The Mystery of Edwin Drood
‘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 eyeglass 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.
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 figures 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.