The Mystery of Edwin Drood (7 page)

 

  “At which he takes aim?” Mr. Jasper
suggests.

 

  “That's it, sir,” returns Durdles, quite
satisfied; “at which he takes aim. I took him in hand and gave him an object.
What was he before? A destroyer. What work did he do? Nothing but destruction.
What did he earn by it? Short terms in Cloisterham jail. Not a person, not a
piece of property, not a winder, not a horse, nor a dog, nor a cat, nor a bird,
nor a fowl, nor a pig, but what he stoned, for want of an enlightened object. I
put that enlightened object before him, and now he can turn his honest
halfpenny by the three penn'orth a week.”

 

  “I wonder he has no competitors.”

 

  “He has plenty, Mr. Jasper, but he
stones “em all away. Now, I don't know what this scheme of mine comes to,”
pursues Durdles, considering about it with the same sodden gravity; “I don't
know what you may precisely call it. It ain't a sort of a—scheme of a—National
Education?”

 

  “I should say not,” replies Jasper.

 

  “I should say not,” assents Durdles;
“then we won't try to give it a name.”

 

  “He still keeps behind us,” repeats
Jasper, looking over his shoulder; “is he to follow us?”

 

  “We can't help going round by the
Travellers” Twopenny, if we go the short way, which is the back way,” Durdles
answers, “and we'll drop him there.”

 

  So they go on; Deputy, as a rear rank
one, taking open order, and invading the silence of the hour and place by
stoning every wall, post, pillar, and other inanimate object, by the deserted
way.

 

  “Is there anything new down in the
crypt, Durdles?” asks John Jasper.

 

  “Anything old, I think you mean,” growls
Durdles. “It ain't a spot for novelty.”

 

  “Any new discovery on your part, I
meant.”

 

  “There's a old “un under the seventh
pillar on the left as you go down the broken steps of the little underground
chapel as formerly was; I make him out (so fur as I've made him out yet) to be
one of them old “uns with a crook. To judge from the size of the passages in
the walls, and of the steps and doors, by which they come and went, them crooks
must have been a good deal in the way of the old “uns! Two on “em meeting promiscuous
must have hitched one another by the mitre pretty often, I should say.”

 

  Without any endeavour to correct the
literality of this opinion, Jasper surveys his companion—covered from head to
foot with old mortar, lime, and stone grit—as though he, Jasper, were getting
imbued with a romantic interest in his weird life.

 

  “Yours is a curious existence.”

 

  Without furnishing the least clue to the
question, whether he receives this as a compliment or as quite the reverse,
Durdles gruffly answers: “Yours is another.”

 

  “Well! inasmuch as my lot is cast in the
same old earthy, chilly, never-changing place, Yes. But there is much more
mystery and interest in your connection with the Cathedral than in mine.
Indeed, I am beginning to have some idea of asking you to take me on as a sort
of student, or free “prentice, under you, and to let me go about with you sometimes,
and see some of these odd nooks in which you pass your days.”

 

  The Stony One replies, in a general way,
“All right. Everybody knows where to find Durdles, when he's wanted.” Which, if
not strictly true, is approximately so, if taken to express that Durdles may
always be found in a state of vagabondage somewhere.

 

  “What I dwell upon most,” says Jasper,
pursuing his subject of romantic interest, “is the remarkable accuracy with
which you would seem to find out where people are buried. —What is the matter?
That bundle is in your way; let me hold it.”

 

  Durdles has stopped and backed a little
(Deputy, attentive to all his movements, immediately skirmishing into the
road), and was looking about for some ledge or corner to place his bundle on,
when thus relieved of it.

 

  “Just you give me my hammer out of
that,” says Durdles, “and I'll show you.”

 

  Clink, clink. And his hammer is handed
him.

 

  “Now, lookee here. You pitch your note,
don't you, Mr. Jasper?”

 

  “Yes.”

 

  “So I sound for mine. I take my hammer,
and I tap.” (Here he strikes the pavement, and the attentive Deputy skirmishes
at a rather wider range, as supposing that his head may be in requisition.) “I
tap, tap, tap. Solid! I go on tapping. Solid still! Tap again. Holloa! Hollow!
Tap again, persevering. Solid in hollow! Tap, tap, tap, to try it better. Solid
in hollow; and inside solid, hollow again! There you are! Old “un crumbled away
in stone coffin, in vault!”

 

  “Astonishing!”

 

  “I have even done this,” says Durdles,
drawing out his two-foot rule (Deputy meanwhile skirmishing nearer, as
suspecting that Treasure may be about to be discovered, which may somehow lead
to his own enrichment, and the delicious treat of the discoverers being hanged
by the neck, on his evidence, until they are dead). “Say that hammer of mine's
a wall—my work. Two; four; and two is six,” measuring on the pavement. “Six
foot inside that wall is Mrs. Sapsea.”

 

  “Not really Mrs. Sapsea?”

 

  “Say Mrs. Sapsea. Her wall's thicker,
but say Mrs. Sapsea. Durdles taps, that wall represented by that hammer, and
says, after good sounding: “Something betwixt us!” Sure enough, some rubbish
has been left in that same six-foot space by Durdles's men!”

 

  Jasper opines that such accuracy “is a
gift.”

 

  “I wouldn't have it at a gift,” returns
Durdles, by no means receiving the observation in good part. “I worked it out
for myself. Durdles comes by HIS knowledge through grubbing deep for it, and
having it up by the roots when it don't want to come. —Holloa you Deputy!”

 

  “Widdy!” is Deputy's shrill response,
standing off again.

 

  “Catch that ha'penny. And don't let me
see any more of you tonight, after we come to the Travellers” Twopenny.”

 

  “Warning!” returns Deputy, having caught
the halfpenny, and appearing by this mystic word to express his assent to the
arrangement.

 

  They have but to cross what was once the
vineyard, belonging to what was once the Monastery, to come into the narrow
back lane wherein stands the crazy wooden house of two low stories currently
known as the Travellers” Twopenny:- a house all warped and distorted, like the
morals of the travellers, with scant remains of a lattice-work porch over the
door, and also of a rustic fence before its stamped-out garden; by reason of
the travellers being so bound to the premises by a tender sentiment (or so fond
of having a fire by the roadside in the course of the day), that they can never
be persuaded or threatened into departure, without violently possessing
themselves of some wooden forget-me-not, and bearing it off.

 

  The semblance of an inn is attempted to
be given to this wretched place by fragments of conventional red curtaining in
the windows, which rags are made muddily transparent in the night-season by
feeble lights of rush or cotton dip burning dully in the close air of the
inside. As Durdles and Jasper come near, they are addressed by an inscribed
paper lantern over the door, setting forth the purport of the house. They are
also addressed by some half-dozen other hideous small boys—whether twopenny lodgers
or followers or hangers-on of such, who knows!—who, as if attracted by some
carrion-scent of Deputy in the air, start into the moonlight, as vultures might
gather in the desert, and instantly fall to stoning him and one another.

 

  “Stop, you young brutes,” cries Jasper
angrily, “and let us go by!”

 

  This remonstrance being received with
yells and flying stones, according to a custom of late years comfortably
established among the police regulations of our English communities, where
Christians are stoned on all sides, as if the days of Saint Stephen were
revived, Durdles remarks of the young savages, with some point, that “they
haven't got an object,” and leads the way down the lane.

 

  At the corner of the lane, Jasper, hotly
enraged, checks his companion and looks back. All is silent. Next moment, a
stone coming rattling at his hat, and a distant yell of “Wake-Cock! Warning!”
followed by a crow, as from some infernally-hatched Chanticleer, apprising him
under whose victorious fire he stands, he turns the corner into safety, and
takes Durdles home: Durdles stumbling among the litter of his stony yard as if
he were going to turn head foremost into one of the unfinished tombs.

 

  John Jasper returns by another way to
his gatehouse, and entering softly with his key, finds his fire still burning.
He takes from a locked press a peculiar-looking pipe, which he fills—but not
with tobacco—and, having adjusted the contents of the bowl, very carefully,
with a little instrument, ascends an inner staircase of only a few steps, leading
to two rooms. One of these is his own sleeping chamber: the other is his
nephew's. There is a light in each.

 

  His nephew lies asleep, calm and
untroubled. John Jasper stands looking down upon him, his unlighted pipe in his
hand, for some time, with a fixed and deep attention. Then, hushing his
footsteps, he passes to his own room, lights his pipe, and delivers himself to
the Spectres it invokes at midnight.

 

   

 

   

 

  CHAPTER VI—PHILANTHROPY IN MINOR CANON CORNER

 

   

 

  THE Reverend Septimus Crisparkle
(Septimus, because six little brother Crisparkles before him went out, one by
one, as they were born, like six weak little rushlights, as they were lighted),
having broken the thin morning ice near Cloisterham Weir with his amiable head,
much to the invigoration of his frame, was now assisting his circulation by
boxing at a looking-glass with great science and prowess. A fresh and healthy
portrait the lookingglass presented of the Reverend Septimus, feinting and
dodging with the utmost artfulness, and hitting out from the shoulder with the
utmost straightness, while his radiant features teemed with innocence, and
soft-hearted benevolence beamed from his boxinggloves.

 

  It was scarcely breakfast-time yet, for
Mrs. Crisparkle—mother, not wife of the Reverend Septimus—was only just down,
and waiting for the urn. Indeed, the Reverend Septimus left off at this very
moment to take the pretty old lady's entering face between his boxing-gloves
and kiss it. Having done so with tenderness, the Reverend Septimus turned to
again, countering with his left, and putting in his right, in a tremendous manner.

 

  “I say, every morning of my life, that
you'll do it at last, Sept,” remarked the old lady, looking on; “and so you
will.”

 

  “Do what, Ma dear?”

 

  “Break the pier-glass, or burst a
blood-vessel.”

 

  “Neither, please God, Ma dear. Here's
wind, Ma. Look at this!” In a concluding round of great severity, the Reverend
Septimus administered and escaped all sorts of punishment, and wound up by
getting the old lady's cap into Chancery—such is the technical term used in
scientific circles by the learned in the Noble Art—with a lightness of touch
that hardly stirred the lightest lavender or cherry riband on it. Magnanimously
releasing the defeated, just in time to get his gloves into a drawer and feign
to be looking out of window in a contemplative state of mind when a servant
entered, the Reverend Septimus then gave place to the urn and other
preparations for breakfast. These completed, and the two alone again, it was
pleasant to see (or would have been, if there had been any one to see it, which
there never was), the old lady standing to say the Lord's Prayer aloud, and her
son, Minor Canon nevertheless, standing with bent head to hear it, he being
within five years of forty: much as he had stood to hear the same words from
the same lips when he was within five months of four.

 

  What is prettier than an old lady—except
a young lady—when her eyes are bright, when her figure is trim and compact,
when her face is cheerful and calm, when her dress is as the dress of a china
shepherdess: so dainty in its colours, so individually assorted to herself, so
neatly moulded on her? Nothing is prettier, thought the good Minor Canon
frequently, when taking his seat at table opposite his long-widowed mother. Her
thought at such times may be condensed into the two words that oftenest did
duty together in all her conversations: “My Sept!”

 

  They were a good pair to sit
breakfasting together in Minor Canon Corner, Cloisterham. For Minor Canon
Corner was a quiet place in the shadow of the Cathedral, which the cawing of
the rooks, the echoing footsteps of rare passers, the sound of the Cathedral
bell, or the roll of the Cathedral organ, seemed to render more quiet than
absolute silence. Swaggering fighting men had had their centuries of ramping
and raving about Minor Canon Corner, and beaten serfs had had their centuries
of drudging and dying there, and powerful monks had had their centuries of
being sometimes useful and sometimes harmful there, and behold they were all
gone out of Minor Canon Corner, and so much the better. Perhaps one of the
highest uses of their ever having been there, was, that there might be left
behind, that blessed air of tranquillity which pervaded Minor Canon Corner, and
that serenely romantic state of the mind—productive for the most part of pity
and forbearance—which is engendered by a sorrowful story that is all told, or a
pathetic play that is played out.

 

  Red-brick walls harmoniously toned down
in colour by time, strongrooted ivy, latticed windows, panelled rooms, big
oaken beams in little places, and stone-walled gardens where annual fruit yet
ripened upon monkish trees, were the principal surroundings of pretty old Mrs.
Crisparkle and the Reverend Septimus as they sat at breakfast.