CHAPTER II.

A DEAN, AND A CHAPTER ALSO

Whosoever has observed that sedate and clerical bird, the rook, may

perhaps have noticed that when he wings his way homeward towards

nightfall, in a sedate and clerical company, two rooks will suddenly

detach themselves from the rest, will retrace their flight for some

distance, and will there poise and linger; conveying to mere men the

fancy that it is of some occult importance to the body politic, that

this artful couple should pretend to have renounced connection with it.

Similarly, service being over in the old Cathedral with the square

tower, and the choir scuffling out again, and divers venerable persons

of rook-like aspect dispersing, two of these latter retrace their

steps, and walk together in the echoing Close.

Not only is the day waning, but the year. The low sun is fiery and yet

cold behind the monastery ruin, and the Virginia creeper on the

Cathedral wall has showered half its deep-red leaves down on the

pavement. There has been rain this afternoon, and a wintry shudder goes

among the little pools on the cracked, uneven flag-stones, and through

the giant elm-trees as they shed a gust of tears. Their fallen leaves

lie strewn thickly about. Some of these leaves, in a timid rush, seek

sanctuary within the low arched Cathedral door; but two men coming out

resist them, and cast them forth again with their feet; this done, one

of the two locks the door with a goodly key, and the other flits away

with a folio music-book.

“Mr. Jasper was that, Tope?”

“Yes, Mr. Dean.”

“He has stayed late.”

“Yes, Mr. Dean. I have stayed for him, your Reverence. He has been took

a little poorly.”

“Say ‘taken,’ Tope—to the Dean,” the younger rook interposes in a low

tone with this touch of correction, as who should say: “You may offer

bad grammar to the laity, or the humbler clergy, not to the Dean.”

Mr. Tope, Chief Verger and Showman, and accustomed to be high with

excursion parties, declines with a silent loftiness to perceive that

any suggestion has been tendered to him.

“And when and how has Mr. Jasper been taken—for, as Mr. Crisparkle has

remarked, it is better to say taken—taken—” repeats the Dean; “when and

how has Mr. Jasper been Taken—”

“Taken, sir,” Tope deferentially murmurs.

“—Poorly, Tope?”

“Why, sir, Mr. Jasper was that breathed—”

“I wouldn’t say ‘That breathed,’ Tope,” Mr. Crisparkle interposes with

the same touch as before. “Not English—to the Dean.”

“Breathed to that extent,” the Dean (not unflattered by this indirect

homage) condescendingly remarks, “would be preferable.”

“Mr. Jasper’s breathing was so remarkably short”—thus discreetly does

Mr. Tope work his way round the sunken rock—“when he came in, that it

distressed him mightily to get his notes out: which was perhaps the

cause of his having a kind of fit on him after a little. His memory

grew DAZED.” Mr. Tope, with his eyes on the Reverend Mr. Crisparkle,

shoots this word out, as defying him to improve upon it: “and a dimness

and giddiness crept over him as strange as ever I saw: though he didn’t

seem to mind it particularly, himself. However, a little time and a

little water brought him out of his DAZE.” Mr. Tope repeats the word

and its emphasis, with the air of saying: “As I _have_ made a success,

I’ll make it again.”

“And Mr. Jasper has gone home quite himself, has he?” asked the Dean.

“Your Reverence, he has gone home quite himself. And I’m glad to see

he’s having his fire kindled up, for it’s chilly after the wet, and the

Cathedral had both a damp feel and a damp touch this afternoon, and he

was very shivery.”

They all three look towards an old stone gatehouse crossing the Close,

with an arched thoroughfare passing beneath it. Through its latticed

window, a fire shines out upon the fast-darkening scene, involving in

shadow the pendent masses of ivy and creeper covering the building’s

front. As the deep Cathedral-bell strikes the hour, a ripple of wind

goes through these at their distance, like a ripple of the solemn sound

that hums through tomb and tower, broken niche and defaced statue, in

the pile close at hand.

“Is Mr. Jasper’s nephew with him?” the Dean asks.

“No, sir,” replied the Verger, “but expected. There’s his own solitary

shadow betwixt his two windows—the one looking this way, and the one

looking down into the High Street—drawing his own curtains now.”

“Well, well,” says the Dean, with a sprightly air of breaking up the

little conference, “I hope Mr. Jasper’s heart may not be too much set

upon his nephew. Our affections, however laudable, in this transitory

world, should never master us; we should guide them, guide them. I find

I am not disagreeably reminded of my dinner, by hearing my dinner-bell.

Perhaps, Mr. Crisparkle, you will, before going home, look in on

Jasper?”

“Certainly, Mr. Dean. And tell him that you had the kindness to desire

to know how he was?”

“Ay; do so, do so. Certainly. Wished to know how he was. By all means.

Wished to know how he was.”

With a pleasant air of patronage, the Dean as nearly cocks his quaint

hat as a Dean in good spirits may, and directs his comely gaiters

towards the ruddy dining-room of the snug old red-brick house where he

is at present, “in residence” with Mrs. Dean and Miss Dean.

Mr. Crisparkle, Minor Canon, fair and rosy, and perpetually pitching

himself head-foremost into all the deep running water in the

surrounding country; Mr. Crisparkle, Minor Canon, early riser, musical,

classical, cheerful, kind, good-natured, social, contented, and

boy-like; Mr. Crisparkle, Minor Canon and good man, lately “Coach” upon

the chief Pagan high roads, but since promoted by a patron (grateful

for a well-taught son) to his present Christian beat; betakes himself

to the gatehouse, on his way home to his early tea.

“Sorry to hear from Tope that you have not been well, Jasper.”

“O, it was nothing, nothing!”

“You look a little worn.”

“Do I? O, I don’t think so. What is better, I don’t feel so. Tope has

made too much of it, I suspect. It’s his trade to make the most of

everything appertaining to the Cathedral, you know.”

“I may tell the Dean—I call expressly from the Dean—that you are all

right again?”

The reply, with a slight smile, is: “Certainly; with my respects and

thanks to the Dean.”

“I’m glad to hear that you expect young Drood.”

“I expect the dear fellow every moment.”

“Ah! He will do you more good than a doctor, Jasper.”

“More good than a dozen doctors. For I love him dearly, and I don’t

love doctors, or doctors’ stuff.”

Mr. Jasper is a dark man of some six-and-twenty, with thick, lustrous,

well-arranged black hair and whiskers. He looks older than he is, as

dark men often do. His voice is deep and good, his face and figure are

good, his manner is a little sombre. His room is a little sombre, and

may have had its influence in forming his manner. It is mostly in

shadow. Even when the sun shines brilliantly, it seldom touches the

grand piano in the recess, or the folio music-books on the stand, or

the book-shelves on the wall, or the unfinished picture of a blooming

schoolgirl hanging over the chimneypiece; her flowing brown hair tied

with a blue riband, and her beauty remarkable for a quite childish,

almost babyish, touch of saucy discontent, comically conscious of

itself. (There is not the least artistic merit in this picture, which

is a mere daub; but it is clear that the painter has made it

humorously—one might almost say, revengefully—like the original.)

“We shall miss you, Jasper, at the ‘Alternate Musical Wednesdays’

to-night; but no doubt you are best at home. Good-night. God bless you!

‘Tell me, shep-herds, te-e-ell me; tell me-e-e, have you seen (have you

seen, have you seen, have you seen) my-y-y Flo-o-ora-a pass this way!’”

Melodiously good Minor Canon the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle thus

delivers himself, in musical rhythm, as he withdraws his amiable face

from the doorway and conveys it down-stairs.

Sounds of recognition and greeting pass between the Reverend Septimus

and somebody else, at the stair-foot. Mr. Jasper listens, starts from

his chair, and catches a young fellow in his arms, exclaiming:

“My dear Edwin!”

“My dear Jack! So glad to see you!”

“Get off your greatcoat, bright boy, and sit down here in your own

corner. Your feet are not wet? Pull your boots off. Do pull your boots

off.”

“My dear Jack, I am as dry as a bone. Don’t moddley-coddley, there’s a

good fellow. I like anything better than being moddley-coddleyed.”

With the check upon him of being unsympathetically restrained in a

genial outburst of enthusiasm, Mr. Jasper stands still, and looks on

intently at the young fellow, divesting himself of his outward coat,

hat, gloves, and so forth. Once for all, a look of intentness and

intensity—a look of hungry, exacting, watchful, and yet devoted

affection—is always, now and ever afterwards, on the Jasper face

whenever the Jasper face is addressed in this direction. And whenever

it is so addressed, it is never, on this occasion or on any other,

dividedly addressed; it is always concentrated.

“Now I am right, and now I’ll take my corner, Jack. Any dinner, Jack?”

Mr. Jasper opens a door at the upper end of the room, and discloses a

small inner room pleasantly lighted and prepared, wherein a comely dame

is in the act of setting dishes on table.

“What a jolly old Jack it is!” cries the young fellow, with a clap of

his hands. “Look here, Jack; tell me; whose birthday is it?”

“Not yours, I know,” Mr. Jasper answers, pausing to consider.

“Not mine, you know? No; not mine, _I_ know! Pussy’s!”

Fixed as the look the young fellow meets is, there is yet in it some

strange power of suddenly including the sketch over the chimneypiece.

“Pussy’s, Jack! We must drink Many happy returns to her. Come, uncle;

take your dutiful and sharp-set nephew in to dinner.”

As the boy (for he is little more) lays a hand on Jasper’s shoulder,

Jasper cordially and gaily lays a hand on _his_ shoulder, and so

Marseillaise-wise they go in to dinner.

“And, Lord! here’s Mrs. Tope!” cries the boy. “Lovelier than ever!”

“Never you mind me, Master Edwin,” retorts the Verger’s wife; “I can

take care of myself.”

“You can’t. You’re much too handsome. Give me a kiss because it’s

Pussy’s birthday.”

“I’d Pussy you, young man, if I was Pussy, as you call her,” Mrs. Tope

blushingly retorts, after being saluted. “Your uncle’s too much wrapt

up in you, that’s where it is. He makes so much of you, that it’s my

opinion you think you’ve only to call your Pussys by the dozen, to make

’em come.”

“You forget, Mrs. Tope,” Mr. Jasper interposes, taking his place at the

table with a genial smile, “and so do you, Ned, that Uncle and Nephew

are words prohibited here by common consent and express agreement. For

what we are going to receive His holy name be praised!”

“Done like the Dean! Witness, Edwin Drood! Please to carve, Jack, for I

can’t.”

This sally ushers in the dinner. Little to the present purpose, or to

any purpose, is said, while it is in course of being disposed of. At

length the cloth is drawn, and a dish of walnuts and a decanter of

rich-coloured sherry are placed upon the table.

“I say! Tell me, Jack,” the young fellow then flows on: “do you really

and truly feel as if the mention of our relationship divided us at all?

_I_ don’t.”

“Uncles as a rule, Ned, are so much older than their nephews,” is the

reply, “that I have that feeling instinctively.”

“As a rule! Ah, may-be! But what is a difference in age of half-a-dozen

years or so? And some uncles, in large families, are even younger than

their nephews. By George, I wish it was the case with us!”

“Why?”

“Because if it was, I’d take the lead with you, Jack, and be as wise as

Begone, dull Care! that turned a young man gray, and Begone, dull Care!

that turned an old man to clay.—Halloa, Jack! Don’t drink.”

“Why not?”

“Asks why not, on Pussy’s birthday, and no Happy returns proposed!

Pussy, Jack, and many of ’em! Happy returns, I mean.”

Laying an affectionate and laughing touch on the boy’s extended hand,

as if it were at once his giddy head and his light heart, Mr. Jasper

drinks the toast in silence.

“Hip, hip, hip, and nine times nine, and one to finish with, and all

that, understood. Hooray, hooray, hooray!—And now, Jack, let’s have a

little talk about Pussy. Two pairs of nut-crackers? Pass me one, and

take the other.” Crack. “How’s Pussy getting on Jack?”

“With her music? Fairly.”

“What a dreadfully conscientious fellow you are, Jack! But _I_ know,

Lord bless you! Inattentive, isn’t she?”

“She can learn anything, if she will.”

“_If_ she will! Egad, that’s it. But if she won’t?”

Crack!—on Mr. Jasper’s part.

“How’s she looking, Jack?”

Mr. Jasper’s concentrated face again includes the portrait as he

returns: “Very like your sketch indeed.”

“I _am_ a little proud of it,” says the young fellow, glancing up at

the sketch with complacency, and then shutting one eye, and taking a

corrected prospect of it over a level bridge of nut-crackers in the

air: “Not badly hit off from memory. But I ought to have caught that

expression pretty well, for I have seen it often enough.”

Crack!—on Edwin Drood’s part.

Crack!—on Mr. Jasper’s part.

“In point of fact,” the former resumes, after some silent dipping among

his fragments of walnut with an air of pique, “I see it whenever I go

to see Pussy. If I don’t find it on her face, I leave it there.—You

know I do, Miss Scornful Pert. Booh!” With a twirl of the nut-crackers

at the portrait.

Crack! crack! crack. Slowly, on Mr. Jasper’s part.

Crack. Sharply on the part of Edwin Drood.

Silence on both sides.

“Have you lost your tongue, Jack?”

“Have you found yours, Ned?”

“No, but really;—isn’t it, you know, after all—”

Mr. Jasper lifts his dark eyebrows inquiringly.

“Isn’t it unsatisfactory to be cut off from choice in such a matter?

There, Jack! I tell you! If I could choose, I would choose Pussy from

all the pretty girls in the world.”

“But you have not got to choose.”

“That’s what I complain of. My dead and gone father and Pussy’s dead

and gone father must needs marry us together by anticipation. Why

the—Devil, I was going to say, if it had been respectful to their

memory—couldn’t they leave us alone?”

“Tut, tut, dear boy,” Mr. Jasper remonstrates, in a tone of gentle

deprecation.

“Tut, tut? Yes, Jack, it’s all very well for _you_. _You_ can take it

easily. _Your_ life is not laid down to scale, and lined and dotted out

for you, like a surveyor’s plan. _You_ have no uncomfortable suspicion

that you are forced upon anybody, nor has anybody an uncomfortable

suspicion that she is forced upon you, or that you are forced upon her.

_You_ can choose for yourself. Life, for _you_, is a plum with the

natural bloom on; it hasn’t been over-carefully wiped off for _you_—”

“Don’t stop, dear fellow. Go on.”

“Can I anyhow have hurt your feelings, Jack?”

“How can you have hurt my feelings?”

“Good Heaven, Jack, you look frightfully ill! There’s a strange film

come over your eyes.”

Mr. Jasper, with a forced smile, stretches out his right hand, as if at

once to disarm apprehension and gain time to get better. After a while

he says faintly:

“I have been taking opium for a pain—an agony—that sometimes overcomes

me. The effects of the medicine steal over me like a blight or a cloud,

and pass. You see them in the act of passing; they will be gone

directly. Look away from me. They will go all the sooner.”

With a scared face the younger man complies by casting his eyes

downward at the ashes on the hearth. Not relaxing his own gaze on the

fire, but rather strengthening it with a fierce, firm grip upon his

elbow-chair, the elder sits for a few moments rigid, and then, with

thick drops standing on his forehead, and a sharp catch of his breath,

becomes as he was before. On his so subsiding in his chair, his nephew

gently and assiduously tends him while he quite recovers. When Jasper

is restored, he lays a tender hand upon his nephew’s shoulder, and, in

a tone of voice less troubled than the purport of his words—indeed with

something of raillery or banter in it—thus addresses him:

“There is said to be a hidden skeleton in every house; but you thought

there was none in mine, dear Ned.”

“Upon my life, Jack, I did think so. However, when I come to consider

that even in Pussy’s house—if she had one—and in mine—if I had one—”

“You were going to say (but that I interrupted you in spite of myself)

what a quiet life mine is. No whirl and uproar around me, no

distracting commerce or calculation, no risk, no change of place,

myself devoted to the art I pursue, my business my pleasure.”

“I really was going to say something of the kind, Jack; but you see,

you, speaking of yourself, almost necessarily leave out much that I

should have put in. For instance: I should have put in the foreground

your being so much respected as Lay Precentor, or Lay Clerk, or

whatever you call it, of this Cathedral; your enjoying the reputation

of having done such wonders with the choir; your choosing your society,

and holding such an independent position in this queer old place; your

gift of teaching (why, even Pussy, who don’t like being taught, says

there never was such a Master as you are!), and your connexion.”

“Yes; I saw what you were tending to. I hate it.”

“Hate it, Jack?” (Much bewildered.)

“I hate it. The cramped monotony of my existence grinds me away by the

grain. How does our service sound to you?”

“Beautiful! Quite celestial!”

“It 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?”

“I thought you had so exactly found your niche in life, Jack,” Edwin

Drood returns, astonished, bending forward in his chair to lay a

sympathetic hand on Jasper’s knee, and looking at him with an anxious

face.

“I know you thought so. They all think so.”

“Well, I suppose they do,” says Edwin, meditating aloud. “Pussy thinks

so.”

“When did she tell you that?”

“The last time I was here. You remember when. Three months ago.”

“How did she phrase it?”

“O, she only said that she had become your pupil, and that you were

made for your vocation.”

The younger man glances at the portrait. The elder sees it in him.

“Anyhow, my dear Ned,” Jasper resumes, as he shakes his head with a

grave cheerfulness, “I must subdue myself to my vocation: which is much

the same thing outwardly. It’s too late to find another now. This is a

confidence between us.”

“It shall be sacredly preserved, Jack.”

“I have reposed it in you, because—”

“I 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.”

As each stands looking into the other’s eyes, and as the uncle holds

the nephew’s hands, the uncle thus proceeds:

“You know now, don’t you, that even a poor monotonous chorister and

grinder of music—in his niche—may be troubled with some stray sort of

ambition, aspiration, restlessness, dissatisfaction, what shall we call

it?”

“Yes, dear Jack.”

“And you will remember?”

“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 reassure 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

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 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 pass the day. Of Pussy’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

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:

“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 Pussy;

as many pairs of gloves as she is years old to-day. Rather poetical,

Jack?”

Mr. Jasper, still in the same attitude, 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 attitude, and they go out together.