The Mystery of Edwin Drood (3 page)

  “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
oystershells, 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 housefront 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 gatebell 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.