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.”