The Mystery of Edwin Drood (59 page)

 

  Then he closes his piano softly, softly
changes his coat for a peajacket, 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 ChoirMaster 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 longerwinded 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 fellowexplorer.

 

  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 moon-lit 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 mosssoftened 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.