The Mystery of Edwin Drood (69 page)

 

  “How do you do, reverend sir?” said Mr.
Grewgious, with abundant offers of hospitality, which were as cordially
declined as made. “And how is your charge getting on over the way in the set
that I had the pleasure of recommending to you as vacant and eligible?”

 

  Mr. Crisparkle replied suitably.

 

  “I am glad you approve of them,” said
Mr. Grewgious, “because I entertain a sort of fancy for having him under my
eye.”

 

  As Mr. Grewgious had to turn his eye up
considerably before he could see the chambers, the phrase was to be taken
figuratively and not literally.

 

  “And how did you leave Mr. Jasper,
reverend sir?” said Mr. Grewgious.

 

  Mr. Crisparkle had left him pretty well.

 

  “And where did you leave Mr. Jasper,
reverend sir?” Mr. Crisparkle had left him at Cloisterham.

 

  “And when did you leave Mr. Jasper,
reverend sir?” That morning.

 

  “Umps!” said Mr. Grewgious. “He didn't
say he was coming, perhaps?”

 

  “Coming where?”

 

  “Anywhere, for instance?” said Mr.
Grewgious.

 

  “No.”

 

  “Because here he is,” said Mr.
Grewgious, who had asked all these questions, with his preoccupied glance
directed out at window. “And he don't look agreeable, does he?”

 

  Mr. Crisparkle was craning towards the
window, when Mr. Grewgious added:

 

  “If you will kindly step round here
behind me, in the gloom of the room, and will cast your eye at the second-floor
landing window in yonder house, I think you will hardly fail to see a slinking
individual in whom I recognise our local friend.”

 

  “You are right!” cried Mr. Crisparkle.

 

  “Umps!” said Mr. Grewgious. Then he
added, turning his face so abruptly that his head nearly came into collision
with Mr. Crisparkle's: “what should you say that our local friend was up to?”

 

  The last passage he had been shown in
the Diary returned on Mr. Crisparkle's mind with the force of a strong recoil,
and he asked Mr. Grewgious if he thought it possible that Neville was to be
harassed by the keeping of a watch upon him?

 

  “A watch?” repeated Mr. Grewgious
musingly. “Ay!”

 

  “Which would not only of itself haunt
and torture his life,” said Mr. Crisparkle warmly, “but would expose him to the
torment of a perpetually reviving suspicion, whatever he might do, or wherever
he might go.”

 

  “Ay!” said Mr. Grewgious musingly still.
“Do I see him waiting for you?”

 

  “No doubt you do.”

 

  “Then WOULD you have the goodness to
excuse my getting up to see you out, and to go out to join him, and to go the
way that you were going, and to take no notice of our local friend?” said Mr.
Grewgious. “I entertain a sort of fancy for having HIM under my eye to-night,
do you know?”

 

  Mr. Crisparkle, with a significant need
complied; and rejoining Neville, went away with him. They dined together, and
parted at the yet unfinished and undeveloped railway station: Mr. Crisparkle to
get home; Neville to walk the streets, cross the bridges, make a wide round of
the city in the friendly darkness, and tire himself out.

 

  It was midnight when he returned from
his solitary expedition and climbed his staircase. The night was hot, and the
windows of the staircase were all wide open. Coming to the top, it gave him a
passing chill of surprise (there being no rooms but his up there) to find a
stranger sitting on the window-sill, more after the manner of a venturesome glazier
than an amateur ordinarily careful of his neck; in fact, so much more outside
the window than inside, as to suggest the thought that he must have come up by
the waterspout instead of the stairs.

 

  The stranger said nothing until Neville
put his key in his door; then, seeming to make sure of his identity from the
action, he spoke:

 

  “I beg your pardon,” he said, coming
from the window with a frank and smiling air, and a prepossessing address; “the
beans.”

 

  Neville was quite at a loss.

 

  “Runners,” said the visitor. “Scarlet.
Next door at the back.”

 

  “O,” returned Neville. “And the
mignonette and wall-flower?”

 

  “The same,” said the visitor.

 

  “Pray walk in.”

 

  “Thank you.”

 

  Neville lighted his candles, and the
visitor sat down. A handsome gentleman, with a young face, but with an older
figure in its robustness and its breadth of shoulder; say a man of
eight-andtwenty, or at the utmost thirty; so extremely sunburnt that the
contrast between his brown visage and the white forehead shaded out of doors by
his hat, and the glimpses of white throat below the neckerchief, would have
been almost ludicrous but for his broad temples, bright blue eyes, clustering
brown hair, and laughing teeth.

 

  “I have noticed,” said he; “—my name is
Tartar.”

 

  Neville inclined his head.

 

  “I have noticed (excuse me) that you
shut yourself up a good deal, and that you seem to like my garden aloft here.
If you would like a little more of it, I could throw out a few lines and stays between
my windows and yours, which the runners would take to directly. And I have some
boxes, both of mignonette and wallflower, that I could shove on along the
gutter (with a boathook I have by me) to your windows, and draw back again when
they wanted watering or gardening, and shove on again when they were shipshape;
so that they would cause you no trouble. I couldn't take this liberty without
asking your permission, so I venture to ask it. Tartar, corresponding set, next
door.”

 

  “You are very kind.”

 

  “Not at all. I ought to apologise for
looking in so late. But having noticed (excuse me) that you generally walk out
at night, I thought I should inconvenience you least by awaiting your return. I
am always afraid of inconveniencing busy men, being an idle man.”

 

  “I should not have thought so, from your
appearance.”

 

  “No? I take it as a compliment. In fact,
I was bred in the Royal Navy, and was First Lieutenant when I quitted it. But,
an uncle disappointed in the service leaving me his property on condition that I
left the Navy, I accepted the fortune, and resigned my commission.”

 

  “Lately, I presume?”

 

  “Well, I had had twelve or fifteen years
of knocking about first. I came here some nine months before you; I had had one
crop before you came. I chose this place, because, having served last in a
little corvette, I knew I should feel more at home where I had a constant
opportunity of knocking my head against the ceiling. Besides, it would never do
for a man who had been aboard ship from his boyhood to turn luxurious all at
once. Besides, again; having been accustomed to a very short allowance of land
all my life, I thought I'd feel my way to the command of a landed estate, by
beginning in boxes.”

 

  Whimsically as this was said, there was
a touch of merry earnestness in it that made it doubly whimsical.

 

  “However,” said the Lieutenant, “I have
talked quite enough about myself. It is not my way, I hope; it has merely been
to present myself to you naturally. If you will allow me to take the liberty I
have described, it will be a charity, for it will give me something more to do.
And you are not to suppose that it will entail any interruption or intrusion on
you, for that is far from my intention.”

 

  Neville replied that he was greatly
obliged, and that he thankfully accepted the kind proposal.

 

  “I am very glad to take your windows in
tow,” said the Lieutenant. “From what I have seen of you when I have been
gardening at mine, and you have been looking on, I have thought you (excuse me)
rather too studious and delicate. May I ask, is your health at all affected?”

 

  “I have undergone some mental distress,”
said Neville, confused, “which has stood me in the stead of illness.”

 

  “Pardon me,” said Mr. Tartar.

 

  With the greatest delicacy he shifted
his ground to the windows again, and asked if he could look at one of them. On
Neville's opening it, he immediately sprang out, as if he were going aloft with
a whole watch in an emergency, and were setting a bright example.

 

  “For Heaven's sake,” cried Neville,
“don't do that! Where are you going Mr. Tartar? You'll be dashed to pieces!”

 

  “All well!” said the Lieutenant, coolly
looking about him on the housetop. “All taut and trim here. Those lines and
stays shall be rigged before you turn out in the morning. May I take this short
cut home, and say good-night?”

 

  “Mr. Tartar!” urged Neville. “Pray! It
makes me giddy to see you!”

 

  But Mr. Tartar, with a wave of his hand
and the deftness of a cat, had already dipped through his scuttle of scarlet
runners without breaking a leaf, and “gone below.”

 

  Mr. Grewgious, his bedroom window-blind
held aside with his hand, happened at the moment to have Neville's chambers
under his eye for the last time that night. Fortunately his eye was on the
front of the house and not the back, or this remarkable appearance and disappearance
might have broken his rest as a phenomenon. But Mr. Grewgious seeing nothing
there, not even a light in the windows, his gaze wandered from the windows to
the stars, as if he would have read in them something that was hidden from him.
Many of us would, if we could; but none of us so much as know our letters in
the stars yet—or seem likely to do it, in this state of existence—and few
languages can be read until their alphabets are mastered.

 

   

 

   

 

  CHAPTER XVIII—A SETTLER IN CLOISTERHAM

 

   

 

  AT about this time a stranger appeared
in Cloisterham; a whitehaired personage, with black eyebrows. Being buttoned up
in a tightish blue surtout, with a buff waistcoat and gray trousers, he had
something of a military air, but he announced himself at the Crozier (the orthodox
hotel, where he put up with a portmanteau) as an idle dog who lived upon his
means; and he farther announced that he had a mind to take a lodging in the
picturesque old city for a month or two, with a view of settling down there
altogether. Both announcements were made in the coffee-room of the Crozier, to
all whom it might or might not concern, by the stranger as he stood with his
back to the empty fireplace, waiting for his fried sole, veal cutlet, and pint
of sherry. And the waiter (business being chronically slack at the Crozier)
represented all whom it might or might not concern, and absorbed the whole of
the information.

 

  This gentleman's white head was
unusually large, and his shock of white hair was unusually thick and ample. “I
suppose, waiter,” he said, shaking his shock of hair, as a Newfoundland dog
might shake his before sitting down to dinner, “that a fair lodging for a
single buffer might be found in these parts, eh?”

 

  The waiter had no doubt of it.

 

  “Something old,” said the gentleman.
“Take my hat down for a moment from that peg, will you? No, I don't want it;
look into it. What do you see written there?”

 

  The waiter read: “Datchery.”

 

  “Now you know my name,” said the
gentleman; “Dick Datchery. Hang it up again. I was saying something old is what
I should prefer, something odd and out of the way; something venerable,
architectural, and inconvenient.”

 

  “We have a good choice of inconvenient
lodgings in the town, sir, I think,” replied the waiter, with modest confidence
in its resources that way; “indeed, I have no doubt that we could suit you that
far, however particular you might be. But a architectural lodging!” That seemed
to trouble the waiter's head, and he shook it.

 

  “Anything Cathedraly, now,” Mr. Datchery
suggested.

 

  “Mr. Tope,” said the waiter,
brightening, as he rubbed his chin with his hand, “would be the likeliest party
to inform in that line.”

 

  “Who is Mr. Tope?” inquired Dick
Datchery.

 

  The waiter explained that he was the
Verger, and that Mrs. Tope had indeed once upon a time let lodgings herself or
offered to let them; but that as nobody had ever taken them, Mrs. Tope's
windowbill, long a Cloisterham Institution, had disappeared; probably had
tumbled down one day, and never been put up again.

 

  “I'll call on Mrs. Tope,” said Mr.
Datchery, “after dinner.”

 

  So when he had done his dinner, he was
duly directed to the spot, and sallied out for it. But the Crozier being an
hotel of a most retiring disposition, and the waiter's directions being fatally
precise, he soon became bewildered, and went boggling about and about the
Cathedral Tower, whenever he could catch a glimpse of it, with a general
impression on his mind that Mrs. Tope's was somewhere very near it, and that,
like the children in the game of hot boiled beans and very good butter, he was
warm in his search when he saw the Tower, and cold when he didn't see it.

 

  He was getting very cold indeed when he
came upon a fragment of burial-ground in which an unhappy sheep was grazing.
Unhappy, because a hideous small boy was stoning it through the railings, and
had already lamed it in one leg, and was much excited by the benevolent
sportsmanlike purpose of breaking its other three legs, and bringing it down.

 

  “'It “im agin!” cried the boy, as the
poor creature leaped; “and made a dint in his wool.”

 

  “Let him be!” said Mr. Datchery. “Don't
you see you have lamed him?”

 

  “Yer lie,” returned the sportsman. “'E
went and lamed isself. I see “im do it, and I giv” “im a shy as a Widdy-warning
to “im not to go a-bruisin” “is master's mutton any more.”

 

  “Come here.”