"I have now said all I have to say: except that this young couple parted, firmly, though not without tears and sorrow, on the evening when you last saw them together."
Mr. Grewgious heard a terrible shriek, and saw no ghastly figure, sitting or standing; saw nothing but a heap of torn and miry clothes upon the floor.
Not changing his action even then, he opened and shut the palms of his hands as he warmed them, and looked down at it.
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 gla.s.s, 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 c.h.i.n.k 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 a.s.sent 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 a.s.sent 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 embarra.s.sing 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 circ.u.mstance 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 pa.s.sion 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 circ.u.mstances combined so wofully against him, that he dreaded to add two more to their c.u.mulative 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 surpa.s.singly 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 circ.u.mstance 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 pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.sage 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 circ.u.mstances, 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.