The Mystery of Edwin Drood
precautions against the discovery of the so vitally defective boots of
Mr. Edwin Drood: precautions, let us hope, effective for the peace of
Mrs. Edwin Drood that is to be.
“Which way shall we take, Rosa?”
Rosa replies: “I want to go to the Lumps-of-Delight shop.”
“To the—?”
“A Turkish sweetmeat, sir. My gracious me, don’t you understand
anything? Call yourself an Engineer, and not know _that_?”
“Why, how should I know it, Rosa?”
“Because I am very fond of them. But O! I forgot what we are to
pretend. No, you needn’t know anything about them; never mind.”
So he is gloomily borne off to the Lumps-of-Delight shop, where Rosa
makes her purchase, and, after offering some to him (which he rather
indignantly declines), begins to partake of it with great zest:
previously taking off and rolling up a pair of little pink gloves, like
rose-leaves, and occasionally putting her little pink fingers to her
rosy lips, to cleanse them from the Dust of Delight that comes off the
Lumps.
“Now, be a good-tempered Eddy, and pretend. And so you are engaged?”
“And so I am engaged.”
“Is she nice?”
“Charming.”
“Tall?”
“Immensely tall!” Rosa being short.
“Must be gawky, I should think,” is Rosa’s quiet commentary.
“I beg your pardon; not at all,” contradiction rising in him.
“What is termed a fine woman; a splendid woman.”
“Big nose, no doubt,” is the quiet commentary again.
“Not a little one, certainly,” is the quick reply, (Rosa’s being a
little one.)
“Long pale nose, with a red knob in the middle. I know the sort of
nose,” says Rosa, with a satisfied nod, and tranquilly enjoying the
Lumps.
“You _don’t_ know the sort of nose, Rosa,” with some warmth; “because
it’s nothing of the kind.”
“Not a pale nose, Eddy?”
“No.” Determined not to assent.
“A red nose? O! I don’t like red noses. However; to be sure she can
always powder it.”
“She would scorn to powder it,” says Edwin, becoming heated.
“Would she? What a stupid thing she must be! Is she stupid in
everything?”
“No; in nothing.”
After a pause, in which the whimsically wicked face has not been
unobservant of him, Rosa says:
“And this most sensible of creatures likes the idea of being carried
off to Egypt; does she, Eddy?”
“Yes. She takes a sensible interest in triumphs of engineering skill:
especially when they are to change the whole condition of an
undeveloped country.”
“Lor!” says Rosa, shrugging her shoulders, with a little laugh of
wonder.
“Do you object,” Edwin inquires, with a majestic turn of his eyes
downward upon the fairy figure: “do you object, Rosa, to her feeling
that interest?”
“Object? my dear Eddy! But really, doesn’t she hate boilers and
things?”
“I can answer for her not being so idiotic as to hate Boilers,” he
returns with angry emphasis; “though I cannot answer for her views
about Things; really not understanding what Things are meant.”
“But don’t she hate Arabs, and Turks, and Fellahs, and people?”
“Certainly not.” Very firmly.
“At least she _must_ hate the Pyramids? Come, Eddy?”
“Why should she be such a little—tall, I mean—goose, as to hate the
Pyramids, Rosa?”
“Ah! you should hear Miss Twinkleton,” often nodding her head, and much
enjoying the Lumps, “bore about them, and then you wouldn’t ask.
Tiresome old burying-grounds! Isises, and Ibises, and Cheopses, and
Pharaohses; who cares about them? And then there was Belzoni, or
somebody, dragged out by the legs, half-choked with bats and dust. All
the girls say: Serve him right, and hope it hurt him, and wish he had
been quite choked.”
The two youthful figures, side by side, but not now arm-in-arm, wander
discontentedly about the old Close; and each sometimes stops and slowly
imprints a deeper footstep in the fallen leaves.
“Well!” says Edwin, after a lengthy silence. “According to custom. We
can’t get on, Rosa.”
Rosa tosses her head, and says she don’t want to get on.
“That’s a pretty sentiment, Rosa, considering.”
“Considering what?”
“If I say what, you’ll go wrong again.”
“_You’ll_ go wrong, you mean, Eddy. Don’t be ungenerous.”
“Ungenerous! I like that!”
“Then I _don’t_ like that, and so I tell you plainly,” Rosa pouts.
“Now, Rosa, I put it to you. Who disparaged my profession, my
destination—”
“You are not going to be buried in the Pyramids, I hope?” she
interrupts, arching her delicate eyebrows. “You never said you were. If
you are, why haven’t you mentioned it to me? I can’t find out your
plans by instinct.”
“Now, Rosa, you know very well what I mean, my dear.”
“Well then, why did you begin with your detestable red-nosed
giantesses? And she would, she would, she would, she would, she WOULD
powder it!” cries Rosa, in a little burst of comical contradictory
spleen.
“Somehow or other, I never can come right in these discussions,” says
Edwin, sighing and becoming resigned.
“How is it possible, sir, that you ever can come right when you’re
always wrong? And as to Belzoni, I suppose he’s dead;—I’m sure I hope
he is—and how can his legs or his chokes concern you?”
“It is nearly time for your return, Rosa. We have not had a very happy
walk, have we?”
“A happy walk? A detestably unhappy walk, sir. If I go up-stairs the
moment I get in and cry till I can’t take my dancing lesson, you are
responsible, mind!”
“Let us be friends, Rosa.”
“Ah!” cries Rosa, shaking her head and bursting into real tears, “I
wish we _could_ be friends! It’s because we can’t be friends, that we
try one another so. I am a young little thing, Eddy, to have an old
heartache; but I really, really have, sometimes. Don’t be angry. I know
you have one yourself too often. We should both of us have done better,
if What is to be had been left What might have been. I am quite a
little serious thing now, and not teasing you. Let each of us forbear,
this one time, on our own account, and on the other’s!”
Disarmed by this glimpse of a woman’s nature in the spoilt child,
though for an instant disposed to resent it as seeming to involve the
enforced infliction of himself upon her, Edwin Drood stands watching
her as she childishly cries and sobs, with both hands to the
handkerchief at her eyes, and then—she becoming more composed, and
indeed beginning in her young inconstancy to laugh at herself for
having been so moved—leads her to a seat hard by, under the elm-trees.
“One clear word of understanding, Pussy dear. I am not clever out of my
own line—now I come to think of it, I don’t know that I am particularly
clever in it—but I want to do right. There is not—there may be—I really
don’t see my way to what I want to say, but I must say it before we
part—there is not any other young—”
“O no, Eddy! It’s generous of you to ask me; but no, no, no!”
They have come very near to the Cathedral windows, and at this moment
the organ and the choir sound out sublimely. As they sit listening to
the solemn swell, the confidence of last night rises in young Edwin
Drood’s mind, and he thinks how unlike this music is to that
discordance.
“I fancy I can distinguish Jack’s voice,” is his remark in a low tone
in connection with the train of thought.
“Take me back at once, please,” urges his Affianced, quickly laying her
light hand upon his wrist. “They will all be coming out directly; let
us get away. O, what a resounding chord! But don’t let us stop to
listen to it; let us get away!”
Her hurry is over as soon as they have passed out of the Close. They go
arm-in-arm now, gravely and deliberately enough, along the old
High-street, to the Nuns’ House. At the gate, the street being within
sight empty, Edwin bends down his face to Rosebud’s.
She remonstrates, laughing, and is a childish schoolgirl again.
“Eddy, no! I’m too sticky to be kissed. But give me your hand, and I’ll
blow a kiss into that.”
He does so. She breathes a light breath into it and asks, retaining it
and looking into it:—
“Now say, what do you see?”
“See, Rosa?”
“Why, I thought you Egyptian boys could look into a hand and see all
sorts of phantoms. Can’t you see a happy Future?”
For certain, neither of them sees a happy Present, as the gate opens
and closes, and one goes in, and the other goes away.
CHAPTER IV.
MR. SAPSEA
Accepting the Jackass as the type of self-sufficient stupidity and
conceit—a custom, perhaps, like some few other customs, more
conventional than fair—then the purest jackass in Cloisterham is Mr.
Thomas Sapsea, Auctioneer.
Mr. Sapsea “dresses at” the Dean; has been bowed to for the Dean, in
mistake; has even been spoken to in the street as My Lord, under the
impression that he was the Bishop come down unexpectedly, without his
chaplain. Mr. Sapsea is very proud of this, and of his voice, and of
his style. He has even (in selling landed property) tried the
experiment of slightly intoning in his pulpit, to make himself more
like what he takes to be the genuine ecclesiastical article. So, in
ending a Sale by Public Auction, Mr. Sapsea finishes off with an air of
bestowing a benediction on the assembled brokers, which leaves the real
Dean—a modest and worthy gentleman—far behind.
Mr. Sapsea has many admirers; indeed, the proposition is carried by a
large local majority, even including non-believers in his wisdom, that
he is a credit to Cloisterham. He possesses the great qualities of
being portentous and dull, and of having a roll in his speech, and
another roll in his gait; not to mention a certain gravely flowing
action with his hands, as if he were presently going to Confirm the
individual with whom he holds discourse. Much nearer sixty years of age
than fifty, with a flowing outline of stomach, and horizontal creases
in his waistcoat; reputed to be rich; voting at elections in the
strictly respectable interest; morally satisfied that nothing but he
himself has grown since he was a baby; how can dunder-headed Mr. Sapsea
be otherwise than a credit to Cloisterham, and society?
Mr. Sapsea’s premises are in the High-street, over against the Nuns’
House. They are of about the period of the Nuns’ House, irregularly
modernised here and there, as steadily deteriorating generations found,
more and more, that they preferred air and light to Fever and the
Plague. Over the doorway is a wooden effigy, about half life-size,
representing Mr. Sapsea’s father, in a curly wig and toga, in the act
of selling. The chastity of the idea, and the natural appearance of the
little finger, hammer, and pulpit, have been much admired.
Mr. Sapsea sits in his dull ground-floor sitting-room, giving first on
his paved back yard; and then on his railed-off garden. Mr. Sapsea has
a bottle of port wine on a table before the fire—the fire is an early
luxury, but pleasant on the cool, chilly autumn evening—and is
characteristically attended by his portrait, his eight-day clock, and
his weather-glass. Characteristically, because he would uphold himself
against mankind, his weather-glass against weather, and his clock
against time.
By Mr. Sapsea’s side on the table are a writing-desk and writing
materials. Glancing at a scrap of manuscript, Mr. Sapsea reads it to
himself with a lofty air, and then, slowly pacing the room with his
thumbs in the arm-holes of his waistcoat, repeats it from memory: so
internally, though with much dignity, that the word “Ethelinda” is
alone audible.
There are three clean wineglasses in a tray on the table. His
serving-maid entering, and announcing “Mr. Jasper is come, sir,” Mr.
Sapsea waves “Admit him,” and draws two wineglasses from the rank, as
being claimed.
“Glad to see you, sir. I congratulate myself on having the honour of
receiving you here for the first time.” Mr. Sapsea does the honours of
his house in this wise.