The Mystery of Edwin Drood

An ancient English Cathedral Tower? How can the ancient English Cathedral tower be here! The well-known massive gray square tower of its old Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect. What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe it is set up by the Sultan’s orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in number and attendants. Still the Cathedral Tower rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike. Stay! Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on the top of a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry? Some vague period of drowsy laughter must be devoted to the consideration of this possibility.

Shaking from head to foot, the man whose scattered consciousness has thus fantastically pieced itself together, at length rises, supports his trembling frame upon his arms, and looks around. He is in the meanest and closest of small rooms. Through the ragged window-curtain, the light of early day steals in from a miserable court. He lies, dressed, across a large unseemly bed, upon a bedstead that has indeed given way under the weight upon it. Lying, also dressed and also across the bed, not longwise, are a Chinaman, a Lascar, and a haggard woman. The two first are in a sleep or stupor; the last is blowing at a kind of pipe, to kindle it. And as she blows, and shading it with her lean hand, concentrates its red spark of light, it serves in the dim morning as a lamp to show him what he sees of her.

“Another?” says this woman, in a querulous, rattling whisper. “Have another?”

He looks about him, with his hand to his forehead.

“Ye’ve smoked as many as five since ye come in at midnight,” the woman goes on, as she chronically complains. “Poor me, poor me, my head is so bad. Them two come in after ye. Ah, poor me, the business is slack, is slack! Few Chinamen about the Docks, and fewer Lascars, and no ships coming in, these say! Here’s another ready for ye, deary. Ye’ll remember like a good soul, won’t ye, that the market price is dreffle high just now? More nor three shillings and sixpence for a thimbleful! And ye’ll remember that nobody but me (and Jack Chinaman t’other side the court; but he can’t do it as well as me) has the true secret of mixing it? Ye’ll pay up accordingly, deary, won’t ye?”

She blows at the pipe as she speaks, and, occasionally bubbling at it, inhales much of its contents.

“O me, O me, my lungs is weak, my lungs is bad! It’s nearly ready for ye, deary. Ah, poor me, poor me, my poor hand shakes like to drop off! I see ye coming-to, and I ses to my poor self, ‘I’ll have another ready for him, and he’ll bear in mind the market price of opium, and pay according.’ O my poor head! I makes my pipes of old penny ink-bottles, ye see, deary—this is one—and I fits-in a mouthpiece, this way, and I takes my mixter out of this thimble with this little horn spoon; and so I fills, deary. Ah, my poor nerves! I got Heavens-hard drunk for sixteen year afore I took to this; but this don’t hurt me, not to speak of. And it takes away the hunger as well as wittles, deary.”

She hands him the nearly-emptied pipe, and sinks back, turning over on her face.

He rises unsteadily from the bed, lays the pipe upon the hearth-stone, draws back the ragged curtain, and looks with repugnance at his three companions. He notices that the woman has opium-smoked herself into a strange likeness of the Chinaman. His form of cheek, eye, and temple, and his colour, are repeated in her. Said Chinaman convulsively wrestles with one of his many Gods or Devils, perhaps, and snarls horribly. The Lascar laughs and dribbles at the mouth. The hostess is still.

“What visions can she have?” the waking man muses, as he turns her face towards him, and stands looking down at it. “Visions of many butchers’ shops, and public-houses, and much credit? Of an increase of hideous customers, and this horrible bedstead set upright again, and this horrible court swept clean? What can she rise to, under any quantity of opium, higher than that!—Eh?”

He bends down his ear, to listen to her mutterings.

“Unintelligible!”

As he watches the spasmodic shoots and darts that break out of her face and limbs, like fitful lightning out of a dark sky, some contagion in them seizes upon him: insomuch that he has to withdraw himself to a lean arm-chair by the hearth—placed there, perhaps, for such emergencies—and to sit in it, holding tight, until he has got the better of this unclean spirit of imitation.

Then he comes back, pounces on the Chinaman, and seizing him with both hands by the throat, turns him violently on the bed. The Chinaman clutches the aggressive hands, resists, gasps, and protests.

“What do you say?”

A watchful pause.

“Unintelligible!”

Slowly loosening his grasp as he listens to the incoherent jargon with an attentive frown, he turns to the Lascar and fairly drags him forth upon the floor. As he falls, the Lascar starts into a half-risen attitude, glares with his eyes, lashes about him fiercely with his arms, and draws a phantom knife. It then becomes apparent that the woman has taken possession of this knife, for safety’s sake; for, she too starting up, and restraining and expostulating with him, the knife is visible in her dress, not in his, when they drowsily drop back, side by side.

There has been chattering and clattering enough between them, but to no purpose. When any distinct word has been flung into the air, it has had no sense or sequence. Wherefore “unintelligible!” is again the comment of the watcher, made with some reassured nodding of his head, and a gloomy smile. He then lays certain silver money on the table, finds his hat, gropes his way down the broken stairs, gives a good morning to some rat-ridden doorkeeper, in bed in a black hutch beneath the stairs, and passes out.

That same afternoon, the massive gray square tower of an old Cathedral rises before the sight of a jaded traveller. The bells are going for daily vesper service, and he must needs attend it, one would say, from his haste to reach the open Cathedral door. The choir are getting on their sullied white robes, in a hurry, when he arrives among them, gets on his own robe, and falls into the procession filing in to service. Then, the Sacristan locks the iron-barred gates that divide the sanctuary from the chancel, and all of the procession having scuttled into their places, hide their faces; and then the intoned words, “WHEN THE WICKED MAN—” rise among groins of arches and beams of roof, awakening muttered thunder.

Whosoever has observed that sedate and clerical bird, the rook, may perhaps have noticed that when he wings his way homeward towards nightfall, in a sedate and clerical company, two rooks will suddenly detach themselves from the rest, will retrace their flight for some distance, and will there poise and linger; conveying to mere men the fancy that it is of some occult importance to the body politic, that this artful couple should pretend to have renounced connection with it.

Similarly, service being over in the old Cathedral with the square tower, and the choir scuffling out again, and divers venerable persons of rook-like aspect dispersing, two of these latter retrace their steps, and walk together in the echoing Close.

Not only is the day waning, but the year. The low sun is fiery and yet cold behind the monastery ruin, and the Virginia creeper on the Cathedral wall has showered half its deep-red leaves down on the pavement. There has been rain this afternoon, and a wintry shudder goes among the little pools on the cracked, uneven flag-stones, and through the giant elm-trees as they shed a gust of tears. Their fallen leaves lie strewn thickly about. Some of these leaves, in a timid rush, seek sanctuary within the low arched Cathedral door; but two men coming out resist them, and cast them forth again with their feet; this done, one of the two locks the door with a goodly key, and the other flits away with a folio music-book.

“Mr. Jasper was that, Tope?”

“Yes, Mr. Dean.”

“He has stayed late.”

“Yes, Mr. Dean. I have stayed for him, your Reverence. He has been took a little poorly.”

“Say ‘taken,’ Tope—to the Dean,” the younger rook interposes in a low tone with this touch of correction, as who should say: “You may offer bad grammar to the laity, or the humbler clergy, not to the Dean.”

Mr. Tope, Chief Verger and Showman, and accustomed to be high with excursion parties, declines with a silent loftiness to perceive that any suggestion has been tendered to him.

“And when and how has Mr. Jasper been taken—for, as Mr. Crisparkle has remarked, it is better to say taken—taken—” repeats the Dean; “when and how has Mr. Jasper been Taken—”

“Taken, sir,” Tope deferentially murmurs.

“—Poorly, Tope?”

“Why, sir, Mr. Jasper was that breathed—”

“I wouldn’t say ‘That breathed,’ Tope,” Mr. Crisparkle interposes with the same touch as before. “Not English—to the Dean.”

“Breathed to that extent,” the Dean (not unflattered by this indirect homage) condescendingly remarks, “would be preferable.”

“Mr. Jasper’s breathing was so remarkably short”—thus discreetly does Mr. Tope work his way round the sunken rock—“when he came in, that it distressed him mightily to get his notes out: which was perhaps the cause of his having a kind of fit on him after a little. His memory grew DAZED.” Mr. Tope, with his eyes on the Reverend Mr. Crisparkle, shoots this word out, as defying him to improve upon it: “and a dimness and giddiness crept over him as strange as ever I saw: though he didn’t seem to mind it particularly, himself. However, a little time and a little water brought him out of his DAZE.” Mr. Tope repeats the word and its emphasis, with the air of saying: “As I have made a success, I’ll make it again.”

“And Mr. Jasper has gone home quite himself, has he?” asked the Dean.

“Your Reverence, he has gone home quite himself. And I’m glad to see he’s having his fire kindled up, for it’s chilly after the wet, and the Cathedral had both a damp feel and a damp touch this afternoon, and he was very shivery.”

They all three look towards an old stone gatehouse crossing the Close, with an arched thoroughfare passing beneath it. Through its latticed window, a fire shines out upon the fast-darkening scene, involving in shadow the pendent masses of ivy and creeper covering the building’s front. As the deep Cathedral-bell strikes the hour, a ripple of wind goes through these at their distance, like a ripple of the solemn sound that hums through tomb and tower, broken niche and defaced statue, in the pile close at hand.

“Is Mr. Jasper’s nephew with him?” the Dean asks.

“No, sir,” replied the Verger, “but expected. There’s his own solitary shadow betwixt his two windows—the one looking this way, and the one looking down into the High Street—drawing his own curtains now.”

“Well, well,” says the Dean, with a sprightly air of breaking up the little conference, “I hope Mr. Jasper’s heart may not be too much set upon his nephew. Our affections, however laudable, in this transitory world, should never master us; we should guide them, guide them. I find I am not disagreeably reminded of my dinner, by hearing my dinner-bell. Perhaps, Mr. Crisparkle, you will, before going home, look in on Jasper?”

“Certainly, Mr. Dean. And tell him that you had the kindness to desire to know how he was?”

“Ay; do so, do so. Certainly. Wished to know how he was. By all means. Wished to know how he was.”

With a pleasant air of patronage, the Dean as nearly cocks his quaint hat as a Dean in good spirits may, and directs his comely gaiters towards the ruddy dining-room of the snug old red-brick house where he is at present, “in residence” with Mrs. Dean and Miss Dean.

Mr. Crisparkle, Minor Canon, fair and rosy, and perpetually pitching himself head-foremost into all the deep running water in the surrounding country; Mr. Crisparkle, Minor Canon, early riser, musical, classical, cheerful, kind, good-natured, social, contented, and boy-like; Mr. Crisparkle, Minor Canon and good man, lately “Coach” upon the chief Pagan high roads, but since promoted by a patron (grateful for a well-taught son) to his present Christian beat; betakes himself to the gatehouse, on his way home to his early tea.

“Sorry to hear from Tope that you have not been well, Jasper.”

“O, it was nothing, nothing!”

“You look a little worn.”

“Do I? O, I don’t think so. What is better, I don’t feel so. Tope has made too much of it, I suspect. It’s his trade to make the most of everything appertaining to the Cathedral, you know.”

“I may tell the Dean—I call expressly from the Dean—that you are all right again?”

The reply, with a slight smile, is: “Certainly; with my respects and thanks to the Dean.”

“I’m glad to hear that you expect young Drood.”

“I expect the dear fellow every moment.”

“Ah! He will do you more good than a doctor, Jasper.”

“More good than a dozen doctors. For I love him dearly, and I don’t love doctors, or doctors’ stuff.”

Mr. Jasper is a dark man of some six-and-twenty, with thick, lustrous, well-arranged black hair and whiskers. He looks older than he is, as dark men often do. His voice is deep and good, his face and figure are good, his manner is a little sombre. His room is a little sombre, and may have had its influence in forming his manner. It is mostly in shadow. Even when the sun shines brilliantly, it seldom touches the grand piano in the recess, or the folio music-books on the stand, or the book-shelves on the wall, or the unfinished picture of a blooming schoolgirl hanging over the chimneypiece; her flowing brown hair tied with a blue riband, and her beauty remarkable for a quite childish, almost babyish, touch of saucy discontent, comically conscious of itself. (There is not the least artistic merit in this picture, which is a mere daub; but it is clear that the painter has made it humorously—one might almost say, revengefully—like the original.)

“We shall miss you, Jasper, at the ‘Alternate Musical Wednesdays’ to-night; but no doubt you are best at home. Good-night. God bless you! ‘Tell me, shep-herds, te-e-ell me; tell me-e-e, have you seen (have you seen, have you seen, have you seen) my-y-y Flo-o-ora-a pass this way!’” Melodiously good Minor Canon the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle thus delivers himself, in musical rhythm, as he withdraws his amiable face from the doorway and conveys it down-stairs.

Sounds of recognition and greeting pass between the Reverend Septimus and somebody else, at the stair-foot. Mr. Jasper listens, starts from his chair, and catches a young fellow in his arms, exclaiming:

“My dear Edwin!”

“My dear Jack! So glad to see you!”

“Get off your greatcoat, bright boy, and sit down here in your own corner. Your feet are not wet? Pull your boots off. Do pull your boots off.”

“My dear Jack, I am as dry as a bone. Don’t moddley-coddley, there’s a good fellow. I like anything better than being moddley-coddleyed.”

With the check upon him of being unsympathetically restrained in a genial outburst of enthusiasm, Mr. Jasper stands still, and looks on intently at the young fellow, divesting himself of his outward coat, hat, gloves, and so forth. Once for all, a look of intentness and intensity—a look of hungry, exacting, watchful, and yet devoted affection—is always, now and ever afterwards, on the Jasper face whenever the Jasper face is addressed in this direction. And whenever it is so addressed, it is never, on this occasion or on any other, dividedly addressed; it is always concentrated.

“Now I am right, and now I’ll take my corner, Jack. Any dinner, Jack?”

Mr. Jasper opens a door at the upper end of the room, and discloses a small inner room pleasantly lighted and prepared, wherein a comely dame is in the act of setting dishes on table.

“What a jolly old Jack it is!” cries the young fellow, with a clap of his hands. “Look here, Jack; tell me; whose birthday is it?”

“Not yours, I know,” Mr. Jasper answers, pausing to consider.

“Not mine, you know? No; not mine, I know! Pussy’s!”

Fixed as the look the young fellow meets is, there is yet in it some strange power of suddenly including the sketch over the chimneypiece.

“Pussy’s, Jack! We must drink Many happy returns to her. Come, uncle; take your dutiful and sharp-set nephew in to dinner.”

As the boy (for he is little more) lays a hand on Jasper’s shoulder, Jasper cordially and gaily lays a hand on his shoulder, and so Marseillaise-wise they go in to dinner.

“And, Lord! here’s Mrs. Tope!” cries the boy. “Lovelier than ever!”

“Never you mind me, Master Edwin,” retorts the Verger’s wife; “I can take care of myself.”

“You can’t. You’re much too handsome. Give me a kiss because it’s Pussy’s birthday.”

“I’d Pussy you, young man, if I was Pussy, as you call her,” Mrs. Tope blushingly retorts, after being saluted. “Your uncle’s too much wrapt up in you, that’s where it is. He makes so much of you, that it’s my opinion you think you’ve only to call your Pussys by the dozen, to make ’em come.”

“You forget, Mrs. Tope,” Mr. Jasper interposes, taking his place at the table with a genial smile, “and so do you, Ned, that Uncle and Nephew are words prohibited here by common consent and express agreement. For what we are going to receive His holy name be praised!”

“Done like the Dean! Witness, Edwin Drood! Please to carve, Jack, for I can’t.”

This sally ushers in the dinner. Little to the present purpose, or to any purpose, is said, while it is in course of being disposed of. At length the cloth is drawn, and a dish of walnuts and a decanter of rich-coloured sherry are placed upon the table.

“I say! Tell me, Jack,” the young fellow then flows on: “do you really and truly feel as if the mention of our relationship divided us at all? I don’t.”

“Uncles as a rule, Ned, are so much older than their nephews,” is the reply, “that I have that feeling instinctively.”

“As a rule! Ah, may-be! But what is a difference in age of half-a-dozen years or so? And some uncles, in large families, are even younger than their nephews. By George, I wish it was the case with us!”

“Why?”

“Because if it was, I’d take the lead with you, Jack, and be as wise as Begone, dull Care! that turned a young man gray, and Begone, dull Care! that turned an old man to clay.—Halloa, Jack! Don’t drink.”

“Why not?”

“Asks why not, on Pussy’s birthday, and no Happy returns proposed! Pussy, Jack, and many of ’em! Happy returns, I mean.”

Laying an affectionate and laughing touch on the boy’s extended hand, as if it were at once his giddy head and his light heart, Mr. Jasper drinks the toast in silence.

“Hip, hip, hip, and nine times nine, and one to finish with, and all that, understood. Hooray, hooray, hooray!—And now, Jack, let’s have a little talk about Pussy. Two pairs of nut-crackers? Pass me one, and take the other.” Crack. “How’s Pussy getting on Jack?”

“With her music? Fairly.”

“What a dreadfully conscientious fellow you are, Jack! But I know, Lord bless you! Inattentive, isn’t she?”

“She can learn anything, if she will.”

“If she will! Egad, that’s it. But if she won’t?”

Crack!—on Mr. Jasper’s part.

“How’s she looking, Jack?”

Mr. Jasper’s concentrated face again includes the portrait as he returns: “Very like your sketch indeed.”

“I am a little proud of it,” says the young fellow, glancing up at the sketch with complacency, and then shutting one eye, and taking a corrected prospect of it over a level bridge of nut-crackers in the air: “Not badly hit off from memory. But I ought to have caught that expression pretty well, for I have seen it often enough.”

Crack!—on Edwin Drood’s part.

Crack!—on Mr. Jasper’s part.

“In point of fact,” the former resumes, after some silent dipping among his fragments of walnut with an air of pique, “I see it whenever I go to see Pussy. If I don’t find it on her face, I leave it there.—You know I do, Miss Scornful Pert. Booh!” With a twirl of the nut-crackers at the portrait.

Crack! crack! crack. Slowly, on Mr. Jasper’s part.

Crack. Sharply on the part of Edwin Drood.

Silence on both sides.

“Have you lost your tongue, Jack?”

“Have you found yours, Ned?”

“No, but really;—isn’t it, you know, after all—”

Mr. Jasper lifts his dark eyebrows inquiringly.

“Isn’t it unsatisfactory to be cut off from choice in such a matter? There, Jack! I tell you! If I could choose, I would choose Pussy from all the pretty girls in the world.”

“But you have not got to choose.”

“That’s what I complain of. My dead and gone father and Pussy’s dead and gone father must needs marry us together by anticipation. Why the—Devil, I was going to say, if it had been respectful to their memory—couldn’t they leave us alone?”

“Tut, tut, dear boy,” Mr. Jasper remonstrates, in a tone of gentle deprecation.

“Tut, tut? Yes, Jack, it’s all very well for you. You can take it easily. Your life is not laid down to scale, and lined and dotted out for you, like a surveyor’s plan. You have no uncomfortable suspicion that you are forced upon anybody, nor has anybody an uncomfortable suspicion that she is forced upon you, or that you are forced upon her. You can choose for yourself. Life, for you, is a plum with the natural bloom on; it hasn’t been over-carefully wiped off for you—”

“Don’t stop, dear fellow. Go on.”

“Can I anyhow have hurt your feelings, Jack?”

“How can you have hurt my feelings?”

“Good Heaven, Jack, you look frightfully ill! There’s a strange film come over your eyes.”

Mr. Jasper, with a forced smile, stretches out his right hand, as if at once to disarm apprehension and gain time to get better. After a while he says faintly:

“I have been taking opium for a pain—an agony—that sometimes overcomes me. The effects of the medicine steal over me like a blight or a cloud, and pass. You see them in the act of passing; they will be gone directly. Look away from me. They will go all the sooner.”

With a scared face the younger man complies by casting his eyes downward at the ashes on the hearth. Not relaxing his own gaze on the fire, but rather strengthening it with a fierce, firm grip upon his elbow-chair, the elder sits for a few moments rigid, and then, with thick drops standing on his forehead, and a sharp catch of his breath, becomes as he was before. On his so subsiding in his chair, his nephew gently and assiduously tends him while he quite recovers. When Jasper is restored, he lays a tender hand upon his nephew’s shoulder, and, in a tone of voice less troubled than the purport of his words—indeed with something of raillery or banter in it—thus addresses him:

“There is said to be a hidden skeleton in every house; but you thought there was none in mine, dear Ned.”

“Upon my life, Jack, I did think so. However, when I come to consider that even in Pussy’s house—if she had one—and in mine—if I had one—”

“You were going to say (but that I interrupted you in spite of myself) what a quiet life mine is. No whirl and uproar around me, no distracting commerce or calculation, no risk, no change of place, myself devoted to the art I pursue, my business my pleasure.”

“I really was going to say something of the kind, Jack; but you see, you, speaking of yourself, almost necessarily leave out much that I should have put in. For instance: I should have put in the foreground your being so much respected as Lay Precentor, or Lay Clerk, or whatever you call it, of this Cathedral; your enjoying the reputation of having done such wonders with the choir; your choosing your society, and holding such an independent position in this queer old place; your gift of teaching (why, even Pussy, who don’t like being taught, says there never was such a Master as you are!), and your connexion.”

“Yes; I saw what you were tending to. I hate it.”

“Hate it, Jack?” (Much bewildered.)

“I hate it. The cramped monotony of my existence grinds me away by the grain. How does our service sound to you?”

“Beautiful! Quite celestial!”

“It often sounds to me quite devilish. I am so weary of it. The echoes of my own voice among the arches seem to mock me with my daily drudging round. No wretched monk who droned his life away in that gloomy place, before me, can have been more tired of it than I am. He could take for relief (and did take) to carving demons out of the stalls and seats and desks. What shall I do? Must I take to carving them out of my heart?”

“I thought you had so exactly found your niche in life, Jack,” Edwin Drood returns, astonished, bending forward in his chair to lay a sympathetic hand on Jasper’s knee, and looking at him with an anxious face.

“I know you thought so. They all think so.”

“Well, I suppose they do,” says Edwin, meditating aloud. “Pussy thinks so.”

“When did she tell you that?”

“The last time I was here. You remember when. Three months ago.”

“How did she phrase it?”

“O, she only said that she had become your pupil, and that you were made for your vocation.”

The younger man glances at the portrait. The elder sees it in him.

“Anyhow, my dear Ned,” Jasper resumes, as he shakes his head with a grave cheerfulness, “I must subdue myself to my vocation: which is much the same thing outwardly. It’s too late to find another now. This is a confidence between us.”

“It shall be sacredly preserved, Jack.”

“I have reposed it in you, because—”

“I feel it, I assure you. Because we are fast friends, and because you love and trust me, as I love and trust you. Both hands, Jack.”

As each stands looking into the other’s eyes, and as the uncle holds the nephew’s hands, the uncle thus proceeds:

“You know now, don’t you, that even a poor monotonous chorister and grinder of music—in his niche—may be troubled with some stray sort of ambition, aspiration, restlessness, dissatisfaction, what shall we call it?”

“Yes, dear Jack.”

“And you will remember?”

“My dear Jack, I only ask you, am I likely to forget what you have said with so much feeling?”

“Take it as a warning, then.”

In the act of having his hands released, and of moving a step back, Edwin pauses for an instant to consider the application of these last words. The instant over, he says, sensibly touched:

“I am afraid I am but a shallow, surface kind of fellow, Jack, and that my headpiece is none of the best. But I needn’t say I am young; and perhaps I shall not grow worse as I grow older. At all events, I hope I have something impressible within me, which feels—deeply feels—the disinterestedness of your painfully laying your inner self bare, as a warning to me.”

Mr. Jasper’s steadiness of face and figure becomes so marvellous that his breathing seems to have stopped.

“I couldn’t fail to notice, Jack, that it cost you a great effort, and that you were very much moved, and very unlike your usual self. Of course I knew that you were extremely fond of me, but I really was not prepared for your, as I may say, sacrificing yourself to me in that way.”

Mr. Jasper, becoming a breathing man again without the smallest stage of transition between the two extreme states, lifts his shoulders, laughs, and waves his right arm.

“No; don’t put the sentiment away, Jack; please don’t; for I am very much in earnest. I have no doubt that that unhealthy state of mind which you have so powerfully described is attended with some real suffering, and is hard to bear. But let me reassure you, Jack, as to the chances of its overcoming me. I don’t think I am in the way of it. In some few months less than another year, you know, I shall carry Pussy off from school as Mrs. Edwin Drood. I shall then go engineering into the East, and Pussy with me. And although we have our little tiffs now, arising out of a certain unavoidable flatness that attends our love-making, owing to its end being all settled beforehand, still I have no doubt of our getting on capitally then, when it’s done and can’t be helped. In short, Jack, to go back to the old song I was freely quoting at dinner (and who knows old songs better than you?), my wife shall dance, and I will sing, so merrily pass the day. Of Pussy’s being beautiful there cannot be a doubt;—and when you are good besides, Little Miss Impudence,” once more apostrophising the portrait, “I’ll burn your comic likeness, and paint your music-master another.”

Mr. Jasper, with his hand to his chin, and with an expression of musing benevolence on his face, has attentively watched every animated look and gesture attending the delivery of these words. He remains in that attitude after they are spoken, as if in a kind of fascination attendant on his strong interest in the youthful spirit that he loves so well. Then he says with a quiet smile:

“You won’t be warned, then?”

“No, Jack.”

“You can’t be warned, then?”

“No, Jack, not by you. Besides that I don’t really consider myself in danger, I don’t like your putting yourself in that position.”

“Shall we go and walk in the churchyard?”

“By all means. You won’t mind my slipping out of it for half a moment to the Nuns’ House, and leaving a parcel there? Only gloves for Pussy; as many pairs of gloves as she is years old to-day. Rather poetical, Jack?”

Mr. Jasper, still in the same attitude, murmurs: “‘Nothing half so sweet in life,’ Ned!”

“Here’s the parcel in my greatcoat-pocket. They must be presented to-night, or the poetry is gone. It’s against regulations for me to call at night, but not to leave a packet. I am ready, Jack!”

Mr. Jasper dissolves his attitude, and they go out together.

For sufficient reasons, which this narrative will itself unfold as it advances, a fictitious name must be bestowed upon the old Cathedral town. Let it stand in these pages as Cloisterham. It was once possibly known to the Druids by another name, and certainly to the Romans by another, and to the Saxons by another, and to the Normans by another; and a name more or less in the course of many centuries can be of little moment to its dusty chronicles.

An ancient city, Cloisterham, and no meet dwelling-place for any one with hankerings after the noisy world. A monotonous, silent city, deriving an earthy flavour throughout from its Cathedral crypt, and so abounding in vestiges of monastic graves, that the Cloisterham children grow small salad in the dust of abbots and abbesses, and make dirt-pies of nuns and friars; while every ploughman in its outlying fields renders to once puissant Lord Treasurers, Archbishops, Bishops, and such-like, the attention which the Ogre in the story-book desired to render to his unbidden visitor, and grinds their bones to make his bread.

A drowsy city, Cloisterham, whose inhabitants seem to suppose, with an inconsistency more strange than rare, that all its changes lie behind it, and that there are no more to come. A queer moral to derive from antiquity, yet older than any traceable antiquity. So silent are the streets of Cloisterham (though prone to echo on the smallest provocation), that of a summer-day the sunblinds of its shops scarce dare to flap in the south wind; while the sun-browned tramps, who pass along and stare, quicken their limp a little, that they may the sooner get beyond the confines of its oppressive respectability. This is a feat not difficult of achievement, seeing that the streets of Cloisterham city are little more than one narrow street by which you get into it and get out of it: the rest being mostly disappointing yards with pumps in them and no thoroughfare—exception made of the Cathedral-close, and a paved Quaker settlement, in colour and general confirmation very like a Quakeress’s bonnet, up in a shady corner.

In a word, a city of another and a bygone time is Cloisterham, with its hoarse Cathedral-bell, its hoarse rooks hovering about the Cathedral tower, its hoarser and less distinct rooks in the stalls far beneath. Fragments of old wall, saint’s chapel, chapter-house, convent and monastery, have got incongruously or obstructively built into many of its houses and gardens, much as kindred jumbled notions have become incorporated into many of its citizens’ minds. All things in it are of the past. Even its single pawnbroker takes in no pledges, nor has he for a long time, but offers vainly an unredeemed stock for sale, of which the costlier articles are dim and pale old watches apparently in a slow perspiration, tarnished sugar-tongs with ineffectual legs, and odd volumes of dismal books. The most abundant and the most agreeable evidences of progressing life in Cloisterham are the evidences of vegetable life in many gardens; even its drooping and despondent little theatre has its poor strip of garden, receiving the foul fiend, when he ducks from its stage into the infernal regions, among scarlet-beans or oyster-shells, according to the season of the year.

In the midst of Cloisterham stands the Nuns’ House: a venerable brick edifice, whose present appellation is doubtless derived from the legend of its conventual uses. On the trim gate enclosing its old courtyard is a resplendent brass plate flashing forth the legend: “Seminary for Young Ladies. Miss Twinkleton.” The house-front is so old and worn, and the brass plate is so shining and staring, that the general result has reminded imaginative strangers of a battered old beau with a large modern eye-glass stuck in his blind eye.

Whether the nuns of yore, being of a submissive rather than a stiff-necked generation, habitually bent their contemplative heads to avoid collision with the beams in the low ceilings of the many chambers of their House; whether they sat in its long low windows telling their beads for their mortification, instead of making necklaces of them for their adornment; whether they were ever walled up alive in odd angles and jutting gables of the building for having some ineradicable leaven of busy mother Nature in them which has kept the fermenting world alive ever since; these may be matters of interest to its haunting ghosts (if any), but constitute no item in Miss Twinkleton’s half-yearly accounts. They are neither of Miss Twinkleton’s inclusive regulars, nor of her extras. The lady who undertakes the poetical department of the establishment at so much (or so little) a quarter has no pieces in her list of recitals bearing on such unprofitable questions.

As, in some cases of drunkenness, and in others of animal magnetism, there are two states of consciousness which never clash, but each of which pursues its separate course as though it were continuous instead of broken (thus, if I hide my watch when I am drunk, I must be drunk again before I can remember where), so Miss Twinkleton has two distinct and separate phases of being. Every night, the moment the young ladies have retired to rest, does Miss Twinkleton smarten up her curls a little, brighten up her eyes a little, and become a sprightlier Miss Twinkleton than the young ladies have ever seen. Every night, at the same hour, does Miss Twinkleton resume the topics of the previous night, comprehending the tenderer scandal of Cloisterham, of which she has no knowledge whatever by day, and references to a certain season at Tunbridge Wells (airily called by Miss Twinkleton in this state of her existence “The Wells”), notably the season wherein a certain finished gentleman (compassionately called by Miss Twinkleton, in this stage of her existence, “Foolish Mr. Porters”) revealed a homage of the heart, whereof Miss Twinkleton, in her scholastic state of existence, is as ignorant as a granite pillar. Miss Twinkleton’s companion in both states of existence, and equally adaptable to either, is one Mrs. Tisher: a deferential widow with a weak back, a chronic sigh, and a suppressed voice, who looks after the young ladies’ wardrobes, and leads them to infer that she has seen better days. Perhaps this is the reason why it is an article of faith with the servants, handed down from race to race, that the departed Tisher was a hairdresser.

The pet pupil of the Nuns’ House is Miss Rosa Bud, of course called Rosebud; wonderfully pretty, wonderfully childish, wonderfully whimsical. An awkward interest (awkward because romantic) attaches to Miss Bud in the minds of the young ladies, on account of its being known to them that a husband has been chosen for her by will and bequest, and that her guardian is bound down to bestow her on that husband when he comes of age. Miss Twinkleton, in her seminarial state of existence, has combated the romantic aspect of this destiny by affecting to shake her head over it behind Miss Bud’s dimpled shoulders, and to brood on the unhappy lot of that doomed little victim. But with no better effect—possibly some unfelt touch of foolish Mr. Porters has undermined the endeavour—than to evoke from the young ladies an unanimous bedchamber cry of “O, what a pretending old thing Miss Twinkleton is, my dear!”

The Nuns’ House is never in such a state of flutter as when this allotted husband calls to see little Rosebud. (It is unanimously understood by the young ladies that he is lawfully entitled to this privilege, and that if Miss Twinkleton disputed it, she would be instantly taken up and transported.) When his ring at the gate-bell is expected, or takes place, every young lady who can, under any pretence, look out of window, looks out of window; while every young lady who is “practising,” practises out of time; and the French class becomes so demoralised that the mark goes round as briskly as the bottle at a convivial party in the last century.

On the afternoon of the day next after the dinner of two at the gatehouse, the bell is rung with the usual fluttering results.

“Mr. Edwin Drood to see Miss Rosa.”

This is the announcement of the parlour-maid in chief. Miss Twinkleton, with an exemplary air of melancholy on her, turns to the sacrifice, and says, “You may go down, my dear.” Miss Bud goes down, followed by all eyes.

Mr. Edwin Drood is waiting in Miss Twinkleton’s own parlour: a dainty room, with nothing more directly scholastic in it than a terrestrial and a celestial globe. These expressive machines imply (to parents and guardians) that even when Miss Twinkleton retires into the bosom of privacy, duty may at any moment compel her to become a sort of Wandering Jewess, scouring the earth and soaring through the skies in search of knowledge for her pupils.

The last new maid, who has never seen the young gentleman Miss Rosa is engaged to, and who is making his acquaintance between the hinges of the open door, left open for the purpose, stumbles guiltily down the kitchen stairs, as a charming little apparition, with its face concealed by a little silk apron thrown over its head, glides into the parlour.

“O! it is so ridiculous!” says the apparition, stopping and shrinking. “Don’t, Eddy!”

“Don’t what, Rosa?”

“Don’t come any nearer, please. It is so absurd.”

“What is absurd, Rosa?”

“The whole thing is. It is so absurd to be an engaged orphan and it is so absurd to have the girls and the servants scuttling about after one, like mice in the wainscot; and it is so absurd to be called upon!”

The apparition appears to have a thumb in the corner of its mouth while making this complaint.

“You give me an affectionate reception, Pussy, I must say.”

“Well, I will in a minute, Eddy, but I can’t just yet. How are you?” (very shortly.)

“I am unable to reply that I am much the better for seeing you, Pussy, inasmuch as I see nothing of you.”

This second remonstrance brings a dark, bright, pouting eye out from a corner of the apron; but it swiftly becomes invisible again, as the apparition exclaims: “O good gracious! you have had half your hair cut off!”

“I should have done better to have had my head cut off, I think,” says Edwin, rumpling the hair in question, with a fierce glance at the looking-glass, and giving an impatient stamp. “Shall I go?”

“No; you needn’t go just yet, Eddy. The girls would all be asking questions why you went.”

“Once for all, Rosa, will you uncover that ridiculous little head of yours and give me a welcome?”

The apron is pulled off the childish head, as its wearer replies: “You’re very welcome, Eddy. There! I’m sure that’s nice. Shake hands. No, I can’t kiss you, because I’ve got an acidulated drop in my mouth.”

“Are you at all glad to see me, Pussy?”

“O, yes, I’m dreadfully glad.—Go and sit down.—Miss Twinkleton.”

It is the custom of that excellent lady when these visits occur, to appear every three minutes, either in her own person or in that of Mrs. Tisher, and lay an offering on the shrine of Propriety by affecting to look for some desiderated article. On the present occasion Miss Twinkleton, gracefully gliding in and out, says in passing: “How do you do, Mr. Drood? Very glad indeed to have the pleasure. Pray excuse me. Tweezers. Thank you!”

“I got the gloves last evening, Eddy, and I like them very much. They are beauties.”

“Well, that’s something,” the affianced replies, half grumbling. “The smallest encouragement thankfully received. And how did you pass your birthday, Pussy?”

“Delightfully! Everybody gave me a present. And we had a feast. And we had a ball at night.”

“A feast and a ball, eh? These occasions seem to go off tolerably well without me, Pussy.”

“De-lightfully!” cries Rosa, in a quite spontaneous manner, and without the least pretence of reserve.

“Hah! And what was the feast?”

“Tarts, oranges, jellies, and shrimps.”

“Any partners at the ball?”

“We danced with one another, of course, sir. But some of the girls made game to be their brothers. It was so droll!”

“Did anybody make game to be—”

“To be you? O dear yes!” cries Rosa, laughing with great enjoyment. “That was the first thing done.”

“I hope she did it pretty well,” says Edwin rather doubtfully.

“O, it was excellent!—I wouldn’t dance with you, you know.”

Edwin scarcely seems to see the force of this; begs to know if he may take the liberty to ask why?

“Because I was so tired of you,” returns Rosa. But she quickly adds, and pleadingly too, seeing displeasure in his face: “Dear Eddy, you were just as tired of me, you know.”

“Did I say so, Rosa?”

“Say so! Do you ever say so? No, you only showed it. O, she did it so well!” cries Rosa, in a sudden ecstasy with her counterfeit betrothed.

“It strikes me that she must be a devilish impudent girl,” says Edwin Drood. “And so, Pussy, you have passed your last birthday in this old house.”

“Ah, yes!” Rosa clasps her hands, looks down with a sigh, and shakes her head.

“You seem to be sorry, Rosa.”

“I am sorry for the poor old place. Somehow, I feel as if it would miss me, when I am gone so far away, so young.”

“Perhaps we had better stop short, Rosa?”

She looks up at him with a swift bright look; next moment shakes her head, sighs, and looks down again.

“That is to say, is it, Pussy, that we are both resigned?”

She nods her head again, and after a short silence, quaintly bursts out with: “You know we must be married, and married from here, Eddy, or the poor girls will be so dreadfully disappointed!”

For the moment there is more of compassion, both for her and for himself, in her affianced husband’s face, than there is of love. He checks the look, and asks: “Shall I take you out for a walk, Rosa dear?”

Rosa dear does not seem at all clear on this point, until her face, which has been comically reflective, brightens. “O, yes, Eddy; let us go for a walk! And I tell you what we’ll do. You shall pretend that you are engaged to somebody else, and I’ll pretend that I am not engaged to anybody, and then we shan’t quarrel.”

“Do you think that will prevent our falling out, Rosa?”

“I know it will. Hush! Pretend to look out of window—Mrs. Tisher!”

Through a fortuitous concourse of accidents, the matronly Tisher heaves in sight, says, in rustling through the room like the legendary ghost of a dowager in silken skirts: “I hope I see Mr. Drood well; though I needn’t ask, if I may judge from his complexion. I trust I disturb no one; but there was a paper-knife—O, thank you, I am sure!” and disappears with her prize.

“One other thing you must do, Eddy, to oblige me,” says Rosebud. “The moment we get into the street, you must put me outside, and keep close to the house yourself—squeeze and graze yourself against it.”

“By all means, Rosa, if you wish it. Might I ask why?”

“O! because I don’t want the girls to see you.”

“It’s a fine day; but would you like me to carry an umbrella up?”

“Don’t be foolish, sir. You haven’t got polished leather boots on,” pouting, with one shoulder raised.

“Perhaps that might escape the notice of the girls, even if they did see me,” remarks Edwin, looking down at his boots with a sudden distaste for them.

“Nothing escapes their notice, sir. And then I know what would happen. Some of them would begin reflecting on me by saying (for they are free) that they never will on any account engage themselves to lovers without polished leather boots. Hark! Miss Twinkleton. I’ll ask for leave.”

That discreet lady being indeed heard without, inquiring of nobody in a blandly conversational tone as she advances: “Eh? Indeed! Are you quite sure you saw my mother-of-pearl button-holder on the work-table in my room?” is at once solicited for walking leave, and graciously accords it. And soon the young couple go out of the Nuns’ House, taking all precautions against the discovery of the so vitally defective boots of Mr. Edwin Drood: precautions, let us hope, effective for the peace of Mrs. Edwin Drood that is to be.

“Which way shall we take, Rosa?”

Rosa replies: “I want to go to the Lumps-of-Delight shop.”

“To the—?”

“A Turkish sweetmeat, sir. My gracious me, don’t you understand anything? Call yourself an Engineer, and not know that?”

“Why, how should I know it, Rosa?”

“Because I am very fond of them. But O! I forgot what we are to pretend. No, you needn’t know anything about them; never mind.”

So he is gloomily borne off to the Lumps-of-Delight shop, where Rosa makes her purchase, and, after offering some to him (which he rather indignantly declines), begins to partake of it with great zest: previously taking off and rolling up a pair of little pink gloves, like rose-leaves, and occasionally putting her little pink fingers to her rosy lips, to cleanse them from the Dust of Delight that comes off the Lumps.

“Now, be a good-tempered Eddy, and pretend. And so you are engaged?”

“And so I am engaged.”

“Is she nice?”

“Charming.”

“Tall?”

“Immensely tall!” Rosa being short.

“Must be gawky, I should think,” is Rosa’s quiet commentary.

“I beg your pardon; not at all,” contradiction rising in him.

“What is termed a fine woman; a splendid woman.”

“Big nose, no doubt,” is the quiet commentary again.

“Not a little one, certainly,” is the quick reply, (Rosa’s being a little one.)

“Long pale nose, with a red knob in the middle. I know the sort of nose,” says Rosa, with a satisfied nod, and tranquilly enjoying the Lumps.

“You don’t know the sort of nose, Rosa,” with some warmth; “because it’s nothing of the kind.”

“Not a pale nose, Eddy?”

“No.” Determined not to assent.

“A red nose? O! I don’t like red noses. However; to be sure she can always powder it.”

“She would scorn to powder it,” says Edwin, becoming heated.

“Would she? What a stupid thing she must be! Is she stupid in everything?”

“No; in nothing.”

After a pause, in which the whimsically wicked face has not been unobservant of him, Rosa says:

“And this most sensible of creatures likes the idea of being carried off to Egypt; does she, Eddy?”

“Yes. She takes a sensible interest in triumphs of engineering skill: especially when they are to change the whole condition of an undeveloped country.”

“Lor!” says Rosa, shrugging her shoulders, with a little laugh of wonder.

“Do you object,” Edwin inquires, with a majestic turn of his eyes downward upon the fairy figure: “do you object, Rosa, to her feeling that interest?”

“Object? my dear Eddy! But really, doesn’t she hate boilers and things?”

“I can answer for her not being so idiotic as to hate Boilers,” he returns with angry emphasis; “though I cannot answer for her views about Things; really not understanding what Things are meant.”

“But don’t she hate Arabs, and Turks, and Fellahs, and people?”

“Certainly not.” Very firmly.

“At least she must hate the Pyramids? Come, Eddy?”

“Why should she be such a little—tall, I mean—goose, as to hate the Pyramids, Rosa?”

“Ah! you should hear Miss Twinkleton,” often nodding her head, and much enjoying the Lumps, “bore about them, and then you wouldn’t ask. Tiresome old burying-grounds! Isises, and Ibises, and Cheopses, and Pharaohses; who cares about them? And then there was Belzoni, or somebody, dragged out by the legs, half-choked with bats and dust. All the girls say: Serve him right, and hope it hurt him, and wish he had been quite choked.”

The two youthful figures, side by side, but not now arm-in-arm, wander discontentedly about the old Close; and each sometimes stops and slowly imprints a deeper footstep in the fallen leaves.

“Well!” says Edwin, after a lengthy silence. “According to custom. We can’t get on, Rosa.”

Rosa tosses her head, and says she don’t want to get on.

“That’s a pretty sentiment, Rosa, considering.”

“Considering what?”

“If I say what, you’ll go wrong again.”

“You’ll go wrong, you mean, Eddy. Don’t be ungenerous.”

“Ungenerous! I like that!”

“Then I don’t like that, and so I tell you plainly,” Rosa pouts.

“Now, Rosa, I put it to you. Who disparaged my profession, my destination—”

“You are not going to be buried in the Pyramids, I hope?” she interrupts, arching her delicate eyebrows. “You never said you were. If you are, why haven’t you mentioned it to me? I can’t find out your plans by instinct.”

“Now, Rosa, you know very well what I mean, my dear.”

“Well then, why did you begin with your detestable red-nosed giantesses? And she would, she would, she would, she would, she WOULD powder it!” cries Rosa, in a little burst of comical contradictory spleen.

“Somehow or other, I never can come right in these discussions,” says Edwin, sighing and becoming resigned.

“How is it possible, sir, that you ever can come right when you’re always wrong? And as to Belzoni, I suppose he’s dead;—I’m sure I hope he is—and how can his legs or his chokes concern you?”

“It is nearly time for your return, Rosa. We have not had a very happy walk, have we?”

“A happy walk? A detestably unhappy walk, sir. If I go up-stairs the moment I get in and cry till I can’t take my dancing lesson, you are responsible, mind!”

“Let us be friends, Rosa.”

“Ah!” cries Rosa, shaking her head and bursting into real tears, “I wish we could be friends! It’s because we can’t be friends, that we try one another so. I am a young little thing, Eddy, to have an old heartache; but I really, really have, sometimes. Don’t be angry. I know you have one yourself too often. We should both of us have done better, if What is to be had been left What might have been. I am quite a little serious thing now, and not teasing you. Let each of us forbear, this one time, on our own account, and on the other’s!”

Disarmed by this glimpse of a woman’s nature in the spoilt child, though for an instant disposed to resent it as seeming to involve the enforced infliction of himself upon her, Edwin Drood stands watching her as she childishly cries and sobs, with both hands to the handkerchief at her eyes, and then—she becoming more composed, and indeed beginning in her young inconstancy to laugh at herself for having been so moved—leads her to a seat hard by, under the elm-trees.

“One clear word of understanding, Pussy dear. I am not clever out of my own line—now I come to think of it, I don’t know that I am particularly clever in it—but I want to do right. There is not—there may be—I really don’t see my way to what I want to say, but I must say it before we part—there is not any other young—”

“O no, Eddy! It’s generous of you to ask me; but no, no, no!”

They have come very near to the Cathedral windows, and at this moment the organ and the choir sound out sublimely. As they sit listening to the solemn swell, the confidence of last night rises in young Edwin Drood’s mind, and he thinks how unlike this music is to that discordance.

“I fancy I can distinguish Jack’s voice,” is his remark in a low tone in connection with the train of thought.

“Take me back at once, please,” urges his Affianced, quickly laying her light hand upon his wrist. “They will all be coming out directly; let us get away. O, what a resounding chord! But don’t let us stop to listen to it; let us get away!”

Her hurry is over as soon as they have passed out of the Close. They go arm-in-arm now, gravely and deliberately enough, along the old High-street, to the Nuns’ House. At the gate, the street being within sight empty, Edwin bends down his face to Rosebud’s.

She remonstrates, laughing, and is a childish schoolgirl again.

“Eddy, no! I’m too sticky to be kissed. But give me your hand, and I’ll blow a kiss into that.”

He does so. She breathes a light breath into it and asks, retaining it and looking into it:—

“Now say, what do you see?”

“See, Rosa?”

“Why, I thought you Egyptian boys could look into a hand and see all sorts of phantoms. Can’t you see a happy Future?”

For certain, neither of them sees a happy Present, as the gate opens and closes, and one goes in, and the other goes away.

Accepting the Jackass as the type of self-sufficient stupidity and conceit—a custom, perhaps, like some few other customs, more conventional than fair—then the purest jackass in Cloisterham is Mr. Thomas Sapsea, Auctioneer.

Mr. Sapsea “dresses at” the Dean; has been bowed to for the Dean, in mistake; has even been spoken to in the street as My Lord, under the impression that he was the Bishop come down unexpectedly, without his chaplain. Mr. Sapsea is very proud of this, and of his voice, and of his style. He has even (in selling landed property) tried the experiment of slightly intoning in his pulpit, to make himself more like what he takes to be the genuine ecclesiastical article. So, in ending a Sale by Public Auction, Mr. Sapsea finishes off with an air of bestowing a benediction on the assembled brokers, which leaves the real Dean—a modest and worthy gentleman—far behind.

Mr. Sapsea has many admirers; indeed, the proposition is carried by a large local majority, even including non-believers in his wisdom, that he is a credit to Cloisterham. He possesses the great qualities of being portentous and dull, and of having a roll in his speech, and another roll in his gait; not to mention a certain gravely flowing action with his hands, as if he were presently going to Confirm the individual with whom he holds discourse. Much nearer sixty years of age than fifty, with a flowing outline of stomach, and horizontal creases in his waistcoat; reputed to be rich; voting at elections in the strictly respectable interest; morally satisfied that nothing but he himself has grown since he was a baby; how can dunder-headed Mr. Sapsea be otherwise than a credit to Cloisterham, and society?

Mr. Sapsea’s premises are in the High-street, over against the Nuns’ House. They are of about the period of the Nuns’ House, irregularly modernised here and there, as steadily deteriorating generations found, more and more, that they preferred air and light to Fever and the Plague. Over the doorway is a wooden effigy, about half life-size, representing Mr. Sapsea’s father, in a curly wig and toga, in the act of selling. The chastity of the idea, and the natural appearance of the little finger, hammer, and pulpit, have been much admired.

Mr. Sapsea sits in his dull ground-floor sitting-room, giving first on his paved back yard; and then on his railed-off garden. Mr. Sapsea has a bottle of port wine on a table before the fire—the fire is an early luxury, but pleasant on the cool, chilly autumn evening—and is characteristically attended by his portrait, his eight-day clock, and his weather-glass. Characteristically, because he would uphold himself against mankind, his weather-glass against weather, and his clock against time.

By Mr. Sapsea’s side on the table are a writing-desk and writing materials. Glancing at a scrap of manuscript, Mr. Sapsea reads it to himself with a lofty air, and then, slowly pacing the room with his thumbs in the arm-holes of his waistcoat, repeats it from memory: so internally, though with much dignity, that the word “Ethelinda” is alone audible.

There are three clean wineglasses in a tray on the table. His serving-maid entering, and announcing “Mr. Jasper is come, sir,” Mr. Sapsea waves “Admit him,” and draws two wineglasses from the rank, as being claimed.

“Glad to see you, sir. I congratulate myself on having the honour of receiving you here for the first time.” Mr. Sapsea does the honours of his house in this wise.

“You are very good. The honour is mine and the self-congratulation is mine.”

“You are pleased to say so, sir. But I do assure you that it is a satisfaction to me to receive you in my humble home. And that is what I would not say to everybody.” Ineffable loftiness on Mr. Sapsea’s part accompanies these words, as leaving the sentence to be understood: “You will not easily believe that your society can be a satisfaction to a man like myself; nevertheless, it is.”

“I have for some time desired to know you, Mr. Sapsea.”

“And I, sir, have long known you by reputation as a man of taste. Let me fill your glass. I will give you, sir,” says Mr. Sapsea, filling his own:

“When the French come over,
May we meet them at Dover!”

This was a patriotic toast in Mr. Sapsea’s infancy, and he is therefore fully convinced of its being appropriate to any subsequent era.

“You can scarcely be ignorant, Mr. Sapsea,” observes Jasper, watching the auctioneer with a smile as the latter stretches out his legs before the fire, “that you know the world.”

“Well, sir,” is the chuckling reply, “I think I know something of it; something of it.”

“Your reputation for that knowledge has always interested and surprised me, and made me wish to know you. For Cloisterham is a little place. Cooped up in it myself, I know nothing beyond it, and feel it to be a very little place.”

“If I have not gone to foreign countries, young man,” Mr. Sapsea begins, and then stops:—“You will excuse me calling you young man, Mr. Jasper? You are much my junior.”

“By all means.”

“If I have not gone to foreign countries, young man, foreign countries have come to me. They have come to me in the way of business, and I have improved upon my opportunities. Put it that I take an inventory, or make a catalogue. I see a French clock. I never saw him before, in my life, but I instantly lay my finger on him and say ‘Paris!’ I see some cups and saucers of Chinese make, equally strangers to me personally: I put my finger on them, then and there, and I say ‘Pekin, Nankin, and Canton.’ It is the same with Japan, with Egypt, and with bamboo and sandalwood from the East Indies; I put my finger on them all. I have put my finger on the North Pole before now, and said ‘Spear of Esquimaux make, for half a pint of pale sherry!’”

“Really? A very remarkable way, Mr. Sapsea, of acquiring a knowledge of men and things.”

“I mention it, sir,” Mr. Sapsea rejoins, with unspeakable complacency, “because, as I say, it don’t do to boast of what you are; but show how you came to be it, and then you prove it.”

“Most interesting. We were to speak of the late Mrs. Sapsea.”

“We were, sir.” Mr. Sapsea fills both glasses, and takes the decanter into safe keeping again. “Before I consult your opinion as a man of taste on this little trifle”—holding it up—“which is but a trifle, and still has required some thought, sir, some little fever of the brow, I ought perhaps to describe the character of the late Mrs. Sapsea, now dead three quarters of a year.”

Mr. Jasper, in the act of yawning behind his wineglass, puts down that screen and calls up a look of interest. It is a little impaired in its expressiveness by his having a shut-up gape still to dispose of, with watering eyes.

“Half a dozen years ago, or so,” Mr. Sapsea proceeds, “when I had enlarged my mind up to—I will not say to what it now is, for that might seem to aim at too much, but up to the pitch of wanting another mind to be absorbed in it—I cast my eye about me for a nuptial partner. Because, as I say, it is not good for man to be alone.”

Mr. Jasper appears to commit this original idea to memory.

“Miss Brobity at that time kept, I will not call it the rival establishment to the establishment at the Nuns’ House opposite, but I will call it the other parallel establishment down town. The world did have it that she showed a passion for attending my sales, when they took place on half holidays, or in vacation time. The world did put it about, that she admired my style. The world did notice that as time flowed by, my style became traceable in the dictation-exercises of Miss Brobity’s pupils. Young man, a whisper even sprang up in obscure malignity, that one ignorant and besotted Churl (a parent) so committed himself as to object to it by name. But I do not believe this. For is it likely that any human creature in his right senses would so lay himself open to be pointed at, by what I call the finger of scorn?”

Mr. Jasper shakes his head. Not in the least likely. Mr. Sapsea, in a grandiloquent state of absence of mind, seems to refill his visitor’s glass, which is full already; and does really refill his own, which is empty.

“Miss Brobity’s Being, young man, was deeply imbued with homage to Mind. She revered Mind, when launched, or, as I say, precipitated, on an extensive knowledge of the world. When I made my proposal, she did me the honour to be so overshadowed with a species of Awe, as to be able to articulate only the two words, ‘O Thou!’ meaning myself. Her limpid blue eyes were fixed upon me, her semi-transparent hands were clasped together, pallor overspread her aquiline features, and, though encouraged to proceed, she never did proceed a word further. I disposed of the parallel establishment by private contract, and we became as nearly one as could be expected under the circumstances. But she never could, and she never did, find a phrase satisfactory to her perhaps-too-favourable estimate of my intellect. To the very last (feeble action of liver), she addressed me in the same unfinished terms.”

Mr. Jasper has closed his eyes as the auctioneer has deepened his voice. He now abruptly opens them, and says, in unison with the deepened voice “Ah!”—rather as if stopping himself on the extreme verge of adding—“men!”

“I have been since,” says Mr. Sapsea, with his legs stretched out, and solemnly enjoying himself with the wine and the fire, “what you behold me; I have been since a solitary mourner; I have been since, as I say, wasting my evening conversation on the desert air. I will not say that I have reproached myself; but there have been times when I have asked myself the question: What if her husband had been nearer on a level with her? If she had not had to look up quite so high, what might the stimulating action have been upon the liver?”

Mr. Jasper says, with an appearance of having fallen into dreadfully low spirits, that he “supposes it was to be.”

“We can only suppose so, sir,” Mr. Sapsea coincides. “As I say, Man proposes, Heaven disposes. It may or may not be putting the same thought in another form; but that is the way I put it.”

Mr. Jasper murmurs assent.

“And now, Mr. Jasper,” resumes the auctioneer, producing his scrap of manuscript, “Mrs. Sapsea’s monument having had full time to settle and dry, let me take your opinion, as a man of taste, on the inscription I have (as I before remarked, not without some little fever of the brow) drawn out for it. Take it in your own hand. The setting out of the lines requires to be followed with the eye, as well as the contents with the mind.”

Mr. Jasper complying, sees and reads as follows:

ETHELINDA,
Reverential Wife of
MR. THOMAS SAPSEA,
AUCTIONEER, VALUER, ESTATE AGENT, &c.,
OF THIS CITY.
Whose Knowledge of the World,
Though somewhat extensive,
Never brought him acquainted with
A SPIRIT
More capable of
LOOKING UP TO HIM.
STRANGER, PAUSE
And ask thyself the Question,
CANST THOU DO LIKEWISE?
If Not,
WITH A BLUSH RETIRE.

Mr. Sapsea having risen and stationed himself with his back to the fire, for the purpose of observing the effect of these lines on the countenance of a man of taste, consequently has his face towards the door, when his serving-maid, again appearing, announces, “Durdles is come, sir!” He promptly draws forth and fills the third wineglass, as being now claimed, and replies, “Show Durdles in.”

“Admirable!” quoth Mr. Jasper, handing back the paper.

“You approve, sir?”

“Impossible not to approve. Striking, characteristic, and complete.”

The auctioneer inclines his head, as one accepting his due and giving a receipt; and invites the entering Durdles to take off that glass of wine (handing the same), for it will warm him.

Durdles is a stonemason; chiefly in the gravestone, tomb, and monument way, and wholly of their colour from head to foot. No man is better known in Cloisterham. He is the chartered libertine of the place. Fame trumpets him a wonderful workman—which, for aught that anybody knows, he may be (as he never works); and a wonderful sot—which everybody knows he is. With the Cathedral crypt he is better acquainted than any living authority; it may even be than any dead one. It is said that the intimacy of this acquaintance began in his habitually resorting to that secret place, to lock-out the Cloisterham boy-populace, and sleep off fumes of liquor: he having ready access to the Cathedral, as contractor for rough repairs. Be this as it may, he does know much about it, and, in the demolition of impedimental fragments of wall, buttress, and pavement, has seen strange sights. He often speaks of himself in the third person; perhaps, being a little misty as to his own identity, when he narrates; perhaps impartially adopting the Cloisterham nomenclature in reference to a character of acknowledged distinction. Thus he will say, touching his strange sights: “Durdles come upon the old chap,” in reference to a buried magnate of ancient time and high degree, “by striking right into the coffin with his pick. The old chap gave Durdles a look with his open eyes, as much as to say, ‘Is your name Durdles? Why, my man, I’ve been waiting for you a devil of a time!’ And then he turned to powder.” With a two-foot rule always in his pocket, and a mason’s hammer all but always in his hand, Durdles goes continually sounding and tapping all about and about the Cathedral; and whenever he says to Tope: “Tope, here’s another old ’un in here!” Tope announces it to the Dean as an established discovery.

In a suit of coarse flannel with horn buttons, a yellow neckerchief with draggled ends, an old hat more russet-coloured than black, and laced boots of the hue of his stony calling, Durdles leads a hazy, gipsy sort of life, carrying his dinner about with him in a small bundle, and sitting on all manner of tombstones to dine. This dinner of Durdles’s has become quite a Cloisterham institution: not only because of his never appearing in public without it, but because of its having been, on certain renowned occasions, taken into custody along with Durdles (as drunk and incapable), and exhibited before the Bench of justices at the townhall. These occasions, however, have been few and far apart: Durdles being as seldom drunk as sober. For the rest, he is an old bachelor, and he lives in a little antiquated hole of a house that was never finished: supposed to be built, so far, of stones stolen from the city wall. To this abode there is an approach, ankle-deep in stone chips, resembling a petrified grove of tombstones, urns, draperies, and broken columns, in all stages of sculpture. Herein two journeymen incessantly chip, while other two journeymen, who face each other, incessantly saw stone; dipping as regularly in and out of their sheltering sentry-boxes, as if they were mechanical figures emblematical of Time and Death.

To Durdles, when he had consumed his glass of port, Mr. Sapsea intrusts that precious effort of his Muse. Durdles unfeelingly takes out his two-foot rule, and measures the lines calmly, alloying them with stone-grit.

“This is for the monument, is it, Mr. Sapsea?”

“The Inscription. Yes.” Mr. Sapsea waits for its effect on a common mind.

“It’ll come in to a eighth of a inch,” says Durdles. “Your servant, Mr. Jasper. Hope I see you well.”

“How are you Durdles?”

“I’ve got a touch of the Tombatism on me, Mr. Jasper, but that I must expect.”

“You mean the Rheumatism,” says Sapsea, in a sharp tone. (He is nettled by having his composition so mechanically received.)

“No, I don’t. I mean, Mr. Sapsea, the Tombatism. It’s another sort from Rheumatism. Mr. Jasper knows what Durdles means. You get among them Tombs afore it’s well light on a winter morning, and keep on, as the Catechism says, a-walking in the same all the days of your life, and you’ll know what Durdles means.”

“It is a bitter cold place,” Mr. Jasper assents, with an antipathetic shiver.

“And if it’s bitter cold for you, up in the chancel, with a lot of live breath smoking out about you, what the bitterness is to Durdles, down in the crypt among the earthy damps there, and the dead breath of the old ’uns,” returns that individual, “Durdles leaves you to judge.—Is this to be put in hand at once, Mr. Sapsea?”

Mr. Sapsea, with an Author’s anxiety to rush into publication, replies that it cannot be out of hand too soon.

“You had better let me have the key then,” says Durdles.

“Why, man, it is not to be put inside the monument!”

“Durdles knows where it’s to be put, Mr. Sapsea; no man better. Ask ’ere a man in Cloisterham whether Durdles knows his work.”

Mr. Sapsea rises, takes a key from a drawer, unlocks an iron safe let into the wall, and takes from it another key.

“When Durdles puts a touch or a finish upon his work, no matter where, inside or outside, Durdles likes to look at his work all round, and see that his work is a-doing him credit,” Durdles explains, doggedly.

The key proffered him by the bereaved widower being a large one, he slips his two-foot rule into a side-pocket of his flannel trousers made for it, and deliberately opens his flannel coat, and opens the mouth of a large breast-pocket within it before taking the key to place it in that repository.

“Why, Durdles!” exclaims Jasper, looking on amused, “you are undermined with pockets!”

“And I carries weight in ’em too, Mr. Jasper. Feel those!” producing two other large keys.

“Hand me Mr. Sapsea’s likewise. Surely this is the heaviest of the three.”

“You’ll find ’em much of a muchness, I expect,” says Durdles. “They all belong to monuments. They all open Durdles’s work. Durdles keeps the keys of his work mostly. Not that they’re much used.”

“By the bye,” it comes into Jasper’s mind to say, as he idly examines the keys, “I have been going to ask you, many a day, and have always forgotten. You know they sometimes call you Stony Durdles, don’t you?”

“Cloisterham knows me as Durdles, Mr. Jasper.”

“I am aware of that, of course. But the boys sometimes—”

“O! if you mind them young imps of boys—” Durdles gruffly interrupts.

“I don’t mind them any more than you do. But there was a discussion the other day among the Choir, whether Stony stood for Tony;” clinking one key against another.

(“Take care of the wards, Mr. Jasper.”)

“Or whether Stony stood for Stephen;” clinking with a change of keys.

(“You can’t make a pitch pipe of ’em, Mr. Jasper.”)

“Or whether the name comes from your trade. How stands the fact?”

Mr. Jasper weighs the three keys in his hand, lifts his head from his idly stooping attitude over the fire, and delivers the keys to Durdles with an ingenuous and friendly face.

But the stony one is a gruff one likewise, and that hazy state of his is always an uncertain state, highly conscious of its dignity, and prone to take offence. He drops his two keys back into his pocket one by one, and buttons them up; he takes his dinner-bundle from the chair-back on which he hung it when he came in; he distributes the weight he carries, by tying the third key up in it, as though he were an Ostrich, and liked to dine off cold iron; and he gets out of the room, deigning no word of answer.

Mr. Sapsea then proposes a hit at backgammon, which, seasoned with his own improving conversation, and terminating in a supper of cold roast beef and salad, beguiles the golden evening until pretty late. Mr. Sapsea’s wisdom being, in its delivery to mortals, rather of the diffuse than the epigrammatic order, is by no means expended even then; but his visitor intimates that he will come back for more of the precious commodity on future occasions, and Mr. Sapsea lets him off for the present, to ponder on the instalment he carries away.

John Jasper, on his way home through the Close, is brought to a stand-still by the spectacle of Stony Durdles, dinner-bundle and all, leaning his back against the iron railing of the burial-ground enclosing it from the old cloister-arches; and a hideous small boy in rags flinging stones at him as a well-defined mark in the moonlight. Sometimes the stones hit him, and sometimes they miss him, but Durdles seems indifferent to either fortune. The hideous small boy, on the contrary, whenever he hits Durdles, blows a whistle of triumph through a jagged gap, convenient for the purpose, in the front of his mouth, where half his teeth are wanting; and whenever he misses him, yelps out “Mulled agin!” and tries to atone for the failure by taking a more correct and vicious aim.

“What are you doing to the man?” demands Jasper, stepping out into the moonlight from the shade.

“Making a cock-shy of him,” replies the hideous small boy.

“Give me those stones in your hand.”

“Yes, I’ll give ’em you down your throat, if you come a-ketching hold of me,” says the small boy, shaking himself loose, and backing. “I’ll smash your eye, if you don’t look out!”

“Baby-Devil that you are, what has the man done to you?”

“He won’t go home.”

“What is that to you?”

“He gives me a ’apenny to pelt him home if I ketches him out too late,” says the boy. And then chants, like a little savage, half stumbling and half dancing among the rags and laces of his dilapidated boots:—

“Widdy widdy wen!
I—ket—ches—Im—out—ar—ter—ten,
Widdy widdy wy!
Then—E—don’t—go—then—I—shy—
Widdy Widdy Wake-cock warning!”

—with a comprehensive sweep on the last word, and one more delivery at Durdles.

This would seem to be a poetical note of preparation, agreed upon, as a caution to Durdles to stand clear if he can, or to betake himself homeward.

John Jasper invites the boy with a beck of his head to follow him (feeling it hopeless to drag him, or coax him), and crosses to the iron railing where the Stony (and stoned) One is profoundly meditating.

“Do you know this thing, this child?” asks Jasper, at a loss for a word that will define this thing.

“Deputy,” says Durdles, with a nod.

“Is that its—his—name?”

“Deputy,” assents Durdles.

“I’m man-servant up at the Travellers’ Twopenny in Gas Works Garding,” this thing explains. “All us man-servants at Travellers’ Lodgings is named Deputy. When we’re chock full and the Travellers is all a-bed I come out for my ’elth.” Then withdrawing into the road, and taking aim, he resumes:—

“Widdy widdy wen!
I—ket—ches—Im—out—ar—ter—”

“Hold your hand,” cries Jasper, “and don’t throw while I stand so near him, or I’ll kill you! Come, Durdles; let me walk home with you to-night. Shall I carry your bundle?”

“Not on any account,” replies Durdles, adjusting it. “Durdles was making his reflections here when you come up, sir, surrounded by his works, like a poplar Author.—Your own brother-in-law;” introducing a sarcophagus within the railing, white and cold in the moonlight. “Mrs. Sapsea;” introducing the monument of that devoted wife. “Late Incumbent;” introducing the Reverend Gentleman’s broken column. “Departed Assessed Taxes;” introducing a vase and towel, standing on what might represent the cake of soap. “Former pastrycook and Muffin-maker, much respected;” introducing gravestone. “All safe and sound here, sir, and all Durdles’s work. Of the common folk, that is merely bundled up in turf and brambles, the less said the better. A poor lot, soon forgot.”

“This creature, Deputy, is behind us,” says Jasper, looking back. “Is he to follow us?”

The relations between Durdles and Deputy are of a capricious kind; for, on Durdles’s turning himself about with the slow gravity of beery suddenness, Deputy makes a pretty wide circuit into the road and stands on the defensive.

“You never cried Widdy Warning before you begun to-night,” says Durdles, unexpectedly reminded of, or imagining, an injury.

“Yer lie, I did,” says Deputy, in his only form of polite contradiction.

“Own brother, sir,” observes Durdles, turning himself about again, and as unexpectedly forgetting his offence as he had recalled or conceived it; “own brother to Peter the Wild Boy! But I gave him an object in life.”

“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 to-night, 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.

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 looking-glass 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 boxing-gloves.

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, strong-rooted 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.

“And what, Ma dear,” inquired the Minor Canon, giving proof of a wholesome and vigorous appetite, “does the letter say?”

The pretty old lady, after reading it, had just laid it down upon the breakfast-cloth. She handed it over to her son.

Now, the old lady was exceedingly proud of her bright eyes being so clear that she could read writing without spectacles. Her son was also so proud of the circumstance, and so dutifully bent on her deriving the utmost possible gratification from it, that he had invented the pretence that he himself could not read writing without spectacles. Therefore he now assumed a pair, of grave and prodigious proportions, which not only seriously inconvenienced his nose and his breakfast, but seriously impeded his perusal of the letter. For, he had the eyes of a microscope and a telescope combined, when they were unassisted.

“It’s from Mr. Honeythunder, of course,” said the old lady, folding her arms.

“Of course,” assented her son. He then lamely read on:

“‘Haven of Philanthropy,
Chief Offices, London, Wednesday.

“‘DEAR MADAM,

“‘I write in the—;’ In the what’s this? What does he write in?”

“In the chair,” said the old lady.

The Reverend Septimus took off his spectacles, that he might see her face, as he exclaimed:

“Why, what should he write in?”

“Bless me, bless me, Sept,” returned the old lady, “you don’t see the context! Give it back to me, my dear.”

Glad to get his spectacles off (for they always made his eyes water), her son obeyed: murmuring that his sight for reading manuscript got worse and worse daily.

“‘I write,’” his mother went on, reading very perspicuously and precisely, “‘from the chair, to which I shall probably be confined for some hours.’”

Septimus looked at the row of chairs against the wall, with a half-protesting and half-appealing countenance.

“‘We have,’” the old lady read on with a little extra emphasis, “‘a meeting of our Convened Chief Composite Committee of Central and District Philanthropists, at our Head Haven as above; and it is their unanimous pleasure that I take the chair.’”

Septimus breathed more freely, and muttered: “O! if he comes to that, let him.”

“‘Not to lose a day’s post, I take the opportunity of a long report being read, denouncing a public miscreant—’”

“It is a most extraordinary thing,” interposed the gentle Minor Canon, laying down his knife and fork to rub his ear in a vexed manner, “that these Philanthropists are always denouncing somebody. And it is another most extraordinary thing that they are always so violently flush of miscreants!”

“‘Denouncing a public miscreant—’”—the old lady resumed, “‘to get our little affair of business off my mind. I have spoken with my two wards, Neville and Helena Landless, on the subject of their defective education, and they give in to the plan proposed; as I should have taken good care they did, whether they liked it or not.’”

“And it is another most extraordinary thing,” remarked the Minor Canon in the same tone as before, “that these philanthropists are so given to seizing their fellow-creatures by the scruff of the neck, and (as one may say) bumping them into the paths of peace.—I beg your pardon, Ma dear, for interrupting.”

“‘Therefore, dear Madam, you will please prepare your son, the Rev. Mr. Septimus, to expect Neville as an inmate to be read with, on Monday next. On the same day Helena will accompany him to Cloisterham, to take up her quarters at the Nuns’ House, the establishment recommended by yourself and son jointly. Please likewise to prepare for her reception and tuition there. The terms in both cases are understood to be exactly as stated to me in writing by yourself, when I opened a correspondence with you on this subject, after the honour of being introduced to you at your sister’s house in town here. With compliments to the Rev. Mr. Septimus, I am, Dear Madam, Your affectionate brother (In Philanthropy), LUKE HONEYTHUNDER.’”

“Well, Ma,” said Septimus, after a little more rubbing of his ear, “we must try it. There can be no doubt that we have room for an inmate, and that I have time to bestow upon him, and inclination too. I must confess to feeling rather glad that he is not Mr. Honeythunder himself. Though that seems wretchedly prejudiced—does it not?—for I never saw him. Is he a large man, Ma?”

“I should call him a large man, my dear,” the old lady replied after some hesitation, “but that his voice is so much larger.”

“Than himself?”

“Than anybody.”

“Hah!” said Septimus. And finished his breakfast as if the flavour of the Superior Family Souchong, and also of the ham and toast and eggs, were a little on the wane.

Mrs. Crisparkle’s sister, another piece of Dresden china, and matching her so neatly that they would have made a delightful pair of ornaments for the two ends of any capacious old-fashioned chimneypiece, and by right should never have been seen apart, was the childless wife of a clergyman holding Corporation preferment in London City. Mr. Honeythunder in his public character of Professor of Philanthropy had come to know Mrs. Crisparkle during the last re-matching of the china ornaments (in other words during her last annual visit to her sister), after a public occasion of a philanthropic nature, when certain devoted orphans of tender years had been glutted with plum buns, and plump bumptiousness. These were all the antecedents known in Minor Canon Corner of the coming pupils.

“I am sure you will agree with me, Ma,” said Mr. Crisparkle, after thinking the matter over, “that the first thing to be done, is, to put these young people as much at their ease as possible. There is nothing disinterested in the notion, because we cannot be at our ease with them unless they are at their ease with us. Now, Jasper’s nephew is down here at present; and like takes to like, and youth takes to youth. He is a cordial young fellow, and we will have him to meet the brother and sister at dinner. That’s three. We can’t think of asking him, without asking Jasper. That’s four. Add Miss Twinkleton and the fairy bride that is to be, and that’s six. Add our two selves, and that’s eight. Would eight at a friendly dinner at all put you out, Ma?”

“Nine would, Sept,” returned the old lady, visibly nervous.

“My dear Ma, I particularise eight.”

“The exact size of the table and the room, my dear.”

So it was settled that way: and when Mr. Crisparkle called with his mother upon Miss Twinkleton, to arrange for the reception of Miss Helena Landless at the Nuns’ House, the two other invitations having reference to that establishment were proffered and accepted. Miss Twinkleton did, indeed, glance at the globes, as regretting that they were not formed to be taken out into society; but became reconciled to leaving them behind. Instructions were then despatched to the Philanthropist for the departure and arrival, in good time for dinner, of Mr. Neville and Miss Helena; and stock for soup became fragrant in the air of Minor Canon Corner.

In those days there was no railway to Cloisterham, and Mr. Sapsea said there never would be. Mr. Sapsea said more; he said there never should be. And yet, marvellous to consider, it has come to pass, in these days, that Express Trains don’t think Cloisterham worth stopping at, but yell and whirl through it on their larger errands, casting the dust off their wheels as a testimony against its insignificance. Some remote fragment of Main Line to somewhere else, there was, which was going to ruin the Money Market if it failed, and Church and State if it succeeded, and (of course), the Constitution, whether or no; but even that had already so unsettled Cloisterham traffic, that the traffic, deserting the high road, came sneaking in from an unprecedented part of the country by a back stable-way, for many years labelled at the corner: “Beware of the Dog.”

To this ignominious avenue of approach, Mr. Crisparkle repaired, awaiting the arrival of a short, squat omnibus, with a disproportionate heap of luggage on the roof—like a little Elephant with infinitely too much Castle—which was then the daily service between Cloisterham and external mankind. As this vehicle lumbered up, Mr. Crisparkle could hardly see anything else of it for a large outside passenger seated on the box, with his elbows squared, and his hands on his knees, compressing the driver into a most uncomfortably small compass, and glowering about him with a strongly-marked face.

“Is this Cloisterham?” demanded the passenger, in a tremendous voice.

“It is,” replied the driver, rubbing himself as if he ached, after throwing the reins to the ostler. “And I never was so glad to see it.”

“Tell your master to make his box-seat wider, then,” returned the passenger. “Your master is morally bound—and ought to be legally, under ruinous penalties—to provide for the comfort of his fellow-man.”

The driver instituted, with the palms of his hands, a superficial perquisition into the state of his skeleton; which seemed to make him anxious.

“Have I sat upon you?” asked the passenger.

“You have,” said the driver, as if he didn’t like it at all.

“Take that card, my friend.”

“I think I won’t deprive you on it,” returned the driver, casting his eyes over it with no great favour, without taking it. “What’s the good of it to me?”

“Be a Member of that Society,” said the passenger.

“What shall I get by it?” asked the driver.

“Brotherhood,” returned the passenger, in a ferocious voice.

“Thankee,” said the driver, very deliberately, as he got down; “my mother was contented with myself, and so am I. I don’t want no brothers.”

“But you must have them,” replied the passenger, also descending, “whether you like it or not. I am your brother.”

“I say!” expostulated the driver, becoming more chafed in temper, “not too fur! The worm will, when—”

But here, Mr. Crisparkle interposed, remonstrating aside, in a friendly voice: “Joe, Joe, Joe! don’t forget yourself, Joe, my good fellow!” and then, when Joe peaceably touched his hat, accosting the passenger with: “Mr. Honeythunder?”

“That is my name, sir.”

“My name is Crisparkle.”

“Reverend Mr. Septimus? Glad to see you, sir. Neville and Helena are inside. Having a little succumbed of late, under the pressure of my public labours, I thought I would take a mouthful of fresh air, and come down with them, and return at night. So you are the Reverend Mr. Septimus, are you?” surveying him on the whole with disappointment, and twisting a double eye-glass by its ribbon, as if he were roasting it, but not otherwise using it. “Hah! I expected to see you older, sir.”

“I hope you will,” was the good-humoured reply.

“Eh?” demanded Mr. Honeythunder.

“Only a poor little joke. Not worth repeating.”

“Joke? Ay; I never see a joke,” Mr. Honeythunder frowningly retorted. “A joke is wasted upon me, sir. Where are they? Helena and Neville, come here! Mr. Crisparkle has come down to meet you.”

An unusually handsome lithe young fellow, and an unusually handsome lithe girl; much alike; both very dark, and very rich in colour; she of almost the gipsy type; something untamed about them both; a certain air upon them of hunter and huntress; yet withal a certain air of being the objects of the chase, rather than the followers. Slender, supple, quick of eye and limb; half shy, half defiant; fierce of look; an indefinable kind of pause coming and going on their whole expression, both of face and form, which might be equally likened to the pause before a crouch or a bound. The rough mental notes made in the first five minutes by Mr. Crisparkle would have read thus, verbatim.

He invited Mr. Honeythunder to dinner, with a troubled mind (for the discomfiture of the dear old china shepherdess lay heavy on it), and gave his arm to Helena Landless. Both she and her brother, as they walked all together through the ancient streets, took great delight in what he pointed out of the Cathedral and the Monastery ruin, and wondered—so his notes ran on—much as if they were beautiful barbaric captives brought from some wild tropical dominion. Mr. Honeythunder walked in the middle of the road, shouldering the natives out of his way, and loudly developing a scheme he had, for making a raid on all the unemployed persons in the United Kingdom, laying them every one by the heels in jail, and forcing them, on pain of prompt extermination, to become philanthropists.

Mrs. Crisparkle had need of her own share of philanthropy when she beheld this very large and very loud excrescence on the little party. Always something in the nature of a Boil upon the face of society, Mr. Honeythunder expanded into an inflammatory Wen in Minor Canon Corner. Though it was not literally true, as was facetiously charged against him by public unbelievers, that he called aloud to his fellow-creatures: “Curse your souls and bodies, come here and be blessed!” still his philanthropy was of that gunpowderous sort that the difference between it and animosity was hard to determine. You were to abolish military force, but you were first to bring all commanding officers who had done their duty, to trial by court-martial for that offence, and shoot them. You were to abolish war, but were to make converts by making war upon them, and charging them with loving war as the apple of their eye. You were to have no capital punishment, but were first to sweep off the face of the earth all legislators, jurists, and judges, who were of the contrary opinion. You were to have universal concord, and were to get it by eliminating all the people who wouldn’t, or conscientiously couldn’t, be concordant. You were to love your brother as yourself, but after an indefinite interval of maligning him (very much as if you hated him), and calling him all manner of names. Above all things, you were to do nothing in private, or on your own account. You were to go to the offices of the Haven of Philanthropy, and put your name down as a Member and a Professing Philanthropist. Then, you were to pay up your subscription, get your card of membership and your riband and medal, and were evermore to live upon a platform, and evermore to say what Mr. Honeythunder said, and what the Treasurer said, and what the sub-Treasurer said, and what the Committee said, and what the sub-Committee said, and what the Secretary said, and what the Vice-Secretary said. And this was usually said in the unanimously-carried resolution under hand and seal, to the effect: “That this assembled Body of Professing Philanthropists views, with indignant scorn and contempt, not unmixed with utter detestation and loathing abhorrence”—in short, the baseness of all those who do not belong to it, and pledges itself to make as many obnoxious statements as possible about them, without being at all particular as to facts.

The dinner was a most doleful breakdown. The philanthropist deranged the symmetry of the table, sat himself in the way of the waiting, blocked up the thoroughfare, and drove Mr. Tope (who assisted the parlour-maid) to the verge of distraction by passing plates and dishes on, over his own head. Nobody could talk to anybody, because he held forth to everybody at once, as if the company had no individual existence, but were a Meeting. He impounded the Reverend Mr. Septimus, as an official personage to be addressed, or kind of human peg to hang his oratorical hat on, and fell into the exasperating habit, common among such orators, of impersonating him as a wicked and weak opponent. Thus, he would ask: “And will you, sir, now stultify yourself by telling me”—and so forth, when the innocent man had not opened his lips, nor meant to open them. Or he would say: “Now see, sir, to what a position you are reduced. I will leave you no escape. After exhausting all the resources of fraud and falsehood, during years upon years; after exhibiting a combination of dastardly meanness with ensanguined daring, such as the world has not often witnessed; you have now the hypocrisy to bend the knee before the most degraded of mankind, and to sue and whine and howl for mercy!” Whereat the unfortunate Minor Canon would look, in part indignant and in part perplexed; while his worthy mother sat bridling, with tears in her eyes, and the remainder of the party lapsed into a sort of gelatinous state, in which there was no flavour or solidity, and very little resistance.

But the gush of philanthropy that burst forth when the departure of Mr. Honeythunder began to impend, must have been highly gratifying to the feelings of that distinguished man. His coffee was produced, by the special activity of Mr. Tope, a full hour before he wanted it. Mr. Crisparkle sat with his watch in his hand for about the same period, lest he should overstay his time. The four young people were unanimous in believing that the Cathedral clock struck three-quarters, when it actually struck but one. Miss Twinkleton estimated the distance to the omnibus at five-and-twenty minutes’ walk, when it was really five. The affectionate kindness of the whole circle hustled him into his greatcoat, and shoved him out into the moonlight, as if he were a fugitive traitor with whom they sympathised, and a troop of horse were at the back door. Mr. Crisparkle and his new charge, who took him to the omnibus, were so fervent in their apprehensions of his catching cold, that they shut him up in it instantly and left him, with still half-an-hour to spare.

“I know very little of that gentleman, sir,” said Neville to the Minor Canon as they turned back.

“You know very little of your guardian?” the Minor Canon repeated.

“Almost nothing!”

“How came he—”

“To be my guardian? I’ll tell you, sir. I suppose you know that we come (my sister and I) from Ceylon?”

“Indeed, no.”

“I wonder at that. We lived with a stepfather there. Our mother died there, when we were little children. We have had a wretched existence. She made him our guardian, and he was a miserly wretch who grudged us food to eat, and clothes to wear. At his death, he passed us over to this man; for no better reason that I know of, than his being a friend or connexion of his, whose name was always in print and catching his attention.”

“That was lately, I suppose?”

“Quite lately, sir. This stepfather of ours was a cruel brute as well as a grinding one. It is well he died when he did, or I might have killed him.”

Mr. Crisparkle stopped short in the moonlight and looked at his hopeful pupil in consternation.

“I surprise you, sir?” he said, with a quick change to a submissive manner.

“You shock me; unspeakably shock me.”

The pupil hung his head for a little while, as they walked on, and then said: “You never saw him beat your sister. I have seen him beat mine, more than once or twice, and I never forgot it.”

“Nothing,” said Mr. Crisparkle, “not even a beloved and beautiful sister’s tears under dastardly ill-usage;” he became less severe, in spite of himself, as his indignation rose; “could justify those horrible expressions that you used.”

“I am sorry I used them, and especially to you, sir. I beg to recall them. But permit me to set you right on one point. You spoke of my sister’s tears. My sister would have let him tear her to pieces, before she would have let him believe that he could make her shed a tear.”

Mr. Crisparkle reviewed those mental notes of his, and was neither at all surprised to hear it, nor at all disposed to question it.

“Perhaps you will think it strange, sir,”—this was said in a hesitating voice—“that I should so soon ask you to allow me to confide in you, and to have the kindness to hear a word or two from me in my defence?”

“Defence?” Mr. Crisparkle repeated. “You are not on your defence, Mr. Neville.”

“I think I am, sir. At least I know I should be, if you were better acquainted with my character.”

“Well, Mr. Neville,” was the rejoinder. “What if you leave me to find it out?”

“Since it is your pleasure, sir,” answered the young man, with a quick change in his manner to sullen disappointment: “since it is your pleasure to check me in my impulse, I must submit.”

There was that in the tone of this short speech which made the conscientious man to whom it was addressed uneasy. It hinted to him that he might, without meaning it, turn aside a trustfulness beneficial to a mis-shapen young mind and perhaps to his own power of directing and improving it. They were within sight of the lights in his windows, and he stopped.

“Let us turn back and take a turn or two up and down, Mr. Neville, or you may not have time to finish what you wish to say to me. You are hasty in thinking that I mean to check you. Quite the contrary. I invite your confidence.”

“You have invited it, sir, without knowing it, ever since I came here. I say ‘ever since,’ as if I had been here a week. The truth is, we came here (my sister and I) to quarrel with you, and affront you, and break away again.”

“Really?” said Mr. Crisparkle, at a dead loss for anything else to say.

“You see, we could not know what you were beforehand, sir; could we?”

“Clearly not,” said Mr. Crisparkle.

“And having liked no one else with whom we have ever been brought into contact, we had made up our minds not to like you.”

“Really?” said Mr. Crisparkle again.

“But we do like you, sir, and we see an unmistakable difference between your house and your reception of us, and anything else we have ever known. This—and my happening to be alone with you—and everything around us seeming so quiet and peaceful after Mr. Honeythunder’s departure—and Cloisterham being so old and grave and beautiful, with the moon shining on it—these things inclined me to open my heart.”

“I quite understand, Mr. Neville. And it is salutary to listen to such influences.”

“In describing my own imperfections, sir, I must ask you not to suppose that I am describing my sister’s. She has come out of the disadvantages of our miserable life, as much better than I am, as that Cathedral tower is higher than those chimneys.”

Mr. Crisparkle in his own breast was not so sure of this.

“I have had, sir, from my earliest remembrance, to suppress a deadly and bitter hatred. This has made me secret and revengeful. I have been always tyrannically held down by the strong hand. This has driven me, in my weakness, to the resource of being false and mean. I have been stinted of education, liberty, money, dress, the very necessaries of life, the commonest pleasures of childhood, the commonest possessions of youth. This has caused me to be utterly wanting in I don’t know what emotions, or remembrances, or good instincts—I have not even a name for the thing, you see!—that you have had to work upon in other young men to whom you have been accustomed.”

“This is evidently true. But this is not encouraging,” thought Mr. Crisparkle as they turned again.

“And to finish with, sir: I have been brought up among abject and servile dependents, of an inferior race, and I may easily have contracted some affinity with them. Sometimes, I don’t know but that it may be a drop of what is tigerish in their blood.”

“As in the case of that remark just now,” thought Mr. Crisparkle.

“In a last word of reference to my sister, sir (we are twin children), you ought to know, to her honour, that nothing in our misery ever subdued her, though it often cowed me. When we ran away from it (we ran away four times in six years, to be soon brought back and cruelly punished), the flight was always of her planning and leading. Each time she dressed as a boy, and showed the daring of a man. I take it we were seven years old when we first decamped; but I remember, when I lost the pocket-knife with which she was to have cut her hair short, how desperately she tried to tear it out, or bite it off. I have nothing further to say, sir, except that I hope you will bear with me and make allowance for me.”

“Of that, Mr. Neville, you may be sure,” returned the Minor Canon. “I don’t preach more than I can help, and I will not repay your confidence with a sermon. But I entreat you to bear in mind, very seriously and steadily, that if I am to do you any good, it can only be with your own assistance; and that you can only render that, efficiently, by seeking aid from Heaven.”

“I will try to do my part, sir.”

“And, Mr. Neville, I will try to do mine. Here is my hand on it. May God bless our endeavours!”

They were now standing at his house-door, and a cheerful sound of voices and laughter was heard within.

“We will take one more turn before going in,” said Mr. Crisparkle, “for I want to ask you a question. When you said you were in a changed mind concerning me, you spoke, not only for yourself, but for your sister too?”

“Undoubtedly I did, sir.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Neville, but I think you have had no opportunity of communicating with your sister, since I met you. Mr. Honeythunder was very eloquent; but perhaps I may venture to say, without ill-nature, that he rather monopolised the occasion. May you not have answered for your sister without sufficient warrant?”

Neville shook his head with a proud smile.

“You don’t know, sir, yet, what a complete understanding can exist between my sister and me, though no spoken word—perhaps hardly as much as a look—may have passed between us. She not only feels as I have described, but she very well knows that I am taking this opportunity of speaking to you, both for her and for myself.”

Mr. Crisparkle looked in his face, with some incredulity; but his face expressed such absolute and firm conviction of the truth of what he said, that Mr. Crisparkle looked at the pavement, and mused, until they came to his door again.

“I will ask for one more turn, sir, this time,” said the young man, with a rather heightened colour rising in his face. “But for Mr. Honeythunder’s—I think you called it eloquence, sir?” (somewhat slyly.)

“I—yes, I called it eloquence,” said Mr. Crisparkle.

“But for Mr. Honeythunder’s eloquence, I might have had no need to ask you what I am going to ask you. This Mr. Edwin Drood, sir: I think that’s the name?”

“Quite correct,” said Mr. Crisparkle. “D-r-double o-d.”

“Does he—or did he—read with you, sir?”

“Never, Mr. Neville. He comes here visiting his relation, Mr. Jasper.”

“Is Miss Bud his relation too, sir?”

(“Now, why should he ask that, with sudden superciliousness?” thought Mr. Crisparkle.) Then he explained, aloud, what he knew of the little story of their betrothal.

“O! that’s it, is it?” said the young man. “I understand his air of proprietorship now!”

This was said so evidently to himself, or to anybody rather than Mr. Crisparkle, that the latter instinctively felt as if to notice it would be almost tantamount to noticing a passage in a letter which he had read by chance over the writer’s shoulder. A moment afterwards they re-entered the house.

Mr. Jasper was seated at the piano as they came into his drawing-room, and was accompanying Miss Rosebud while she sang. It was a consequence of his playing the accompaniment without notes, and of her being a heedless little creature, very apt to go wrong, that he followed her lips most attentively, with his eyes as well as hands; carefully and softly hinting the key-note from time to time. Standing with an arm drawn round her, but with a face far more intent on Mr. Jasper than on her singing, stood Helena, between whom and her brother an instantaneous recognition passed, in which Mr. Crisparkle saw, or thought he saw, the understanding that had been spoken of, flash out. Mr. Neville then took his admiring station, leaning against the piano, opposite the singer; Mr. Crisparkle sat down by the china shepherdess; Edwin Drood gallantly furled and unfurled Miss Twinkleton’s fan; and that lady passively claimed that sort of exhibitor’s proprietorship in the accomplishment on view, which Mr. Tope, the Verger, daily claimed in the Cathedral service.

The song went on. It was a sorrowful strain of parting, and the fresh young voice was very plaintive and tender. As Jasper watched the pretty lips, and ever and again hinted the one note, as though it were a low whisper from himself, the voice became less steady, until all at once the singer broke into a burst of tears, and shrieked out, with her hands over her eyes: “I can’t bear this! I am frightened! Take me away!”

With one swift turn of her lithe figure, Helena laid the little beauty on a sofa, as if she had never caught her up. Then, on one knee beside her, and with one hand upon her rosy mouth, while with the other she appealed to all the rest, Helena said to them: “It’s nothing; it’s all over; don’t speak to her for one minute, and she is well!”

Jasper’s hands had, in the same instant, lifted themselves from the keys, and were now poised above them, as though he waited to resume. In that attitude he yet sat quiet: not even looking round, when all the rest had changed their places and were reassuring one another.

“Pussy’s not used to an audience; that’s the fact,” said Edwin Drood. “She got nervous, and couldn’t hold out. Besides, Jack, you are such a conscientious master, and require so much, that I believe you make her afraid of you. No wonder.”

“No wonder,” repeated Helena.

“There, Jack, you hear! You would be afraid of him, under similar circumstances, wouldn’t you, Miss Landless?”

“Not under any circumstances,” returned Helena.

Jasper brought down his hands, looked over his shoulder, and begged to thank Miss Landless for her vindication of his character. Then he fell to dumbly playing, without striking the notes, while his little pupil was taken to an open window for air, and was otherwise petted and restored. When she was brought back, his place was empty. “Jack’s gone, Pussy,” Edwin told her. “I am more than half afraid he didn’t like to be charged with being the Monster who had frightened you.” But she answered never a word, and shivered, as if they had made her a little too cold.

Miss Twinkleton now opining that indeed these were late hours, Mrs. Crisparkle, for finding ourselves outside the walls of the Nuns’ House, and that we who undertook the formation of the future wives and mothers of England (the last words in a lower voice, as requiring to be communicated in confidence) were really bound (voice coming up again) to set a better example than one of rakish habits, wrappers were put in requisition, and the two young cavaliers volunteered to see the ladies home. It was soon done, and the gate of the Nuns’ House closed upon them.

The boarders had retired, and only Mrs. Tisher in solitary vigil awaited the new pupil. Her bedroom being within Rosa’s, very little introduction or explanation was necessary, before she was placed in charge of her new friend, and left for the night.

“This is a blessed relief, my dear,” said Helena. “I have been dreading all day, that I should be brought to bay at this time.”

“There are not many of us,” returned Rosa, “and we are good-natured girls; at least the others are; I can answer for them.”

“I can answer for you,” laughed Helena, searching the lovely little face with her dark, fiery eyes, and tenderly caressing the small figure. “You will be a friend to me, won’t you?”

“I hope so. But the idea of my being a friend to you seems too absurd, though.”

“Why?”

“O, I am such a mite of a thing, and you are so womanly and handsome. You seem to have resolution and power enough to crush me. I shrink into nothing by the side of your presence even.”

“I am a neglected creature, my dear, unacquainted with all accomplishments, sensitively conscious that I have everything to learn, and deeply ashamed to own my ignorance.”

“And yet you acknowledge everything to me!” said Rosa.

“My pretty one, can I help it? There is a fascination in you.”

“O! is there though?” pouted Rosa, half in jest and half in earnest. “What a pity Master Eddy doesn’t feel it more!”

Of course her relations towards that young gentleman had been already imparted in Minor Canon Corner.

“Why, surely he must love you with all his heart!” cried Helena, with an earnestness that threatened to blaze into ferocity if he didn’t.

“Eh? O, well, I suppose he does,” said Rosa, pouting again; “I am sure I have no right to say he doesn’t. Perhaps it’s my fault. Perhaps I am not as nice to him as I ought to be. I don’t think I am. But it is so ridiculous!”

Helena’s eyes demanded what was.

“We are,” said Rosa, answering as if she had spoken. “We are such a ridiculous couple. And we are always quarrelling.”

“Why?”

“Because we both know we are ridiculous, my dear!” Rosa gave that answer as if it were the most conclusive answer in the world.

Helena’s masterful look was intent upon her face for a few moments, and then she impulsively put out both her hands and said:

“You will be my friend and help me?”

“Indeed, my dear, I will,” replied Rosa, in a tone of affectionate childishness that went straight and true to her heart; “I will be as good a friend as such a mite of a thing can be to such a noble creature as you. And be a friend to me, please; I don’t understand myself: and I want a friend who can understand me, very much indeed.”

Helena Landless kissed her, and retaining both her hands said:

“Who is Mr. Jasper?”

Rosa turned aside her head in answering: “Eddy’s uncle, and my music-master.”

“You do not love him?”

“Ugh!” She put her hands up to her face, and shook with fear or horror.

“You know that he loves you?”

“O, don’t, don’t, don’t!” cried Rosa, dropping on her knees, and clinging to her new resource. “Don’t tell me of it! He terrifies me. He haunts my thoughts, like a dreadful ghost. I feel that I am never safe from him. I feel as if he could pass in through the wall when he is spoken of.” She actually did look round, as if she dreaded to see him standing in the shadow behind her.

“Try to tell me more about it, darling.”

“Yes, I will, I will. Because you are so strong. But hold me the while, and stay with me afterwards.”

“My child! You speak as if he had threatened you in some dark way.”

“He has never spoken to me about—that. Never.”

“What has he done?”

“He has made a slave of me with his looks. He has forced me to understand him, without his saying a word; and he has forced me to keep silence, without his uttering a threat. When I play, he never moves his eyes from my hands. When I sing, he never moves his eyes from my lips. When he corrects me, and strikes a note, or a chord, or plays a passage, he himself is in the sounds, whispering that he pursues me as a lover, and commanding me to keep his secret. I avoid his eyes, but he forces me to see them without looking at them. Even when a glaze comes over them (which is sometimes the case), and he seems to wander away into a frightful sort of dream in which he threatens most, he obliges me to know it, and to know that he is sitting close at my side, more terrible to me than ever.”

“What is this imagined threatening, pretty one? What is threatened?”

“I don’t know. I have never even dared to think or wonder what it is.”

“And was this all, to-night?”

“This was all; except that to-night when he watched my lips so closely as I was singing, besides feeling terrified I felt ashamed and passionately hurt. It was as if he kissed me, and I couldn’t bear it, but cried out. You must never breathe this to any one. Eddy is devoted to him. But you said to-night that you would not be afraid of him, under any circumstances, and that gives me—who am so much afraid of him—courage to tell only you. Hold me! Stay with me! I am too frightened to be left by myself.”

The lustrous gipsy-face drooped over the clinging arms and bosom, and the wild black hair fell down protectingly over the childish form. There was a slumbering gleam of fire in the intense dark eyes, though they were then softened with compassion and admiration. Let whomsoever it most concerned look well to it!

The two young men, having seen the damsels, their charges, enter the courtyard of the Nuns’ House, and finding themselves coldly stared at by the brazen door-plate, as if the battered old beau with the glass in his eye were insolent, look at one another, look along the perspective of the moonlit street, and slowly walk away together.

“Do you stay here long, Mr. Drood?” says Neville.

“Not this time,” is the careless answer. “I leave for London again, to-morrow. But I shall be here, off and on, until next Midsummer; then I shall take my leave of Cloisterham, and England too; for many a long day, I expect.”

“Are you going abroad?”

“Going to wake up Egypt a little,” is the condescending answer.

“Are you reading?”

“Reading?” repeats Edwin Drood, with a touch of contempt. “No. Doing, working, engineering. My small patrimony was left a part of the capital of the Firm I am with, by my father, a former partner; and I am a charge upon the Firm until I come of age; and then I step into my modest share in the concern. Jack—you met him at dinner—is, until then, my guardian and trustee.”

“I heard from Mr. Crisparkle of your other good fortune.”

“What do you mean by my other good fortune?”

Neville has made his remark in a watchfully advancing, and yet furtive and shy manner, very expressive of that peculiar air already noticed, of being at once hunter and hunted. Edwin has made his retort with an abruptness not at all polite. They stop and interchange a rather heated look.

“I hope,” says Neville, “there is no offence, Mr. Drood, in my innocently referring to your betrothal?”

“By George!” cries Edwin, leading on again at a somewhat quicker pace; “everybody in this chattering old Cloisterham refers to it. I wonder no public-house has been set up, with my portrait for the sign of The Betrothed’s Head. Or Pussy’s portrait. One or the other.”

“I am not accountable for Mr. Crisparkle’s mentioning the matter to me, quite openly,” Neville begins.

“No; that’s true; you are not,” Edwin Drood assents.

“But,” resumes Neville, “I am accountable for mentioning it to you. And I did so, on the supposition that you could not fail to be highly proud of it.”

Now, there are these two curious touches of human nature working the secret springs of this dialogue. Neville Landless is already enough impressed by Little Rosebud, to feel indignant that Edwin Drood (far below her) should hold his prize so lightly. Edwin Drood is already enough impressed by Helena, to feel indignant that Helena’s brother (far below her) should dispose of him so coolly, and put him out of the way so entirely.

However, the last remark had better be answered. So, says Edwin:

“I don’t know, Mr. Neville” (adopting that mode of address from Mr. Crisparkle), “that what people are proudest of, they usually talk most about; I don’t know either, that what they are proudest of, they most like other people to talk about. But I live a busy life, and I speak under correction by you readers, who ought to know everything, and I daresay do.”

By this time they had both become savage; Mr. Neville out in the open; Edwin Drood under the transparent cover of a popular tune, and a stop now and then to pretend to admire picturesque effects in the moonlight before him.

“It does not seem to me very civil in you,” remarks Neville, at length, “to reflect upon a stranger who comes here, not having had your advantages, to try to make up for lost time. But, to be sure, I was not brought up in ‘busy life,’ and my ideas of civility were formed among Heathens.”

“Perhaps, the best civility, whatever kind of people we are brought up among,” retorts Edwin Drood, “is to mind our own business. If you will set me that example, I promise to follow it.”

“Do you know that you take a great deal too much upon yourself?” is the angry rejoinder, “and that in the part of the world I come from, you would be called to account for it?”

“By whom, for instance?” asks Edwin Drood, coming to a halt, and surveying the other with a look of disdain.

But, here a startling right hand is laid on Edwin’s shoulder, and Jasper stands between them. For, it would seem that he, too, has strolled round by the Nuns’ House, and has come up behind them on the shadowy side of the road.

“Ned, Ned, Ned!” he says; “we must have no more of this. I don’t like this. I have overheard high words between you two. Remember, my dear boy, you are almost in the position of host to-night. You belong, as it were, to the place, and in a manner represent it towards a stranger. Mr. Neville is a stranger, and you should respect the obligations of hospitality. And, Mr. Neville,” laying his left hand on the inner shoulder of that young gentleman, and thus walking on between them, hand to shoulder on either side: “you will pardon me; but I appeal to you to govern your temper too. Now, what is amiss? But why ask! Let there be nothing amiss, and the question is superfluous. We are all three on a good understanding, are we not?”

After a silent struggle between the two young men who shall speak last, Edwin Drood strikes in with: “So far as I am concerned, Jack, there is no anger in me.”

“Nor in me,” says Neville Landless, though not so freely; or perhaps so carelessly. “But if Mr. Drood knew all that lies behind me, far away from here, he might know better how it is that sharp-edged words have sharp edges to wound me.”

“Perhaps,” says Jasper, in a soothing manner, “we had better not qualify our good understanding. We had better not say anything having the appearance of a remonstrance or condition; it might not seem generous. Frankly and freely, you see there is no anger in Ned. Frankly and freely, there is no anger in you, Mr. Neville?”

“None at all, Mr. Jasper.” Still, not quite so frankly or so freely; or, be it said once again, not quite so carelessly perhaps.

“All over then! Now, my bachelor gatehouse is a few yards from here, and the heater is on the fire, and the wine and glasses are on the table, and it is not a stone’s throw from Minor Canon Corner. Ned, you are up and away to-morrow. We will carry Mr. Neville in with us, to take a stirrup-cup.”

“With all my heart, Jack.”

“And with all mine, Mr. Jasper.” Neville feels it impossible to say less, but would rather not go. He has an impression upon him that he has lost hold of his temper; feels that Edwin Drood’s coolness, so far from being infectious, makes him red-hot.

Mr. Jasper, still walking in the centre, hand to shoulder on either side, beautifully turns the Refrain of a drinking song, and they all go up to his rooms. There, the first object visible, when he adds the light of a lamp to that of the fire, is the portrait over the chimneypiece. It is not an object calculated to improve the understanding between the two young men, as rather awkwardly reviving the subject of their difference. Accordingly, they both glance at it consciously, but say nothing. Jasper, however (who would appear from his conduct to have gained but an imperfect clue to the cause of their late high words), directly calls attention to it.

“You recognise that picture, Mr. Neville?” shading the lamp to throw the light upon it.

“I recognise it, but it is far from flattering the original.”

“O, you are hard upon it! It was done by Ned, who made me a present of it.”

“I am sorry for that, Mr. Drood.” Neville apologises, with a real intention to apologise; “if I had known I was in the artist’s presence—”

“O, a joke, sir, a mere joke,” Edwin cuts in, with a provoking yawn. “A little humouring of Pussy’s points! I’m going to paint her gravely, one of these days, if she’s good.”

The air of leisurely patronage and indifference with which this is said, as the speaker throws himself back in a chair and clasps his hands at the back of his head, as a rest for it, is very exasperating to the excitable and excited Neville. Jasper looks observantly from the one to the other, slightly smiles, and turns his back to mix a jug of mulled wine at the fire. It seems to require much mixing and compounding.

“I suppose, Mr. Neville,” says Edwin, quick to resent the indignant protest against himself in the face of young Landless, which is fully as visible as the portrait, or the fire, or the lamp: “I suppose that if you painted the picture of your lady love—”

“I can’t paint,” is the hasty interruption.

“That’s your misfortune, and not your fault. You would if you could. But if you could, I suppose you would make her (no matter what she was in reality), Juno, Minerva, Diana, and Venus, all in one. Eh?”

“I have no lady love, and I can’t say.”

“If I were to try my hand,” says Edwin, with a boyish boastfulness getting up in him, “on a portrait of Miss Landless—in earnest, mind you; in earnest—you should see what I could do!”

“My sister’s consent to sit for it being first got, I suppose? As it never will be got, I am afraid I shall never see what you can do. I must bear the loss.”

Jasper turns round from the fire, fills a large goblet glass for Neville, fills a large goblet glass for Edwin, and hands each his own; then fills for himself, saying:

“Come, Mr. Neville, we are to drink to my nephew, Ned. As it is his foot that is in the stirrup—metaphorically—our stirrup-cup is to be devoted to him. Ned, my dearest fellow, my love!”

Jasper sets the example of nearly emptying his glass, and Neville follows it. Edwin Drood says, “Thank you both very much,” and follows the double example.

“Look at him,” cries Jasper, stretching out his hand admiringly and tenderly, though rallyingly too. “See where he lounges so easily, Mr. Neville! The world is all before him where to choose. A life of stirring work and interest, a life of change and excitement, a life of domestic ease and love! Look at him!”

Edwin Drood’s face has become quickly and remarkably flushed with the wine; so has the face of Neville Landless. Edwin still sits thrown back in his chair, making that rest of clasped hands for his head.

“See how little he heeds it all!” Jasper proceeds in a bantering vein. “It is hardly worth his while to pluck the golden fruit that hangs ripe on the tree for him. And yet consider the contrast, Mr. Neville. You and I have no prospect of stirring work and interest, or of change and excitement, or of domestic ease and love. You and I have no prospect (unless you are more fortunate than I am, which may easily be), but the tedious unchanging round of this dull place.”

“Upon my soul, Jack,” says Edwin, complacently, “I feel quite apologetic for having my way smoothed as you describe. But you know what I know, Jack, and it may not be so very easy as it seems, after all. May it, Pussy?” To the portrait, with a snap of his thumb and finger. “We have got to hit it off yet; haven’t we, Pussy? You know what I mean, Jack.”

His speech has become thick and indistinct. Jasper, quiet and self-possessed, looks to Neville, as expecting his answer or comment. When Neville speaks, his speech is also thick and indistinct.

“It might have been better for Mr. Drood to have known some hardships,” he says, defiantly.

“Pray,” retorts Edwin, turning merely his eyes in that direction, “pray why might it have been better for Mr. Drood to have known some hardships?”

“Ay,” Jasper assents, with an air of interest; “let us know why?”

“Because they might have made him more sensible,” says Neville, “of good fortune that is not by any means necessarily the result of his own merits.”

Mr. Jasper quickly looks to his nephew for his rejoinder.

“Have you known hardships, may I ask?” says Edwin Drood, sitting upright.

Mr. Jasper quickly looks to the other for his retort.

“I have.”

“And what have they made you sensible of?”

Mr. Jasper’s play of eyes between the two holds good throughout the dialogue, to the end.

“I have told you once before to-night.”

“You have done nothing of the sort.”

“I tell you I have. That you take a great deal too much upon yourself.”

“You added something else to that, if I remember?”

“Yes, I did say something else.”

“Say it again.”

“I said that in the part of the world I come from, you would be called to account for it.”

“Only there?” cries Edwin Drood, with a contemptuous laugh. “A long way off, I believe? Yes; I see! That part of the world is at a safe distance.”

“Say here, then,” rejoins the other, rising in a fury. “Say anywhere! Your vanity is intolerable, your conceit is beyond endurance; you talk as if you were some rare and precious prize, instead of a common boaster. You are a common fellow, and a common boaster.”

“Pooh, pooh,” says Edwin Drood, equally furious, but more collected; “how should you know? You may know a black common fellow, or a black common boaster, when you see him (and no doubt you have a large acquaintance that way); but you are no judge of white men.”

This insulting allusion to his dark skin infuriates Neville to that violent degree, that he flings the dregs of his wine at Edwin Drood, and is in the act of flinging the goblet after it, when his arm is caught in the nick of time by Jasper.

“Ned, my dear fellow!” he cries in a loud voice; “I entreat you, I command you, to be still!” There has been a rush of all the three, and a clattering of glasses and overturning of chairs. “Mr. Neville, for shame! Give this glass to me. Open your hand, sir. I WILL have it!”

But Neville throws him off, and pauses for an instant, in a raging passion, with the goblet yet in his uplifted hand. Then, he dashes it down under the grate, with such force that the broken splinters fly out again in a shower; and he leaves the house.

When he first emerges into the night air, nothing around him is still or steady; nothing around him shows like what it is; he only knows that he stands with a bare head in the midst of a blood-red whirl, waiting to be struggled with, and to struggle to the death.

But, nothing happening, and the moon looking down upon him as if he were dead after a fit of wrath, he holds his steam-hammer beating head and heart, and staggers away. Then, he becomes half-conscious of having heard himself bolted and barred out, like a dangerous animal; and thinks what shall he do?

Some wildly passionate ideas of the river dissolve under the spell of the moonlight on the Cathedral and the graves, and the remembrance of his sister, and the thought of what he owes to the good man who has but that very day won his confidence and given him his pledge. He repairs to Minor Canon Corner, and knocks softly at the door.

It is Mr. Crisparkle’s custom to sit up last of the early household, very softly touching his piano and practising his favourite parts in concerted vocal music. The south wind that goes where it lists, by way of Minor Canon Corner on a still night, is not more subdued than Mr. Crisparkle at such times, regardful of the slumbers of the china shepherdess.

His knock is immediately answered by Mr. Crisparkle himself. When he opens the door, candle in hand, his cheerful face falls, and disappointed amazement is in it.

“Mr. Neville! In this disorder! Where have you been?”

“I have been to Mr. Jasper’s, sir. With his nephew.”

“Come in.”

The Minor Canon props him by the elbow with a strong hand (in a strictly scientific manner, worthy of his morning trainings), and turns him into his own little book-room, and shuts the door.

“I have begun ill, sir. I have begun dreadfully ill.”

“Too true. You are not sober, Mr. Neville.”

“I am afraid I am not, sir, though I can satisfy you at another time that I have had a very little indeed to drink, and that it overcame me in the strangest and most sudden manner.”

“Mr. Neville, Mr. Neville,” says the Minor Canon, shaking his head with a sorrowful smile; “I have heard that said before.”

“I think—my mind is much confused, but I think—it is equally true of Mr. Jasper’s nephew, sir.”

“Very likely,” is the dry rejoinder.

“We quarrelled, sir. He insulted me most grossly. He had heated that tigerish blood I told you of to-day, before then.”

“Mr. Neville,” rejoins the Minor Canon, mildly, but firmly: “I request you not to speak to me with that clenched right hand. Unclench it, if you please.”

“He goaded me, sir,” pursues the young man, instantly obeying, “beyond my power of endurance. I cannot say whether or no he meant it at first, but he did it. He certainly meant it at last. In short, sir,” with an irrepressible outburst, “in the passion into which he lashed me, I would have cut him down if I could, and I tried to do it.”

“You have clenched that hand again,” is Mr. Crisparkle’s quiet commentary.

“I beg your pardon, sir.”

“You know your room, for I showed it you before dinner; but I will accompany you to it once more. Your arm, if you please. Softly, for the house is all a-bed.”

Scooping his hand into the same scientific elbow-rest as before, and backing it up with the inert strength of his arm, as skilfully as a Police Expert, and with an apparent repose quite unattainable by novices, Mr. Crisparkle conducts his pupil to the pleasant and orderly old room prepared for him. Arrived there, the young man throws himself into a chair, and, flinging his arms upon his reading-table, rests his head upon them with an air of wretched self-reproach.

The gentle Minor Canon has had it in his thoughts to leave the room, without a word. But looking round at the door, and seeing this dejected figure, he turns back to it, touches it with a mild hand, says “Good night!” A sob is his only acknowledgment. He might have had many a worse; perhaps, could have had few better.

Another soft knock at the outer door attracts his attention as he goes down-stairs. He opens it to Mr. Jasper, holding in his hand the pupil’s hat.

“We have had an awful scene with him,” says Jasper, in a low voice.

“Has it been so bad as that?”

“Murderous!”

Mr. Crisparkle remonstrates: “No, no, no. Do not use such strong words.”

“He might have laid my dear boy dead at my feet. It is no fault of his, that he did not. But that I was, through the mercy of God, swift and strong with him, he would have cut him down on my hearth.”

The phrase smites home. “Ah!” thinks Mr. Crisparkle, “his own words!”

“Seeing what I have seen to-night, and hearing what I have heard,” adds Jasper, with great earnestness, “I shall never know peace of mind when there is danger of those two coming together, with no one else to interfere. It was horrible. There is something of the tiger in his dark blood.”

“Ah!” thinks Mr. Crisparkle, “so he said!”

“You, my dear sir,” pursues Jasper, taking his hand, “even you, have accepted a dangerous charge.”

“You need have no fear for me, Jasper,” returns Mr. Crisparkle, with a quiet smile. “I have none for myself.”

“I have none for myself,” returns Jasper, with an emphasis on the last pronoun, “because I am not, nor am I in the way of being, the object of his hostility. But you may be, and my dear boy has been. Good night!”

Mr. Crisparkle goes in, with the hat that has so easily, so almost imperceptibly, acquired the right to be hung up in his hall; hangs it up; and goes thoughtfully to bed.

Rosa, having no relation that she knew of in the world, had, from the seventh year of her age, known no home but the Nuns’ House, and no mother but Miss Twinkleton. Her remembrance of her own mother was of a pretty little creature like herself (not much older than herself it seemed to her), who had been brought home in her father’s arms, drowned. The fatal accident had happened at a party of pleasure. Every fold and colour in the pretty summer dress, and even the long wet hair, with scattered petals of ruined flowers still clinging to it, as the dead young figure, in its sad, sad beauty lay upon the bed, were fixed indelibly in Rosa’s recollection. So were the wild despair and the subsequent bowed-down grief of her poor young father, who died broken-hearted on the first anniversary of that hard day.

The betrothal of Rosa grew out of the soothing of his year of mental distress by his fast friend and old college companion, Drood: who likewise had been left a widower in his youth. But he, too, went the silent road into which all earthly pilgrimages merge, some sooner, and some later; and thus the young couple had come to be as they were.

The atmosphere of pity surrounding the little orphan girl when she first came to Cloisterham, had never cleared away. It had taken brighter hues as she grew older, happier, prettier; now it had been golden, now roseate, and now azure; but it had always adorned her with some soft light of its own. The general desire to console and caress her, had caused her to be treated in the beginning as a child much younger than her years; the same desire had caused her to be still petted when she was a child no longer. Who should be her favourite, who should anticipate this or that small present, or do her this or that small service; who should take her home for the holidays; who should write to her the oftenest when they were separated, and whom she would most rejoice to see again when they were reunited; even these gentle rivalries were not without their slight dashes of bitterness in the Nuns’ House. Well for the poor Nuns in their day, if they hid no harder strife under their veils and rosaries!

Thus Rosa had grown to be an amiable, giddy, wilful, winning little creature; spoilt, in the sense of counting upon kindness from all around her; but not in the sense of repaying it with indifference. Possessing an exhaustless well of affection in her nature, its sparkling waters had freshened and brightened the Nuns’ House for years, and yet its depths had never yet been moved: what might betide when that came to pass; what developing changes might fall upon the heedless head, and light heart, then; remained to be seen.

By what means the news that there had been a quarrel between the two young men overnight, involving even some kind of onslaught by Mr. Neville upon Edwin Drood, got into Miss Twinkleton’s establishment before breakfast, it is impossible to say. Whether it was brought in by the birds of the air, or came blowing in with the very air itself, when the casement windows were set open; whether the baker brought it kneaded into the bread, or the milkman delivered it as part of the adulteration of his milk; or the housemaids, beating the dust out of their mats against the gateposts, received it in exchange deposited on the mats by the town atmosphere; certain it is that the news permeated every gable of the old building before Miss Twinkleton was down, and that Miss Twinkleton herself received it through Mrs. Tisher, while yet in the act of dressing; or (as she might have expressed the phrase to a parent or guardian of a mythological turn) of sacrificing to the Graces.

Miss Landless’s brother had thrown a bottle at Mr. Edwin Drood.

Miss Landless’s brother had thrown a knife at Mr. Edwin Drood.

A knife became suggestive of a fork; and Miss Landless’s brother had thrown a fork at Mr. Edwin Drood.

As in the governing precedence of Peter Piper, alleged to have picked the peck of pickled pepper, it was held physically desirable to have evidence of the existence of the peck of pickled pepper which Peter Piper was alleged to have picked; so, in this case, it was held psychologically important to know why Miss Landless’s brother threw a bottle, knife, or fork—or bottle, knife, and fork—for the cook had been given to understand it was all three—at Mr. Edwin Drood?

Well, then. Miss Landless’s brother had said he admired Miss Bud. Mr. Edwin Drood had said to Miss Landless’s brother that he had no business to admire Miss Bud. Miss Landless’s brother had then “up’d” (this was the cook’s exact information) with the bottle, knife, fork, and decanter (the decanter now coolly flying at everybody’s head, without the least introduction), and thrown them all at Mr. Edwin Drood.

Poor little Rosa put a forefinger into each of her ears when these rumours began to circulate, and retired into a corner, beseeching not to be told any more; but Miss Landless, begging permission of Miss Twinkleton to go and speak with her brother, and pretty plainly showing that she would take it if it were not given, struck out the more definite course of going to Mr. Crisparkle’s for accurate intelligence.

When she came back (being first closeted with Miss Twinkleton, in order that anything objectionable in her tidings might be retained by that discreet filter), she imparted to Rosa only, what had taken place; dwelling with a flushed cheek on the provocation her brother had received, but almost limiting it to that last gross affront as crowning “some other words between them,” and, out of consideration for her new friend, passing lightly over the fact that the other words had originated in her lover’s taking things in general so very easily. To Rosa direct, she brought a petition from her brother that she would forgive him; and, having delivered it with sisterly earnestness, made an end of the subject.

It was reserved for Miss Twinkleton to tone down the public mind of the Nuns’ House. That lady, therefore, entering in a stately manner what plebeians might have called the school-room, but what, in the patrician language of the head of the Nuns’ House, was euphuistically, not to say round-aboutedly, denominated “the apartment allotted to study,” and saying with a forensic air, “Ladies!” all rose. Mrs. Tisher at the same time grouped herself behind her chief, as representing Queen Elizabeth’s first historical female friend at Tilbury fort. Miss Twinkleton then proceeded to remark that Rumour, Ladies, had been represented by the bard of Avon—needless were it to mention the immortal SHAKESPEARE, also called the Swan of his native river, not improbably with some reference to the ancient superstition that that bird of graceful plumage (Miss Jennings will please stand upright) sang sweetly on the approach of death, for which we have no ornithological authority,—Rumour, Ladies, had been represented by that bard—hem!—

        “who drew
The celebrated Jew,”

as painted full of tongues. Rumour in Cloisterham (Miss Ferdinand will honour me with her attention) was no exception to the great limner’s portrait of Rumour elsewhere. A slight fracas between two young gentlemen occurring last night within a hundred miles of these peaceful walls (Miss Ferdinand, being apparently incorrigible, will have the kindness to write out this evening, in the original language, the first four fables of our vivacious neighbour, Monsieur La Fontaine) had been very grossly exaggerated by Rumour’s voice. In the first alarm and anxiety arising from our sympathy with a sweet young friend, not wholly to be dissociated from one of the gladiators in the bloodless arena in question (the impropriety of Miss Reynolds’s appearing to stab herself in the hand with a pin, is far too obvious, and too glaringly unladylike, to be pointed out), we descended from our maiden elevation to discuss this uncongenial and this unfit theme. Responsible inquiries having assured us that it was but one of those “airy nothings” pointed at by the Poet (whose name and date of birth Miss Giggles will supply within half an hour), we would now discard the subject, and concentrate our minds upon the grateful labours of the day.

But the subject so survived all day, nevertheless, that Miss Ferdinand got into new trouble by surreptitiously clapping on a paper moustache at dinner-time, and going through the motions of aiming a water-bottle at Miss Giggles, who drew a table-spoon in defence.

Now, Rosa thought of this unlucky quarrel a great deal, and thought of it with an uncomfortable feeling that she was involved in it, as cause, or consequence, or what not, through being in a false position altogether as to her marriage engagement. Never free from such uneasiness when she was with her affianced husband, it was not likely that she would be free from it when they were apart. To-day, too, she was cast in upon herself, and deprived of the relief of talking freely with her new friend, because the quarrel had been with Helena’s brother, and Helena undisguisedly avoided the subject as a delicate and difficult one to herself. At this critical time, of all times, Rosa’s guardian was announced as having come to see her.

Mr. Grewgious had been well selected for his trust, as a man of incorruptible integrity, but certainly for no other appropriate quality discernible on the surface. He was an arid, sandy man, who, if he had been put into a grinding-mill, looked as if he would have ground immediately into high-dried snuff. He had a scanty flat crop of hair, in colour and consistency like some very mangy yellow fur tippet; it was so unlike hair, that it must have been a wig, but for the stupendous improbability of anybody’s voluntarily sporting such a head. The little play of feature that his face presented, was cut deep into it, in a few hard curves that made it more like work; and he had certain notches in his forehead, which looked as though Nature had been about to touch them into sensibility or refinement, when she had impatiently thrown away the chisel, and said: “I really cannot be worried to finish off this man; let him go as he is.”

With too great length of throat at his upper end, and too much ankle-bone and heel at his lower; with an awkward and hesitating manner; with a shambling walk; and with what is called a near sight—which perhaps prevented his observing how much white cotton stocking he displayed to the public eye, in contrast with his black suit—Mr. Grewgious still had some strange capacity in him of making on the whole an agreeable impression.

Mr. Grewgious was discovered by his ward, much discomfited by being in Miss Twinkleton’s company in Miss Twinkleton’s own sacred room. Dim forebodings of being examined in something, and not coming well out of it, seemed to oppress the poor gentleman when found in these circumstances.

“My dear, how do you do? I am glad to see you. My dear, how much improved you are. Permit me to hand you a chair, my dear.”

Miss Twinkleton rose at her little writing-table, saying, with general sweetness, as to the polite Universe: “Will you permit me to retire?”

“By no means, madam, on my account. I beg that you will not move.”

“I must entreat permission to move,” returned Miss Twinkleton, repeating the word with a charming grace; “but I will not withdraw, since you are so obliging. If I wheel my desk to this corner window, shall I be in the way?”

“Madam! In the way!”

“You are very kind.—Rosa, my dear, you will be under no restraint, I am sure.”

Here Mr. Grewgious, left by the fire with Rosa, said again: “My dear, how do you do? I am glad to see you, my dear.” And having waited for her to sit down, sat down himself.

“My visits,” said Mr. Grewgious, “are, like those of the angels—not that I compare myself to an angel.”

“No, sir,” said Rosa.

“Not by any means,” assented Mr. Grewgious. “I merely refer to my visits, which are few and far between. The angels are, we know very well, up-stairs.”

Miss Twinkleton looked round with a kind of stiff stare.

“I refer, my dear,” said Mr. Grewgious, laying his hand on Rosa’s, as the possibility thrilled through his frame of his otherwise seeming to take the awful liberty of calling Miss Twinkleton my dear; “I refer to the other young ladies.”

Miss Twinkleton resumed her writing.

Mr. Grewgious, with a sense of not having managed his opening point quite as neatly as he might have desired, smoothed his head from back to front as if he had just dived, and were pressing the water out—this smoothing action, however superfluous, was habitual with him—and took a pocket-book from his coat-pocket, and a stump of black-lead pencil from his waistcoat-pocket.

“I made,” he said, turning the leaves: “I made a guiding memorandum or so—as I usually do, for I have no conversational powers whatever—to which I will, with your permission, my dear, refer. ‘Well and happy.’ Truly. You are well and happy, my dear? You look so.”

“Yes, indeed, sir,” answered Rosa.

“For which,” said Mr. Grewgious, with a bend of his head towards the corner window, “our warmest acknowledgments are due, and I am sure are rendered, to the maternal kindness and the constant care and consideration of the lady whom I have now the honour to see before me.”

This point, again, made but a lame departure from Mr. Grewgious, and never got to its destination; for, Miss Twinkleton, feeling that the courtesies required her to be by this time quite outside the conversation, was biting the end of her pen, and looking upward, as waiting for the descent of an idea from any member of the Celestial Nine who might have one to spare.

Mr. Grewgious smoothed his smooth head again, and then made another reference to his pocket-book; lining out “well and happy,” as disposed of.

“‘Pounds, shillings, and pence,’ is my next note. A dry subject for a young lady, but an important subject too. Life is pounds, shillings, and pence. Death is—” A sudden recollection of the death of her two parents seemed to stop him, and he said in a softer tone, and evidently inserting the negative as an after-thought: “Death is not pounds, shillings, and pence.”

His voice was as hard and dry as himself, and Fancy might have ground it straight, like himself, into high-dried snuff. And yet, through the very limited means of expression that he possessed, he seemed to express kindness. If Nature had but finished him off, kindness might have been recognisable in his face at this moment. But if the notches in his forehead wouldn’t fuse together, and if his face would work and couldn’t play, what could he do, poor man!

“‘Pounds, shillings, and pence.’ You find your allowance always sufficient for your wants, my dear?”

Rosa wanted for nothing, and therefore it was ample.

“And you are not in debt?”

Rosa laughed at the idea of being in debt. It seemed, to her inexperience, a comical vagary of the imagination. Mr. Grewgious stretched his near sight to be sure that this was her view of the case. “Ah!” he said, as comment, with a furtive glance towards Miss Twinkleton, and lining out pounds, shillings, and pence: “I spoke of having got among the angels! So I did!”

Rosa felt what his next memorandum would prove to be, and was blushing and folding a crease in her dress with one embarrassed hand, long before he found it.

“‘Marriage.’ Hem!” Mr. Grewgious carried his smoothing hand down over his eyes and nose, and even chin, before drawing his chair a little nearer, and speaking a little more confidentially: “I now touch, my dear, upon the point that is the direct cause of my troubling you with the present visit. Otherwise, being a particularly Angular man, I should not have intruded here. I am the last man to intrude into a sphere for which I am so entirely unfitted. I feel, on these premises, as if I was a bear—with the cramp—in a youthful Cotillon.”

His ungainliness gave him enough of the air of his simile to set Rosa off laughing heartily.

“It strikes you in the same light,” said Mr. Grewgious, with perfect calmness. “Just so. To return to my memorandum. Mr. Edwin has been to and fro here, as was arranged. You have mentioned that, in your quarterly letters to me. And you like him, and he likes you.”

“I like him very much, sir,” rejoined Rosa.

“So I said, my dear,” returned her guardian, for whose ear the timid emphasis was much too fine. “Good. And you correspond.”

“We write to one another,” said Rosa, pouting, as she recalled their epistolary differences.

“Such is the meaning that I attach to the word ‘correspond’ in this application, my dear,” said Mr. Grewgious. “Good. All goes well, time works on, and at this next Christmas-time it will become necessary, as a matter of form, to give the exemplary lady in the corner window, to whom we are so much indebted, business notice of your departure in the ensuing half-year. Your relations with her are far more than business relations, no doubt; but a residue of business remains in them, and business is business ever. I am a particularly Angular man,” proceeded Mr. Grewgious, as if it suddenly occurred to him to mention it, “and I am not used to give anything away. If, for these two reasons, some competent Proxy would give you away, I should take it very kindly.”

Rosa intimated, with her eyes on the ground, that she thought a substitute might be found, if required.

“Surely, surely,” said Mr. Grewgious. “For instance, the gentleman who teaches Dancing here—he would know how to do it with graceful propriety. He would advance and retire in a manner satisfactory to the feelings of the officiating clergyman, and of yourself, and the bridegroom, and all parties concerned. I am—I am a particularly Angular man,” said Mr. Grewgious, as if he had made up his mind to screw it out at last: “and should only blunder.”

Rosa sat still and silent. Perhaps her mind had not got quite so far as the ceremony yet, but was lagging on the way there.

“Memorandum, ‘Will.’ Now, my dear,” said Mr. Grewgious, referring to his notes, disposing of “Marriage” with his pencil, and taking a paper from his pocket; “although I have before possessed you with the contents of your father’s will, I think it right at this time to leave a certified copy of it in your hands. And although Mr. Edwin is also aware of its contents, I think it right at this time likewise to place a certified copy of it in Mr. Jasper’s hand—”

“Not in his own!” asked Rosa, looking up quickly. “Cannot the copy go to Eddy himself?”

“Why, yes, my dear, if you particularly wish it; but I spoke of Mr. Jasper as being his trustee.”

“I do particularly wish it, if you please,” said Rosa, hurriedly and earnestly; “I don’t like Mr. Jasper to come between us, in any way.”

“It is natural, I suppose,” said Mr. Grewgious, “that your young husband should be all in all. Yes. You observe that I say, I suppose. The fact is, I am a particularly Unnatural man, and I don’t know from my own knowledge.”

Rosa looked at him with some wonder.

“I mean,” he explained, “that young ways were never my ways. I was the only offspring of parents far advanced in life, and I half believe I was born advanced in life myself. No personality is intended towards the name you will so soon change, when I remark that while the general growth of people seem to have come into existence, buds, I seem to have come into existence a chip. I was a chip—and a very dry one—when I first became aware of myself. Respecting the other certified copy, your wish shall be complied with. Respecting your inheritance, I think you know all. It is an annuity of two hundred and fifty pounds. The savings upon that annuity, and some other items to your credit, all duly carried to account, with vouchers, will place you in possession of a lump-sum of money, rather exceeding Seventeen Hundred Pounds. I am empowered to advance the cost of your preparations for your marriage out of that fund. All is told.”

“Will you please tell me,” said Rosa, taking the paper with a prettily knitted brow, but not opening it: “whether I am right in what I am going to say? I can understand what you tell me, so very much better than what I read in law-writings. My poor papa and Eddy’s father made their agreement together, as very dear and firm and fast friends, in order that we, too, might be very dear and firm and fast friends after them?”

“Just so.”

“For the lasting good of both of us, and the lasting happiness of both of us?”

“Just so.”

“That we might be to one another even much more than they had been to one another?”

“Just so.”

“It was not bound upon Eddy, and it was not bound upon me, by any forfeit, in case—”

“Don’t be agitated, my dear. In the case that it brings tears into your affectionate eyes even to picture to yourself—in the case of your not marrying one another—no, no forfeiture on either side. You would then have been my ward until you were of age. No worse would have befallen you. Bad enough perhaps!”

“And Eddy?”

“He would have come into his partnership derived from his father, and into its arrears to his credit (if any), on attaining his majority, just as now.”

Rosa, with her perplexed face and knitted brow, bit the corner of her attested copy, as she sat with her head on one side, looking abstractedly on the floor, and smoothing it with her foot.

“In short,” said Mr. Grewgious, “this betrothal is a wish, a sentiment, a friendly project, tenderly expressed on both sides. That it was strongly felt, and that there was a lively hope that it would prosper, there can be no doubt. When you were both children, you began to be accustomed to it, and it has prospered. But circumstances alter cases; and I made this visit to-day, partly, indeed principally, to discharge myself of the duty of telling you, my dear, that two young people can only be betrothed in marriage (except as a matter of convenience, and therefore mockery and misery) of their own free will, their own attachment, and their own assurance (it may or it may not prove a mistaken one, but we must take our chance of that), that they are suited to each other, and will make each other happy. Is it to be supposed, for example, that if either of your fathers were living now, and had any mistrust on that subject, his mind would not be changed by the change of circumstances involved in the change of your years? Untenable, unreasonable, inconclusive, and preposterous!”

Mr. Grewgious said all this, as if he were reading it aloud; or, still more, as if he were repeating a lesson. So expressionless of any approach to spontaneity were his face and manner.

“I have now, my dear,” he added, blurring out “Will” with his pencil, “discharged myself of what is doubtless a formal duty in this case, but still a duty in such a case. Memorandum, ‘Wishes.’ My dear, is there any wish of yours that I can further?”

Rosa shook her head, with an almost plaintive air of hesitation in want of help.

“Is there any instruction that I can take from you with reference to your affairs?”

“I—I should like to settle them with Eddy first, if you please,” said Rosa, plaiting the crease in her dress.

“Surely, surely,” returned Mr. Grewgious. “You two should be of one mind in all things. Is the young gentleman expected shortly?”

“He has gone away only this morning. He will be back at Christmas.”

“Nothing could happen better. You will, on his return at Christmas, arrange all matters of detail with him; you will then communicate with me; and I will discharge myself (as a mere business acquaintance) of my business responsibilities towards the accomplished lady in the corner window. They will accrue at that season.” Blurring pencil once again. “Memorandum, ‘Leave.’ Yes. I will now, my dear, take my leave.”

“Could I,” said Rosa, rising, as he jerked out of his chair in his ungainly way: “could I ask you, most kindly to come to me at Christmas, if I had anything particular to say to you?”

“Why, certainly, certainly,” he rejoined; apparently—if such a word can be used of one who had no apparent lights or shadows about him—complimented by the question. “As a particularly Angular man, I do not fit smoothly into the social circle, and consequently I have no other engagement at Christmas-time than to partake, on the twenty-fifth, of a boiled turkey and celery sauce with a—with a particularly Angular clerk I have the good fortune to possess, whose father, being a Norfolk farmer, sends him up (the turkey up), as a present to me, from the neighbourhood of Norwich. I should be quite proud of your wishing to see me, my dear. As a professional Receiver of rents, so very few people do wish to see me, that the novelty would be bracing.”

For his ready acquiescence, the grateful Rosa put her hands upon his shoulders, stood on tiptoe, and instantly kissed him.

“Lord bless me!” cried Mr. Grewgious. “Thank you, my dear! The honour is almost equal to the pleasure. Miss Twinkleton, madam, I have had a most satisfactory conversation with my ward, and I will now release you from the incumbrance of my presence.”

“Nay, sir,” rejoined Miss Twinkleton, rising with a gracious condescension: “say not incumbrance. Not so, by any means. I cannot permit you to say so.”

“Thank you, madam. I have read in the newspapers,” said Mr. Grewgious, stammering a little, “that when a distinguished visitor (not that I am one: far from it) goes to a school (not that this is one: far from it), he asks for a holiday, or some sort of grace. It being now the afternoon in the—College—of which you are the eminent head, the young ladies might gain nothing, except in name, by having the rest of the day allowed them. But if there is any young lady at all under a cloud, might I solicit—”

“Ah, Mr. Grewgious, Mr. Grewgious!” cried Miss Twinkleton, with a chastely-rallying forefinger. “O you gentlemen, you gentlemen! Fie for shame, that you are so hard upon us poor maligned disciplinarians of our sex, for your sakes! But as Miss Ferdinand is at present weighed down by an incubus”—Miss Twinkleton might have said a pen-and-ink-ubus of writing out Monsieur La Fontaine—“go to her, Rosa my dear, and tell her the penalty is remitted, in deference to the intercession of your guardian, Mr. Grewgious.”

Miss Twinkleton here achieved a curtsey, suggestive of marvels happening to her respected legs, and which she came out of nobly, three yards behind her starting-point.

As he held it incumbent upon him to call on Mr. Jasper before leaving Cloisterham, Mr. Grewgious went to the gatehouse, and climbed its postern stair. But Mr. Jasper’s door being closed, and presenting on a slip of paper the word “Cathedral,” the fact of its being service-time was borne into the mind of Mr. Grewgious. So he descended the stair again, and, crossing the Close, paused at the great western folding-door of the Cathedral, which stood open on the fine and bright, though short-lived, afternoon, for the airing of the place.

“Dear me,” said Mr. Grewgious, peeping in, “it’s like looking down the throat of Old Time.”

Old Time heaved a mouldy sigh from tomb and arch and vault; and gloomy shadows began to deepen in corners; and damps began to rise from green patches of stone; and jewels, cast upon the pavement of the nave from stained glass by the declining sun, began to perish. Within the grill-gate of the chancel, up the steps surmounted loomingly by the fast-darkening organ, white robes could be dimly seen, and one feeble voice, rising and falling in a cracked, monotonous mutter, could at intervals be faintly heard. In the free outer air, the river, the green pastures, and the brown arable lands, the teeming hills and dales, were reddened by the sunset: while the distant little windows in windmills and farm homesteads, shone, patches of bright beaten gold. In the Cathedral, all became gray, murky, and sepulchral, and the cracked monotonous mutter went on like a dying voice, until the organ and the choir burst forth, and drowned it in a sea of music. Then, the sea fell, and the dying voice made another feeble effort, and then the sea rose high, and beat its life out, and lashed the roof, and surged among the arches, and pierced the heights of the great tower; and then the sea was dry, and all was still.

Mr. Grewgious had by that time walked to the chancel-steps, where he met the living waters coming out.

“Nothing is the matter?” Thus Jasper accosted him, rather quickly. “You have not been sent for?”

“Not at all, not at all. I came down of my own accord. I have been to my pretty ward’s, and am now homeward bound again.”

“You found her thriving?”

“Blooming indeed. Most blooming. I merely came to tell her, seriously, what a betrothal by deceased parents is.”

“And what is it—according to your judgment?”

Mr. Grewgious noticed the whiteness of the lips that asked the question, and put it down to the chilling account of the Cathedral.

“I merely came to tell her that it could not be considered binding, against any such reason for its dissolution as a want of affection, or want of disposition to carry it into effect, on the side of either party.”

“May I ask, had you any especial reason for telling her that?”

Mr. Grewgious answered somewhat sharply: “The especial reason of doing my duty, sir. Simply that.” Then he added: “Come, Mr. Jasper; I know your affection for your nephew, and that you are quick to feel on his behalf. I assure you that this implies not the least doubt of, or disrespect to, your nephew.”

“You could not,” returned Jasper, with a friendly pressure of his arm, as they walked on side by side, “speak more handsomely.”

Mr. Grewgious pulled off his hat to smooth his head, and, having smoothed it, nodded it contentedly, and put his hat on again.

“I will wager,” said Jasper, smiling—his lips were still so white that he was conscious of it, and bit and moistened them while speaking: “I will wager that she hinted no wish to be released from Ned.”

“And you will win your wager, if you do,” retorted Mr. Grewgious. “We should allow some margin for little maidenly delicacies in a young motherless creature, under such circumstances, I suppose; it is not in my line; what do you think?”

“There can be no doubt of it.”

“I am glad you say so. Because,” proceeded Mr. Grewgious, who had all this time very knowingly felt his way round to action on his remembrance of what she had said of Jasper himself: “because she seems to have some little delicate instinct that all preliminary arrangements had best be made between Mr. Edwin Drood and herself, don’t you see? She don’t want us, don’t you know?”

Jasper touched himself on the breast, and said, somewhat indistinctly: “You mean me.”

Mr. Grewgious touched himself on the breast, and said: “I mean us. Therefore, let them have their little discussions and councils together, when Mr. Edwin Drood comes back here at Christmas; and then you and I will step in, and put the final touches to the business.”

“So, you settled with her that you would come back at Christmas?” observed Jasper. “I see! Mr. Grewgious, as you quite fairly said just now, there is such an exceptional attachment between my nephew and me, that I am more sensitive for the dear, fortunate, happy, happy fellow than for myself. But it is only right that the young lady should be considered, as you have pointed out, and that I should accept my cue from you. I accept it. I understand that at Christmas they will complete their preparations for May, and that their marriage will be put in final train by themselves, and that nothing will remain for us but to put ourselves in train also, and have everything ready for our formal release from our trusts, on Edwin’s birthday.”

“That is my understanding,” assented Mr. Grewgious, as they shook hands to part. “God bless them both!”

“God save them both!” cried Jasper.

“I said, bless them,” remarked the former, looking back over his shoulder.

“I said, save them,” returned the latter. “Is there any difference?”

It has been often enough remarked that women have a curious power of divining the characters of men, which would seem to be innate and instinctive; seeing that it is arrived at through no patient process of reasoning, that it can give no satisfactory or sufficient account of itself, and that it pronounces in the most confident manner even against accumulated observation on the part of the other sex. But it has not been quite so often remarked that this power (fallible, like every other human attribute) is for the most part absolutely incapable of self-revision; and that when it has delivered an adverse opinion which by all human lights is subsequently proved to have failed, it is undistinguishable from prejudice, in respect of its determination not to be corrected. Nay, the very possibility of contradiction or disproof, however remote, communicates to this feminine judgment from the first, in nine cases out of ten, the weakness attendant on the testimony of an interested witness; so personally and strongly does the fair diviner connect herself with her divination.

“Now, don’t you think, Ma dear,” said the Minor Canon to his mother one day as she sat at her knitting in his little book-room, “that you are rather hard on Mr. Neville?”

“No, I do not, Sept,” returned the old lady.

“Let us discuss it, Ma.”

“I have no objection to discuss it, Sept. I trust, my dear, I am always open to discussion.” There was a vibration in the old lady’s cap, as though she internally added: “and I should like to see the discussion that would change my mind!”

“Very good, Ma,” said her conciliatory son. “There is nothing like being open to discussion.”

“I hope not, my dear,” returned the old lady, evidently shut to it.

“Well! Mr. Neville, on that unfortunate occasion, commits himself under provocation.”

“And under mulled wine,” added the old lady.

“I must admit the wine. Though I believe the two young men were much alike in that regard.”

“I don’t,” said the old lady.

“Why not, Ma?”

“Because I don’t,” said the old lady. “Still, I am quite open to discussion.”

“But, my dear Ma, I cannot see how we are to discuss, if you take that line.”

“Blame Mr. Neville for it, Sept, and not me,” said the old lady, with stately severity.

“My dear Ma! why Mr. Neville?”

“Because,” said Mrs. Crisparkle, retiring on first principles, “he came home intoxicated, and did great discredit to this house, and showed great disrespect to this family.”

“That is not to be denied, Ma. He was then, and he is now, very sorry for it.”

“But for Mr. Jasper’s well-bred consideration in coming up to me, next day, after service, in the Nave itself, with his gown still on, and expressing his hope that I had not been greatly alarmed or had my rest violently broken, I believe I might never have heard of that disgraceful transaction,” said the old lady.

“To be candid, Ma, I think I should have kept it from you if I could: though I had not decidedly made up my mind. I was following Jasper out, to confer with him on the subject, and to consider the expediency of his and my jointly hushing the thing up on all accounts, when I found him speaking to you. Then it was too late.”

“Too late, indeed, Sept. He was still as pale as gentlemanly ashes at what had taken place in his rooms overnight.”

“If I had kept it from you, Ma, you may be sure it would have been for your peace and quiet, and for the good of the young men, and in my best discharge of my duty according to my lights.”

The old lady immediately walked across the room and kissed him: saying, “Of course, my dear Sept, I am sure of that.”

“However, it became the town-talk,” said Mr. Crisparkle, rubbing his ear, as his mother resumed her seat, and her knitting, “and passed out of my power.”

“And I said then, Sept,” returned the old lady, “that I thought ill of Mr. Neville. And I say now, that I think ill of Mr. Neville. And I said then, and I say now, that I hope Mr. Neville may come to good, but I don’t believe he will.” Here the cap vibrated again considerably.

“I am sorry to hear you say so, Ma—”

“I am sorry to say so, my dear,” interposed the old lady, knitting on firmly, “but I can’t help it.”

“—For,” pursued the Minor Canon, “it is undeniable that Mr. Neville is exceedingly industrious and attentive, and that he improves apace, and that he has—I hope I may say—an attachment to me.”

“There is no merit in the last article, my dear,” said the old lady, quickly; “and if he says there is, I think the worse of him for the boast.”

“But, my dear Ma, he never said there was.”

“Perhaps not,” returned the old lady; “still, I don’t see that it greatly signifies.”

There was no impatience in the pleasant look with which Mr. Crisparkle contemplated the pretty old piece of china as it knitted; but there was, certainly, a humorous sense of its not being a piece of china to argue with very closely.

“Besides, Sept, ask yourself what he would be without his sister. You know what an influence she has over him; you know what a capacity she has; you know that whatever he reads with you, he reads with her. Give her her fair share of your praise, and how much do you leave for him?”

At these words Mr. Crisparkle fell into a little reverie, in which he thought of several things. He thought of the times he had seen the brother and sister together in deep converse over one of his own old college books; now, in the rimy mornings, when he made those sharpening pilgrimages to Cloisterham Weir; now, in the sombre evenings, when he faced the wind at sunset, having climbed his favourite outlook, a beetling fragment of monastery ruin; and the two studious figures passed below him along the margin of the river, in which the town fires and lights already shone, making the landscape bleaker. He thought how the consciousness had stolen upon him that in teaching one, he was teaching two; and how he had almost insensibly adapted his explanations to both minds—that with which his own was daily in contact, and that which he only approached through it. He thought of the gossip that had reached him from the Nuns’ House, to the effect that Helena, whom he had mistrusted as so proud and fierce, submitted herself to the fairy-bride (as he called her), and learnt from her what she knew. He thought of the picturesque alliance between those two, externally so very different. He thought—perhaps most of all—could it be that these things were yet but so many weeks old, and had become an integral part of his life?

As, whenever the Reverend Septimus fell a-musing, his good mother took it to be an infallible sign that he “wanted support,” the blooming old lady made all haste to the dining-room closet, to produce from it the support embodied in a glass of Constantia and a home-made biscuit. It was a most wonderful closet, worthy of Cloisterham and of Minor Canon Corner. Above it, a portrait of Handel in a flowing wig beamed down at the spectator, with a knowing air of being up to the contents of the closet, and a musical air of intending to combine all its harmonies in one delicious fugue. No common closet with a vulgar door on hinges, openable all at once, and leaving nothing to be disclosed by degrees, this rare closet had a lock in mid-air, where two perpendicular slides met; the one falling down, and the other pushing up. The upper slide, on being pulled down (leaving the lower a double mystery), revealed deep shelves of pickle-jars, jam-pots, tin canisters, spice-boxes, and agreeably outlandish vessels of blue and white, the luscious lodgings of preserved tamarinds and ginger. Every benevolent inhabitant of this retreat had his name inscribed upon his stomach. The pickles, in a uniform of rich brown double-breasted buttoned coat, and yellow or sombre drab continuations, announced their portly forms, in printed capitals, as Walnut, Gherkin, Onion, Cabbage, Cauliflower, Mixed, and other members of that noble family. The jams, as being of a less masculine temperament, and as wearing curlpapers, announced themselves in feminine caligraphy, like a soft whisper, to be Raspberry, Gooseberry, Apricot, Plum, Damson, Apple, and Peach. The scene closing on these charmers, and the lower slide ascending, oranges were revealed, attended by a mighty japanned sugar-box, to temper their acerbity if unripe. Home-made biscuits waited at the Court of these Powers, accompanied by a goodly fragment of plum-cake, and various slender ladies’ fingers, to be dipped into sweet wine and kissed. Lowest of all, a compact leaden-vault enshrined the sweet wine and a stock of cordials: whence issued whispers of Seville Orange, Lemon, Almond, and Caraway-seed. There was a crowning air upon this closet of closets, of having been for ages hummed through by the Cathedral bell and organ, until those venerable bees had made sublimated honey of everything in store; and it was always observed that every dipper among the shelves (deep, as has been noticed, and swallowing up head, shoulders, and elbows) came forth again mellow-faced, and seeming to have undergone a saccharine transfiguration.

The Reverend Septimus yielded himself up quite as willing a victim to a nauseous medicinal herb-closet, also presided over by the china shepherdess, as to this glorious cupboard. To what amazing infusions of gentian, peppermint, gilliflower, sage, parsley, thyme, rue, rosemary, and dandelion, did his courageous stomach submit itself! In what wonderful wrappers, enclosing layers of dried leaves, would he swathe his rosy and contented face, if his mother suspected him of a toothache! What botanical blotches would he cheerfully stick upon his cheek, or forehead, if the dear old lady convicted him of an imperceptible pimple there! Into this herbaceous penitentiary, situated on an upper staircase-landing: a low and narrow whitewashed cell, where bunches of dried leaves hung from rusty hooks in the ceiling, and were spread out upon shelves, in company with portentous bottles: would the Reverend Septimus submissively be led, like the highly popular lamb who has so long and unresistingly been led to the slaughter, and there would he, unlike that lamb, bore nobody but himself. Not even doing that much, so that the old lady were busy and pleased, he would quietly swallow what was given him, merely taking a corrective dip of hands and face into the great bowl of dried rose-leaves, and into the other great bowl of dried lavender, and then would go out, as confident in the sweetening powers of Cloisterham Weir and a wholesome mind, as Lady Macbeth was hopeless of those of all the seas that roll.

In the present instance the good Minor Canon took his glass of Constantia with an excellent grace, and, so supported to his mother’s satisfaction, applied himself to the remaining duties of the day. In their orderly and punctual progress they brought round Vesper Service and twilight. The Cathedral being very cold, he set off for a brisk trot after service; the trot to end in a charge at his favourite fragment of ruin, which was to be carried by storm, without a pause for breath.

He carried it in a masterly manner, and, not breathed even then, stood looking down upon the river. The river at Cloisterham is sufficiently near the sea to throw up oftentimes a quantity of seaweed. An unusual quantity had come in with the last tide, and this, and the confusion of the water, and the restless dipping and flapping of the noisy gulls, and an angry light out seaward beyond the brown-sailed barges that were turning black, foreshadowed a stormy night. In his mind he was contrasting the wild and noisy sea with the quiet harbour of Minor Canon Corner, when Helena and Neville Landless passed below him. He had had the two together in his thoughts all day, and at once climbed down to speak to them together. The footing was rough in an uncertain light for any tread save that of a good climber; but the Minor Canon was as good a climber as most men, and stood beside them before many good climbers would have been half-way down.

“A wild evening, Miss Landless! Do you not find your usual walk with your brother too exposed and cold for the time of year? Or at all events, when the sun is down, and the weather is driving in from the sea?”

Helena thought not. It was their favourite walk. It was very retired.

“It is very retired,” assented Mr. Crisparkle, laying hold of his opportunity straightway, and walking on with them. “It is a place of all others where one can speak without interruption, as I wish to do. Mr. Neville, I believe you tell your sister everything that passes between us?”

“Everything, sir.”

“Consequently,” said Mr. Crisparkle, “your sister is aware that I have repeatedly urged you to make some kind of apology for that unfortunate occurrence which befell on the night of your arrival here.” In saying it he looked to her, and not to him; therefore it was she, and not he, who replied:

“Yes.”

“I call it unfortunate, Miss Helena,” resumed Mr. Crisparkle, “forasmuch as it certainly has engendered a prejudice against Neville. There is a notion about, that he is a dangerously passionate fellow, of an uncontrollable and furious temper: he is really avoided as such.”

“I have no doubt he is, poor fellow,” said Helena, with a look of proud compassion at her brother, expressing a deep sense of his being ungenerously treated. “I should be quite sure of it, from your saying so; but what you tell me is confirmed by suppressed hints and references that I meet with every day.”

“Now,” Mr. Crisparkle again resumed, in a tone of mild though firm persuasion, “is not this to be regretted, and ought it not to be amended? These are early days of Neville’s in Cloisterham, and I have no fear of his outliving such a prejudice, and proving himself to have been misunderstood. But how much wiser to take action at once, than to trust to uncertain time! Besides, apart from its being politic, it is right. For there can be no question that Neville was wrong.”

“He was provoked,” Helena submitted.

“He was the assailant,” Mr. Crisparkle submitted.

They walked on in silence, until Helena raised her eyes to the Minor Canon’s face, and said, almost reproachfully: “O Mr. Crisparkle, would you have Neville throw himself at young Drood’s feet, or at Mr. Jasper’s, who maligns him every day? In your heart you cannot mean it. From your heart you could not do it, if his case were yours.”

“I have represented to Mr. Crisparkle, Helena,” said Neville, with a glance of deference towards his tutor, “that if I could do it from my heart, I would. But I cannot, and I revolt from the pretence. You forget however, that to put the case to Mr. Crisparkle as his own, is to suppose to have done what I did.”

“I ask his pardon,” said Helena.

“You see,” remarked Mr. Crisparkle, again laying hold of his opportunity, though with a moderate and delicate touch, “you both instinctively acknowledge that Neville did wrong. Then why stop short, and not otherwise acknowledge it?”

“Is there no difference,” asked Helena, with a little faltering in her manner; “between submission to a generous spirit, and submission to a base or trivial one?”

Before the worthy Minor Canon was quite ready with his argument in reference to this nice distinction, Neville struck in:

“Help me to clear myself with Mr. Crisparkle, Helena. Help me to convince him that I cannot be the first to make concessions without mockery and falsehood. My nature must be changed before I can do so, and it is not changed. I am sensible of inexpressible affront, and deliberate aggravation of inexpressible affront, and I am angry. The plain truth is, I am still as angry when I recall that night as I was that night.”

“Neville,” hinted the Minor Canon, with a steady countenance, “you have repeated that former action of your hands, which I so much dislike.”

“I am sorry for it, sir, but it was involuntary. I confessed that I was still as angry.”

“And I confess,” said Mr. Crisparkle, “that I hoped for better things.”

“I am sorry to disappoint you, sir, but it would be far worse to deceive you, and I should deceive you grossly if I pretended that you had softened me in this respect. The time may come when your powerful influence will do even that with the difficult pupil whose antecedents you know; but it has not come yet. Is this so, and in spite of my struggles against myself, Helena?”

She, whose dark eyes were watching the effect of what he said on Mr. Crisparkle’s face, replied—to Mr. Crisparkle, not to him: “It is so.” After a short pause, she answered the slightest look of inquiry conceivable, in her brother’s eyes, with as slight an affirmative bend of her own head; and he went on:

“I have never yet had the courage to say to you, sir, what in full openness I ought to have said when you first talked with me on this subject. It is not easy to say, and I have been withheld by a fear of its seeming ridiculous, which is very strong upon me down to this last moment, and might, but for my sister, prevent my being quite open with you even now.—I admire Miss Bud, sir, so very much, that I cannot bear her being treated with conceit or indifference; and even if I did not feel that I had an injury against young Drood on my own account, I should feel that I had an injury against him on hers.”

Mr. Crisparkle, in utter amazement, looked at Helena for corroboration, and met in her expressive face full corroboration, and a plea for advice.

“The young lady of whom you speak is, as you know, Mr. Neville, shortly to be married,” said Mr. Crisparkle, gravely; “therefore your admiration, if it be of that special nature which you seem to indicate, is outrageously misplaced. Moreover, it is monstrous that you should take upon yourself to be the young lady’s champion against her chosen husband. Besides, you have seen them only once. The young lady has become your sister’s friend; and I wonder that your sister, even on her behalf, has not checked you in this irrational and culpable fancy.”

“She has tried, sir, but uselessly. Husband or no husband, that fellow is incapable of the feeling with which I am inspired towards the beautiful young creature whom he treats like a doll. I say he is as incapable of it, as he is unworthy of her. I say she is sacrificed in being bestowed upon him. I say that I love her, and despise and hate him!” This with a face so flushed, and a gesture so violent, that his sister crossed to his side, and caught his arm, remonstrating, “Neville, Neville!”

Thus recalled to himself, he quickly became sensible of having lost the guard he had set upon his passionate tendency, and covered his face with his hand, as one repentant and wretched.

Mr. Crisparkle, watching him attentively, and at the same time meditating how to proceed, walked on for some paces in silence. Then he spoke:

“Mr. Neville, Mr. Neville, I am sorely grieved to see in you more traces of a character as sullen, angry, and wild, as the night now closing in. They are of too serious an aspect to leave me the resource of treating the infatuation you have disclosed, as undeserving serious consideration. I give it very serious consideration, and I speak to you accordingly. This feud between you and young Drood must not go on. I cannot permit it to go on any longer, knowing what I now know from you, and you living under my roof. Whatever prejudiced and unauthorised constructions your blind and envious wrath may put upon his character, it is a frank, good-natured character. I know I can trust to it for that. Now, pray observe what I am about to say. On reflection, and on your sister’s representation, I am willing to admit that, in making peace with young Drood, you have a right to be met half-way. I will engage that you shall be, and even that young Drood shall make the first advance. This condition fulfilled, you will pledge me the honour of a Christian gentleman that the quarrel is for ever at an end on your side. What may be in your heart when you give him your hand, can only be known to the Searcher of all hearts; but it will never go well with you, if there be any treachery there. So far, as to that; next as to what I must again speak of as your infatuation. I understand it to have been confided to me, and to be known to no other person save your sister and yourself. Do I understand aright?”

Helena answered in a low voice: “It is only known to us three who are here together.”

“It is not at all known to the young lady, your friend?”

“On my soul, no!”

“I require you, then, to give me your similar and solemn pledge, Mr. Neville, that it shall remain the secret it is, and that you will take no other action whatsoever upon it than endeavouring (and that most earnestly) to erase it from your mind. I will not tell you that it will soon pass; I will not tell you that it is the fancy of the moment; I will not tell you that such caprices have their rise and fall among the young and ardent every hour; I will leave you undisturbed in the belief that it has few parallels or none, that it will abide with you a long time, and that it will be very difficult to conquer. So much the more weight shall I attach to the pledge I require from you, when it is unreservedly given.”

The young man twice or thrice essayed to speak, but failed.

“Let me leave you with your sister, whom it is time you took home,” said Mr. Crisparkle. “You will find me alone in my room by-and-by.”

“Pray do not leave us yet,” Helena implored him. “Another minute.”

“I should not,” said Neville, pressing his hand upon his face, “have needed so much as another minute, if you had been less patient with me, Mr. Crisparkle, less considerate of me, and less unpretendingly good and true. O, if in my childhood I had known such a guide!”

“Follow your guide now, Neville,” murmured Helena, “and follow him to Heaven!”

There was that in her tone which broke the good Minor Canon’s voice, or it would have repudiated her exaltation of him. As it was, he laid a finger on his lips, and looked towards her brother.

“To say that I give both pledges, Mr. Crisparkle, out of my innermost heart, and to say that there is no treachery in it, is to say nothing!” Thus Neville, greatly moved. “I beg your forgiveness for my miserable lapse into a burst of passion.”

“Not mine, Neville, not mine. You know with whom forgiveness lies, as the highest attribute conceivable. Miss Helena, you and your brother are twin children. You came into this world with the same dispositions, and you passed your younger days together surrounded by the same adverse circumstances. What you have overcome in yourself, can you not overcome in him? You see the rock that lies in his course. Who but you can keep him clear of it?”

“Who but you, sir?” replied Helena. “What is my influence, or my weak wisdom, compared with yours!”

“You have the wisdom of Love,” returned the Minor Canon, “and it was the highest wisdom ever known upon this earth, remember. As to mine—but the less said of that commonplace commodity the better. Good night!”

She took the hand he offered her, and gratefully and almost reverently raised it to her lips.

“Tut!” said the Minor Canon softly, “I am much overpaid!” and turned away.

Retracing his steps towards the Cathedral Close, he tried, as he went along in the dark, to think out the best means of bringing to pass what he had promised to effect, and what must somehow be done. “I shall probably be asked to marry them,” he reflected, “and I would they were married and gone! But this presses first.”

He debated principally whether he should write to young Drood, or whether he should speak to Jasper. The consciousness of being popular with the whole Cathedral establishment inclined him to the latter course, and the well-timed sight of the lighted gatehouse decided him to take it. “I will strike while the iron is hot,” he said, “and see him now.”

Jasper was lying asleep on a couch before the fire, when, having ascended the postern-stair, and received no answer to his knock at the door, Mr. Crisparkle gently turned the handle and looked in. Long afterwards he had cause to remember how Jasper sprang from the couch in a delirious state between sleeping and waking, and crying out: “What is the matter? Who did it?”

“It is only I, Jasper. I am sorry to have disturbed you.”

The glare of his eyes settled down into a look of recognition, and he moved a chair or two, to make a way to the fireside.

“I was dreaming at a great rate, and am glad to be disturbed from an indigestive after-dinner sleep. Not to mention that you are always welcome.”

“Thank you. I am not confident,” returned Mr. Crisparkle, as he sat himself down in the easy-chair placed for him, “that my subject will at first sight be quite as welcome as myself; but I am a minister of peace, and I pursue my subject in the interests of peace. In a word, Jasper, I want to establish peace between these two young fellows.”

A very perplexed expression took hold of Mr. Jasper’s face; a very perplexing expression too, for Mr. Crisparkle could make nothing of it.

“How?” was Jasper’s inquiry, in a low and slow voice, after a silence.

“For the ‘How’ I come to you. I want to ask you to do me the great favour and service of interposing with your nephew (I have already interposed with Mr. Neville), and getting him to write you a short note, in his lively way, saying that he is willing to shake hands. I know what a good-natured fellow he is, and what influence you have with him. And without in the least defending Mr. Neville, we must all admit that he was bitterly stung.”

Jasper turned that perplexed face towards the fire. Mr. Crisparkle continuing to observe it, found it even more perplexing than before, inasmuch as it seemed to denote (which could hardly be) some close internal calculation.

“I know that you are not prepossessed in Mr. Neville’s favour,” the Minor Canon was going on, when Jasper stopped him:

“You have cause to say so. I am not, indeed.”

“Undoubtedly; and I admit his lamentable violence of temper, though I hope he and I will get the better of it between us. But I have exacted a very solemn promise from him as to his future demeanour towards your nephew, if you do kindly interpose; and I am sure he will keep it.”

“You are always responsible and trustworthy, Mr. Crisparkle. Do you really feel sure that you can answer for him so confidently?”

“I do.”

The perplexed and perplexing look vanished.

“Then you relieve my mind of a great dread, and a heavy weight,” said Jasper; “I will do it.”

Mr. Crisparkle, delighted by the swiftness and completeness of his success, acknowledged it in the handsomest terms.

“I will do it,” repeated Jasper, “for the comfort of having your guarantee against my vague and unfounded fears. You will laugh—but do you keep a Diary?”

“A line for a day; not more.”

“A line for a day would be quite as much as my uneventful life would need, Heaven knows,” said Jasper, taking a book from a desk, “but that my Diary is, in fact, a Diary of Ned’s life too. You will laugh at this entry; you will guess when it was made:

“‘Past midnight.—After what I have just now seen, I have a morbid dread upon me of some horrible consequences resulting to my dear boy, that I cannot reason with or in any way contend against. All my efforts are vain. The demoniacal passion of this Neville Landless, his strength in his fury, and his savage rage for the destruction of its object, appal me. So profound is the impression, that twice since I have gone into my dear boy’s room, to assure myself of his sleeping safely, and not lying dead in his blood.’

“Here is another entry next morning:

“‘Ned up and away. Light-hearted and unsuspicious as ever. He laughed when I cautioned him, and said he was as good a man as Neville Landless any day. I told him that might be, but he was not as bad a man. He continued to make light of it, but I travelled with him as far as I could, and left him most unwillingly. I am unable to shake off these dark intangible presentiments of evil—if feelings founded upon staring facts are to be so called.’

“Again and again,” said Jasper, in conclusion, twirling the leaves of the book before putting it by, “I have relapsed into these moods, as other entries show. But I have now your assurance at my back, and shall put it in my book, and make it an antidote to my black humours.”

“Such an antidote, I hope,” returned Mr. Crisparkle, “as will induce you before long to consign the black humours to the flames. I ought to be the last to find any fault with you this evening, when you have met my wishes so freely; but I must say, Jasper, that your devotion to your nephew has made you exaggerative here.”

“You are my witness,” said Jasper, shrugging his shoulders, “what my state of mind honestly was, that night, before I sat down to write, and in what words I expressed it. You remember objecting to a word I used, as being too strong? It was a stronger word than any in my Diary.”

“Well, well. Try the antidote,” rejoined Mr. Crisparkle; “and may it give you a brighter and better view of the case! We will discuss it no more now. I have to thank you for myself, thank you sincerely.”

“You shall find,” said Jasper, as they shook hands, “that I will not do the thing you wish me to do, by halves. I will take care that Ned, giving way at all, shall give way thoroughly.”

On the third day after this conversation, he called on Mr. Crisparkle with the following letter:

“MY DEAR JACK,
    “I am touched by your account of your interview with Mr. Crisparkle, whom I much respect and esteem. At once I openly say that I forgot myself on that occasion quite as much as Mr. Landless did, and that I wish that bygone to be a bygone, and all to be right again.
    “Look here, dear old boy. Ask Mr. Landless to dinner on Christmas Eve (the better the day the better the deed), and let there be only we three, and let us shake hands all round there and then, and say no more about it.

“My dear Jack,
“Ever your most affectionate,
“EDWIN DROOD.

“P.S. Love to Miss Pussy at the next music-lesson.”

“You expect Mr. Neville, then?” said Mr. Crisparkle.

“I count upon his coming,” said Mr. Jasper.

Behind the most ancient part of Holborn, London, where certain gabled houses some centuries of age still stand looking on the public way, as if disconsolately looking for the Old Bourne that has long run dry, is a little nook composed of two irregular quadrangles, called Staple Inn. It is one of those nooks, the turning into which out of the clashing street, imparts to the relieved pedestrian the sensation of having put cotton in his ears, and velvet soles on his boots. It is one of those nooks where a few smoky sparrows twitter in smoky trees, as though they called to one another, “Let us play at country,” and where a few feet of garden-mould and a few yards of gravel enable them to do that refreshing violence to their tiny understandings. Moreover, it is one of those nooks which are legal nooks; and it contains a little Hall, with a little lantern in its roof: to what obstructive purposes devoted, and at whose expense, this history knoweth not.

In the days when Cloisterham took offence at the existence of a railroad afar off, as menacing that sensitive constitution, the property of us Britons: the odd fortune of which sacred institution it is to be in exactly equal degrees croaked about, trembled for, and boasted of, whatever happens to anything, anywhere in the world: in those days no neighbouring architecture of lofty proportions had arisen to overshadow Staple Inn. The westering sun bestowed bright glances on it, and the south-west wind blew into it unimpeded.

Neither wind nor sun, however, favoured Staple Inn one December afternoon towards six o’clock, when it was filled with fog, and candles shed murky and blurred rays through the windows of all its then-occupied sets of chambers; notably from a set of chambers in a corner house in the little inner quadrangle, presenting in black and white over its ugly portal the mysterious inscription:

In which set of chambers, never having troubled his head about the inscription, unless to bethink himself at odd times on glancing up at it, that haply it might mean Perhaps John Thomas, or Perhaps Joe Tyler, sat Mr. Grewgious writing by his fire.

Who could have told, by looking at Mr. Grewgious, whether he had ever known ambition or disappointment? He had been bred to the Bar, and had laid himself out for chamber practice; to draw deeds; “convey the wise it call,” as Pistol says. But Conveyancing and he had made such a very indifferent marriage of it that they had separated by consent—if there can be said to be separation where there has never been coming together.

No. Coy Conveyancing would not come to Mr. Grewgious. She was wooed, not won, and they went their several ways. But an Arbitration being blown towards him by some unaccountable wind, and he gaining great credit in it as one indefatigable in seeking out right and doing right, a pretty fat Receivership was next blown into his pocket by a wind more traceable to its source. So, by chance, he had found his niche. Receiver and Agent now, to two rich estates, and deputing their legal business, in an amount worth having, to a firm of solicitors on the floor below, he had snuffed out his ambition (supposing him to have ever lighted it), and had settled down with his snuffers for the rest of his life under the dry vine and fig-tree of P. J. T., who planted in seventeen-forty-seven.

Many accounts and account-books, many files of correspondence, and several strong boxes, garnished Mr. Grewgious’s room. They can scarcely be represented as having lumbered it, so conscientious and precise was their orderly arrangement. The apprehension of dying suddenly, and leaving one fact or one figure with any incompleteness or obscurity attaching to it, would have stretched Mr. Grewgious stone-dead any day. The largest fidelity to a trust was the life-blood of the man. There are sorts of life-blood that course more quickly, more gaily, more attractively; but there is no better sort in circulation.

There was no luxury in his room. Even its comforts were limited to its being dry and warm, and having a snug though faded fireside. What may be called its private life was confined to the hearth, and an easy-chair, and an old-fashioned occasional round table that was brought out upon the rug after business hours, from a corner where it elsewise remained turned up like a shining mahogany shield. Behind it, when standing thus on the defensive, was a closet, usually containing something good to drink. An outer room was the clerk’s room; Mr. Grewgious’s sleeping-room was across the common stair; and he held some not empty cellarage at the bottom of the common stair. Three hundred days in the year, at least, he crossed over to the hotel in Furnival’s Inn for his dinner, and after dinner crossed back again, to make the most of these simplicities until it should become broad business day once more, with P. J. T., date seventeen-forty-seven.

As Mr. Grewgious sat and wrote by his fire that afternoon, so did the clerk of Mr. Grewgious sit and write by his fire. A pale, puffy-faced, dark-haired person of thirty, with big dark eyes that wholly wanted lustre, and a dissatisfied doughy complexion, that seemed to ask to be sent to the baker’s, this attendant was a mysterious being, possessed of some strange power over Mr. Grewgious. As though he had been called into existence, like a fabulous Familiar, by a magic spell which had failed when required to dismiss him, he stuck tight to Mr. Grewgious’s stool, although Mr. Grewgious’s comfort and convenience would manifestly have been advanced by dispossessing him. A gloomy person with tangled locks, and a general air of having been reared under the shadow of that baleful tree of Java which has given shelter to more lies than the whole botanical kingdom, Mr. Grewgious, nevertheless, treated him with unaccountable consideration.

“Now, Bazzard,” said Mr. Grewgious, on the entrance of his clerk: looking up from his papers as he arranged them for the night: “what is in the wind besides fog?”

“Mr. Drood,” said Bazzard.

“What of him?”

“Has called,” said Bazzard.

“You might have shown him in.”

“I am doing it,” said Bazzard.

The visitor came in accordingly.

“Dear me!” said Mr. Grewgious, looking round his pair of office candles. “I thought you had called and merely left your name and gone. How do you do, Mr. Edwin? Dear me, you’re choking!”

“It’s this fog,” returned Edwin; “and it makes my eyes smart, like Cayenne pepper.”

“Is it really so bad as that? Pray undo your wrappers. It’s fortunate I have so good a fire; but Mr. Bazzard has taken care of me.”

“No I haven’t,” said Mr. Bazzard at the door.

“Ah! then it follows that I must have taken care of myself without observing it,” said Mr. Grewgious. “Pray be seated in my chair. No. I beg! Coming out of such an atmosphere, in my chair.”

Edwin took the easy-chair in the corner; and the fog he had brought in with him, and the fog he took off with his greatcoat and neck-shawl, was speedily licked up by the eager fire.

“I look,” said Edwin, smiling, “as if I had come to stop.”

“—By the by,” cried Mr. Grewgious; “excuse my interrupting you; do stop. The fog may clear in an hour or two. We can have dinner in from just across Holborn. You had better take your Cayenne pepper here than outside; pray stop and dine.”

“You are very kind,” said Edwin, glancing about him as though attracted by the notion of a new and relishing sort of gipsy-party.

“Not at all,” said Mr. Grewgious; “you are very kind to join issue with a bachelor in chambers, and take pot-luck. And I’ll ask,” said Mr. Grewgious, dropping his voice, and speaking with a twinkling eye, as if inspired with a bright thought: “I’ll ask Bazzard. He mightn’t like it else.—Bazzard!”

Bazzard reappeared.

“Dine presently with Mr. Drood and me.”

“If I am ordered to dine, of course I will, sir,” was the gloomy answer.

“Save the man!” cried Mr. Grewgious. “You’re not ordered; you’re invited.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Bazzard; “in that case I don’t care if I do.”

“That’s arranged. And perhaps you wouldn’t mind,” said Mr. Grewgious, “stepping over to the hotel in Furnival’s, and asking them to send in materials for laying the cloth. For dinner we’ll have a tureen of the hottest and strongest soup available, and we’ll have the best made-dish that can be recommended, and we’ll have a joint (such as a haunch of mutton), and we’ll have a goose, or a turkey, or any little stuffed thing of that sort that may happen to be in the bill of fare—in short, we’ll have whatever there is on hand.”

These liberal directions Mr. Grewgious issued with his usual air of reading an inventory, or repeating a lesson, or doing anything else by rote. Bazzard, after drawing out the round table, withdrew to execute them.

“I was a little delicate, you see,” said Mr. Grewgious, in a lower tone, after his clerk’s departure, “about employing him in the foraging or commissariat department. Because he mightn’t like it.”

“He seems to have his own way, sir,” remarked Edwin.

“His own way?” returned Mr. Grewgious. “O dear no! Poor fellow, you quite mistake him. If he had his own way, he wouldn’t be here.”

“I wonder where he would be!” Edwin thought. But he only thought it, because Mr. Grewgious came and stood himself with his back to the other corner of the fire, and his shoulder-blades against the chimneypiece, and collected his skirts for easy conversation.

“I take it, without having the gift of prophecy, that you have done me the favour of looking in to mention that you are going down yonder—where I can tell you, you are expected—and to offer to execute any little commission from me to my charming ward, and perhaps to sharpen me up a bit in any proceedings? Eh, Mr. Edwin?”

“I called, sir, before going down, as an act of attention.”

“Of attention!” said Mr. Grewgious. “Ah! of course, not of impatience?”

“Impatience, sir?”

Mr. Grewgious had meant to be arch—not that he in the remotest degree expressed that meaning—and had brought himself into scarcely supportable proximity with the fire, as if to burn the fullest effect of his archness into himself, as other subtle impressions are burnt into hard metals. But his archness suddenly flying before the composed face and manner of his visitor, and only the fire remaining, he started and rubbed himself.

“I have lately been down yonder,” said Mr. Grewgious, rearranging his skirts; “and that was what I referred to, when I said I could tell you you are expected.”

“Indeed, sir! Yes; I knew that Pussy was looking out for me.”

“Do you keep a cat down there?” asked Mr. Grewgious.

Edwin coloured a little as he explained: “I call Rosa Pussy.”

“O, really,” said Mr. Grewgious, smoothing down his head; “that’s very affable.”

Edwin glanced at his face, uncertain whether or no he seriously objected to the appellation. But Edwin might as well have glanced at the face of a clock.

“A pet name, sir,” he explained again.

“Umps,” said Mr. Grewgious, with a nod. But with such an extraordinary compromise between an unqualified assent and a qualified dissent, that his visitor was much disconcerted.

“Did PRosa—” Edwin began by way of recovering himself.

“PRosa?” repeated Mr. Grewgious.

“I was going to say Pussy, and changed my mind;—did she tell you anything about the Landlesses?”

“No,” said Mr. Grewgious. “What is the Landlesses? An estate? A villa? A farm?”

“A brother and sister. The sister is at the Nuns’ House, and has become a great friend of P—”

“PRosa’s,” Mr. Grewgious struck in, with a fixed face.

“She is a strikingly handsome girl, sir, and I thought she might have been described to you, or presented to you perhaps?”

“Neither,” said Mr. Grewgious. “But here is Bazzard.”

Bazzard returned, accompanied by two waiters—an immovable waiter, and a flying waiter; and the three brought in with them as much fog as gave a new roar to the fire. The flying waiter, who had brought everything on his shoulders, laid the cloth with amazing rapidity and dexterity; while the immovable waiter, who had brought nothing, found fault with him. The flying waiter then highly polished all the glasses he had brought, and the immovable waiter looked through them. The flying waiter then flew across Holborn for the soup, and flew back again, and then took another flight for the made-dish, and flew back again, and then took another flight for the joint and poultry, and flew back again, and between whiles took supplementary flights for a great variety of articles, as it was discovered from time to time that the immovable waiter had forgotten them all. But let the flying waiter cleave the air as he might, he was always reproached on his return by the immovable waiter for bringing fog with him, and being out of breath. At the conclusion of the repast, by which time the flying waiter was severely blown, the immovable waiter gathered up the tablecloth under his arm with a grand air, and having sternly (not to say with indignation) looked on at the flying waiter while he set the clean glasses round, directed a valedictory glance towards Mr. Grewgious, conveying: “Let it be clearly understood between us that the reward is mine, and that Nil is the claim of this slave,” and pushed the flying waiter before him out of the room.

It was like a highly-finished miniature painting representing My Lords of the Circumlocution Department, Commandership-in-Chief of any sort, Government. It was quite an edifying little picture to be hung on the line in the National Gallery.

As the fog had been the proximate cause of this sumptuous repast, so the fog served for its general sauce. To hear the out-door clerks sneezing, wheezing, and beating their feet on the gravel was a zest far surpassing Doctor Kitchener’s. To bid, with a shiver, the unfortunate flying waiter shut the door before he had opened it, was a condiment of a profounder flavour than Harvey. And here let it be noticed, parenthetically, that the leg of this young man, in its application to the door, evinced the finest sense of touch: always preceding himself and tray (with something of an angling air about it), by some seconds: and always lingering after he and the tray had disappeared, like Macbeth’s leg when accompanying him off the stage with reluctance to the assassination of Duncan.

The host had gone below to the cellar, and had brought up bottles of ruby, straw-coloured, and golden drinks, which had ripened long ago in lands where no fogs are, and had since lain slumbering in the shade. Sparkling and tingling after so long a nap, they pushed at their corks to help the corkscrew (like prisoners helping rioters to force their gates), and danced out gaily. If P. J. T. in seventeen-forty-seven, or in any other year of his period, drank such wines—then, for a certainty, P. J. T. was Pretty Jolly Too.

Externally, Mr. Grewgious showed no signs of being mellowed by these glowing vintages. Instead of his drinking them, they might have been poured over him in his high-dried snuff form, and run to waste, for any lights and shades they caused to flicker over his face. Neither was his manner influenced. But, in his wooden way, he had observant eyes for Edwin; and when at the end of dinner, he motioned Edwin back to his own easy-chair in the fireside corner, and Edwin sank luxuriously into it after very brief remonstrance, Mr. Grewgious, as he turned his seat round towards the fire too, and smoothed his head and face, might have been seen looking at his visitor between his smoothing fingers.

“Bazzard!” said Mr. Grewgious, suddenly turning to him.

“I follow you, sir,” returned Bazzard; who had done his work of consuming meat and drink in a workmanlike manner, though mostly in speechlessness.

“I drink to you, Bazzard; Mr. Edwin, success to Mr. Bazzard!”

“Success to Mr. Bazzard!” echoed Edwin, with a totally unfounded appearance of enthusiasm, and with the unspoken addition: “What in, I wonder!”

“And May!” pursued Mr. Grewgious—“I am not at liberty to be definite—May!—my conversational powers are so very limited that I know I shall not come well out of this—May!—it ought to be put imaginatively, but I have no imagination—May!—the thorn of anxiety is as nearly the mark as I am likely to get—May it come out at last!”

Mr. Bazzard, with a frowning smile at the fire, put a hand into his tangled locks, as if the thorn of anxiety were there; then into his waistcoat, as if it were there; then into his pockets, as if it were there. In all these movements he was closely followed by the eyes of Edwin, as if that young gentleman expected to see the thorn in action. It was not produced, however, and Mr. Bazzard merely said: “I follow you, sir, and I thank you.”

“I am going,” said Mr. Grewgious, jingling his glass on the table with one hand, and bending aside under cover of the other, to whisper to Edwin, “to drink to my ward. But I put Bazzard first. He mightn’t like it else.”

This was said with a mysterious wink; or what would have been a wink, if, in Mr. Grewgious’s hands, it could have been quick enough. So Edwin winked responsively, without the least idea what he meant by doing so.

“And now,” said Mr. Grewgious, “I devote a bumper to the fair and fascinating Miss Rosa. Bazzard, the fair and fascinating Miss Rosa!”

“I follow you, sir,” said Bazzard, “and I pledge you!”

“And so do I!” said Edwin.

“Lord bless me,” cried Mr. Grewgious, breaking the blank silence which of course ensued: though why these pauses should come upon us when we have performed any small social rite, not directly inducive of self-examination or mental despondency, who can tell? “I am a particularly Angular man, and yet I fancy (if I may use the word, not having a morsel of fancy), that I could draw a picture of a true lover’s state of mind, to-night.”

“Let us follow you, sir,” said Bazzard, “and have the picture.”

“Mr. Edwin will correct it where it’s wrong,” resumed Mr. Grewgious, “and will throw in a few touches from the life. I dare say it is wrong in many particulars, and wants many touches from the life, for I was born a Chip, and have neither soft sympathies nor soft experiences. Well! I hazard the guess that the true lover’s mind is completely permeated by the beloved object of his affections. I hazard the guess that her dear name is precious to him, cannot be heard or repeated without emotion, and is preserved sacred. If he has any distinguishing appellation of fondness for her, it is reserved for her, and is not for common ears. A name that it would be a privilege to call her by, being alone with her own bright self, it would be a liberty, a coldness, an insensibility, almost a breach of good faith, to flaunt elsewhere.”

It was wonderful to see Mr. Grewgious sitting bolt upright, with his hands on his knees, continuously chopping this discourse out of himself: much as a charity boy with a very good memory might get his catechism said: and evincing no correspondent emotion whatever, unless in a certain occasional little tingling perceptible at the end of his nose.

“My picture,” Mr. Grewgious proceeded, “goes on to represent (under correction from you, Mr. Edwin), the true lover as ever impatient to be in the presence or vicinity of the beloved object of his affections; as caring very little for his case in any other society; and as constantly seeking that. If I was to say seeking that, as a bird seeks its nest, I should make an ass of myself, because that would trench upon what I understand to be poetry; and I am so far from trenching upon poetry at any time, that I never, to my knowledge, got within ten thousand miles of it. And I am besides totally unacquainted with the habits of birds, except the birds of Staple Inn, who seek their nests on ledges, and in gutter-pipes and chimneypots, not constructed for them by the beneficent hand of Nature. I beg, therefore, to be understood as foregoing the bird’s-nest. But my picture does represent the true lover as having no existence separable from that of the beloved object of his affections, and as living at once a doubled life and a halved life. And if I do not clearly express what I mean by that, it is either for the reason that having no conversational powers, I cannot express what I mean, or that having no meaning, I do not mean what I fail to express. Which, to the best of my belief, is not the case.”

Edwin had turned red and turned white, as certain points of this picture came into the light. He now sat looking at the fire, and bit his lip.

“The speculations of an Angular man,” resumed Mr. Grewgious, still sitting and speaking exactly as before, “are probably erroneous on so globular a topic. But I figure to myself (subject, as before, to Mr. Edwin’s correction), that there can be no coolness, no lassitude, no doubt, no indifference, no half fire and half smoke state of mind, in a real lover. Pray am I at all near the mark in my picture?”

As abrupt in his conclusion as in his commencement and progress, he jerked this inquiry at Edwin, and stopped when one might have supposed him in the middle of his oration.

“I should say, sir,” stammered Edwin, “as you refer the question to me—”

“Yes,” said Mr. Grewgious, “I refer it to you, as an authority.”

“I should say, then, sir,” Edwin went on, embarrassed, “that the picture you have drawn is generally correct; but I submit that perhaps you may be rather hard upon the unlucky lover.”

“Likely so,” assented Mr. Grewgious, “likely so. I am a hard man in the grain.”

“He may not show,” said Edwin, “all he feels; or he may not—”

There he stopped so long, to find the rest of his sentence, that Mr. Grewgious rendered his difficulty a thousand times the greater by unexpectedly striking in with:

“No to be sure; he may not!”

After that, they all sat silent; the silence of Mr. Bazzard being occasioned by slumber.

“His responsibility is very great, though,” said Mr. Grewgious at length, with his eyes on the fire.

Edwin nodded assent, with his eyes on the fire.

“And let him be sure that he trifles with no one,” said Mr. Grewgious; “neither with himself, nor with any other.”

Edwin bit his lip again, and still sat looking at the fire.

“He must not make a plaything of a treasure. Woe betide him if he does! Let him take that well to heart,” said Mr. Grewgious.

Though he said these things in short sentences, much as the supposititious charity boy just now referred to might have repeated a verse or two from the Book of Proverbs, there was something dreamy (for so literal a man) in the way in which he now shook his right forefinger at the live coals in the grate, and again fell silent.

But not for long. As he sat upright and stiff in his chair, he suddenly rapped his knees, like the carved image of some queer Joss or other coming out of its reverie, and said: “We must finish this bottle, Mr. Edwin. Let me help you. I’ll help Bazzard too, though he is asleep. He mightn’t like it else.”

He helped them both, and helped himself, and drained his glass, and stood it bottom upward on the table, as though he had just caught a bluebottle in it.

“And now, Mr. Edwin,” he proceeded, wiping his mouth and hands upon his handkerchief: “to a little piece of business. You received from me, the other day, a certified copy of Miss Rosa’s father’s will. You knew its contents before, but you received it from me as a matter of business. I should have sent it to Mr. Jasper, but for Miss Rosa’s wishing it to come straight to you, in preference. You received it?”

“Quite safely, sir.”

“You should have acknowledged its receipt,” said Mr. Grewgious; “business being business all the world over. However, you did not.”

“I meant to have acknowledged it when I first came in this evening, sir.”

“Not a business-like acknowledgment,” returned Mr. Grewgious; “however, let that pass. Now, in that document you have observed a few words of kindly allusion to its being left to me to discharge a little trust, confided to me in conversation, at such time as I in my discretion may think best.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Mr. Edwin, it came into my mind just now, when I was looking at the fire, that I could, in my discretion, acquit myself of that trust at no better time than the present. Favour me with your attention, half a minute.”

He took a bunch of keys from his pocket, singled out by the candle-light the key he wanted, and then, with a candle in his hand, went to a bureau or escritoire, unlocked it, touched the spring of a little secret drawer, and took from it an ordinary ring-case made for a single ring. With this in his hand, he returned to his chair. As he held it up for the young man to see, his hand trembled.

“Mr. Edwin, this rose of diamonds and rubies delicately set in gold, was a ring belonging to Miss Rosa’s mother. It was removed from her dead hand, in my presence, with such distracted grief as I hope it may never be my lot to contemplate again. Hard man as I am, I am not hard enough for that. See how bright these stones shine!” opening the case. “And yet the eyes that were so much brighter, and that so often looked upon them with a light and a proud heart, have been ashes among ashes, and dust among dust, some years! If I had any imagination (which it is needless to say I have not), I might imagine that the lasting beauty of these stones was almost cruel.”

He closed the case again as he spoke.

“This ring was given to the young lady who was drowned so early in her beautiful and happy career, by her husband, when they first plighted their faith to one another. It was he who removed it from her unconscious hand, and it was he who, when his death drew very near, placed it in mine. The trust in which I received it, was, that, you and Miss Rosa growing to manhood and womanhood, and your betrothal prospering and coming to maturity, I should give it to you to place upon her finger. Failing those desired results, it was to remain in my possession.”

Some trouble was in the young man’s face, and some indecision was in the action of his hand, as Mr. Grewgious, looking steadfastly at him, gave him the ring.

“Your placing it on her finger,” said Mr. Grewgious, “will be the solemn seal upon your strict fidelity to the living and the dead. You are going to her, to make the last irrevocable preparations for your marriage. Take it with you.”

The young man took the little case, and placed it in his breast.

“If anything should be amiss, if anything should be even slightly wrong, between you; if you should have any secret consciousness that you are committing yourself to this step for no higher reason than because you have long been accustomed to look forward to it; then,” said Mr. Grewgious, “I charge you once more, by the living and by the dead, to bring that ring back to me!”

Here Bazzard awoke himself by his own snoring; and, as is usual in such cases, sat apoplectically staring at vacancy, as defying vacancy to accuse him of having been asleep.

“Bazzard!” said Mr. Grewgious, harder than ever.

“I follow you, sir,” said Bazzard, “and I have been following you.”

“In discharge of a trust, I have handed Mr. Edwin Drood a ring of diamonds and rubies. You see?”

Edwin reproduced the little case, and opened it; and Bazzard looked into it.

“I follow you both, sir,” returned Bazzard, “and I witness the transaction.”

Evidently anxious to get away and be alone, Edwin Drood now resumed his outer clothing, muttering something about time and appointments. The fog was reported no clearer (by the flying waiter, who alighted from a speculative flight in the coffee interest), but he went out into it; and Bazzard, after his manner, “followed” him.

Mr. Grewgious, left alone, walked softly and slowly to and fro, for an hour and more. He was restless to-night, and seemed dispirited.

“I hope I have done right,” he said. “The appeal to him seemed necessary. It was hard to lose the ring, and yet it must have gone from me very soon.”

He closed the empty little drawer with a sigh, and shut and locked the escritoire, and came back to the solitary fireside.

“Her ring,” he went on. “Will it come back to me? My mind hangs about her ring very uneasily to-night. But that is explainable. I have had it so long, and I have prized it so much! I wonder—”

He was in a wondering mood as well as a restless; for, though he checked himself at that point, and took another walk, he resumed his wondering when he sat down again.

“I wonder (for the ten-thousandth time, and what a weak fool I, for what can it signify now!) whether he confided the charge of their orphan child to me, because he knew—Good God, how like her mother she has become!”

“I wonder whether he ever so much as suspected that some one doted on her, at a hopeless, speechless distance, when he struck in and won her. I wonder whether it ever crept into his mind who that unfortunate some one was!”

“I wonder whether I shall sleep to-night! At all events, I will shut out the world with the bedclothes, and try.”

Mr. Grewgious crossed the staircase to his raw and foggy bedroom, and was soon ready for bed. Dimly catching sight of his face in the misty looking-glass, he held his candle to it for a moment.

“A likely some one, you, to come into anybody’s thoughts in such an aspect!” he exclaimed. “There! there! there! Get to bed, poor man, and cease to jabber!”

With that, he extinguished his light, pulled up the bedclothes around him, and with another sigh shut out the world. And yet there are such unexplored romantic nooks in the unlikeliest men, that even old tinderous and touchwoody P. J. T. Possibly Jabbered Thus, at some odd times, in or about seventeen-forty-seven.

When Mr. Sapsea has nothing better to do, towards evening, and finds the contemplation of his own profundity becoming a little monotonous in spite of the vastness of the subject, he often takes an airing in the Cathedral Close and thereabout. He likes to pass the churchyard with a swelling air of proprietorship, and to encourage in his breast a sort of benignant-landlord feeling, in that he has been bountiful towards that meritorious tenant, Mrs. Sapsea, and has publicly given her a prize. He likes to see a stray face or two looking in through the railings, and perhaps reading his inscription. Should he meet a stranger coming from the churchyard with a quick step, he is morally convinced that the stranger is “with a blush retiring,” as monumentally directed.

Mr. Sapsea’s importance has received enhancement, for he has become Mayor of Cloisterham. Without mayors, and many of them, it cannot be disputed that the whole framework of society—Mr. Sapsea is confident that he invented that forcible figure—would fall to pieces. Mayors have been knighted for “going up” with addresses: explosive machines intrepidly discharging shot and shell into the English Grammar. Mr. Sapsea may “go up” with an address. Rise, Sir Thomas Sapsea! Of such is the salt of the earth.

Mr. Sapsea has improved the acquaintance of Mr. Jasper, since their first meeting to partake of port, epitaph, backgammon, beef, and salad. Mr. Sapsea has been received at the gatehouse with kindred hospitality; and on that occasion Mr. Jasper seated himself at the piano, and sang to him, tickling his ears—figuratively—long enough to present a considerable area for tickling. What Mr. Sapsea likes in that young man is, that he is always ready to profit by the wisdom of his elders, and that he is sound, sir, at the core. In proof of which, he sang to Mr. Sapsea that evening, no kickshaw ditties, favourites with national enemies, but gave him the genuine George the Third home-brewed; exhorting him (as “my brave boys”) to reduce to a smashed condition all other islands but this island, and all continents, peninsulas, isthmuses, promontories, and other geographical forms of land soever, besides sweeping the seas in all directions. In short, he rendered it pretty clear that Providence made a distinct mistake in originating so small a nation of hearts of oak, and so many other verminous peoples.

Mr. Sapsea, walking slowly this moist evening near the churchyard with his hands behind him, on the look-out for a blushing and retiring stranger, turns a corner, and comes instead into the goodly presence of the Dean, conversing with the Verger and Mr. Jasper. Mr. Sapsea makes his obeisance, and is instantly stricken far more ecclesiastical than any Archbishop of York or Canterbury.

“You are evidently going to write a book about us, Mr. Jasper,” quoth the Dean; “to write a book about us. Well! We are very ancient, and we ought to make a good book. We are not so richly endowed in possessions as in age; but perhaps you will put that in your book, among other things, and call attention to our wrongs.”

Mr. Tope, as in duty bound, is greatly entertained by this.

“I really have no intention at all, sir,” replies Jasper, “of turning author or archæologist. It is but a whim of mine. And even for my whim, Mr. Sapsea here is more accountable than I am.”

“How so, Mr. Mayor?” says the Dean, with a nod of good-natured recognition of his Fetch. “How is that, Mr. Mayor?”

“I am not aware,” Mr. Sapsea remarks, looking about him for information, “to what the Very Reverend the Dean does me the honour of referring.” And then falls to studying his original in minute points of detail.

“Durdles,” Mr. Tope hints.

“Ay!” the Dean echoes; “Durdles, Durdles!”

“The truth is, sir,” explains Jasper, “that my curiosity in the man was first really stimulated by Mr. Sapsea. Mr. Sapsea’s knowledge of mankind and power of drawing out whatever is recluse or odd around him, first led to my bestowing a second thought upon the man: though of course I had met him constantly about. You would not be surprised by this, Mr. Dean, if you had seen Mr. Sapsea deal with him in his own parlour, as I did.”

“O!” cries Sapsea, picking up the ball thrown to him with ineffable complacency and pomposity; “yes, yes. The Very Reverend the Dean refers to that? Yes. I happened to bring Durdles and Mr. Jasper together. I regard Durdles as a Character.”

“A character, Mr. Sapsea, that with a few skilful touches you turn inside out,” says Jasper.

“Nay, not quite that,” returns the lumbering auctioneer. “I may have a little influence over him, perhaps; and a little insight into his character, perhaps. The Very Reverend the Dean will please to bear in mind that I have seen the world.” Here Mr. Sapsea gets a little behind the Dean, to inspect his coat-buttons.

“Well!” says the Dean, looking about him to see what has become of his copyist: “I hope, Mr. Mayor, you will use your study and knowledge of Durdles to the good purpose of exhorting him not to break our worthy and respected Choir-Master’s neck; we cannot afford it; his head and voice are much too valuable to us.”

Mr. Tope is again highly entertained, and, having fallen into respectful convulsions of laughter, subsides into a deferential murmur, importing that surely any gentleman would deem it a pleasure and an honour to have his neck broken, in return for such a compliment from such a source.

“I will take it upon myself, sir,” observes Sapsea loftily, “to answer for Mr. Jasper’s neck. I will tell Durdles to be careful of it. He will mind what I say. How is it at present endangered?” he inquires, looking about him with magnificent patronage.

“Only by my making a moonlight expedition with Durdles among the tombs, vaults, towers, and ruins,” returns Jasper. “You remember suggesting, when you brought us together, that, as a lover of the picturesque, it might be worth my while?”

“I remember!” replies the auctioneer. And the solemn idiot really believes that he does remember.

“Profiting by your hint,” pursues Jasper, “I have had some day-rambles with the extraordinary old fellow, and we are to make a moonlight hole-and-corner exploration to-night.”

“And here he is,” says the Dean.

Durdles with his dinner-bundle in his hand, is indeed beheld slouching towards them. Slouching nearer, and perceiving the Dean, he pulls off his hat, and is slouching away with it under his arm, when Mr. Sapsea stops him.

“Mind you take care of my friend,” is the injunction Mr. Sapsea lays upon him.

“What friend o’ yourn is dead?” asks Durdles. “No orders has come in for any friend o’ yourn.”

“I mean my live friend there.”

“O! him?” says Durdles. “He can take care of himself, can Mister Jarsper.”

“But do you take care of him too,” says Sapsea.

Whom Durdles (there being command in his tone) surlily surveys from head to foot.

“With submission to his Reverence the Dean, if you’ll mind what concerns you, Mr. Sapsea, Durdles he’ll mind what concerns him.”

“You’re out of temper,” says Mr. Sapsea, winking to the company to observe how smoothly he will manage him. “My friend concerns me, and Mr. Jasper is my friend. And you are my friend.”

“Don’t you get into a bad habit of boasting,” retorts Durdles, with a grave cautionary nod. “It’ll grow upon you.”

“You are out of temper,” says Sapsea again; reddening, but again sinking to the company.

“I own to it,” returns Durdles; “I don’t like liberties.”

Mr. Sapsea winks a third wink to the company, as who should say: “I think you will agree with me that I have settled his business;” and stalks out of the controversy.

Durdles then gives the Dean a good evening, and adding, as he puts his hat on, “You’ll find me at home, Mister Jarsper, as agreed, when you want me; I’m a-going home to clean myself,” soon slouches out of sight. This going home to clean himself is one of the man’s incomprehensible compromises with inexorable facts; he, and his hat, and his boots, and his clothes, never showing any trace of cleaning, but being uniformly in one condition of dust and grit.

The lamplighter now dotting the quiet Close with specks of light, and running at a great rate up and down his little ladder with that object—his little ladder under the sacred shadow of whose inconvenience generations had grown up, and which all Cloisterham would have stood aghast at the idea of abolishing—the Dean withdraws to his dinner, Mr. Tope to his tea, and Mr. Jasper to his piano. There, with no light but that of the fire, he sits chanting choir-music in a low and beautiful voice, for two or three hours; in short, until it has been for some time dark, and the moon is about to rise.

Then he closes his piano softly, softly changes his coat for a pea-jacket, 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 Choir-Master 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 longer-winded 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 fellow-explorer.

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 moonlit 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 moss-softened 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.

Once again, an unaccountable expedition this! Jasper (always moving softly with no visible reason) contemplates the scene, and especially that stillest part of it which the Cathedral overshadows. But he contemplates Durdles quite as curiously, and Durdles is by times conscious of his watchful eyes.

Only by times, because Durdles is growing drowsy. As aëronauts lighten the load they carry, when they wish to rise, similarly Durdles has lightened the wicker bottle in coming up. Snatches of sleep surprise him on his legs, and stop him in his talk. A mild fit of calenture seizes him, in which he deems that the ground so far below, is on a level with the tower, and would as lief walk off the tower into the air as not. Such is his state when they begin to come down. And as aëronauts make themselves heavier when they wish to descend, similarly Durdles charges himself with more liquid from the wicker bottle, that he may come down the better.

The iron gate attained and locked—but not before Durdles has tumbled twice, and cut an eyebrow open once—they descend into the crypt again, with the intent of issuing forth as they entered. But, while returning among those lanes of light, Durdles becomes so very uncertain, both of foot and speech, that he half drops, half throws himself down, by one of the heavy pillars, scarcely less heavy than itself, and indistinctly appeals to his companion for forty winks of a second each.

“If you will have it so, or must have it so,” replies Jasper, “I’ll not leave you here. Take them, while I walk to and fro.”

Durdles is asleep at once; and in his sleep he dreams a dream.

It is not much of a dream, considering the vast extent of the domains of dreamland, and their wonderful productions; it is only remarkable for being unusually restless and unusually real. He dreams of lying there, asleep, and yet counting his companion’s footsteps as he walks to and fro. He dreams that the footsteps die away into distance of time and of space, and that something touches him, and that something falls from his hand. Then something clinks and gropes about, and he dreams that he is alone for so long a time, that the lanes of light take new directions as the moon advances in her course. From succeeding unconsciousness he passes into a dream of slow uneasiness from cold; and painfully awakes to a perception of the lanes of light—really changed, much as he had dreamed—and Jasper walking among them, beating his hands and feet.

“Holloa!” Durdles cries out, unmeaningly alarmed.

“Awake at last?” says Jasper, coming up to him. “Do you know that your forties have stretched into thousands?”

“No.”

“They have though.”

“What’s the time?”

“Hark! The bells are going in the Tower!”

They strike four quarters, and then the great bell strikes.

“Two!” cries Durdles, scrambling up; “why didn’t you try to wake me, Mister Jarsper?”

“I did. I might as well have tried to wake the dead—your own family of dead, up in the corner there.”

“Did you touch me?”

“Touch you! Yes. Shook you.”

As Durdles recalls that touching something in his dream, he looks down on the pavement, and sees the key of the crypt door lying close to where he himself lay.

“I dropped you, did I?” he says, picking it up, and recalling that part of his dream. As he gathers himself up again into an upright position, or into a position as nearly upright as he ever maintains, he is again conscious of being watched by his companion.

“Well?” says Jasper, smiling, “are you quite ready? Pray don’t hurry.”

“Let me get my bundle right, Mister Jarsper, and I’m with you.” As he ties it afresh, he is once more conscious that he is very narrowly observed.

“What do you suspect me of, Mister Jarsper?” he asks, with drunken displeasure. “Let them as has any suspicions of Durdles name ’em.”

“I’ve no suspicions of you, my good Mr. Durdles; but I have suspicions that my bottle was filled with something stiffer than either of us supposed. And I also have suspicions,” Jasper adds, taking it from the pavement and turning it bottom upwards, “that it’s empty.”

Durdles condescends to laugh at this. Continuing to chuckle when his laugh is over, as though remonstrant with himself on his drinking powers, he rolls to the door and unlocks it. They both pass out, and Durdles relocks it, and pockets his key.

“A thousand thanks for a curious and interesting night,” says Jasper, giving him his hand; “you can make your own way home?”

“I should think so!” answers Durdles. “If you was to offer Durdles the affront to show him his way home, he wouldn’t go home.

Durdles wouldn’t go home till morning;
And then Durdles wouldn’t go home,

Durdles wouldn’t.” This with the utmost defiance.

“Good-night, then.”

“Good-night, Mister Jarsper.”

Each is turning his own way, when a sharp whistle rends the silence, and the jargon is yelped out:

Widdy widdy wen!
I—ket—ches—Im—out—ar—ter—ten.
Widdy widdy wy!
Then—E—don’t—go—then—I—shy—
Widdy Widdy Wake-cock warning!”

Instantly afterwards, a rapid fire of stones rattles at the Cathedral wall, and the hideous small boy is beheld opposite, dancing in the moonlight.

“What! Is that baby-devil on the watch there!” cries Jasper in a fury: so quickly roused, and so violent, that he seems an older devil himself. “I shall shed the blood of that impish wretch! I know I shall do it!” Regardless of the fire, though it hits him more than once, he rushes at Deputy, collars him, and tries to bring him across. But Deputy is not to be so easily brought across. With a diabolical insight into the strongest part of his position, he is no sooner taken by the throat than he curls up his legs, forces his assailant to hang him, as it were, and gurgles in his throat, and screws his body, and twists, as already undergoing the first agonies of strangulation. There is nothing for it but to drop him. He instantly gets himself together, backs over to Durdles, and cries to his assailant, gnashing the great gap in front of his mouth with rage and malice:

“I’ll blind yer, s’elp me! I’ll stone yer eyes out, s’elp me! If I don’t have yer eyesight, bellows me!” At the same time dodging behind Durdles, and snarling at Jasper, now from this side of him, and now from that: prepared, if pounced upon, to dart away in all manner of curvilinear directions, and, if run down after all, to grovel in the dust, and cry: “Now, hit me when I’m down! Do it!”

“Don’t hurt the boy, Mister Jarsper,” urges Durdles, shielding him. “Recollect yourself.”

“He followed us to-night, when we first came here!”

“Yer lie, I didn’t!” replies Deputy, in his one form of polite contradiction.

“He has been prowling near us ever since!”

“Yer lie, I haven’t,” returns Deputy. “I’d only jist come out for my ’elth when I see you two a-coming out of the Kin-freederel. If

I—ket—ches—Im—out—ar—ter—ten!”

(with the usual rhythm and dance, though dodging behind Durdles), “it ain’t any fault, is it?”

“Take him home, then,” retorts Jasper, ferociously, though with a strong check upon himself, “and let my eyes be rid of the sight of you!”

Deputy, with another sharp whistle, at once expressing his relief, and his commencement of a milder stoning of Mr. Durdles, begins stoning that respectable gentleman home, as if he were a reluctant ox. Mr. Jasper goes to his gatehouse, brooding. And thus, as everything comes to an end, the unaccountable expedition comes to an end—for the time.

Miss Twinkleton’s establishment was about to undergo a serene hush. The Christmas recess was at hand. What had once, and at no remote period, been called, even by the erudite Miss Twinkleton herself, “the half,” but what was now called, as being more elegant, and more strictly collegiate, “the term,” would expire to-morrow. A noticeable relaxation of discipline had for some few days pervaded the Nuns’ House. Club suppers had occurred in the bedrooms, and a dressed tongue had been carved with a pair of scissors, and handed round with the curling tongs. Portions of marmalade had likewise been distributed on a service of plates constructed of curlpaper; and cowslip wine had been quaffed from the small squat measuring glass in which little Rickitts (a junior of weakly constitution) took her steel drops daily. The housemaids had been bribed with various fragments of riband, and sundry pairs of shoes more or less down at heel, to make no mention of crumbs in the beds; the airiest costumes had been worn on these festive occasions; and the daring Miss Ferdinand had even surprised the company with a sprightly solo on the comb-and-curlpaper, until suffocated in her own pillow by two flowing-haired executioners.

Nor were these the only tokens of dispersal. Boxes appeared in the bedrooms (where they were capital at other times), and a surprising amount of packing took place, out of all proportion to the amount packed. Largess, in the form of odds and ends of cold cream and pomatum, and also of hairpins, was freely distributed among the attendants. On charges of inviolable secrecy, confidences were interchanged respecting golden youth of England expected to call, “at home,” on the first opportunity. Miss Giggles (deficient in sentiment) did indeed profess that she, for her part, acknowledged such homage by making faces at the golden youth; but this young lady was outvoted by an immense majority.

On the last night before a recess, it was always expressly made a point of honour that nobody should go to sleep, and that Ghosts should be encouraged by all possible means. This compact invariably broke down, and all the young ladies went to sleep very soon, and got up very early.

The concluding ceremony came off at twelve o’clock on the day of departure; when Miss Twinkleton, supported by Mrs. Tisher, held a drawing-room in her own apartment (the globes already covered with brown Holland), where glasses of white-wine and plates of cut pound-cake were discovered on the table. Miss Twinkleton then said: Ladies, another revolving year had brought us round to that festive period at which the first feelings of our nature bounded in our—Miss Twinkleton was annually going to add “bosoms,” but annually stopped on the brink of that expression, and substituted “hearts.” Hearts; our hearts. Hem! Again a revolving year, ladies, had brought us to a pause in our studies—let us hope our greatly advanced studies—and, like the mariner in his bark, the warrior in his tent, the captive in his dungeon, and the traveller in his various conveyances, we yearned for home. Did we say, on such an occasion, in the opening words of Mr. Addison’s impressive tragedy:

“The dawn is overcast, the morning lowers,
And heavily in clouds brings on the day,
The great, th’ important day—?”

Not so. From horizon to zenith all was couleur de rose, for all was redolent of our relations and friends. Might we find them prospering as we expected; might they find us prospering as they expected! Ladies, we would now, with our love to one another, wish one another good-bye, and happiness, until we met again. And when the time should come for our resumption of those pursuits which (here a general depression set in all round), pursuits which, pursuits which;—then let us ever remember what was said by the Spartan General, in words too trite for repetition, at the battle it were superfluous to specify.

The handmaidens of the establishment, in their best caps, then handed the trays, and the young ladies sipped and crumbled, and the bespoken coaches began to choke the street. Then leave-taking was not long about; and Miss Twinkleton, in saluting each young lady’s cheek, confided to her an exceedingly neat letter, addressed to her next friend at law, “with Miss Twinkleton’s best compliments” in the corner. This missive she handed with an air as if it had not the least connexion with the bill, but were something in the nature of a delicate and joyful surprise.

So many times had Rosa seen such dispersals, and so very little did she know of any other Home, that she was contented to remain where she was, and was even better contented than ever before, having her latest friend with her. And yet her latest friendship had a blank place in it of which she could not fail to be sensible. Helena Landless, having been a party to her brother’s revelation about Rosa, and having entered into that compact of silence with Mr. Crisparkle, shrank from any allusion to Edwin Drood’s name. Why she so avoided it, was mysterious to Rosa, but she perfectly perceived the fact. But for the fact, she might have relieved her own little perplexed heart of some of its doubts and hesitations, by taking Helena into her confidence. As it was, she had no such vent: she could only ponder on her own difficulties, and wonder more and more why this avoidance of Edwin’s name should last, now that she knew—for so much Helena had told her—that a good understanding was to be reëstablished between the two young men, when Edwin came down.

It would have made a pretty picture, so many pretty girls kissing Rosa in the cold porch of the Nuns’ House, and that sunny little creature peeping out of it (unconscious of sly faces carved on spout and gable peeping at her), and waving farewells to the departing coaches, as if she represented the spirit of rosy youth abiding in the place to keep it bright and warm in its desertion. The hoarse High Street became musical with the cry, in various silvery voices, “Good-bye, Rosebud darling!” and the effigy of Mr. Sapsea’s father over the opposite doorway seemed to say to mankind: “Gentlemen, favour me with your attention to this charming little last lot left behind, and bid with a spirit worthy of the occasion!” Then the staid street, so unwontedly sparkling, youthful, and fresh for a few rippling moments, ran dry, and Cloisterham was itself again.

If Rosebud in her bower now waited Edwin Drood’s coming with an uneasy heart, Edwin for his part was uneasy too. With far less force of purpose in his composition than the childish beauty, crowned by acclamation fairy queen of Miss Twinkleton’s establishment, he had a conscience, and Mr. Grewgious had pricked it. That gentleman’s steady convictions of what was right and what was wrong in such a case as his, were neither to be frowned aside nor laughed aside. They would not be moved. But for the dinner in Staple Inn, and but for the ring he carried in the breast pocket of his coat, he would have drifted into their wedding-day without another pause for real thought, loosely trusting that all would go well, left alone. But that serious putting him on his truth to the living and the dead had brought him to a check. He must either give the ring to Rosa, or he must take it back. Once put into this narrowed way of action, it was curious that he began to consider Rosa’s claims upon him more unselfishly than he had ever considered them before, and began to be less sure of himself than he had ever been in all his easy-going days.

“I will be guided by what she says, and by how we get on,” was his decision, walking from the gatehouse to the Nuns’ House. “Whatever comes of it, I will bear his words in mind, and try to be true to the living and the dead.”

Rosa was dressed for walking. She expected him. It was a bright, frosty day, and Miss Twinkleton had already graciously sanctioned fresh air. Thus they got out together before it became necessary for either Miss Twinkleton, or the deputy high-priest Mrs. Tisher, to lay even so much as one of those usual offerings on the shrine of Propriety.

“My dear Eddy,” said Rosa, when they had turned out of the High Street, and had got among the quiet walks in the neighbourhood of the Cathedral and the river: “I want to say something very serious to you. I have been thinking about it for a long, long time.”

“I want to be serious with you too, Rosa dear. I mean to be serious and earnest.”

“Thank you, Eddy. And you will not think me unkind because I begin, will you? You will not think I speak for myself only, because I speak first? That would not be generous, would it? And I know you are generous!”

He said, “I hope I am not ungenerous to you, Rosa.” He called her Pussy no more. Never again.

“And there is no fear,” pursued Rosa, “of our quarrelling, is there? Because, Eddy,” clasping her hand on his arm, “we have so much reason to be very lenient to each other!”

“We will be, Rosa.”

“That’s a dear good boy! Eddy, let us be courageous. Let us change to brother and sister from this day forth.”

“Never be husband and wife?”

“Never!”

Neither spoke again for a little while. But after that pause he said, with some effort:

“Of course I know that this has been in both our minds, Rosa, and of course I am in honour bound to confess freely that it does not originate with you.”

“No, nor with you, dear,” she returned, with pathetic earnestness. “That sprung up between us. You are not truly happy in our engagement; I am not truly happy in it. O, I am so sorry, so sorry!” And there she broke into tears.

“I am deeply sorry too, Rosa. Deeply sorry for you.”

“And I for you, poor boy! And I for you!”

This pure young feeling, this gentle and forbearing feeling of each towards the other, brought with it its reward in a softening light that seemed to shine on their position. The relations between them did not look wilful, or capricious, or a failure, in such a light; they became elevated into something more self-denying, honourable, affectionate, and true.

“If we knew yesterday,” said Rosa, as she dried her eyes, “and we did know yesterday, and on many, many yesterdays, that we were far from right together in those relations which were not of our own choosing, what better could we do to-day than change them? It is natural that we should be sorry, and you see how sorry we both are; but how much better to be sorry now than then!”

“When, Rosa?”

“When it would be too late. And then we should be angry, besides.”

Another silence fell upon them.

“And you know,” said Rosa innocently, “you couldn’t like me then; and you can always like me now, for I shall not be a drag upon you, or a worry to you. And I can always like you now, and your sister will not tease or trifle with you. I often did when I was not your sister, and I beg your pardon for it.”

“Don’t let us come to that, Rosa; or I shall want more pardoning than I like to think of.”

“No, indeed, Eddy; you are too hard, my generous boy, upon yourself. Let us sit down, brother, on these ruins, and let me tell you how it was with us. I think I know, for I have considered about it very much since you were here last time. You liked me, didn’t you? You thought I was a nice little thing?”

“Everybody thinks that, Rosa.”

“Do they?” She knitted her brow musingly for a moment, and then flashed out with the bright little induction: “Well, but say they do. Surely it was not enough that you should think of me only as other people did; now, was it?”

The point was not to be got over. It was not enough.

“And that is just what I mean; that is just how it was with us,” said Rosa. “You liked me very well, and you had grown used to me, and had grown used to the idea of our being married. You accepted the situation as an inevitable kind of thing, didn’t you? It was to be, you thought, and why discuss or dispute it?”

It was new and strange to him to have himself presented to himself so clearly, in a glass of her holding up. He had always patronised her, in his superiority to her share of woman’s wit. Was that but another instance of something radically amiss in the terms on which they had been gliding towards a life-long bondage?

“All this that I say of you is true of me as well, Eddy. Unless it was, I might not be bold enough to say it. Only, the difference between us was, that by little and little there crept into my mind a habit of thinking about it, instead of dismissing it. My life is not so busy as yours, you see, and I have not so many things to think of. So I thought about it very much, and I cried about it very much too (though that was not your fault, poor boy); when all at once my guardian came down, to prepare for my leaving the Nuns’ House. I tried to hint to him that I was not quite settled in my mind, but I hesitated and failed, and he didn’t understand me. But he is a good, good man. And he put before me so kindly, and yet so strongly, how seriously we ought to consider, in our circumstances, that I resolved to speak to you the next moment we were alone and grave. And if I seemed to come to it easily just now, because I came to it all at once, don’t think it was so really, Eddy, for O, it was very, very hard, and O, I am very, very sorry!”

Her full heart broke into tears again. He put his arm about her waist, and they walked by the river-side together.

“Your guardian has spoken to me too, Rosa dear. I saw him before I left London.” His right hand was in his breast, seeking the ring; but he checked it, as he thought: “If I am to take it back, why should I tell her of it?”

“And that made you more serious about it, didn’t it, Eddy? And if I had not spoken to you, as I have, you would have spoken to me? I hope you can tell me so? I don’t like it to be all my doing, though it is so much better for us.”

“Yes, I should have spoken; I should have put everything before you; I came intending to do it. But I never could have spoken to you as you have spoken to me, Rosa.”

“Don’t say you mean so coldly or unkindly, Eddy, please, if you can help it.”

“I mean so sensibly and delicately, so wisely and affectionately.”

“That’s my dear brother!” She kissed his hand in a little rapture. “The dear girls will be dreadfully disappointed,” added Rosa, laughing, with the dewdrops glistening in her bright eyes. “They have looked forward to it so, poor pets!”

“Ah! but I fear it will be a worse disappointment to Jack,” said Edwin Drood, with a start. “I never thought of Jack!”

Her swift and intent look at him as he said the words could no more be recalled than a flash of lightning can. But it appeared as though she would have instantly recalled it, if she could; for she looked down, confused, and breathed quickly.

“You don’t doubt its being a blow to Jack, Rosa?”

She merely replied, and that evasively and hurriedly: Why should she? She had not thought about it. He seemed, to her, to have so little to do with it.

“My dear child! can you suppose that any one so wrapped up in another—Mrs. Tope’s expression: not mine—as Jack is in me, could fail to be struck all of a heap by such a sudden and complete change in my life? I say sudden, because it will be sudden to him, you know.”

She nodded twice or thrice, and her lips parted as if she would have assented. But she uttered no sound, and her breathing was no slower.

“How shall I tell Jack?” said Edwin, ruminating. If he had been less occupied with the thought, he must have seen her singular emotion. “I never thought of Jack. It must be broken to him, before the town-crier knows it. I dine with the dear fellow to-morrow and next day—Christmas Eve and Christmas Day—but it would never do to spoil his feast-days. He always worries about me, and moddley-coddleys in the merest trifles. The news is sure to overset him. How on earth shall this be broken to Jack?”

“He must be told, I suppose?” said Rosa.

“My dear Rosa! who ought to be in our confidence, if not Jack?”

“My guardian promised to come down, if I should write and ask him. I am going to do so. Would you like to leave it to him?”

“A bright idea!” cried Edwin. “The other trustee. Nothing more natural. He comes down, he goes to Jack, he relates what we have agreed upon, and he states our case better than we could. He has already spoken feelingly to you, he has already spoken feelingly to me, and he’ll put the whole thing feelingly to Jack. That’s it! I am not a coward, Rosa, but to tell you a secret, I am a little afraid of Jack.”

“No, no! you are not afraid of him!” cried Rosa, turning white, and clasping her hands.

“Why, sister Rosa, sister Rosa, what do you see from the turret?” said Edwin, rallying her. “My dear girl!”

“You frightened me.”

“Most unintentionally, but I am as sorry as if I had meant to do it. Could you possibly suppose for a moment, from any loose way of speaking of mine, that I was literally afraid of the dear fond fellow? What I mean is, that he is subject to a kind of paroxysm, or fit—I saw him in it once—and I don’t know but that so great a surprise, coming upon him direct from me whom he is so wrapped up in, might bring it on perhaps. Which—and this is the secret I was going to tell you—is another reason for your guardian’s making the communication. He is so steady, precise, and exact, that he will talk Jack’s thoughts into shape, in no time: whereas with me Jack is always impulsive and hurried, and, I may say, almost womanish.”

Rosa seemed convinced. Perhaps from her own very different point of view of “Jack,” she felt comforted and protected by the interposition of Mr. Grewgious between herself and him.

And now, Edwin Drood’s right hand closed again upon the ring in its little case, and again was checked by the consideration: “It is certain, now, that I am to give it back to him; then why should I tell her of it?” That pretty sympathetic nature which could be so sorry for him in the blight of their childish hopes of happiness together, and could so quietly find itself alone in a new world to weave fresh wreaths of such flowers as it might prove to bear, the old world’s flowers being withered, would be grieved by those sorrowful jewels; and to what purpose? Why should it be? They were but a sign of broken joys and baseless projects; in their very beauty they were (as the unlikeliest of men had said) almost a cruel satire on the loves, hopes, plans, of humanity, which are able to forecast nothing, and are so much brittle dust. Let them be. He would restore them to her guardian when he came down; he in his turn would restore them to the cabinet from which he had unwillingly taken them; and there, like old letters or old vows, or other records of old aspirations come to nothing, they would be disregarded, until, being valuable, they were sold into circulation again, to repeat their former round.

Let them be. Let them lie unspoken of, in his breast. However distinctly or indistinctly he entertained these thoughts, he arrived at the conclusion, Let them be. Among the mighty store of wonderful chains that are for ever forging, day and night, in the vast iron-works of time and circumstance, there was one chain forged in the moment of that small conclusion, riveted to the foundations of heaven and earth, and gifted with invincible force to hold and drag.

They walked on by the river. They began to speak of their separate plans. He would quicken his departure from England, and she would remain where she was, at least as long as Helena remained. The poor dear girls should have their disappointment broken to them gently, and, as the first preliminary, Miss Twinkleton should be confided in by Rosa, even in advance of the reappearance of Mr. Grewgious. It should be made clear in all quarters that she and Edwin were the best of friends. There had never been so serene an understanding between them since they were first affianced. And yet there was one reservation on each side; on hers, that she intended through her guardian to withdraw herself immediately from the tuition of her music-master; on his, that he did already entertain some wandering speculations whether it might ever come to pass that he would know more of Miss Landless.

The bright, frosty day declined as they walked and spoke together. The sun dipped in the river far behind them, and the old city lay red before them, as their walk drew to a close. The moaning water cast its seaweed duskily at their feet, when they turned to leave its margin; and the rooks hovered above them with hoarse cries, darker splashes in the darkening air.

“I will prepare Jack for my flitting soon,” said Edwin, in a low voice, “and I will but see your guardian when he comes, and then go before they speak together. It will be better done without my being by. Don’t you think so?”

“Yes.”

“We know we have done right, Rosa?”

“Yes.”

“We know we are better so, even now?”

“And shall be far, far better so by-and-by.”

Still there was that lingering tenderness in their hearts towards the old positions they were relinquishing, that they prolonged their parting. When they came among the elm-trees by the Cathedral, where they had last sat together, they stopped as by consent, and Rosa raised her face to his, as she had never raised it in the old days;—for they were old already.

“God bless you, dear! Good-bye!”

“God bless you, dear! Good-bye!”

They kissed each other fervently.

“Now, please take me home, Eddy, and let me be by myself.”

“Don’t look round, Rosa,” he cautioned her, as he drew her arm through his, and led her away. “Didn’t you see Jack?”

“No! Where?”

“Under the trees. He saw us, as we took leave of each other. Poor fellow! he little thinks we have parted. This will be a blow to him, I am much afraid!”

She hurried on, without resting, and hurried on until they had passed under the gatehouse into the street; once there, she asked:

“Has he followed us? You can look without seeming to. Is he behind?”

“No. Yes, he is! He has just passed out under the gateway. The dear, sympathetic old fellow likes to keep us in sight. I am afraid he will be bitterly disappointed!”

She pulled hurriedly at the handle of the hoarse old bell, and the gate soon opened. Before going in, she gave him one last, wide, wondering look, as if she would have asked him with imploring emphasis: “O! don’t you understand?” And out of that look he vanished from her view.

Christmas Eve in Cloisterham. A few strange faces in the streets; a few other faces, half strange and half familiar, once the faces of Cloisterham children, now the faces of men and women who come back from the outer world at long intervals to find the city wonderfully shrunken in size, as if it had not washed by any means well in the meanwhile. To these, the striking of the Cathedral clock, and the cawing of the rooks from the Cathedral tower, are like voices of their nursery time. To such as these, it has happened in their dying hours afar off, that they have imagined their chamber-floor to be strewn with the autumnal leaves fallen from the elm-trees in the Close: so have the rustling sounds and fresh scents of their earliest impressions revived when the circle of their lives was very nearly traced, and the beginning and the end were drawing close together.

Seasonable tokens are about. Red berries shine here and there in the lattices of Minor Canon Corner; Mr. and Mrs. Tope are daintily sticking sprigs of holly into the carvings and sconces of the Cathedral stalls, as if they were sticking them into the coat-button-holes of the Dean and Chapter. Lavish profusion is in the shops: particularly in the articles of currants, raisins, spices, candied peel, and moist sugar. An unusual air of gallantry and dissipation is abroad; evinced in an immense bunch of mistletoe hanging in the greengrocer’s shop doorway, and a poor little Twelfth Cake, culminating in the figure of a Harlequin—such a very poor little Twelfth Cake, that one would rather called it a Twenty-fourth Cake or a Forty-eighth Cake—to be raffled for at the pastrycook’s, terms one shilling per member. Public amusements are not wanting. The Wax-Work which made so deep an impression on the reflective mind of the Emperor of China is to be seen by particular desire during Christmas Week only, on the premises of the bankrupt livery-stable-keeper up the lane; and a new grand comic Christmas pantomime is to be produced at the Theatre: the latter heralded by the portrait of Signor Jacksonini the clown, saying “How do you do to-morrow?” quite as large as life, and almost as miserably. In short, Cloisterham is up and doing: though from this description the High School and Miss Twinkleton’s are to be excluded. From the former establishment the scholars have gone home, every one of them in love with one of Miss Twinkleton’s young ladies (who knows nothing about it); and only the handmaidens flutter occasionally in the windows of the latter. It is noticed, by the bye, that these damsels become, within the limits of decorum, more skittish when thus intrusted with the concrete representation of their sex, than when dividing the representation with Miss Twinkleton’s young ladies.

Three are to meet at the gatehouse to-night. How does each one of the three get through the day?

Neville Landless, though absolved from his books for the time by Mr. Crisparkle—whose fresh nature is by no means insensible to the charms of a holiday—reads and writes in his quiet room, with a concentrated air, until it is two hours past noon. He then sets himself to clearing his table, to arranging his books, and to tearing up and burning his stray papers. He makes a clean sweep of all untidy accumulations, puts all his drawers in order, and leaves no note or scrap of paper undestroyed, save such memoranda as bear directly on his studies. This done, he turns to his wardrobe, selects a few articles of ordinary wear—among them, change of stout shoes and socks for walking—and packs these in a knapsack. This knapsack is new, and he bought it in the High Street yesterday. He also purchased, at the same time and at the same place, a heavy walking-stick; strong in the handle for the grip of the hand, and iron-shod. He tries this, swings it, poises it, and lays it by, with the knapsack, on a window-seat. By this time his arrangements are complete.

He dresses for going out, and is in the act of going—indeed has left his room, and has met the Minor Canon on the staircase, coming out of his bedroom upon the same story—when he turns back again for his walking-stick, thinking he will carry it now. Mr. Crisparkle, who has paused on the staircase, sees it in his hand on his immediately reappearing, takes it from him, and asks him with a smile how he chooses a stick?

“Really I don’t know that I understand the subject,” he answers. “I chose it for its weight.”

“Much too heavy, Neville; much too heavy.”

“To rest upon in a long walk, sir?”

“Rest upon?” repeats Mr. Crisparkle, throwing himself into pedestrian form. “You don’t rest upon it; you merely balance with it.”

“I shall know better, with practice, sir. I have not lived in a walking country, you know.”

“True,” says Mr. Crisparkle. “Get into a little training, and we will have a few score miles together. I should leave you nowhere now. Do you come back before dinner?”

“I think not, as we dine early.”

Mr. Crisparkle gives him a bright nod and a cheerful good-bye; expressing (not without intention) absolute confidence and ease.

Neville repairs to the Nuns’ House, and requests that Miss Landless may be informed that her brother is there, by appointment. He waits at the gate, not even crossing the threshold; for he is on his parole not to put himself in Rosa’s way.

His sister is at least as mindful of the obligation they have taken on themselves as he can be, and loses not a moment in joining him. They meet affectionately, avoid lingering there, and walk towards the upper inland country.

“I am not going to tread upon forbidden ground, Helena,” says Neville, when they have walked some distance and are turning; “you will understand in another moment that I cannot help referring to—what shall I say?—my infatuation.”

“Had you not better avoid it, Neville? You know that I can hear nothing.”

“You can hear, my dear, what Mr. Crisparkle has heard, and heard with approval.”

“Yes; I can hear so much.”

“Well, it is this. I am not only unsettled and unhappy myself, but I am conscious of unsettling and interfering with other people. How do I know that, but for my unfortunate presence, you, and—and—the rest of that former party, our engaging guardian excepted, might be dining cheerfully in Minor Canon Corner to-morrow? Indeed it probably would be so. I can see too well that I am not high in the old lady’s opinion, and it is easy to understand what an irksome clog I must be upon the hospitalities of her orderly house—especially at this time of year—when I must be kept asunder from this person, and there is such a reason for my not being brought into contact with that person, and an unfavourable reputation has preceded me with such another person; and so on. I have put this very gently to Mr. Crisparkle, for you know his self-denying ways; but still I have put it. What I have laid much greater stress upon at the same time is, that I am engaged in a miserable struggle with myself, and that a little change and absence may enable me to come through it the better. So, the weather being bright and hard, I am going on a walking expedition, and intend taking myself out of everybody’s way (my own included, I hope) to-morrow morning.”

“When to come back?”

“In a fortnight.”

“And going quite alone?”

“I am much better without company, even if there were any one but you to bear me company, my dear Helena.”

“Mr. Crisparkle entirely agrees, you say?”

“Entirely. I am not sure but that at first he was inclined to think it rather a moody scheme, and one that might do a brooding mind harm. But we took a moonlight walk last Monday night, to talk it over at leisure, and I represented the case to him as it really is. I showed him that I do want to conquer myself, and that, this evening well got over, it is surely better that I should be away from here just now, than here. I could hardly help meeting certain people walking together here, and that could do no good, and is certainly not the way to forget. A fortnight hence, that chance will probably be over, for the time; and when it again arises for the last time, why, I can again go away. Farther, I really do feel hopeful of bracing exercise and wholesome fatigue. You know that Mr. Crisparkle allows such things their full weight in the preservation of his own sound mind in his own sound body, and that his just spirit is not likely to maintain one set of natural laws for himself and another for me. He yielded to my view of the matter, when convinced that I was honestly in earnest; and so, with his full consent, I start to-morrow morning. Early enough to be not only out of the streets, but out of hearing of the bells, when the good people go to church.”

Helena thinks it over, and thinks well of it. Mr. Crisparkle doing so, she would do so; but she does originally, out of her own mind, think well of it, as a healthy project, denoting a sincere endeavour and an active attempt at self-correction. She is inclined to pity him, poor fellow, for going away solitary on the great Christmas festival; but she feels it much more to the purpose to encourage him. And she does encourage him.

He will write to her?

He will write to her every alternate day, and tell her all his adventures.

Does he send clothes on in advance of him?

“My dear Helena, no. Travel like a pilgrim, with wallet and staff. My wallet—or my knapsack—is packed, and ready for strapping on; and here is my staff!”

He hands it to her; she makes the same remark as Mr. Crisparkle, that it is very heavy; and gives it back to him, asking what wood it is? Iron-wood.

Up to this point he has been extremely cheerful. Perhaps, the having to carry his case with her, and therefore to present it in its brightest aspect, has roused his spirits. Perhaps, the having done so with success, is followed by a revulsion. As the day closes in, and the city-lights begin to spring up before them, he grows depressed.

“I wish I were not going to this dinner, Helena.”

“Dear Neville, is it worth while to care much about it? Think how soon it will be over.”

“How soon it will be over!” he repeats gloomily. “Yes. But I don’t like it.”

There may be a moment’s awkwardness, she cheeringly represents to him, but it can only last a moment. He is quite sure of himself.

“I wish I felt as sure of everything else, as I feel of myself,” he answers her.

“How strangely you speak, dear! What do you mean?”

“Helena, I don’t know. I only know that I don’t like it. What a strange dead weight there is in the air!”

She calls his attention to those copperous clouds beyond the river, and says that the wind is rising. He scarcely speaks again, until he takes leave of her, at the gate of the Nuns’ House. She does not immediately enter, when they have parted, but remains looking after him along the street. Twice he passes the gatehouse, reluctant to enter. At length, the Cathedral clock chiming one quarter, with a rapid turn he hurries in.

And so he goes up the postern stair.

Edwin Drood passes a solitary day. Something of deeper moment than he had thought, has gone out of his life; and in the silence of his own chamber he wept for it last night. Though the image of Miss Landless still hovers in the background of his mind, the pretty little affectionate creature, so much firmer and wiser than he had supposed, occupies its stronghold. It is with some misgiving of his own unworthiness that he thinks of her, and of what they might have been to one another, if he had been more in earnest some time ago; if he had set a higher value on her; if, instead of accepting his lot in life as an inheritance of course, he had studied the right way to its appreciation and enhancement. And still, for all this, and though there is a sharp heartache in all this, the vanity and caprice of youth sustain that handsome figure of Miss Landless in the background of his mind.

That was a curious look of Rosa’s when they parted at the gate. Did it mean that she saw below the surface of his thoughts, and down into their twilight depths? Scarcely that, for it was a look of astonished and keen inquiry. He decides that he cannot understand it, though it was remarkably expressive.

As he only waits for Mr. Grewgious now, and will depart immediately after having seen him, he takes a sauntering leave of the ancient city and its neighbourhood. He recalls the time when Rosa and he walked here or there, mere children, full of the dignity of being engaged. Poor children! he thinks, with a pitying sadness.

Finding that his watch has stopped, he turns into the jeweller’s shop, to have it wound and set. The jeweller is knowing on the subject of a bracelet, which he begs leave to submit, in a general and quite aimless way. It would suit (he considers) a young bride, to perfection; especially if of a rather diminutive style of beauty. Finding the bracelet but coldly looked at, the jeweller invites attention to a tray of rings for gentlemen; here is a style of ring, now, he remarks—a very chaste signet—which gentlemen are much given to purchasing, when changing their condition. A ring of a very responsible appearance. With the date of their wedding-day engraved inside, several gentlemen have preferred it to any other kind of memento.

The rings are as coldly viewed as the bracelet. Edwin tells the tempter that he wears no jewellery but his watch and chain, which were his father’s; and his shirt-pin.

“That I was aware of,” is the jeweller’s reply, “for Mr. Jasper dropped in for a watch-glass the other day, and, in fact, I showed these articles to him, remarking that if he should wish to make a present to a gentleman relative, on any particular occasion—But he said with a smile that he had an inventory in his mind of all the jewellery his gentleman relative ever wore; namely, his watch and chain, and his shirt-pin.” Still (the jeweller considers) that might not apply to all times, though applying to the present time. “Twenty minutes past two, Mr. Drood, I set your watch at. Let me recommend you not to let it run down, sir.”

Edwin takes his watch, puts it on, and goes out, thinking: “Dear old Jack! If I were to make an extra crease in my neckcloth, he would think it worth noticing!”

He strolls about and about, to pass the time until the dinner-hour. It somehow happens that Cloisterham seems reproachful to him to-day; has fault to find with him, as if he had not used it well; but is far more pensive with him than angry. His wonted carelessness is replaced by a wistful looking at, and dwelling upon, all the old landmarks. He will soon be far away, and may never see them again, he thinks. Poor youth! Poor youth!

As dusk draws on, he paces the Monks’ Vineyard. He has walked to and fro, full half an hour by the Cathedral chimes, and it has closed in dark, before he becomes quite aware of a woman crouching on the ground near a wicket gate in a corner. The gate commands a cross bye-path, little used in the gloaming; and the figure must have been there all the time, though he has but gradually and lately made it out.

He strikes into that path, and walks up to the wicket. By the light of a lamp near it, he sees that the woman is of a haggard appearance, and that her weazen chin is resting on her hands, and that her eyes are staring—with an unwinking, blind sort of steadfastness—before her.

Always kindly, but moved to be unusually kind this evening, and having bestowed kind words on most of the children and aged people he has met, he at once bends down, and speaks to this woman.

“Are you ill?”

“No, deary,” she answers, without looking at him, and with no departure from her strange blind stare.

“Are you blind?”

“No, deary.”

“Are you lost, homeless, faint? What is the matter, that you stay here in the cold so long, without moving?”

By slow and stiff efforts, she appears to contract her vision until it can rest upon him; and then a curious film passes over her, and she begins to shake.

He straightens himself, recoils a step, and looks down at her in a dread amazement; for he seems to know her.

“Good Heaven!” he thinks, next moment. “Like Jack that night!”

As he looks down at her, she looks up at him, and whimpers: “My lungs is weakly; my lungs is dreffle bad. Poor me, poor me, my cough is rattling dry!” and coughs in confirmation horribly.

“Where do you come from?”

“Come from London, deary.” (Her cough still rending her.)

“Where are you going to?”

“Back to London, deary. I came here, looking for a needle in a haystack, and I ain’t found it. Look’ee, deary; give me three-and-sixpence, and don’t you be afeard for me. I’ll get back to London then, and trouble no one. I’m in a business.—Ah, me! It’s slack, it’s slack, and times is very bad!—but I can make a shift to live by it.”

“Do you eat opium?”

“Smokes it,” she replies with difficulty, still racked by her cough. “Give me three-and-sixpence, and I’ll lay it out well, and get back. If you don’t give me three-and-sixpence, don’t give me a brass farden. And if you do give me three-and-sixpence, deary, I’ll tell you something.”

He counts the money from his pocket, and puts it in her hand. She instantly clutches it tight, and rises to her feet with a croaking laugh of satisfaction.

“Bless ye! Hark’ee, dear genl’mn. What’s your Chris’en name?”

“Edwin.”

“Edwin, Edwin, Edwin,” she repeats, trailing off into a drowsy repetition of the word; and then asks suddenly: “Is the short of that name Eddy?”

“It is sometimes called so,” he replies, with the colour starting to his face.

“Don’t sweethearts call it so?” she asks, pondering.

“How should I know?”

“Haven’t you a sweetheart, upon your soul?”

“None.”

She is moving away, with another “Bless ye, and thank’ee, deary!” when he adds: “You were to tell me something; you may as well do so.”

“So I was, so I was. Well, then. Whisper. You be thankful that your name ain’t Ned.”

He looks at her quite steadily, as he asks: “Why?”

“Because it’s a bad name to have just now.”

“How a bad name?”

“A threatened name. A dangerous name.”

“The proverb says that threatened men live long,” he tells her, lightly.

“Then Ned—so threatened is he, wherever he may be while I am a-talking to you, deary—should live to all eternity!” replies the woman.

She has leaned forward to say it in his ear, with her forefinger shaking before his eyes, and now huddles herself together, and with another “Bless ye, and thank’ee!” goes away in the direction of the Travellers’ Lodging House.

This is not an inspiriting close to a dull day. Alone, in a sequestered place, surrounded by vestiges of old time and decay, it rather has a tendency to call a shudder into being. He makes for the better-lighted streets, and resolves as he walks on to say nothing of this to-night, but to mention it to Jack (who alone calls him Ned), as an odd coincidence, to-morrow; of course only as a coincidence, and not as anything better worth remembering.

Still, it holds to him, as many things much better worth remembering never did. He has another mile or so, to linger out before the dinner-hour; and, when he walks over the bridge and by the river, the woman’s words are in the rising wind, in the angry sky, in the troubled water, in the flickering lights. There is some solemn echo of them even in the Cathedral chime, which strikes a sudden surprise to his heart as he turns in under the archway of the gatehouse.

And so he goes up the postern stair.

John Jasper passes a more agreeable and cheerful day than either of his guests. Having no music-lessons to give in the holiday season, his time is his own, but for the Cathedral services. He is early among the shopkeepers, ordering little table luxuries that his nephew likes. His nephew will not be with him long, he tells his provision-dealers, and so must be petted and made much of. While out on his hospitable preparations, he looks in on Mr. Sapsea; and mentions that dear Ned, and that inflammable young spark of Mr. Crisparkle’s, are to dine at the gatehouse to-day, and make up their difference. Mr. Sapsea is by no means friendly towards the inflammable young spark. He says that his complexion is “Un-English.” And when Mr. Sapsea has once declared anything to be Un-English, he considers that thing everlastingly sunk in the bottomless pit.

John Jasper is truly sorry to hear Mr. Sapsea speak thus, for he knows right well that Mr. Sapsea never speaks without a meaning, and that he has a subtle trick of being right. Mr. Sapsea (by a very remarkable coincidence) is of exactly that opinion.

Mr. Jasper is in beautiful voice this day. In the pathetic supplication to have his heart inclined to keep this law, he quite astonishes his fellows by his melodious power. He has never sung difficult music with such skill and harmony, as in this day’s Anthem. His nervous temperament is occasionally prone to take difficult music a little too quickly; to-day, his time is perfect.

These results are probably attained through a grand composure of the spirits. The mere mechanism of his throat is a little tender, for he wears, both with his singing-robe and with his ordinary dress, a large black scarf of strong close-woven silk, slung loosely round his neck. But his composure is so noticeable, that Mr. Crisparkle speaks of it as they come out from Vespers.

“I must thank you, Jasper, for the pleasure with which I have heard you to-day. Beautiful! Delightful! You could not have so outdone yourself, I hope, without being wonderfully well.”

“I am wonderfully well.”

“Nothing unequal,” says the Minor Canon, with a smooth motion of his hand: “nothing unsteady, nothing forced, nothing avoided; all thoroughly done in a masterly manner, with perfect self-command.”

“Thank you. I hope so, if it is not too much to say.”

“One would think, Jasper, you had been trying a new medicine for that occasional indisposition of yours.”

“No, really? That’s well observed; for I have.”

“Then stick to it, my good fellow,” says Mr. Crisparkle, clapping him on the shoulder with friendly encouragement, “stick to it.”

“I will.”

“I congratulate you,” Mr. Crisparkle pursues, as they come out of the Cathedral, “on all accounts.”

“Thank you again. I will walk round to the Corner with you, if you don’t object; I have plenty of time before my company come; and I want to say a word to you, which I think you will not be displeased to hear.”

“What is it?”

“Well. We were speaking, the other evening, of my black humours.”

Mr. Crisparkle’s face falls, and he shakes his head deploringly.

“I said, you know, that I should make you an antidote to those black humours; and you said you hoped I would consign them to the flames.”

“And I still hope so, Jasper.”

“With the best reason in the world! I mean to burn this year’s Diary at the year’s end.”

“Because you—?” Mr. Crisparkle brightens greatly as he thus begins.

“You anticipate me. Because I feel that I have been out of sorts, gloomy, bilious, brain-oppressed, whatever it may be. You said I had been exaggerative. So I have.”

Mr. Crisparkle’s brightened face brightens still more.

“I couldn’t see it then, because I was out of sorts; but I am in a healthier state now, and I acknowledge it with genuine pleasure. I made a great deal of a very little; that’s the fact.”

“It does me good,” cries Mr. Crisparkle, “to hear you say it!”

“A man leading a monotonous life,” Jasper proceeds, “and getting his nerves, or his stomach, out of order, dwells upon an idea until it loses its proportions. That was my case with the idea in question. So I shall burn the evidence of my case, when the book is full, and begin the next volume with a clearer vision.”

“This is better,” says Mr. Crisparkle, stopping at the steps of his own door to shake hands, “than I could have hoped.”

“Why, naturally,” returns Jasper. “You had but little reason to hope that I should become more like yourself. You are always training yourself to be, mind and body, as clear as crystal, and you always are, and never change; whereas I am a muddy, solitary, moping weed. However, I have got over that mope. Shall I wait, while you ask if Mr. Neville has left for my place? If not, he and I may walk round together.”

“I think,” says Mr. Crisparkle, opening the entrance-door with his key, “that he left some time ago; at least I know he left, and I think he has not come back. But I’ll inquire. You won’t come in?”

“My company wait,” said Jasper, with a smile.

The Minor Canon disappears, and in a few moments returns. As he thought, Mr. Neville has not come back; indeed, as he remembers now, Mr. Neville said he would probably go straight to the gatehouse.

“Bad manners in a host!” says Jasper. “My company will be there before me! What will you bet that I don’t find my company embracing?”

“I will bet—or I would, if ever I did bet,” returns Mr. Crisparkle, “that your company will have a gay entertainer this evening.”

Jasper nods, and laughs good-night!

He retraces his steps to the Cathedral door, and turns down past it to the gatehouse. He sings, in a low voice and with delicate expression, as he walks along. It still seems as if a false note were not within his power to-night, and as if nothing could hurry or retard him. Arriving thus under the arched entrance of his dwelling, he pauses for an instant in the shelter to pull off that great black scarf, and bang it in a loop upon his arm. For that brief time, his face is knitted and stern. But it immediately clears, as he resumes his singing, and his way.

And so he goes up the postern stair.

The red light burns steadily all the evening in the lighthouse on the margin of the tide of busy life. Softened sounds and hum of traffic pass it and flow on irregularly into the lonely Precincts; but very little else goes by, save violent rushes of wind. It comes on to blow a boisterous gale.

The Precincts are never particularly well lighted; but the strong blasts of wind blowing out many of the lamps (in some instances shattering the frames too, and bringing the glass rattling to the ground), they are unusually dark to-night. The darkness is augmented and confused, by flying dust from the earth, dry twigs from the trees, and great ragged fragments from the rooks’ nests up in the tower. The trees themselves so toss and creak, as this tangible part of the darkness madly whirls about, that they seem in peril of being torn out of the earth: while ever and again a crack, and a rushing fall, denote that some large branch has yielded to the storm.

Not such power of wind has blown for many a winter night. Chimneys topple in the streets, and people hold to posts and corners, and to one another, to keep themselves upon their feet. The violent rushes abate not, but increase in frequency and fury until at midnight, when the streets are empty, the storm goes thundering along them, rattling at all the latches, and tearing at all the shutters, as if warning the people to get up and fly with it, rather than have the roofs brought down upon their brains.

Still, the red light burns steadily. Nothing is steady but the red light.

All through the night the wind blows, and abates not. But early in the morning, when there is barely enough light in the east to dim the stars, it begins to lull. From that time, with occasional wild charges, like a wounded monster dying, it drops and sinks; and at full daylight it is dead.

It is then seen that the hands of the Cathedral clock are torn off; that lead from the roof has been stripped away, rolled up, and blown into the Close; and that some stones have been displaced upon the summit of the great tower. Christmas morning though it be, it is necessary to send up workmen, to ascertain the extent of the damage done. These, led by Durdles, go aloft; while Mr. Tope and a crowd of early idlers gather down in Minor Canon Corner, shading their eyes and watching for their appearance up there.

This cluster is suddenly broken and put aside by the hands of Mr. Jasper; all the gazing eyes are brought down to the earth by his loudly inquiring of Mr. Crisparkle, at an open window:

“Where is my nephew?”

“He has not been here. Is he not with you?”

“No. He went down to the river last night, with Mr. Neville, to look at the storm, and has not been back. Call Mr. Neville!”

“He left this morning, early.”

“Left this morning early? Let me in! let me in!”

There is no more looking up at the tower, now. All the assembled eyes are turned on Mr. Jasper, white, half-dressed, panting, and clinging to the rail before the Minor Canon’s house.

Neville Landless had started so early and walked at so good a pace, that when the church-bells began to ring in Cloisterham for morning service, he was eight miles away. As he wanted his breakfast by that time, having set forth on a crust of bread, he stopped at the next roadside tavern to refresh.

Visitors in want of breakfast—unless they were horses or cattle, for which class of guests there was preparation enough in the way of water-trough and hay—were so unusual at the sign of The Tilted Wagon, that it took a long time to get the wagon into the track of tea and toast and bacon. Neville in the interval, sitting in a sanded parlour, wondering in how long a time after he had gone, the sneezy fire of damp fagots would begin to make somebody else warm.

Indeed, The Tilted Wagon, as a cool establishment on the top of a hill, where the ground before the door was puddled with damp hoofs and trodden straw; where a scolding landlady slapped a moist baby (with one red sock on and one wanting), in the bar; where the cheese was cast aground upon a shelf, in company with a mouldy tablecloth and a green-handled knife, in a sort of cast-iron canoe; where the pale-faced bread shed tears of crumb over its shipwreck in another canoe; where the family linen, half washed and half dried, led a public life of lying about; where everything to drink was drunk out of mugs, and everything else was suggestive of a rhyme to mugs; The Tilted Wagon, all these things considered, hardly kept its painted promise of providing good entertainment for Man and Beast. However, Man, in the present case, was not critical, but took what entertainment he could get, and went on again after a longer rest than he needed.

He stopped at some quarter of a mile from the house, hesitating whether to pursue the road, or to follow a cart track between two high hedgerows, which led across the slope of a breezy heath, and evidently struck into the road again by-and-by. He decided in favour of this latter track, and pursued it with some toil; the rise being steep, and the way worn into deep ruts.

He was labouring along, when he became aware of some other pedestrians behind him. As they were coming up at a faster pace than his, he stood aside, against one of the high banks, to let them pass. But their manner was very curious. Only four of them passed. Other four slackened speed, and loitered as intending to follow him when he should go on. The remainder of the party (half-a-dozen perhaps) turned, and went back at a great rate.

He looked at the four behind him, and he looked at the four before him. They all returned his look. He resumed his way. The four in advance went on, constantly looking back; the four in the rear came closing up.

When they all ranged out from the narrow track upon the open slope of the heath, and this order was maintained, let him diverge as he would to either side, there was no longer room to doubt that he was beset by these fellows. He stopped, as a last test; and they all stopped.

“Why do you attend upon me in this way?” he asked the whole body. “Are you a pack of thieves?”

“Don’t answer him,” said one of the number; he did not see which. “Better be quiet.”

“Better be quiet?” repeated Neville. “Who said so?”

Nobody replied.

“It’s good advice, whichever of you skulkers gave it,” he went on angrily. “I will not submit to be penned in between four men there, and four men there. I wish to pass, and I mean to pass, those four in front.”

They were all standing still; himself included.

“If eight men, or four men, or two men, set upon one,” he proceeded, growing more enraged, “the one has no chance but to set his mark upon some of them. And, by the Lord, I’ll do it, if I am interrupted any farther!”

Shouldering his heavy stick, and quickening his pace, he shot on to pass the four ahead. The largest and strongest man of the number changed swiftly to the side on which he came up, and dexterously closed with him and went down with him; but not before the heavy stick had descended smartly.

“Let him be!” said this man in a suppressed voice, as they struggled together on the grass. “Fair play! His is the build of a girl to mine, and he’s got a weight strapped to his back besides. Let him alone. I’ll manage him.”

After a little rolling about, in a close scuffle which caused the faces of both to be besmeared with blood, the man took his knee from Neville’s chest, and rose, saying: “There! Now take him arm-in-arm, any two of you!”

It was immediately done.

“As to our being a pack of thieves, Mr. Landless,” said the man, as he spat out some blood, and wiped more from his face; “you know better than that at midday. We wouldn’t have touched you if you hadn’t forced us. We’re going to take you round to the high road, anyhow, and you’ll find help enough against thieves there, if you want it.—Wipe his face, somebody; see how it’s a-trickling down him!”

When his face was cleansed, Neville recognised in the speaker, Joe, driver of the Cloisterham omnibus, whom he had seen but once, and that on the day of his arrival.

“And what I recommend you for the present, is, don’t talk, Mr. Landless. You’ll find a friend waiting for you, at the high road—gone ahead by the other way when we split into two parties—and you had much better say nothing till you come up with him. Bring that stick along, somebody else, and let’s be moving!”

Utterly bewildered, Neville stared around him and said not a word. Walking between his two conductors, who held his arms in theirs, he went on, as in a dream, until they came again into the high road, and into the midst of a little group of people. The men who had turned back were among the group; and its central figures were Mr. Jasper and Mr. Crisparkle. Neville’s conductors took him up to the Minor Canon, and there released him, as an act of deference to that gentleman.

“What is all this, sir? What is the matter? I feel as if I had lost my senses!” cried Neville, the group closing in around him.

“Where is my nephew?” asked Mr. Jasper, wildly.

“Where is your nephew?” repeated Neville, “Why do you ask me?”

“I ask you,” retorted Jasper, “because you were the last person in his company, and he is not to be found.”

“Not to be found!” cried Neville, aghast.

“Stay, stay,” said Mr. Crisparkle. “Permit me, Jasper. Mr. Neville, you are confounded; collect your thoughts; it is of great importance that you should collect your thoughts; attend to me.”

“I will try, sir, but I seem mad.”

“You left Mr. Jasper last night with Edwin Drood?”

“Yes.”

“At what hour?”

“Was it at twelve o’clock?” asked Neville, with his hand to his confused head, and appealing to Jasper.

“Quite right,” said Mr. Crisparkle; “the hour Mr. Jasper has already named to me. You went down to the river together?”

“Undoubtedly. To see the action of the wind there.”

“What followed? How long did you stay there?”

“About ten minutes; I should say not more. We then walked together to your house, and he took leave of me at the door.”

“Did he say that he was going down to the river again?”

“No. He said that he was going straight back.”

The bystanders looked at one another, and at Mr. Crisparkle. To whom Mr. Jasper, who had been intensely watching Neville, said, in a low, distinct, suspicious voice: “What are those stains upon his dress?”

All eyes were turned towards the blood upon his clothes.

“And here are the same stains upon this stick!” said Jasper, taking it from the hand of the man who held it. “I know the stick to be his, and he carried it last night. What does this mean?”

“In the name of God, say what it means, Neville!” urged Mr. Crisparkle.

“That man and I,” said Neville, pointing out his late adversary, “had a struggle for the stick just now, and you may see the same marks on him, sir. What was I to suppose, when I found myself molested by eight people? Could I dream of the true reason when they would give me none at all?”

They admitted that they had thought it discreet to be silent, and that the struggle had taken place. And yet the very men who had seen it looked darkly at the smears which the bright cold air had already dried.

“We must return, Neville,” said Mr. Crisparkle; “of course you will be glad to come back to clear yourself?”

“Of course, sir.”