The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens (best english novels to read TXT) đ
- Author: Charles Dickens
Book online «The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens (best english novels to read TXT) đ». Author Charles Dickens
âYes; I saw what you were tending to. I hate it.â
âHate it, Jack?â (Much bewildered.)
âI hate it. The cramped monotony of my existence grinds me away by the grain. How does our service sound to you?â
âBeautiful! Quite celestial!â
âIt 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?â
âI thought you had so exactly found your niche in life, Jack,â Edwin Drood returns, astonished, bending forward in his chair to lay a sympathetic hand on Jasperâs knee, and looking at him with an anxious face.
âI know you thought so. They all think so.â
âWell, I suppose they do,â says Edwin, meditating aloud. âPussy thinks so.â
âWhen did she tell you that?â
âThe last time I was here. You remember when. Three months ago.â
âHow did she phrase it?â
âO, she only said that she had become your pupil, and that you were made for your vocation.â
The younger man glances at the portrait. The elder sees it in him.
âAnyhow, my dear Ned,â Jasper resumes, as he shakes his head with a grave cheerfulness, âI must subdue myself to my vocation: which is much the same thing outwardly. Itâs too late to find another now. This is a confidence between us.â
âIt shall be sacredly preserved, Jack.â
âI have reposed it in you, becauseââ
âI 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.â
As each stands looking into the otherâs eyes, and as the uncle holds the nephewâs hands, the uncle thus proceeds:
âYou know now, donât you, that even a poor monotonous chorister and grinder of musicâin his nicheâmay be troubled with some stray sort of ambition, aspiration, restlessness, dissatisfaction, what shall we call it?â
âYes, dear Jack.â
âAnd you will remember?â
âMy dear Jack, I only ask you, am I likely to forget what you have said with so much feeling?â
âTake it as a warning, then.â
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:
âI am afraid I am but a shallow, surface kind of fellow, Jack, and that my headpiece is none of the best. But I neednât 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 feelsâdeeply feelsâthe disinterestedness of your painfully laying your inner self bare, as a warning to me.â
Mr. Jasperâs steadiness of face and figure becomes so marvellous that his breathing seems to have stopped.
âI couldnât 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.â
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.
âNo; donât put the sentiment away, Jack; please donât; 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 donât 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 itâs done and canât 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 Pussyâs being beautiful there cannot be a doubt;âand when you are good besides, Little Miss Impudence,â once more apostrophising the portrait, âIâll burn your comic likeness, and paint your music-master another.â
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:
âYou wonât be warned, then?â
âNo, Jack.â
âYou canât be warned, then?â
âNo, Jack, not by you. Besides that I donât really consider myself in danger, I donât like your putting yourself in that position.â
âShall we go and walk in the churchyard?â
âBy all means. You wonât mind my slipping out of it for half a moment to the Nunsâ 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?â
Mr. Jasper, still in the same attitude, murmurs: ââNothing half so sweet in life,â Ned!â
âHereâs the parcel in my greatcoat-pocket. They must be presented to-night, or the poetry is gone. Itâs against regulations for me to call at night, but not to leave a packet. I am ready, Jack!â
Mr. Jasper dissolves his attitude, and they go out together.
THE NUNSâ HOUSE
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 thoroughfareâexception made of the Cathedral-close, and a paved Quaker settlement, in colour and general confirmation very like a Quakeressâs 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, saintâs 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 citizensâ 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 Nunsâ 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: âSeminary for Young Ladies. Miss Twinkleton.â 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 Twinkletonâs half-yearly accounts. They are neither of Miss Twinkletonâs 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 âThe Wellsâ), notably the season wherein a certain finished gentleman (compassionately called by Miss Twinkleton, in this stage of her existence, âFoolish Mr. Portersâ) revealed a homage of the heart, whereof Miss Twinkleton, in her scholastic state of existence, is as ignorant as a granite pillar. Miss Twinkletonâs 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 ladiesâ wardrobes, and leads them to infer that she has seen better days. Perhaps this is the reason why it
Comments (0)