The Mystery of Edwin Drood (56 page)

  “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-fortyseven.

 

  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 all 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 neckshawl, 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.