The Mystery of Edwin Drood - Charles Dickens (crime books to read txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Dickens
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All this time Mr. Datchery had walked with his hat under his arm, and his white hair streaming. He had an odd momentary appearance upon him of having forgotten his hat, when Mr. Sapsea now touched it; and he clapped his hand up to his head as if with some vague expectation of finding another hat upon it.
‘Pray be covered, sir,’ entreated Mr. Sapsea; magnificently plying: ‘I shall not mind it, I assure you.’
‘His Honour is very good, but I do it for coolness,’ said Mr. Datchery.
Then Mr. Datchery admired the Cathedral, and Mr. Sapsea pointed it out as if he himself had invented and built it: there were a few details indeed of which he did not approve, but those he glossed over, as if the workmen had made mistakes in his absence. The Cathedral disposed of, he led the way by the churchyard, and stopped to extol the beauty of the evening—by chance—in the immediate vicinity of Mrs. Sapsea’s epitaph.
‘And by the by,’ said Mr. Sapsea, appearing to descend from an elevation to remember it all of a sudden; like Apollo shooting down from Olympus to pick up his forgotten lyre; ‘THAT is one of our small lions. The partiality of our people has made it so, and strangers have been seen taking a copy of it now and then. I am not a judge of it myself, for it is a little work of my own. But it was troublesome to turn, sir; I may say, difficult to turn with elegance.’
Mr. Datchery became so ecstatic over Mr. Sapsea’s composition, that, in spite of his intention to end his days in Cloisterham, and therefore his probably having in reserve many opportunities of copying it, he would have transcribed it into his pocket-book on the spot, but for the slouching towards them of its material producer and perpetuator, Durdles, whom Mr. Sapsea hailed, not sorry to show him a bright example of behaviour to superiors.
‘Ah, Durdles! This is the mason, sir; one of our Cloisterham worthies; everybody here knows Durdles. Mr. Datchery, Durdles a gentleman who is going to settle here.’
‘I wouldn’t do it if I was him,’ growled Durdles. ‘We’re a heavy lot.’
‘You surely don’t speak for yourself, Mr. Durdles,’ returned Mr. Datchery, ‘any more than for His Honour.’
‘Who’s His Honour?’ demanded Durdles.
‘His Honour the Mayor.’
‘I never was brought afore him,’ said Durdles, with anything but the look of a loyal subject of the mayoralty, ‘and it’ll be time enough for me to Honour him when I am. Until which, and when, and where,
“Mister Sapsea is his name, England is his nation, Cloisterham’s his dwelling-place, Aukshneer’s his occupation.”’
Here, Deputy (preceded by a flying oyster-shell) appeared upon the scene, and requested to have the sum of threepence instantly ‘chucked’ to him by Mr. Durdles, whom he had been vainly seeking up and down, as lawful wages overdue. While that gentleman, with his bundle under his arm, slowly found and counted out the money, Mr. Sapsea informed the new settler of Durdles’s habits, pursuits, abode, and reputation. ‘I suppose a curious stranger might come to see you, and your works, Mr. Durdles, at any odd time?’ said Mr. Datchery upon that.
‘Any gentleman is welcome to come and see me any evening if he brings liquor for two with him,’ returned Durdles, with a penny between his teeth and certain halfpence in his hands; ‘or if he likes to make it twice two, he’ll be doubly welcome.’
‘I shall come. Master Deputy, what do you owe me?’
‘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!’
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 doorsteps, 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 music-master.’
‘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.
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