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Title: The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Author: Charles Dickens

Release date: June 1, 1996 [eBook #564]
Most recently updated: March 25, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/564

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MYSTERY
OF EDWIN DROOD ***

The Mystery of Edwin
Drood

by Charles Dickens

Contents

CHAPTER I. THE DAWN
CHAPTER II. A DEAN, AND A CHAPTER ALSO
CHAPTER III. THE NUNS’ HOUSE
CHAPTER IV. MR. SAPSEA
CHAPTER V. MR. DURDLES AND FRIEND
CHAPTER VI. PHILANTHROPY IN MINOR CANON CORNER
CHAPTER VII. MORE CONFIDENCES THAN ONE
CHAPTER VIII. DAGGERS DRAWN
CHAPTER IX. BIRDS IN THE BUSH
CHAPTER X. SMOOTHING THE WAY
CHAPTER XI. A PICTURE AND A RING
CHAPTER XII. A NIGHT WITH DURDLES
CHAPTER XIII. BOTH AT THEIR BEST
CHAPTER XIV. WHEN SHALL THESE THREE MEET AGAIN?
CHAPTER XV. IMPEACHED
CHAPTER XVI. DEVOTED
CHAPTER XVII. PHILANTHROPY, PROFESSIONAL AND
UNPROFESSIONAL
CHAPTER XVIII. A SETTLER IN CLOISTERHAM
CHAPTER XIX. SHADOW ON THE SUN-DIAL
CHAPTER XX. A FLIGHT
CHAPTER XXI. A RECOGNITION
CHAPTER XXII. A GRITTY STATE OF THINGS COMES ON
CHAPTER XXIII. THE DAWN AGAIN

THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD

Rochester castle

CHAPTER I.
THE DAWN

An ancient English Cathedral Tower? How can the ancient English
Cathedral tower be here! The well-known massive gray square tower of its
old Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the
air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect. What is the
spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe it is set up by the
Sultan’s orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. It
is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long
procession. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten
thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. Then, follow white elephants
caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in number and
attendants. Still the Cathedral Tower rises in the background, where it cannot
be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike. Stay! Is the spike so low
a thing as the rusty spike on the top of a post of an old bedstead that has
tumbled all awry? Some vague period of drowsy laughter must be devoted to
the consideration of this possibility.
Shaking from head to foot, the man whose scattered consciousness has
thus fantastically pieced itself together, at length rises, supports his
trembling frame upon his arms, and looks around. He is in the meanest and
closest of small rooms. Through the ragged window-curtain, the light of
early day steals in from a miserable court. He lies, dressed, across a large
unseemly bed, upon a bedstead that has indeed given way under the weight
upon it. Lying, also dressed and also across the bed, not longwise, are a
Chinaman, a Lascar, and a haggard woman. The two first are in a sleep or
stupor; the last is blowing at a kind of pipe, to kindle it. And as she blows,
and shading it with her lean hand, concentrates its red spark of light, it serves
in the dim morning as a lamp to show him what he sees of her.

“Another?” says this woman, in a querulous, rattling whisper. “Have
another?”
He looks about him, with his hand to his forehead.
“Ye’ve smoked as many as five since ye come in at midnight,” the woman
goes on, as she chronically complains. “Poor me, poor me, my head is so
bad. Them two come in after ye. Ah, poor me, the business is slack, is slack!
Few Chinamen about the Docks, and fewer Lascars, and no ships coming in,
these say! Here’s another ready for ye, deary. Ye’ll remember like a good
soul, won’t ye, that the market price is dreffle high just now? More nor three
shillings and sixpence for a thimbleful! And ye’ll remember that nobody but
me (and Jack Chinaman t’other side the court; but he can’t do it as well as
me) has the true secret of mixing it? Ye’ll pay up accordingly, deary, won’t
ye?”
She blows at the pipe as she speaks, and, occasionally bubbling at it,
inhales much of its contents.
“O me, O me, my lungs is weak, my lungs is bad! It’s nearly ready for ye,
deary. Ah, poor me, poor me, my poor hand shakes like to drop off! I see ye
coming-to, and I ses to my poor self, ‘I’ll have another ready for him, and
he’ll bear in mind the market price of opium, and pay according.’ O my poor
head! I makes my pipes of old penny ink-bottles, ye see, deary—this is one
—and I fits-in a mouthpiece, this way, and I takes my mixter out of this
thimble with this little horn spoon; and so I fills, deary. Ah, my poor nerves!
I got Heavens-hard drunk for sixteen year afore I took to this; but this don’t
hurt me, not to speak of. And it takes away the hunger as well as wittles,
deary.”
She hands him the nearly-emptied pipe, and sinks back, turning over on
her face.
He rises unsteadily from the bed, lays the pipe upon the hearth-stone,
draws back the ragged curtain, and looks with repugnance at his three
companions. He notices that the woman has opium-smoked herself into a
strange likeness of the Chinaman. His form of cheek, eye, and temple, and
his colour, are repeated in her. Said Chinaman convulsively wrestles with
one of his many Gods or Devils, perhaps, and snarls horribly. The Lascar
laughs and dribbles at the mouth. The hostess is still.

In the Court

“What visions can she have?” the waking man muses, as he turns her face
towards him, and stands looking down at it. “Visions of many butchers’
shops, and public-houses, and much credit? Of an increase of hideous
customers, and this horrible bedstead set upright again, and this horrible
court swept clean? What can she rise to, under any quantity of opium, higher
than that!—Eh?”
He bends down his ear, to listen to her mutterings.
“Unintelligible!”
As he watches the spasmodic shoots and darts that break out of her face
and limbs, like fitful lightning out of a dark sky, some contagion in them
seizes upon him: insomuch that he has to withdraw himself to a lean arm-
chair by the hearth—placed there, perhaps, for such emergencies—and to sit
in it, holding tight, until he has got the better of this unclean spirit of
imitation.
Then he comes back, pounces on the Chinaman, and seizing him with
both hands by the throat, turns him violently on the bed. The Chinaman
clutches the aggressive hands, resists, gasps, and protests.

“What do you say?”
A watchful pause.
“Unintelligible!”
Slowly loosening his grasp as he listens to the incoherent jargon with an
attentive frown, he turns to the Lascar and fairly drags him forth upon the
floor. As he falls, the Lascar starts into a half-risen attitude, glares with his
eyes, lashes about him fiercely with his arms, and draws a phantom knife. It
then becomes apparent that the woman has taken possession of this knife, for
safety’s sake; for, she too starting up, and restraining and expostulating with
him, the knife is visible in her dress, not in his, when they drowsily drop
back, side by side.
There has been chattering and clattering enough between them, but to no
purpose. When any distinct word has been flung into the air, it has had no
sense or sequence. Wherefore “unintelligible!” is again the comment of the
watcher, made with some reassured nodding of his head, and a gloomy
smile. He then lays certain silver money on the table, finds his hat, gropes
his way down the broken stairs, gives a good morning to some rat-ridden
doorkeeper, in bed in a black hutch beneath the stairs, and passes out.
That same afternoon, the massive gray square tower of an old Cathedral
rises before the sight of a jaded traveller. The bells are going for daily vesper
service, and he must needs attend it, one would say, from his haste to reach
the open Cathedral door. The choir are getting on their sullied white robes, in
a hurry, when he arrives among them, gets on his own robe, and falls into the
procession filing in to service. Then, the Sacristan locks the iron-barred
gates that divide the sanctuary from the chancel, and all of the procession
having scuttled into their places, hide their faces; and then the intoned
words, “WHEN THE WICKED MAN—” rise among groins of arches and beams
of roof, awakening muttered thunder.

CHAPTER II.
A DEAN, AND A CHAPTER ALSO

Whosoever has observed that sedate and clerical bird, the rook, may
perhaps have noticed that when he wings his way homeward towards
nightfall, in a sedate and clerical company, two rooks will suddenly detach
themselves from the rest, will retrace their flight for some distance, and will
there poise and linger; conveying to mere men the fancy that it is of some
occult importance to the body politic, that this artful couple should pretend
to have renounced connection with it.
Similarly, service being over in the old Cathedral with the square tower,
and the choir scuffling out again, and divers venerable persons of rook-like
aspect dispersing, two of these latter retrace their steps, and walk together
in the echoing Close.
Not only is the day waning, but the year. The low sun is fiery and yet
cold behind the monastery ruin, and the Virginia creeper on the Cathedral
wall has showered half its deep-red leaves down on the pavement. There
has been rain this afternoon, and a wintry shudder goes among the little
pools on the cracked, uneven flag-stones, and through the giant elm-trees as
they shed a gust of tears. Their fallen leaves lie strewn thickly about. Some
of these leaves, in a timid rush, seek sanctuary within the low arched
Cathedral door; but two men coming out resist them, and cast them forth
again with their feet; this done, one of the two locks the door with a goodly
key, and the other flits away with a folio music-book.
“Mr. Jasper was that, Tope?”
“Yes, Mr. Dean.”
“He has stayed late.”
“Yes, Mr. Dean. I have stayed for him, your Reverence. He has been took
a little poorly.”

“Say ‘taken,’ Tope—to the Dean,” the younger rook interposes in a low
tone with this touch of correction, as who should say: “You may offer bad
grammar to the laity, or the humbler clergy, not to the Dean.”
Mr. Tope, Chief Verger and Showman, and accustomed to be high with
excursion parties, declines with a silent loftiness to perceive that any
suggestion has been tendered to him.
“And when and how has Mr. Jasper been taken—for, as Mr. Crisparkle
has remarked, it is better to say taken—taken—” repeats the Dean; “when
and how has Mr. Jasper been Taken—”
“Taken, sir,” Tope deferentially murmurs.
“—Poorly, Tope?”
“Why, sir, Mr. Jasper was that breathed—”
“I wouldn’t say ‘That breathed,’ Tope,” Mr. Crisparkle interposes with
the same touch as before. “Not English—to the Dean.”
“Breathed to that extent,” the Dean (not unflattered by this indirect
homage) condescendingly remarks, “would be preferable.”
“Mr. Jasper’s breathing was so remarkably short”—thus discreetly does
Mr. Tope work his way round the sunken rock—“when he came in, that it
distressed him mightily to get his notes out: which was perhaps the cause of
his having a kind of fit on him after a little. His memory grew DAZED.” Mr.
Tope, with his eyes on the Reverend Mr. Crisparkle, shoots this word out, as
defying him to improve upon it: “and a dimness and giddiness crept over
him as strange as ever I saw: though he didn’t seem to mind it particularly,
himself. However, a little time and a little water brought him out of his
DAZE.” Mr. Tope repeats the word and its emphasis, with the air of saying:
“As I have made a success, I’ll make it again.”
“And Mr. Jasper has gone home quite himself, has he?” asked the Dean.
“Your Reverence, he has gone home quite himself. And I’m glad to see
he’s having his fire kindled up, for it’s chilly after the wet, and the
Cathedral had both a damp feel and a damp touch this afternoon, and he
was very shivery.”
They all three look towards an old stone gatehouse crossing the Close,
with an arched thoroughfare passing beneath it. Through its latticed
window, a fire shines out upon the fast-darkening scene, involving in
shadow the pendent masses of ivy and creeper covering the building’s front.

As the deep Cathedral-bell strikes the hour, a ripple of wind goes through
these at their distance, like a ripple of the solemn sound that hums through
tomb and tower, broken niche and defaced statue, in the pile close at hand.
“Is Mr. Jasper’s nephew with him?” the Dean asks.
“No, sir,” replied the Verger, “but expected. There’s his own solitary
shadow betwixt his two windows—the one looking this way, and the one
looking down into the High Street—drawing his own curtains now.”
“Well, well,” says the Dean, with a sprightly air of breaking up the little
conference, “I hope Mr. Jasper’s heart may not be too much set upon his
nephew. Our affections, however laudable, in this transitory world, should
never master us; we should guide them, guide them. I find I am not
disagreeably reminded of my dinner, by hearing my dinner-bell. Perhaps,
Mr. Crisparkle, you will, before going home, look in on Jasper?”
“Certainly, Mr. Dean. And tell him that you had the kindness to desire to
know how he was?”
“Ay; do so, do so. Certainly. Wished to know how he was. By all means.
Wished to know how he was.”
With a pleasant air of patronage, the Dean as nearly cocks his quaint hat
as a Dean in good spirits may, and directs his comely gaiters towards the
ruddy dining-room of the snug old red-brick house where he is at present,
“in residence” with Mrs. Dean and Miss Dean.
Mr. Crisparkle, Minor Canon, fair and rosy, and perpetually pitching
himself head-foremost into all the deep running water in the surrounding
country; Mr. Crisparkle, Minor Canon, early riser, musical, classical,
cheerful, kind, good-natured, social, contented, and boy-like; Mr.
Crisparkle, Minor Canon and good man, lately “Coach” upon the chief
Pagan high roads, but since promoted by a patron (grateful for a well-taught
son) to his present Christian beat; betakes himself to the gatehouse, on his
way home to his early tea.
“Sorry to hear from Tope that you have not been well, Jasper.”
“O, it was nothing, nothing!”
“You look a little worn.”
“Do I? O, I don’t think so. What is better, I don’t feel so. Tope has made
too much of it, I suspect. It’s his trade to make the most of everything
appertaining to the Cathedral, you know.”

“I may tell the Dean—I call expressly from the Dean—that you are all
right again?”
The reply, with a slight smile, is: “Certainly; with my respects and thanks
to the Dean.”
“I’m glad to hear that you expect young Drood.”
“I expect the dear fellow every moment.”
“Ah! He will do you more good than a doctor, Jasper.”
“More good than a dozen doctors. For I love him dearly, and I don’t love
doctors, or doctors’ stuff.”
Mr. Jasper is a dark man of some six-and-twenty, with thick, lustrous,
well-arranged black hair and whiskers. He looks older than he is, as dark
men often do. His voice is deep and good, his face and figure are good, his
manner is a little sombre. His room is a little sombre, and may have had its
influence in forming his manner. It is mostly in shadow. Even when the sun
shines brilliantly, it seldom touches the grand piano in the recess, or the
folio music-books on the stand, or the book-shelves on the wall, or the
unfinished picture of a blooming schoolgirl hanging over the chimneypiece;
her flowing brown hair tied with a blue riband, and her beauty remarkable
for a quite childish, almost babyish, touch of saucy discontent, comically
conscious of itself. (There is not the least artistic merit in this picture, which
is a mere daub; but it is clear that the painter has made it humorously—one
might almost say, revengefully—like the original.)
“We shall miss you, Jasper, at the ‘Alternate Musical Wednesdays’ to-
night; but no doubt you are best at home. Good-night. God bless you! ‘Tell
me, shep-herds, te-e-ell me; tell me-e-e, have you seen (have you seen, have
you seen, have you seen) my-y-y Flo-o-ora-a pass this way!’” Melodiously
good Minor Canon the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle thus delivers himself,
in musical rhythm, as he withdraws his amiable face from the doorway and
conveys it down-stairs.
Sounds of recognition and greeting pass between the Reverend Septimus
and somebody else, at the stair-foot. Mr. Jasper listens, starts from his chair,
and catches a young fellow in his arms, exclaiming:
“My dear Edwin!”
“My dear Jack! So glad to see you!”

“Get off your greatcoat, bright boy, and sit down here in your own corner.
Your feet are not wet? Pull your boots off. Do pull your boots off.”
“My dear Jack, I am as dry as a bone. Don’t moddley-coddley, there’s a
good fellow. I like anything better than being moddley-coddleyed.”
With the check upon him of being unsympathetically restrained in a
genial outburst of enthusiasm, Mr. Jasper stands still, and looks on intently
at the young fellow, divesting himself of his outward coat, hat, gloves, and
so forth. Once for all, a look of intentness and intensity—a look of hungry,
exacting, watchful, and yet devoted affection—is always, now and ever
afterwards, on the Jasper face whenever the Jasper face is addressed in this
direction. And whenever it is so addressed, it is never, on this occasion or
on any other, dividedly addressed; it is always concentrated.
“Now I am right, and now I’ll take my corner, Jack. Any dinner, Jack?”
Mr. Jasper opens a door at the upper end of the room, and discloses a
small inner room pleasantly lighted and prepared, wherein a comely dame
is in the act of setting dishes on table.
“What a jolly old Jack it is!” cries the young fellow, with a clap of his
hands. “Look here, Jack; tell me; whose birthday is it?”
“Not yours, I know,” Mr. Jasper answers, pausing to consider.
“Not mine, you know? No; not mine, I know! Pussy’s!”
Fixed as the look the young fellow meets is, there is yet in it some
strange power of suddenly including the sketch over the chimneypiece.
“Pussy’s, Jack! We must drink Many happy returns to her. Come, uncle;
take your dutiful and sharp-set nephew in to dinner.”
As the boy (for he is little more) lays a hand on Jasper’s shoulder, Jasper
cordially and gaily lays a hand on his shoulder, and so Marseillaise-wise
they go in to dinner.
“And, Lord! here’s Mrs. Tope!” cries the boy. “Lovelier than ever!”
“Never you mind me, Master Edwin,” retorts the Verger’s wife; “I can
take care of myself.”
“You can’t. You’re much too handsome. Give me a kiss because it’s
Pussy’s birthday.”
“I’d Pussy you, young man, if I was Pussy, as you call her,” Mrs. Tope
blushingly retorts, after being saluted. “Your uncle’s too much wrapt up in

you, that’s where it is. He makes so much of you, that it’s my opinion you
think you’ve only to call your Pussys by the dozen, to make ’em come.”
“You forget, Mrs. Tope,” Mr. Jasper interposes, taking his place at the
table with a genial smile, “and so do you, Ned, that Uncle and Nephew are
words prohibited here by common consent and express agreement. For what
we are going to receive His holy name be praised!”
“Done like the Dean! Witness, Edwin Drood! Please to carve, Jack, for I
can’t.”
This sally ushers in the dinner. Little to the present purpose, or to any
purpose, is said, while it is in course of being disposed of. At length the
cloth is drawn, and a dish of walnuts and a decanter of rich-coloured sherry
are placed upon the table.
“I say! Tell me, Jack,” the young fellow then flows on: “do you really
and truly feel as if the mention of our relationship divided us at all? I
don’t.”
“Uncles as a rule, Ned, are so much older than their nephews,” is the
reply, “that I have that feeling instinctively.”
“As a rule! Ah, may-be! But what is a difference in age of half-a-dozen
years or so? And some uncles, in large families, are even younger than their
nephews. By George, I wish it was the case with us!”
“Why?”
“Because if it was, I’d take the lead with you, Jack, and be as wise as
Begone, dull Care! that turned a young man gray, and Begone, dull Care!
that turned an old man to clay.—Halloa, Jack! Don’t drink.”
“Why not?”
“Asks why not, on Pussy’s birthday, and no Happy returns proposed!
Pussy, Jack, and many of ’em! Happy returns, I mean.”
Laying an affectionate and laughing touch on the boy’s extended hand, as
if it were at once his giddy head and his light heart, Mr. Jasper drinks the
toast in silence.
“Hip, hip, hip, and nine times nine, and one to finish with, and all that,
understood. Hooray, hooray, hooray!—And now, Jack, let’s have a little talk
about Pussy. Two pairs of nut-crackers? Pass me one, and take the other.”
Crack. “How’s Pussy getting on Jack?”

“With her music? Fairly.”
“What a dreadfully conscientious fellow you are, Jack! But I know, Lord
bless you! Inattentive, isn’t she?”
“She can learn anything, if she will.”
“If she will! Egad, that’s it. But if she won’t?”
Crack!—on Mr. Jasper’s part.
“How’s she looking, Jack?”
Mr. Jasper’s concentrated face again includes the portrait as he returns:
“Very like your sketch indeed.”
“I am a little proud of it,” says the young fellow, glancing up at the
sketch with complacency, and then shutting one eye, and taking a corrected
prospect of it over a level bridge of nut-crackers in the air: “Not badly hit
off from memory. But I ought to have caught that expression pretty well, for
I have seen it often enough.”
Crack!—on Edwin Drood’s part.
Crack!—on Mr. Jasper’s part.
“In point of fact,” the former resumes, after some silent dipping among
his fragments of walnut with an air of pique, “I see it whenever I go to see
Pussy. If I don’t find it on her face, I leave it there.—You know I do, Miss
Scornful Pert. Booh!” With a twirl of the nut-crackers at the portrait.
Crack! crack! crack. Slowly, on Mr. Jasper’s part.
Crack. Sharply on the part of Edwin Drood.
Silence on both sides.
“Have you lost your tongue, Jack?”
“Have you found yours, Ned?”
“No, but really;—isn’t it, you know, after all—”
Mr. Jasper lifts his dark eyebrows inquiringly.
“Isn’t it unsatisfactory to be cut off from choice in such a matter? There,
Jack! I tell you! If I could choose, I would choose Pussy from all the pretty
girls in the world.”
“But you have not got to choose.”
“That’s what I complain of. My dead and gone father and Pussy’s dead
and gone father must needs marry us together by anticipation. Why the—

Devil, I was going to say, if it had been respectful to their memory—
couldn’t they leave us alone?”
“Tut, tut, dear boy,” Mr. Jasper remonstrates, in a tone of gentle
deprecation.
“Tut, tut? Yes, Jack, it’s all very well for you. You can take it easily. Your
life is not laid down to scale, and lined and dotted out for you, like a
surveyor’s plan. You have no uncomfortable suspicion that you are forced
upon anybody, nor has anybody an uncomfortable suspicion that she is
forced upon you, or that you are forced upon her. You can choose for
yourself. Life, for you, is a plum with the natural bloom on; it hasn’t been
over-carefully wiped off for you—”
“Don’t stop, dear fellow. Go on.”
“Can I anyhow have hurt your feelings, Jack?”
“How can you have hurt my feelings?”
“Good Heaven, Jack, you look frightfully ill! There’s a strange film come
over your eyes.”
Mr. Jasper, with a forced smile, stretches out his right hand, as if at once
to disarm apprehension and gain time to get better. After a while he says
faintly:
“I have been taking opium for a pain—an agony—that sometimes
overcomes me. The effects of the medicine steal over me like a blight or a
cloud, and pass. You see them in the act of passing; they will be gone
directly. Look away from me. They will go all the sooner.”
With a scared face the younger man complies by casting his eyes
downward at the ashes on the hearth. Not relaxing his own gaze on the fire,
but rather strengthening it with a fierce, firm grip upon his elbow-chair, the
elder sits for a few moments rigid, and then, with thick drops standing on
his forehead, and a sharp catch of his breath, becomes as he was before. On
his so subsiding in his chair, his nephew gently and assiduously tends him
while he quite recovers. When Jasper is restored, he lays a tender hand upon
his nephew’s shoulder, and, in a tone of voice less troubled than the purport
of his words—indeed with something of raillery or banter in it—thus
addresses him:
“There is said to be a hidden skeleton in every house; but you thought
there was none in mine, dear Ned.”

“Upon my life, Jack, I did think so. However, when I come to consider
that even in Pussy’s house—if she had one—and in mine—if I had one—”
“You were going to say (but that I interrupted you in spite of myself)
what a quiet life mine is. No whirl and uproar around me, no distracting
commerce or calculation, no risk, no change of place, myself devoted to the
art I pursue, my business my pleasure.”
“I really was going to say something of the kind, Jack; but you see, you,
speaking of yourself, almost necessarily leave out much that I should have
put in. For instance: I should have put in the foreground your being so much
respected as Lay Precentor, or Lay Clerk, or whatever you call it, of this
Cathedral; your enjoying the reputation of having done such wonders with
the choir; your choosing your society, and holding such an independent
position in this queer old place; your gift of teaching (why, even Pussy, who
don’t like being taught, says there never was such a Master as you are!), and
your connexion.”
“Yes; I saw what you were tending to. I hate it.”
“Hate it, Jack?” (Much bewildered.)
“I hate it. The cramped monotony of my existence grinds me away by the
grain. How does our service sound to you?”
“Beautiful! Quite celestial!”
“It often sounds to me quite devilish. I am so weary of it. The echoes of
my own voice among the arches seem to mock me with my daily drudging
round. No wretched monk who droned his life away in that gloomy place,
before me, can have been more tired of it than I am. He could take for relief
(and did take) to carving demons out of the stalls and seats and desks. What
shall I do? Must I take to carving them out of my heart?”
“I thought you had so exactly found your niche in life, Jack,” Edwin
Drood returns, astonished, bending forward in his chair to lay a sympathetic
hand on Jasper’s knee, and looking at him with an anxious face.
“I know you thought so. They all think so.”
“Well, I suppose they do,” says Edwin, meditating aloud. “Pussy thinks
so.”
“When did she tell you that?”
“The last time I was here. You remember when. Three months ago.”

“How did she phrase it?”
“O, she only said that she had become your pupil, and that you were
made for your vocation.”
The younger man glances at the portrait. The elder sees it in him.
“Anyhow, my dear Ned,” Jasper resumes, as he shakes his head with a
grave cheerfulness, “I must subdue myself to my vocation: which is much
the same thing outwardly. It’s too late to find another now. This is a
confidence between us.”
“It shall be sacredly preserved, Jack.”
“I have reposed it in you, because—”
“I feel it, I assure you. Because we are fast friends, and because you love
and trust me, as I love and trust you. Both hands, Jack.”
As each stands looking into the other’s eyes, and as the uncle holds the
nephew’s hands, the uncle thus proceeds:
“You know now, don’t you, that even a poor monotonous chorister and
grinder of music—in his niche—may be troubled with some stray sort of
ambition, aspiration, restlessness, dissatisfaction, what shall we call it?”
“Yes, dear Jack.”
“And you will remember?”
“My dear Jack, I only ask you, am I likely to forget what you have said
with so much feeling?”
“Take it as a warning, then.”
In the act of having his hands released, and of moving a step back, Edwin
pauses for an instant to consider the application of these last words. The
instant over, he says, sensibly touched:
“I am afraid I am but a shallow, surface kind of fellow, Jack, and that my
headpiece is none of the best. But I needn’t say I am young; and perhaps I
shall not grow worse as I grow older. At all events, I hope I have something
impressible within me, which feels—deeply feels—the disinterestedness of
your painfully laying your inner self bare, as a warning to me.”
Mr. Jasper’s steadiness of face and figure becomes so marvellous that his
breathing seems to have stopped.
“I couldn’t fail to notice, Jack, that it cost you a great effort, and that you
were very much moved, and very unlike your usual self. Of course I knew

that you were extremely fond of me, but I really was not prepared for your,
as I may say, sacrificing yourself to me in that way.”
Mr. Jasper, becoming a breathing man again without the smallest stage of
transition between the two extreme states, lifts his shoulders, laughs, and
waves his right arm.
“No; don’t put the sentiment away, Jack; please don’t; for I am very
much in earnest. I have no doubt that that unhealthy state of mind which
you have so powerfully described is attended with some real suffering, and
is hard to bear. But let me reassure you, Jack, as to the chances of its
overcoming me. I don’t think I am in the way of it. In some few months less
than another year, you know, I shall carry Pussy off from school as Mrs.
Edwin Drood. I shall then go engineering into the East, and Pussy with me.
And although we have our little tiffs now, arising out of a certain
unavoidable flatness that attends our love-making, owing to its end being
all settled beforehand, still I have no doubt of our getting on capitally then,
when it’s done and can’t be helped. In short, Jack, to go back to the old
song I was freely quoting at dinner (and who knows old songs better than
you?), my wife shall dance, and I will sing, so merrily pass the day. Of
Pussy’s being beautiful there cannot be a doubt;—and when you are good
besides, Little Miss Impudence,” once more apostrophising the portrait,
“I’ll burn your comic likeness, and paint your music-master another.”
Mr. Jasper, with his hand to his chin, and with an expression of musing
benevolence on his face, has attentively watched every animated look and
gesture attending the delivery of these words. He remains in that attitude
after they are spoken, as if in a kind of fascination attendant on his strong
interest in the youthful spirit that he loves so well. Then he says with a quiet
smile:
“You won’t be warned, then?”
“No, Jack.”
“You can’t be warned, then?”
“No, Jack, not by you. Besides that I don’t really consider myself in
danger, I don’t like your putting yourself in that position.”
“Shall we go and walk in the churchyard?”
“By all means. You won’t mind my slipping out of it for half a moment to
the Nuns’ House, and leaving a parcel there? Only gloves for Pussy; as

many pairs of gloves as she is years old to-day. Rather poetical, Jack?”
Mr. Jasper, still in the same attitude, murmurs: “‘Nothing half so sweet in
life,’ Ned!”
“Here’s the parcel in my greatcoat-pocket. They must be presented to-
night, or the poetry is gone. It’s against regulations for me to call at night,
but not to leave a packet. I am ready, Jack!”
Mr. Jasper dissolves his attitude, and they go out together.

CHAPTER III.
THE NUNS’ HOUSE

For sufficient reasons, which this narrative will itself unfold as it
advances, a fictitious name must be bestowed upon the old Cathedral town.
Let it stand in these pages as Cloisterham. It was once possibly known to the
Druids by another name, and certainly to the Romans by another, and to the
Saxons by another, and to the Normans by another; and a name more or less
in the course of many centuries can be of little moment to its dusty
chronicles.
An ancient city, Cloisterham, and no meet dwelling-place for any one with
hankerings after the noisy world. A monotonous, silent city, deriving an
earthy flavour throughout from its Cathedral crypt, and so abounding in
vestiges of monastic graves, that the Cloisterham children grow small salad
in the dust of abbots and abbesses, and make dirt-pies of nuns and friars;
while every ploughman in its outlying fields renders to once puissant Lord
Treasurers, Archbishops, Bishops, and such-like, the attention which the
Ogre in the story-book desired to render to his unbidden visitor, and grinds
their bones to make his bread.
A drowsy city, Cloisterham, whose inhabitants seem to suppose, with an
inconsistency more strange than rare, that all its changes lie behind it, and
that there are no more to come. A queer moral to derive from antiquity, yet
older than any traceable antiquity. So silent are the streets of Cloisterham
(though prone to echo on the smallest provocation), that of a summer-day
the sunblinds of its shops scarce dare to flap in the south wind; while the
sun-browned tramps, who pass along and stare, quicken their limp a little,
that they may the sooner get beyond the confines of its oppressive
respectability. This is a feat not difficult of achievement, seeing that the
streets of Cloisterham city are little more than one narrow street by which
you get into it and get out of it: the rest being mostly disappointing yards

with pumps in them and no thoroughfare—exception made of the Cathedral-
close, and a paved Quaker settlement, in colour and general confirmation
very like a Quakeress’s bonnet, up in a shady corner.
In a word, a city of another and a bygone time is Cloisterham, with its
hoarse Cathedral-bell, its hoarse rooks hovering about the Cathedral tower,
its hoarser and less distinct rooks in the stalls far beneath. Fragments of old
wall, saint’s chapel, chapter-house, convent and monastery, have got
incongruously or obstructively built into many of its houses and gardens,
much as kindred jumbled notions have become incorporated into many of its
citizens’ minds. All things in it are of the past. Even its single pawnbroker
takes in no pledges, nor has he for a long time, but offers vainly an
unredeemed stock for sale, of which the costlier articles are dim and pale old
watches apparently in a slow perspiration, tarnished sugar-tongs with
ineffectual legs, and odd volumes of dismal books. The most abundant and
the most agreeable evidences of progressing life in Cloisterham are the
evidences of vegetable life in many gardens; even its drooping and
despondent little theatre has its poor strip of garden, receiving the foul fiend,
when he ducks from its stage into the infernal regions, among scarlet-beans
or oyster-shells, according to the season of the year.
In the midst of Cloisterham stands the Nuns’ House: a venerable brick
edifice, whose present appellation is doubtless derived from the legend of its
conventual uses. On the trim gate enclosing its old courtyard is a resplendent
brass plate flashing forth the legend: “Seminary for Young Ladies. Miss
Twinkleton.” The house-front is so old and worn, and the brass plate is so
shining and staring, that the general result has reminded imaginative
strangers of a battered old beau with a large modern eye-glass stuck in his
blind eye.
Whether the nuns of yore, being of a submissive rather than a stiff-necked
generation, habitually bent their contemplative heads to avoid collision with
the beams in the low ceilings of the many chambers of their House; whether
they sat in its long low windows telling their beads for their mortification,
instead of making necklaces of them for their adornment; whether they were
ever walled up alive in odd angles and jutting gables of the building for
having some ineradicable leaven of busy mother Nature in them which has
kept the fermenting world alive ever since; these may be matters of interest
to its haunting ghosts (if any), but constitute no item in Miss Twinkleton’s
half-yearly accounts. They are neither of Miss Twinkleton’s inclusive

regulars, nor of her extras. The lady who undertakes the poetical department
of the establishment at so much (or so little) a quarter has no pieces in her
list of recitals bearing on such unprofitable questions.
As, in some cases of drunkenness, and in others of animal magnetism,
there are two states of consciousness which never clash, but each of which
pursues its separate course as though it were continuous instead of broken
(thus, if I hide my watch when I am drunk, I must be drunk again before I
can remember where), so Miss Twinkleton has two distinct and separate
phases of being. Every night, the moment the young ladies have retired to
rest, does Miss Twinkleton smarten up her curls a little, brighten up her eyes
a little, and become a sprightlier Miss Twinkleton than the young ladies have
ever seen. Every night, at the same hour, does Miss Twinkleton resume the
topics of the previous night, comprehending the tenderer scandal of
Cloisterham, of which she has no knowledge whatever by day, and
references to a certain season at Tunbridge Wells (airily called by Miss
Twinkleton in this state of her existence “The Wells”), notably the season
wherein a certain finished gentleman (compassionately called by Miss
Twinkleton, in this stage of her existence, “Foolish Mr. Porters”) revealed a
homage of the heart, whereof Miss Twinkleton, in her scholastic state of
existence, is as ignorant as a granite pillar. Miss Twinkleton’s companion in
both states of existence, and equally adaptable to either, is one Mrs. Tisher: a
deferential widow with a weak back, a chronic sigh, and a suppressed voice,
who looks after the young ladies’ wardrobes, and leads them to infer that she
has seen better days. Perhaps this is the reason why it is an article of faith
with the servants, handed down from race to race, that the departed Tisher
was a hairdresser.
The pet pupil of the Nuns’ House is Miss Rosa Bud, of course called
Rosebud; wonderfully pretty, wonderfully childish, wonderfully whimsical.
An awkward interest (awkward because romantic) attaches to Miss Bud in
the minds of the young ladies, on account of its being known to them that a
husband has been chosen for her by will and bequest, and that her guardian
is bound down to bestow her on that husband when he comes of age. Miss
Twinkleton, in her seminarial state of existence, has combated the romantic
aspect of this destiny by affecting to shake her head over it behind Miss
Bud’s dimpled shoulders, and to brood on the unhappy lot of that doomed
little victim. But with no better effect—possibly some unfelt touch of foolish
Mr. Porters has undermined the endeavour—than to evoke from the young

ladies an unanimous bedchamber cry of “O, what a pretending old thing
Miss Twinkleton is, my dear!”
The Nuns’ House is never in such a state of flutter as when this allotted
husband calls to see little Rosebud. (It is unanimously understood by the
young ladies that he is lawfully entitled to this privilege, and that if Miss
Twinkleton disputed it, she would be instantly taken up and transported.)
When his ring at the gate-bell is expected, or takes place, every young lady
who can, under any pretence, look out of window, looks out of window;
while every young lady who is “practising,” practises out of time; and the
French class becomes so demoralised that the mark goes round as briskly as
the bottle at a convivial party in the last century.
On the afternoon of the day next after the dinner of two at the gatehouse,
the bell is rung with the usual fluttering results.
“Mr. Edwin Drood to see Miss Rosa.”
This is the announcement of the parlour-maid in chief. Miss Twinkleton,
with an exemplary air of melancholy on her, turns to the sacrifice, and says,
“You may go down, my dear.” Miss Bud goes down, followed by all eyes.
Mr. Edwin Drood is waiting in Miss Twinkleton’s own parlour: a dainty
room, with nothing more directly scholastic in it than a terrestrial and a
celestial globe. These expressive machines imply (to parents and guardians)
that even when Miss Twinkleton retires into the bosom of privacy, duty may
at any moment compel her to become a sort of Wandering Jewess, scouring
the earth and soaring through the skies in search of knowledge for her pupils.
The last new maid, who has never seen the young gentleman Miss Rosa is
engaged to, and who is making his acquaintance between the hinges of the
open door, left open for the purpose, stumbles guiltily down the kitchen
stairs, as a charming little apparition, with its face concealed by a little silk
apron thrown over its head, glides into the parlour.
“O! it is so ridiculous!” says the apparition, stopping and shrinking.
“Don’t, Eddy!”
“Don’t what, Rosa?”
“Don’t come any nearer, please. It is so absurd.”
“What is absurd, Rosa?”
“The whole thing is. It is so absurd to be an engaged orphan and it is so
absurd to have the girls and the servants scuttling about after one, like mice

in the wainscot; and it is so absurd to be called upon!”
The apparition appears to have a thumb in the corner of its mouth while
making this complaint.
“You give me an affectionate reception, Pussy, I must say.”
“Well, I will in a minute, Eddy, but I can’t just yet. How are you?” (very
shortly.)
“I am unable to reply that I am much the better for seeing you, Pussy,
inasmuch as I see nothing of you.”
This second remonstrance brings a dark, bright, pouting eye out from a
corner of the apron; but it swiftly becomes invisible again, as the apparition
exclaims: “O good gracious! you have had half your hair cut off!”
“I should have done better to have had my head cut off, I think,” says
Edwin, rumpling the hair in question, with a fierce glance at the looking-
glass, and giving an impatient stamp. “Shall I go?”
“No; you needn’t go just yet, Eddy. The girls would all be asking
questions why you went.”
“Once for all, Rosa, will you uncover that ridiculous little head of yours
and give me a welcome?”
The apron is pulled off the childish head, as its wearer replies: “You’re
very welcome, Eddy. There! I’m sure that’s nice. Shake hands. No, I can’t
kiss you, because I’ve got an acidulated drop in my mouth.”
“Are you at all glad to see me, Pussy?”
“O, yes, I’m dreadfully glad.—Go and sit down.—Miss Twinkleton.”
It is the custom of that excellent lady when these visits occur, to appear
every three minutes, either in her own person or in that of Mrs. Tisher, and
lay an offering on the shrine of Propriety by affecting to look for some
desiderated article. On the present occasion Miss Twinkleton, gracefully
gliding in and out, says in passing: “How do you do, Mr. Drood? Very glad
indeed to have the pleasure. Pray excuse me. Tweezers. Thank you!”
“I got the gloves last evening, Eddy, and I like them very much. They are
beauties.”
“Well, that’s something,” the affianced replies, half grumbling. “The
smallest encouragement thankfully received. And how did you pass your
birthday, Pussy?”

“Delightfully! Everybody gave me a present. And we had a feast. And we
had a ball at night.”
“A feast and a ball, eh? These occasions seem to go off tolerably well
without me, Pussy.”
“De-lightfully!” cries Rosa, in a quite spontaneous manner, and without
the least pretence of reserve.
“Hah! And what was the feast?”
“Tarts, oranges, jellies, and shrimps.”
“Any partners at the ball?”
“We danced with one another, of course, sir. But some of the girls made
game to be their brothers. It was so droll!”
“Did anybody make game to be—”
“To be you? O dear yes!” cries Rosa, laughing with great enjoyment.
“That was the first thing done.”
“I hope she did it pretty well,” says Edwin rather doubtfully.
“O, it was excellent!—I wouldn’t dance with you, you know.”
Edwin scarcely seems to see the force of this; begs to know if he may take
the liberty to ask why?
“Because I was so tired of you,” returns Rosa. But she quickly adds, and
pleadingly too, seeing displeasure in his face: “Dear Eddy, you were just as
tired of me, you know.”
“Did I say so, Rosa?”
“Say so! Do you ever say so? No, you only showed it. O, she did it so
well!” cries Rosa, in a sudden ecstasy with her counterfeit betrothed.
“It strikes me that she must be a devilish impudent girl,” says Edwin
Drood. “And so, Pussy, you have passed your last birthday in this old
house.”
“Ah, yes!” Rosa clasps her hands, looks down with a sigh, and shakes her
head.
“You seem to be sorry, Rosa.”
“I am sorry for the poor old place. Somehow, I feel as if it would miss me,
when I am gone so far away, so young.”
“Perhaps we had better stop short, Rosa?”

She looks up at him with a swift bright look; next moment shakes her
head, sighs, and looks down again.
“That is to say, is it, Pussy, that we are both resigned?”
She nods her head again, and after a short silence, quaintly bursts out
with: “You know we must be married, and married from here, Eddy, or the
poor girls will be so dreadfully disappointed!”
For the moment there is more of compassion, both for her and for himself,
in her affianced husband’s face, than there is of love. He checks the look,
and asks: “Shall I take you out for a walk, Rosa dear?”
Rosa dear does not seem at all clear on this point, until her face, which has
been comically reflective, brightens. “O, yes, Eddy; let us go for a walk!
And I tell you what we’ll do. You shall pretend that you are engaged to
somebody else, and I’ll pretend that I am not engaged to anybody, and then
we shan’t quarrel.”
“Do you think that will prevent our falling out, Rosa?”
“I know it will. Hush! Pretend to look out of window—Mrs. Tisher!”
Through a fortuitous concourse of accidents, the matronly Tisher heaves
in sight, says, in rustling through the room like the legendary ghost of a
dowager in silken skirts: “I hope I see Mr. Drood well; though I needn’t ask,
if I may judge from his complexion. I trust I disturb no one; but there was a
paper-knife—O, thank you, I am sure!” and disappears with her prize.
“One other thing you must do, Eddy, to oblige me,” says Rosebud. “The
moment we get into the street, you must put me outside, and keep close to
the house yourself—squeeze and graze yourself against it.”
“By all means, Rosa, if you wish it. Might I ask why?”
“O! because I don’t want the girls to see you.”
“It’s a fine day; but would you like me to carry an umbrella up?”
“Don’t be foolish, sir. You haven’t got polished leather boots on,” pouting,
with one shoulder raised.
“Perhaps that might escape the notice of the girls, even if they did see
me,” remarks Edwin, looking down at his boots with a sudden distaste for
them.
“Nothing escapes their notice, sir. And then I know what would happen.
Some of them would begin reflecting on me by saying (for they are free) that

they never will on any account engage themselves to lovers without polished
leather boots. Hark! Miss Twinkleton. I’ll ask for leave.”
That discreet lady being indeed heard without, inquiring of nobody in a
blandly conversational tone as she advances: “Eh? Indeed! Are you quite
sure you saw my mother-of-pearl button-holder on the work-table in my
room?” is at once solicited for walking leave, and graciously accords it. And
soon the young couple go out of the Nuns’ House, taking all 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.

Under the 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.
“You are very good. The honour is mine and the self-congratulation is
mine.”
“You are pleased to say so, sir. But I do assure you that it is a satisfaction
to me to receive you in my humble home. And that is what I would not say
to everybody.” Ineffable loftiness on Mr. Sapsea’s part accompanies these
words, as leaving the sentence to be understood: “You will not easily
believe that your society can be a satisfaction to a man like myself;
nevertheless, it is.”
“I have for some time desired to know you, Mr. Sapsea.”
“And I, sir, have long known you by reputation as a man of taste. Let me
fill your glass. I will give you, sir,” says Mr. Sapsea, filling his own:

“When the French come over,
May we meet them at Dover!”

This was a patriotic toast in Mr. Sapsea’s infancy, and he is therefore fully
convinced of its being appropriate to any subsequent era.
“You can scarcely be ignorant, Mr. Sapsea,” observes Jasper, watching
the auctioneer with a smile as the latter stretches out his legs before the fire,
“that you know the world.”
“Well, sir,” is the chuckling reply, “I think I know something of it;
something of it.”
“Your reputation for that knowledge has always interested and surprised
me, and made me wish to know you. For Cloisterham is a little place.
Cooped up in it myself, I know nothing beyond it, and feel it to be a very
little place.”
“If I have not gone to foreign countries, young man,” Mr. Sapsea begins,
and then stops:—“You will excuse me calling you young man, Mr. Jasper?
You are much my junior.”
“By all means.”
“If I have not gone to foreign countries, young man, foreign countries
have come to me. They have come to me in the way of business, and I have
improved upon my opportunities. Put it that I take an inventory, or make a
catalogue. I see a French clock. I never saw him before, in my life, but I
instantly lay my finger on him and say ‘Paris!’ I see some cups and saucers
of Chinese make, equally strangers to me personally: I put my finger on
them, then and there, and I say ‘Pekin, Nankin, and Canton.’ It is the same
with Japan, with Egypt, and with bamboo and sandalwood from the East
Indies; I put my finger on them all. I have put my finger on the North Pole
before now, and said ‘Spear of Esquimaux make, for half a pint of pale
sherry!’”
“Really? A very remarkable way, Mr. Sapsea, of acquiring a knowledge
of men and things.”
“I mention it, sir,” Mr. Sapsea rejoins, with unspeakable complacency,
“because, as I say, it don’t do to boast of what you are; but show how you
came to be it, and then you prove it.”
“Most interesting. We were to speak of the late Mrs. Sapsea.”

“We were, sir.” Mr. Sapsea fills both glasses, and takes the decanter into
safe keeping again. “Before I consult your opinion as a man of taste on this
little trifle”—holding it up—“which is but a trifle, and still has required
some thought, sir, some little fever of the brow, I ought perhaps to describe
the character of the late Mrs. Sapsea, now dead three quarters of a year.”
Mr. Jasper, in the act of yawning behind his wineglass, puts down that
screen and calls up a look of interest. It is a little impaired in its
expressiveness by his having a shut-up gape still to dispose of, with
watering eyes.
“Half a dozen years ago, or so,” Mr. Sapsea proceeds, “when I had
enlarged my mind up to—I will not say to what it now is, for that might
seem to aim at too much, but up to the pitch of wanting another mind to be
absorbed in it—I cast my eye about me for a nuptial partner. Because, as I
say, it is not good for man to be alone.”
Mr. Jasper appears to commit this original idea to memory.
“Miss Brobity at that time kept, I will not call it the rival establishment to
the establishment at the Nuns’ House opposite, but I will call it the other
parallel establishment down town. The world did have it that she showed a
passion for attending my sales, when they took place on half holidays, or in
vacation time. The world did put it about, that she admired my style. The
world did notice that as time flowed by, my style became traceable in the
dictation-exercises of Miss Brobity’s pupils. Young man, a whisper even
sprang up in obscure malignity, that one ignorant and besotted Churl (a
parent) so committed himself as to object to it by name. But I do not believe
this. For is it likely that any human creature in his right senses would so lay
himself open to be pointed at, by what I call the finger of scorn?”
Mr. Jasper shakes his head. Not in the least likely. Mr. Sapsea, in a
grandiloquent state of absence of mind, seems to refill his visitor’s glass,
which is full already; and does really refill his own, which is empty.
“Miss Brobity’s Being, young man, was deeply imbued with homage to
Mind. She revered Mind, when launched, or, as I say, precipitated, on an
extensive knowledge of the world. When I made my proposal, she did me
the honour to be so overshadowed with a species of Awe, as to be able to
articulate only the two words, ‘O Thou!’ meaning myself. Her limpid blue
eyes were fixed upon me, her semi-transparent hands were clasped together,
pallor overspread her aquiline features, and, though encouraged to proceed,

she never did proceed a word further. I disposed of the parallel
establishment by private contract, and we became as nearly one as could be
expected under the circumstances. But she never could, and she never did,
find a phrase satisfactory to her perhaps-too-favourable estimate of my
intellect. To the very last (feeble action of liver), she addressed me in the
same unfinished terms.”
Mr. Jasper has closed his eyes as the auctioneer has deepened his voice.
He now abruptly opens them, and says, in unison with the deepened voice
“Ah!”—rather as if stopping himself on the extreme verge of adding
—“men!”
“I have been since,” says Mr. Sapsea, with his legs stretched out, and
solemnly enjoying himself with the wine and the fire, “what you behold me;
I have been since a solitary mourner; I have been since, as I say, wasting my
evening conversation on the desert air. I will not say that I have reproached
myself; but there have been times when I have asked myself the question:
What if her husband had been nearer on a level with her? If she had not had
to look up quite so high, what might the stimulating action have been upon
the liver?”
Mr. Jasper says, with an appearance of having fallen into dreadfully low
spirits, that he “supposes it was to be.”
“We can only suppose so, sir,” Mr. Sapsea coincides. “As I say, Man
proposes, Heaven disposes. It may or may not be putting the same thought
in another form; but that is the way I put it.”
Mr. Jasper murmurs assent.
“And now, Mr. Jasper,” resumes the auctioneer, producing his scrap of
manuscript, “Mrs. Sapsea’s monument having had full time to settle and
dry, let me take your opinion, as a man of taste, on the inscription I have (as
I before remarked, not without some little fever of the brow) drawn out for
it. Take it in your own hand. The setting out of the lines requires to be
followed with the eye, as well as the contents with the mind.”
Mr. Jasper complying, sees and reads as follows:

ETHELINDA,
Reverential Wife of
MR. THOMAS SAPSEA,
AUCTIONEER, VALUER, ESTATE AGENT, &c.,

OF THIS CITY.
Whose Knowledge of the World,
Though somewhat extensive,
Never brought him acquainted with
A SPIRIT
More capable of
LOOKING UP TO HIM.
STRANGER, PAUSE
And ask thyself the Question,
CANST THOU DO LIKEWISE?
If Not,
WITH A BLUSH RETIRE.

Mr. Sapsea having risen and stationed himself with his back to the fire,
for the purpose of observing the effect of these lines on the countenance of
a man of taste, consequently has his face towards the door, when his
serving-maid, again appearing, announces, “Durdles is come, sir!” He
promptly draws forth and fills the third wineglass, as being now claimed,
and replies, “Show Durdles in.”
“Admirable!” quoth Mr. Jasper, handing back the paper.
“You approve, sir?”
“Impossible not to approve. Striking, characteristic, and complete.”
The auctioneer inclines his head, as one accepting his due and giving a
receipt; and invites the entering Durdles to take off that glass of wine
(handing the same), for it will warm him.
Durdles is a stonemason; chiefly in the gravestone, tomb, and monument
way, and wholly of their colour from head to foot. No man is better known
in Cloisterham. He is the chartered libertine of the place. Fame trumpets
him a wonderful workman—which, for aught that anybody knows, he may
be (as he never works); and a wonderful sot—which everybody knows he
is. With the Cathedral crypt he is better acquainted than any living
authority; it may even be than any dead one. It is said that the intimacy of
this acquaintance began in his habitually resorting to that secret place, to
lock-out the Cloisterham boy-populace, and sleep off fumes of liquor: he
having ready access to the Cathedral, as contractor for rough repairs. Be
this as it may, he does know much about it, and, in the demolition of

impedimental fragments of wall, buttress, and pavement, has seen strange
sights. He often speaks of himself in the third person; perhaps, being a little
misty as to his own identity, when he narrates; perhaps impartially adopting
the Cloisterham nomenclature in reference to a character of acknowledged
distinction. Thus he will say, touching his strange sights: “Durdles come
upon the old chap,” in reference to a buried magnate of ancient time and
high degree, “by striking right into the coffin with his pick. The old chap
gave Durdles a look with his open eyes, as much as to say, ‘Is your name
Durdles? Why, my man, I’ve been waiting for you a devil of a time!’ And
then he turned to powder.” With a two-foot rule always in his pocket, and a
mason’s hammer all but always in his hand, Durdles goes continually
sounding and tapping all about and about the Cathedral; and whenever he
says to Tope: “Tope, here’s another old ’un in here!” Tope announces it to
the Dean as an established discovery.
In a suit of coarse flannel with horn buttons, a yellow neckerchief with
draggled ends, an old hat more russet-coloured than black, and laced boots
of the hue of his stony calling, Durdles leads a hazy, gipsy sort of life,
carrying his dinner about with him in a small bundle, and sitting on all
manner of tombstones to dine. This dinner of Durdles’s has become quite a
Cloisterham institution: not only because of his never appearing in public
without it, but because of its having been, on certain renowned occasions,
taken into custody along with Durdles (as drunk and incapable), and
exhibited before the Bench of justices at the townhall. These occasions,
however, have been few and far apart: Durdles being as seldom drunk as
sober. For the rest, he is an old bachelor, and he lives in a little antiquated
hole of a house that was never finished: supposed to be built, so far, of
stones stolen from the city wall. To this abode there is an approach, ankle-
deep in stone chips, resembling a petrified grove of tombstones, urns,
draperies, and broken columns, in all stages of sculpture. Herein two
journeymen incessantly chip, while other two journeymen, who face each
other, incessantly saw stone; dipping as regularly in and out of their
sheltering sentry-boxes, as if they were mechanical figures emblematical of
Time and Death.
To Durdles, when he had consumed his glass of port, Mr. Sapsea intrusts
that precious effort of his Muse. Durdles unfeelingly takes out his two-foot
rule, and measures the lines calmly, alloying them with stone-grit.

“This is for the monument, is it, Mr. Sapsea?”
“The Inscription. Yes.” Mr. Sapsea waits for its effect on a common
mind.
“It’ll come in to a eighth of a inch,” says Durdles. “Your servant, Mr.
Jasper. Hope I see you well.”
“How are you Durdles?”
“I’ve got a touch of the Tombatism on me, Mr. Jasper, but that I must
expect.”
“You mean the Rheumatism,” says Sapsea, in a sharp tone. (He is nettled
by having his composition so mechanically received.)
“No, I don’t. I mean, Mr. Sapsea, the Tombatism. It’s another sort from
Rheumatism. Mr. Jasper knows what Durdles means. You get among them
Tombs afore it’s well light on a winter morning, and keep on, as the
Catechism says, a-walking in the same all the days of your life, and you’ll
know what Durdles means.”
“It is a bitter cold place,” Mr. Jasper assents, with an antipathetic shiver.
“And if it’s bitter cold for you, up in the chancel, with a lot of live breath
smoking out about you, what the bitterness is to Durdles, down in the crypt
among the earthy damps there, and the dead breath of the old ’uns,” returns
that individual, “Durdles leaves you to judge.—Is this to be put in hand at
once, Mr. Sapsea?”
Mr. Sapsea, with an Author’s anxiety to rush into publication, replies that
it cannot be out of hand too soon.
“You had better let me have the key then,” says Durdles.
“Why, man, it is not to be put inside the monument!”
“Durdles knows where it’s to be put, Mr. Sapsea; no man better. Ask ’ere
a man in Cloisterham whether Durdles knows his work.”
Mr. Sapsea rises, takes a key from a drawer, unlocks an iron safe let into
the wall, and takes from it another key.
“When Durdles puts a touch or a finish upon his work, no matter where,
inside or outside, Durdles likes to look at his work all round, and see that
his work is a-doing him credit,” Durdles explains, doggedly.
The key proffered him by the bereaved widower being a large one, he
slips his two-foot rule into a side-pocket of his flannel trousers made for it,

and deliberately opens his flannel coat, and opens the mouth of a large
breast-pocket within it before taking the key to place it in that repository.
“Why, Durdles!” exclaims Jasper, looking on amused, “you are
undermined with pockets!”
“And I carries weight in ’em too, Mr. Jasper. Feel those!” producing two
other large keys.
“Hand me Mr. Sapsea’s likewise. Surely this is the heaviest of the three.”
“You’ll find ’em much of a muchness, I expect,” says Durdles. “They all
belong to monuments. They all open Durdles’s work. Durdles keeps the
keys of his work mostly. Not that they’re much used.”
“By the bye,” it comes into Jasper’s mind to say, as he idly examines the
keys, “I have been going to ask you, many a day, and have always
forgotten. You know they sometimes call you Stony Durdles, don’t you?”
“Cloisterham knows me as Durdles, Mr. Jasper.”
“I am aware of that, of course. But the boys sometimes—”
“O! if you mind them young imps of boys—” Durdles gruffly interrupts.
“I don’t mind them any more than you do. But there was a discussion the
other day among the Choir, whether Stony stood for Tony;” clinking one
key against another.
(“Take care of the wards, Mr. Jasper.”)
“Or whether Stony stood for Stephen;” clinking with a change of keys.
(“You can’t make a pitch pipe of ’em, Mr. Jasper.”)
“Or whether the name comes from your trade. How stands the fact?”
Mr. Jasper weighs the three keys in his hand, lifts his head from his idly
stooping attitude over the fire, and delivers the keys to Durdles with an
ingenuous and friendly face.
But the stony one is a gruff one likewise, and that hazy state of his is
always an uncertain state, highly conscious of its dignity, and prone to take
offence. He drops his two keys back into his pocket one by one, and buttons
them up; he takes his dinner-bundle from the chair-back on which he hung
it when he came in; he distributes the weight he carries, by tying the third
key up in it, as though he were an Ostrich, and liked to dine off cold iron;
and he gets out of the room, deigning no word of answer.

Mr. Sapsea then proposes a hit at backgammon, which, seasoned with his
own improving conversation, and terminating in a supper of cold roast beef
and salad, beguiles the golden evening until pretty late. Mr. Sapsea’s
wisdom being, in its delivery to mortals, rather of the diffuse than the
epigrammatic order, is by no means expended even then; but his visitor
intimates that he will come back for more of the precious commodity on
future occasions, and Mr. Sapsea lets him off for the present, to ponder on
the instalment he carries away.

CHAPTER V.
MR. DURDLES AND FRIEND

John Jasper, on his way home through the Close, is brought to a stand-
still by the spectacle of Stony Durdles, dinner-bundle and all, leaning his
back against the iron railing of the burial-ground enclosing it from the old
cloister-arches; and a hideous small boy in rags flinging stones at him as a
well-defined mark in the moonlight. Sometimes the stones hit him, and
sometimes they miss him, but Durdles seems indifferent to either fortune.
The hideous small boy, on the contrary, whenever he hits Durdles, blows a
whistle of triumph through a jagged gap, convenient for the purpose, in the
front of his mouth, where half his teeth are wanting; and whenever he
misses him, yelps out “Mulled agin!” and tries to atone for the failure by
taking a more correct and vicious aim.
“What are you doing to the man?” demands Jasper, stepping out into the
moonlight from the shade.
“Making a cock-shy of him,” replies the hideous small boy.
“Give me those stones in your hand.”
“Yes, I’ll give ’em you down your throat, if you come a-ketching hold of
me,” says the small boy, shaking himself loose, and backing. “I’ll smash
your eye, if you don’t look out!”
“Baby-Devil that you are, what has the man done to you?”
“He won’t go home.”
“What is that to you?”
“He gives me a ’apenny to pelt him home if I ketches him out too late,”
says the boy. And then chants, like a little savage, half stumbling and half
dancing among the rags and laces of his dilapidated boots:—
“Widdy widdy wen!
I—ket—ches—Im—out—ar—ter—ten,

Widdy widdy wy!
Then—E—don’t—go—then—I—shy—
Widdy Widdy Wake-cock warning!”

—with a comprehensive sweep on the last word, and one more delivery at
Durdles.
This would seem to be a poetical note of preparation, agreed upon, as a
caution to Durdles to stand clear if he can, or to betake himself homeward.
John Jasper invites the boy with a beck of his head to follow him (feeling
it hopeless to drag him, or coax him), and crosses to the iron railing where
the Stony (and stoned) One is profoundly meditating.
“Do you know this thing, this child?” asks Jasper, at a loss for a word
that will define this thing.
“Deputy,” says Durdles, with a nod.
“Is that its—his—name?”
“Deputy,” assents Durdles.
“I’m man-servant up at the Travellers’ Twopenny in Gas Works
Garding,” this thing explains. “All us man-servants at Travellers’ Lodgings
is named Deputy. When we’re chock full and the Travellers is all a-bed I
come out for my ’elth.” Then withdrawing into the road, and taking aim, he
resumes:—
“Widdy widdy wen!
I—ket—ches—Im—out—ar—ter—”

“Hold your hand,” cries Jasper, “and don’t throw while I stand so near
him, or I’ll kill you! Come, Durdles; let me walk home with you to-night.
Shall I carry your bundle?”
“Not on any account,” replies Durdles, adjusting it. “Durdles was making
his reflections here when you come up, sir, surrounded by his works, like a
poplar Author.—Your own brother-in-law;” introducing a sarcophagus
within the railing, white and cold in the moonlight. “Mrs. Sapsea;”
introducing the monument of that devoted wife. “Late Incumbent;”
introducing the Reverend Gentleman’s broken column. “Departed Assessed
Taxes;” introducing a vase and towel, standing on what might represent the
cake of soap. “Former pastrycook and Muffin-maker, much respected;”
introducing gravestone. “All safe and sound here, sir, and all Durdles’s

work. Of the common folk, that is merely bundled up in turf and brambles,
the less said the better. A poor lot, soon forgot.”
“This creature, Deputy, is behind us,” says Jasper, looking back. “Is he to
follow us?”
The relations between Durdles and Deputy are of a capricious kind; for,
on Durdles’s turning himself about with the slow gravity of beery
suddenness, Deputy makes a pretty wide circuit into the road and stands on
the defensive.
“You never cried Widdy Warning before you begun to-night,” says
Durdles, unexpectedly reminded of, or imagining, an injury.
“Yer lie, I did,” says Deputy, in his only form of polite contradiction.
“Own brother, sir,” observes Durdles, turning himself about again, and as
unexpectedly forgetting his offence as he had recalled or conceived it; “own
brother to Peter the Wild Boy! But I gave him an object in life.”
“At which he takes aim?” Mr. Jasper suggests.
“That’s it, sir,” returns Durdles, quite satisfied; “at which he takes aim. I
took him in hand and gave him an object. What was he before? A destroyer.
What work did he do? Nothing but destruction. What did he earn by it?
Short terms in Cloisterham jail. Not a person, not a piece of property, not a
winder, not a horse, nor a dog, nor a cat, nor a bird, nor a fowl, nor a pig,
but what he stoned, for want of an enlightened object. I put that enlightened
object before him, and now he can turn his honest halfpenny by the three
penn’orth a week.”
“I wonder he has no competitors.”
“He has plenty, Mr. Jasper, but he stones ’em all away. Now, I don’t
know what this scheme of mine comes to,” pursues Durdles, considering
about it with the same sodden gravity; “I don’t know what you may
precisely call it. It ain’t a sort of a—scheme of a—National Education?”
“I should say not,” replies Jasper.
“I should say not,” assents Durdles; “then we won’t try to give it a
name.”
“He still keeps behind us,” repeats Jasper, looking over his shoulder; “is
he to follow us?”

“We can’t help going round by the Travellers’ Twopenny, if we go the
short way, which is the back way,” Durdles answers, “and we’ll drop him
there.”
So they go on; Deputy, as a rear rank one, taking open order, and
invading the silence of the hour and place by stoning every wall, post,
pillar, and other inanimate object, by the deserted way.
“Is there anything new down in the crypt, Durdles?” asks John Jasper.
“Anything old, I think you mean,” growls Durdles. “It ain’t a spot for
novelty.”
“Any new discovery on your part, I meant.”
“There’s a old ’un under the seventh pillar on the left as you go down the
broken steps of the little underground chapel as formerly was; I make him
out (so fur as I’ve made him out yet) to be one of them old ’uns with a
crook. To judge from the size of the passages in the walls, and of the steps
and doors, by which they come and went, them crooks must have been a
good deal in the way of the old ’uns! Two on ’em meeting promiscuous
must have hitched one another by the mitre pretty often, I should say.”
Without any endeavour to correct the literality of this opinion, Jasper
surveys his companion—covered from head to foot with old mortar, lime,
and stone grit—as though he, Jasper, were getting imbued with a romantic
interest in his weird life.
“Yours is a curious existence.”
Without furnishing the least clue to the question, whether he receives this
as a compliment or as quite the reverse, Durdles gruffly answers: “Yours is
another.”
“Well! inasmuch as my lot is cast in the same old earthy, chilly, never-
changing place, Yes. But there is much more mystery and interest in your
connection with the Cathedral than in mine. Indeed, I am beginning to have
some idea of asking you to take me on as a sort of student, or free ’prentice,
under you, and to let me go about with you sometimes, and see some of
these odd nooks in which you pass your days.”
The Stony One replies, in a general way, “All right. Everybody knows
where to find Durdles, when he’s wanted.” Which, if not strictly true, is
approximately so, if taken to express that Durdles may always be found in a
state of vagabondage somewhere.

“What I dwell upon most,” says Jasper, pursuing his subject of romantic
interest, “is the remarkable accuracy with which you would seem to find out
where people are buried.—What is the matter? That bundle is in your way;
let me hold it.”
Durdles has stopped and backed a little (Deputy, attentive to all his
movements, immediately skirmishing into the road), and was looking about
for some ledge or corner to place his bundle on, when thus relieved of it.
“Just you give me my hammer out of that,” says Durdles, “and I’ll show
you.”
Clink, clink. And his hammer is handed him.
“Now, lookee here. You pitch your note, don’t you, Mr. Jasper?”
“Yes.”
“So I sound for mine. I take my hammer, and I tap.” (Here he strikes the
pavement, and the attentive Deputy skirmishes at a rather wider range, as
supposing that his head may be in requisition.) “I tap, tap, tap. Solid! I go
on tapping. Solid still! Tap again. Holloa! Hollow! Tap again, persevering.
Solid in hollow! Tap, tap, tap, to try it better. Solid in hollow; and inside
solid, hollow again! There you are! Old ’un crumbled away in stone coffin,
in vault!”
“Astonishing!”
“I have even done this,” says Durdles, drawing out his two-foot rule
(Deputy meanwhile skirmishing nearer, as suspecting that Treasure may be
about to be discovered, which may somehow lead to his own enrichment,
and the delicious treat of the discoverers being hanged by the neck, on his
evidence, until they are dead). “Say that hammer of mine’s a wall—my
work. Two; four; and two is six,” measuring on the pavement. “Six foot
inside that wall is Mrs. Sapsea.”
“Not really Mrs. Sapsea?”
“Say Mrs. Sapsea. Her wall’s thicker, but say Mrs. Sapsea. Durdles taps,
that wall represented by that hammer, and says, after good sounding:
‘Something betwixt us!’ Sure enough, some rubbish has been left in that
same six-foot space by Durdles’s men!”
Jasper opines that such accuracy “is a gift.”

“I wouldn’t have it at a gift,” returns Durdles, by no means receiving the
observation in good part. “I worked it out for myself. Durdles comes by his
knowledge through grubbing deep for it, and having it up by the roots when
it don’t want to come.—Holloa you Deputy!”
“Widdy!” is Deputy’s shrill response, standing off again.
“Catch that ha’penny. And don’t let me see any more of you to-night,
after we come to the Travellers’ Twopenny.”
“Warning!” returns Deputy, having caught the halfpenny, and appearing
by this mystic word to express his assent to the arrangement.
They have but to cross what was once the vineyard, belonging to what
was once the Monastery, to come into the narrow back lane wherein stands
the crazy wooden house of two low stories currently known as the
Travellers’ Twopenny:—a house all warped and distorted, like the morals of
the travellers, with scant remains of a lattice-work porch over the door, and
also of a rustic fence before its stamped-out garden; by reason of the
travellers being so bound to the premises by a tender sentiment (or so fond
of having a fire by the roadside in the course of the day), that they can never
be persuaded or threatened into departure, without violently possessing
themselves of some wooden forget-me-not, and bearing it off.
The semblance of an inn is attempted to be given to this wretched place
by fragments of conventional red curtaining in the windows, which rags are
made muddily transparent in the night-season by feeble lights of rush or
cotton dip burning dully in the close air of the inside. As Durdles and Jasper
come near, they are addressed by an inscribed paper lantern over the door,
setting forth the purport of the house. They are also addressed by some half-
dozen other hideous small boys—whether twopenny lodgers or followers or
hangers-on of such, who knows!—who, as if attracted by some carrion-
scent of Deputy in the air, start into the moonlight, as vultures might gather
in the desert, and instantly fall to stoning him and one another.
“Stop, you young brutes,” cries Jasper angrily, “and let us go by!”
This remonstrance being received with yells and flying stones, according
to a custom of late years comfortably established among the police
regulations of our English communities, where Christians are stoned on all
sides, as if the days of Saint Stephen were revived, Durdles remarks of the
young savages, with some point, that “they haven’t got an object,” and
leads the way down the lane.

At the corner of the lane, Jasper, hotly enraged, checks his companion
and looks back. All is silent. Next moment, a stone coming rattling at his
hat, and a distant yell of “Wake-Cock! Warning!” followed by a crow, as
from some infernally-hatched Chanticleer, apprising him under whose
victorious fire he stands, he turns the corner into safety, and takes Durdles
home: Durdles stumbling among the litter of his stony yard as if he were
going to turn head foremost into one of the unfinished tombs.
John Jasper returns by another way to his gatehouse, and entering softly
with his key, finds his fire still burning. He takes from a locked press a
peculiar-looking pipe, which he fills—but not with tobacco—and, having
adjusted the contents of the bowl, very carefully, with a little instrument,
ascends an inner staircase of only a few steps, leading to two rooms. One of
these is his own sleeping chamber: the other is his nephew’s. There is a
light in each.
His nephew lies asleep, calm and untroubled. John Jasper stands looking
down upon him, his unlighted pipe in his hand, for some time, with a fixed
and deep attention. Then, hushing his footsteps, he passes to his own room,
lights his pipe, and delivers himself to the Spectres it invokes at midnight.

CHAPTER VI.
PHILANTHROPY IN MINOR CANON CORNER

The Reverend Septimus Crisparkle (Septimus, because six little brother
Crisparkles before him went out, one by one, as they were born, like six
weak little rushlights, as they were lighted), having broken the thin morning
ice near Cloisterham Weir with his amiable head, much to the invigoration
of his frame, was now assisting his circulation by boxing at a looking-glass
with great science and prowess. A fresh and healthy portrait the looking-
glass presented of the Reverend Septimus, feinting and dodging with the
utmost artfulness, and hitting out from the shoulder with the utmost
straightness, while his radiant features teemed with innocence, and soft-
hearted benevolence beamed from his boxing-gloves.
It was scarcely breakfast-time yet, for Mrs. Crisparkle—mother, not wife
of the Reverend Septimus—was only just down, and waiting for the urn.
Indeed, the Reverend Septimus left off at this very moment to take the
pretty old lady’s entering face between his boxing-gloves and kiss it.
Having done so with tenderness, the Reverend Septimus turned to again,
countering with his left, and putting in his right, in a tremendous manner.
“I say, every morning of my life, that you’ll do it at last, Sept,” remarked
the old lady, looking on; “and so you will.”
“Do what, Ma dear?”
“Break the pier-glass, or burst a blood-vessel.”
“Neither, please God, Ma dear. Here’s wind, Ma. Look at this!” In a
concluding round of great severity, the Reverend Septimus administered
and escaped all sorts of punishment, and wound up by getting the old lady’s
cap into Chancery—such is the technical term used in scientific circles by
the learned in the Noble Art—with a lightness of touch that hardly stirred
the lightest lavender or cherry riband on it. Magnanimously releasing the

defeated, just in time to get his gloves into a drawer and feign to be looking
out of window in a contemplative state of mind when a servant entered, the
Reverend Septimus then gave place to the urn and other preparations for
breakfast. These completed, and the two alone again, it was pleasant to see
(or would have been, if there had been any one to see it, which there never
was), the old lady standing to say the Lord’s Prayer aloud, and her son,
Minor Canon nevertheless, standing with bent head to hear it, he being
within five years of forty: much as he had stood to hear the same words
from the same lips when he was within five months of four.
What is prettier than an old lady—except a young lady—when her eyes
are bright, when her figure is trim and compact, when her face is cheerful
and calm, when her dress is as the dress of a china shepherdess: so dainty in
its colours, so individually assorted to herself, so neatly moulded on her?
Nothing is prettier, thought the good Minor Canon frequently, when taking
his seat at table opposite his long-widowed mother. Her thought at such
times may be condensed into the two words that oftenest did duty together
in all her conversations: “My Sept!”
They were a good pair to sit breakfasting together in Minor Canon
Corner, Cloisterham. For Minor Canon Corner was a quiet place in the
shadow of the Cathedral, which the cawing of the rooks, the echoing
footsteps of rare passers, the sound of the Cathedral bell, or the roll of the
Cathedral organ, seemed to render more quiet than absolute silence.
Swaggering fighting men had had their centuries of ramping and raving
about Minor Canon Corner, and beaten serfs had had their centuries of
drudging and dying there, and powerful monks had had their centuries of
being sometimes useful and sometimes harmful there, and behold they were
all gone out of Minor Canon Corner, and so much the better. Perhaps one of
the highest uses of their ever having been there, was, that there might be left
behind, that blessed air of tranquillity which pervaded Minor Canon Corner,
and that serenely romantic state of the mind—productive for the most part
of pity and forbearance—which is engendered by a sorrowful story that is
all told, or a pathetic play that is played out.
Red-brick walls harmoniously toned down in colour by time, strong-
rooted ivy, latticed windows, panelled rooms, big oaken beams in little
places, and stone-walled gardens where annual fruit yet ripened upon

monkish trees, were the principal surroundings of pretty old Mrs. Crisparkle
and the Reverend Septimus as they sat at breakfast.
“And what, Ma dear,” inquired the Minor Canon, giving proof of a
wholesome and vigorous appetite, “does the letter say?”
The pretty old lady, after reading it, had just laid it down upon the
breakfast-cloth. She handed it over to her son.
Now, the old lady was exceedingly proud of her bright eyes being so
clear that she could read writing without spectacles. Her son was also so
proud of the circumstance, and so dutifully bent on her deriving the utmost
possible gratification from it, that he had invented the pretence that he
himself could not read writing without spectacles. Therefore he now
assumed a pair, of grave and prodigious proportions, which not only
seriously inconvenienced his nose and his breakfast, but seriously impeded
his perusal of the letter. For, he had the eyes of a microscope and a
telescope combined, when they were unassisted.
“It’s from Mr. Honeythunder, of course,” said the old lady, folding her
arms.
“Of course,” assented her son. He then lamely read on:

“‘Haven of Philanthropy,
Chief Offices, London, Wednesday.

“‘DEAR MADAM,

“‘I write in the—;’ In the what’s this? What does he write in?”
“In the chair,” said the old lady.
The Reverend Septimus took off his spectacles, that he might see her
face, as he exclaimed:
“Why, what should he write in?”
“Bless me, bless me, Sept,” returned the old lady, “you don’t see the
context! Give it back to me, my dear.”
Glad to get his spectacles off (for they always made his eyes water), her
son obeyed: murmuring that his sight for reading manuscript got worse and
worse daily.

“‘I write,’” his mother went on, reading very perspicuously and precisely,
“‘from the chair, to which I shall probably be confined for some hours.’”
Septimus looked at the row of chairs against the wall, with a half-
protesting and half-appealing countenance.
“‘We have,’” the old lady read on with a little extra emphasis, “‘a
meeting of our Convened Chief Composite Committee of Central and
District Philanthropists, at our Head Haven as above; and it is their
unanimous pleasure that I take the chair.’”
Septimus breathed more freely, and muttered: “O! if he comes to that, let
him.”
“‘Not to lose a day’s post, I take the opportunity of a long report being
read, denouncing a public miscreant—’”
“It is a most extraordinary thing,” interposed the gentle Minor Canon,
laying down his knife and fork to rub his ear in a vexed manner, “that these
Philanthropists are always denouncing somebody. And it is another most
extraordinary thing that they are always so violently flush of miscreants!”
“‘Denouncing a public miscreant—’”—the old lady resumed, “‘to get our
little affair of business off my mind. I have spoken with my two wards,
Neville and Helena Landless, on the subject of their defective education,
and they give in to the plan proposed; as I should have taken good care they
did, whether they liked it or not.’”
“And it is another most extraordinary thing,” remarked the Minor Canon
in the same tone as before, “that these philanthropists are so given to
seizing their fellow-creatures by the scruff of the neck, and (as one may
say) bumping them into the paths of peace.—I beg your pardon, Ma dear,
for interrupting.”
“‘Therefore, dear Madam, you will please prepare your son, the Rev. Mr.
Septimus, to expect Neville as an inmate to be read with, on Monday next.
On the same day Helena will accompany him to Cloisterham, to take up her
quarters at the Nuns’ House, the establishment recommended by yourself
and son jointly. Please likewise to prepare for her reception and tuition
there. The terms in both cases are understood to be exactly as stated to me
in writing by yourself, when I opened a correspondence with you on this
subject, after the honour of being introduced to you at your sister’s house in

town here. With compliments to the Rev. Mr. Septimus, I am, Dear Madam,
Your affectionate brother (In Philanthropy), LUKE HONEYTHUNDER.’”
“Well, Ma,” said Septimus, after a little more rubbing of his ear, “we
must try it. There can be no doubt that we have room for an inmate, and that
I have time to bestow upon him, and inclination too. I must confess to
feeling rather glad that he is not Mr. Honeythunder himself. Though that
seems wretchedly prejudiced—does it not?—for I never saw him. Is he a
large man, Ma?”
“I should call him a large man, my dear,” the old lady replied after some
hesitation, “but that his voice is so much larger.”
“Than himself?”
“Than anybody.”
“Hah!” said Septimus. And finished his breakfast as if the flavour of the
Superior Family Souchong, and also of the ham and toast and eggs, were a
little on the wane.
Mrs. Crisparkle’s sister, another piece of Dresden china, and matching
her so neatly that they would have made a delightful pair of ornaments for
the two ends of any capacious old-fashioned chimneypiece, and by right
should never have been seen apart, was the childless wife of a clergyman
holding Corporation preferment in London City. Mr. Honeythunder in his
public character of Professor of Philanthropy had come to know Mrs.
Crisparkle during the last re-matching of the china ornaments (in other
words during her last annual visit to her sister), after a public occasion of a
philanthropic nature, when certain devoted orphans of tender years had
been glutted with plum buns, and plump bumptiousness. These were all the
antecedents known in Minor Canon Corner of the coming pupils.
“I am sure you will agree with me, Ma,” said Mr. Crisparkle, after
thinking the matter over, “that the first thing to be done, is, to put these
young people as much at their ease as possible. There is nothing
disinterested in the notion, because we cannot be at our ease with them
unless they are at their ease with us. Now, Jasper’s nephew is down here at
present; and like takes to like, and youth takes to youth. He is a cordial
young fellow, and we will have him to meet the brother and sister at dinner.
That’s three. We can’t think of asking him, without asking Jasper. That’s
four. Add Miss Twinkleton and the fairy bride that is to be, and that’s six.

Add our two selves, and that’s eight. Would eight at a friendly dinner at all
put you out, Ma?”
“Nine would, Sept,” returned the old lady, visibly nervous.
“My dear Ma, I particularise eight.”
“The exact size of the table and the room, my dear.”
So it was settled that way: and when Mr. Crisparkle called with his
mother upon Miss Twinkleton, to arrange for the reception of Miss Helena
Landless at the Nuns’ House, the two other invitations having reference to
that establishment were proffered and accepted. Miss Twinkleton did,
indeed, glance at the globes, as regretting that they were not formed to be
taken out into society; but became reconciled to leaving them behind.
Instructions were then despatched to the Philanthropist for the departure
and arrival, in good time for dinner, of Mr. Neville and Miss Helena; and
stock for soup became fragrant in the air of Minor Canon Corner.
In those days there was no railway to Cloisterham, and Mr. Sapsea said
there never would be. Mr. Sapsea said more; he said there never should be.
And yet, marvellous to consider, it has come to pass, in these days, that
Express Trains don’t think Cloisterham worth stopping at, but yell and
whirl through it on their larger errands, casting the dust off their wheels as a
testimony against its insignificance. Some remote fragment of Main Line to
somewhere else, there was, which was going to ruin the Money Market if it
failed, and Church and State if it succeeded, and (of course), the
Constitution, whether or no; but even that had already so unsettled
Cloisterham traffic, that the traffic, deserting the high road, came sneaking
in from an unprecedented part of the country by a back stable-way, for
many years labelled at the corner: “Beware of the Dog.”
To this ignominious avenue of approach, Mr. Crisparkle repaired,
awaiting the arrival of a short, squat omnibus, with a disproportionate heap
of luggage on the roof—like a little Elephant with infinitely too much
Castle—which was then the daily service between Cloisterham and external
mankind. As this vehicle lumbered up, Mr. Crisparkle could hardly see
anything else of it for a large outside passenger seated on the box, with his
elbows squared, and his hands on his knees, compressing the driver into a
most uncomfortably small compass, and glowering about him with a
strongly-marked face.
“Is this Cloisterham?” demanded the passenger, in a tremendous voice.

“It is,” replied the driver, rubbing himself as if he ached, after throwing
the reins to the ostler. “And I never was so glad to see it.”
“Tell your master to make his box-seat wider, then,” returned the
passenger. “Your master is morally bound—and ought to be legally, under
ruinous penalties—to provide for the comfort of his fellow-man.”
The driver instituted, with the palms of his hands, a superficial
perquisition into the state of his skeleton; which seemed to make him
anxious.
“Have I sat upon you?” asked the passenger.
“You have,” said the driver, as if he didn’t like it at all.
“Take that card, my friend.”
“I think I won’t deprive you on it,” returned the driver, casting his eyes
over it with no great favour, without taking it. “What’s the good of it to
me?”
“Be a Member of that Society,” said the passenger.
“What shall I get by it?” asked the driver.
“Brotherhood,” returned the passenger, in a ferocious voice.
“Thankee,” said the driver, very deliberately, as he got down; “my
mother was contented with myself, and so am I. I don’t want no brothers.”
“But you must have them,” replied the passenger, also descending,
“whether you like it or not. I am your brother.”
“I say!” expostulated the driver, becoming more chafed in temper, “not
too fur! The worm will, when—”
But here, Mr. Crisparkle interposed, remonstrating aside, in a friendly
voice: “Joe, Joe, Joe! don’t forget yourself, Joe, my good fellow!” and then,
when Joe peaceably touched his hat, accosting the passenger with: “Mr.
Honeythunder?”
“That is my name, sir.”
“My name is Crisparkle.”
“Reverend Mr. Septimus? Glad to see you, sir. Neville and Helena are
inside. Having a little succumbed of late, under the pressure of my public
labours, I thought I would take a mouthful of fresh air, and come down with
them, and return at night. So you are the Reverend Mr. Septimus, are you?”
surveying him on the whole with disappointment, and twisting a double

eye-glass by its ribbon, as if he were roasting it, but not otherwise using it.
“Hah! I expected to see you older, sir.”
“I hope you will,” was the good-humoured reply.
“Eh?” demanded Mr. Honeythunder.
“Only a poor little joke. Not worth repeating.”
“Joke? Ay; I never see a joke,” Mr. Honeythunder frowningly retorted.
“A joke is wasted upon me, sir. Where are they? Helena and Neville, come
here! Mr. Crisparkle has come down to meet you.”
An unusually handsome lithe young fellow, and an unusually handsome
lithe girl; much alike; both very dark, and very rich in colour; she of almost
the gipsy type; something untamed about them both; a certain air upon them
of hunter and huntress; yet withal a certain air of being the objects of the
chase, rather than the followers. Slender, supple, quick of eye and limb; half
shy, half defiant; fierce of look; an indefinable kind of pause coming and
going on their whole expression, both of face and form, which might be
equally likened to the pause before a crouch or a bound. The rough mental
notes made in the first five minutes by Mr. Crisparkle would have read thus,
verbatim.
He invited Mr. Honeythunder to dinner, with a troubled mind (for the
discomfiture of the dear old china shepherdess lay heavy on it), and gave
his arm to Helena Landless. Both she and her brother, as they walked all
together through the ancient streets, took great delight in what he pointed
out of the Cathedral and the Monastery ruin, and wondered—so his notes
ran on—much as if they were beautiful barbaric captives brought from
some wild tropical dominion. Mr. Honeythunder walked in the middle of
the road, shouldering the natives out of his way, and loudly developing a
scheme he had, for making a raid on all the unemployed persons in the
United Kingdom, laying them every one by the heels in jail, and forcing
them, on pain of prompt extermination, to become philanthropists.
Mrs. Crisparkle had need of her own share of philanthropy when she
beheld this very large and very loud excrescence on the little party. Always
something in the nature of a Boil upon the face of society, Mr.
Honeythunder expanded into an inflammatory Wen in Minor Canon Corner.
Though it was not literally true, as was facetiously charged against him by
public unbelievers, that he called aloud to his fellow-creatures: “Curse your
souls and bodies, come here and be blessed!” still his philanthropy was of

that gunpowderous sort that the difference between it and animosity was
hard to determine. You were to abolish military force, but you were first to
bring all commanding officers who had done their duty, to trial by court-
martial for that offence, and shoot them. You were to abolish war, but were
to make converts by making war upon them, and charging them with loving
war as the apple of their eye. You were to have no capital punishment, but
were first to sweep off the face of the earth all legislators, jurists, and
judges, who were of the contrary opinion. You were to have universal
concord, and were to get it by eliminating all the people who wouldn’t, or
conscientiously couldn’t, be concordant. You were to love your brother as
yourself, but after an indefinite interval of maligning him (very much as if
you hated him), and calling him all manner of names. Above all things, you
were to do nothing in private, or on your own account. You were to go to
the offices of the Haven of Philanthropy, and put your name down as a
Member and a Professing Philanthropist. Then, you were to pay up your
subscription, get your card of membership and your riband and medal, and
were evermore to live upon a platform, and evermore to say what Mr.
Honeythunder said, and what the Treasurer said, and what the sub-Treasurer
said, and what the Committee said, and what the sub-Committee said, and
what the Secretary said, and what the Vice-Secretary said. And this was
usually said in the unanimously-carried resolution under hand and seal, to
the effect: “That this assembled Body of Professing Philanthropists views,
with indignant scorn and contempt, not unmixed with utter detestation and
loathing abhorrence”—in short, the baseness of all those who do not belong
to it, and pledges itself to make as many obnoxious statements as possible
about them, without being at all particular as to facts.
The dinner was a most doleful breakdown. The philanthropist deranged
the symmetry of the table, sat himself in the way of the waiting, blocked up
the thoroughfare, and drove Mr. Tope (who assisted the parlour-maid) to the
verge of distraction by passing plates and dishes on, over his own head.
Nobody could talk to anybody, because he held forth to everybody at once,
as if the company had no individual existence, but were a Meeting. He
impounded the Reverend Mr. Septimus, as an official personage to be
addressed, or kind of human peg to hang his oratorical hat on, and fell into
the exasperating habit, common among such orators, of impersonating him
as a wicked and weak opponent. Thus, he would ask: “And will you, sir,
now stultify yourself by telling me”—and so forth, when the innocent man

had not opened his lips, nor meant to open them. Or he would say: “Now
see, sir, to what a position you are reduced. I will leave you no escape. After
exhausting all the resources of fraud and falsehood, during years upon
years; after exhibiting a combination of dastardly meanness with
ensanguined daring, such as the world has not often witnessed; you have
now the hypocrisy to bend the knee before the most degraded of mankind,
and to sue and whine and howl for mercy!” Whereat the unfortunate Minor
Canon would look, in part indignant and in part perplexed; while his worthy
mother sat bridling, with tears in her eyes, and the remainder of the party
lapsed into a sort of gelatinous state, in which there was no flavour or
solidity, and very little resistance.
But the gush of philanthropy that burst forth when the departure of Mr.
Honeythunder began to impend, must have been highly gratifying to the
feelings of that distinguished man. His coffee was produced, by the special
activity of Mr. Tope, a full hour before he wanted it. Mr. Crisparkle sat with
his watch in his hand for about the same period, lest he should overstay his
time. The four young people were unanimous in believing that the
Cathedral clock struck three-quarters, when it actually struck but one. Miss
Twinkleton estimated the distance to the omnibus at five-and-twenty
minutes’ walk, when it was really five. The affectionate kindness of the
whole circle hustled him into his greatcoat, and shoved him out into the
moonlight, as if he were a fugitive traitor with whom they sympathised, and
a troop of horse were at the back door. Mr. Crisparkle and his new charge,
who took him to the omnibus, were so fervent in their apprehensions of his
catching cold, that they shut him up in it instantly and left him, with still
half-an-hour to spare.

CHAPTER VII.
MORE CONFIDENCES THAN ONE

“I know very little of that gentleman, sir,” said Neville to the Minor
Canon as they turned back.
“You know very little of your guardian?” the Minor Canon repeated.
“Almost nothing!”
“How came he—”
“To be my guardian? I’ll tell you, sir. I suppose you know that we come
(my sister and I) from Ceylon?”
“Indeed, no.”
“I wonder at that. We lived with a stepfather there. Our mother died there,
when we were little children. We have had a wretched existence. She made
him our guardian, and he was a miserly wretch who grudged us food to eat,
and clothes to wear. At his death, he passed us over to this man; for no better
reason that I know of, than his being a friend or connexion of his, whose
name was always in print and catching his attention.”
“That was lately, I suppose?”
“Quite lately, sir. This stepfather of ours was a cruel brute as well as a
grinding one. It is well he died when he did, or I might have killed him.”
Mr. Crisparkle stopped short in the moonlight and looked at his hopeful
pupil in consternation.
“I surprise you, sir?” he said, with a quick change to a submissive manner.
“You shock me; unspeakably shock me.”
The pupil hung his head for a little while, as they walked on, and then
said: “You never saw him beat your sister. I have seen him beat mine, more
than once or twice, and I never forgot it.”

“Nothing,” said Mr. Crisparkle, “not even a beloved and beautiful sister’s
tears under dastardly ill-usage;” he became less severe, in spite of himself, as
his indignation rose; “could justify those horrible expressions that you used.”
“I am sorry I used them, and especially to you, sir. I beg to recall them.
But permit me to set you right on one point. You spoke of my sister’s tears.
My sister would have let him tear her to pieces, before she would have let
him believe that he could make her shed a tear.”
Mr. Crisparkle reviewed those mental notes of his, and was neither at all
surprised to hear it, nor at all disposed to question it.
“Perhaps you will think it strange, sir,”—this was said in a hesitating
voice—“that I should so soon ask you to allow me to confide in you, and to
have the kindness to hear a word or two from me in my defence?”
“Defence?” Mr. Crisparkle repeated. “You are not on your defence, Mr.
Neville.”
“I think I am, sir. At least I know I should be, if you were better
acquainted with my character.”
“Well, Mr. Neville,” was the rejoinder. “What if you leave me to find it
out?”
“Since it is your pleasure, sir,” answered the young man, with a quick
change in his manner to sullen disappointment: “since it is your pleasure to
check me in my impulse, I must submit.”
There was that in the tone of this short speech which made the
conscientious man to whom it was addressed uneasy. It hinted to him that he
might, without meaning it, turn aside a trustfulness beneficial to a mis-
shapen young mind and perhaps to his own power of directing and
improving it. They were within sight of the lights in his windows, and he
stopped.
“Let us turn back and take a turn or two up and down, Mr. Neville, or you
may not have time to finish what you wish to say to me. You are hasty in
thinking that I mean to check you. Quite the contrary. I invite your
confidence.”
“You have invited it, sir, without knowing it, ever since I came here. I say
‘ever since,’ as if I had been here a week. The truth is, we came here (my
sister and I) to quarrel with you, and affront you, and break away again.”
“Really?” said Mr. Crisparkle, at a dead loss for anything else to say.

“You see, we could not know what you were beforehand, sir; could we?”
“Clearly not,” said Mr. Crisparkle.
“And having liked no one else with whom we have ever been brought into
contact, we had made up our minds not to like you.”
“Really?” said Mr. Crisparkle again.
“But we do like you, sir, and we see an unmistakable difference between
your house and your reception of us, and anything else we have ever known.
This—and my happening to be alone with you—and everything around us
seeming so quiet and peaceful after Mr. Honeythunder’s departure—and
Cloisterham being so old and grave and beautiful, with the moon shining on
it—these things inclined me to open my heart.”
“I quite understand, Mr. Neville. And it is salutary to listen to such
influences.”
“In describing my own imperfections, sir, I must ask you not to suppose
that I am describing my sister’s. She has come out of the disadvantages of
our miserable life, as much better than I am, as that Cathedral tower is higher
than those chimneys.”
Mr. Crisparkle in his own breast was not so sure of this.
“I have had, sir, from my earliest remembrance, to suppress a deadly and
bitter hatred. This has made me secret and revengeful. I have been always
tyrannically held down by the strong hand. This has driven me, in my
weakness, to the resource of being false and mean. I have been stinted of
education, liberty, money, dress, the very necessaries of life, the commonest
pleasures of childhood, the commonest possessions of youth. This has
caused me to be utterly wanting in I don’t know what emotions, or
remembrances, or good instincts—I have not even a name for the thing, you
see!—that you have had to work upon in other young men to whom you
have been accustomed.”
“This is evidently true. But this is not encouraging,” thought Mr.
Crisparkle as they turned again.
“And to finish with, sir: I have been brought up among abject and servile
dependents, of an inferior race, and I may easily have contracted some
affinity with them. Sometimes, I don’t know but that it may be a drop of
what is tigerish in their blood.”
“As in the case of that remark just now,” thought Mr. Crisparkle.

“In a last word of reference to my sister, sir (we are twin children), you
ought to know, to her honour, that nothing in our misery ever subdued her,
though it often cowed me. When we ran away from it (we ran away four
times in six years, to be soon brought back and cruelly punished), the flight
was always of her planning and leading. Each time she dressed as a boy, and
showed the daring of a man. I take it we were seven years old when we first
decamped; but I remember, when I lost the pocket-knife with which she was
to have cut her hair short, how desperately she tried to tear it out, or bite it
off. I have nothing further to say, sir, except that I hope you will bear with
me and make allowance for me.”
“Of that, Mr. Neville, you may be sure,” returned the Minor Canon. “I
don’t preach more than I can help, and I will not repay your confidence with
a sermon. But I entreat you to bear in mind, very seriously and steadily, that
if I am to do you any good, it can only be with your own assistance; and that
you can only render that, efficiently, by seeking aid from Heaven.”
“I will try to do my part, sir.”
“And, Mr. Neville, I will try to do mine. Here is my hand on it. May God
bless our endeavours!”
They were now standing at his house-door, and a cheerful sound of voices
and laughter was heard within.
“We will take one more turn before going in,” said Mr. Crisparkle, “for I
want to ask you a question. When you said you were in a changed mind
concerning me, you spoke, not only for yourself, but for your sister too?”
“Undoubtedly I did, sir.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Neville, but I think you have had no opportunity of
communicating with your sister, since I met you. Mr. Honeythunder was
very eloquent; but perhaps I may venture to say, without ill-nature, that he
rather monopolised the occasion. May you not have answered for your sister
without sufficient warrant?”
Neville shook his head with a proud smile.
“You don’t know, sir, yet, what a complete understanding can exist
between my sister and me, though no spoken word—perhaps hardly as much
as a look—may have passed between us. She not only feels as I have
described, but she very well knows that I am taking this opportunity of
speaking to you, both for her and for myself.”

Mr. Crisparkle looked in his face, with some incredulity; but his face
expressed such absolute and firm conviction of the truth of what he said, that
Mr. Crisparkle looked at the pavement, and mused, until they came to his
door again.
“I will ask for one more turn, sir, this time,” said the young man, with a
rather heightened colour rising in his face. “But for Mr. Honeythunder’s—I
think you called it eloquence, sir?” (somewhat slyly.)
“I—yes, I called it eloquence,” said Mr. Crisparkle.
“But for Mr. Honeythunder’s eloquence, I might have had no need to ask
you what I am going to ask you. This Mr. Edwin Drood, sir: I think that’s the
name?”
“Quite correct,” said Mr. Crisparkle. “D-r-double o-d.”
“Does he—or did he—read with you, sir?”
“Never, Mr. Neville. He comes here visiting his relation, Mr. Jasper.”
“Is Miss Bud his relation too, sir?”
(“Now, why should he ask that, with sudden superciliousness?” thought
Mr. Crisparkle.) Then he explained, aloud, what he knew of the little story of
their betrothal.
“O! that’s it, is it?” said the young man. “I understand his air of
proprietorship now!”
This was said so evidently to himself, or to anybody rather than Mr.
Crisparkle, that the latter instinctively felt as if to notice it would be almost
tantamount to noticing a passage in a letter which he had read by chance
over the writer’s shoulder. A moment afterwards they re-entered the house.
Mr. Jasper was seated at the piano as they came into his drawing-room,
and was accompanying Miss Rosebud while she sang. It was a consequence
of his playing the accompaniment without notes, and of her being a heedless
little creature, very apt to go wrong, that he followed her lips most
attentively, with his eyes as well as hands; carefully and softly hinting the
key-note from time to time. Standing with an arm drawn round her, but with
a face far more intent on Mr. Jasper than on her singing, stood Helena,
between whom and her brother an instantaneous recognition passed, in
which Mr. Crisparkle saw, or thought he saw, the understanding that had
been spoken of, flash out. Mr. Neville then took his admiring station, leaning
against the piano, opposite the singer; Mr. Crisparkle sat down by the china

shepherdess; Edwin Drood gallantly furled and unfurled Miss Twinkleton’s
fan; and that lady passively claimed that sort of exhibitor’s proprietorship in
the accomplishment on view, which Mr. Tope, the Verger, daily claimed in
the Cathedral service.

At the piano

The song went on. It was a sorrowful strain of parting, and the fresh
young voice was very plaintive and tender. As Jasper watched the pretty lips,
and ever and again hinted the one note, as though it were a low whisper from
himself, the voice became less steady, until all at once the singer broke into a
burst of tears, and shrieked out, with her hands over her eyes: “I can’t bear
this! I am frightened! Take me away!”
With one swift turn of her lithe figure, Helena laid the little beauty on a
sofa, as if she had never caught her up. Then, on one knee beside her, and
with one hand upon her rosy mouth, while with the other she appealed to all
the rest, Helena said to them: “It’s nothing; it’s all over; don’t speak to her
for one minute, and she is well!”
Jasper’s hands had, in the same instant, lifted themselves from the keys,
and were now poised above them, as though he waited to resume. In that

attitude he yet sat quiet: not even looking round, when all the rest had
changed their places and were reassuring one another.
“Pussy’s not used to an audience; that’s the fact,” said Edwin Drood. “She
got nervous, and couldn’t hold out. Besides, Jack, you are such a
conscientious master, and require so much, that I believe you make her
afraid of you. No wonder.”
“No wonder,” repeated Helena.
“There, Jack, you hear! You would be afraid of him, under similar
circumstances, wouldn’t you, Miss Landless?”
“Not under any circumstances,” returned Helena.
Jasper brought down his hands, looked over his shoulder, and begged to
thank Miss Landless for her vindication of his character. Then he fell to
dumbly playing, without striking the notes, while his little pupil was taken to
an open window for air, and was otherwise petted and restored. When she
was brought back, his place was empty. “Jack’s gone, Pussy,” Edwin told
her. “I am more than half afraid he didn’t like to be charged with being the
Monster who had frightened you.” But she answered never a word, and
shivered, as if they had made her a little too cold.
Miss Twinkleton now opining that indeed these were late hours, Mrs.
Crisparkle, for finding ourselves outside the walls of the Nuns’ House, and
that we who undertook the formation of the future wives and mothers of
England (the last words in a lower voice, as requiring to be communicated in
confidence) were really bound (voice coming up again) to set a better
example than one of rakish habits, wrappers were put in requisition, and the
two young cavaliers volunteered to see the ladies home. It was soon done,
and the gate of the Nuns’ House closed upon them.
The boarders had retired, and only Mrs. Tisher in solitary vigil awaited the
new pupil. Her bedroom being within Rosa’s, very little introduction or
explanation was necessary, before she was placed in charge of her new
friend, and left for the night.
“This is a blessed relief, my dear,” said Helena. “I have been dreading all
day, that I should be brought to bay at this time.”
“There are not many of us,” returned Rosa, “and we are good-natured
girls; at least the others are; I can answer for them.”

“I can answer for you,” laughed Helena, searching the lovely little face
with her dark, fiery eyes, and tenderly caressing the small figure. “You will
be a friend to me, won’t you?”
“I hope so. But the idea of my being a friend to you seems too absurd,
though.”
“Why?”
“O, I am such a mite of a thing, and you are so womanly and handsome.
You seem to have resolution and power enough to crush me. I shrink into
nothing by the side of your presence even.”
“I am a neglected creature, my dear, unacquainted with all
accomplishments, sensitively conscious that I have everything to learn, and
deeply ashamed to own my ignorance.”
“And yet you acknowledge everything to me!” said Rosa.
“My pretty one, can I help it? There is a fascination in you.”
“O! is there though?” pouted Rosa, half in jest and half in earnest. “What
a pity Master Eddy doesn’t feel it more!”
Of course her relations towards that young gentleman had been already
imparted in Minor Canon Corner.
“Why, surely he must love you with all his heart!” cried Helena, with an
earnestness that threatened to blaze into ferocity if he didn’t.
“Eh? O, well, I suppose he does,” said Rosa, pouting again; “I am sure I
have no right to say he doesn’t. Perhaps it’s my fault. Perhaps I am not as
nice to him as I ought to be. I don’t think I am. But it is so ridiculous!”
Helena’s eyes demanded what was.
“We are,” said Rosa, answering as if she had spoken. “We are such a
ridiculous couple. And we are always quarrelling.”
“Why?”
“Because we both know we are ridiculous, my dear!” Rosa gave that
answer as if it were the most conclusive answer in the world.
Helena’s masterful look was intent upon her face for a few moments, and
then she impulsively put out both her hands and said:
“You will be my friend and help me?”
“Indeed, my dear, I will,” replied Rosa, in a tone of affectionate
childishness that went straight and true to her heart; “I will be as good a

friend as such a mite of a thing can be to such a noble creature as you. And
be a friend to me, please; I don’t understand myself: and I want a friend who
can understand me, very much indeed.”
Helena Landless kissed her, and retaining both her hands said:
“Who is Mr. Jasper?”
Rosa turned aside her head in answering: “Eddy’s uncle, and my music-
master.”
“You do not love him?”
“Ugh!” She put her hands up to her face, and shook with fear or horror.
“You know that he loves you?”
“O, don’t, don’t, don’t!” cried Rosa, dropping on her knees, and clinging
to her new resource. “Don’t tell me of it! He terrifies me. He haunts my
thoughts, like a dreadful ghost. I feel that I am never safe from him. I feel as
if he could pass in through the wall when he is spoken of.” She actually did
look round, as if she dreaded to see him standing in the shadow behind her.
“Try to tell me more about it, darling.”
“Yes, I will, I will. Because you are so strong. But hold me the while, and
stay with me afterwards.”
“My child! You speak as if he had threatened you in some dark way.”
“He has never spoken to me about—that. Never.”
“What has he done?”
“He has made a slave of me with his looks. He has forced me to
understand him, without his saying a word; and he has forced me to keep
silence, without his uttering a threat. When I play, he never moves his eyes
from my hands. When I sing, he never moves his eyes from my lips. When
he corrects me, and strikes a note, or a chord, or plays a passage, he himself
is in the sounds, whispering that he pursues me as a lover, and commanding
me to keep his secret. I avoid his eyes, but he forces me to see them without
looking at them. Even when a glaze comes over them (which is sometimes
the case), and he seems to wander away into a frightful sort of dream in
which he threatens most, he obliges me to know it, and to know that he is
sitting close at my side, more terrible to me than ever.”
“What is this imagined threatening, pretty one? What is threatened?”
“I don’t know. I have never even dared to think or wonder what it is.”

“And was this all, to-night?”
“This was all; except that to-night when he watched my lips so closely as I
was singing, besides feeling terrified I felt ashamed and passionately hurt. It
was as if he kissed me, and I couldn’t bear it, but cried out. You must never
breathe this to any one. Eddy is devoted to him. But you said to-night that
you would not be afraid of him, under any circumstances, and that gives me
—who am so much afraid of him—courage to tell only you. Hold me! Stay
with me! I am too frightened to be left by myself.”
The lustrous gipsy-face drooped over the clinging arms and bosom, and
the wild black hair fell down protectingly over the childish form. There was
a slumbering gleam of fire in the intense dark eyes, though they were then
softened with compassion and admiration. Let whomsoever it most
concerned look well to it!

CHAPTER VIII.
DAGGERS DRAWN

The two young men, having seen the damsels, their charges, enter the
courtyard of the Nuns’ House, and finding themselves coldly stared at by the
brazen door-plate, as if the battered old beau with the glass in his eye were
insolent, look at one another, look along the perspective of the moonlit
street, and slowly walk away together.
“Do you stay here long, Mr. Drood?” says Neville.
“Not this time,” is the careless answer. “I leave for London again, to-
morrow. But I shall be here, off and on, until next Midsummer; then I shall
take my leave of Cloisterham, and England too; for many a long day, I
expect.”
“Are you going abroad?”
“Going to wake up Egypt a little,” is the condescending answer.
“Are you reading?”
“Reading?” repeats Edwin Drood, with a touch of contempt. “No. Doing,
working, engineering. My small patrimony was left a part of the capital of
the Firm I am with, by my father, a former partner; and I am a charge upon
the Firm until I come of age; and then I step into my modest share in the
concern. Jack—you met him at dinner—is, until then, my guardian and
trustee.”
“I heard from Mr. Crisparkle of your other good fortune.”
“What do you mean by my other good fortune?”
Neville has made his remark in a watchfully advancing, and yet furtive
and shy manner, very expressive of that peculiar air already noticed, of being
at once hunter and hunted. Edwin has made his retort with an abruptness not
at all polite. They stop and interchange a rather heated look.

“I hope,” says Neville, “there is no offence, Mr. Drood, in my innocently
referring to your betrothal?”
“By George!” cries Edwin, leading on again at a somewhat quicker pace;
“everybody in this chattering old Cloisterham refers to it. I wonder no
public-house has been set up, with my portrait for the sign of The
Betrothed’s Head. Or Pussy’s portrait. One or the other.”
“I am not accountable for Mr. Crisparkle’s mentioning the matter to me,
quite openly,” Neville begins.
“No; that’s true; you are not,” Edwin Drood assents.
“But,” resumes Neville, “I am accountable for mentioning it to you. And I
did so, on the supposition that you could not fail to be highly proud of it.”
Now, there are these two curious touches of human nature working the
secret springs of this dialogue. Neville Landless is already enough impressed
by Little Rosebud, to feel indignant that Edwin Drood (far below her) should
hold his prize so lightly. Edwin Drood is already enough impressed by
Helena, to feel indignant that Helena’s brother (far below her) should
dispose of him so coolly, and put him out of the way so entirely.
However, the last remark had better be answered. So, says Edwin:
“I don’t know, Mr. Neville” (adopting that mode of address from Mr.
Crisparkle), “that what people are proudest of, they usually talk most about;
I don’t know either, that what they are proudest of, they most like other
people to talk about. But I live a busy life, and I speak under correction by
you readers, who ought to know everything, and I daresay do.”
By this time they had both become savage; Mr. Neville out in the open;
Edwin Drood under the transparent cover of a popular tune, and a stop now
and then to pretend to admire picturesque effects in the moonlight before
him.
“It does not seem to me very civil in you,” remarks Neville, at length, “to
reflect upon a stranger who comes here, not having had your advantages, to
try to make up for lost time. But, to be sure, I was not brought up in ‘busy
life,’ and my ideas of civility were formed among Heathens.”
“Perhaps, the best civility, whatever kind of people we are brought up
among,” retorts Edwin Drood, “is to mind our own business. If you will set
me that example, I promise to follow it.”

“Do you know that you take a great deal too much upon yourself?” is the
angry rejoinder, “and that in the part of the world I come from, you would be
called to account for it?”
“By whom, for instance?” asks Edwin Drood, coming to a halt, and
surveying the other with a look of disdain.
But, here a startling right hand is laid on Edwin’s shoulder, and Jasper
stands between them. For, it would seem that he, too, has strolled round by
the Nuns’ House, and has come up behind them on the shadowy side of the
road.
“Ned, Ned, Ned!” he says; “we must have no more of this. I don’t like
this. I have overheard high words between you two. Remember, my dear
boy, you are almost in the position of host to-night. You belong, as it were, to
the place, and in a manner represent it towards a stranger. Mr. Neville is a
stranger, and you should respect the obligations of hospitality. And, Mr.
Neville,” laying his left hand on the inner shoulder of that young gentleman,
and thus walking on between them, hand to shoulder on either side: “you
will pardon me; but I appeal to you to govern your temper too. Now, what is
amiss? But why ask! Let there be nothing amiss, and the question is
superfluous. We are all three on a good understanding, are we not?”
After a silent struggle between the two young men who shall speak last,
Edwin Drood strikes in with: “So far as I am concerned, Jack, there is no
anger in me.”
“Nor in me,” says Neville Landless, though not so freely; or perhaps so
carelessly. “But if Mr. Drood knew all that lies behind me, far away from
here, he might know better how it is that sharp-edged words have sharp
edges to wound me.”
“Perhaps,” says Jasper, in a soothing manner, “we had better not qualify
our good understanding. We had better not say anything having the
appearance of a remonstrance or condition; it might not seem generous.
Frankly and freely, you see there is no anger in Ned. Frankly and freely,
there is no anger in you, Mr. Neville?”
“None at all, Mr. Jasper.” Still, not quite so frankly or so freely; or, be it
said once again, not quite so carelessly perhaps.
“All over then! Now, my bachelor gatehouse is a few yards from here, and
the heater is on the fire, and the wine and glasses are on the table, and it is

not a stone’s throw from Minor Canon Corner. Ned, you are up and away to-
morrow. We will carry Mr. Neville in with us, to take a stirrup-cup.”
“With all my heart, Jack.”
“And with all mine, Mr. Jasper.” Neville feels it impossible to say less, but
would rather not go. He has an impression upon him that he has lost hold of
his temper; feels that Edwin Drood’s coolness, so far from being infectious,
makes him red-hot.
Mr. Jasper, still walking in the centre, hand to shoulder on either side,
beautifully turns the Refrain of a drinking song, and they all go up to his
rooms. There, the first object visible, when he adds the light of a lamp to that
of the fire, is the portrait over the chimneypiece. It is not an object calculated
to improve the understanding between the two young men, as rather
awkwardly reviving the subject of their difference. Accordingly, they both
glance at it consciously, but say nothing. Jasper, however (who would appear
from his conduct to have gained but an imperfect clue to the cause of their
late high words), directly calls attention to it.
“You recognise that picture, Mr. Neville?” shading the lamp to throw the
light upon it.
“I recognise it, but it is far from flattering the original.”
“O, you are hard upon it! It was done by Ned, who made me a present of
it.”
“I am sorry for that, Mr. Drood.” Neville apologises, with a real intention
to apologise; “if I had known I was in the artist’s presence—”
“O, a joke, sir, a mere joke,” Edwin cuts in, with a provoking yawn. “A
little humouring of Pussy’s points! I’m going to paint her gravely, one of
these days, if she’s good.”
The air of leisurely patronage and indifference with which this is said, as
the speaker throws himself back in a chair and clasps his hands at the back
of his head, as a rest for it, is very exasperating to the excitable and excited
Neville. Jasper looks observantly from the one to the other, slightly smiles,
and turns his back to mix a jug of mulled wine at the fire. It seems to require
much mixing and compounding.
“I suppose, Mr. Neville,” says Edwin, quick to resent the indignant protest
against himself in the face of young Landless, which is fully as visible as the

portrait, or the fire, or the lamp: “I suppose that if you painted the picture of
your lady love—”
“I can’t paint,” is the hasty interruption.
“That’s your misfortune, and not your fault. You would if you could. But
if you could, I suppose you would make her (no matter what she was in
reality), Juno, Minerva, Diana, and Venus, all in one. Eh?”
“I have no lady love, and I can’t say.”
“If I were to try my hand,” says Edwin, with a boyish boastfulness getting
up in him, “on a portrait of Miss Landless—in earnest, mind you; in earnest
—you should see what I could do!”
“My sister’s consent to sit for it being first got, I suppose? As it never will
be got, I am afraid I shall never see what you can do. I must bear the loss.”
Jasper turns round from the fire, fills a large goblet glass for Neville, fills
a large goblet glass for Edwin, and hands each his own; then fills for
himself, saying:
“Come, Mr. Neville, we are to drink to my nephew, Ned. As it is his foot
that is in the stirrup—metaphorically—our stirrup-cup is to be devoted to
him. Ned, my dearest fellow, my love!”
Jasper sets the example of nearly emptying his glass, and Neville follows
it. Edwin Drood says, “Thank you both very much,” and follows the double
example.
“Look at him,” cries Jasper, stretching out his hand admiringly and
tenderly, though rallyingly too. “See where he lounges so easily, Mr.
Neville! The world is all before him where to choose. A life of stirring work
and interest, a life of change and excitement, a life of domestic ease and
love! Look at him!”
Edwin Drood’s face has become quickly and remarkably flushed with the
wine; so has the face of Neville Landless. Edwin still sits thrown back in his
chair, making that rest of clasped hands for his head.
“See how little he heeds it all!” Jasper proceeds in a bantering vein. “It is
hardly worth his while to pluck the golden fruit that hangs ripe on the tree
for him. And yet consider the contrast, Mr. Neville. You and I have no
prospect of stirring work and interest, or of change and excitement, or of
domestic ease and love. You and I have no prospect (unless you are more

fortunate than I am, which may easily be), but the tedious unchanging round
of this dull place.”
“Upon my soul, Jack,” says Edwin, complacently, “I feel quite apologetic
for having my way smoothed as you describe. But you know what I know,
Jack, and it may not be so very easy as it seems, after all. May it, Pussy?” To
the portrait, with a snap of his thumb and finger. “We have got to hit it off
yet; haven’t we, Pussy? You know what I mean, Jack.”

On dangerous ground

His speech has become thick and indistinct. Jasper, quiet and self-
possessed, looks to Neville, as expecting his answer or comment. When
Neville speaks, his speech is also thick and indistinct.
“It might have been better for Mr. Drood to have known some hardships,”
he says, defiantly.
“Pray,” retorts Edwin, turning merely his eyes in that direction, “pray why
might it have been better for Mr. Drood to have known some hardships?”
“Ay,” Jasper assents, with an air of interest; “let us know why?”
“Because they might have made him more sensible,” says Neville, “of
good fortune that is not by any means necessarily the result of his own

merits.”
Mr. Jasper quickly looks to his nephew for his rejoinder.
“Have you known hardships, may I ask?” says Edwin Drood, sitting
upright.
Mr. Jasper quickly looks to the other for his retort.
“I have.”
“And what have they made you sensible of?”
Mr. Jasper’s play of eyes between the two holds good throughout the
dialogue, to the end.
“I have told you once before to-night.”
“You have done nothing of the sort.”
“I tell you I have. That you take a great deal too much upon yourself.”
“You added something else to that, if I remember?”
“Yes, I did say something else.”
“Say it again.”
“I said that in the part of the world I come from, you would be called to
account for it.”
“Only there?” cries Edwin Drood, with a contemptuous laugh. “A long
way off, I believe? Yes; I see! That part of the world is at a safe distance.”
“Say here, then,” rejoins the other, rising in a fury. “Say anywhere! Your
vanity is intolerable, your conceit is beyond endurance; you talk as if you
were some rare and precious prize, instead of a common boaster. You are a
common fellow, and a common boaster.”
“Pooh, pooh,” says Edwin Drood, equally furious, but more collected;
“how should you know? You may know a black common fellow, or a black
common boaster, when you see him (and no doubt you have a large
acquaintance that way); but you are no judge of white men.”
This insulting allusion to his dark skin infuriates Neville to that violent
degree, that he flings the dregs of his wine at Edwin Drood, and is in the act
of flinging the goblet after it, when his arm is caught in the nick of time by
Jasper.
“Ned, my dear fellow!” he cries in a loud voice; “I entreat you, I
command you, to be still!” There has been a rush of all the three, and a

clattering of glasses and overturning of chairs. “Mr. Neville, for shame! Give
this glass to me. Open your hand, sir. I WILL have it!”
But Neville throws him off, and pauses for an instant, in a raging passion,
with the goblet yet in his uplifted hand. Then, he dashes it down under the
grate, with such force that the broken splinters fly out again in a shower; and
he leaves the house.
When he first emerges into the night air, nothing around him is still or
steady; nothing around him shows like what it is; he only knows that he
stands with a bare head in the midst of a blood-red whirl, waiting to be
struggled with, and to struggle to the death.
But, nothing happening, and the moon looking down upon him as if he
were dead after a fit of wrath, he holds his steam-hammer beating head and
heart, and staggers away. Then, he becomes half-conscious of having heard
himself bolted and barred out, like a dangerous animal; and thinks what shall
he do?
Some wildly passionate ideas of the river dissolve under the spell of the
moonlight on the Cathedral and the graves, and the remembrance of his
sister, and the thought of what he owes to the good man who has but that
very day won his confidence and given him his pledge. He repairs to Minor
Canon Corner, and knocks softly at the door.
It is Mr. Crisparkle’s custom to sit up last of the early household, very
softly touching his piano and practising his favourite parts in concerted vocal
music. The south wind that goes where it lists, by way of Minor Canon
Corner on a still night, is not more subdued than Mr. Crisparkle at such
times, regardful of the slumbers of the china shepherdess.
His knock is immediately answered by Mr. Crisparkle himself. When he
opens the door, candle in hand, his cheerful face falls, and disappointed
amazement is in it.
“Mr. Neville! In this disorder! Where have you been?”
“I have been to Mr. Jasper’s, sir. With his nephew.”
“Come in.”
The Minor Canon props him by the elbow with a strong hand (in a strictly
scientific manner, worthy of his morning trainings), and turns him into his
own little book-room, and shuts the door.
“I have begun ill, sir. I have begun dreadfully ill.”

“Too true. You are not sober, Mr. Neville.”
“I am afraid I am not, sir, though I can satisfy you at another time that I
have had a very little indeed to drink, and that it overcame me in the
strangest and most sudden manner.”
“Mr. Neville, Mr. Neville,” says the Minor Canon, shaking his head with a
sorrowful smile; “I have heard that said before.”
“I think—my mind is much confused, but I think—it is equally true of Mr.
Jasper’s nephew, sir.”
“Very likely,” is the dry rejoinder.
“We quarrelled, sir. He insulted me most grossly. He had heated that
tigerish blood I told you of to-day, before then.”
“Mr. Neville,” rejoins the Minor Canon, mildly, but firmly: “I request you
not to speak to me with that clenched right hand. Unclench it, if you please.”
“He goaded me, sir,” pursues the young man, instantly obeying, “beyond
my power of endurance. I cannot say whether or no he meant it at first, but
he did it. He certainly meant it at last. In short, sir,” with an irrepressible
outburst, “in the passion into which he lashed me, I would have cut him
down if I could, and I tried to do it.”
“You have clenched that hand again,” is Mr. Crisparkle’s quiet
commentary.
“I beg your pardon, sir.”
“You know your room, for I showed it you before dinner; but I will
accompany you to it once more. Your arm, if you please. Softly, for the
house is all a-bed.”
Scooping his hand into the same scientific elbow-rest as before, and
backing it up with the inert strength of his arm, as skilfully as a Police
Expert, and with an apparent repose quite unattainable by novices, Mr.
Crisparkle conducts his pupil to the pleasant and orderly old room prepared
for him. Arrived there, the young man throws himself into a chair, and,
flinging his arms upon his reading-table, rests his head upon them with an air
of wretched self-reproach.
The gentle Minor Canon has had it in his thoughts to leave the room,
without a word. But looking round at the door, and seeing this dejected
figure, he turns back to it, touches it with a mild hand, says “Good night!” A

sob is his only acknowledgment. He might have had many a worse; perhaps,
could have had few better.
Another soft knock at the outer door attracts his attention as he goes
down-stairs. He opens it to Mr. Jasper, holding in his hand the pupil’s hat.
“We have had an awful scene with him,” says Jasper, in a low voice.
“Has it been so bad as that?”
“Murderous!”
Mr. Crisparkle remonstrates: “No, no, no. Do not use such strong words.”
“He might have laid my dear boy dead at my feet. It is no fault of his, that
he did not. But that I was, through the mercy of God, swift and strong with
him, he would have cut him down on my hearth.”
The phrase smites home. “Ah!” thinks Mr. Crisparkle, “his own words!”
“Seeing what I have seen to-night, and hearing what I have heard,” adds
Jasper, with great earnestness, “I shall never know peace of mind when there
is danger of those two coming together, with no one else to interfere. It was
horrible. There is something of the tiger in his dark blood.”
“Ah!” thinks Mr. Crisparkle, “so he said!”
“You, my dear sir,” pursues Jasper, taking his hand, “even you, have
accepted a dangerous charge.”
“You need have no fear for me, Jasper,” returns Mr. Crisparkle, with a
quiet smile. “I have none for myself.”
“I have none for myself,” returns Jasper, with an emphasis on the last
pronoun, “because I am not, nor am I in the way of being, the object of his
hostility. But you may be, and my dear boy has been. Good night!”
Mr. Crisparkle goes in, with the hat that has so easily, so almost
imperceptibly, acquired the right to be hung up in his hall; hangs it up; and
goes thoughtfully to bed.

CHAPTER IX.
BIRDS IN THE BUSH

Rosa, having no relation that she knew of in the world, had, from the
seventh year of her age, known no home but the Nuns’ House, and no
mother but Miss Twinkleton. Her remembrance of her own mother was of a
pretty little creature like herself (not much older than herself it seemed to
her), who had been brought home in her father’s arms, drowned. The fatal
accident had happened at a party of pleasure. Every fold and colour in the
pretty summer dress, and even the long wet hair, with scattered petals of
ruined flowers still clinging to it, as the dead young figure, in its sad, sad
beauty lay upon the bed, were fixed indelibly in Rosa’s recollection. So
were the wild despair and the subsequent bowed-down grief of her poor
young father, who died broken-hearted on the first anniversary of that hard
day.
The betrothal of Rosa grew out of the soothing of his year of mental
distress by his fast friend and old college companion, Drood: who likewise
had been left a widower in his youth. But he, too, went the silent road into
which all earthly pilgrimages merge, some sooner, and some later; and thus
the young couple had come to be as they were.
The atmosphere of pity surrounding the little orphan girl when she first
came to Cloisterham, had never cleared away. It had taken brighter hues as
she grew older, happier, prettier; now it had been golden, now roseate, and
now azure; but it had always adorned her with some soft light of its own.
The general desire to console and caress her, had caused her to be treated in
the beginning as a child much younger than her years; the same desire had
caused her to be still petted when she was a child no longer. Who should be
her favourite, who should anticipate this or that small present, or do her this
or that small service; who should take her home for the holidays; who
should write to her the oftenest when they were separated, and whom she

would most rejoice to see again when they were reunited; even these gentle
rivalries were not without their slight dashes of bitterness in the Nuns’
House. Well for the poor Nuns in their day, if they hid no harder strife under
their veils and rosaries!
Thus Rosa had grown to be an amiable, giddy, wilful, winning little
creature; spoilt, in the sense of counting upon kindness from all around her;
but not in the sense of repaying it with indifference. Possessing an
exhaustless well of affection in her nature, its sparkling waters had
freshened and brightened the Nuns’ House for years, and yet its depths had
never yet been moved: what might betide when that came to pass; what
developing changes might fall upon the heedless head, and light heart, then;
remained to be seen.
By what means the news that there had been a quarrel between the two
young men overnight, involving even some kind of onslaught by Mr.
Neville upon Edwin Drood, got into Miss Twinkleton’s establishment
before breakfast, it is impossible to say. Whether it was brought in by the
birds of the air, or came blowing in with the very air itself, when the
casement windows were set open; whether the baker brought it kneaded
into the bread, or the milkman delivered it as part of the adulteration of his
milk; or the housemaids, beating the dust out of their mats against the
gateposts, received it in exchange deposited on the mats by the town
atmosphere; certain it is that the news permeated every gable of the old
building before Miss Twinkleton was down, and that Miss Twinkleton
herself received it through Mrs. Tisher, while yet in the act of dressing; or
(as she might have expressed the phrase to a parent or guardian of a
mythological turn) of sacrificing to the Graces.
Miss Landless’s brother had thrown a bottle at Mr. Edwin Drood.
Miss Landless’s brother had thrown a knife at Mr. Edwin Drood.
A knife became suggestive of a fork; and Miss Landless’s brother had
thrown a fork at Mr. Edwin Drood.
As in the governing precedence of Peter Piper, alleged to have picked the
peck of pickled pepper, it was held physically desirable to have evidence of
the existence of the peck of pickled pepper which Peter Piper was alleged to
have picked; so, in this case, it was held psychologically important to know
why Miss Landless’s brother threw a bottle, knife, or fork—or bottle, knife,

and fork—for the cook had been given to understand it was all three—at
Mr. Edwin Drood?
Well, then. Miss Landless’s brother had said he admired Miss Bud. Mr.
Edwin Drood had said to Miss Landless’s brother that he had no business to
admire Miss Bud. Miss Landless’s brother had then “up’d” (this was the
cook’s exact information) with the bottle, knife, fork, and decanter (the
decanter now coolly flying at everybody’s head, without the least
introduction), and thrown them all at Mr. Edwin Drood.
Poor little Rosa put a forefinger into each of her ears when these rumours
began to circulate, and retired into a corner, beseeching not to be told any
more; but Miss Landless, begging permission of Miss Twinkleton to go and
speak with her brother, and pretty plainly showing that she would take it if
it were not given, struck out the more definite course of going to Mr.
Crisparkle’s for accurate intelligence.
When she came back (being first closeted with Miss Twinkleton, in order
that anything objectionable in her tidings might be retained by that discreet
filter), she imparted to Rosa only, what had taken place; dwelling with a
flushed cheek on the provocation her brother had received, but almost
limiting it to that last gross affront as crowning “some other words between
them,” and, out of consideration for her new friend, passing lightly over the
fact that the other words had originated in her lover’s taking things in
general so very easily. To Rosa direct, she brought a petition from her
brother that she would forgive him; and, having delivered it with sisterly
earnestness, made an end of the subject.
It was reserved for Miss Twinkleton to tone down the public mind of the
Nuns’ House. That lady, therefore, entering in a stately manner what
plebeians might have called the school-room, but what, in the patrician
language of the head of the Nuns’ House, was euphuistically, not to say
round-aboutedly, denominated “the apartment allotted to study,” and saying
with a forensic air, “Ladies!” all rose. Mrs. Tisher at the same time grouped
herself behind her chief, as representing Queen Elizabeth’s first historical
female friend at Tilbury fort. Miss Twinkleton then proceeded to remark
that Rumour, Ladies, had been represented by the bard of Avon—needless
were it to mention the immortal SHAKESPEARE, also called the Swan of his
native river, not improbably with some reference to the ancient superstition
that that bird of graceful plumage (Miss Jennings will please stand upright)

sang sweetly on the approach of death, for which we have no ornithological
authority,—Rumour, Ladies, had been represented by that bard—hem!—
“who drew
The celebrated Jew,”

as painted full of tongues. Rumour in Cloisterham (Miss Ferdinand will
honour me with her attention) was no exception to the great limner’s
portrait of Rumour elsewhere. A slight fracas between two young
gentlemen occurring last night within a hundred miles of these peaceful
walls (Miss Ferdinand, being apparently incorrigible, will have the kindness
to write out this evening, in the original language, the first four fables of our
vivacious neighbour, Monsieur La Fontaine) had been very grossly
exaggerated by Rumour’s voice. In the first alarm and anxiety arising from
our sympathy with a sweet young friend, not wholly to be dissociated from
one of the gladiators in the bloodless arena in question (the impropriety of
Miss Reynolds’s appearing to stab herself in the hand with a pin, is far too
obvious, and too glaringly unladylike, to be pointed out), we descended
from our maiden elevation to discuss this uncongenial and this unfit theme.
Responsible inquiries having assured us that it was but one of those “airy
nothings” pointed at by the Poet (whose name and date of birth Miss
Giggles will supply within half an hour), we would now discard the subject,
and concentrate our minds upon the grateful labours of the day.
But the subject so survived all day, nevertheless, that Miss Ferdinand got
into new trouble by surreptitiously clapping on a paper moustache at
dinner-time, and going through the motions of aiming a water-bottle at Miss
Giggles, who drew a table-spoon in defence.
Now, Rosa thought of this unlucky quarrel a great deal, and thought of it
with an uncomfortable feeling that she was involved in it, as cause, or
consequence, or what not, through being in a false position altogether as to
her marriage engagement. Never free from such uneasiness when she was
with her affianced husband, it was not likely that she would be free from it
when they were apart. To-day, too, she was cast in upon herself, and
deprived of the relief of talking freely with her new friend, because the
quarrel had been with Helena’s brother, and Helena undisguisedly avoided
the subject as a delicate and difficult one to herself. At this critical time, of
all times, Rosa’s guardian was announced as having come to see her.

Mr. Grewgious had been well selected for his trust, as a man of
incorruptible integrity, but certainly for no other appropriate quality
discernible on the surface. He was an arid, sandy man, who, if he had been
put into a grinding-mill, looked as if he would have ground immediately
into high-dried snuff. He had a scanty flat crop of hair, in colour and
consistency like some very mangy yellow fur tippet; it was so unlike hair,
that it must have been a wig, but for the stupendous improbability of
anybody’s voluntarily sporting such a head. The little play of feature that
his face presented, was cut deep into it, in a few hard curves that made it
more like work; and he had certain notches in his forehead, which looked as
though Nature had been about to touch them into sensibility or refinement,
when she had impatiently thrown away the chisel, and said: “I really cannot
be worried to finish off this man; let him go as he is.”
With too great length of throat at his upper end, and too much ankle-bone
and heel at his lower; with an awkward and hesitating manner; with a
shambling walk; and with what is called a near sight—which perhaps
prevented his observing how much white cotton stocking he displayed to
the public eye, in contrast with his black suit—Mr. Grewgious still had
some strange capacity in him of making on the whole an agreeable
impression.
Mr. Grewgious was discovered by his ward, much discomfited by being
in Miss Twinkleton’s company in Miss Twinkleton’s own sacred room. Dim
forebodings of being examined in something, and not coming well out of it,
seemed to oppress the poor gentleman when found in these circumstances.
“My dear, how do you do? I am glad to see you. My dear, how much
improved you are. Permit me to hand you a chair, my dear.”
Miss Twinkleton rose at her little writing-table, saying, with general
sweetness, as to the polite Universe: “Will you permit me to retire?”
“By no means, madam, on my account. I beg that you will not move.”
“I must entreat permission to move,” returned Miss Twinkleton, repeating
the word with a charming grace; “but I will not withdraw, since you are so
obliging. If I wheel my desk to this corner window, shall I be in the way?”
“Madam! In the way!”
“You are very kind.—Rosa, my dear, you will be under no restraint, I am
sure.”

Here Mr. Grewgious, left by the fire with Rosa, said again: “My dear,
how do you do? I am glad to see you, my dear.” And having waited for her
to sit down, sat down himself.
“My visits,” said Mr. Grewgious, “are, like those of the angels—not that
I compare myself to an angel.”
“No, sir,” said Rosa.
“Not by any means,” assented Mr. Grewgious. “I merely refer to my
visits, which are few and far between. The angels are, we know very well,
up-stairs.”
Miss Twinkleton looked round with a kind of stiff stare.
“I refer, my dear,” said Mr. Grewgious, laying his hand on Rosa’s, as the
possibility thrilled through his frame of his otherwise seeming to take the
awful liberty of calling Miss Twinkleton my dear; “I refer to the other
young ladies.”
Miss Twinkleton resumed her writing.
Mr. Grewgious, with a sense of not having managed his opening point
quite as neatly as he might have desired, smoothed his head from back to
front as if he had just dived, and were pressing the water out—this
smoothing action, however superfluous, was habitual with him—and took a
pocket-book from his coat-pocket, and a stump of black-lead pencil from
his waistcoat-pocket.
“I made,” he said, turning the leaves: “I made a guiding memorandum or
so—as I usually do, for I have no conversational powers whatever—to
which I will, with your permission, my dear, refer. ‘Well and happy.’ Truly.
You are well and happy, my dear? You look so.”
“Yes, indeed, sir,” answered Rosa.
“For which,” said Mr. Grewgious, with a bend of his head towards the
corner window, “our warmest acknowledgments are due, and I am sure are
rendered, to the maternal kindness and the constant care and consideration
of the lady whom I have now the honour to see before me.”
This point, again, made but a lame departure from Mr. Grewgious, and
never got to its destination; for, Miss Twinkleton, feeling that the courtesies
required her to be by this time quite outside the conversation, was biting the
end of her pen, and looking upward, as waiting for the descent of an idea
from any member of the Celestial Nine who might have one to spare.

Mr. Grewgious smoothed his smooth head again, and then made another
reference to his pocket-book; lining out “well and happy,” as disposed of.
“‘Pounds, shillings, and pence,’ is my next note. A dry subject for a
young lady, but an important subject too. Life is pounds, shillings, and
pence. Death is—” A sudden recollection of the death of her two parents
seemed to stop him, and he said in a softer tone, and evidently inserting the
negative as an after-thought: “Death is not pounds, shillings, and pence.”
His voice was as hard and dry as himself, and Fancy might have ground
it straight, like himself, into high-dried snuff. And yet, through the very
limited means of expression that he possessed, he seemed to express
kindness. If Nature had but finished him off, kindness might have been
recognisable in his face at this moment. But if the notches in his forehead
wouldn’t fuse together, and if his face would work and couldn’t play, what
could he do, poor man!
“‘Pounds, shillings, and pence.’ You find your allowance always
sufficient for your wants, my dear?”
Rosa wanted for nothing, and therefore it was ample.
“And you are not in debt?”
Rosa laughed at the idea of being in debt. It seemed, to her inexperience,
a comical vagary of the imagination. Mr. Grewgious stretched his near sight
to be sure that this was her view of the case. “Ah!” he said, as comment,
with a furtive glance towards Miss Twinkleton, and lining out pounds,
shillings, and pence: “I spoke of having got among the angels! So I did!”
Rosa felt what his next memorandum would prove to be, and was
blushing and folding a crease in her dress with one embarrassed hand, long
before he found it.
“‘Marriage.’ Hem!” Mr. Grewgious carried his smoothing hand down
over his eyes and nose, and even chin, before drawing his chair a little
nearer, and speaking a little more confidentially: “I now touch, my dear,
upon the point that is the direct cause of my troubling you with the present
visit. Otherwise, being a particularly Angular man, I should not have
intruded here. I am the last man to intrude into a sphere for which I am so
entirely unfitted. I feel, on these premises, as if I was a bear—with the
cramp—in a youthful Cotillon.”

His ungainliness gave him enough of the air of his simile to set Rosa off
laughing heartily.
“It strikes you in the same light,” said Mr. Grewgious, with perfect
calmness. “Just so. To return to my memorandum. Mr. Edwin has been to
and fro here, as was arranged. You have mentioned that, in your quarterly
letters to me. And you like him, and he likes you.”
“I like him very much, sir,” rejoined Rosa.
“So I said, my dear,” returned her guardian, for whose ear the timid
emphasis was much too fine. “Good. And you correspond.”
“We write to one another,” said Rosa, pouting, as she recalled their
epistolary differences.
“Such is the meaning that I attach to the word ‘correspond’ in this
application, my dear,” said Mr. Grewgious. “Good. All goes well, time
works on, and at this next Christmas-time it will become necessary, as a
matter of form, to give the exemplary lady in the corner window, to whom
we are so much indebted, business notice of your departure in the ensuing
half-year. Your relations with her are far more than business relations, no
doubt; but a residue of business remains in them, and business is business
ever. I am a particularly Angular man,” proceeded Mr. Grewgious, as if it
suddenly occurred to him to mention it, “and I am not used to give anything
away. If, for these two reasons, some competent Proxy would give you
away, I should take it very kindly.”
Rosa intimated, with her eyes on the ground, that she thought a substitute
might be found, if required.
“Surely, surely,” said Mr. Grewgious. “For instance, the gentleman who
teaches Dancing here—he would know how to do it with graceful propriety.
He would advance and retire in a manner satisfactory to the feelings of the
officiating clergyman, and of yourself, and the bridegroom, and all parties
concerned. I am—I am a particularly Angular man,” said Mr. Grewgious, as
if he had made up his mind to screw it out at last: “and should only
blunder.”
Rosa sat still and silent. Perhaps her mind had not got quite so far as the
ceremony yet, but was lagging on the way there.
“Memorandum, ‘Will.’ Now, my dear,” said Mr. Grewgious, referring to
his notes, disposing of “Marriage” with his pencil, and taking a paper from

his pocket; “although I have before possessed you with the contents of your
father’s will, I think it right at this time to leave a certified copy of it in your
hands. And although Mr. Edwin is also aware of its contents, I think it right
at this time likewise to place a certified copy of it in Mr. Jasper’s hand—”
“Not in his own!” asked Rosa, looking up quickly. “Cannot the copy go
to Eddy himself?”
“Why, yes, my dear, if you particularly wish it; but I spoke of Mr. Jasper
as being his trustee.”
“I do particularly wish it, if you please,” said Rosa, hurriedly and
earnestly; “I don’t like Mr. Jasper to come between us, in any way.”
“It is natural, I suppose,” said Mr. Grewgious, “that your young husband
should be all in all. Yes. You observe that I say, I suppose. The fact is, I am
a particularly Unnatural man, and I don’t know from my own knowledge.”
Rosa looked at him with some wonder.
“I mean,” he explained, “that young ways were never my ways. I was the
only offspring of parents far advanced in life, and I half believe I was born
advanced in life myself. No personality is intended towards the name you
will so soon change, when I remark that while the general growth of people
seem to have come into existence, buds, I seem to have come into existence
a chip. I was a chip—and a very dry one—when I first became aware of
myself. Respecting the other certified copy, your wish shall be complied
with. Respecting your inheritance, I think you know all. It is an annuity of
two hundred and fifty pounds. The savings upon that annuity, and some
other items to your credit, all duly carried to account, with vouchers, will
place you in possession of a lump-sum of money, rather exceeding
Seventeen Hundred Pounds. I am empowered to advance the cost of your
preparations for your marriage out of that fund. All is told.”
“Will you please tell me,” said Rosa, taking the paper with a prettily
knitted brow, but not opening it: “whether I am right in what I am going to
say? I can understand what you tell me, so very much better than what I
read in law-writings. My poor papa and Eddy’s father made their agreement
together, as very dear and firm and fast friends, in order that we, too, might
be very dear and firm and fast friends after them?”
“Just so.”

“For the lasting good of both of us, and the lasting happiness of both of
us?”
“Just so.”
“That we might be to one another even much more than they had been to
one another?”
“Just so.”
“It was not bound upon Eddy, and it was not bound upon me, by any
forfeit, in case—”
“Don’t be agitated, my dear. In the case that it brings tears into your
affectionate eyes even to picture to yourself—in the case of your not
marrying one another—no, no forfeiture on either side. You would then
have been my ward until you were of age. No worse would have befallen
you. Bad enough perhaps!”
“And Eddy?”
“He would have come into his partnership derived from his father, and
into its arrears to his credit (if any), on attaining his majority, just as now.”
Rosa, with her perplexed face and knitted brow, bit the corner of her
attested copy, as she sat with her head on one side, looking abstractedly on
the floor, and smoothing it with her foot.
“In short,” said Mr. Grewgious, “this betrothal is a wish, a sentiment, a
friendly project, tenderly expressed on both sides. That it was strongly felt,
and that there was a lively hope that it would prosper, there can be no doubt.
When you were both children, you began to be accustomed to it, and it has
prospered. But circumstances alter cases; and I made this visit to-day,
partly, indeed principally, to discharge myself of the duty of telling you, my
dear, that two young people can only be betrothed in marriage (except as a
matter of convenience, and therefore mockery and misery) of their own free
will, their own attachment, and their own assurance (it may or it may not
prove a mistaken one, but we must take our chance of that), that they are
suited to each other, and will make each other happy. Is it to be supposed,
for example, that if either of your fathers were living now, and had any
mistrust on that subject, his mind would not be changed by the change of
circumstances involved in the change of your years? Untenable,
unreasonable, inconclusive, and preposterous!”

Mr. Grewgious said all this, as if he were reading it aloud; or, still more,
as if he were repeating a lesson. So expressionless of any approach to
spontaneity were his face and manner.
“I have now, my dear,” he added, blurring out “Will” with his pencil,
“discharged myself of what is doubtless a formal duty in this case, but still a
duty in such a case. Memorandum, ‘Wishes.’ My dear, is there any wish of
yours that I can further?”
Rosa shook her head, with an almost plaintive air of hesitation in want of
help.
“Is there any instruction that I can take from you with reference to your
affairs?”
“I—I should like to settle them with Eddy first, if you please,” said Rosa,
plaiting the crease in her dress.
“Surely, surely,” returned Mr. Grewgious. “You two should be of one
mind in all things. Is the young gentleman expected shortly?”
“He has gone away only this morning. He will be back at Christmas.”
“Nothing could happen better. You will, on his return at Christmas,
arrange all matters of detail with him; you will then communicate with me;
and I will discharge myself (as a mere business acquaintance) of my
business responsibilities towards the accomplished lady in the corner
window. They will accrue at that season.” Blurring pencil once again.
“Memorandum, ‘Leave.’ Yes. I will now, my dear, take my leave.”
“Could I,” said Rosa, rising, as he jerked out of his chair in his ungainly
way: “could I ask you, most kindly to come to me at Christmas, if I had
anything particular to say to you?”
“Why, certainly, certainly,” he rejoined; apparently—if such a word can
be used of one who had no apparent lights or shadows about him—
complimented by the question. “As a particularly Angular man, I do not fit
smoothly into the social circle, and consequently I have no other
engagement at Christmas-time than to partake, on the twenty-fifth, of a
boiled turkey and celery sauce with a—with a particularly Angular clerk I
have the good fortune to possess, whose father, being a Norfolk farmer,
sends him up (the turkey up), as a present to me, from the neighbourhood of
Norwich. I should be quite proud of your wishing to see me, my dear. As a

professional Receiver of rents, so very few people do wish to see me, that
the novelty would be bracing.”
For his ready acquiescence, the grateful Rosa put her hands upon his
shoulders, stood on tiptoe, and instantly kissed him.
“Lord bless me!” cried Mr. Grewgious. “Thank you, my dear! The
honour is almost equal to the pleasure. Miss Twinkleton, madam, I have had
a most satisfactory conversation with my ward, and I will now release you
from the incumbrance of my presence.”
“Nay, sir,” rejoined Miss Twinkleton, rising with a gracious
condescension: “say not incumbrance. Not so, by any means. I cannot
permit you to say so.”
“Thank you, madam. I have read in the newspapers,” said Mr.
Grewgious, stammering a little, “that when a distinguished visitor (not that I
am one: far from it) goes to a school (not that this is one: far from it), he
asks for a holiday, or some sort of grace. It being now the afternoon in the
—College—of which you are the eminent head, the young ladies might
gain nothing, except in name, by having the rest of the day allowed them.
But if there is any young lady at all under a cloud, might I solicit—”
“Ah, Mr. Grewgious, Mr. Grewgious!” cried Miss Twinkleton, with a
chastely-rallying forefinger. “O you gentlemen, you gentlemen! Fie for
shame, that you are so hard upon us poor maligned disciplinarians of our
sex, for your sakes! But as Miss Ferdinand is at present weighed down by
an incubus”—Miss Twinkleton might have said a pen-and-ink-ubus of
writing out Monsieur La Fontaine—“go to her, Rosa my dear, and tell her
the penalty is remitted, in deference to the intercession of your guardian,
Mr. Grewgious.”
Miss Twinkleton here achieved a curtsey, suggestive of marvels
happening to her respected legs, and which she came out of nobly, three
yards behind her starting-point.
As he held it incumbent upon him to call on Mr. Jasper before leaving
Cloisterham, Mr. Grewgious went to the gatehouse, and climbed its postern
stair. But Mr. Jasper’s door being closed, and presenting on a slip of paper
the word “Cathedral,” the fact of its being service-time was borne into the
mind of Mr. Grewgious. So he descended the stair again, and, crossing the
Close, paused at the great western folding-door of the Cathedral, which

stood open on the fine and bright, though short-lived, afternoon, for the
airing of the place.
“Dear me,” said Mr. Grewgious, peeping in, “it’s like looking down the
throat of Old Time.”
Old Time heaved a mouldy sigh from tomb and arch and vault; and
gloomy shadows began to deepen in corners; and damps began to rise from
green patches of stone; and jewels, cast upon the pavement of the nave from
stained glass by the declining sun, began to perish. Within the grill-gate of
the chancel, up the steps surmounted loomingly by the fast-darkening
organ, white robes could be dimly seen, and one feeble voice, rising and
falling in a cracked, monotonous mutter, could at intervals be faintly heard.
In the free outer air, the river, the green pastures, and the brown arable
lands, the teeming hills and dales, were reddened by the sunset: while the
distant little windows in windmills and farm homesteads, shone, patches of
bright beaten gold. In the Cathedral, all became gray, murky, and
sepulchral, and the cracked monotonous mutter went on like a dying voice,
until the organ and the choir burst forth, and drowned it in a sea of music.
Then, the sea fell, and the dying voice made another feeble effort, and then
the sea rose high, and beat its life out, and lashed the roof, and surged
among the arches, and pierced the heights of the great tower; and then the
sea was dry, and all was still.
Mr. Grewgious had by that time walked to the chancel-steps, where he
met the living waters coming out.
“Nothing is the matter?” Thus Jasper accosted him, rather quickly. “You
have not been sent for?”
“Not at all, not at all. I came down of my own accord. I have been to my
pretty ward’s, and am now homeward bound again.”
“You found her thriving?”
“Blooming indeed. Most blooming. I merely came to tell her, seriously,
what a betrothal by deceased parents is.”
“And what is it—according to your judgment?”
Mr. Grewgious noticed the whiteness of the lips that asked the question,
and put it down to the chilling account of the Cathedral.
“I merely came to tell her that it could not be considered binding, against
any such reason for its dissolution as a want of affection, or want of

disposition to carry it into effect, on the side of either party.”
“May I ask, had you any especial reason for telling her that?”
Mr. Grewgious answered somewhat sharply: “The especial reason of
doing my duty, sir. Simply that.” Then he added: “Come, Mr. Jasper; I know
your affection for your nephew, and that you are quick to feel on his behalf.
I assure you that this implies not the least doubt of, or disrespect to, your
nephew.”
“You could not,” returned Jasper, with a friendly pressure of his arm, as
they walked on side by side, “speak more handsomely.”
Mr. Grewgious pulled off his hat to smooth his head, and, having
smoothed it, nodded it contentedly, and put his hat on again.
“I will wager,” said Jasper, smiling—his lips were still so white that he
was conscious of it, and bit and moistened them while speaking: “I will
wager that she hinted no wish to be released from Ned.”
“And you will win your wager, if you do,” retorted Mr. Grewgious. “We
should allow some margin for little maidenly delicacies in a young
motherless creature, under such circumstances, I suppose; it is not in my
line; what do you think?”
“There can be no doubt of it.”
“I am glad you say so. Because,” proceeded Mr. Grewgious, who had all
this time very knowingly felt his way round to action on his remembrance
of what she had said of Jasper himself: “because she seems to have some
little delicate instinct that all preliminary arrangements had best be made
between Mr. Edwin Drood and herself, don’t you see? She don’t want us,
don’t you know?”
Jasper touched himself on the breast, and said, somewhat indistinctly:
“You mean me.”
Mr. Grewgious touched himself on the breast, and said: “I mean us.
Therefore, let them have their little discussions and councils together, when
Mr. Edwin Drood comes back here at Christmas; and then you and I will
step in, and put the final touches to the business.”
“So, you settled with her that you would come back at Christmas?”
observed Jasper. “I see! Mr. Grewgious, as you quite fairly said just now,
there is such an exceptional attachment between my nephew and me, that I
am more sensitive for the dear, fortunate, happy, happy fellow than for

myself. But it is only right that the young lady should be considered, as you
have pointed out, and that I should accept my cue from you. I accept it. I
understand that at Christmas they will complete their preparations for May,
and that their marriage will be put in final train by themselves, and that
nothing will remain for us but to put ourselves in train also, and have
everything ready for our formal release from our trusts, on Edwin’s
birthday.”
“That is my understanding,” assented Mr. Grewgious, as they shook
hands to part. “God bless them both!”
“God save them both!” cried Jasper.
“I said, bless them,” remarked the former, looking back over his shoulder.
“I said, save them,” returned the latter. “Is there any difference?”

CHAPTER X.
SMOOTHING THE WAY

It has been often enough remarked that women have a curious power of
divining the characters of men, which would seem to be innate and
instinctive; seeing that it is arrived at through no patient process of
reasoning, that it can give no satisfactory or sufficient account of itself, and
that it pronounces in the most confident manner even against accumulated
observation on the part of the other sex. But it has not been quite so often
remarked that this power (fallible, like every other human attribute) is for the
most part absolutely incapable of self-revision; and that when it has
delivered an adverse opinion which by all human lights is subsequently
proved to have failed, it is undistinguishable from prejudice, in respect of its
determination not to be corrected. Nay, the very possibility of contradiction
or disproof, however remote, communicates to this feminine judgment from
the first, in nine cases out of ten, the weakness attendant on the testimony of
an interested witness; so personally and strongly does the fair diviner
connect herself with her divination.
“Now, don’t you think, Ma dear,” said the Minor Canon to his mother one
day as she sat at her knitting in his little book-room, “that you are rather hard
on Mr. Neville?”
“No, I do not, Sept,” returned the old lady.
“Let us discuss it, Ma.”
“I have no objection to discuss it, Sept. I trust, my dear, I am always open
to discussion.” There was a vibration in the old lady’s cap, as though she
internally added: “and I should like to see the discussion that would change
my mind!”
“Very good, Ma,” said her conciliatory son. “There is nothing like being
open to discussion.”
“I hope not, my dear,” returned the old lady, evidently shut to it.

“Well! Mr. Neville, on that unfortunate occasion, commits himself under
provocation.”
“And under mulled wine,” added the old lady.
“I must admit the wine. Though I believe the two young men were much
alike in that regard.”
“I don’t,” said the old lady.
“Why not, Ma?”
“Because I don’t,” said the old lady. “Still, I am quite open to discussion.”
“But, my dear Ma, I cannot see how we are to discuss, if you take that
line.”
“Blame Mr. Neville for it, Sept, and not me,” said the old lady, with
stately severity.
“My dear Ma! why Mr. Neville?”
“Because,” said Mrs. Crisparkle, retiring on first principles, “he came
home intoxicated, and did great discredit to this house, and showed great
disrespect to this family.”
“That is not to be denied, Ma. He was then, and he is now, very sorry for
it.”
“But for Mr. Jasper’s well-bred consideration in coming up to me, next
day, after service, in the Nave itself, with his gown still on, and expressing
his hope that I had not been greatly alarmed or had my rest violently broken,
I believe I might never have heard of that disgraceful transaction,” said the
old lady.
“To be candid, Ma, I think I should have kept it from you if I could:
though I had not decidedly made up my mind. I was following Jasper out, to
confer with him on the subject, and to consider the expediency of his and my
jointly hushing the thing up on all accounts, when I found him speaking to
you. Then it was too late.”
“Too late, indeed, Sept. He was still as pale as gentlemanly ashes at what
had taken place in his rooms overnight.”
“If I had kept it from you, Ma, you may be sure it would have been for
your peace and quiet, and for the good of the young men, and in my best
discharge of my duty according to my lights.”

The old lady immediately walked across the room and kissed him: saying,
“Of course, my dear Sept, I am sure of that.”
“However, it became the town-talk,” said Mr. Crisparkle, rubbing his ear,
as his mother resumed her seat, and her knitting, “and passed out of my
power.”
“And I said then, Sept,” returned the old lady, “that I thought ill of Mr.
Neville. And I say now, that I think ill of Mr. Neville. And I said then, and I
say now, that I hope Mr. Neville may come to good, but I don’t believe he
will.” Here the cap vibrated again considerably.
“I am sorry to hear you say so, Ma—”
“I am sorry to say so, my dear,” interposed the old lady, knitting on firmly,
“but I can’t help it.”
“—For,” pursued the Minor Canon, “it is undeniable that Mr. Neville is
exceedingly industrious and attentive, and that he improves apace, and that
he has—I hope I may say—an attachment to me.”
“There is no merit in the last article, my dear,” said the old lady, quickly;
“and if he says there is, I think the worse of him for the boast.”
“But, my dear Ma, he never said there was.”
“Perhaps not,” returned the old lady; “still, I don’t see that it greatly
signifies.”
There was no impatience in the pleasant look with which Mr. Crisparkle
contemplated the pretty old piece of china as it knitted; but there was,
certainly, a humorous sense of its not being a piece of china to argue with
very closely.
“Besides, Sept, ask yourself what he would be without his sister. You
know what an influence she has over him; you know what a capacity she
has; you know that whatever he reads with you, he reads with her. Give her
her fair share of your praise, and how much do you leave for him?”
At these words Mr. Crisparkle fell into a little reverie, in which he thought
of several things. He thought of the times he had seen the brother and sister
together in deep converse over one of his own old college books; now, in the
rimy mornings, when he made those sharpening pilgrimages to Cloisterham
Weir; now, in the sombre evenings, when he faced the wind at sunset, having
climbed his favourite outlook, a beetling fragment of monastery ruin; and the
two studious figures passed below him along the margin of the river, in

which the town fires and lights already shone, making the landscape bleaker.
He thought how the consciousness had stolen upon him that in teaching one,
he was teaching two; and how he had almost insensibly adapted his
explanations to both minds—that with which his own was daily in contact,
and that which he only approached through it. He thought of the gossip that
had reached him from the Nuns’ House, to the effect that Helena, whom he
had mistrusted as so proud and fierce, submitted herself to the fairy-bride (as
he called her), and learnt from her what she knew. He thought of the
picturesque alliance between those two, externally so very different. He
thought—perhaps most of all—could it be that these things were yet but so
many weeks old, and had become an integral part of his life?
As, whenever the Reverend Septimus fell a-musing, his good mother took
it to be an infallible sign that he “wanted support,” the blooming old lady
made all haste to the dining-room closet, to produce from it the support
embodied in a glass of Constantia and a home-made biscuit. It was a most
wonderful closet, worthy of Cloisterham and of Minor Canon Corner. Above
it, a portrait of Handel in a flowing wig beamed down at the spectator, with a
knowing air of being up to the contents of the closet, and a musical air of
intending to combine all its harmonies in one delicious fugue. No common
closet with a vulgar door on hinges, openable all at once, and leaving
nothing to be disclosed by degrees, this rare closet had a lock in mid-air,
where two perpendicular slides met; the one falling down, and the other
pushing up. The upper slide, on being pulled down (leaving the lower a
double mystery), revealed deep shelves of pickle-jars, jam-pots, tin canisters,
spice-boxes, and agreeably outlandish vessels of blue and white, the luscious
lodgings of preserved tamarinds and ginger. Every benevolent inhabitant of
this retreat had his name inscribed upon his stomach. The pickles, in a
uniform of rich brown double-breasted buttoned coat, and yellow or sombre
drab continuations, announced their portly forms, in printed capitals, as
Walnut, Gherkin, Onion, Cabbage, Cauliflower, Mixed, and other members
of that noble family. The jams, as being of a less masculine temperament,
and as wearing curlpapers, announced themselves in feminine caligraphy,
like a soft whisper, to be Raspberry, Gooseberry, Apricot, Plum, Damson,
Apple, and Peach. The scene closing on these charmers, and the lower slide
ascending, oranges were revealed, attended by a mighty japanned sugar-box,
to temper their acerbity if unripe. Home-made biscuits waited at the Court of
these Powers, accompanied by a goodly fragment of plum-cake, and various

slender ladies’ fingers, to be dipped into sweet wine and kissed. Lowest of
all, a compact leaden-vault enshrined the sweet wine and a stock of cordials:
whence issued whispers of Seville Orange, Lemon, Almond, and Caraway-
seed. There was a crowning air upon this closet of closets, of having been for
ages hummed through by the Cathedral bell and organ, until those venerable
bees had made sublimated honey of everything in store; and it was always
observed that every dipper among the shelves (deep, as has been noticed,
and swallowing up head, shoulders, and elbows) came forth again mellow-
faced, and seeming to have undergone a saccharine transfiguration.
The Reverend Septimus yielded himself up quite as willing a victim to a
nauseous medicinal herb-closet, also presided over by the china shepherdess,
as to this glorious cupboard. To what amazing infusions of gentian,
peppermint, gilliflower, sage, parsley, thyme, rue, rosemary, and dandelion,
did his courageous stomach submit itself! In what wonderful wrappers,
enclosing layers of dried leaves, would he swathe his rosy and contented
face, if his mother suspected him of a toothache! What botanical blotches
would he cheerfully stick upon his cheek, or forehead, if the dear old lady
convicted him of an imperceptible pimple there! Into this herbaceous
penitentiary, situated on an upper staircase-landing: a low and narrow
whitewashed cell, where bunches of dried leaves hung from rusty hooks in
the ceiling, and were spread out upon shelves, in company with portentous
bottles: would the Reverend Septimus submissively be led, like the highly
popular lamb who has so long and unresistingly been led to the slaughter,
and there would he, unlike that lamb, bore nobody but himself. Not even
doing that much, so that the old lady were busy and pleased, he would
quietly swallow what was given him, merely taking a corrective dip of hands
and face into the great bowl of dried rose-leaves, and into the other great
bowl of dried lavender, and then would go out, as confident in the
sweetening powers of Cloisterham Weir and a wholesome mind, as Lady
Macbeth was hopeless of those of all the seas that roll.
In the present instance the good Minor Canon took his glass of Constantia
with an excellent grace, and, so supported to his mother’s satisfaction,
applied himself to the remaining duties of the day. In their orderly and
punctual progress they brought round Vesper Service and twilight. The
Cathedral being very cold, he set off for a brisk trot after service; the trot to
end in a charge at his favourite fragment of ruin, which was to be carried by
storm, without a pause for breath.

He carried it in a masterly manner, and, not breathed even then, stood
looking down upon the river. The river at Cloisterham is sufficiently near the
sea to throw up oftentimes a quantity of seaweed. An unusual quantity had
come in with the last tide, and this, and the confusion of the water, and the
restless dipping and flapping of the noisy gulls, and an angry light out
seaward beyond the brown-sailed barges that were turning black,
foreshadowed a stormy night. In his mind he was contrasting the wild and
noisy sea with the quiet harbour of Minor Canon Corner, when Helena and
Neville Landless passed below him. He had had the two together in his
thoughts all day, and at once climbed down to speak to them together. The
footing was rough in an uncertain light for any tread save that of a good
climber; but the Minor Canon was as good a climber as most men, and stood
beside them before many good climbers would have been half-way down.
“A wild evening, Miss Landless! Do you not find your usual walk with
your brother too exposed and cold for the time of year? Or at all events,
when the sun is down, and the weather is driving in from the sea?”
Helena thought not. It was their favourite walk. It was very retired.
“It is very retired,” assented Mr. Crisparkle, laying hold of his opportunity
straightway, and walking on with them. “It is a place of all others where one
can speak without interruption, as I wish to do. Mr. Neville, I believe you tell
your sister everything that passes between us?”
“Everything, sir.”
“Consequently,” said Mr. Crisparkle, “your sister is aware that I have
repeatedly urged you to make some kind of apology for that unfortunate
occurrence which befell on the night of your arrival here.” In saying it he
looked to her, and not to him; therefore it was she, and not he, who replied:
“Yes.”
“I call it unfortunate, Miss Helena,” resumed Mr. Crisparkle, “forasmuch
as it certainly has engendered a prejudice against Neville. There is a notion
about, that he is a dangerously passionate fellow, of an uncontrollable and
furious temper: he is really avoided as such.”
“I have no doubt he is, poor fellow,” said Helena, with a look of proud
compassion at her brother, expressing a deep sense of his being
ungenerously treated. “I should be quite sure of it, from your saying so; but
what you tell me is confirmed by suppressed hints and references that I meet
with every day.”

“Now,” Mr. Crisparkle again resumed, in a tone of mild though firm
persuasion, “is not this to be regretted, and ought it not to be amended?
These are early days of Neville’s in Cloisterham, and I have no fear of his
outliving such a prejudice, and proving himself to have been misunderstood.
But how much wiser to take action at once, than to trust to uncertain time!
Besides, apart from its being politic, it is right. For there can be no question
that Neville was wrong.”
“He was provoked,” Helena submitted.
“He was the assailant,” Mr. Crisparkle submitted.
They walked on in silence, until Helena raised her eyes to the Minor
Canon’s face, and said, almost reproachfully: “O Mr. Crisparkle, would you
have Neville throw himself at young Drood’s feet, or at Mr. Jasper’s, who
maligns him every day? In your heart you cannot mean it. From your heart
you could not do it, if his case were yours.”
“I have represented to Mr. Crisparkle, Helena,” said Neville, with a glance
of deference towards his tutor, “that if I could do it from my heart, I would.
But I cannot, and I revolt from the pretence. You forget however, that to put
the case to Mr. Crisparkle as his own, is to suppose to have done what I did.”
“I ask his pardon,” said Helena.
“You see,” remarked Mr. Crisparkle, again laying hold of his opportunity,
though with a moderate and delicate touch, “you both instinctively
acknowledge that Neville did wrong. Then why stop short, and not otherwise
acknowledge it?”
“Is there no difference,” asked Helena, with a little faltering in her
manner; “between submission to a generous spirit, and submission to a base
or trivial one?”
Before the worthy Minor Canon was quite ready with his argument in
reference to this nice distinction, Neville struck in:
“Help me to clear myself with Mr. Crisparkle, Helena. Help me to
convince him that I cannot be the first to make concessions without mockery
and falsehood. My nature must be changed before I can do so, and it is not
changed. I am sensible of inexpressible affront, and deliberate aggravation of
inexpressible affront, and I am angry. The plain truth is, I am still as angry
when I recall that night as I was that night.”

“Neville,” hinted the Minor Canon, with a steady countenance, “you have
repeated that former action of your hands, which I so much dislike.”
“I am sorry for it, sir, but it was involuntary. I confessed that I was still as
angry.”
“And I confess,” said Mr. Crisparkle, “that I hoped for better things.”
“I am sorry to disappoint you, sir, but it would be far worse to deceive
you, and I should deceive you grossly if I pretended that you had softened
me in this respect. The time may come when your powerful influence will do
even that with the difficult pupil whose antecedents you know; but it has not
come yet. Is this so, and in spite of my struggles against myself, Helena?”
She, whose dark eyes were watching the effect of what he said on Mr.
Crisparkle’s face, replied—to Mr. Crisparkle, not to him: “It is so.” After a
short pause, she answered the slightest look of inquiry conceivable, in her
brother’s eyes, with as slight an affirmative bend of her own head; and he
went on:
“I have never yet had the courage to say to you, sir, what in full openness
I ought to have said when you first talked with me on this subject. It is not
easy to say, and I have been withheld by a fear of its seeming ridiculous,
which is very strong upon me down to this last moment, and might, but for
my sister, prevent my being quite open with you even now.—I admire Miss
Bud, sir, so very much, that I cannot bear her being treated with conceit or
indifference; and even if I did not feel that I had an injury against young
Drood on my own account, I should feel that I had an injury against him on
hers.”
Mr. Crisparkle, in utter amazement, looked at Helena for corroboration,
and met in her expressive face full corroboration, and a plea for advice.
“The young lady of whom you speak is, as you know, Mr. Neville, shortly
to be married,” said Mr. Crisparkle, gravely; “therefore your admiration, if it
be of that special nature which you seem to indicate, is outrageously
misplaced. Moreover, it is monstrous that you should take upon yourself to
be the young lady’s champion against her chosen husband. Besides, you
have seen them only once. The young lady has become your sister’s friend;
and I wonder that your sister, even on her behalf, has not checked you in this
irrational and culpable fancy.”
“She has tried, sir, but uselessly. Husband or no husband, that fellow is
incapable of the feeling with which I am inspired towards the beautiful

young creature whom he treats like a doll. I say he is as incapable of it, as he
is unworthy of her. I say she is sacrificed in being bestowed upon him. I say
that I love her, and despise and hate him!” This with a face so flushed, and a
gesture so violent, that his sister crossed to his side, and caught his arm,
remonstrating, “Neville, Neville!”
Thus recalled to himself, he quickly became sensible of having lost the
guard he had set upon his passionate tendency, and covered his face with his
hand, as one repentant and wretched.
Mr. Crisparkle, watching him attentively, and at the same time meditating
how to proceed, walked on for some paces in silence. Then he spoke:
“Mr. Neville, Mr. Neville, I am sorely grieved to see in you more traces of
a character as sullen, angry, and wild, as the night now closing in. They are
of too serious an aspect to leave me the resource of treating the infatuation
you have disclosed, as undeserving serious consideration. I give it very
serious consideration, and I speak to you accordingly. This feud between you
and young Drood must not go on. I cannot permit it to go on any longer,
knowing what I now know from you, and you living under my roof.
Whatever prejudiced and unauthorised constructions your blind and envious
wrath may put upon his character, it is a frank, good-natured character. I
know I can trust to it for that. Now, pray observe what I am about to say. On
reflection, and on your sister’s representation, I am willing to admit that, in
making peace with young Drood, you have a right to be met half-way. I will
engage that you shall be, and even that young Drood shall make the first
advance. This condition fulfilled, you will pledge me the honour of a
Christian gentleman that the quarrel is for ever at an end on your side. What
may be in your heart when you give him your hand, can only be known to
the Searcher of all hearts; but it will never go well with you, if there be any
treachery there. So far, as to that; next as to what I must again speak of as
your infatuation. I understand it to have been confided to me, and to be
known to no other person save your sister and yourself. Do I understand
aright?”
Helena answered in a low voice: “It is only known to us three who are
here together.”
“It is not at all known to the young lady, your friend?”
“On my soul, no!”

“I require you, then, to give me your similar and solemn pledge, Mr.
Neville, that it shall remain the secret it is, and that you will take no other
action whatsoever upon it than endeavouring (and that most earnestly) to
erase it from your mind. I will not tell you that it will soon pass; I will not
tell you that it is the fancy of the moment; I will not tell you that such
caprices have their rise and fall among the young and ardent every hour; I
will leave you undisturbed in the belief that it has few parallels or none, that
it will abide with you a long time, and that it will be very difficult to
conquer. So much the more weight shall I attach to the pledge I require from
you, when it is unreservedly given.”
The young man twice or thrice essayed to speak, but failed.
“Let me leave you with your sister, whom it is time you took home,” said
Mr. Crisparkle. “You will find me alone in my room by-and-by.”
“Pray do not leave us yet,” Helena implored him. “Another minute.”
“I should not,” said Neville, pressing his hand upon his face, “have
needed so much as another minute, if you had been less patient with me, Mr.
Crisparkle, less considerate of me, and less unpretendingly good and true. O,
if in my childhood I had known such a guide!”
“Follow your guide now, Neville,” murmured Helena, “and follow him to
Heaven!”
There was that in her tone which broke the good Minor Canon’s voice, or
it would have repudiated her exaltation of him. As it was, he laid a finger on
his lips, and looked towards her brother.
“To say that I give both pledges, Mr. Crisparkle, out of my innermost
heart, and to say that there is no treachery in it, is to say nothing!” Thus
Neville, greatly moved. “I beg your forgiveness for my miserable lapse into
a burst of passion.”
“Not mine, Neville, not mine. You know with whom forgiveness lies, as
the highest attribute conceivable. Miss Helena, you and your brother are
twin children. You came into this world with the same dispositions, and you
passed your younger days together surrounded by the same adverse
circumstances. What you have overcome in yourself, can you not overcome
in him? You see the rock that lies in his course. Who but you can keep him
clear of it?”
“Who but you, sir?” replied Helena. “What is my influence, or my weak
wisdom, compared with yours!”

“You have the wisdom of Love,” returned the Minor Canon, “and it was
the highest wisdom ever known upon this earth, remember. As to mine—but
the less said of that commonplace commodity the better. Good night!”
She took the hand he offered her, and gratefully and almost reverently
raised it to her lips.
“Tut!” said the Minor Canon softly, “I am much overpaid!” and turned
away.

Mr. Crisparkle is overpaid

Retracing his steps towards the Cathedral Close, he tried, as he went along
in the dark, to think out the best means of bringing to pass what he had
promised to effect, and what must somehow be done. “I shall probably be
asked to marry them,” he reflected, “and I would they were married and
gone! But this presses first.”
He debated principally whether he should write to young Drood, or
whether he should speak to Jasper. The consciousness of being popular with
the whole Cathedral establishment inclined him to the latter course, and the
well-timed sight of the lighted gatehouse decided him to take it. “I will strike
while the iron is hot,” he said, “and see him now.”

Jasper was lying asleep on a couch before the fire, when, having ascended
the postern-stair, and received no answer to his knock at the door, Mr.
Crisparkle gently turned the handle and looked in. Long afterwards he had
cause to remember how Jasper sprang from the couch in a delirious state
between sleeping and waking, and crying out: “What is the matter? Who did
it?”
“It is only I, Jasper. I am sorry to have disturbed you.”
The glare of his eyes settled down into a look of recognition, and he
moved a chair or two, to make a way to the fireside.
“I was dreaming at a great rate, and am glad to be disturbed from an
indigestive after-dinner sleep. Not to mention that you are always welcome.”
“Thank you. I am not confident,” returned Mr. Crisparkle, as he sat
himself down in the easy-chair placed for him, “that my subject will at first
sight be quite as welcome as myself; but I am a minister of peace, and I
pursue my subject in the interests of peace. In a word, Jasper, I want to
establish peace between these two young fellows.”
A very perplexed expression took hold of Mr. Jasper’s face; a very
perplexing expression too, for Mr. Crisparkle could make nothing of it.
“How?” was Jasper’s inquiry, in a low and slow voice, after a silence.
“For the ‘How’ I come to you. I want to ask you to do me the great favour
and service of interposing with your nephew (I have already interposed with
Mr. Neville), and getting him to write you a short note, in his lively way,
saying that he is willing to shake hands. I know what a good-natured fellow
he is, and what influence you have with him. And without in the least
defending Mr. Neville, we must all admit that he was bitterly stung.”
Jasper turned that perplexed face towards the fire. Mr. Crisparkle
continuing to observe it, found it even more perplexing than before,
inasmuch as it seemed to denote (which could hardly be) some close internal
calculation.
“I know that you are not prepossessed in Mr. Neville’s favour,” the Minor
Canon was going on, when Jasper stopped him:
“You have cause to say so. I am not, indeed.”
“Undoubtedly; and I admit his lamentable violence of temper, though I
hope he and I will get the better of it between us. But I have exacted a very

solemn promise from him as to his future demeanour towards your nephew,
if you do kindly interpose; and I am sure he will keep it.”
“You are always responsible and trustworthy, Mr. Crisparkle. Do you
really feel sure that you can answer for him so confidently?”
“I do.”
The perplexed and perplexing look vanished.
“Then you relieve my mind of a great dread, and a heavy weight,” said
Jasper; “I will do it.”
Mr. Crisparkle, delighted by the swiftness and completeness of his
success, acknowledged it in the handsomest terms.
“I will do it,” repeated Jasper, “for the comfort of having your guarantee
against my vague and unfounded fears. You will laugh—but do you keep a
Diary?”
“A line for a day; not more.”
“A line for a day would be quite as much as my uneventful life would
need, Heaven knows,” said Jasper, taking a book from a desk, “but that my
Diary is, in fact, a Diary of Ned’s life too. You will laugh at this entry; you
will guess when it was made:

“‘Past midnight.—After what I have just now seen, I have a
morbid dread upon me of some horrible consequences
resulting to my dear boy, that I cannot reason with or in any
way contend against. All my efforts are vain. The demoniacal
passion of this Neville Landless, his strength in his fury, and
his savage rage for the destruction of its object, appal me. So
profound is the impression, that twice since I have gone into
my dear boy’s room, to assure myself of his sleeping safely,
and not lying dead in his blood.’

“Here is another entry next morning:

“‘Ned up and away. Light-hearted and unsuspicious as ever.
He laughed when I cautioned him, and said he was as good a
man as Neville Landless any day. I told him that might be,
but he was not as bad a man. He continued to make light of
it, but I travelled with him as far as I could, and left him most

unwillingly. I am unable to shake off these dark intangible
presentiments of evil—if feelings founded upon staring facts
are to be so called.’

“Again and again,” said Jasper, in conclusion, twirling the leaves of the
book before putting it by, “I have relapsed into these moods, as other entries
show. But I have now your assurance at my back, and shall put it in my
book, and make it an antidote to my black humours.”
“Such an antidote, I hope,” returned Mr. Crisparkle, “as will induce you
before long to consign the black humours to the flames. I ought to be the last
to find any fault with you this evening, when you have met my wishes so
freely; but I must say, Jasper, that your devotion to your nephew has made
you exaggerative here.”
“You are my witness,” said Jasper, shrugging his shoulders, “what my
state of mind honestly was, that night, before I sat down to write, and in
what words I expressed it. You remember objecting to a word I used, as
being too strong? It was a stronger word than any in my Diary.”
“Well, well. Try the antidote,” rejoined Mr. Crisparkle; “and may it give
you a brighter and better view of the case! We will discuss it no more now. I
have to thank you for myself, thank you sincerely.”
“You shall find,” said Jasper, as they shook hands, “that I will not do the
thing you wish me to do, by halves. I will take care that Ned, giving way at
all, shall give way thoroughly.”
On the third day after this conversation, he called on Mr. Crisparkle with
the following letter:

“MY DEAR JACK,
“I am touched by your account of your interview with Mr.
Crisparkle, whom I much respect and esteem. At once I
openly say that I forgot myself on that occasion quite as
much as Mr. Landless did, and that I wish that bygone to be a
bygone, and all to be right again.
“Look here, dear old boy. Ask Mr. Landless to dinner on
Christmas Eve (the better the day the better the deed), and let
there be only we three, and let us shake hands all round there
and then, and say no more about it.

“My dear Jack,
“Ever your most affectionate,
“EDWIN DROOD.

“P.S. Love to Miss Pussy at the next music-lesson.”

“You expect Mr. Neville, then?” said Mr. Crisparkle.
“I count upon his coming,” said Mr. Jasper.

CHAPTER XI.
A PICTURE AND A RING

Behind the most ancient part of Holborn, London, where certain gabled
houses some centuries of age still stand looking on the public way, as if
disconsolately looking for the Old Bourne that has long run dry, is a little
nook composed of two irregular quadrangles, called Staple Inn. It is one of
those nooks, the turning into which out of the clashing street, imparts to the
relieved pedestrian the sensation of having put cotton in his ears, and velvet
soles on his boots. It is one of those nooks where a few smoky sparrows
twitter in smoky trees, as though they called to one another, “Let us play at
country,” and where a few feet of garden-mould and a few yards of gravel
enable them to do that refreshing violence to their tiny understandings.
Moreover, it is one of those nooks which are legal nooks; and it contains a
little Hall, with a little lantern in its roof: to what obstructive purposes
devoted, and at whose expense, this history knoweth not.
In the days when Cloisterham took offence at the existence of a railroad
afar off, as menacing that sensitive constitution, the property of us Britons:
the odd fortune of which sacred institution it is to be in exactly equal
degrees croaked about, trembled for, and boasted of, whatever happens to
anything, anywhere in the world: in those days no neighbouring architecture
of lofty proportions had arisen to overshadow Staple Inn. The westering sun
bestowed bright glances on it, and the south-west wind blew into it
unimpeded.
Neither wind nor sun, however, favoured Staple Inn one December
afternoon towards six o’clock, when it was filled with fog, and candles shed
murky and blurred rays through the windows of all its then-occupied sets of
chambers; notably from a set of chambers in a corner house in the little
inner quadrangle, presenting in black and white over its ugly portal the
mysterious inscription:

P
J T
1747
In which set of chambers, never having troubled his head about the
inscription, unless to bethink himself at odd times on glancing up at it, that
haply it might mean Perhaps John Thomas, or Perhaps Joe Tyler, sat Mr.
Grewgious writing by his fire.
Who could have told, by looking at Mr. Grewgious, whether he had ever
known ambition or disappointment? He had been bred to the Bar, and had
laid himself out for chamber practice; to draw deeds; “convey the wise it
call,” as Pistol says. But Conveyancing and he had made such a very
indifferent marriage of it that they had separated by consent—if there can
be said to be separation where there has never been coming together.
No. Coy Conveyancing would not come to Mr. Grewgious. She was
wooed, not won, and they went their several ways. But an Arbitration being
blown towards him by some unaccountable wind, and he gaining great
credit in it as one indefatigable in seeking out right and doing right, a pretty
fat Receivership was next blown into his pocket by a wind more traceable
to its source. So, by chance, he had found his niche. Receiver and Agent
now, to two rich estates, and deputing their legal business, in an amount
worth having, to a firm of solicitors on the floor below, he had snuffed out
his ambition (supposing him to have ever lighted it), and had settled down
with his snuffers for the rest of his life under the dry vine and fig-tree of P.
J. T., who planted in seventeen-forty-seven.
Many accounts and account-books, many files of correspondence, and
several strong boxes, garnished Mr. Grewgious’s room. They can scarcely
be represented as having lumbered it, so conscientious and precise was their
orderly arrangement. The apprehension of dying suddenly, and leaving one
fact or one figure with any incompleteness or obscurity attaching to it,
would have stretched Mr. Grewgious stone-dead any day. The largest
fidelity to a trust was the life-blood of the man. There are sorts of life-blood
that course more quickly, more gaily, more attractively; but there is no
better sort in circulation.

There was no luxury in his room. Even its comforts were limited to its
being dry and warm, and having a snug though faded fireside. What may be
called its private life was confined to the hearth, and an easy-chair, and an
old-fashioned occasional round table that was brought out upon the rug
after business hours, from a corner where it elsewise remained turned up
like a shining mahogany shield. Behind it, when standing thus on the
defensive, was a closet, usually containing something good to drink. An
outer room was the clerk’s room; Mr. Grewgious’s sleeping-room was
across the common stair; and he held some not empty cellarage at the
bottom of the common stair. Three hundred days in the year, at least, he
crossed over to the hotel in Furnival’s Inn for his dinner, and after dinner
crossed back again, to make the most of these simplicities until it should
become broad business day once more, with P. J. T., date seventeen-forty-
seven.
As Mr. Grewgious sat and wrote by his fire that afternoon, so did the
clerk of Mr. Grewgious sit and write by his fire. A pale, puffy-faced, dark-
haired person of thirty, with big dark eyes that wholly wanted lustre, and a
dissatisfied doughy complexion, that seemed to ask to be sent to the
baker’s, this attendant was a mysterious being, possessed of some strange
power over Mr. Grewgious. As though he had been called into existence,
like a fabulous Familiar, by a magic spell which had failed when required to
dismiss him, he stuck tight to Mr. Grewgious’s stool, although Mr.
Grewgious’s comfort and convenience would manifestly have been
advanced by dispossessing him. A gloomy person with tangled locks, and a
general air of having been reared under the shadow of that baleful tree of
Java which has given shelter to more lies than the whole botanical kingdom,
Mr. Grewgious, nevertheless, treated him with unaccountable consideration.
“Now, Bazzard,” said Mr. Grewgious, on the entrance of his clerk:
looking up from his papers as he arranged them for the night: “what is in
the wind besides fog?”
“Mr. Drood,” said Bazzard.
“What of him?”
“Has called,” said Bazzard.
“You might have shown him in.”
“I am doing it,” said Bazzard.

The visitor came in accordingly.
“Dear me!” said Mr. Grewgious, looking round his pair of office candles.
“I thought you had called and merely left your name and gone. How do you
do, Mr. Edwin? Dear me, you’re choking!”
“It’s this fog,” returned Edwin; “and it makes my eyes smart, like
Cayenne pepper.”
“Is it really so bad as that? Pray undo your wrappers. It’s fortunate I have
so good a fire; but Mr. Bazzard has taken care of me.”
“No I haven’t,” said Mr. Bazzard at the door.
“Ah! then it follows that I must have taken care of myself without
observing it,” said Mr. Grewgious. “Pray be seated in my chair. No. I beg!
Coming out of such an atmosphere, in my chair.”
Edwin took the easy-chair in the corner; and the fog he had brought in
with him, and the fog he took off with his greatcoat and neck-shawl, was
speedily licked up by the eager fire.
“I look,” said Edwin, smiling, “as if I had come to stop.”
“—By the by,” cried Mr. Grewgious; “excuse my interrupting you; do
stop. The fog may clear in an hour or two. We can have dinner in from just
across Holborn. You had better take your Cayenne pepper here than outside;
pray stop and dine.”
“You are very kind,” said Edwin, glancing about him as though attracted
by the notion of a new and relishing sort of gipsy-party.
“Not at all,” said Mr. Grewgious; “you are very kind to join issue with a
bachelor in chambers, and take pot-luck. And I’ll ask,” said Mr. Grewgious,
dropping his voice, and speaking with a twinkling eye, as if inspired with a
bright thought: “I’ll ask Bazzard. He mightn’t like it else.—Bazzard!”
Bazzard reappeared.
“Dine presently with Mr. Drood and me.”
“If I am ordered to dine, of course I will, sir,” was the gloomy answer.
“Save the man!” cried Mr. Grewgious. “You’re not ordered; you’re
invited.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Bazzard; “in that case I don’t care if I do.”
“That’s arranged. And perhaps you wouldn’t mind,” said Mr. Grewgious,
“stepping over to the hotel in Furnival’s, and asking them to send in

materials for laying the cloth. For dinner we’ll have a tureen of the hottest
and strongest soup available, and we’ll have the best made-dish that can be
recommended, and we’ll have a joint (such as a haunch of mutton), and
we’ll have a goose, or a turkey, or any little stuffed thing of that sort that
may happen to be in the bill of fare—in short, we’ll have whatever there is
on hand.”
These liberal directions Mr. Grewgious issued with his usual air of
reading an inventory, or repeating a lesson, or doing anything else by rote.
Bazzard, after drawing out the round table, withdrew to execute them.
“I was a little delicate, you see,” said Mr. Grewgious, in a lower tone,
after his clerk’s departure, “about employing him in the foraging or
commissariat department. Because he mightn’t like it.”
“He seems to have his own way, sir,” remarked Edwin.
“His own way?” returned Mr. Grewgious. “O dear no! Poor fellow, you
quite mistake him. If he had his own way, he wouldn’t be here.”
“I wonder where he would be!” Edwin thought. But he only thought it,
because Mr. Grewgious came and stood himself with his back to the other
corner of the fire, and his shoulder-blades against the chimneypiece, and
collected his skirts for easy conversation.
“I take it, without having the gift of prophecy, that you have done me the
favour of looking in to mention that you are going down yonder—where I
can tell you, you are expected—and to offer to execute any little
commission from me to my charming ward, and perhaps to sharpen me up a
bit in any proceedings? Eh, Mr. Edwin?”
“I called, sir, before going down, as an act of attention.”
“Of attention!” said Mr. Grewgious. “Ah! of course, not of impatience?”
“Impatience, sir?”
Mr. Grewgious had meant to be arch—not that he in the remotest degree
expressed that meaning—and had brought himself into scarcely supportable
proximity with the fire, as if to burn the fullest effect of his archness into
himself, as other subtle impressions are burnt into hard metals. But his
archness suddenly flying before the composed face and manner of his
visitor, and only the fire remaining, he started and rubbed himself.
“I have lately been down yonder,” said Mr. Grewgious, rearranging his
skirts; “and that was what I referred to, when I said I could tell you you are

expected.”
“Indeed, sir! Yes; I knew that Pussy was looking out for me.”
“Do you keep a cat down there?” asked Mr. Grewgious.
Edwin coloured a little as he explained: “I call Rosa Pussy.”
“O, really,” said Mr. Grewgious, smoothing down his head; “that’s very
affable.”
Edwin glanced at his face, uncertain whether or no he seriously objected
to the appellation. But Edwin might as well have glanced at the face of a
clock.
“A pet name, sir,” he explained again.
“Umps,” said Mr. Grewgious, with a nod. But with such an extraordinary
compromise between an unqualified assent and a qualified dissent, that his
visitor was much disconcerted.
“Did PRosa—” Edwin began by way of recovering himself.
“PRosa?” repeated Mr. Grewgious.
“I was going to say Pussy, and changed my mind;—did she tell you
anything about the Landlesses?”
“No,” said Mr. Grewgious. “What is the Landlesses? An estate? A villa?
A farm?”
“A brother and sister. The sister is at the Nuns’ House, and has become a
great friend of P—”
“PRosa’s,” Mr. Grewgious struck in, with a fixed face.
“She is a strikingly handsome girl, sir, and I thought she might have been
described to you, or presented to you perhaps?”
“Neither,” said Mr. Grewgious. “But here is Bazzard.”
Bazzard returned, accompanied by two waiters—an immovable waiter,
and a flying waiter; and the three brought in with them as much fog as gave
a new roar to the fire. The flying waiter, who had brought everything on his
shoulders, laid the cloth with amazing rapidity and dexterity; while the
immovable waiter, who had brought nothing, found fault with him. The
flying waiter then highly polished all the glasses he had brought, and the
immovable waiter looked through them. The flying waiter then flew across
Holborn for the soup, and flew back again, and then took another flight for
the made-dish, and flew back again, and then took another flight for the

joint and poultry, and flew back again, and between whiles took
supplementary flights for a great variety of articles, as it was discovered
from time to time that the immovable waiter had forgotten them all. But let
the flying waiter cleave the air as he might, he was always reproached on
his return by the immovable waiter for bringing fog with him, and being out
of breath. At the conclusion of the repast, by which time the flying waiter
was severely blown, the immovable waiter gathered up the tablecloth under
his arm with a grand air, and having sternly (not to say with indignation)
looked on at the flying waiter while he set the clean glasses round, directed
a valedictory glance towards Mr. Grewgious, conveying: “Let it be clearly
understood between us that the reward is mine, and that Nil is the claim of
this slave,” and pushed the flying waiter before him out of the room.
It was like a highly-finished miniature painting representing My Lords of
the Circumlocution Department, Commandership-in-Chief of any sort,
Government. It was quite an edifying little picture to be hung on the line in
the National Gallery.
As the fog had been the proximate cause of this sumptuous repast, so the
fog served for its general sauce. To hear the out-door clerks sneezing,
wheezing, and beating their feet on the gravel was a zest far surpassing
Doctor Kitchener’s. To bid, with a shiver, the unfortunate flying waiter shut
the door before he had opened it, was a condiment of a profounder flavour
than Harvey. And here let it be noticed, parenthetically, that the leg of this
young man, in its application to the door, evinced the finest sense of touch:
always preceding himself and tray (with something of an angling air about
it), by some seconds: and always lingering after he and the tray had
disappeared, like Macbeth’s leg when accompanying him off the stage with
reluctance to the assassination of Duncan.
The host had gone below to the cellar, and had brought up bottles of ruby,
straw-coloured, and golden drinks, which had ripened long ago in lands
where no fogs are, and had since lain slumbering in the shade. Sparkling
and tingling after so long a nap, they pushed at their corks to help the
corkscrew (like prisoners helping rioters to force their gates), and danced
out gaily. If P. J. T. in seventeen-forty-seven, or in any other year of his
period, drank such wines—then, for a certainty, P. J. T. was Pretty Jolly Too.
Externally, Mr. Grewgious showed no signs of being mellowed by these
glowing vintages. Instead of his drinking them, they might have been

poured over him in his high-dried snuff form, and run to waste, for any
lights and shades they caused to flicker over his face. Neither was his
manner influenced. But, in his wooden way, he had observant eyes for
Edwin; and when at the end of dinner, he motioned Edwin back to his own
easy-chair in the fireside corner, and Edwin sank luxuriously into it after
very brief remonstrance, Mr. Grewgious, as he turned his seat round
towards the fire too, and smoothed his head and face, might have been seen
looking at his visitor between his smoothing fingers.
“Bazzard!” said Mr. Grewgious, suddenly turning to him.
“I follow you, sir,” returned Bazzard; who had done his work of
consuming meat and drink in a workmanlike manner, though mostly in
speechlessness.
“I drink to you, Bazzard; Mr. Edwin, success to Mr. Bazzard!”
“Success to Mr. Bazzard!” echoed Edwin, with a totally unfounded
appearance of enthusiasm, and with the unspoken addition: “What in, I
wonder!”
“And May!” pursued Mr. Grewgious—“I am not at liberty to be definite
—May!—my conversational powers are so very limited that I know I shall
not come well out of this—May!—it ought to be put imaginatively, but I
have no imagination—May!—the thorn of anxiety is as nearly the mark as I
am likely to get—May it come out at last!”
Mr. Bazzard, with a frowning smile at the fire, put a hand into his tangled
locks, as if the thorn of anxiety were there; then into his waistcoat, as if it
were there; then into his pockets, as if it were there. In all these movements
he was closely followed by the eyes of Edwin, as if that young gentleman
expected to see the thorn in action. It was not produced, however, and Mr.
Bazzard merely said: “I follow you, sir, and I thank you.”
“I am going,” said Mr. Grewgious, jingling his glass on the table with
one hand, and bending aside under cover of the other, to whisper to Edwin,
“to drink to my ward. But I put Bazzard first. He mightn’t like it else.”
This was said with a mysterious wink; or what would have been a wink,
if, in Mr. Grewgious’s hands, it could have been quick enough. So Edwin
winked responsively, without the least idea what he meant by doing so.
“And now,” said Mr. Grewgious, “I devote a bumper to the fair and
fascinating Miss Rosa. Bazzard, the fair and fascinating Miss Rosa!”

“I follow you, sir,” said Bazzard, “and I pledge you!”
“And so do I!” said Edwin.
“Lord bless me,” cried Mr. Grewgious, breaking the blank silence which
of course ensued: though why these pauses should come upon us when we
have performed any small social rite, not directly inducive of self-
examination or mental despondency, who can tell? “I am a particularly
Angular man, and yet I fancy (if I may use the word, not having a morsel of
fancy), that I could draw a picture of a true lover’s state of mind, to-night.”
“Let us follow you, sir,” said Bazzard, “and have the picture.”
“Mr. Edwin will correct it where it’s wrong,” resumed Mr. Grewgious,
“and will throw in a few touches from the life. I dare say it is wrong in
many particulars, and wants many touches from the life, for I was born a
Chip, and have neither soft sympathies nor soft experiences. Well! I hazard
the guess that the true lover’s mind is completely permeated by the beloved
object of his affections. I hazard the guess that her dear name is precious to
him, cannot be heard or repeated without emotion, and is preserved sacred.
If he has any distinguishing appellation of fondness for her, it is reserved
for her, and is not for common ears. A name that it would be a privilege to
call her by, being alone with her own bright self, it would be a liberty, a
coldness, an insensibility, almost a breach of good faith, to flaunt
elsewhere.”
It was wonderful to see Mr. Grewgious sitting bolt upright, with his
hands on his knees, continuously chopping this discourse out of himself:
much as a charity boy with a very good memory might get his catechism
said: and evincing no correspondent emotion whatever, unless in a certain
occasional little tingling perceptible at the end of his nose.
“My picture,” Mr. Grewgious proceeded, “goes on to represent (under
correction from you, Mr. Edwin), the true lover as ever impatient to be in
the presence or vicinity of the beloved object of his affections; as caring
very little for his case in any other society; and as constantly seeking that. If
I was to say seeking that, as a bird seeks its nest, I should make an ass of
myself, because that would trench upon what I understand to be poetry; and
I am so far from trenching upon poetry at any time, that I never, to my
knowledge, got within ten thousand miles of it. And I am besides totally
unacquainted with the habits of birds, except the birds of Staple Inn, who
seek their nests on ledges, and in gutter-pipes and chimneypots, not

constructed for them by the beneficent hand of Nature. I beg, therefore, to
be understood as foregoing the bird’s-nest. But my picture does represent
the true lover as having no existence separable from that of the beloved
object of his affections, and as living at once a doubled life and a halved
life. And if I do not clearly express what I mean by that, it is either for the
reason that having no conversational powers, I cannot express what I mean,
or that having no meaning, I do not mean what I fail to express. Which, to
the best of my belief, is not the case.”
Edwin had turned red and turned white, as certain points of this picture
came into the light. He now sat looking at the fire, and bit his lip.
“The speculations of an Angular man,” resumed Mr. Grewgious, still
sitting and speaking exactly as before, “are probably erroneous on so
globular a topic. But I figure to myself (subject, as before, to Mr. Edwin’s
correction), that there can be no coolness, no lassitude, no doubt, no
indifference, no half fire and half smoke state of mind, in a real lover. Pray
am I at all near the mark in my picture?”
As abrupt in his conclusion as in his commencement and progress, he
jerked this inquiry at Edwin, and stopped when one might have supposed
him in the middle of his oration.
“I should say, sir,” stammered Edwin, “as you refer the question to me
—”
“Yes,” said Mr. Grewgious, “I refer it to you, as an authority.”
“I should say, then, sir,” Edwin went on, embarrassed, “that the picture
you have drawn is generally correct; but I submit that perhaps you may be
rather hard upon the unlucky lover.”
“Likely so,” assented Mr. Grewgious, “likely so. I am a hard man in the
grain.”
“He may not show,” said Edwin, “all he feels; or he may not—”
There he stopped so long, to find the rest of his sentence, that Mr.
Grewgious rendered his difficulty a thousand times the greater by
unexpectedly striking in with:
“No to be sure; he may not!”
After that, they all sat silent; the silence of Mr. Bazzard being occasioned
by slumber.

“His responsibility is very great, though,” said Mr. Grewgious at length,
with his eyes on the fire.
Edwin nodded assent, with his eyes on the fire.
“And let him be sure that he trifles with no one,” said Mr. Grewgious;
“neither with himself, nor with any other.”
Edwin bit his lip again, and still sat looking at the fire.
“He must not make a plaything of a treasure. Woe betide him if he does!
Let him take that well to heart,” said Mr. Grewgious.
Though he said these things in short sentences, much as the
supposititious charity boy just now referred to might have repeated a verse
or two from the Book of Proverbs, there was something dreamy (for so
literal a man) in the way in which he now shook his right forefinger at the
live coals in the grate, and again fell silent.
But not for long. As he sat upright and stiff in his chair, he suddenly
rapped his knees, like the carved image of some queer Joss or other coming
out of its reverie, and said: “We must finish this bottle, Mr. Edwin. Let me
help you. I’ll help Bazzard too, though he is asleep. He mightn’t like it
else.”
He helped them both, and helped himself, and drained his glass, and
stood it bottom upward on the table, as though he had just caught a
bluebottle in it.
“And now, Mr. Edwin,” he proceeded, wiping his mouth and hands upon
his handkerchief: “to a little piece of business. You received from me, the
other day, a certified copy of Miss Rosa’s father’s will. You knew its
contents before, but you received it from me as a matter of business. I
should have sent it to Mr. Jasper, but for Miss Rosa’s wishing it to come
straight to you, in preference. You received it?”
“Quite safely, sir.”
“You should have acknowledged its receipt,” said Mr. Grewgious;
“business being business all the world over. However, you did not.”
“I meant to have acknowledged it when I first came in this evening, sir.”
“Not a business-like acknowledgment,” returned Mr. Grewgious;
“however, let that pass. Now, in that document you have observed a few
words of kindly allusion to its being left to me to discharge a little trust,

confided to me in conversation, at such time as I in my discretion may think
best.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Mr. Edwin, it came into my mind just now, when I was looking at the
fire, that I could, in my discretion, acquit myself of that trust at no better
time than the present. Favour me with your attention, half a minute.”
He took a bunch of keys from his pocket, singled out by the candle-light
the key he wanted, and then, with a candle in his hand, went to a bureau or
escritoire, unlocked it, touched the spring of a little secret drawer, and took
from it an ordinary ring-case made for a single ring. With this in his hand,
he returned to his chair. As he held it up for the young man to see, his hand
trembled.
“Mr. Edwin, this rose of diamonds and rubies delicately set in gold, was a
ring belonging to Miss Rosa’s mother. It was removed from her dead hand,
in my presence, with such distracted grief as I hope it may never be my lot
to contemplate again. Hard man as I am, I am not hard enough for that. See
how bright these stones shine!” opening the case. “And yet the eyes that
were so much brighter, and that so often looked upon them with a light and
a proud heart, have been ashes among ashes, and dust among dust, some
years! If I had any imagination (which it is needless to say I have not), I
might imagine that the lasting beauty of these stones was almost cruel.”
He closed the case again as he spoke.
“This ring was given to the young lady who was drowned so early in her
beautiful and happy career, by her husband, when they first plighted their
faith to one another. It was he who removed it from her unconscious hand,
and it was he who, when his death drew very near, placed it in mine. The
trust in which I received it, was, that, you and Miss Rosa growing to
manhood and womanhood, and your betrothal prospering and coming to
maturity, I should give it to you to place upon her finger. Failing those
desired results, it was to remain in my possession.”
Some trouble was in the young man’s face, and some indecision was in
the action of his hand, as Mr. Grewgious, looking steadfastly at him, gave
him the ring.
“Your placing it on her finger,” said Mr. Grewgious, “will be the solemn
seal upon your strict fidelity to the living and the dead. You are going to her,

to make the last irrevocable preparations for your marriage. Take it with
you.”
The young man took the little case, and placed it in his breast.
“If anything should be amiss, if anything should be even slightly wrong,
between you; if you should have any secret consciousness that you are
committing yourself to this step for no higher reason than because you have
long been accustomed to look forward to it; then,” said Mr. Grewgious, “I
charge you once more, by the living and by the dead, to bring that ring back
to me!”
Here Bazzard awoke himself by his own snoring; and, as is usual in such
cases, sat apoplectically staring at vacancy, as defying vacancy to accuse
him of having been asleep.
“Bazzard!” said Mr. Grewgious, harder than ever.
“I follow you, sir,” said Bazzard, “and I have been following you.”
“In discharge of a trust, I have handed Mr. Edwin Drood a ring of
diamonds and rubies. You see?”
Edwin reproduced the little case, and opened it; and Bazzard looked into
it.
“I follow you both, sir,” returned Bazzard, “and I witness the
transaction.”
Evidently anxious to get away and be alone, Edwin Drood now resumed
his outer clothing, muttering something about time and appointments. The
fog was reported no clearer (by the flying waiter, who alighted from a
speculative flight in the coffee interest), but he went out into it; and
Bazzard, after his manner, “followed” him.
Mr. Grewgious, left alone, walked softly and slowly to and fro, for an
hour and more. He was restless to-night, and seemed dispirited.
“I hope I have done right,” he said. “The appeal to him seemed necessary.
It was hard to lose the ring, and yet it must have gone from me very soon.”
He closed the empty little drawer with a sigh, and shut and locked the
escritoire, and came back to the solitary fireside.
“Her ring,” he went on. “Will it come back to me? My mind hangs about
her ring very uneasily to-night. But that is explainable. I have had it so long,
and I have prized it so much! I wonder—”

He was in a wondering mood as well as a restless; for, though he checked
himself at that point, and took another walk, he resumed his wondering
when he sat down again.
“I wonder (for the ten-thousandth time, and what a weak fool I, for what
can it signify now!) whether he confided the charge of their orphan child to
me, because he knew—Good God, how like her mother she has become!”
“I wonder whether he ever so much as suspected that some one doted on
her, at a hopeless, speechless distance, when he struck in and won her. I
wonder whether it ever crept into his mind who that unfortunate some one
was!”
“I wonder whether I shall sleep to-night! At all events, I will shut out the
world with the bedclothes, and try.”
Mr. Grewgious crossed the staircase to his raw and foggy bedroom, and
was soon ready for bed. Dimly catching sight of his face in the misty
looking-glass, he held his candle to it for a moment.
“A likely some one, you, to come into anybody’s thoughts in such an
aspect!” he exclaimed. “There! there! there! Get to bed, poor man, and
cease to jabber!”
With that, he extinguished his light, pulled up the bedclothes around him,
and with another sigh shut out the world. And yet there are such unexplored
romantic nooks in the unlikeliest men, that even old tinderous and
touchwoody P. J. T. Possibly Jabbered Thus, at some odd times, in or about
seventeen-forty-seven.

CHAPTER XII.
A NIGHT WITH DURDLES

When Mr. Sapsea has nothing better to do, towards evening, and finds the
contemplation of his own profundity becoming a little monotonous in spite
of the vastness of the subject, he often takes an airing in the Cathedral Close
and thereabout. He likes to pass the churchyard with a swelling air of
proprietorship, and to encourage in his breast a sort of benignant-landlord
feeling, in that he has been bountiful towards that meritorious tenant, Mrs.
Sapsea, and has publicly given her a prize. He likes to see a stray face or two
looking in through the railings, and perhaps reading his inscription. Should
he meet a stranger coming from the churchyard with a quick step, he is
morally convinced that the stranger is “with a blush retiring,” as
monumentally directed.
Mr. Sapsea’s importance has received enhancement, for he has become
Mayor of Cloisterham. Without mayors, and many of them, it cannot be
disputed that the whole framework of society—Mr. Sapsea is confident that
he invented that forcible figure—would fall to pieces. Mayors have been
knighted for “going up” with addresses: explosive machines intrepidly
discharging shot and shell into the English Grammar. Mr. Sapsea may “go
up” with an address. Rise, Sir Thomas Sapsea! Of such is the salt of the
earth.
Mr. Sapsea has improved the acquaintance of Mr. Jasper, since their first
meeting to partake of port, epitaph, backgammon, beef, and salad. Mr.
Sapsea has been received at the gatehouse with kindred hospitality; and on
that occasion Mr. Jasper seated himself at the piano, and sang to him,
tickling his ears—figuratively—long enough to present a considerable area
for tickling. What Mr. Sapsea likes in that young man is, that he is always
ready to profit by the wisdom of his elders, and that he is sound, sir, at the
core. In proof of which, he sang to Mr. Sapsea that evening, no kickshaw

ditties, favourites with national enemies, but gave him the genuine George
the Third home-brewed; exhorting him (as “my brave boys”) to reduce to a
smashed condition all other islands but this island, and all continents,
peninsulas, isthmuses, promontories, and other geographical forms of land
soever, besides sweeping the seas in all directions. In short, he rendered it
pretty clear that Providence made a distinct mistake in originating so small a
nation of hearts of oak, and so many other verminous peoples.
Mr. Sapsea, walking slowly this moist evening near the churchyard with
his hands behind him, on the look-out for a blushing and retiring stranger,
turns a corner, and comes instead into the goodly presence of the Dean,
conversing with the Verger and Mr. Jasper. Mr. Sapsea makes his obeisance,
and is instantly stricken far more ecclesiastical than any Archbishop of York
or Canterbury.
“You are evidently going to write a book about us, Mr. Jasper,” quoth the
Dean; “to write a book about us. Well! We are very ancient, and we ought to
make a good book. We are not so richly endowed in possessions as in age;
but perhaps you will put that in your book, among other things, and call
attention to our wrongs.”
Mr. Tope, as in duty bound, is greatly entertained by this.
“I really have no intention at all, sir,” replies Jasper, “of turning author or
archæologist. It is but a whim of mine. And even for my whim, Mr. Sapsea
here is more accountable than I am.”
“How so, Mr. Mayor?” says the Dean, with a nod of good-natured
recognition of his Fetch. “How is that, Mr. Mayor?”
“I am not aware,” Mr. Sapsea remarks, looking about him for information,
“to what the Very Reverend the Dean does me the honour of referring.” And
then falls to studying his original in minute points of detail.
“Durdles,” Mr. Tope hints.
“Ay!” the Dean echoes; “Durdles, Durdles!”
“The truth is, sir,” explains Jasper, “that my curiosity in the man was first
really stimulated by Mr. Sapsea. Mr. Sapsea’s knowledge of mankind and
power of drawing out whatever is recluse or odd around him, first led to my
bestowing a second thought upon the man: though of course I had met him
constantly about. You would not be surprised by this, Mr. Dean, if you had
seen Mr. Sapsea deal with him in his own parlour, as I did.”

“O!” cries Sapsea, picking up the ball thrown to him with ineffable
complacency and pomposity; “yes, yes. The Very Reverend the Dean refers
to that? Yes. I happened to bring Durdles and Mr. Jasper together. I regard
Durdles as a Character.”
“A character, Mr. Sapsea, that with a few skilful touches you turn inside
out,” says Jasper.
“Nay, not quite that,” returns the lumbering auctioneer. “I may have a
little influence over him, perhaps; and a little insight into his character,
perhaps. The Very Reverend the Dean will please to bear in mind that I have
seen the world.” Here Mr. Sapsea gets a little behind the Dean, to inspect his
coat-buttons.
“Well!” says the Dean, looking about him to see what has become of his
copyist: “I hope, Mr. Mayor, you will use your study and knowledge of
Durdles to the good purpose of exhorting him not to break our worthy and
respected Choir-Master’s neck; we cannot afford it; his head and voice are
much too valuable to us.”
Mr. Tope is again highly entertained, and, having fallen into respectful
convulsions of laughter, subsides into a deferential murmur, importing that
surely any gentleman would deem it a pleasure and an honour to have his
neck broken, in return for such a compliment from such a source.
“I will take it upon myself, sir,” observes Sapsea loftily, “to answer for
Mr. Jasper’s neck. I will tell Durdles to be careful of it. He will mind what I
say. How is it at present endangered?” he inquires, looking about him with
magnificent patronage.
“Only by my making a moonlight expedition with Durdles among the
tombs, vaults, towers, and ruins,” returns Jasper. “You remember suggesting,
when you brought us together, that, as a lover of the picturesque, it might be
worth my while?”
“I remember!” replies the auctioneer. And the solemn idiot really believes
that he does remember.
“Profiting by your hint,” pursues Jasper, “I have had some day-rambles
with the extraordinary old fellow, and we are to make a moonlight hole-and-
corner exploration to-night.”
“And here he is,” says the Dean.

Durdles with his dinner-bundle in his hand, is indeed beheld slouching
towards them. Slouching nearer, and perceiving the Dean, he pulls off his
hat, and is slouching away with it under his arm, when Mr. Sapsea stops him.
“Mind you take care of my friend,” is the injunction Mr. Sapsea lays upon
him.
“What friend o’ yourn is dead?” asks Durdles. “No orders has come in for
any friend o’ yourn.”
“I mean my live friend there.”
“O! him?” says Durdles. “He can take care of himself, can Mister
Jarsper.”
“But do you take care of him too,” says Sapsea.
Whom Durdles (there being command in his tone) surlily surveys from
head to foot.
“With submission to his Reverence the Dean, if you’ll mind what
concerns you, Mr. Sapsea, Durdles he’ll mind what concerns him.”
“You’re out of temper,” says Mr. Sapsea, winking to the company to
observe how smoothly he will manage him. “My friend concerns me, and
Mr. Jasper is my friend. And you are my friend.”
“Don’t you get into a bad habit of boasting,” retorts Durdles, with a grave
cautionary nod. “It’ll grow upon you.”

Durdles cautions Mr. Sapsea against boasting

“You are out of temper,” says Sapsea again; reddening, but again sinking
to the company.
“I own to it,” returns Durdles; “I don’t like liberties.”
Mr. Sapsea winks a third wink to the company, as who should say: “I
think you will agree with me that I have settled his business;” and stalks out
of the controversy.
Durdles then gives the Dean a good evening, and adding, as he puts his
hat on, “You’ll find me at home, Mister Jarsper, as agreed, when you want
me; I’m a-going home to clean myself,” soon slouches out of sight. This
going home to clean himself is one of the man’s incomprehensible
compromises with inexorable facts; he, and his hat, and his boots, and his
clothes, never showing any trace of cleaning, but being uniformly in one
condition of dust and grit.
The lamplighter now dotting the quiet Close with specks of light, and
running at a great rate up and down his little ladder with that object—his
little ladder under the sacred shadow of whose inconvenience generations
had grown up, and which all Cloisterham would have stood aghast at the

idea of abolishing—the Dean withdraws to his dinner, Mr. Tope to his tea,
and Mr. Jasper to his piano. There, with no light but that of the fire, he sits
chanting choir-music in a low and beautiful voice, for two or three hours; in
short, until it has been for some time dark, and the moon is about to rise.
Then he closes his piano softly, softly changes his coat for a pea-jacket,
with a goodly wicker-cased bottle in its largest pocket, and putting on a low-
crowned, flap-brimmed hat, goes softly out. Why does he move so softly to-
night? No outward reason is apparent for it. Can there be any sympathetic
reason crouching darkly within him?
Repairing to Durdles’s unfinished house, or hole in the city wall, and
seeing a light within it, he softly picks his course among the gravestones,
monuments, and stony lumber of the yard, already touched here and there,
sidewise, by the rising moon. The two journeymen have left their two great
saws sticking in their blocks of stone; and two skeleton journeymen out of
the Dance of Death might be grinning in the shadow of their sheltering
sentry-boxes, about to slash away at cutting out the gravestones of the next
two people destined to die in Cloisterham. Likely enough, the two think little
of that now, being alive, and perhaps merry. Curious, to make a guess at the
two;—or say one of the two!
“Ho! Durdles!”
The light moves, and he appears with it at the door. He would seem to
have been “cleaning himself” with the aid of a bottle, jug, and tumbler; for
no other cleansing instruments are visible in the bare brick room with rafters
overhead and no plastered ceiling, into which he shows his visitor.
“Are you ready?”
“I am ready, Mister Jarsper. Let the old ’uns come out if they dare, when
we go among their tombs. My spirit is ready for ’em.”
“Do you mean animal spirits, or ardent?”
“The one’s the t’other,” answers Durdles, “and I mean ’em both.”
He takes a lantern from a hook, puts a match or two in his pocket
wherewith to light it, should there be need; and they go out together, dinner-
bundle and all.
Surely an unaccountable sort of expedition! That Durdles himself, who is
always prowling among old graves, and ruins, like a Ghoul—that he should
be stealing forth to climb, and dive, and wander without an object, is nothing

extraordinary; but that the Choir-Master or any one else should hold it worth
his while to be with him, and to study moonlight effects in such company is
another affair. Surely an unaccountable sort of expedition, therefore!
“’Ware that there mound by the yard-gate, Mister Jarsper.”
“I see it. What is it?”
“Lime.”
Mr. Jasper stops, and waits for him to come up, for he lags behind. “What
you call quick-lime?”
“Ay!” says Durdles; “quick enough to eat your boots. With a little handy
stirring, quick enough to eat your bones.”
They go on, presently passing the red windows of the Travellers’
Twopenny, and emerging into the clear moonlight of the Monks’ Vineyard.
This crossed, they come to Minor Canon Corner: of which the greater part
lies in shadow until the moon shall rise higher in the sky.
The sound of a closing house-door strikes their ears, and two men come
out. These are Mr. Crisparkle and Neville. Jasper, with a strange and sudden
smile upon his face, lays the palm of his hand upon the breast of Durdles,
stopping him where he stands.
At that end of Minor Canon Corner the shadow is profound in the existing
state of the light: at that end, too, there is a piece of old dwarf wall, breast
high, the only remaining boundary of what was once a garden, but is now the
thoroughfare. Jasper and Durdles would have turned this wall in another
instant; but, stopping so short, stand behind it.
“Those two are only sauntering,” Jasper whispers; “they will go out into
the moonlight soon. Let us keep quiet here, or they will detain us, or want to
join us, or what not.”
Durdles nods assent, and falls to munching some fragments from his
bundle. Jasper folds his arms upon the top of the wall, and, with his chin
resting on them, watches. He takes no note whatever of the Minor Canon,
but watches Neville, as though his eye were at the trigger of a loaded rifle,
and he had covered him, and were going to fire. A sense of destructive power
is so expressed in his face, that even Durdles pauses in his munching, and
looks at him, with an unmunched something in his cheek.
Meanwhile Mr. Crisparkle and Neville walk to and fro, quietly talking
together. What they say, cannot be heard consecutively; but Mr. Jasper has

already distinguished his own name more than once.
“This is the first day of the week,” Mr. Crisparkle can be distinctly heard
to observe, as they turn back; “and the last day of the week is Christmas
Eve.”
“You may be certain of me, sir.”
The echoes were favourable at those points, but as the two approach, the
sound of their talking becomes confused again. The word “confidence,”
shattered by the echoes, but still capable of being pieced together, is uttered
by Mr. Crisparkle. As they draw still nearer, this fragment of a reply is heard:
“Not deserved yet, but shall be, sir.” As they turn away again, Jasper again
hears his own name, in connection with the words from Mr. Crisparkle:
“Remember that I said I answered for you confidently.” Then the sound of
their talk becomes confused again; they halting for a little while, and some
earnest action on the part of Neville succeeding. When they move once
more, Mr. Crisparkle is seen to look up at the sky, and to point before him.
They then slowly disappear; passing out into the moonlight at the opposite
end of the Corner.
It is not until they are gone, that Mr. Jasper moves. But then he turns to
Durdles, and bursts into a fit of laughter. Durdles, who still has that
suspended something in his cheek, and who sees nothing to laugh at, stares
at him until Mr. Jasper lays his face down on his arms to have his laugh out.
Then Durdles bolts the something, as if desperately resigning himself to
indigestion.
Among those secluded nooks there is very little stir or movement after
dark. There is little enough in the high tide of the day, but there is next to
none at night. Besides that the cheerfully frequented High Street lies nearly
parallel to the spot (the old Cathedral rising between the two), and is the
natural channel in which the Cloisterham traffic flows, a certain awful hush
pervades the ancient pile, the cloisters, and the churchyard, after dark, which
not many people care to encounter. Ask the first hundred citizens of
Cloisterham, met at random in the streets at noon, if they believed in Ghosts,
they would tell you no; but put them to choose at night between these eerie
Precincts and the thoroughfare of shops, and you would find that ninety-nine
declared for the longer round and the more frequented way. The cause of this
is not to be found in any local superstition that attaches to the Precincts—
albeit a mysterious lady, with a child in her arms and a rope dangling from

her neck, has been seen flitting about there by sundry witnesses as intangible
as herself—but it is to be sought in the innate shrinking of dust with the
breath of life in it from dust out of which the breath of life has passed; also,
in the widely diffused, and almost as widely unacknowledged, reflection: “If
the dead do, under any circumstances, become visible to the living, these are
such likely surroundings for the purpose that I, the living, will get out of
them as soon as I can.” Hence, when Mr. Jasper and Durdles pause to glance
around them, before descending into the crypt by a small side door, of which
the latter has a key, the whole expanse of moonlight in their view is utterly
deserted. One might fancy that the tide of life was stemmed by Mr. Jasper’s
own gatehouse. The murmur of the tide is heard beyond; but no wave passes
the archway, over which his lamp burns red behind his curtain, as if the
building were a Lighthouse.
They enter, locking themselves in, descend the rugged steps, and are down
in the Crypt. The lantern is not wanted, for the moonlight strikes in at the
groined windows, bare of glass, the broken frames for which cast patterns on
the ground. The heavy pillars which support the roof engender masses of
black shade, but between them there are lanes of light. Up and down these
lanes they walk, Durdles discoursing of the “old uns” he yet counts on
disinterring, and slapping a wall, in which he considers “a whole family on
’em” to be stoned and earthed up, just as if he were a familiar friend of the
family. The taciturnity of Durdles is for the time overcome by Mr. Jasper’s
wicker bottle, which circulates freely;—in the sense, that is to say, that its
contents enter freely into Mr. Durdles’s circulation, while Mr. Jasper only
rinses his mouth once, and casts forth the rinsing.
They are to ascend the great Tower. On the steps by which they rise to the
Cathedral, Durdles pauses for new store of breath. The steps are very dark,
but out of the darkness they can see the lanes of light they have traversed.
Durdles seats himself upon a step. Mr. Jasper seats himself upon another.
The odour from the wicker bottle (which has somehow passed into Durdles’s
keeping) soon intimates that the cork has been taken out; but this is not
ascertainable through the sense of sight, since neither can descry the other.
And yet, in talking, they turn to one another, as though their faces could
commune together.
“This is good stuff, Mister Jarsper!”
“It is very good stuff, I hope.—I bought it on purpose.”

“They don’t show, you see, the old uns don’t, Mister Jarsper!”
“It would be a more confused world than it is, if they could.”
“Well, it would lead towards a mixing of things,” Durdles acquiesces:
pausing on the remark, as if the idea of ghosts had not previously presented
itself to him in a merely inconvenient light, domestically or chronologically.
“But do you think there may be Ghosts of other things, though not of men
and women?”
“What things? Flower-beds and watering-pots? Horses and harness?”
“No. Sounds.”
“What sounds?”
“Cries.”
“What cries do you mean? Chairs to mend?”
“No. I mean screeches. Now I’ll tell you, Mr. Jarsper. Wait a bit till I put
the bottle right.” Here the cork is evidently taken out again, and replaced
again. “There! Now it’s right! This time last year, only a few days later, I
happened to have been doing what was correct by the season, in the way of
giving it the welcome it had a right to expect, when them town-boys set on
me at their worst. At length I gave ’em the slip, and turned in here. And here
I fell asleep. And what woke me? The ghost of a cry. The ghost of one
terrific shriek, which shriek was followed by the ghost of the howl of a dog:
a long, dismal, woeful howl, such as a dog gives when a person’s dead. That
was my last Christmas Eve.”
“What do you mean?” is the very abrupt, and, one might say, fierce retort.
“I mean that I made inquiries everywhere about, and, that no living ears
but mine heard either that cry or that howl. So I say they was both ghosts;
though why they came to me, I’ve never made out.”
“I thought you were another kind of man,” says Jasper, scornfully.
“So I thought myself,” answers Durdles with his usual composure; “and
yet I was picked out for it.”
Jasper had risen suddenly, when he asked him what he meant, and he now
says, “Come; we shall freeze here; lead the way.”
Durdles complies, not over-steadily; opens the door at the top of the steps
with the key he has already used; and so emerges on the Cathedral level, in a
passage at the side of the chancel. Here, the moonlight is so very bright

again that the colours of the nearest stained-glass window are thrown upon
their faces. The appearance of the unconscious Durdles, holding the door
open for his companion to follow, as if from the grave, is ghastly enough,
with a purple hand across his face, and a yellow splash upon his brow; but he
bears the close scrutiny of his companion in an insensible way, although it is
prolonged while the latter fumbles among his pockets for a key confided to
him that will open an iron gate, so to enable them to pass to the staircase of
the great tower.
“That and the bottle are enough for you to carry,” he says, giving it to
Durdles; “hand your bundle to me; I am younger and longer-winded than
you.” Durdles hesitates for a moment between bundle and bottle; but gives
the preference to the bottle as being by far the better company, and consigns
the dry weight to his fellow-explorer.
Then they go up the winding staircase of the great tower, toilsomely,
turning and turning, and lowering their heads to avoid the stairs above, or the
rough stone pivot around which they twist. Durdles has lighted his lantern,
by drawing from the cold, hard wall a spark of that mysterious fire which
lurks in everything, and, guided by this speck, they clamber up among the
cobwebs and the dust. Their way lies through strange places. Twice or thrice
they emerge into level, low-arched galleries, whence they can look down
into the moonlit nave; and where Durdles, waving his lantern, waves the dim
angels’ heads upon the corbels of the roof, seeming to watch their progress.
Anon they turn into narrower and steeper staircases, and the night-air begins
to blow upon them, and the chirp of some startled jackdaw or frightened
rook precedes the heavy beating of wings in a confined space, and the
beating down of dust and straws upon their heads. At last, leaving their light
behind a stair—for it blows fresh up here—they look down on Cloisterham,
fair to see in the moonlight: its ruined habitations and sanctuaries of the
dead, at the tower’s base: its moss-softened red-tiled roofs and red-brick
houses of the living, clustered beyond: its river winding down from the mist
on the horizon, as though that were its source, and already heaving with a
restless knowledge of its approach towards the sea.
Once again, an unaccountable expedition this! Jasper (always moving
softly with no visible reason) contemplates the scene, and especially that
stillest part of it which the Cathedral overshadows. But he contemplates
Durdles quite as curiously, and Durdles is by times conscious of his watchful
eyes.

Only by times, because Durdles is growing drowsy. As aëronauts lighten
the load they carry, when they wish to rise, similarly Durdles has lightened
the wicker bottle in coming up. Snatches of sleep surprise him on his legs,
and stop him in his talk. A mild fit of calenture seizes him, in which he
deems that the ground so far below, is on a level with the tower, and would
as lief walk off the tower into the air as not. Such is his state when they
begin to come down. And as aëronauts make themselves heavier when they
wish to descend, similarly Durdles charges himself with more liquid from
the wicker bottle, that he may come down the better.
The iron gate attained and locked—but not before Durdles has tumbled
twice, and cut an eyebrow open once—they descend into the crypt again,
with the intent of issuing forth as they entered. But, while returning among
those lanes of light, Durdles becomes so very uncertain, both of foot and
speech, that he half drops, half throws himself down, by one of the heavy
pillars, scarcely less heavy than itself, and indistinctly appeals to his
companion for forty winks of a second each.
“If you will have it so, or must have it so,” replies Jasper, “I’ll not leave
you here. Take them, while I walk to and fro.”
Durdles is asleep at once; and in his sleep he dreams a dream.
It is not much of a dream, considering the vast extent of the domains of
dreamland, and their wonderful productions; it is only remarkable for being
unusually restless and unusually real. He dreams of lying there, asleep, and
yet counting his companion’s footsteps as he walks to and fro. He dreams
that the footsteps die away into distance of time and of space, and that
something touches him, and that something falls from his hand. Then
something clinks and gropes about, and he dreams that he is alone for so
long a time, that the lanes of light take new directions as the moon advances
in her course. From succeeding unconsciousness he passes into a dream of
slow uneasiness from cold; and painfully awakes to a perception of the lanes
of light—really changed, much as he had dreamed—and Jasper walking
among them, beating his hands and feet.
“Holloa!” Durdles cries out, unmeaningly alarmed.
“Awake at last?” says Jasper, coming up to him. “Do you know that your
forties have stretched into thousands?”
“No.”
“They have though.”

“What’s the time?”
“Hark! The bells are going in the Tower!”
They strike four quarters, and then the great bell strikes.
“Two!” cries Durdles, scrambling up; “why didn’t you try to wake me,
Mister Jarsper?”
“I did. I might as well have tried to wake the dead—your own family of
dead, up in the corner there.”
“Did you touch me?”
“Touch you! Yes. Shook you.”
As Durdles recalls that touching something in his dream, he looks down
on the pavement, and sees the key of the crypt door lying close to where he
himself lay.
“I dropped you, did I?” he says, picking it up, and recalling that part of his
dream. As he gathers himself up again into an upright position, or into a
position as nearly upright as he ever maintains, he is again conscious of
being watched by his companion.
“Well?” says Jasper, smiling, “are you quite ready? Pray don’t hurry.”
“Let me get my bundle right, Mister Jarsper, and I’m with you.” As he ties
it afresh, he is once more conscious that he is very narrowly observed.
“What do you suspect me of, Mister Jarsper?” he asks, with drunken
displeasure. “Let them as has any suspicions of Durdles name ’em.”
“I’ve no suspicions of you, my good Mr. Durdles; but I have suspicions
that my bottle was filled with something stiffer than either of us supposed.
And I also have suspicions,” Jasper adds, taking it from the pavement and
turning it bottom upwards, “that it’s empty.”
Durdles condescends to laugh at this. Continuing to chuckle when his
laugh is over, as though remonstrant with himself on his drinking powers, he
rolls to the door and unlocks it. They both pass out, and Durdles relocks it,
and pockets his key.
“A thousand thanks for a curious and interesting night,” says Jasper,
giving him his hand; “you can make your own way home?”
“I should think so!” answers Durdles. “If you was to offer Durdles the
affront to show him his way home, he wouldn’t go home.

Durdles wouldn’t go home till morning;
And then Durdles wouldn’t go home,

Durdles wouldn’t.” This with the utmost defiance.
“Good-night, then.”
“Good-night, Mister Jarsper.”
Each is turning his own way, when a sharp whistle rends the silence, and
the jargon is yelped out:
Widdy widdy wen!
I—ket—ches—Im—out—ar—ter—ten.
Widdy widdy wy!
Then—E—don’t—go—then—I—shy—
Widdy Widdy Wake-cock warning!”

Instantly afterwards, a rapid fire of stones rattles at the Cathedral wall, and
the hideous small boy is beheld opposite, dancing in the moonlight.
“What! Is that baby-devil on the watch there!” cries Jasper in a fury: so
quickly roused, and so violent, that he seems an older devil himself. “I shall
shed the blood of that impish wretch! I know I shall do it!” Regardless of the
fire, though it hits him more than once, he rushes at Deputy, collars him, and
tries to bring him across. But Deputy is not to be so easily brought across.
With a diabolical insight into the strongest part of his position, he is no
sooner taken by the throat than he curls up his legs, forces his assailant to
hang him, as it were, and gurgles in his throat, and screws his body, and
twists, as already undergoing the first agonies of strangulation. There is
nothing for it but to drop him. He instantly gets himself together, backs over
to Durdles, and cries to his assailant, gnashing the great gap in front of his
mouth with rage and malice:
“I’ll blind yer, s’elp me! I’ll stone yer eyes out, s’elp me! If I don’t have
yer eyesight, bellows me!” At the same time dodging behind Durdles, and
snarling at Jasper, now from this side of him, and now from that: prepared, if
pounced upon, to dart away in all manner of curvilinear directions, and, if
run down after all, to grovel in the dust, and cry: “Now, hit me when I’m
down! Do it!”
“Don’t hurt the boy, Mister Jarsper,” urges Durdles, shielding him.
“Recollect yourself.”
“He followed us to-night, when we first came here!”
“Yer lie, I didn’t!” replies Deputy, in his one form of polite contradiction.

“He has been prowling near us ever since!”
“Yer lie, I haven’t,” returns Deputy. “I’d only jist come out for my ’elth
when I see you two a-coming out of the Kin-freederel. If
I—ket—ches—Im—out—ar—ter—ten!”

(with the usual rhythm and dance, though dodging behind Durdles), “it ain’t
any fault, is it?”
“Take him home, then,” retorts Jasper, ferociously, though with a strong
check upon himself, “and let my eyes be rid of the sight of you!”
Deputy, with another sharp whistle, at once expressing his relief, and his
commencement of a milder stoning of Mr. Durdles, begins stoning that
respectable gentleman home, as if he were a reluctant ox. Mr. Jasper goes to
his gatehouse, brooding. And thus, as everything comes to an end, the
unaccountable expedition comes to an end—for the time.

CHAPTER XIII.
BOTH AT THEIR BEST

Miss Twinkleton’s establishment was about to undergo a serene hush. The
Christmas recess was at hand. What had once, and at no remote period, been
called, even by the erudite Miss Twinkleton herself, “the half,” but what was
now called, as being more elegant, and more strictly collegiate, “the term,”
would expire to-morrow. A noticeable relaxation of discipline had for some
few days pervaded the Nuns’ House. Club suppers had occurred in the
bedrooms, and a dressed tongue had been carved with a pair of scissors, and
handed round with the curling tongs. Portions of marmalade had likewise
been distributed on a service of plates constructed of curlpaper; and cowslip
wine had been quaffed from the small squat measuring glass in which little
Rickitts (a junior of weakly constitution) took her steel drops daily. The
housemaids had been bribed with various fragments of riband, and sundry
pairs of shoes more or less down at heel, to make no mention of crumbs in
the beds; the airiest costumes had been worn on these festive occasions; and
the daring Miss Ferdinand had even surprised the company with a sprightly
solo on the comb-and-curlpaper, until suffocated in her own pillow by two
flowing-haired executioners.
Nor were these the only tokens of dispersal. Boxes appeared in the
bedrooms (where they were capital at other times), and a surprising amount
of packing took place, out of all proportion to the amount packed. Largess,
in the form of odds and ends of cold cream and pomatum, and also of
hairpins, was freely distributed among the attendants. On charges of
inviolable secrecy, confidences were interchanged respecting golden youth
of England expected to call, “at home,” on the first opportunity. Miss
Giggles (deficient in sentiment) did indeed profess that she, for her part,
acknowledged such homage by making faces at the golden youth; but this
young lady was outvoted by an immense majority.

On the last night before a recess, it was always expressly made a point of
honour that nobody should go to sleep, and that Ghosts should be
encouraged by all possible means. This compact invariably broke down, and
all the young ladies went to sleep very soon, and got up very early.
The concluding ceremony came off at twelve o’clock on the day of
departure; when Miss Twinkleton, supported by Mrs. Tisher, held a drawing-
room in her own apartment (the globes already covered with brown
Holland), where glasses of white-wine and plates of cut pound-cake were
discovered on the table. Miss Twinkleton then said: Ladies, another
revolving year had brought us round to that festive period at which the first
feelings of our nature bounded in our—Miss Twinkleton was annually going
to add “bosoms,” but annually stopped on the brink of that expression, and
substituted “hearts.” Hearts; our hearts. Hem! Again a revolving year, ladies,
had brought us to a pause in our studies—let us hope our greatly advanced
studies—and, like the mariner in his bark, the warrior in his tent, the captive
in his dungeon, and the traveller in his various conveyances, we yearned for
home. Did we say, on such an occasion, in the opening words of Mr.
Addison’s impressive tragedy:
“The dawn is overcast, the morning lowers,
And heavily in clouds brings on the day,
The great, th’ important day—?”

Not so. From horizon to zenith all was couleur de rose, for all was redolent
of our relations and friends. Might we find them prospering as we expected;
might they find us prospering as they expected! Ladies, we would now, with
our love to one another, wish one another good-bye, and happiness, until we
met again. And when the time should come for our resumption of those
pursuits which (here a general depression set in all round), pursuits which,
pursuits which;—then let us ever remember what was said by the Spartan
General, in words too trite for repetition, at the battle it were superfluous to
specify.
The handmaidens of the establishment, in their best caps, then handed the
trays, and the young ladies sipped and crumbled, and the bespoken coaches
began to choke the street. Then leave-taking was not long about; and Miss
Twinkleton, in saluting each young lady’s cheek, confided to her an
exceedingly neat letter, addressed to her next friend at law, “with Miss
Twinkleton’s best compliments” in the corner. This missive she handed with

an air as if it had not the least connexion with the bill, but were something in
the nature of a delicate and joyful surprise.
So many times had Rosa seen such dispersals, and so very little did she
know of any other Home, that she was contented to remain where she was,
and was even better contented than ever before, having her latest friend with
her. And yet her latest friendship had a blank place in it of which she could
not fail to be sensible. Helena Landless, having been a party to her brother’s
revelation about Rosa, and having entered into that compact of silence with
Mr. Crisparkle, shrank from any allusion to Edwin Drood’s name. Why she
so avoided it, was mysterious to Rosa, but she perfectly perceived the fact.
But for the fact, she might have relieved her own little perplexed heart of
some of its doubts and hesitations, by taking Helena into her confidence. As
it was, she had no such vent: she could only ponder on her own difficulties,
and wonder more and more why this avoidance of Edwin’s name should last,
now that she knew—for so much Helena had told her—that a good
understanding was to be reëstablished between the two young men, when
Edwin came down.
It would have made a pretty picture, so many pretty girls kissing Rosa in
the cold porch of the Nuns’ House, and that sunny little creature peeping out
of it (unconscious of sly faces carved on spout and gable peeping at her), and
waving farewells to the departing coaches, as if she represented the spirit of
rosy youth abiding in the place to keep it bright and warm in its desertion.
The hoarse High Street became musical with the cry, in various silvery
voices, “Good-bye, Rosebud darling!” and the effigy of Mr. Sapsea’s father
over the opposite doorway seemed to say to mankind: “Gentlemen, favour
me with your attention to this charming little last lot left behind, and bid
with a spirit worthy of the occasion!” Then the staid street, so unwontedly
sparkling, youthful, and fresh for a few rippling moments, ran dry, and
Cloisterham was itself again.

“Good-bye, Rosebud darling”

If Rosebud in her bower now waited Edwin Drood’s coming with an
uneasy heart, Edwin for his part was uneasy too. With far less force of
purpose in his composition than the childish beauty, crowned by acclamation
fairy queen of Miss Twinkleton’s establishment, he had a conscience, and
Mr. Grewgious had pricked it. That gentleman’s steady convictions of what
was right and what was wrong in such a case as his, were neither to be
frowned aside nor laughed aside. They would not be moved. But for the
dinner in Staple Inn, and but for the ring he carried in the breast pocket of
his coat, he would have drifted into their wedding-day without another pause
for real thought, loosely trusting that all would go well, left alone. But that
serious putting him on his truth to the living and the dead had brought him to
a check. He must either give the ring to Rosa, or he must take it back. Once
put into this narrowed way of action, it was curious that he began to consider
Rosa’s claims upon him more unselfishly than he had ever considered them
before, and began to be less sure of himself than he had ever been in all his
easy-going days.
“I will be guided by what she says, and by how we get on,” was his
decision, walking from the gatehouse to the Nuns’ House. “Whatever comes

of it, I will bear his words in mind, and try to be true to the living and the
dead.”
Rosa was dressed for walking. She expected him. It was a bright, frosty
day, and Miss Twinkleton had already graciously sanctioned fresh air. Thus
they got out together before it became necessary for either Miss Twinkleton,
or the deputy high-priest Mrs. Tisher, to lay even so much as one of those
usual offerings on the shrine of Propriety.
“My dear Eddy,” said Rosa, when they had turned out of the High Street,
and had got among the quiet walks in the neighbourhood of the Cathedral
and the river: “I want to say something very serious to you. I have been
thinking about it for a long, long time.”
“I want to be serious with you too, Rosa dear. I mean to be serious and
earnest.”
“Thank you, Eddy. And you will not think me unkind because I begin, will
you? You will not think I speak for myself only, because I speak first? That
would not be generous, would it? And I know you are generous!”
He said, “I hope I am not ungenerous to you, Rosa.” He called her Pussy
no more. Never again.
“And there is no fear,” pursued Rosa, “of our quarrelling, is there?
Because, Eddy,” clasping her hand on his arm, “we have so much reason to
be very lenient to each other!”
“We will be, Rosa.”
“That’s a dear good boy! Eddy, let us be courageous. Let us change to
brother and sister from this day forth.”
“Never be husband and wife?”
“Never!”
Neither spoke again for a little while. But after that pause he said, with
some effort:
“Of course I know that this has been in both our minds, Rosa, and of
course I am in honour bound to confess freely that it does not originate with
you.”
“No, nor with you, dear,” she returned, with pathetic earnestness. “That
sprung up between us. You are not truly happy in our engagement; I am not
truly happy in it. O, I am so sorry, so sorry!” And there she broke into tears.

“I am deeply sorry too, Rosa. Deeply sorry for you.”
“And I for you, poor boy! And I for you!”
This pure young feeling, this gentle and forbearing feeling of each
towards the other, brought with it its reward in a softening light that seemed
to shine on their position. The relations between them did not look wilful, or
capricious, or a failure, in such a light; they became elevated into something
more self-denying, honourable, affectionate, and true.
“If we knew yesterday,” said Rosa, as she dried her eyes, “and we did
know yesterday, and on many, many yesterdays, that we were far from right
together in those relations which were not of our own choosing, what better
could we do to-day than change them? It is natural that we should be sorry,
and you see how sorry we both are; but how much better to be sorry now
than then!”
“When, Rosa?”
“When it would be too late. And then we should be angry, besides.”
Another silence fell upon them.
“And you know,” said Rosa innocently, “you couldn’t like me then; and
you can always like me now, for I shall not be a drag upon you, or a worry to
you. And I can always like you now, and your sister will not tease or trifle
with you. I often did when I was not your sister, and I beg your pardon for
it.”
“Don’t let us come to that, Rosa; or I shall want more pardoning than I
like to think of.”
“No, indeed, Eddy; you are too hard, my generous boy, upon yourself. Let
us sit down, brother, on these ruins, and let me tell you how it was with us. I
think I know, for I have considered about it very much since you were here
last time. You liked me, didn’t you? You thought I was a nice little thing?”
“Everybody thinks that, Rosa.”
“Do they?” She knitted her brow musingly for a moment, and then flashed
out with the bright little induction: “Well, but say they do. Surely it was not
enough that you should think of me only as other people did; now, was it?”
The point was not to be got over. It was not enough.
“And that is just what I mean; that is just how it was with us,” said Rosa.
“You liked me very well, and you had grown used to me, and had grown
used to the idea of our being married. You accepted the situation as an

inevitable kind of thing, didn’t you? It was to be, you thought, and why
discuss or dispute it?”
It was new and strange to him to have himself presented to himself so
clearly, in a glass of her holding up. He had always patronised her, in his
superiority to her share of woman’s wit. Was that but another instance of
something radically amiss in the terms on which they had been gliding
towards a life-long bondage?
“All this that I say of you is true of me as well, Eddy. Unless it was, I
might not be bold enough to say it. Only, the difference between us was, that
by little and little there crept into my mind a habit of thinking about it,
instead of dismissing it. My life is not so busy as yours, you see, and I have
not so many things to think of. So I thought about it very much, and I cried
about it very much too (though that was not your fault, poor boy); when all
at once my guardian came down, to prepare for my leaving the Nuns’ House.
I tried to hint to him that I was not quite settled in my mind, but I hesitated
and failed, and he didn’t understand me. But he is a good, good man. And he
put before me so kindly, and yet so strongly, how seriously we ought to
consider, in our circumstances, that I resolved to speak to you the next
moment we were alone and grave. And if I seemed to come to it easily just
now, because I came to it all at once, don’t think it was so really, Eddy, for
O, it was very, very hard, and O, I am very, very sorry!”
Her full heart broke into tears again. He put his arm about her waist, and
they walked by the river-side together.
“Your guardian has spoken to me too, Rosa dear. I saw him before I left
London.” His right hand was in his breast, seeking the ring; but he checked
it, as he thought: “If I am to take it back, why should I tell her of it?”
“And that made you more serious about it, didn’t it, Eddy? And if I had
not spoken to you, as I have, you would have spoken to me? I hope you can
tell me so? I don’t like it to be all my doing, though it is so much better for
us.”
“Yes, I should have spoken; I should have put everything before you; I
came intending to do it. But I never could have spoken to you as you have
spoken to me, Rosa.”
“Don’t say you mean so coldly or unkindly, Eddy, please, if you can help
it.”
“I mean so sensibly and delicately, so wisely and affectionately.”

“That’s my dear brother!” She kissed his hand in a little rapture. “The dear
girls will be dreadfully disappointed,” added Rosa, laughing, with the
dewdrops glistening in her bright eyes. “They have looked forward to it so,
poor pets!”
“Ah! but I fear it will be a worse disappointment to Jack,” said Edwin
Drood, with a start. “I never thought of Jack!”
Her swift and intent look at him as he said the words could no more be
recalled than a flash of lightning can. But it appeared as though she would
have instantly recalled it, if she could; for she looked down, confused, and
breathed quickly.
“You don’t doubt its being a blow to Jack, Rosa?”
She merely replied, and that evasively and hurriedly: Why should she?
She had not thought about it. He seemed, to her, to have so little to do with
it.
“My dear child! can you suppose that any one so wrapped up in another—
Mrs. Tope’s expression: not mine—as Jack is in me, could fail to be struck
all of a heap by such a sudden and complete change in my life? I say sudden,
because it will be sudden to him, you know.”
She nodded twice or thrice, and her lips parted as if she would have
assented. But she uttered no sound, and her breathing was no slower.
“How shall I tell Jack?” said Edwin, ruminating. If he had been less
occupied with the thought, he must have seen her singular emotion. “I never
thought of Jack. It must be broken to him, before the town-crier knows it. I
dine with the dear fellow to-morrow and next day—Christmas Eve and
Christmas Day—but it would never do to spoil his feast-days. He always
worries about me, and moddley-coddleys in the merest trifles. The news is
sure to overset him. How on earth shall this be broken to Jack?”
“He must be told, I suppose?” said Rosa.
“My dear Rosa! who ought to be in our confidence, if not Jack?”
“My guardian promised to come down, if I should write and ask him. I am
going to do so. Would you like to leave it to him?”
“A bright idea!” cried Edwin. “The other trustee. Nothing more natural.
He comes down, he goes to Jack, he relates what we have agreed upon, and
he states our case better than we could. He has already spoken feelingly to
you, he has already spoken feelingly to me, and he’ll put the whole thing

feelingly to Jack. That’s it! I am not a coward, Rosa, but to tell you a secret,
I am a little afraid of Jack.”
“No, no! you are not afraid of him!” cried Rosa, turning white, and
clasping her hands.
“Why, sister Rosa, sister Rosa, what do you see from the turret?” said
Edwin, rallying her. “My dear girl!”
“You frightened me.”
“Most unintentionally, but I am as sorry as if I had meant to do it. Could
you possibly suppose for a moment, from any loose way of speaking of
mine, that I was literally afraid of the dear fond fellow? What I mean is, that
he is subject to a kind of paroxysm, or fit—I saw him in it once—and I don’t
know but that so great a surprise, coming upon him direct from me whom he
is so wrapped up in, might bring it on perhaps. Which—and this is the secret
I was going to tell you—is another reason for your guardian’s making the
communication. He is so steady, precise, and exact, that he will talk Jack’s
thoughts into shape, in no time: whereas with me Jack is always impulsive
and hurried, and, I may say, almost womanish.”
Rosa seemed convinced. Perhaps from her own very different point of
view of “Jack,” she felt comforted and protected by the interposition of Mr.
Grewgious between herself and him.
And now, Edwin Drood’s right hand closed again upon the ring in its little
case, and again was checked by the consideration: “It is certain, now, that I
am to give it back to him; then why should I tell her of it?” That pretty
sympathetic nature which could be so sorry for him in the blight of their
childish hopes of happiness together, and could so quietly find itself alone in
a new world to weave fresh wreaths of such flowers as it might prove to
bear, the old world’s flowers being withered, would be grieved by those
sorrowful jewels; and to what purpose? Why should it be? They were but a
sign of broken joys and baseless projects; in their very beauty they were (as
the unlikeliest of men had said) almost a cruel satire on the loves, hopes,
plans, of humanity, which are able to forecast nothing, and are so much
brittle dust. Let them be. He would restore them to her guardian when he
came down; he in his turn would restore them to the cabinet from which he
had unwillingly taken them; and there, like old letters or old vows, or other
records of old aspirations come to nothing, they would be disregarded, until,

being valuable, they were sold into circulation again, to repeat their former
round.
Let them be. Let them lie unspoken of, in his breast. However distinctly or
indistinctly he entertained these thoughts, he arrived at the conclusion, Let
them be. Among the mighty store of wonderful chains that are for ever
forging, day and night, in the vast iron-works of time and circumstance,
there was one chain forged in the moment of that small conclusion, riveted
to the foundations of heaven and earth, and gifted with invincible force to
hold and drag.
They walked on by the river. They began to speak of their separate plans.
He would quicken his departure from England, and she would remain where
she was, at least as long as Helena remained. The poor dear girls should have
their disappointment broken to them gently, and, as the first preliminary,
Miss Twinkleton should be confided in by Rosa, even in advance of the
reappearance of Mr. Grewgious. It should be made clear in all quarters that
she and Edwin were the best of friends. There had never been so serene an
understanding between them since they were first affianced. And yet there
was one reservation on each side; on hers, that she intended through her
guardian to withdraw herself immediately from the tuition of her music-
master; on his, that he did already entertain some wandering speculations
whether it might ever come to pass that he would know more of Miss
Landless.
The bright, frosty day declined as they walked and spoke together. The
sun dipped in the river far behind them, and the old city lay red before them,
as their walk drew to a close. The moaning water cast its seaweed duskily at
their feet, when they turned to leave its margin; and the rooks hovered above
them with hoarse cries, darker splashes in the darkening air.
“I will prepare Jack for my flitting soon,” said Edwin, in a low voice, “and
I will but see your guardian when he comes, and then go before they speak
together. It will be better done without my being by. Don’t you think so?”
“Yes.”
“We know we have done right, Rosa?”
“Yes.”
“We know we are better so, even now?”
“And shall be far, far better so by-and-by.”

Still there was that lingering tenderness in their hearts towards the old
positions they were relinquishing, that they prolonged their parting. When
they came among the elm-trees by the Cathedral, where they had last sat
together, they stopped as by consent, and Rosa raised her face to his, as she
had never raised it in the old days;—for they were old already.
“God bless you, dear! Good-bye!”
“God bless you, dear! Good-bye!”
They kissed each other fervently.
“Now, please take me home, Eddy, and let me be by myself.”
“Don’t look round, Rosa,” he cautioned her, as he drew her arm through
his, and led her away. “Didn’t you see Jack?”
“No! Where?”
“Under the trees. He saw us, as we took leave of each other. Poor fellow!
he little thinks we have parted. This will be a blow to him, I am much
afraid!”
She hurried on, without resting, and hurried on until they had passed
under the gatehouse into the street; once there, she asked:
“Has he followed us? You can look without seeming to. Is he behind?”
“No. Yes, he is! He has just passed out under the gateway. The dear,
sympathetic old fellow likes to keep us in sight. I am afraid he will be
bitterly disappointed!”
She pulled hurriedly at the handle of the hoarse old bell, and the gate soon
opened. Before going in, she gave him one last, wide, wondering look, as if
she would have asked him with imploring emphasis: “O! don’t you
understand?” And out of that look he vanished from her view.

CHAPTER XIV.
WHEN SHALL THESE THREE MEET AGAIN?

Christmas Eve in Cloisterham. A few strange faces in the streets; a few
other faces, half strange and half familiar, once the faces of Cloisterham
children, now the faces of men and women who come back from the outer
world at long intervals to find the city wonderfully shrunken in size, as if it
had not washed by any means well in the meanwhile. To these, the striking
of the Cathedral clock, and the cawing of the rooks from the Cathedral
tower, are like voices of their nursery time. To such as these, it has
happened in their dying hours afar off, that they have imagined their
chamber-floor to be strewn with the autumnal leaves fallen from the elm-
trees in the Close: so have the rustling sounds and fresh scents of their
earliest impressions revived when the circle of their lives was very nearly
traced, and the beginning and the end were drawing close together.
Seasonable tokens are about. Red berries shine here and there in the
lattices of Minor Canon Corner; Mr. and Mrs. Tope are daintily sticking
sprigs of holly into the carvings and sconces of the Cathedral stalls, as if
they were sticking them into the coat-button-holes of the Dean and Chapter.
Lavish profusion is in the shops: particularly in the articles of currants,
raisins, spices, candied peel, and moist sugar. An unusual air of gallantry
and dissipation is abroad; evinced in an immense bunch of mistletoe
hanging in the greengrocer’s shop doorway, and a poor little Twelfth Cake,
culminating in the figure of a Harlequin—such a very poor little Twelfth
Cake, that one would rather called it a Twenty-fourth Cake or a Forty-
eighth Cake—to be raffled for at the pastrycook’s, terms one shilling per
member. Public amusements are not wanting. The Wax-Work which made
so deep an impression on the reflective mind of the Emperor of China is to
be seen by particular desire during Christmas Week only, on the premises of
the bankrupt livery-stable-keeper up the lane; and a new grand comic

Christmas pantomime is to be produced at the Theatre: the latter heralded
by the portrait of Signor Jacksonini the clown, saying “How do you do to-
morrow?” quite as large as life, and almost as miserably. In short,
Cloisterham is up and doing: though from this description the High School
and Miss Twinkleton’s are to be excluded. From the former establishment
the scholars have gone home, every one of them in love with one of Miss
Twinkleton’s young ladies (who knows nothing about it); and only the
handmaidens flutter occasionally in the windows of the latter. It is noticed,
by the bye, that these damsels become, within the limits of decorum, more
skittish when thus intrusted with the concrete representation of their sex,
than when dividing the representation with Miss Twinkleton’s young ladies.
Three are to meet at the gatehouse to-night. How does each one of the
three get through the day?

Neville Landless, though absolved from his books for the time by Mr.
Crisparkle—whose fresh nature is by no means insensible to the charms of
a holiday—reads and writes in his quiet room, with a concentrated air, until
it is two hours past noon. He then sets himself to clearing his table, to
arranging his books, and to tearing up and burning his stray papers. He
makes a clean sweep of all untidy accumulations, puts all his drawers in
order, and leaves no note or scrap of paper undestroyed, save such
memoranda as bear directly on his studies. This done, he turns to his
wardrobe, selects a few articles of ordinary wear—among them, change of
stout shoes and socks for walking—and packs these in a knapsack. This
knapsack is new, and he bought it in the High Street yesterday. He also
purchased, at the same time and at the same place, a heavy walking-stick;
strong in the handle for the grip of the hand, and iron-shod. He tries this,
swings it, poises it, and lays it by, with the knapsack, on a window-seat. By
this time his arrangements are complete.
He dresses for going out, and is in the act of going—indeed has left his
room, and has met the Minor Canon on the staircase, coming out of his
bedroom upon the same story—when he turns back again for his walking-
stick, thinking he will carry it now. Mr. Crisparkle, who has paused on the
staircase, sees it in his hand on his immediately reappearing, takes it from
him, and asks him with a smile how he chooses a stick?

“Really I don’t know that I understand the subject,” he answers. “I chose
it for its weight.”
“Much too heavy, Neville; much too heavy.”
“To rest upon in a long walk, sir?”
“Rest upon?” repeats Mr. Crisparkle, throwing himself into pedestrian
form. “You don’t rest upon it; you merely balance with it.”
“I shall know better, with practice, sir. I have not lived in a walking
country, you know.”
“True,” says Mr. Crisparkle. “Get into a little training, and we will have a
few score miles together. I should leave you nowhere now. Do you come
back before dinner?”
“I think not, as we dine early.”
Mr. Crisparkle gives him a bright nod and a cheerful good-bye;
expressing (not without intention) absolute confidence and ease.
Neville repairs to the Nuns’ House, and requests that Miss Landless may
be informed that her brother is there, by appointment. He waits at the gate,
not even crossing the threshold; for he is on his parole not to put himself in
Rosa’s way.
His sister is at least as mindful of the obligation they have taken on
themselves as he can be, and loses not a moment in joining him. They meet
affectionately, avoid lingering there, and walk towards the upper inland
country.
“I am not going to tread upon forbidden ground, Helena,” says Neville,
when they have walked some distance and are turning; “you will understand
in another moment that I cannot help referring to—what shall I say?—my
infatuation.”
“Had you not better avoid it, Neville? You know that I can hear nothing.”
“You can hear, my dear, what Mr. Crisparkle has heard, and heard with
approval.”
“Yes; I can hear so much.”
“Well, it is this. I am not only unsettled and unhappy myself, but I am
conscious of unsettling and interfering with other people. How do I know
that, but for my unfortunate presence, you, and—and—the rest of that
former party, our engaging guardian excepted, might be dining cheerfully in

Minor Canon Corner to-morrow? Indeed it probably would be so. I can see
too well that I am not high in the old lady’s opinion, and it is easy to
understand what an irksome clog I must be upon the hospitalities of her
orderly house—especially at this time of year—when I must be kept
asunder from this person, and there is such a reason for my not being
brought into contact with that person, and an unfavourable reputation has
preceded me with such another person; and so on. I have put this very
gently to Mr. Crisparkle, for you know his self-denying ways; but still I
have put it. What I have laid much greater stress upon at the same time is,
that I am engaged in a miserable struggle with myself, and that a little
change and absence may enable me to come through it the better. So, the
weather being bright and hard, I am going on a walking expedition, and
intend taking myself out of everybody’s way (my own included, I hope) to-
morrow morning.”
“When to come back?”
“In a fortnight.”
“And going quite alone?”
“I am much better without company, even if there were any one but you
to bear me company, my dear Helena.”
“Mr. Crisparkle entirely agrees, you say?”
“Entirely. I am not sure but that at first he was inclined to think it rather a
moody scheme, and one that might do a brooding mind harm. But we took a
moonlight walk last Monday night, to talk it over at leisure, and I
represented the case to him as it really is. I showed him that I do want to
conquer myself, and that, this evening well got over, it is surely better that I
should be away from here just now, than here. I could hardly help meeting
certain people walking together here, and that could do no good, and is
certainly not the way to forget. A fortnight hence, that chance will probably
be over, for the time; and when it again arises for the last time, why, I can
again go away. Farther, I really do feel hopeful of bracing exercise and
wholesome fatigue. You know that Mr. Crisparkle allows such things their
full weight in the preservation of his own sound mind in his own sound
body, and that his just spirit is not likely to maintain one set of natural laws
for himself and another for me. He yielded to my view of the matter, when
convinced that I was honestly in earnest; and so, with his full consent, I

start to-morrow morning. Early enough to be not only out of the streets, but
out of hearing of the bells, when the good people go to church.”
Helena thinks it over, and thinks well of it. Mr. Crisparkle doing so, she
would do so; but she does originally, out of her own mind, think well of it,
as a healthy project, denoting a sincere endeavour and an active attempt at
self-correction. She is inclined to pity him, poor fellow, for going away
solitary on the great Christmas festival; but she feels it much more to the
purpose to encourage him. And she does encourage him.
He will write to her?
He will write to her every alternate day, and tell her all his adventures.
Does he send clothes on in advance of him?
“My dear Helena, no. Travel like a pilgrim, with wallet and staff. My
wallet—or my knapsack—is packed, and ready for strapping on; and here is
my staff!”
He hands it to her; she makes the same remark as Mr. Crisparkle, that it is
very heavy; and gives it back to him, asking what wood it is? Iron-wood.
Up to this point he has been extremely cheerful. Perhaps, the having to
carry his case with her, and therefore to present it in its brightest aspect, has
roused his spirits. Perhaps, the having done so with success, is followed by
a revulsion. As the day closes in, and the city-lights begin to spring up
before them, he grows depressed.
“I wish I were not going to this dinner, Helena.”
“Dear Neville, is it worth while to care much about it? Think how soon it
will be over.”
“How soon it will be over!” he repeats gloomily. “Yes. But I don’t like
it.”
There may be a moment’s awkwardness, she cheeringly represents to
him, but it can only last a moment. He is quite sure of himself.
“I wish I felt as sure of everything else, as I feel of myself,” he answers
her.
“How strangely you speak, dear! What do you mean?”
“Helena, I don’t know. I only know that I don’t like it. What a strange
dead weight there is in the air!”

She calls his attention to those copperous clouds beyond the river, and
says that the wind is rising. He scarcely speaks again, until he takes leave of
her, at the gate of the Nuns’ House. She does not immediately enter, when
they have parted, but remains looking after him along the street. Twice he
passes the gatehouse, reluctant to enter. At length, the Cathedral clock
chiming one quarter, with a rapid turn he hurries in.
And so he goes up the postern stair.
Edwin Drood passes a solitary day. Something of deeper moment than he
had thought, has gone out of his life; and in the silence of his own chamber
he wept for it last night. Though the image of Miss Landless still hovers in
the background of his mind, the pretty little affectionate creature, so much
firmer and wiser than he had supposed, occupies its stronghold. It is with
some misgiving of his own unworthiness that he thinks of her, and of what
they might have been to one another, if he had been more in earnest some
time ago; if he had set a higher value on her; if, instead of accepting his lot
in life as an inheritance of course, he had studied the right way to its
appreciation and enhancement. And still, for all this, and though there is a
sharp heartache in all this, the vanity and caprice of youth sustain that
handsome figure of Miss Landless in the background of his mind.
That was a curious look of Rosa’s when they parted at the gate. Did it
mean that she saw below the surface of his thoughts, and down into their
twilight depths? Scarcely that, for it was a look of astonished and keen
inquiry. He decides that he cannot understand it, though it was remarkably
expressive.
As he only waits for Mr. Grewgious now, and will depart immediately
after having seen him, he takes a sauntering leave of the ancient city and its
neighbourhood. He recalls the time when Rosa and he walked here or there,
mere children, full of the dignity of being engaged. Poor children! he
thinks, with a pitying sadness.
Finding that his watch has stopped, he turns into the jeweller’s shop, to
have it wound and set. The jeweller is knowing on the subject of a bracelet,
which he begs leave to submit, in a general and quite aimless way. It would
suit (he considers) a young bride, to perfection; especially if of a rather
diminutive style of beauty. Finding the bracelet but coldly looked at, the
jeweller invites attention to a tray of rings for gentlemen; here is a style of
ring, now, he remarks—a very chaste signet—which gentlemen are much

given to purchasing, when changing their condition. A ring of a very
responsible appearance. With the date of their wedding-day engraved
inside, several gentlemen have preferred it to any other kind of memento.
The rings are as coldly viewed as the bracelet. Edwin tells the tempter
that he wears no jewellery but his watch and chain, which were his father’s;
and his shirt-pin.
“That I was aware of,” is the jeweller’s reply, “for Mr. Jasper dropped in
for a watch-glass the other day, and, in fact, I showed these articles to him,
remarking that if he should wish to make a present to a gentleman relative,
on any particular occasion—But he said with a smile that he had an
inventory in his mind of all the jewellery his gentleman relative ever wore;
namely, his watch and chain, and his shirt-pin.” Still (the jeweller
considers) that might not apply to all times, though applying to the present
time. “Twenty minutes past two, Mr. Drood, I set your watch at. Let me
recommend you not to let it run down, sir.”
Edwin takes his watch, puts it on, and goes out, thinking: “Dear old Jack!
If I were to make an extra crease in my neckcloth, he would think it worth
noticing!”
He strolls about and about, to pass the time until the dinner-hour. It
somehow happens that Cloisterham seems reproachful to him to-day; has
fault to find with him, as if he had not used it well; but is far more pensive
with him than angry. His wonted carelessness is replaced by a wistful
looking at, and dwelling upon, all the old landmarks. He will soon be far
away, and may never see them again, he thinks. Poor youth! Poor youth!
As dusk draws on, he paces the Monks’ Vineyard. He has walked to and
fro, full half an hour by the Cathedral chimes, and it has closed in dark,
before he becomes quite aware of a woman crouching on the ground near a
wicket gate in a corner. The gate commands a cross bye-path, little used in
the gloaming; and the figure must have been there all the time, though he
has but gradually and lately made it out.
He strikes into that path, and walks up to the wicket. By the light of a
lamp near it, he sees that the woman is of a haggard appearance, and that
her weazen chin is resting on her hands, and that her eyes are staring—with
an unwinking, blind sort of steadfastness—before her.
Always kindly, but moved to be unusually kind this evening, and having
bestowed kind words on most of the children and aged people he has met,

he at once bends down, and speaks to this woman.
“Are you ill?”
“No, deary,” she answers, without looking at him, and with no departure
from her strange blind stare.
“Are you blind?”
“No, deary.”
“Are you lost, homeless, faint? What is the matter, that you stay here in
the cold so long, without moving?”
By slow and stiff efforts, she appears to contract her vision until it can
rest upon him; and then a curious film passes over her, and she begins to
shake.
He straightens himself, recoils a step, and looks down at her in a dread
amazement; for he seems to know her.
“Good Heaven!” he thinks, next moment. “Like Jack that night!”
As he looks down at her, she looks up at him, and whimpers: “My lungs
is weakly; my lungs is dreffle bad. Poor me, poor me, my cough is rattling
dry!” and coughs in confirmation horribly.
“Where do you come from?”
“Come from London, deary.” (Her cough still rending her.)
“Where are you going to?”
“Back to London, deary. I came here, looking for a needle in a haystack,
and I ain’t found it. Look’ee, deary; give me three-and-sixpence, and don’t
you be afeard for me. I’ll get back to London then, and trouble no one. I’m
in a business.—Ah, me! It’s slack, it’s slack, and times is very bad!—but I
can make a shift to live by it.”
“Do you eat opium?”
“Smokes it,” she replies with difficulty, still racked by her cough. “Give
me three-and-sixpence, and I’ll lay it out well, and get back. If you don’t
give me three-and-sixpence, don’t give me a brass farden. And if you do
give me three-and-sixpence, deary, I’ll tell you something.”
He counts the money from his pocket, and puts it in her hand. She
instantly clutches it tight, and rises to her feet with a croaking laugh of
satisfaction.

“Bless ye! Hark’ee, dear genl’mn. What’s your Chris’en name?”
“Edwin.”
“Edwin, Edwin, Edwin,” she repeats, trailing off into a drowsy repetition
of the word; and then asks suddenly: “Is the short of that name Eddy?”
“It is sometimes called so,” he replies, with the colour starting to his face.
“Don’t sweethearts call it so?” she asks, pondering.
“How should I know?”
“Haven’t you a sweetheart, upon your soul?”
“None.”
She is moving away, with another “Bless ye, and thank’ee, deary!” when
he adds: “You were to tell me something; you may as well do so.”
“So I was, so I was. Well, then. Whisper. You be thankful that your name
ain’t Ned.”
He looks at her quite steadily, as he asks: “Why?”
“Because it’s a bad name to have just now.”
“How a bad name?”
“A threatened name. A dangerous name.”
“The proverb says that threatened men live long,” he tells her, lightly.
“Then Ned—so threatened is he, wherever he may be while I am a-
talking to you, deary—should live to all eternity!” replies the woman.
She has leaned forward to say it in his ear, with her forefinger shaking
before his eyes, and now huddles herself together, and with another “Bless
ye, and thank’ee!” goes away in the direction of the Travellers’ Lodging
House.
This is not an inspiriting close to a dull day. Alone, in a sequestered
place, surrounded by vestiges of old time and decay, it rather has a tendency
to call a shudder into being. He makes for the better-lighted streets, and
resolves as he walks on to say nothing of this to-night, but to mention it to
Jack (who alone calls him Ned), as an odd coincidence, to-morrow; of
course only as a coincidence, and not as anything better worth
remembering.
Still, it holds to him, as many things much better worth remembering
never did. He has another mile or so, to linger out before the dinner-hour;

and, when he walks over the bridge and by the river, the woman’s words are
in the rising wind, in the angry sky, in the troubled water, in the flickering
lights. There is some solemn echo of them even in the Cathedral chime,
which strikes a sudden surprise to his heart as he turns in under the archway
of the gatehouse.
And so he goes up the postern stair.

John Jasper passes a more agreeable and cheerful day than either of his
guests. Having no music-lessons to give in the holiday season, his time is
his own, but for the Cathedral services. He is early among the shopkeepers,
ordering little table luxuries that his nephew likes. His nephew will not be
with him long, he tells his provision-dealers, and so must be petted and
made much of. While out on his hospitable preparations, he looks in on Mr.
Sapsea; and mentions that dear Ned, and that inflammable young spark of
Mr. Crisparkle’s, are to dine at the gatehouse to-day, and make up their
difference. Mr. Sapsea is by no means friendly towards the inflammable
young spark. He says that his complexion is “Un-English.” And when Mr.
Sapsea has once declared anything to be Un-English, he considers that thing
everlastingly sunk in the bottomless pit.
John Jasper is truly sorry to hear Mr. Sapsea speak thus, for he knows
right well that Mr. Sapsea never speaks without a meaning, and that he has
a subtle trick of being right. Mr. Sapsea (by a very remarkable coincidence)
is of exactly that opinion.
Mr. Jasper is in beautiful voice this day. In the pathetic supplication to
have his heart inclined to keep this law, he quite astonishes his fellows by
his melodious power. He has never sung difficult music with such skill and
harmony, as in this day’s Anthem. His nervous temperament is occasionally
prone to take difficult music a little too quickly; to-day, his time is perfect.
These results are probably attained through a grand composure of the
spirits. The mere mechanism of his throat is a little tender, for he wears,
both with his singing-robe and with his ordinary dress, a large black scarf of
strong close-woven silk, slung loosely round his neck. But his composure is
so noticeable, that Mr. Crisparkle speaks of it as they come out from
Vespers.

“I must thank you, Jasper, for the pleasure with which I have heard you
to-day. Beautiful! Delightful! You could not have so outdone yourself, I
hope, without being wonderfully well.”
“I am wonderfully well.”
“Nothing unequal,” says the Minor Canon, with a smooth motion of his
hand: “nothing unsteady, nothing forced, nothing avoided; all thoroughly
done in a masterly manner, with perfect self-command.”
“Thank you. I hope so, if it is not too much to say.”
“One would think, Jasper, you had been trying a new medicine for that
occasional indisposition of yours.”
“No, really? That’s well observed; for I have.”
“Then stick to it, my good fellow,” says Mr. Crisparkle, clapping him on
the shoulder with friendly encouragement, “stick to it.”
“I will.”
“I congratulate you,” Mr. Crisparkle pursues, as they come out of the
Cathedral, “on all accounts.”
“Thank you again. I will walk round to the Corner with you, if you don’t
object; I have plenty of time before my company come; and I want to say a
word to you, which I think you will not be displeased to hear.”
“What is it?”
“Well. We were speaking, the other evening, of my black humours.”
Mr. Crisparkle’s face falls, and he shakes his head deploringly.
“I said, you know, that I should make you an antidote to those black
humours; and you said you hoped I would consign them to the flames.”
“And I still hope so, Jasper.”
“With the best reason in the world! I mean to burn this year’s Diary at the
year’s end.”
“Because you—?” Mr. Crisparkle brightens greatly as he thus begins.
“You anticipate me. Because I feel that I have been out of sorts, gloomy,
bilious, brain-oppressed, whatever it may be. You said I had been
exaggerative. So I have.”
Mr. Crisparkle’s brightened face brightens still more.

“I couldn’t see it then, because I was out of sorts; but I am in a healthier
state now, and I acknowledge it with genuine pleasure. I made a great deal
of a very little; that’s the fact.”
“It does me good,” cries Mr. Crisparkle, “to hear you say it!”
“A man leading a monotonous life,” Jasper proceeds, “and getting his
nerves, or his stomach, out of order, dwells upon an idea until it loses its
proportions. That was my case with the idea in question. So I shall burn the
evidence of my case, when the book is full, and begin the next volume with
a clearer vision.”
“This is better,” says Mr. Crisparkle, stopping at the steps of his own
door to shake hands, “than I could have hoped.”
“Why, naturally,” returns Jasper. “You had but little reason to hope that I
should become more like yourself. You are always training yourself to be,
mind and body, as clear as crystal, and you always are, and never change;
whereas I am a muddy, solitary, moping weed. However, I have got over
that mope. Shall I wait, while you ask if Mr. Neville has left for my place?
If not, he and I may walk round together.”
“I think,” says Mr. Crisparkle, opening the entrance-door with his key,
“that he left some time ago; at least I know he left, and I think he has not
come back. But I’ll inquire. You won’t come in?”
“My company wait,” said Jasper, with a smile.
The Minor Canon disappears, and in a few moments returns. As he
thought, Mr. Neville has not come back; indeed, as he remembers now, Mr.
Neville said he would probably go straight to the gatehouse.
“Bad manners in a host!” says Jasper. “My company will be there before
me! What will you bet that I don’t find my company embracing?”
“I will bet—or I would, if ever I did bet,” returns Mr. Crisparkle, “that
your company will have a gay entertainer this evening.”
Jasper nods, and laughs good-night!
He retraces his steps to the Cathedral door, and turns down past it to the
gatehouse. He sings, in a low voice and with delicate expression, as he
walks along. It still seems as if a false note were not within his power to-
night, and as if nothing could hurry or retard him. Arriving thus under the
arched entrance of his dwelling, he pauses for an instant in the shelter to
pull off that great black scarf, and bang it in a loop upon his arm. For that

brief time, his face is knitted and stern. But it immediately clears, as he
resumes his singing, and his way.
And so he goes up the postern stair.

The red light burns steadily all the evening in the lighthouse on the
margin of the tide of busy life. Softened sounds and hum of traffic pass it
and flow on irregularly into the lonely Precincts; but very little else goes by,
save violent rushes of wind. It comes on to blow a boisterous gale.
The Precincts are never particularly well lighted; but the strong blasts of
wind blowing out many of the lamps (in some instances shattering the
frames too, and bringing the glass rattling to the ground), they are unusually
dark to-night. The darkness is augmented and confused, by flying dust from
the earth, dry twigs from the trees, and great ragged fragments from the
rooks’ nests up in the tower. The trees themselves so toss and creak, as this
tangible part of the darkness madly whirls about, that they seem in peril of
being torn out of the earth: while ever and again a crack, and a rushing fall,
denote that some large branch has yielded to the storm.
Not such power of wind has blown for many a winter night. Chimneys
topple in the streets, and people hold to posts and corners, and to one
another, to keep themselves upon their feet. The violent rushes abate not,
but increase in frequency and fury until at midnight, when the streets are
empty, the storm goes thundering along them, rattling at all the latches, and
tearing at all the shutters, as if warning the people to get up and fly with it,
rather than have the roofs brought down upon their brains.
Still, the red light burns steadily. Nothing is steady but the red light.
All through the night the wind blows, and abates not. But early in the
morning, when there is barely enough light in the east to dim the stars, it
begins to lull. From that time, with occasional wild charges, like a wounded
monster dying, it drops and sinks; and at full daylight it is dead.
It is then seen that the hands of the Cathedral clock are torn off; that lead
from the roof has been stripped away, rolled up, and blown into the Close;
and that some stones have been displaced upon the summit of the great
tower. Christmas morning though it be, it is necessary to send up workmen,
to ascertain the extent of the damage done. These, led by Durdles, go aloft;

while Mr. Tope and a crowd of early idlers gather down in Minor Canon
Corner, shading their eyes and watching for their appearance up there.
This cluster is suddenly broken and put aside by the hands of Mr. Jasper;
all the gazing eyes are brought down to the earth by his loudly inquiring of
Mr. Crisparkle, at an open window:
“Where is my nephew?”
“He has not been here. Is he not with you?”
“No. He went down to the river last night, with Mr. Neville, to look at the
storm, and has not been back. Call Mr. Neville!”
“He left this morning, early.”
“Left this morning early? Let me in! let me in!”
There is no more looking up at the tower, now. All the assembled eyes
are turned on Mr. Jasper, white, half-dressed, panting, and clinging to the
rail before the Minor Canon’s house.

CHAPTER XV.
IMPEACHED

Neville Landless had started so early and walked at so good a pace, that
when the church-bells began to ring in Cloisterham for morning service, he
was eight miles away. As he wanted his breakfast by that time, having set
forth on a crust of bread, he stopped at the next roadside tavern to refresh.
Visitors in want of breakfast—unless they were horses or cattle, for which
class of guests there was preparation enough in the way of water-trough and
hay—were so unusual at the sign of The Tilted Wagon, that it took a long
time to get the wagon into the track of tea and toast and bacon. Neville in the
interval, sitting in a sanded parlour, wondering in how long a time after he
had gone, the sneezy fire of damp fagots would begin to make somebody
else warm.
Indeed, The Tilted Wagon, as a cool establishment on the top of a hill,
where the ground before the door was puddled with damp hoofs and trodden
straw; where a scolding landlady slapped a moist baby (with one red sock on
and one wanting), in the bar; where the cheese was cast aground upon a
shelf, in company with a mouldy tablecloth and a green-handled knife, in a
sort of cast-iron canoe; where the pale-faced bread shed tears of crumb over
its shipwreck in another canoe; where the family linen, half washed and half
dried, led a public life of lying about; where everything to drink was drunk
out of mugs, and everything else was suggestive of a rhyme to mugs; The
Tilted Wagon, all these things considered, hardly kept its painted promise of
providing good entertainment for Man and Beast. However, Man, in the
present case, was not critical, but took what entertainment he could get, and
went on again after a longer rest than he needed.
He stopped at some quarter of a mile from the house, hesitating whether to
pursue the road, or to follow a cart track between two high hedgerows,
which led across the slope of a breezy heath, and evidently struck into the

road again by-and-by. He decided in favour of this latter track, and pursued
it with some toil; the rise being steep, and the way worn into deep ruts.
He was labouring along, when he became aware of some other pedestrians
behind him. As they were coming up at a faster pace than his, he stood aside,
against one of the high banks, to let them pass. But their manner was very
curious. Only four of them passed. Other four slackened speed, and loitered
as intending to follow him when he should go on. The remainder of the party
(half-a-dozen perhaps) turned, and went back at a great rate.
He looked at the four behind him, and he looked at the four before him.
They all returned his look. He resumed his way. The four in advance went
on, constantly looking back; the four in the rear came closing up.
When they all ranged out from the narrow track upon the open slope of
the heath, and this order was maintained, let him diverge as he would to
either side, there was no longer room to doubt that he was beset by these
fellows. He stopped, as a last test; and they all stopped.
“Why do you attend upon me in this way?” he asked the whole body. “Are
you a pack of thieves?”
“Don’t answer him,” said one of the number; he did not see which.
“Better be quiet.”
“Better be quiet?” repeated Neville. “Who said so?”
Nobody replied.
“It’s good advice, whichever of you skulkers gave it,” he went on angrily.
“I will not submit to be penned in between four men there, and four men
there. I wish to pass, and I mean to pass, those four in front.”
They were all standing still; himself included.
“If eight men, or four men, or two men, set upon one,” he proceeded,
growing more enraged, “the one has no chance but to set his mark upon
some of them. And, by the Lord, I’ll do it, if I am interrupted any farther!”
Shouldering his heavy stick, and quickening his pace, he shot on to pass
the four ahead. The largest and strongest man of the number changed swiftly
to the side on which he came up, and dexterously closed with him and went
down with him; but not before the heavy stick had descended smartly.
“Let him be!” said this man in a suppressed voice, as they struggled
together on the grass. “Fair play! His is the build of a girl to mine, and he’s
got a weight strapped to his back besides. Let him alone. I’ll manage him.”

After a little rolling about, in a close scuffle which caused the faces of
both to be besmeared with blood, the man took his knee from Neville’s
chest, and rose, saying: “There! Now take him arm-in-arm, any two of you!”
It was immediately done.
“As to our being a pack of thieves, Mr. Landless,” said the man, as he spat
out some blood, and wiped more from his face; “you know better than that at
midday. We wouldn’t have touched you if you hadn’t forced us. We’re going
to take you round to the high road, anyhow, and you’ll find help enough
against thieves there, if you want it.—Wipe his face, somebody; see how it’s
a-trickling down him!”
When his face was cleansed, Neville recognised in the speaker, Joe, driver
of the Cloisterham omnibus, whom he had seen but once, and that on the day
of his arrival.
“And what I recommend you for the present, is, don’t talk, Mr. Landless.
You’ll find a friend waiting for you, at the high road—gone ahead by the
other way when we split into two parties—and you had much better say
nothing till you come up with him. Bring that stick along, somebody else,
and let’s be moving!”
Utterly bewildered, Neville stared around him and said not a word.
Walking between his two conductors, who held his arms in theirs, he went
on, as in a dream, until they came again into the high road, and into the
midst of a little group of people. The men who had turned back were among
the group; and its central figures were Mr. Jasper and Mr. Crisparkle.
Neville’s conductors took him up to the Minor Canon, and there released
him, as an act of deference to that gentleman.
“What is all this, sir? What is the matter? I feel as if I had lost my senses!”
cried Neville, the group closing in around him.
“Where is my nephew?” asked Mr. Jasper, wildly.
“Where is your nephew?” repeated Neville, “Why do you ask me?”
“I ask you,” retorted Jasper, “because you were the last person in his
company, and he is not to be found.”
“Not to be found!” cried Neville, aghast.
“Stay, stay,” said Mr. Crisparkle. “Permit me, Jasper. Mr. Neville, you are
confounded; collect your thoughts; it is of great importance that you should
collect your thoughts; attend to me.”

“I will try, sir, but I seem mad.”
“You left Mr. Jasper last night with Edwin Drood?”
“Yes.”
“At what hour?”
“Was it at twelve o’clock?” asked Neville, with his hand to his confused
head, and appealing to Jasper.
“Quite right,” said Mr. Crisparkle; “the hour Mr. Jasper has already named
to me. You went down to the river together?”
“Undoubtedly. To see the action of the wind there.”
“What followed? How long did you stay there?”
“About ten minutes; I should say not more. We then walked together to
your house, and he took leave of me at the door.”
“Did he say that he was going down to the river again?”
“No. He said that he was going straight back.”
The bystanders looked at one another, and at Mr. Crisparkle. To whom Mr.
Jasper, who had been intensely watching Neville, said, in a low, distinct,
suspicious voice: “What are those stains upon his dress?”
All eyes were turned towards the blood upon his clothes.
“And here are the same stains upon this stick!” said Jasper, taking it from
the hand of the man who held it. “I know the stick to be his, and he carried it
last night. What does this mean?”
“In the name of God, say what it means, Neville!” urged Mr. Crisparkle.
“That man and I,” said Neville, pointing out his late adversary, “had a
struggle for the stick just now, and you may see the same marks on him, sir.
What was I to suppose, when I found myself molested by eight people?
Could I dream of the true reason when they would give me none at all?”
They admitted that they had thought it discreet to be silent, and that the
struggle had taken place. And yet the very men who had seen it looked
darkly at the smears which the bright cold air had already dried.
“We must return, Neville,” said Mr. Crisparkle; “of course you will be
glad to come back to clear yourself?”
“Of course, sir.”

“Mr. Landless will walk at my side,” the Minor Canon continued, looking
around him. “Come, Neville!”
They set forth on the walk back; and the others, with one exception,
straggled after them at various distances. Jasper walked on the other side of
Neville, and never quitted that position. He was silent, while Mr. Crisparkle
more than once repeated his former questions, and while Neville repeated his
former answers; also, while they both hazarded some explanatory
conjectures. He was obstinately silent, because Mr. Crisparkle’s manner
directly appealed to him to take some part in the discussion, and no appeal
would move his fixed face. When they drew near to the city, and it was
suggested by the Minor Canon that they might do well in calling on the
Mayor at once, he assented with a stern nod; but he spake no word until they
stood in Mr. Sapsea’s parlour.
Mr. Sapsea being informed by Mr. Crisparkle of the circumstances under
which they desired to make a voluntary statement before him, Mr. Jasper
broke silence by declaring that he placed his whole reliance, humanly
speaking, on Mr. Sapsea’s penetration. There was no conceivable reason
why his nephew should have suddenly absconded, unless Mr. Sapsea could
suggest one, and then he would defer. There was no intelligible likelihood of
his having returned to the river, and been accidentally drowned in the dark,
unless it should appear likely to Mr. Sapsea, and then again he would defer.
He washed his hands as clean as he could of all horrible suspicions, unless it
should appear to Mr. Sapsea that some such were inseparable from his last
companion before his disappearance (not on good terms with previously),
and then, once more, he would defer. His own state of mind, he being
distracted with doubts, and labouring under dismal apprehensions, was not to
be safely trusted; but Mr. Sapsea’s was.
Mr. Sapsea expressed his opinion that the case had a dark look; in short
(and here his eyes rested full on Neville’s countenance), an Un-English
complexion. Having made this grand point, he wandered into a denser haze
and maze of nonsense than even a mayor might have been expected to
disport himself in, and came out of it with the brilliant discovery that to take
the life of a fellow-creature was to take something that didn’t belong to you.
He wavered whether or no he should at once issue his warrant for the
committal of Neville Landless to jail, under circumstances of grave
suspicion; and he might have gone so far as to do it but for the indignant
protest of the Minor Canon: who undertook for the young man’s remaining

in his own house, and being produced by his own hands, whenever
demanded. Mr. Jasper then understood Mr. Sapsea to suggest that the river
should be dragged, that its banks should be rigidly examined, that particulars
of the disappearance should be sent to all outlying places and to London, and
that placards and advertisements should be widely circulated imploring
Edwin Drood, if for any unknown reason he had withdrawn himself from his
uncle’s home and society, to take pity on that loving kinsman’s sore
bereavement and distress, and somehow inform him that he was yet alive.
Mr. Sapsea was perfectly understood, for this was exactly his meaning
(though he had said nothing about it); and measures were taken towards all
these ends immediately.
It would be difficult to determine which was the more oppressed with
horror and amazement: Neville Landless, or John Jasper. But that Jasper’s
position forced him to be active, while Neville’s forced him to be passive,
there would have been nothing to choose between them. Each was bowed
down and broken.
With the earliest light of the next morning, men were at work upon the
river, and other men—most of whom volunteered for the service—were
examining the banks. All the livelong day the search went on; upon the river,
with barge and pole, and drag and net; upon the muddy and rushy shore,
with jack-boots, hatchet, spade, rope, dogs, and all imaginable appliances.
Even at night, the river was specked with lanterns, and lurid with fires; far-
off creeks, into which the tide washed as it changed, had their knots of
watchers, listening to the lapping of the stream, and looking out for any
burden it might bear; remote shingly causeways near the sea, and lonely
points off which there was a race of water, had their unwonted flaring
cressets and rough-coated figures when the next day dawned; but no trace of
Edwin Drood revisited the light of the sun.
All that day, again, the search went on. Now, in barge and boat; and now
ashore among the osiers, or tramping amidst mud and stakes and jagged
stones in low-lying places, where solitary watermarks and signals of strange
shapes showed like spectres, John Jasper worked and toiled. But to no
purpose; for still no trace of Edwin Drood revisited the light of the sun.
Setting his watches for that night again, so that vigilant eyes should be
kept on every change of tide, he went home exhausted. Unkempt and
disordered, bedaubed with mud that had dried upon him, and with much of

his clothing torn to rags, he had but just dropped into his easy-chair, when
Mr. Grewgious stood before him.
“This is strange news,” said Mr. Grewgious.
“Strange and fearful news.”
Jasper had merely lifted up his heavy eyes to say it, and now dropped
them again as he drooped, worn out, over one side of his easy-chair.
Mr. Grewgious smoothed his head and face, and stood looking at the fire.
“How is your ward?” asked Jasper, after a time, in a faint, fatigued voice.
“Poor little thing! You may imagine her condition.”
“Have you seen his sister?” inquired Jasper, as before.
“Whose?”
The curtness of the counter-question, and the cool, slow manner in which,
as he put it, Mr. Grewgious moved his eyes from the fire to his companion’s
face, might at any other time have been exasperating. In his depression and
exhaustion, Jasper merely opened his eyes to say: “The suspected young
man’s.”
“Do you suspect him?” asked Mr. Grewgious.
“I don’t know what to think. I cannot make up my mind.”
“Nor I,” said Mr. Grewgious. “But as you spoke of him as the suspected
young man, I thought you had made up your mind.—I have just left Miss
Landless.”

Mr. Grewgious has his suspicions

“What is her state?”
“Defiance of all suspicion, and unbounded faith in her brother.”
“Poor thing!”
“However,” pursued Mr. Grewgious, “it is not of her that I came to speak.
It is of my ward. I have a communication to make that will surprise you. At
least, it has surprised me.”
Jasper, with a groaning sigh, turned wearily in his chair.
“Shall I put it off till to-morrow?” said Mr. Grewgious. “Mind, I warn
you, that I think it will surprise you!”
More attention and concentration came into John Jasper’s eyes as they
caught sight of Mr. Grewgious smoothing his head again, and again looking
at the fire; but now, with a compressed and determined mouth.
“What is it?” demanded Jasper, becoming upright in his chair.
“To be sure,” said Mr. Grewgious, provokingly slowly and internally, as
he kept his eyes on the fire: “I might have known it sooner; she gave me the

opening; but I am such an exceedingly Angular man, that it never occurred
to me; I took all for granted.”
“What is it?” demanded Jasper once more.
Mr. Grewgious, alternately opening and shutting the palms of his hands as
he warmed them at the fire, and looking fixedly at him sideways, and never
changing either his action or his look in all that followed, went on to reply.
“This young couple, the lost youth and Miss Rosa, my ward, though so
long betrothed, and so long recognising their betrothal, and so near being
married—”
Mr. Grewgious saw a staring white face, and two quivering white lips, in
the easy-chair, and saw two muddy hands gripping its sides. But for the
hands, he might have thought he had never seen the face.
“—This young couple came gradually to the discovery (made on both
sides pretty equally, I think), that they would be happier and better, both in
their present and their future lives, as affectionate friends, or say rather as
brother and sister, than as husband and wife.”
Mr. Grewgious saw a lead-coloured face in the easy-chair, and on its
surface dreadful starting drops or bubbles, as if of steel.
“This young couple formed at length the healthy resolution of
interchanging their discoveries, openly, sensibly, and tenderly. They met for
that purpose. After some innocent and generous talk, they agreed to dissolve
their existing, and their intended, relations, for ever and ever.”
Mr. Grewgious saw a ghastly figure rise, open-mouthed, from the easy-
chair, and lift its outspread hands towards its head.
“One of this young couple, and that one your nephew, fearful, however,
that in the tenderness of your affection for him you would be bitterly
disappointed by so wide a departure from his projected life, forbore to tell
you the secret, for a few days, and left it to be disclosed by me, when I
should come down to speak to you, and he would be gone. I speak to you,
and he is gone.”
Mr. Grewgious saw the ghastly figure throw back its head, clutch its hair
with its hands, and turn with a writhing action from him.
“I have now said all I have to say: except that this young couple parted,
firmly, though not without tears and sorrow, on the evening when you last
saw them together.”

Mr. Grewgious heard a terrible shriek, and saw no ghastly figure, sitting
or standing; saw nothing but a heap of torn and miry clothes upon the floor.
Not changing his action even then, he opened and shut the palms of his
hands as he warmed them, and looked down at it.

CHAPTER XVI.
DEVOTED

When John Jasper recovered from his fit or swoon, he found himself
being tended by Mr. and Mrs. Tope, whom his visitor had summoned for the
purpose. His visitor, wooden of aspect, sat stiffly in a chair, with his hands
upon his knees, watching his recovery.
“There! You’ve come to nicely now, sir,” said the tearful Mrs. Tope; “you
were thoroughly worn out, and no wonder!”
“A man,” said Mr. Grewgious, with his usual air of repeating a lesson,
“cannot have his rest broken, and his mind cruelly tormented, and his body
overtaxed by fatigue, without being thoroughly worn out.”
“I fear I have alarmed you?” Jasper apologised faintly, when he was
helped into his easy-chair.
“Not at all, I thank you,” answered Mr. Grewgious.
“You are too considerate.”
“Not at all, I thank you,” answered Mr. Grewgious again.
“You must take some wine, sir,” said Mrs. Tope, “and the jelly that I had
ready for you, and that you wouldn’t put your lips to at noon, though I
warned you what would come of it, you know, and you not breakfasted; and
you must have a wing of the roast fowl that has been put back twenty times
if it’s been put back once. It shall all be on table in five minutes, and this
good gentleman belike will stop and see you take it.”
This good gentleman replied with a snort, which might mean yes, or no,
or anything or nothing, and which Mrs. Tope would have found highly
mystifying, but that her attention was divided by the service of the table.
“You will take something with me?” said Jasper, as the cloth was laid.

“I couldn’t get a morsel down my throat, I thank you,” answered Mr.
Grewgious.
Jasper both ate and drank almost voraciously. Combined with the hurry
in his mode of doing it, was an evident indifference to the taste of what he
took, suggesting that he ate and drank to fortify himself against any other
failure of the spirits, far more than to gratify his palate. Mr. Grewgious in
the meantime sat upright, with no expression in his face, and a hard kind of
imperturbably polite protest all over him: as though he would have said, in
reply to some invitation to discourse; “I couldn’t originate the faintest
approach to an observation on any subject whatever, I thank you.”
“Do you know,” said Jasper, when he had pushed away his plate and
glass, and had sat meditating for a few minutes: “do you know that I find
some crumbs of comfort in the communication with which you have so
much amazed me?”
“Do you?” returned Mr. Grewgious, pretty plainly adding the unspoken
clause: “I don’t, I thank you!”
“After recovering from the shock of a piece of news of my dear boy, so
entirely unexpected, and so destructive of all the castles I had built for him;
and after having had time to think of it; yes.”
“I shall be glad to pick up your crumbs,” said Mr. Grewgious, dryly.
“Is there not, or is there—if I deceive myself, tell me so, and shorten my
pain—is there not, or is there, hope that, finding himself in this new
position, and becoming sensitively alive to the awkward burden of
explanation, in this quarter, and that, and the other, with which it would
load him, he avoided the awkwardness, and took to flight?”
“Such a thing might be,” said Mr. Grewgious, pondering.
“Such a thing has been. I have read of cases in which people, rather than
face a seven days’ wonder, and have to account for themselves to the idle
and impertinent, have taken themselves away, and been long unheard of.”
“I believe such things have happened,” said Mr. Grewgious, pondering
still.
“When I had, and could have, no suspicion,” pursued Jasper, eagerly
following the new track, “that the dear lost boy had withheld anything from
me—most of all, such a leading matter as this—what gleam of light was
there for me in the whole black sky? When I supposed that his intended

wife was here, and his marriage close at hand, how could I entertain the
possibility of his voluntarily leaving this place, in a manner that would be
so unaccountable, capricious, and cruel? But now that I know what you
have told me, is there no little chink through which day pierces? Supposing
him to have disappeared of his own act, is not his disappearance more
accountable and less cruel? The fact of his having just parted from your
ward, is in itself a sort of reason for his going away. It does not make his
mysterious departure the less cruel to me, it is true; but it relieves it of
cruelty to her.”
Mr. Grewgious could not but assent to this.
“And even as to me,” continued Jasper, still pursuing the new track, with
ardour, and, as he did so, brightening with hope: “he knew that you were
coming to me; he knew that you were intrusted to tell me what you have
told me; if your doing so has awakened a new train of thought in my
perplexed mind, it reasonably follows that, from the same premises, he
might have foreseen the inferences that I should draw. Grant that he did
foresee them; and even the cruelty to me—and who am I!—John Jasper,
Music Master, vanishes!”—
Once more, Mr. Grewgious could not but assent to this.
“I have had my distrusts, and terrible distrusts they have been,” said
Jasper; “but your disclosure, overpowering as it was at first—showing me
that my own dear boy had had a great disappointing reservation from me,
who so fondly loved him, kindles hope within me. You do not extinguish it
when I state it, but admit it to be a reasonable hope. I begin to believe it
possible:” here he clasped his hands: “that he may have disappeared from
among us of his own accord, and that he may yet be alive and well.”
Mr. Crisparkle came in at the moment. To whom Mr. Jasper repeated:
“I begin to believe it possible that he may have disappeared of his own
accord, and may yet be alive and well.”
Mr. Crisparkle taking a seat, and inquiring: “Why so?” Mr. Jasper
repeated the arguments he had just set forth. If they had been less plausible
than they were, the good Minor Canon’s mind would have been in a state of
preparation to receive them, as exculpatory of his unfortunate pupil. But he,
too, did really attach great importance to the lost young man’s having been,
so immediately before his disappearance, placed in a new and embarrassing

relation towards every one acquainted with his projects and affairs; and the
fact seemed to him to present the question in a new light.
“I stated to Mr. Sapsea, when we waited on him,” said Jasper: as he really
had done: “that there was no quarrel or difference between the two young
men at their last meeting. We all know that their first meeting was
unfortunately very far from amicable; but all went smoothly and quietly
when they were last together at my house. My dear boy was not in his usual
spirits; he was depressed—I noticed that—and I am bound henceforth to
dwell upon the circumstance the more, now that I know there was a special
reason for his being depressed: a reason, moreover, which may possibly
have induced him to absent himself.”
“I pray to Heaven it may turn out so!” exclaimed Mr. Crisparkle.
“I pray to Heaven it may turn out so!” repeated Jasper. “You know—and
Mr. Grewgious should now know likewise—that I took a great
prepossession against Mr. Neville Landless, arising out of his furious
conduct on that first occasion. You know that I came to you, extremely
apprehensive, on my dear boy’s behalf, of his mad violence. You know that
I even entered in my Diary, and showed the entry to you, that I had dark
forebodings against him. Mr. Grewgious ought to be possessed of the whole
case. He shall not, through any suppression of mine, be informed of a part
of it, and kept in ignorance of another part of it. I wish him to be good
enough to understand that the communication he has made to me has
hopefully influenced my mind, in spite of its having been, before this
mysterious occurrence took place, profoundly impressed against young
Landless.”
This fairness troubled the Minor Canon much. He felt that he was not as
open in his own dealing. He charged against himself reproachfully that he
had suppressed, so far, the two points of a second strong outbreak of temper
against Edwin Drood on the part of Neville, and of the passion of jealousy
having, to his own certain knowledge, flamed up in Neville’s breast against
him. He was convinced of Neville’s innocence of any part in the ugly
disappearance; and yet so many little circumstances combined so wofully
against him, that he dreaded to add two more to their cumulative weight. He
was among the truest of men; but he had been balancing in his mind, much
to its distress, whether his volunteering to tell these two fragments of truth,

at this time, would not be tantamount to a piecing together of falsehood in
the place of truth.
However, here was a model before him. He hesitated no longer.
Addressing Mr. Grewgious, as one placed in authority by the revelation he
had brought to bear on the mystery (and surpassingly Angular Mr.
Grewgious became when he found himself in that unexpected position), Mr.
Crisparkle bore his testimony to Mr. Jasper’s strict sense of justice, and,
expressing his absolute confidence in the complete clearance of his pupil
from the least taint of suspicion, sooner or later, avowed that his confidence
in that young gentleman had been formed, in spite of his confidential
knowledge that his temper was of the hottest and fiercest, and that it was
directly incensed against Mr. Jasper’s nephew, by the circumstance of his
romantically supposing himself to be enamoured of the same young lady.
The sanguine reaction manifest in Mr. Jasper was proof even against this
unlooked-for declaration. It turned him paler; but he repeated that he would
cling to the hope he had derived from Mr. Grewgious; and that if no trace of
his dear boy were found, leading to the dreadful inference that he had been
made away with, he would cherish unto the last stretch of possibility the
idea, that he might have absconded of his own wild will.
Now, it fell out that Mr. Crisparkle, going away from this conference still
very uneasy in his mind, and very much troubled on behalf of the young
man whom he held as a kind of prisoner in his own house, took a
memorable night walk.
He walked to Cloisterham Weir.
He often did so, and consequently there was nothing remarkable in his
footsteps tending that way. But the preoccupation of his mind so hindered
him from planning any walk, or taking heed of the objects he passed, that
his first consciousness of being near the Weir, was derived from the sound
of the falling water close at hand.
“How did I come here!” was his first thought, as he stopped.
“Why did I come here!” was his second.
Then, he stood intently listening to the water. A familiar passage in his
reading, about airy tongues that syllable men’s names, rose so unbidden to
his ear, that he put it from him with his hand, as if it were tangible.

It was starlight. The Weir was full two miles above the spot to which the
young men had repaired to watch the storm. No search had been made up
here, for the tide had been running strongly down, at that time of the night
of Christmas Eve, and the likeliest places for the discovery of a body, if a
fatal accident had happened under such circumstances, all lay—both when
the tide ebbed, and when it flowed again—between that spot and the sea.
The water came over the Weir, with its usual sound on a cold starlight night,
and little could be seen of it; yet Mr. Crisparkle had a strange idea that
something unusual hung about the place.
He reasoned with himself: What was it? Where was it? Put it to the proof.
Which sense did it address?
No sense reported anything unusual there. He listened again, and his
sense of hearing again checked the water coming over the Weir, with its
usual sound on a cold starlight night.
Knowing very well that the mystery with which his mind was occupied,
might of itself give the place this haunted air, he strained those hawk’s eyes
of his for the correction of his sight. He got closer to the Weir, and peered at
its well-known posts and timbers. Nothing in the least unusual was
remotely shadowed forth. But he resolved that he would come back early in
the morning.
The Weir ran through his broken sleep, all night, and he was back again
at sunrise. It was a bright frosty morning. The whole composition before
him, when he stood where he had stood last night, was clearly discernible in
its minutest details. He had surveyed it closely for some minutes, and was
about to withdraw his eyes, when they were attracted keenly to one spot.
He turned his back upon the Weir, and looked far away at the sky, and at
the earth, and then looked again at that one spot. It caught his sight again
immediately, and he concentrated his vision upon it. He could not lose it
now, though it was but such a speck in the landscape. It fascinated his sight.
His hands began plucking off his coat. For it struck him that at that spot—a
corner of the Weir—something glistened, which did not move and come
over with the glistening water-drops, but remained stationary.
He assured himself of this, he threw off his clothes, he plunged into the
icy water, and swam for the spot. Climbing the timbers, he took from them,
caught among their interstices by its chain, a gold watch, bearing engraved
upon its back E. D.

He brought the watch to the bank, swam to the Weir again, climbed it,
and dived off. He knew every hole and corner of all the depths, and dived
and dived and dived, until he could bear the cold no more. His notion was,
that he would find the body; he only found a shirt-pin sticking in some mud
and ooze.
With these discoveries he returned to Cloisterham, and, taking Neville
Landless with him, went straight to the Mayor. Mr. Jasper was sent for, the
watch and shirt-pin were identified, Neville was detained, and the wildest
frenzy and fatuity of evil report rose against him. He was of that vindictive
and violent nature, that but for his poor sister, who alone had influence over
him, and out of whose sight he was never to be trusted, he would be in the
daily commission of murder. Before coming to England he had caused to be
whipped to death sundry “Natives”—nomadic persons, encamping now in
Asia, now in Africa, now in the West Indies, and now at the North Pole—
vaguely supposed in Cloisterham to be always black, always of great virtue,
always calling themselves Me, and everybody else Massa or Missie
(according to sex), and always reading tracts of the obscurest meaning, in
broken English, but always accurately understanding them in the purest
mother tongue. He had nearly brought Mrs. Crisparkle’s grey hairs with
sorrow to the grave. (Those original expressions were Mr. Sapsea’s.) He
had repeatedly said he would have Mr. Crisparkle’s life. He had repeatedly
said he would have everybody’s life, and become in effect the last man. He
had been brought down to Cloisterham, from London, by an eminent
Philanthropist, and why? Because that Philanthropist had expressly
declared: “I owe it to my fellow-creatures that he should be, in the words of
BENTHAM, where he is the cause of the greatest danger to the smallest
number.”
These dropping shots from the blunderbusses of blunderheadedness
might not have hit him in a vital place. But he had to stand against a trained
and well-directed fire of arms of precision too. He had notoriously
threatened the lost young man, and had, according to the showing of his
own faithful friend and tutor who strove so hard for him, a cause of bitter
animosity (created by himself, and stated by himself), against that ill-starred
fellow. He had armed himself with an offensive weapon for the fatal night,
and he had gone off early in the morning, after making preparations for
departure. He had been found with traces of blood on him; truly, they might
have been wholly caused as he represented, but they might not, also. On a

search-warrant being issued for the examination of his room, clothes, and so
forth, it was discovered that he had destroyed all his papers, and rearranged
all his possessions, on the very afternoon of the disappearance. The watch
found at the Weir was challenged by the jeweller as one he had wound and
set for Edwin Drood, at twenty minutes past two on that same afternoon;
and it had run down, before being cast into the water; and it was the
jeweller’s positive opinion that it had never been re-wound. This would
justify the hypothesis that the watch was taken from him not long after he
left Mr. Jasper’s house at midnight, in company with the last person seen
with him, and that it had been thrown away after being retained some hours.
Why thrown away? If he had been murdered, and so artfully disfigured, or
concealed, or both, as that the murderer hoped identification to be
impossible, except from something that he wore, assuredly the murderer
would seek to remove from the body the most lasting, the best known, and
the most easily recognisable, things upon it. Those things would be the
watch and shirt-pin. As to his opportunities of casting them into the river; if
he were the object of these suspicions, they were easy. For, he had been
seen by many persons, wandering about on that side of the city—indeed on
all sides of it—in a miserable and seemingly half-distracted manner. As to
the choice of the spot, obviously such criminating evidence had better take
its chance of being found anywhere, rather than upon himself, or in his
possession. Concerning the reconciliatory nature of the appointed meeting
between the two young men, very little could be made of that in young
Landless’s favour; for it distinctly appeared that the meeting originated, not
with him, but with Mr. Crisparkle, and that it had been urged on by Mr.
Crisparkle; and who could say how unwillingly, or in what ill-conditioned
mood, his enforced pupil had gone to it? The more his case was looked into,
the weaker it became in every point. Even the broad suggestion that the lost
young man had absconded, was rendered additionally improbable on the
showing of the young lady from whom he had so lately parted; for; what
did she say, with great earnestness and sorrow, when interrogated? That he
had, expressly and enthusiastically, planned with her, that he would await
the arrival of her guardian, Mr. Grewgious. And yet, be it observed, he
disappeared before that gentleman appeared.
On the suspicions thus urged and supported, Neville was detained, and
re-detained, and the search was pressed on every hand, and Jasper laboured
night and day. But nothing more was found. No discovery being made,

which proved the lost man to be dead, it at length became necessary to
release the person suspected of having made away with him. Neville was
set at large. Then, a consequence ensued which Mr. Crisparkle had too well
foreseen. Neville must leave the place, for the place shunned him and cast
him out. Even had it not been so, the dear old china shepherdess would
have worried herself to death with fears for her son, and with general
trepidation occasioned by their having such an inmate. Even had that not
been so, the authority to which the Minor Canon deferred officially, would
have settled the point.
“Mr. Crisparkle,” quoth the Dean, “human justice may err, but it must act
according to its lights. The days of taking sanctuary are past. This young
man must not take sanctuary with us.”
“You mean that he must leave my house, sir?”
“Mr. Crisparkle,” returned the prudent Dean, “I claim no authority in
your house. I merely confer with you, on the painful necessity you find
yourself under, of depriving this young man of the great advantages of your
counsel and instruction.”
“It is very lamentable, sir,” Mr. Crisparkle represented.
“Very much so,” the Dean assented.
“And if it be a necessity—” Mr. Crisparkle faltered.
“As you unfortunately find it to be,” returned the Dean.
Mr. Crisparkle bowed submissively: “It is hard to prejudge his case, sir,
but I am sensible that—”
“Just so. Perfectly. As you say, Mr. Crisparkle,” interposed the Dean,
nodding his head smoothly, “there is nothing else to be done. No doubt, no
doubt. There is no alternative, as your good sense has discovered.”
“I am entirely satisfied of his perfect innocence, sir, nevertheless.”
“We-e-ell!” said the Dean, in a more confidential tone, and slightly
glancing around him, “I would not say so, generally. Not generally. Enough
of suspicion attaches to him to—no, I think I would not say so, generally.”
Mr. Crisparkle bowed again.
“It does not become us, perhaps,” pursued the Dean, “to be partisans. Not
partisans. We clergy keep our hearts warm and our heads cool, and we hold
a judicious middle course.”

“I hope you do not object, sir, to my having stated in public,
emphatically, that he will reappear here, whenever any new suspicion may
be awakened, or any new circumstance may come to light in this
extraordinary matter?”
“Not at all,” returned the Dean. “And yet, do you know, I don’t think,”
with a very nice and neat emphasis on those two words: “I don’t think I
would state it emphatically. State it? Ye-e-es! But emphatically? No-o-o. I
think not. In point of fact, Mr. Crisparkle, keeping our hearts warm and our
heads cool, we clergy need do nothing emphatically.”
So Minor Canon Row knew Neville Landless no more; and he went
whithersoever he would, or could, with a blight upon his name and fame.
It was not until then that John Jasper silently resumed his place in the
choir. Haggard and red-eyed, his hopes plainly had deserted him, his
sanguine mood was gone, and all his worst misgivings had come back. A
day or two afterwards, while unrobing, he took his Diary from a pocket of
his coat, turned the leaves, and with an impressive look, and without one
spoken word, handed this entry to Mr. Crisparkle to read:
“My dear boy is murdered. The discovery of the watch and shirt-pin
convinces me that he was murdered that night, and that his jewellery was
taken from him to prevent identification by its means. All the delusive
hopes I had founded on his separation from his betrothed wife, I give to the
winds. They perish before this fatal discovery. I now swear, and record the
oath on this page, That I nevermore will discuss this mystery with any
human creature until I hold the clue to it in my hand. That I never will relax
in my secrecy or in my search. That I will fasten the crime of the murder of
my dear dead boy upon the murderer. And, That I devote myself to his
destruction.”

CHAPTER XVII.
PHILANTHROPY, PROFESSIONAL AND
UNPROFESSIONAL

Full half a year had come and gone, and Mr. Crisparkle sat in a waiting-
room in the London chief offices of the Haven of Philanthropy, until he
could have audience of Mr. Honeythunder.
In his college days of athletic exercises, Mr. Crisparkle had known
professors of the Noble Art of fisticuffs, and had attended two or three of
their gloved gatherings. He had now an opportunity of observing that as to
the phrenological formation of the backs of their heads, the Professing
Philanthropists were uncommonly like the Pugilists. In the development of
all those organs which constitute, or attend, a propensity to “pitch into”
your fellow-creatures, the Philanthropists were remarkably favoured. There
were several Professors passing in and out, with exactly the aggressive air
upon them of being ready for a turn-up with any Novice who might happen
to be on hand, that Mr. Crisparkle well remembered in the circles of the
Fancy. Preparations were in progress for a moral little Mill somewhere on
the rural circuit, and other Professors were backing this or that Heavy-
Weight as good for such or such speech-making hits, so very much after the
manner of the sporting publicans, that the intended Resolutions might have
been Rounds. In an official manager of these displays much celebrated for
his platform tactics, Mr. Crisparkle recognised (in a suit of black) the
counterpart of a deceased benefactor of his species, an eminent public
character, once known to fame as Frosty-faced Fogo, who in days of yore
superintended the formation of the magic circle with the ropes and stakes.
There were only three conditions of resemblance wanting between these
Professors and those. Firstly, the Philanthropists were in very bad training:
much too fleshy, and presenting, both in face and figure, a superabundance

of what is known to Pugilistic Experts as Suet Pudding. Secondly, the
Philanthropists had not the good temper of the Pugilists, and used worse
language. Thirdly, their fighting code stood in great need of revision, as
empowering them not only to bore their man to the ropes, but to bore him to
the confines of distraction; also to hit him when he was down, hit him
anywhere and anyhow, kick him, stamp upon him, gouge him, and maul
him behind his back without mercy. In these last particulars the Professors
of the Noble Art were much nobler than the Professors of Philanthropy.
Mr. Crisparkle was so completely lost in musing on these similarities and
dissimilarities, at the same time watching the crowd which came and went
by, always, as it seemed, on errands of antagonistically snatching something
from somebody, and never giving anything to anybody, that his name was
called before he heard it. On his at length responding, he was shown by a
miserably shabby and underpaid stipendiary Philanthropist (who could
hardly have done worse if he had taken service with a declared enemy of
the human race) to Mr. Honeythunder’s room.
“Sir,” said Mr. Honeythunder, in his tremendous voice, like a
schoolmaster issuing orders to a boy of whom he had a bad opinion, “sit
down.”
Mr. Crisparkle seated himself.
Mr. Honeythunder having signed the remaining few score of a few
thousand circulars, calling upon a corresponding number of families
without means to come forward, stump up instantly, and be Philanthropists,
or go to the Devil, another shabby stipendiary Philanthropist (highly
disinterested, if in earnest) gathered these into a basket and walked off with
them.
“Now, Mr. Crisparkle,” said Mr. Honeythunder, turning his chair half
round towards him when they were alone, and squaring his arms with his
hands on his knees, and his brows knitted, as if he added, I am going to
make short work of you: “Now, Mr. Crisparkle, we entertain different
views, you and I, sir, of the sanctity of human life.”
“Do we?” returned the Minor Canon.
“We do, sir.”
“Might I ask you,” said the Minor Canon: “what are your views on that
subject?”

“That human life is a thing to be held sacred, sir.”
“Might I ask you,” pursued the Minor Canon as before: “what you
suppose to be my views on that subject?”
“By George, sir!” returned the Philanthropist, squaring his arms still
more, as he frowned on Mr. Crisparkle: “they are best known to yourself.”
“Readily admitted. But you began by saying that we took different views,
you know. Therefore (or you could not say so) you must have set up some
views as mine. Pray, what views have you set up as mine?”
“Here is a man—and a young man,” said Mr. Honeythunder, as if that
made the matter infinitely worse, and he could have easily borne the loss of
an old one, “swept off the face of the earth by a deed of violence. What do
you call that?”
“Murder,” said the Minor Canon.
“What do you call the doer of that deed, sir?
“A murderer,” said the Minor Canon.
“I am glad to hear you admit so much, sir,” retorted Mr. Honeythunder, in
his most offensive manner; “and I candidly tell you that I didn’t expect it.”
Here he lowered heavily at Mr. Crisparkle again.
“Be so good as to explain what you mean by those very unjustifiable
expressions.”
“I don’t sit here, sir,” returned the Philanthropist, raising his voice to a
roar, “to be browbeaten.”
“As the only other person present, no one can possibly know that better
than I do,” returned the Minor Canon very quietly. “But I interrupt your
explanation.”
“Murder!” proceeded Mr. Honeythunder, in a kind of boisterous reverie,
with his platform folding of his arms, and his platform nod of abhorrent
reflection after each short sentiment of a word. “Bloodshed! Abel! Cain! I
hold no terms with Cain. I repudiate with a shudder the red hand when it is
offered me.”
Instead of instantly leaping into his chair and cheering himself hoarse, as
the Brotherhood in public meeting assembled would infallibly have done on
this cue, Mr. Crisparkle merely reversed the quiet crossing of his legs, and
said mildly: “Don’t let me interrupt your explanation—when you begin it.”

“The Commandments say, no murder. NO murder, sir!” proceeded Mr.
Honeythunder, platformally pausing as if he took Mr. Crisparkle to task for
having distinctly asserted that they said: You may do a little murder, and
then leave off.
“And they also say, you shall bear no false witness,” observed Mr.
Crisparkle.
“Enough!” bellowed Mr. Honeythunder, with a solemnity and severity
that would have brought the house down at a meeting, “E—e—nough! My
late wards being now of age, and I being released from a trust which I
cannot contemplate without a thrill of horror, there are the accounts which
you have undertaken to accept on their behalf, and there is a statement of
the balance which you have undertaken to receive, and which you cannot
receive too soon. And let me tell you, sir, I wish that, as a man and a Minor
Canon, you were better employed,” with a nod. “Better employed,” with
another nod. “Bet—ter em—ployed!” with another and the three nods
added up.
Mr. Crisparkle rose; a little heated in the face, but with perfect command
of himself.
“Mr. Honeythunder,” he said, taking up the papers referred to: “my being
better or worse employed than I am at present is a matter of taste and
opinion. You might think me better employed in enrolling myself a member
of your Society.”
“Ay, indeed, sir!” retorted Mr. Honeythunder, shaking his head in a
threatening manner. “It would have been better for you if you had done that
long ago!”
“I think otherwise.”
“Or,” said Mr. Honeythunder, shaking his head again, “I might think one
of your profession better employed in devoting himself to the discovery and
punishment of guilt than in leaving that duty to be undertaken by a
layman.”
“I may regard my profession from a point of view which teaches me that
its first duty is towards those who are in necessity and tribulation, who are
desolate and oppressed,” said Mr. Crisparkle. “However, as I have quite
clearly satisfied myself that it is no part of my profession to make
professions, I say no more of that. But I owe it to Mr. Neville, and to Mr.

Neville’s sister (and in a much lower degree to myself), to say to you that I
know I was in the full possession and understanding of Mr. Neville’s mind
and heart at the time of this occurrence; and that, without in the least
colouring or concealing what was to be deplored in him and required to be
corrected, I feel certain that his tale is true. Feeling that certainty, I befriend
him. As long as that certainty shall last, I will befriend him. And if any
consideration could shake me in this resolve, I should be so ashamed of
myself for my meanness, that no man’s good opinion—no, nor no woman’s
—so gained, could compensate me for the loss of my own.”
Good fellow! manly fellow! And he was so modest, too. There was no
more self-assertion in the Minor Canon than in the schoolboy who had
stood in the breezy playing-fields keeping a wicket. He was simply and
staunchly true to his duty alike in the large case and in the small. So all true
souls ever are. So every true soul ever was, ever is, and ever will be. There
is nothing little to the really great in spirit.
“Then who do you make out did the deed?” asked Mr. Honeythunder,
turning on him abruptly.
“Heaven forbid,” said Mr. Crisparkle, “that in my desire to clear one man
I should lightly criminate another! I accuse no one.”
“Tcha!” ejaculated Mr. Honeythunder with great disgust; for this was by
no means the principle on which the Philanthropic Brotherhood usually
proceeded. “And, sir, you are not a disinterested witness, we must bear in
mind.”
“How am I an interested one?” inquired Mr. Crisparkle, smiling
innocently, at a loss to imagine.
“There was a certain stipend, sir, paid to you for your pupil, which may
have warped your judgment a bit,” said Mr. Honeythunder, coarsely.
“Perhaps I expect to retain it still?” Mr. Crisparkle returned, enlightened;
“do you mean that too?”
“Well, sir,” returned the professional Philanthropist, getting up and
thrusting his hands down into his trousers-pockets, “I don’t go about
measuring people for caps. If people find I have any about me that fit ’em,
they can put ’em on and wear ’em, if they like. That’s their look out: not
mine.”

Mr. Crisparkle eyed him with a just indignation, and took him to task
thus:
“Mr. Honeythunder, I hoped when I came in here that I might be under
no necessity of commenting on the introduction of platform manners or
platform manœuvres among the decent forbearances of private life. But you
have given me such a specimen of both, that I should be a fit subject for
both if I remained silent respecting them. They are detestable.”
“They don’t suit you, I dare say, sir.”
“They are,” repeated Mr. Crisparkle, without noticing the interruption,
“detestable. They violate equally the justice that should belong to
Christians, and the restraints that should belong to gentlemen. You assume a
great crime to have been committed by one whom I, acquainted with the
attendant circumstances, and having numerous reasons on my side,
devoutly believe to be innocent of it. Because I differ from you on that vital
point, what is your platform resource? Instantly to turn upon me, charging
that I have no sense of the enormity of the crime itself, but am its aider and
abettor! So, another time—taking me as representing your opponent in
other cases—you set up a platform credulity; a moved and seconded and
carried-unanimously profession of faith in some ridiculous delusion or
mischievous imposition. I decline to believe it, and you fall back upon your
platform resource of proclaiming that I believe nothing; that because I will
not bow down to a false God of your making, I deny the true God! Another
time you make the platform discovery that War is a calamity, and you
propose to abolish it by a string of twisted resolutions tossed into the air
like the tail of a kite. I do not admit the discovery to be yours in the least,
and I have not a grain of faith in your remedy. Again, your platform
resource of representing me as revelling in the horrors of a battle-field like a
fiend incarnate! Another time, in another of your undiscriminating platform
rushes, you would punish the sober for the drunken. I claim consideration
for the comfort, convenience, and refreshment of the sober; and you
presently make platform proclamation that I have a depraved desire to turn
Heaven’s creatures into swine and wild beasts! In all such cases your
movers, and your seconders, and your supporters—your regular Professors
of all degrees, run amuck like so many mad Malays; habitually attributing
the lowest and basest motives with the utmost recklessness (let me call your
attention to a recent instance in yourself for which you should blush), and

quoting figures which you know to be as wilfully onesided as a statement of
any complicated account that should be all Creditor side and no Debtor, or
all Debtor side and no Creditor. Therefore it is, Mr. Honeythunder, that I
consider the platform a sufficiently bad example and a sufficiently bad
school, even in public life; but hold that, carried into private life, it becomes
an unendurable nuisance.”
“These are strong words, sir!” exclaimed the Philanthropist.
“I hope so,” said Mr. Crisparkle. “Good morning.”
He walked out of the Haven at a great rate, but soon fell into his regular
brisk pace, and soon had a smile upon his face as he went along, wondering
what the china shepherdess would have said if she had seen him pounding
Mr. Honeythunder in the late little lively affair. For Mr. Crisparkle had just
enough of harmless vanity to hope that he had hit hard, and to glow with the
belief that he had trimmed the Philanthropic Jacket pretty handsomely.
He took himself to Staple Inn, but not to P. J. T. and Mr. Grewgious. Full
many a creaking stair he climbed before he reached some attic rooms in a
corner, turned the latch of their unbolted door, and stood beside the table of
Neville Landless.
An air of retreat and solitude hung about the rooms and about their
inhabitant. He was much worn, and so were they. Their sloping ceilings,
cumbrous rusty locks and grates, and heavy wooden bins and beams, slowly
mouldering withal, had a prisonous look, and he had the haggard face of a
prisoner. Yet the sunlight shone in at the ugly garret-window, which had a
penthouse to itself thrust out among the tiles; and on the cracked and
smoke-blackened parapet beyond, some of the deluded sparrows of the
place rheumatically hopped, like little feathered cripples who had left their
crutches in their nests; and there was a play of living leaves at hand that
changed the air, and made an imperfect sort of music in it that would have
been melody in the country.
The rooms were sparely furnished, but with good store of books.
Everything expressed the abode of a poor student. That Mr. Crisparkle had
been either chooser, lender, or donor of the books, or that he combined the
three characters, might have been easily seen in the friendly beam of his
eyes upon them as he entered.
“How goes it, Neville?”

“I am in good heart, Mr. Crisparkle, and working away.”
“I wish your eyes were not quite so large and not quite so bright,” said
the Minor Canon, slowly releasing the hand he had taken in his.
“They brighten at the sight of you,” returned Neville. “If you were to fall
away from me, they would soon be dull enough.”
“Rally, rally!” urged the other, in a stimulating tone. “Fight for it,
Neville!”
“If I were dying, I feel as if a word from you would rally me; if my pulse
had stopped, I feel as if your touch would make it beat again,” said Neville.
“But I have rallied, and am doing famously.”
Mr. Crisparkle turned him with his face a little more towards the light.
“I want to see a ruddier touch here, Neville,” he said, indicating his own
healthy cheek by way of pattern. “I want more sun to shine upon you.”
Neville drooped suddenly, as he replied in a lowered voice: “I am not
hardy enough for that, yet. I may become so, but I cannot bear it yet. If you
had gone through those Cloisterham streets as I did; if you had seen, as I
did, those averted eyes, and the better sort of people silently giving me too
much room to pass, that I might not touch them or come near them, you
wouldn’t think it quite unreasonable that I cannot go about in the daylight.”
“My poor fellow!” said the Minor Canon, in a tone so purely sympathetic
that the young man caught his hand, “I never said it was unreasonable;
never thought so. But I should like you to do it.”
“And that would give me the strongest motive to do it. But I cannot yet. I
cannot persuade myself that the eyes of even the stream of strangers I pass
in this vast city look at me without suspicion. I feel marked and tainted,
even when I go out—as I do only—at night. But the darkness covers me
then, and I take courage from it.”
Mr. Crisparkle laid a hand upon his shoulder, and stood looking down at
him.
“If I could have changed my name,” said Neville, “I would have done so.
But as you wisely pointed out to me, I can’t do that, for it would look like
guilt. If I could have gone to some distant place, I might have found relief
in that, but the thing is not to be thought of, for the same reason. Hiding and
escaping would be the construction in either case. It seems a little hard to be
so tied to a stake, and innocent; but I don’t complain.”

“And you must expect no miracle to help you, Neville,” said Mr.
Crisparkle, compassionately.
“No, sir, I know that. The ordinary fulness of time and circumstances is
all I have to trust to.”
“It will right you at last, Neville.”
“So I believe, and I hope I may live to know it.”
But perceiving that the despondent mood into which he was falling cast a
shadow on the Minor Canon, and (it may be) feeling that the broad hand
upon his shoulder was not then quite as steady as its own natural strength
had rendered it when it first touched him just now, he brightened and said:
“Excellent circumstances for study, anyhow! and you know, Mr.
Crisparkle, what need I have of study in all ways. Not to mention that you
have advised me to study for the difficult profession of the law, specially,
and that of course I am guiding myself by the advice of such a friend and
helper. Such a good friend and helper!”
He took the fortifying hand from his shoulder, and kissed it. Mr.
Crisparkle beamed at the books, but not so brightly as when he had entered.
“I gather from your silence on the subject that my late guardian is
adverse, Mr. Crisparkle?”
The Minor Canon answered: “Your late guardian is a—a most
unreasonable person, and it signifies nothing to any reasonable person
whether he is adverse, perverse, or the reverse.”
“Well for me that I have enough with economy to live upon,” sighed
Neville, half wearily and half cheerily, “while I wait to be learned, and wait
to be righted! Else I might have proved the proverb, that while the grass
grows, the steed starves!”
He opened some books as he said it, and was soon immersed in their
interleaved and annotated passages; while Mr. Crisparkle sat beside him,
expounding, correcting, and advising. The Minor Canon’s Cathedral duties
made these visits of his difficult to accomplish, and only to be compassed at
intervals of many weeks. But they were as serviceable as they were
precious to Neville Landless.
When they had got through such studies as they had in hand, they stood
leaning on the window-sill, and looking down upon the patch of garden.

“Next week,” said Mr. Crisparkle, “you will cease to be alone, and will
have a devoted companion.”
“And yet,” returned Neville, “this seems an uncongenial place to bring
my sister to.”
“I don’t think so,” said the Minor Canon. “There is duty to be done here;
and there are womanly feeling, sense, and courage wanted here.”
“I meant,” explained Neville, “that the surroundings are so dull and
unwomanly, and that Helena can have no suitable friend or society here.”
“You have only to remember,” said Mr. Crisparkle, “that you are here
yourself, and that she has to draw you into the sunlight.”
They were silent for a little while, and then Mr. Crisparkle began anew.
“When we first spoke together, Neville, you told me that your sister had
risen out of the disadvantages of your past lives as superior to you as the
tower of Cloisterham Cathedral is higher than the chimneys of Minor
Canon Corner. Do you remember that?”
“Right well!”
“I was inclined to think it at the time an enthusiastic flight. No matter
what I think it now. What I would emphasise is, that under the head of Pride
your sister is a great and opportune example to you.”
“Under all heads that are included in the composition of a fine character,
she is.”
“Say so; but take this one. Your sister has learnt how to govern what is
proud in her nature. She can dominate it even when it is wounded through
her sympathy with you. No doubt she has suffered deeply in those same
streets where you suffered deeply. No doubt her life is darkened by the
cloud that darkens yours. But bending her pride into a grand composure that
is not haughty or aggressive, but is a sustained confidence in you and in the
truth, she has won her way through those streets until she passes along them
as high in the general respect as any one who treads them. Every day and
hour of her life since Edwin Drood’s disappearance, she has faced malignity
and folly—for you—as only a brave nature well directed can. So it will be
with her to the end. Another and weaker kind of pride might sink broken-
hearted, but never such a pride as hers: which knows no shrinking, and can
get no mastery over her.”

The pale cheek beside him flushed under the comparison, and the hint
implied in it.
“I will do all I can to imitate her,” said Neville.
“Do so, and be a truly brave man, as she is a truly brave woman,”
answered Mr. Crisparkle stoutly. “It is growing dark. Will you go my way
with me, when it is quite dark? Mind! it is not I who wait for darkness.”
Neville replied, that he would accompany him directly. But Mr.
Crisparkle said he had a moment’s call to make on Mr. Grewgious as an act
of courtesy, and would run across to that gentleman’s chambers, and rejoin
Neville on his own doorstep, if he would come down there to meet him.
Mr. Grewgious, bolt upright as usual, sat taking his wine in the dusk at
his open window; his wineglass and decanter on the round table at his
elbow; himself and his legs on the window-seat; only one hinge in his
whole body, like a bootjack.
“How do you do, reverend sir?” said Mr. Grewgious, with abundant
offers of hospitality, which were as cordially declined as made. “And how is
your charge getting on over the way in the set that I had the pleasure of
recommending to you as vacant and eligible?”
Mr. Crisparkle replied suitably.
“I am glad you approve of them,” said Mr. Grewgious, “because I
entertain a sort of fancy for having him under my eye.”
As Mr. Grewgious had to turn his eye up considerably before he could
see the chambers, the phrase was to be taken figuratively and not literally.
“And how did you leave Mr. Jasper, reverend sir?” said Mr. Grewgious.
Mr. Crisparkle had left him pretty well.
“And where did you leave Mr. Jasper, reverend sir?” Mr. Crisparkle had
left him at Cloisterham.
“And when did you leave Mr. Jasper, reverend sir?” That morning.
“Umps!” said Mr. Grewgious. “He didn’t say he was coming, perhaps?”
“Coming where?”
“Anywhere, for instance?” said Mr. Grewgious.
“No.”

“Because here he is,” said Mr. Grewgious, who had asked all these
questions, with his preoccupied glance directed out at window. “And he
don’t look agreeable, does he?”
Mr. Crisparkle was craning towards the window, when Mr. Grewgious
added:
“If you will kindly step round here behind me, in the gloom of the room,
and will cast your eye at the second-floor landing window in yonder house,
I think you will hardly fail to see a slinking individual in whom I recognise
our local friend.”
“You are right!” cried Mr. Crisparkle.
“Umps!” said Mr. Grewgious. Then he added, turning his face so
abruptly that his head nearly came into collision with Mr. Crisparkle’s:
“what should you say that our local friend was up to?”
The last passage he had been shown in the Diary returned on Mr.
Crisparkle’s mind with the force of a strong recoil, and he asked Mr.
Grewgious if he thought it possible that Neville was to be harassed by the
keeping of a watch upon him?
“A watch?” repeated Mr. Grewgious musingly. “Ay!”
“Which would not only of itself haunt and torture his life,” said Mr.
Crisparkle warmly, “but would expose him to the torment of a perpetually
reviving suspicion, whatever he might do, or wherever he might go.”
“Ay!” said Mr. Grewgious musingly still. “Do I see him waiting for
you?”
“No doubt you do.”
“Then would you have the goodness to excuse my getting up to see you
out, and to go out to join him, and to go the way that you were going, and to
take no notice of our local friend?” said Mr. Grewgious. “I entertain a sort
of fancy for having him under my eye to-night, do you know?”
Mr. Crisparkle, with a significant nod complied; and rejoining Neville,
went away with him. They dined together, and parted at the yet unfinished
and undeveloped railway station: Mr. Crisparkle to get home; Neville to
walk the streets, cross the bridges, make a wide round of the city in the
friendly darkness, and tire himself out.

It was midnight when he returned from his solitary expedition and
climbed his staircase. The night was hot, and the windows of the staircase
were all wide open. Coming to the top, it gave him a passing chill of
surprise (there being no rooms but his up there) to find a stranger sitting on
the window-sill, more after the manner of a venturesome glazier than an
amateur ordinarily careful of his neck; in fact, so much more outside the
window than inside, as to suggest the thought that he must have come up by
the water-spout instead of the stairs.
The stranger said nothing until Neville put his key in his door; then,
seeming to make sure of his identity from the action, he spoke:
“I beg your pardon,” he said, coming from the window with a frank and
smiling air, and a prepossessing address; “the beans.”
Neville was quite at a loss.
“Runners,” said the visitor. “Scarlet. Next door at the back.”
“O,” returned Neville. “And the mignonette and wall-flower?”
“The same,” said the visitor.
“Pray walk in.”
“Thank you.”
Neville lighted his candles, and the visitor sat down. A handsome
gentleman, with a young face, but with an older figure in its robustness and
its breadth of shoulder; say a man of eight-and-twenty, or at the utmost
thirty; so extremely sunburnt that the contrast between his brown visage and
the white forehead shaded out of doors by his hat, and the glimpses of white
throat below the neckerchief, would have been almost ludicrous but for his
broad temples, bright blue eyes, clustering brown hair, and laughing teeth.
“I have noticed,” said he; “—my name is Tartar.”
Neville inclined his head.
“I have noticed (excuse me) that you shut yourself up a good deal, and
that you seem to like my garden aloft here. If you would like a little more of
it, I could throw out a few lines and stays between my windows and yours,
which the runners would take to directly. And I have some boxes, both of
mignonette and wall-flower, that I could shove on along the gutter (with a
boathook I have by me) to your windows, and draw back again when they
wanted watering or gardening, and shove on again when they were ship-

shape; so that they would cause you no trouble. I couldn’t take this liberty
without asking your permission, so I venture to ask it. Tartar, corresponding
set, next door.”
“You are very kind.”
“Not at all. I ought to apologise for looking in so late. But having noticed
(excuse me) that you generally walk out at night, I thought I should
inconvenience you least by awaiting your return. I am always afraid of
inconveniencing busy men, being an idle man.”
“I should not have thought so, from your appearance.”
“No? I take it as a compliment. In fact, I was bred in the Royal Navy, and
was First Lieutenant when I quitted it. But, an uncle disappointed in the
service leaving me his property on condition that I left the Navy, I accepted
the fortune, and resigned my commission.”
“Lately, I presume?”
“Well, I had had twelve or fifteen years of knocking about first. I came
here some nine months before you; I had had one crop before you came. I
chose this place, because, having served last in a little corvette, I knew I
should feel more at home where I had a constant opportunity of knocking
my head against the ceiling. Besides, it would never do for a man who had
been aboard ship from his boyhood to turn luxurious all at once. Besides,
again; having been accustomed to a very short allowance of land all my life,
I thought I’d feel my way to the command of a landed estate, by beginning
in boxes.”
Whimsically as this was said, there was a touch of merry earnestness in it
that made it doubly whimsical.
“However,” said the Lieutenant, “I have talked quite enough about
myself. It is not my way, I hope; it has merely been to present myself to you
naturally. If you will allow me to take the liberty I have described, it will be
a charity, for it will give me something more to do. And you are not to
suppose that it will entail any interruption or intrusion on you, for that is far
from my intention.”
Neville replied that he was greatly obliged, and that he thankfully
accepted the kind proposal.
“I am very glad to take your windows in tow,” said the Lieutenant. “From
what I have seen of you when I have been gardening at mine, and you have

been looking on, I have thought you (excuse me) rather too studious and
delicate. May I ask, is your health at all affected?”
“I have undergone some mental distress,” said Neville, confused, “which
has stood me in the stead of illness.”
“Pardon me,” said Mr. Tartar.
With the greatest delicacy he shifted his ground to the windows again,
and asked if he could look at one of them. On Neville’s opening it, he
immediately sprang out, as if he were going aloft with a whole watch in an
emergency, and were setting a bright example.
“For Heaven’s sake,” cried Neville, “don’t do that! Where are you going
Mr. Tartar? You’ll be dashed to pieces!”
“All well!” said the Lieutenant, coolly looking about him on the
housetop. “All taut and trim here. Those lines and stays shall be rigged
before you turn out in the morning. May I take this short cut home, and say
good-night?”
“Mr. Tartar!” urged Neville. “Pray! It makes me giddy to see you!”
But Mr. Tartar, with a wave of his hand and the deftness of a cat, had
already dipped through his scuttle of scarlet runners without breaking a leaf,
and “gone below.”
Mr. Grewgious, his bedroom window-blind held aside with his hand,
happened at the moment to have Neville’s chambers under his eye for the
last time that night. Fortunately his eye was on the front of the house and
not the back, or this remarkable appearance and disappearance might have
broken his rest as a phenomenon. But Mr. Grewgious seeing nothing there,
not even a light in the windows, his gaze wandered from the windows to the
stars, as if he would have read in them something that was hidden from
him. Many of us would, if we could; but none of us so much as know our
letters in the stars yet—or seem likely to do it, in this state of existence—
and few languages can be read until their alphabets are mastered.

CHAPTER XVIII.
A SETTLER IN CLOISTERHAM

At about this time a stranger appeared in Cloisterham; a white-haired
personage, with black eyebrows. Being buttoned up in a tightish blue
surtout, with a buff waistcoat and gray trousers, he had something of a
military air, but he announced himself at the Crozier (the orthodox hotel,
where he put up with a portmanteau) as an idle dog who lived upon his
means; and he farther announced that he had a mind to take a lodging in the
picturesque old city for a month or two, with a view of settling down there
altogether. Both announcements were made in the coffee-room of the
Crozier, to all whom it might or might not concern, by the stranger as he
stood with his back to the empty fireplace, waiting for his fried sole, veal
cutlet, and pint of sherry. And the waiter (business being chronically slack
at the Crozier) represented all whom it might or might not concern, and
absorbed the whole of the information.
This gentleman’s white head was unusually large, and his shock of white
hair was unusually thick and ample. “I suppose, waiter,” he said, shaking
his shock of hair, as a Newfoundland dog might shake his before sitting
down to dinner, “that a fair lodging for a single buffer might be found in
these parts, eh?”
The waiter had no doubt of it.
“Something old,” said the gentleman. “Take my hat down for a moment
from that peg, will you? No, I don’t want it; look into it. What do you see
written there?”
The waiter read: “Datchery.”
“Now you know my name,” said the gentleman; “Dick Datchery. Hang it
up again. I was saying something old is what I should prefer, something odd
and out of the way; something venerable, architectural, and inconvenient.”

“We have a good choice of inconvenient lodgings in the town, sir, I
think,” replied the waiter, with modest confidence in its resources that way;
“indeed, I have no doubt that we could suit you that far, however particular
you might be. But a architectural lodging!” That seemed to trouble the
waiter’s head, and he shook it.
“Anything Cathedraly, now,” Mr. Datchery suggested.
“Mr. Tope,” said the waiter, brightening, as he rubbed his chin with his
hand, “would be the likeliest party to inform in that line.”
“Who is Mr. Tope?” inquired Dick Datchery.
The waiter explained that he was the Verger, and that Mrs. Tope had
indeed once upon a time let lodgings herself or offered to let them; but that
as nobody had ever taken them, Mrs. Tope’s window-bill, long a
Cloisterham Institution, had disappeared; probably had tumbled down one
day, and never been put up again.
“I’ll call on Mrs. Tope,” said Mr. Datchery, “after dinner.”
So when he had done his dinner, he was duly directed to the spot, and
sallied out for it. But the Crozier being an hotel of a most retiring
disposition, and the waiter’s directions being fatally precise, he soon
became bewildered, and went boggling about and about the Cathedral
Tower, whenever he could catch a glimpse of it, with a general impression
on his mind that Mrs. Tope’s was somewhere very near it, and that, like the
children in the game of hot boiled beans and very good butter, he was warm
in his search when he saw the Tower, and cold when he didn’t see it.
He was getting very cold indeed when he came upon a fragment of
burial-ground in which an unhappy sheep was grazing. Unhappy, because a
hideous small boy was stoning it through the railings, and had already
lamed it in one leg, and was much excited by the benevolent sportsmanlike
purpose of breaking its other three legs, and bringing it down.
“’It ’im agin!” cried the boy, as the poor creature leaped; “and made a
dint in his wool.”
“Let him be!” said Mr. Datchery. “Don’t you see you have lamed him?”
“Yer lie,” returned the sportsman. “’E went and lamed isself. I see ’im do
it, and I giv’ ’im a shy as a Widdy-warning to ’im not to go a-bruisin’ ’is
master’s mutton any more.”
“Come here.”

“I won’t; I’ll come when yer can ketch me.”
“Stay there then, and show me which is Mr. Tope’s.”
“Ow can I stay here and show you which is Topeseses, when Topeseses is
t’other side the Kinfreederal, and over the crossings, and round ever so
many comers? Stoo-pid! Ya-a-ah!”
“Show me where it is, and I’ll give you something.”
“Come on, then.”
This brisk dialogue concluded, the boy led the way, and by-and-by
stopped at some distance from an arched passage, pointing.
“Lookie yonder. You see that there winder and door?”
“That’s Tope’s?”
“Yer lie; it ain’t. That’s Jarsper’s.”
“Indeed?” said Mr. Datchery, with a second look of some interest.
“Yes, and I ain’t a-goin’ no nearer ’IM, I tell yer.”
“Why not?”
“’Cos I ain’t a-goin’ to be lifted off my legs and ’ave my braces bust and
be choked; not if I knows it, and not by ’Im. Wait till I set a jolly good flint
a-flyin’ at the back o’ ’is jolly old ’ed some day! Now look t’other side the
harch; not the side where Jarsper’s door is; t’other side.”
“I see.”
“A little way in, o’ that side, there’s a low door, down two steps. That’s
Topeseses with ’is name on a hoval plate.”
“Good. See here,” said Mr. Datchery, producing a shilling. “You owe me
half of this.”
“Yer lie! I don’t owe yer nothing; I never seen yer.”
“I tell you you owe me half of this, because I have no sixpence in my
pocket. So the next time you meet me you shall do something else for me,
to pay me.”
“All right, give us ’old.”
“What is your name, and where do you live?”
“Deputy. Travellers’ Twopenny, ’cross the green.”
The boy instantly darted off with the shilling, lest Mr. Datchery should
repent, but stopped at a safe distance, on the happy chance of his being

uneasy in his mind about it, to goad him with a demon dance expressive of
its irrevocability.
Mr. Datchery, taking off his hat to give that shock of white hair of his
another shake, seemed quite resigned, and betook himself whither he had
been directed.
Mr. Tope’s official dwelling, communicating by an upper stair with Mr.
Jasper’s (hence Mrs. Tope’s attendance on that gentleman), was of very
modest proportions, and partook of the character of a cool dungeon. Its
ancient walls were massive, and its rooms rather seemed to have been dug
out of them, than to have been designed beforehand with any reference to
them. The main door opened at once on a chamber of no describable shape,
with a groined roof, which in its turn opened on another chamber of no
describable shape, with another groined roof: their windows small, and in
the thickness of the walls. These two chambers, close as to their
atmosphere, and swarthy as to their illumination by natural light, were the
apartments which Mrs. Tope had so long offered to an unappreciative city.
Mr. Datchery, however, was more appreciative. He found that if he sat with
the main door open he would enjoy the passing society of all comers to and
fro by the gateway, and would have light enough. He found that if Mr. and
Mrs. Tope, living overhead, used for their own egress and ingress a little
side stair that came plump into the Precincts by a door opening outward, to
the surprise and inconvenience of a limited public of pedestrians in a
narrow way, he would be alone, as in a separate residence. He found the
rent moderate, and everything as quaintly inconvenient as he could desire.
He agreed, therefore, to take the lodging then and there, and money down,
possession to be had next evening, on condition that reference was
permitted him to Mr. Jasper as occupying the gatehouse, of which on the
other side of the gateway, the Verger’s hole-in-the-wall was an appanage or
subsidiary part.
The poor dear gentleman was very solitary and very sad, Mrs. Tope said,
but she had no doubt he would “speak for her.” Perhaps Mr. Datchery had
heard something of what had occurred there last winter?
Mr. Datchery had as confused a knowledge of the event in question, on
trying to recall it, as he well could have. He begged Mrs. Tope’s pardon
when she found it incumbent on her to correct him in every detail of his
summary of the facts, but pleaded that he was merely a single buffer getting

through life upon his means as idly as he could, and that so many people
were so constantly making away with so many other people, as to render it
difficult for a buffer of an easy temper to preserve the circumstances of the
several cases unmixed in his mind.
Mr. Jasper proving willing to speak for Mrs. Tope, Mr. Datchery, who
had sent up his card, was invited to ascend the postern staircase. The Mayor
was there, Mr. Tope said; but he was not to be regarded in the light of
company, as he and Mr. Jasper were great friends.
“I beg pardon,” said Mr. Datchery, making a leg with his hat under his
arm, as he addressed himself equally to both gentlemen; “a selfish
precaution on my part, and not personally interesting to anybody but
myself. But as a buffer living on his means, and having an idea of doing it
in this lovely place in peace and quiet, for remaining span of life, I beg to
ask if the Tope family are quite respectable?”
Mr. Jasper could answer for that without the slightest hesitation.
“That is enough, sir,” said Mr. Datchery.
“My friend the Mayor,” added Mr. Jasper, presenting Mr. Datchery with a
courtly motion of his hand towards that potentate; “whose recommendation
is actually much more important to a stranger than that of an obscure person
like myself, will testify in their behalf, I am sure.”
“The Worshipful the Mayor,” said Mr. Datchery, with a low bow, “places
me under an infinite obligation.”
“Very good people, sir, Mr. and Mrs. Tope,” said Mr. Sapsea, with
condescension. “Very good opinions. Very well behaved. Very respectful.
Much approved by the Dean and Chapter.”
“The Worshipful the Mayor gives them a character,” said Mr. Datchery,
“of which they may indeed be proud. I would ask His Honour (if I might be
permitted) whether there are not many objects of great interest in the city
which is under his beneficent sway?”
“We are, sir,” returned Mr. Sapsea, “an ancient city, and an ecclesiastical
city. We are a constitutional city, as it becomes such a city to be, and we
uphold and maintain our glorious privileges.”
“His Honour,” said Mr. Datchery, bowing, “inspires me with a desire to
know more of the city, and confirms me in my inclination to end my days in
the city.”

“Retired from the Army, sir?” suggested Mr. Sapsea.
“His Honour the Mayor does me too much credit,” returned Mr.
Datchery.
“Navy, sir?” suggested Mr. Sapsea.
“Again,” repeated Mr. Datchery, “His Honour the Mayor does me too
much credit.”
“Diplomacy is a fine profession,” said Mr. Sapsea, as a general remark.
“There, I confess, His Honour the Mayor is too many for me,” said Mr.
Datchery, with an ingenious smile and bow; “even a diplomatic bird must
fall to such a gun.”
Now this was very soothing. Here was a gentleman of a great, not to say
a grand, address, accustomed to rank and dignity, really setting a fine
example how to behave to a Mayor. There was something in that third-
person style of being spoken to, that Mr. Sapsea found particularly
recognisant of his merits and position.
“But I crave pardon,” said Mr. Datchery. “His Honour the Mayor will
bear with me, if for a moment I have been deluded into occupying his time,
and have forgotten the humble claims upon my own, of my hotel, the
Crozier.”
“Not at all, sir,” said Mr. Sapsea. “I am returning home, and if you would
like to take the exterior of our Cathedral in your way, I shall be glad to point
it out.”
“His Honour the Mayor,” said Mr. Datchery, “is more than kind and
gracious.”
As Mr. Datchery, when he had made his acknowledgments to Mr. Jasper,
could not be induced to go out of the room before the Worshipful, the
Worshipful led the way down-stairs; Mr. Datchery following with his hat
under his arm, and his shock of white hair streaming in the evening breeze.
“Might I ask His Honour,” said Mr. Datchery, “whether that gentleman
we have just left is the gentleman of whom I have heard in the
neighbourhood as being much afflicted by the loss of a nephew, and
concentrating his life on avenging the loss?”
“That is the gentleman. John Jasper, sir.”

“Would His Honour allow me to inquire whether there are strong
suspicions of any one?”
“More than suspicions, sir,” returned Mr. Sapsea; “all but certainties.”
“Only think now!” cried Mr. Datchery.
“But proof, sir, proof must be built up stone by stone,” said the Mayor.
“As I say, the end crowns the work. It is not enough that justice should be
morally certain; she must be immorally certain—legally, that is.”
“His Honour,” said Mr. Datchery, “reminds me of the nature of the law.
Immoral. How true!”
“As I say, sir,” pompously went on the Mayor, “the arm of the law is a
strong arm, and a long arm. That is the way I put it. A strong arm and a long
arm.”
“How forcible!—And yet, again, how true!” murmured Mr. Datchery.
“And without betraying, what I call the secrets of the prison-house,” said
Mr. Sapsea; “the secrets of the prison-house is the term I used on the
bench.”
“And what other term than His Honour’s would express it?” said Mr.
Datchery.
“Without, I say, betraying them, I predict to you, knowing the iron will of
the gentleman we have just left (I take the bold step of calling it iron, on
account of its strength), that in this case the long arm will reach, and the
strong arm will strike.—This is our Cathedral, sir. The best judges are
pleased to admire it, and the best among our townsmen own to being a little
vain of it.”
All this time Mr. Datchery had walked with his hat under his arm, and his
white hair streaming. He had an odd momentary appearance upon him of
having forgotten his hat, when Mr. Sapsea now touched it; and he clapped
his hand up to his head as if with some vague expectation of finding another
hat upon it.
“Pray be covered, sir,” entreated Mr. Sapsea; magnificently plying: “I
shall not mind it, I assure you.”
“His Honour is very good, but I do it for coolness,” said Mr. Datchery.
Then Mr. Datchery admired the Cathedral, and Mr. Sapsea pointed it out
as if he himself had invented and built it: there were a few details indeed of

which he did not approve, but those he glossed over, as if the workmen had
made mistakes in his absence. The Cathedral disposed of, he led the way by
the churchyard, and stopped to extol the beauty of the evening—by chance
—in the immediate vicinity of Mrs. Sapsea’s epitaph.
“And by the by,” said Mr. Sapsea, appearing to descend from an
elevation to remember it all of a sudden; like Apollo shooting down from
Olympus to pick up his forgotten lyre; “that is one of our small lions. The
partiality of our people has made it so, and strangers have been seen taking
a copy of it now and then. I am not a judge of it myself, for it is a little work
of my own. But it was troublesome to turn, sir; I may say, difficult to turn
with elegance.”
Mr. Datchery became so ecstatic over Mr. Sapsea’s composition, that, in
spite of his intention to end his days in Cloisterham, and therefore his
probably having in reserve many opportunities of copying it, he would have
transcribed it into his pocket-book on the spot, but for the slouching
towards them of its material producer and perpetuator, Durdles, whom Mr.
Sapsea hailed, not sorry to show him a bright example of behaviour to
superiors.
“Ah, Durdles! This is the mason, sir; one of our Cloisterham worthies;
everybody here knows Durdles. Mr. Datchery, Durdles a gentleman who is
going to settle here.”
“I wouldn’t do it if I was him,” growled Durdles. “We’re a heavy lot.”
“You surely don’t speak for yourself, Mr. Durdles,” returned Mr.
Datchery, “any more than for His Honour.”
“Who’s His Honour?” demanded Durdles.
“His Honour the Mayor.”
“I never was brought afore him,” said Durdles, with anything but the
look of a loyal subject of the mayoralty, “and it’ll be time enough for me to
Honour him when I am. Until which, and when, and where,
‘Mister Sapsea is his name,
England is his nation,
Cloisterham’s his dwelling-place,
Aukshneer’s his occupation.’”

Here, Deputy (preceded by a flying oyster-shell) appeared upon the
scene, and requested to have the sum of threepence instantly “chucked” to

him by Mr. Durdles, whom he had been vainly seeking up and down, as
lawful wages overdue. While that gentleman, with his bundle under his arm,
slowly found and counted out the money, Mr. Sapsea informed the new
settler of Durdles’s habits, pursuits, abode, and reputation. “I suppose a
curious stranger might come to see you, and your works, Mr. Durdles, at
any odd time?” said Mr. Datchery upon that.
“Any gentleman is welcome to come and see me any evening if he brings
liquor for two with him,” returned Durdles, with a penny between his teeth
and certain halfpence in his hands; “or if he likes to make it twice two, he’ll
be doubly welcome.”
“I shall come. Master Deputy, what do you owe me?”
“A job.”
“Mind you pay me honestly with the job of showing me Mr. Durdles’s
house when I want to go there.”
Deputy, with a piercing broadside of whistle through the whole gap in his
mouth, as a receipt in full for all arrears, vanished.
The Worshipful and the Worshipper then passed on together until they
parted, with many ceremonies, at the Worshipful’s door; even then the
Worshipper carried his hat under his arm, and gave his streaming white hair
to the breeze.
Said Mr. Datchery to himself that night, as he looked at his white hair in
the gas-lighted looking-glass over the coffee-room chimneypiece at the
Crozier, and shook it out: “For a single buffer, of an easy temper, 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.”

Jasper’s sacrifices

“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.
“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 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!”

Mr. Grewgious experiences a new sensation

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 going to walk a
minuet) across Holborn, and into Furnival’s Inn. At the hotel door, he
confided her to the Unlimited head chambermaid, and said that while she

went up to see her room, he would remain below, in case she should wish it
exchanged for another, or should find that there was anything she wanted.
Rosa’s room was airy, clean, comfortable, almost gay. The Unlimited had
laid in everything omitted from the very little bag (that is to say, everything
she could possibly need), and Rosa tripped down the great many stairs again,
to thank her guardian for his thoughtful and affectionate care of her.
“Not at all, my dear,” said Mr. Grewgious, infinitely gratified; “it is I who
thank you for your charming confidence and for your charming company.
Your breakfast will be provided for you in a neat, compact, and graceful
little sitting-room (appropriate to your figure), and I will come to you at ten
o’clock in the morning. I hope you don’t feel very strange indeed, in this
strange place.”
“O no, I feel so safe!”
“Yes, you may be sure that the stairs are fire-proof,” said Mr. Grewgious,
“and that any outbreak of the devouring element would be perceived and
suppressed by the watchmen.”
“I did not mean that,” Rosa replied. “I mean, I feel so safe from him.”
“There is a stout gate of iron bars to keep him out,” said Mr. Grewgious,
smiling; “and Furnival’s is fire-proof, and specially watched and lighted, and
I live over the way!” In the stoutness of his knight-errantry, he seemed to
think the last-named protection all sufficient. In the same spirit he said to the
gate-porter as he went out, “If some one staying in the hotel should wish to
send across the road to me in the night, a crown will be ready for the
messenger.” In the same spirit, he walked up and down outside the iron gate
for the best part of an hour, with some solicitude; occasionally looking in
between the bars, as if he had laid a dove in a high roost in a cage of lions,
and had it on his mind that she might tumble out.

CHAPTER XXI.
A RECOGNITION

Nothing occurred in the night to flutter the tired dove; and the dove arose
refreshed. With Mr. Grewgious, when the clock struck ten in the morning,
came Mr. Crisparkle, who had come at one plunge out of the river at
Cloisterham.
“Miss Twinkleton was so uneasy, Miss Rosa,” he explained to her, “and
came round to Ma and me with your note, in such a state of wonder, that, to
quiet her, I volunteered on this service by the very first train to be caught in
the morning. I wished at the time that you had come to me; but now I think
it best that you did as you did, and came to your guardian.”
“I did think of you,” Rosa told him; “but Minor Canon Corner was so
near him—”
“I understand. It was quite natural.”
“I have told Mr. Crisparkle,” said Mr. Grewgious, “all that you told me
last night, my dear. Of course I should have written it to him immediately;
but his coming was most opportune. And it was particularly kind of him to
come, for he had but just gone.”
“Have you settled,” asked Rosa, appealing to them both, “what is to be
done for Helena and her brother?”
“Why really,” said Mr. Crisparkle, “I am in great perplexity. If even Mr.
Grewgious, whose head is much longer than mine, and who is a whole
night’s cogitation in advance of me, is undecided, what must I be!”
The Unlimited here put her head in at the door—after having rapped, and
been authorised to present herself—announcing that a gentleman wished for
a word with another gentleman named Crisparkle, if any such gentleman
were there. If no such gentleman were there, he begged pardon for being
mistaken.

“Such a gentleman is here,” said Mr. Crisparkle, “but is engaged just
now.”
“Is it a dark gentleman?” interposed Rosa, retreating on her guardian.
“No, Miss, more of a brown gentleman.”
“You are sure not with black hair?” asked Rosa, taking courage.
“Quite sure of that, Miss. Brown hair and blue eyes.”
“Perhaps,” hinted Mr. Grewgious, with habitual caution, “it might be
well to see him, reverend sir, if you don’t object. When one is in a difficulty
or at a loss, one never knows in what direction a way out may chance to
open. It is a business principle of mine, in such a case, not to close up any
direction, but to keep an eye on every direction that may present itself. I
could relate an anecdote in point, but that it would be premature.”
“If Miss Rosa will allow me, then? Let the gentleman come in,” said Mr.
Crisparkle.
The gentleman came in; apologised, with a frank but modest grace, for
not finding Mr. Crisparkle alone; turned to Mr. Crisparkle, and smilingly
asked the unexpected question: “Who am I?”
“You are the gentleman I saw smoking under the trees in Staple Inn, a
few minutes ago.”
“True. There I saw you. Who else am I?”
Mr. Crisparkle concentrated his attention on a handsome face, much
sunburnt; and the ghost of some departed boy seemed to rise, gradually and
dimly, in the room.
The gentleman saw a struggling recollection lighten up the Minor
Canon’s features, and smiling again, said: “What will you have for
breakfast this morning? You are out of jam.”
“Wait a moment!” cried Mr. Crisparkle, raising his right hand. “Give me
another instant! Tartar!”
The two shook hands with the greatest heartiness, and then went the
wonderful length—for Englishmen—of laying their hands each on the
other’s shoulders, and looking joyfully each into the other’s face.
“My old fag!” said Mr. Crisparkle.
“My old master!” said Mr. Tartar.
“You saved me from drowning!” said Mr. Crisparkle.

“After which you took to swimming, you know!” said Mr. Tartar.
“God bless my soul!” said Mr. Crisparkle.
“Amen!” said Mr. Tartar.
And then they fell to shaking hands most heartily again.
“Imagine,” exclaimed Mr. Crisparkle, with glistening eyes: “Miss Rosa
Bud and Mr. Grewgious, imagine Mr. Tartar, when he was the smallest of
juniors, diving for me, catching me, a big heavy senior, by the hair of the
head, and striking out for the shore with me like a water-giant!”
“Imagine my not letting him sink, as I was his fag!” said Mr. Tartar. “But
the truth being that he was my best protector and friend, and did me more
good than all the masters put together, an irrational impulse seized me to
pick him up, or go down with him.”
“Hem! Permit me, sir, to have the honour,” said Mr. Grewgious,
advancing with extended hand, “for an honour I truly esteem it. I am proud
to make your acquaintance. I hope you didn’t take cold. I hope you were not
inconvenienced by swallowing too much water. How have you been since?”
It was by no means apparent that Mr. Grewgious knew what he said,
though it was very apparent that he meant to say something highly friendly
and appreciative.
If Heaven, Rosa thought, had but sent such courage and skill to her poor
mother’s aid! And he to have been so slight and young then!
“I don’t wish to be complimented upon it, I thank you; but I think I have
an idea,” Mr. Grewgious announced, after taking a jog-trot or two across the
room, so unexpected and unaccountable that they all stared at him, doubtful
whether he was choking or had the cramp—“I think I have an idea. I believe
I have had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Tartar’s name as tenant of the top set
in the house next the top set in the corner?”
“Yes, sir,” returned Mr. Tartar. “You are right so far.”
“I am right so far,” said Mr. Grewgious. “Tick that off;” which he did,
with his right thumb on his left. “Might you happen to know the name of
your neighbour in the top set on the other side of the party-wall?” coming
very close to Mr. Tartar, to lose nothing of his face, in his shortness of sight.
“Landless.”

“Tick that off,” said Mr. Grewgious, taking another trot, and then coming
back. “No personal knowledge, I suppose, sir?”
“Slight, but some.”
“Tick that off,” said Mr. Grewgious, taking another trot, and again
coming back. “Nature of knowledge, Mr. Tartar?”
“I thought he seemed to be a young fellow in a poor way, and I asked his
leave—only within a day or so—to share my flowers up there with him;
that is to say, to extend my flower-garden to his windows.”
“Would you have the kindness to take seats?” said Mr. Grewgious. “I
have an idea!”
They complied; Mr. Tartar none the less readily, for being all abroad; and
Mr. Grewgious, seated in the centre, with his hands upon his knees, thus
stated his idea, with his usual manner of having got the statement by heart.
“I cannot as yet make up my mind whether it is prudent to hold open
communication under present circumstances, and on the part of the fair
member of the present company, with Mr. Neville or Miss Helena. I have
reason to know that a local friend of ours (on whom I beg to bestow a
passing but a hearty malediction, with the kind permission of my reverend
friend) sneaks to and fro, and dodges up and down. When not doing so
himself, he may have some informant skulking about, in the person of a
watchman, porter, or such-like hanger-on of Staple. On the other hand, Miss
Rosa very naturally wishes to see her friend Miss Helena, and it would
seem important that at least Miss Helena (if not her brother too, through
her) should privately know from Miss Rosa’s lips what has occurred, and
what has been threatened. Am I agreed with generally in the views I take?”
“I entirely coincide with them,” said Mr. Crisparkle, who had been very
attentive.
“As I have no doubt I should,” added Mr. Tartar, smiling, “if I understood
them.”
“Fair and softly, sir,” said Mr. Grewgious; “we shall fully confide in you
directly, if you will favour us with your permission. Now, if our local friend
should have any informant on the spot, it is tolerably clear that such
informant can only be set to watch the chambers in the occupation of Mr.
Neville. He reporting, to our local friend, who comes and goes there, our
local friend would supply for himself, from his own previous knowledge,

the identity of the parties. Nobody can be set to watch all Staple, or to
concern himself with comers and goers to other sets of chambers: unless,
indeed, mine.”
“I begin to understand to what you tend,” said Mr. Crisparkle, “and
highly approve of your caution.”
“I needn’t repeat that I know nothing yet of the why and wherefore,” said
Mr. Tartar; “but I also understand to what you tend, so let me say at once
that my chambers are freely at your disposal.”
“There!” cried Mr. Grewgious, smoothing his head triumphantly, “now
we have all got the idea. You have it, my dear?”
“I think I have,” said Rosa, blushing a little as Mr. Tartar looked quickly
towards her.
“You see, you go over to Staple with Mr. Crisparkle and Mr. Tartar,” said
Mr. Grewgious; “I going in and out, and out and in alone, in my usual way;
you go up with those gentlemen to Mr. Tartar’s rooms; you look into Mr.
Tartar’s flower-garden; you wait for Miss Helena’s appearance there, or you
signify to Miss Helena that you are close by; and you communicate with her
freely, and no spy can be the wiser.”
“I am very much afraid I shall be—”
“Be what, my dear?” asked Mr. Grewgious, as she hesitated. “Not
frightened?”
“No, not that,” said Rosa, shyly; “in Mr. Tartar’s way. We seem to be
appropriating Mr. Tartar’s residence so very coolly.”
“I protest to you,” returned that gentleman, “that I shall think the better of
it for evermore, if your voice sounds in it only once.”
Rosa, not quite knowing what to say about that, cast down her eyes, and
turning to Mr. Grewgious, dutifully asked if she should put her hat on? Mr.
Grewgious being of opinion that she could not do better, she withdrew for
the purpose. Mr. Crisparkle took the opportunity of giving Mr. Tartar a
summary of the distresses of Neville and his sister; the opportunity was
quite long enough, as the hat happened to require a little extra fitting on.
Mr. Tartar gave his arm to Rosa, and Mr. Crisparkle walked, detached, in
front.
“Poor, poor Eddy!” thought Rosa, as they went along.

Mr. Tartar waved his right hand as he bent his head down over Rosa,
talking in an animated way.
“It was not so powerful or so sun-browned when it saved Mr.
Crisparkle,” thought Rosa, glancing at it; “but it must have been very steady
and determined even then.”
Mr. Tartar told her he had been a sailor, roving everywhere for years and
years.
“When are you going to sea again?” asked Rosa.
“Never!”
Rosa wondered what the girls would say if they could see her crossing
the wide street on the sailor’s arm. And she fancied that the passers-by must
think her very little and very helpless, contrasted with the strong figure that
could have caught her up and carried her out of any danger, miles and miles
without resting.
She was thinking further, that his far-seeing blue eyes looked as if they
had been used to watch danger afar off, and to watch it without flinching,
drawing nearer and nearer: when, happening to raise her own eyes, she
found that he seemed to be thinking something about them.
This a little confused Rosebud, and may account for her never afterwards
quite knowing how she ascended (with his help) to his garden in the air, and
seemed to get into a marvellous country that came into sudden bloom like
the country on the summit of the magic bean-stalk. May it flourish for ever!

CHAPTER XXII.
A GRITTY STATE OF THINGS COMES ON

Mr. Tartar’s chambers were the neatest, the cleanest, and the best-ordered
chambers ever seen under the sun, moon, and stars. The floors were
scrubbed to that extent, that you might have supposed the London blacks
emancipated for ever, and gone out of the land for good. Every inch of brass-
work in Mr. Tartar’s possession was polished and burnished, till it shone like
a brazen mirror. No speck, nor spot, nor spatter soiled the purity of any of
Mr. Tartar’s household gods, large, small, or middle-sized. His sitting-room
was like the admiral’s cabin, his bath-room was like a dairy, his sleeping-
chamber, fitted all about with lockers and drawers, was like a seedsman’s
shop; and his nicely-balanced cot just stirred in the midst, as if it breathed.
Everything belonging to Mr. Tartar had quarters of its own assigned to it: his
maps and charts had their quarters; his books had theirs; his brushes had
theirs; his boots had theirs; his clothes had theirs; his case-bottles had theirs;
his telescopes and other instruments had theirs. Everything was readily
accessible. Shelf, bracket, locker, hook, and drawer were equally within
reach, and were equally contrived with a view to avoiding waste of room,
and providing some snug inches of stowage for something that would have
exactly fitted nowhere else. His gleaming little service of plate was so
arranged upon his sideboard as that a slack salt-spoon would have instantly
betrayed itself; his toilet implements were so arranged upon his dressing-
table as that a toothpick of slovenly deportment could have been reported at
a glance. So with the curiosities he had brought home from various voyages.
Stuffed, dried, repolished, or otherwise preserved, according to their kind;
birds, fishes, reptiles, arms, articles of dress, shells, seaweeds, grasses, or
memorials of coral reef; each was displayed in its especial place, and each
could have been displayed in no better place. Paint and varnish seemed to be
kept somewhere out of sight, in constant readiness to obliterate stray finger-
marks wherever any might become perceptible in Mr. Tartar’s chambers. No

man-of-war was ever kept more spick and span from careless touch. On this
bright summer day, a neat awning was rigged over Mr. Tartar’s flower-
garden as only a sailor can rig it, and there was a sea-going air upon the
whole effect, so delightfully complete, that the flower-garden might have
appertained to stern-windows afloat, and the whole concern might have
bowled away gallantly with all on board, if Mr. Tartar had only clapped to
his lips the speaking-trumpet that was slung in a corner, and given hoarse
orders to heave the anchor up, look alive there, men, and get all sail upon
her!
Mr. Tartar doing the honours of this gallant craft was of a piece with the
rest. When a man rides an amiable hobby that shies at nothing and kicks
nobody, it is only agreeable to find him riding it with a humorous sense of
the droll side of the creature. When the man is a cordial and an earnest man
by nature, and withal is perfectly fresh and genuine, it may be doubted
whether he is ever seen to greater advantage than at such a time. So Rosa
would have naturally thought (even if she hadn’t been conducted over the
ship with all the homage due to the First Lady of the Admiralty, or First
Fairy of the Sea), that it was charming to see and hear Mr. Tartar half
laughing at, and half rejoicing in, his various contrivances. So Rosa would
have naturally thought, anyhow, that the sunburnt sailor showed to great
advantage when, the inspection finished, he delicately withdrew out of his
admiral’s cabin, beseeching her to consider herself its Queen, and waving
her free of his flower-garden with the hand that had had Mr. Crisparkle’s life
in it.
“Helena! Helena Landless! Are you there?”
“Who speaks to me? Not Rosa?” Then a second handsome face appearing.
“Yes, my darling!”
“Why, how did you come here, dearest?”
“I—I don’t quite know,” said Rosa with a blush; “unless I am dreaming!”
Why with a blush? For their two faces were alone with the other flowers.
Are blushes among the fruits of the country of the magic bean-stalk?
“I am not dreaming,” said Helena, smiling. “I should take more for
granted if I were. How do we come together—or so near together—so very
unexpectedly?”
Unexpectedly indeed, among the dingy gables and chimneypots of P. J.
T.’s connection, and the flowers that had sprung from the salt sea. But Rosa,

waking, told in a hurry how they came to be together, and all the why and
wherefore of that matter.
“And Mr. Crisparkle is here,” said Rosa, in rapid conclusion; “and, could
you believe it? long ago he saved his life!”
“I could believe any such thing of Mr. Crisparkle,” returned Helena, with
a mantling face.
(More blushes in the bean-stalk country!)
“Yes, but it wasn’t Crisparkle,” said Rosa, quickly putting in the
correction.
“I don’t understand, love.”
“It was very nice of Mr. Crisparkle to be saved,” said Rosa, “and he
couldn’t have shown his high opinion of Mr. Tartar more expressively. But it
was Mr. Tartar who saved him.”
Helena’s dark eyes looked very earnestly at the bright face among the
leaves, and she asked, in a slower and more thoughtful tone:
“Is Mr. Tartar with you now, dear?”
“No; because he has given up his rooms to me—to us, I mean. It is such a
beautiful place!”
“Is it?”
“It is like the inside of the most exquisite ship that ever sailed. It is like—
it is like—”
“Like a dream?” suggested Helena.
Rosa answered with a little nod, and smelled the flowers.
Helena resumed, after a short pause of silence, during which she seemed
(or it was Rosa’s fancy) to compassionate somebody: “My poor Neville is
reading in his own room, the sun being so very bright on this side just now. I
think he had better not know that you are so near.”
“O, I think so too!” cried Rosa very readily.
“I suppose,” pursued Helena, doubtfully, “that he must know by-and-by
all you have told me; but I am not sure. Ask Mr. Crisparkle’s advice, my
darling. Ask him whether I may tell Neville as much or as little of what you
have told me as I think best.”
Rosa subsided into her state-cabin, and propounded the question. The
Minor Canon was for the free exercise of Helena’s judgment.

“I thank him very much,” said Helena, when Rosa emerged again with her
report. “Ask him whether it would be best to wait until any more maligning
and pursuing of Neville on the part of this wretch shall disclose itself, or to
try to anticipate it: I mean, so far as to find out whether any such goes on
darkly about us?”
The Minor Canon found this point so difficult to give a confident opinion
on, that, after two or three attempts and failures, he suggested a reference to
Mr. Grewgious. Helena acquiescing, he betook himself (with a most
unsuccessful assumption of lounging indifference) across the quadrangle to
P. J. T.’s, and stated it. Mr. Grewgious held decidedly to the general
principle, that if you could steal a march upon a brigand or a wild beast, you
had better do it; and he also held decidedly to the special case, that John
Jasper was a brigand and a wild beast in combination.
Thus advised, Mr. Crisparkle came back again and reported to Rosa, who
in her turn reported to Helena. She now steadily pursuing her train of
thought at her window, considered thereupon.
“We may count on Mr. Tartar’s readiness to help us, Rosa?” she inquired.
O yes! Rosa shyly thought so. O yes, Rosa shyly believed she could
almost answer for it. But should she ask Mr. Crisparkle? “I think your
authority on the point as good as his, my dear,” said Helena, sedately, “and
you needn’t disappear again for that.” Odd of Helena!
“You see, Neville,” Helena pursued after more reflection, “knows no one
else here: he has not so much as exchanged a word with any one else here. If
Mr. Tartar would call to see him openly and often; if he would spare a
minute for the purpose, frequently; if he would even do so, almost daily;
something might come of it.”
“Something might come of it, dear?” repeated Rosa, surveying her
friend’s beauty with a highly perplexed face. “Something might?”
“If Neville’s movements are really watched, and if the purpose really is to
isolate him from all friends and acquaintance and wear his daily life out
grain by grain (which would seem to be the threat to you), does it not appear
likely,” said Helena, “that his enemy would in some way communicate with
Mr. Tartar to warn him off from Neville? In which case, we might not only
know the fact, but might know from Mr. Tartar what the terms of the
communication were.”
“I see!” cried Rosa. And immediately darted into her state-cabin again.

Presently her pretty face reappeared, with a greatly heightened colour, and
she said that she had told Mr. Crisparkle, and that Mr. Crisparkle had fetched
in Mr. Tartar, and that Mr. Tartar—“who is waiting now, in case you want
him,” added Rosa, with a half look back, and in not a little confusion
between the inside of the state-cabin and out—had declared his readiness to
act as she had suggested, and to enter on his task that very day.
“I thank him from my heart,” said Helena. “Pray tell him so.”
Again not a little confused between the Flower-garden and the Cabin,
Rosa dipped in with her message, and dipped out again with more
assurances from Mr. Tartar, and stood wavering in a divided state between
Helena and him, which proved that confusion is not always necessarily
awkward, but may sometimes present a very pleasant appearance.
“And now, darling,” said Helena, “we will be mindful of the caution that
has restricted us to this interview for the present, and will part. I hear Neville
moving too. Are you going back?”
“To Miss Twinkleton’s?” asked Rosa.
“Yes.”
“O, I could never go there any more. I couldn’t indeed, after that dreadful
interview!” said Rosa.
“Then where are you going, pretty one?”
“Now I come to think of it, I don’t know,” said Rosa. “I have settled
nothing at all yet, but my guardian will take care of me. Don’t be uneasy,
dear. I shall be sure to be somewhere.”
(It did seem likely.)
“And I shall hear of my Rosebud from Mr. Tartar?” inquired Helena.
“Yes, I suppose so; from—” Rosa looked back again in a flutter, instead of
supplying the name. “But tell me one thing before we part, dearest Helena.
Tell me—that you are sure, sure, sure, I couldn’t help it.”
“Help it, love?”
“Help making him malicious and revengeful. I couldn’t hold any terms
with him, could I?”
“You know how I love you, darling,” answered Helena, with indignation;
“but I would sooner see you dead at his wicked feet.”