"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 rea.s.sure 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 p.u.s.s.y off from school as Mrs. Edwin Drood. I shall then go engineering into the East, and p.u.s.s.y 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 pa.s.s the day. Of p.u.s.s.y"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 att.i.tude 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 p.u.s.s.y; as many pairs of gloves as she is years old to-day. Rather poetical, Jack?"
Mr. Jasper, still in the same att.i.tude, 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 att.i.tude, and they go out together.
CHAPTER III-THE NUNS" HOUSE
For sufficient reasons, which this narrative will itself unfold as it advances, a fict.i.tious 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 p.r.o.ne 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 pa.s.s 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 hoa.r.s.e Cathedral-bell, its hoa.r.s.e rooks hovering about the Cathedral tower, its hoa.r.s.er 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 p.a.w.nbroker 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-sh.e.l.ls, 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 bra.s.s plate flashing forth the legend: "Seminary for Young Ladies. Miss Twinkleton." The house-front is so old and worn, and the bra.s.s plate is so shining and staring, that the general result has reminded imaginative strangers of a battered old beau with a large modern eye-gla.s.s 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 const.i.tute 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 (compa.s.sionately 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 ent.i.tled 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 cla.s.s 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 ap.r.o.n 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, p.u.s.s.y, 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, p.u.s.s.y, inasmuch as I see nothing of you."
This second remonstrance brings a dark, bright, pouting eye out from a corner of the ap.r.o.n; 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-gla.s.s, 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 ap.r.o.n 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, p.u.s.s.y?"
"O, yes, I"m dreadfully glad.-Go and sit down.-Miss Twinkleton."