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CHAPTER XVI - DEVOTED
When John Jasper recovered from his fit or swoon, he found himself
being tended by Mr. and Mrs. Tope, whom his visitor had summoned
for the purpose. His visitor, wooden of aspect, sat stiffly in a
chair, with his hands upon his knees, watching his recovery.
'There! You've come to nicely now, sir,' said the tearful Mrs.
Tope; 'you were thoroughly worn out, and no wonder!'
'A man,' said Mr. Grewgious, with his usual air of repeating a
lesson, 'cannot have his rest broken, and his mind cruelly
tormented, and his body overtaxed by fatigue, without being
thoroughly worn out.'
'I fear I have alarmed you?' Jasper apologised faintly, when he was
helped into his easy-chair.
'Not at all, I thank you,' answered Mr. Grewgious.
'You are too considerate.'
'Not at all, I thank you,' answered Mr. Grewgious again.
'You must take some wine, sir,' said Mrs. Tope, 'and the jelly that
I had ready for you, and that you wouldn't put your lips to at
noon, though I warned you what would come of it, you know, and you
not breakfasted; and you must have a wing of the roast fowl that
has been put back twenty times if it's been put back once. It
shall all be on table in five minutes, and this good gentleman
belike will stop and see you take it.'
This good gentleman replied with a snort, which might mean yes, or
no, or anything or nothing, and which Mrs. Tope would have found
highly mystifying, but that her attention was divided by the
service of the table.
'You will take something with me?' said Jasper, as the cloth was
laid.
'I couldn't get a morsel down my throat, I thank you,' answered Mr.
Grewgious.
Jasper both ate and drank almost voraciously. Combined with the
hurry in his mode of doing it, was an evident indifference to the
taste of what he took, suggesting that he ate and drank to fortify
himself against any other failure of the spirits, far more than to
gratify his palate. Mr. Grewgious in the meantime sat upright,
with no expression in his face, and a hard kind of imperturbably
polite protest all over him: as though he would have said, in
reply to some invitation to discourse; 'I couldn't originate the
faintest approach to an observation on any subject whatever, I
thank you.'
'Do you know,' said Jasper, when he had pushed away his plate and
glass, and had sat meditating for a few minutes: 'do you know that
I find some crumbs of comfort in the communication with which you
have so much amazed me?'
'DO you?' returned Mr. Grewgious, pretty plainly adding the
unspoken clause: 'I don't, I thank you!'
'After recovering from the shock of a piece of news of my dear boy,
so entirely unexpected, and so destructive of all the castles I had
built for him; and after having had time to think of it; yes.'
'I shall be glad to pick up your crumbs,' said Mr. Grewgious,
dryly.
'Is there not, or is there--if I deceive myself, tell me so, and
shorten my pain--is there not, or is there, hope that, finding
himself in this new position, and becoming sensitively alive to the
awkward burden of explanation, in this quarter, and that, and the
other, with which it would load him, he avoided the awkwardness,
and took to flight?'
'Such a thing might be,' said Mr. Grewgious, pondering.
'Such a thing has been. I have read of cases in which people,
rather than face a seven days' wonder, and have to account for
themselves to the idle and impertinent, have taken themselves away,
and been long unheard of.'
'I believe such things have happened,' said Mr. Grewgious,
pondering still.
'When I had, and could have, no suspicion,' pursued Jasper, eagerly
following the new track, 'that the dear lost boy had withheld
anything from me--most of all, such a leading matter as this--what
gleam of light was there for me in the whole black sky? When I
supposed that his intended wife was here, and his marriage close at
hand, how could I entertain the possibility of his voluntarily
leaving this place, in a manner that would be so unaccountable,
capricious, and cruel? But now that I know what you have told me,
is there no little chink through which day pierces? Supposing him
to have disappeared of his own act, is not his disappearance more
accountable and less cruel? The fact of his having just parted
from your ward, is in itself a sort of reason for his going away.
It does not make his mysterious departure the less cruel to me, it
is true; but it relieves it of cruelty to her.'
Mr. Grewgious could not but assent to this.
'And even as to me,' continued Jasper, still pursuing the new
track, with ardour, and, as he did so, brightening with hope: 'he
knew that you were coming to me; he knew that you were intrusted to
tell me what you have told me; if your doing so has awakened a new
train of thought in my perplexed mind, it reasonably follows that,
from the same premises, he might have foreseen the inferences that
I should draw. Grant that he did foresee them; and even the
cruelty to me--and who am I!--John Jasper, Music Master, vanishes!'
-
Once more, Mr. Grewgious could not but assent to this.
'I have had my distrusts, and terrible distrusts they have been,'
said Jasper; 'but your disclosure, overpowering as it was at first-
-showing me that my own dear boy had had a great disappointing
reservation from me, who so fondly loved him, kindles hope within
me. You do not extinguish it when I state it, but admit it to be a
reasonable hope. I begin to believe it possible:' here he clasped
his hands: 'that he may have disappeared from among us of his own
accord, and that he may yet be alive and well.'
Mr. Crisparkle came in at the moment. To whom Mr. Jasper repeated:
'I begin to believe it possible that he may have disappeared of his
own accord, and may yet be alive and well.'
Mr. Crisparkle taking a seat, and inquiring: 'Why so?' Mr. Jasper
repeated the arguments he had just set forth. If they had been
less plausible than they were, the good Minor Canon's mind would
have been in a state of preparation to receive them, as exculpatory
of his unfortunate pupil. But he, too, did really attach great
importance to the lost young man's having been, so immediately
before his disappearance, placed in a new and embarrassing relation
towards every one acquainted with his projects and affairs; and the
fact seemed to him to present the question in a new light.
'I stated to Mr. Sapsea, when we waited on him,' said Jasper: as
he really had done: 'that there was no quarrel or difference
between the two young men at their last meeting. We all know that
their first meeting was unfortunately very far from amicable; but
all went smoothly and quietly when they were last together at my
house. My dear boy was not in his usual spirits; he was depressed-
-I noticed that--and I am bound henceforth to dwell upon the
circumstance the more, now that I know there was a special reason
for his being depressed: a reason, moreover, which may possibly
have induced him to absent himself.'
'I pray to Heaven it may turn out so!' exclaimed Mr. Crisparkle.
'_I_ pray to Heaven it may turn out so!' repeated Jasper. 'You
know--and Mr. Grewgious should now know likewise--that I took a
great prepossession against Mr. Neville Landless, arising out of
his furious conduct on that first occasion. You know that I came
to you, extremely apprehensive, on my dear boy's behalf, of his mad
violence. You know that I even entered in my Diary, and showed the
entry to you, that I had dark forebodings against him. Mr.
Grewgious ought to be possessed of the whole case. He shall not,
through any suppression of mine, be informed of a part of it, and
kept in ignorance of another part of it. I wish him to be good
enough to understand that the communication he has made to me has
hopefully influenced my mind, in spite of its having been, before
this mysterious occurrence took place, profoundly impressed against
young Landless.'
This fairness troubled the Minor Canon much. He felt that he was
not as open in his own dealing. He charged against himself
reproachfully that he had suppressed, so far, the two points of a
second strong outbreak of temper against Edwin Drood on the part of
Neville, and of the passion of jealousy having, to his own certain
knowledge, flamed up in Neville's breast against him. He was
convinced of Neville's innocence of any part in the ugly
disappearance; and yet so many little circumstances combined so
wofully against him, that he dreaded to add two more to their
cumulative weight. He was among the truest of men; but he had been
balancing in his mind, much to its distress, whether his
volunteering to tell these two fragments of truth, at this time,
would not be tantamount to a piecing together of falsehood in the
place of truth.
However, here was a model before him. He hesitated no longer.
Addressing Mr. Grewgious, as one placed in authority by the
revelation he had brought to bear on the mystery (and surpassingly
Angular Mr. Grewgious became when he found himself in that
unexpected position), Mr. Crisparkle bore his testimony to Mr.
Jasper's strict sense of justice, and, expressing his absolute
confidence in the complete clearance of his pupil from the least
taint of suspicion, sooner or later, avowed that his confidence in
that young gentleman had been formed, in spite of his confidential
knowledge that his temper was of the hottest and fiercest, and that
it was directly incensed against Mr. Jasper's nephew, by the
circumstance of his romantically supposing himself to be enamoured
of the same young lady. The sanguine reaction manifest in Mr.
Jasper was proof even against this unlooked-for declaration. It
turned him paler; but he repeated that he would cling to the hope
he had derived from Mr. Grewgious; and that if no trace of his dear
boy were found, leading to the dreadful inference that he had been
made away with, he would cherish unto the last stretch of
possibility the idea, that he might have absconded of his own wild
will.
Now, it fell out that Mr. Crisparkle, going away from this
conference still very uneasy in his mind, and very much troubled on
behalf of the young man whom he held as a kind of prisoner in his
own house, took a memorable night walk.
He walked to Cloisterham Weir.
He often did so, and consequently there was nothing remarkable in
his footsteps tending that way. But the preoccupation of his mind
so hindered him from planning any walk, or taking heed of the
objects he passed, that his first consciousness of being near the
Weir, was derived from the sound of the falling water close at
hand.
'How did I come here!' was his first thought, as he stopped.
'Why did I come here!' was his second.
Then, he stood intently listening to the water. A familiar passage
in his reading, about airy tongues that syllable men's names, rose
so unbidden to his ear, that he put it from him with his hand, as
if it were tangible.
It was starlight. The Weir was full two miles above the spot to
which the young men had repaired to watch the storm. No search had
been made up here, for the tide had been running strongly down, at
that time of the night of Christmas Eve, and the likeliest places
for the discovery of a body, if a fatal accident had happened under
such circumstances, all lay--both when the tide ebbed, and when it
flowed again--between that spot and the sea. The water came over
the Weir, with its usual sound on a cold starlight night, and
little could be seen of it; yet Mr. Crisparkle had a strange idea
that something unusual hung about the place.
He reasoned with himself: What was it? Where was it? Put it to
the proof. Which sense did it address?
No sense reported anything unusual there. He listened again, and
his sense of hearing again checked the water coming over the Weir,
with its usual sound on a cold starlight night.
Knowing very well that the mystery with which his mind was
occupied, might of itself give the place this haunted air, he
strained those hawk's eyes of his for the correction of his sight.
He got closer to the Weir, and peered at its well-known posts and
timbers. Nothing in the least unusual was remotely shadowed forth.
But he resolved that he would come back early in the morning.
The Weir ran through his broken sleep, all night, and he was back
again at sunrise. It was a bright frosty morning. The whole
composition before him, when he stood where he had stood last
night, was clearly discernible in its minutest details. He had
surveyed it closely for some minutes, and was about to withdraw his
eyes, when they were attracted keenly to one spot.
He turned his back upon the Weir, and looked far away at the sky,
and at the earth, and then looked again at that one spot. It
caught his sight again immediately, and he concentrated his vision
upon it. He could not lose it now, though it was but such a speck
in the landscape. It fascinated his sight. His hands began
plucking off his coat. For it struck him that at that spot--a
corner of the Weir--something glistened, which did not move and
come over with the glistening water-drops, but remained stationary.
He assured himself of this, he threw off his clothes, he plunged
into the icy water, and swam for the spot. Climbing the timbers,
he took from them, caught among their interstices by its chain, a
gold watch, bearing engraved upon its back E. D.
He brought the watch to the bank, swam to the Weir again, climbed
it, and dived off. He knew every hole and corner of all the
depths, and dived and dived and dived, until he could bear the cold
no more. His notion was, that he would find the body; he only
found a shirt-pin sticking in some mud and ooze.
With these discoveries he returned to Cloisterham, and, taking
Neville Landless with him, went straight to the Mayor. Mr. Jasper
was sent for, the watch and shirt-pin were identified, Neville was
detained, and the wildest frenzy and fatuity of evil report rose
against him. He was of that vindictive and violent nature, that
but for his poor sister, who alone had influence over him, and out
of whose sight he was never to be trusted, he would be in the daily
commission of murder. Before coming to England he had caused to be
whipped to death sundry 'Natives'--nomadic persons, encamping now
in Asia, now in Africa, now in the West Indies, and now at the
North Pole--vaguely supposed in Cloisterham to be always black,
always of great virtue, always calling themselves Me, and everybody
else Massa or Missie (according to sex), and always reading tracts
of the obscurest meaning, in broken English, but always accurately
understanding them in the purest mother tongue. He had nearly
brought Mrs. Crisparkle's grey hairs with sorrow to the grave.
(Those original expressions were Mr. Sapsea's.) He had repeatedly
said he would have Mr. Crisparkle's life. He had repeatedly said
he would have everybody's life, and become in effect the last man.
He had been brought down to Cloisterham, from London, by an eminent
Philanthropist, and why? Because that Philanthropist had expressly
declared: 'I owe it to my fellow-creatures that he should be, in
the words of BENTHAM, where he is the cause of the greatest danger
to the smallest number.'
These dropping shots from the blunderbusses of blunderheadedness
might not have hit him in a vital place. But he had to stand
against a trained and well-directed fire of arms of precision too.
He had notoriously threatened the lost young man, and had,
according to the showing of his own faithful friend and tutor who
strove so hard for him, a cause of bitter animosity (created by
himself, and stated by himself), against that ill-starred fellow.
He had armed himself with an offensive weapon for the fatal night,
and he had gone off early in the morning, after making preparations
for departure. He had been found with traces of blood on him;
truly, they might have been wholly caused as he represented, but
they might not, also. On a search-warrant being issued for the
examination of his room, clothes, and so forth, it was discovered
that he had destroyed all his papers, and rearranged all his
possessions, on the very afternoon of the disappearance. The watch
found at the Weir was challenged by the jeweller as one he had
wound and set for Edwin Drood, at twenty minutes past two on that
same afternoon; and it had run down, before being cast into the
water; and it was the jeweller's positive opinion that it had never
been re-wound. This would justify the hypothesis that the watch
was taken from him not long after he left Mr. Jasper's house at
midnight, in company with the last person seen with him, and that
it had been thrown away after being retained some hours. Why
thrown away? If he had been murdered, and so artfully disfigured,
or concealed, or both, as that the murderer hoped identification to
be impossible, except from something that he wore, assuredly the
murderer would seek to remove from the body the most lasting, the
best known, and the most easily recognisable, things upon it.
Those things would be the watch and shirt-pin. As to his
opportunities of casting them into the river; if he were the object
of these suspicions, they were easy. For, he had been seen by many
persons, wandering about on that side of the city--indeed on all
sides of it--in a miserable and seemingly half-distracted manner.
As to the choice of the spot, obviously such criminating evidence
had better take its chance of being found anywhere, rather than
upon himself, or in his possession. Concerning the reconciliatory
nature of the appointed meeting between the two young men, very
little could be made of that in young Landless's favour; for it
distinctly appeared that the meeting originated, not with him, but
with Mr. Crisparkle, and that it had been urged on by Mr.
Crisparkle; and who could say how unwillingly, or in what ill-
conditioned mood, his enforced pupil had gone to it? The more his
case was looked into, the weaker it became in every point. Even
the broad suggestion that the lost young man had absconded, was
rendered additionally improbable on the showing of the young lady
from whom he had so lately parted; for; what did she say, with
great earnestness and sorrow, when interrogated? That he had,
expressly and enthusiastically, planned with her, that he would
await the arrival of her guardian, Mr. Grewgious. And yet, be it
observed, he disappeared before that gentleman appeared.
On the suspicions thus urged and supported, Neville was detained,
and re-detained, and the search was pressed on every hand, and
Jasper laboured night and day. But nothing more was found. No
discovery being made, which proved the lost man to be dead, it at
length became necessary to release the person suspected of having
made away with him. Neville was set at large. Then, a consequence
ensued which Mr. Crisparkle had too well foreseen. Neville must
leave the place, for the place shunned him and cast him out. Even
had it not been so, the dear old china shepherdess would have
worried herself to death with fears for her son, and with general
trepidation occasioned by their having such an inmate. Even had
that not been so, the authority to which the Minor Canon deferred
officially, would have settled the point.
'Mr. Crisparkle,' quoth the Dean, 'human justice may err, but it
must act according to its lights. The days of taking sanctuary are
past. This young man must not take sanctuary with us.'
'You mean that he must leave my house, sir?'
'Mr. Crisparkle,' returned the prudent Dean, 'I claim no authority
in your house. I merely confer with you, on the painful necessity
you find yourself under, of depriving this young man of the great
advantages of your counsel and instruction.'
'It is very lamentable, sir,' Mr. Crisparkle represented.
'Very much so,' the Dean assented.
'And if it be a necessity--' Mr. Crisparkle faltered.
'As you unfortunately find it to be,' returned the Dean.
Mr. Crisparkle bowed submissively: 'It is hard to prejudge his
case, sir, but I am sensible that--'
'Just so. Perfectly. As you say, Mr. Crisparkle,' interposed the
Dean, nodding his head smoothly, 'there is nothing else to be done.
No doubt, no doubt. There is no alternative, as your good sense
has discovered.'
'I am entirely satisfied of his perfect innocence, sir,
nevertheless.'
'We-e-ell!' said the Dean, in a more confidential tone, and
slightly glancing around him, 'I would not say so, generally. Not
generally. Enough of suspicion attaches to him to--no, I think I
would not say so, generally.'
Mr. Crisparkle bowed again.
'It does not become us, perhaps,' pursued the Dean, 'to be
partisans. Not partisans. We clergy keep our hearts warm and our
heads cool, and we hold a judicious middle course.'
'I hope you do not object, sir, to my having stated in public,
emphatically, that he will reappear here, whenever any new
suspicion may be awakened, or any new circumstance may come to
light in this extraordinary matter?'
'Not at all,' returned the Dean. 'And yet, do you know, I don't
think,' with a very nice and neat emphasis on those two words: 'I
DON'T THINK I would state it emphatically. State it? Ye-e-es!
But emphatically? No-o-o. I THINK not. In point of fact, Mr.
Crisparkle, keeping our hearts warm and our heads cool, we clergy
need do nothing emphatically.'
So Minor Canon Row knew Neville Landless no more; and he went
whithersoever he would, or could, with a blight upon his name and
fame.
It was not until then that John Jasper silently resumed his place
in the choir. Haggard and red-eyed, his hopes plainly had deserted
him, his sanguine mood was gone, and all his worst misgivings had
come back. A day or two afterwards, while unrobing, he took his
Diary from a pocket of his coat, turned the leaves, and with an
impressive look, and without one spoken word, handed this entry to
Mr. Crisparkle to read:
'My dear boy is murdered. The discovery of the watch and shirt-pin
convinces me that he was murdered that night, and that his
jewellery was taken from him to prevent identification by its
means. All the delusive hopes I had founded on his separation from
his betrothed wife, I give to the winds. They perish before this
fatal discovery. I now swear, and record the oath on this page,
That I nevermore will discuss this mystery with any human creature
until I hold the clue to it in my hand. That I never will relax in
my secrecy or in my search. That I will fasten the crime of the
murder of my dear dead boy upon the murderer. And, That I devote
myself to his destruction.'
Content of CHAPTER XVI - DEVOTED [Charles Dickens' novel: The Mystery of Edwin Drood]
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