of things in London, or the
air that London had acquired in Rosa’s eyes of waiting for something
that never came. Tired of working, and conversing with Miss Twinkleton,
she suggested working and reading: to which Miss Twinkleton readily
assented, as an admirable reader, of tried powers. But Rosa soon made
the discovery that Miss Twinkleton didn’t read fairly. She cut the
love-scenes, interpolated passages in praise of female celibacy, and
was guilty of other glaring pious frauds. As an instance in point, take
the glowing passage: “Ever dearest and best adored,—said Edward,
clasping the dear head to his breast, and drawing the silken hair
through his caressing fingers, from which he suffered it to fall like
golden rain,—ever dearest and best adored, let us fly from the
unsympathetic world and the sterile coldness of the stony-hearted, to
the rich warm Paradise of Trust and Love.” Miss Twinkleton’s fraudulent
version tamely ran thus: “Ever engaged to me with the consent of our
parents on both sides, and the approbation of the silver-haired rector
of the district,—said Edward, respectfully raising to his lips the
taper fingers so skilful in embroidery, tambour, crochet, and other
truly feminine arts,—let me call on thy papa ere to-morrow’s dawn has
sunk into the west, and propose a suburban establishment, lowly it may
be, but within our means, where he will be always welcome as an evening
guest, and where every arrangement shall invest economy, and constant
interchange of scholastic acquirements with the attributes of the
ministering angel to domestic bliss.”
As the days crept on and nothing happened, the neighbours began to say
that the pretty girl at Billickin’s, who looked so wistfully and so
much out of the gritty windows of the drawing-room, seemed to be losing
her spirits. The pretty girl might have lost them but for the accident
of lighting on some books of voyages and sea-adventure. As a
compensation against their romance, Miss Twinkleton, reading aloud,
made the most of all the latitudes and longitudes, bearings, winds,
currents, offsets, and other statistics (which she felt to be none the
less improving because they expressed nothing whatever to her); while
Rosa, listening intently, made the most of what was nearest to her
heart. So they both did better than before.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE DAWN AGAIN
Although Mr. Crisparkle and John Jasper met daily under the Cathedral
roof, nothing at any time passed between them having reference to Edwin
Drood, after the time, more than half a year gone by, when Jasper
mutely showed the Minor Canon the conclusion and the resolution entered
in his Diary. It is not likely that they ever met, though so often,
without the thoughts of each reverting to the subject. It is not likely
that they ever met, though so often, without a sensation on the part of
each that the other was a perplexing secret to him. Jasper as the
denouncer and pursuer of Neville Landless, and Mr. Crisparkle as his
consistent advocate and protector, must at least have stood
sufficiently in opposition to have speculated with keen interest on the
steadiness and next direction of the other’s designs. But neither ever
broached the theme.
False pretence not being in the Minor Canon’s nature, he doubtless
displayed openly that he would at any time have revived the subject,
and even desired to discuss it. The determined reticence of Jasper,
however, was not to be so approached. Impassive, moody, solitary,
resolute, so concentrated on one idea, and on its attendant fixed
purpose, that he would share it with no fellow-creature, he lived apart
from human life. Constantly exercising an Art which brought him into
mechanical harmony with others, and which could not have been pursued
unless he and they had been in the nicest mechanical relations and
unison, it is curious to consider that the spirit of the man was in
moral accordance or interchange with nothing around him. This indeed he
had confided to his lost nephew, before the occasion for his present
inflexibility arose.
That he must know of Rosa’s abrupt departure, and that he must divine
its cause, was not to be doubted. Did he suppose that he had terrified
her into silence? or did he suppose that she had imparted to any one—to
Mr. Crisparkle himself, for instance—the particulars of his last
interview with her? Mr. Crisparkle could not determine this in his
mind. He could not but admit, however, as a just man, that it was not,
of itself, a crime to fall in love with Rosa, any more than it was a
crime to offer to set love above revenge.
The dreadful suspicion of Jasper, which Rosa was so shocked to have
received into her imagination, appeared to have no harbour in Mr.
Crisparkle’s. If it ever haunted Helena’s thoughts or Neville’s,
neither gave it one spoken word of utterance. Mr. Grewgious took no
pains to conceal his implacable dislike of Jasper, yet he never
referred it, however distantly, to such a source. But he was a reticent
as well as an eccentric man; and he made no mention of a certain
evening when he warmed his hands at the gatehouse fire, and looked
steadily down upon a certain heap of torn and miry clothes upon the
floor.
Drowsy Cloisterham, whenever it awoke to a passing reconsideration of a
story above six months old and dismissed by the bench of magistrates,
was pretty equally divided in opinion whether John Jasper’s beloved
nephew had been killed by his treacherously passionate rival, or in an
open struggle; or had, for his own purposes, spirited himself away. It
then lifted up its head, to notice that the bereaved Jasper was still
ever devoted to discovery and revenge; and then dozed off again. This
was the condition of matters, all round, at the period to which the
present history has now attained.
The Cathedral doors have closed for the night; and the Choir-master, on
a short leave of absence for two or three services, sets his face
towards London. He travels thither by the means by which Rosa
travelled, and arrives, as Rosa arrived, on a hot, dusty evening.
His travelling baggage is easily carried in his hand, and he repairs
with it on foot, to a hybrid hotel in a little square behind Aldersgate
Street, near the General Post Office. It is hotel, boarding-house, or
lodging-house, at its visitor’s option. It announces itself, in the new
Railway Advertisers, as a novel enterprise, timidly beginning to spring
up. It bashfully, almost apologetically, gives the traveller to
understand that it does not expect him, on the good old constitutional
hotel plan, to order a pint of sweet blacking for his drinking, and
throw it away; but insinuates that he may have his boots blacked
instead of his stomach, and maybe also have bed, breakfast, attendance,
and a porter up all night, for a certain fixed charge. From these and
similar premises, many true Britons in the lowest spirits deduce that
the times are levelling times, except in the article of high roads, of
which there will shortly be not one in England.
He eats without appetite, and soon goes forth again. Eastward and still
eastward through the stale streets he takes his way, until he reaches
his destination: a miserable court, specially miserable among many
such.
He ascends a broken staircase, opens a door, looks into a dark stifling
room, and says: “Are you alone here?”
“Alone, deary; worse luck for me, and better for you,” replies a
croaking voice. “Come in, come in, whoever you be: I can’t see you till
I light a match, yet I seem to know the sound of your speaking. I’m
acquainted with you, ain’t I?”
“Light your match, and try.”
“So I will, deary, so I will; but my hand that shakes, as I can’t lay
it on a match all in a moment. And I cough so, that, put my matches
where I may, I never find ’em there. They jump and start, as I cough
and cough, like live things. Are you off a voyage, deary?”
“No.”
“Not seafaring?”
“No.”
“Well, there’s land customers, and there’s water customers. I’m a
mother to both. Different from Jack Chinaman t’other side the court. He
ain’t a father to neither. It ain’t in him. And he ain’t got the true
secret of mixing, though he charges as much as me that has, and more if
he can get it. Here’s a match, and now where’s the candle? If my cough
takes me, I shall cough out twenty matches afore I gets a light.”
But she finds the candle, and lights it, before the cough comes on. It
seizes her in the moment of success, and she sits down rocking herself
to and fro, and gasping at intervals: “O, my lungs is awful bad! my
lungs is wore away to cabbage-nets!” until the fit is over. During its
continuance she has had no power of sight, or any other power not
absorbed in the struggle; but as it leaves her, she begins to strain
her eyes, and as soon as she is able to articulate, she cries, staring:
“Why, it’s you!”
“Are you so surprised to see me?”
“I thought I never should have seen you again, deary. I thought you was
dead, and gone to Heaven.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t suppose you could have kept away, alive, so long, from the
poor old soul with the real receipt for mixing it. And you are in
mourning too! Why didn’t you come and have a pipe or two of comfort?
Did they leave you money, perhaps, and so you didn’t want comfort?”
“No.”
“Who was they as died, deary?”
“A relative.”
“Died of what, lovey?”
“Probably, Death.”
“We are short to-night!” cries the woman, with a propitiatory laugh.
“Short and snappish we are! But we’re out of sorts for want of a smoke.
We’ve got the all-overs, haven’t us, deary? But this is the place to
cure ’em in; this is the place where the all-overs is smoked off.”
“You may make ready, then,” replies the visitor, “as soon as you like.”
He divests himself of his shoes, loosens his cravat, and lies across
the foot of the squalid bed, with his head resting on his left hand.
“Now you begin to look like yourself,” says the woman approvingly. “Now
I begin to know my old customer indeed! Been trying to mix for yourself
this long time, poppet?”
“I have been taking it now and then in my own way.”