The Mystery of Edwin Drood (2 page)

 

  “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 Floo-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 downstairs.

 

  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
moddleycoddleyed.”

 

  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 halfa-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.