The Mystery of Edwin Drood (71 page)

 

  “A job.”

 

  “Mind you pay me honestly with the job
of showing me Mr. Durdles's house when I want to go there.”

 

  Deputy, with a piercing broadside of
whistle through the whole gap in his mouth, as a receipt in full for all
arrears, vanished.

 

  The Worshipful and the Worshipper then
passed on together until they parted, with many ceremonies, at the Worshipful's
door; even then the Worshipper carried his hat under his arm, and gave his
streaming white hair to the breeze.

 

  Said Mr. Datchery to himself that night,
as he looked at his white hair in the gas-lighted looking-glass over the
coffee-room chimneypiece at the Crozier, and shook it out: “For a single
buffer, of an easy temper, living idly on his means, I have had a rather busy
afternoon!”

 

   

 

   

 

  CHAPTER XIX—SHADOW ON THE SUN-DIAL

 

   

 

  AGAIN Miss Twinkleton has delivered her
valedictory address, with the accompaniments of white-wine and pound-cake, and
again the young ladies have departed to their several homes. Helena Landless
has left the Nuns' House to attend her brother's fortunes, and pretty Rosa is
alone.

 

  Cloisterham is so bright and sunny in
these summer days, that the Cathedral and the monastery-ruin show as if their
strong walls were transparent. A soft glow seems to shine from within them,
rather than upon them from without, such is their mellowness as they look forth
on the hot corn-fields and the smoking roads that distantly wind among them.
The Cloisterham gardens blush with ripening fruit. Time was when travel-stained
pilgrims rode in clattering parties through the city's welcome shades; time is
when wayfarers, leading a gipsy life between haymaking time and harvest, and
looking as if they were just made of the dust of the earth, so very dusty are
they, lounge about on cool door-steps, trying to mend their unmendable shoes,
or giving them to the city kennels as a hopeless job, and seeking others in the
bundles that they carry, along with their yet unused sickles swathed in bands
of straw. At all the more public pumps there is much cooling of bare feet,
together with much bubbling and gurgling of drinking with hand to spout on the
part of these Bedouins; the Cloisterham police meanwhile looking askant from
their beats with suspicion, and manifest impatience that the intruders should
depart from within the civic bounds, and once more fry themselves on the
simmering high-roads.

 

  On the afternoon of such a day, when the
last Cathedral service is done, and when that side of the High Street on which
the Nuns' House stands is in grateful shade, save where its quaint old garden
opens to the west between the boughs of trees, a servant informs Rosa, to her
terror, that Mr. Jasper desires to see her.

 

  If he had chosen his time for finding
her at a disadvantage, he could have done no better. Perhaps he has chosen it.
Helena Landless is gone, Mrs. Tisher is absent on leave, Miss Twinkleton (in
her amateur state of existence) has contributed herself and a veal pie to a
picnic.

 

  “O why, why, why, did you say I was at
home!” cried Rosa, helplessly.

 

  The maid replies, that Mr. Jasper never
asked the question.

 

  That he said he knew she was at home,
and begged she might be told that he asked to see her.

 

  “What shall I do! what shall I do!” thinks
Rosa, clasping her hands.

 

  Possessed by a kind of desperation, she
adds in the next breath, that she will come to Mr. Jasper in the garden. She
shudders at the thought of being shut up with him in the house; but many of its
windows command the garden, and she can be seen as well as heard there, and can
shriek in the free air and run away. Such is the wild idea that flutters
through her mind.

 

  She has never seen him since the fatal
night, except when she was questioned before the Mayor, and then he was present
in gloomy watchfulness, as representing his lost nephew and burning to avenge
him. She hangs her garden-hat on her arm, and goes out. The moment she sees him
from the porch, leaning on the sun-dial, the old horrible feeling of being
compelled by him, asserts its hold upon her. She feels that she would even then
go back, but that he draws her feet towards him. She cannot resist, and sits
down, with her head bent, on the garden-seat beside the sun-dial. She cannot
look up at him for abhorrence, but she has perceived that he is dressed in deep
mourning. So is she. It was not so at first; but the lost has long been given
up, and mourned for, as dead.

 

  He would begin by touching her hand. She
feels the intention, and draws her hand back. His eyes are then fixed upon her,
she knows, though her own see nothing but the grass.

 

  “I have been waiting,” he begins, “for
some time, to be summoned back to my duty near you.”

 

  After several times forming her lips,
which she knows he is closely watching, into the shape of some other hesitating
reply, and then into none, she answers: “Duty, sir?”

 

  “The duty of teaching you, serving you
as your faithful musicmaster.”

 

  “I have left off that study.”

 

  “Not left off, I think. Discontinued. I
was told by your guardian that you discontinued it under the shock that we have
all felt so acutely. When will you resume?”

 

  “Never, sir.”

 

  “Never? You could have done no more if
you had loved my dear boy.”

 

  “I did love him!” cried Rosa, with a
flash of anger.

 

  “Yes; but not quite—not quite in the right
way, shall I say? Not in the intended and expected way. Much as my dear boy
was, unhappily, too self-conscious and self-satisfied (I'll draw no parallel
between him and you in that respect) to love as he should have loved, or as any
one in his place would have loved—must have loved!”

 

  She sits in the same still attitude, but
shrinking a little more.

 

  “Then, to be told that you discontinued
your study with me, was to be politely told that you abandoned it altogether?”
he suggested.

 

  “Yes,” says Rosa, with sudden spirit,
“The politeness was my guardian's, not mine. I told him that I was resolved to
leave off, and that I was determined to stand by my resolution.”

 

  “And you still are?”

 

  “I still am, sir. And I beg not to be
questioned any more about it. At all events, I will not answer any more; I have
that in my power.”

 

  She is so conscious of his looking at
her with a gloating admiration of the touch of anger on her, and the fire and
animation it brings with it, that even as her spirit rises, it falls again, and
she struggles with a sense of shame, affront, and fear, much as she did that
night at the piano.

 

  “I will not question you any more, since
you object to it so much; I will confess—”

 

  “I do not wish to hear you, sir,” cries
Rosa, rising.

 

  This time he does touch her with his
outstretched hand. In shrinking from it, she shrinks into her seat again.

 

  “We must sometimes act in opposition to
our wishes,” he tells her in a low voice. “You must do so now, or do more harm
to others than you can ever set right.”

 

  “What harm?”

 

  “Presently, presently. You question ME,
you see, and surely that's not fair when you forbid me to question you.
Nevertheless, I will answer the question presently. Dearest Rosa! Charming
Rosa!”

 

  She starts up again.

 

  This time he does not touch her. But his
face looks so wicked and menacing, as he stands leaning against the
sun-dial-setting, as it were, his black mark upon the very face of day—that her
flight is arrested by horror as she looks at him.

 

  “I do not forget how many windows
command a view of us,” he says, glancing towards them. “I will not touch you
again; I will come no nearer to you than I am. Sit down, and there will be no
mighty wonder in your music-master's leaning idly against a pedestal and
speaking with you, remembering all that has happened, and our shares in it. Sit
down, my beloved.”

 

  She would have gone once more—was all
but gone—and once more his face, darkly threatening what would follow if she
went, has stopped her. Looking at him with the expression of the instant frozen
on her face, she sits down on the seat again.

 

  “Rosa, even when my dear boy was
affianced to you, I loved you madly; even when I thought his happiness in
having you for his wife was certain, I loved you madly; even when I strove to
make him more ardently devoted to you, I loved you madly; even when he gave me
the picture of your lovely face so carelessly traduced by him, which I feigned
to hang always in my sight for his sake, but worshipped in torment for years, I
loved you madly; in the distasteful work of the day, in the wakeful misery of
the night, girded by sordid realities, or wandering through Paradises and Hells
of visions into which I rushed, carrying your image in my arms, I loved you
madly.”

 

  If anything could make his words more
hideous to her than they are in themselves, it would be the contrast between
the violence of his look and delivery, and the composure of his assumed
attitude.

 

  “I endured it all in silence. So long as
you were his, or so long as I supposed you to be his, I hid my secret loyally.
Did I not?”

 

  This lie, so gross, while the mere words
in which it is told are so true, is more than Rosa can endure. She answers with
kindling indignation: “You were as false throughout, sir, as you are now. You
were false to him, daily and hourly. You know that you made my life unhappy by
your pursuit of me. You know that you made me afraid to open his generous eyes,
and that you forced me, for his own trusting, good, good sake, to keep the
truth from him, that you were a bad, bad man!”

 

  His preservation of his easy attitude
rendering his working features and his convulsive hands absolutely diabolical,
he returns, with a fierce extreme of admiration:

 

  “How beautiful you are! You are more
beautiful in anger than in repose. I don't ask you for your love; give me yourself
and your hatred; give me yourself and that pretty rage; give me yourself and
that enchanting scorn; it will be enough for me.”

 

  Impatient tears rise to the eyes of the
trembling little beauty, and her face flames; but as she again rises to leave
him in indignation, and seek protection within the house, he stretches out his
hand towards the porch, as though he invited her to enter it.

 

  “I told you, you rare charmer, you sweet
witch, that you must stay and hear me, or do more harm than can ever be undone.
You asked me what harm. Stay, and I will tell you. Go, and I will do it!”

 

  Again Rosa quails before his threatening
face, though innocent of its meaning, and she remains. Her panting breathing
comes and goes as if it would choke her; but with a repressive hand upon her
bosom, she remains.

 

  “I have made my confession that my love
is mad. It is so mad, that had the ties between me and my dear lost boy been
one silken thread less strong, I might have swept even him from your side, when
you favoured him.”

 

  A film come over the eyes she raises for
an instant, as though he had turned her faint.

 

  “Even him,” he repeats. “Yes, even him!
Rosa, you see me and you hear me. Judge for yourself whether any other admirer
shall love you and live, whose life is in my hand.”

 

  “What do you mean, sir?”

 

  “I mean to show you how mad my love is.
It was hawked through the late inquiries by Mr. Crisparkle, that young Landless
had confessed to him that he was a rival of my lost boy. That is an inexpiable
offence in my eyes. The same Mr. Crisparkle knows under my hand that I have
devoted myself to the murderer's discovery and destruction, be he whom he
might, and that I determined to discuss the mystery with no one until I should
hold the clue in which to entangle the murderer as in a net. I have since
worked patiently to wind and wind it round him; and it is slowly winding as I
speak.”

 

  “Your belief, if you believe in the
criminality of Mr. Landless, is not Mr. Crisparkle's belief, and he is a good
man,” Rosa retorts.

 

  “My belief is my own; and I reserve it,
worshipped of my soul! Circumstances may accumulate so strongly EVEN AGAINST AN
INNOCENT MAN, that directed, sharpened, and pointed, they may slay him. One
wanting link discovered by perseverance against a guilty man, proves his guilt,
however slight its evidence before, and he dies. Young Landless stands in
deadly peril either way.”

 

  “If you really suppose,” Rosa pleads
with him, turning paler, “that I favour Mr. Landless, or that Mr. Landless has
ever in any way addressed himself to me, you are wrong.”

 

  He puts that from him with a slighting
action of his hand and a curled lip.

 

  “I was going to show you how madly I
love you. More madly now than ever, for I am willing to renounce the second
object that has arisen in my life to divide it with you; and henceforth to have
no object in existence but you only. Miss Landless has become your bosom
friend. You care for her peace of mind?”

 

  “I love her dearly.”

 

  “You care for her good name?”

 

  “I have said, sir, I love her dearly.”

 

  “I am unconsciously,” he observes with a
smile, as he folds his hands upon the sun-dial and leans his chin upon them, so
that his talk would seem from the windows (faces occasionally come and go
there) to be of the airiest and playfullest—“I am unconsciously giving offence
by questioning again. I will simply make statements, therefore, and not put
questions. You do care for your bosom friend's good name, and you do care for
her peace of mind. Then remove the shadow of the gallows from her, dear one!”