CHAPTER XIX.

SHADOW ON THE SUN-DIAL

Again Miss Twinkleton has delivered her valedictory address, with the

accompaniments of white-wine and pound-cake, and again the young ladies

have departed to their several homes. Helena Landless has left the

Nuns’ House to attend her brother’s fortunes, and pretty Rosa is alone.

Cloisterham is so bright and sunny in these summer days, that the

Cathedral and the monastery-ruin show as if their strong walls were

transparent. A soft glow seems to shine from within them, rather than

upon them from without, such is their mellowness as they look forth on

the hot corn-fields and the smoking roads that distantly wind among

them. The Cloisterham gardens blush with ripening fruit. Time was when

travel-stained pilgrims rode in clattering parties through the city’s

welcome shades; time is when wayfarers, leading a gipsy life between

haymaking time and harvest, and looking as if they were just made of

the dust of the earth, so very dusty are they, lounge about on cool

doorsteps, trying to mend their unmendable shoes, or giving them to

the city kennels as a hopeless job, and seeking others in the bundles

that they carry, along with their yet unused sickles swathed in bands

of straw. At all the more public pumps there is much cooling of bare

feet, together with much bubbling and gurgling of drinking with hand to

spout on the part of these Bedouins; the Cloisterham police meanwhile

looking askant from their beats with suspicion, and manifest impatience

that the intruders should depart from within the civic bounds, and once

more fry themselves on the simmering high-roads.

On the afternoon of such a day, when the last Cathedral service is

done, and when that side of the High Street on which the Nuns’ House

stands is in grateful shade, save where its quaint old garden opens to

the west between the boughs of trees, a servant informs Rosa, to her

terror, that Mr. Jasper desires to see her.

If he had chosen his time for finding her at a disadvantage, he could

have done no better. Perhaps he has chosen it. Helena Landless is gone,

Mrs. Tisher is absent on leave, Miss Twinkleton (in her amateur state

of existence) has contributed herself and a veal pie to a picnic.

“O why, why, why, did you say I was at home!” cried Rosa, helplessly.

The maid replies, that Mr. Jasper never asked the question.

That he said he knew she was at home, and begged she might be told that

he asked to see her.

“What shall I do! what shall I do!” thinks Rosa, clasping her hands.

Possessed by a kind of desperation, she adds in the next breath, that

she will come to Mr. Jasper in the garden. She shudders at the thought

of being shut up with him in the house; but many of its windows command

the garden, and she can be seen as well as heard there, and can shriek

in the free air and run away. Such is the wild idea that flutters

through her mind.

She has never seen him since the fatal night, except when she was

questioned before the Mayor, and then he was present in gloomy

watchfulness, as representing his lost nephew and burning to avenge

him. She hangs her garden-hat on her arm, and goes out. The moment she

sees him from the porch, leaning on the sun-dial, the old horrible

feeling of being compelled by him, asserts its hold upon her. She feels

that she would even then go back, but that he draws her feet towards

him. She cannot resist, and sits down, with her head bent, on the

garden-seat beside the sun-dial. She cannot look up at him for

abhorrence, but she has perceived that he is dressed in deep mourning.

So is she. It was not so at first; but the lost has long been given up,

and mourned for, as dead.

He would begin by touching her hand. She feels the intention, and draws

her hand back. His eyes are then fixed upon her, she knows, though her

own see nothing but the grass.

“I have been waiting,” he begins, “for some time, to be summoned back

to my duty near you.”

After several times forming her lips, which she knows he is closely

watching, into the shape of some other hesitating reply, and then into

none, she answers: “Duty, sir?”

“The duty of teaching you, serving you as your faithful music-master.”

“I have left off that study.”

“Not left off, I think. Discontinued. I was told by your guardian that

you discontinued it under the shock that we have all felt so acutely.

When will you resume?”

“Never, sir.”

“Never? You could have done no more if you had loved my dear boy.”

“I did love him!” cried Rosa, with a flash of anger.

“Yes; but not quite—not quite in the right way, shall I say? Not in the

intended and expected way. Much as my dear boy was, unhappily, too

self-conscious and self-satisfied (I’ll draw no parallel between him

and you in that respect) to love as he should have loved, or as any one

in his place would have loved—must have loved!”

She sits in the same still attitude, but shrinking a little more.

“Then, to be told that you discontinued your study with me, was to be

politely told that you abandoned it altogether?” he suggested.

“Yes,” says Rosa, with sudden spirit, “The politeness was my

guardian’s, not mine. I told him that I was resolved to leave off, and

that I was determined to stand by my resolution.”

“And you still are?”

“I still am, sir. And I beg not to be questioned any more about it. At

all events, I will not answer any more; I have that in my power.”

She is so conscious of his looking at her with a gloating admiration of

the touch of anger on her, and the fire and animation it brings with

it, that even as her spirit rises, it falls again, and she struggles

with a sense of shame, affront, and fear, much as she did that night at

the piano.

“I will not question you any more, since you object to it so much; I

will confess—”

“I do not wish to hear you, sir,” cries Rosa, rising.

This time he does touch her with his outstretched hand. In shrinking

from it, she shrinks into her seat again.

“We must sometimes act in opposition to our wishes,” he tells her in a

low voice. “You must do so now, or do more harm to others than you can

ever set right.”

“What harm?”

“Presently, presently. You question _me_, you see, and surely that’s

not fair when you forbid me to question you. Nevertheless, I will

answer the question presently. Dearest Rosa! Charming Rosa!”

She starts up again.

This time he does not touch her. But his face looks so wicked and

menacing, as he stands leaning against the sun-dial-setting, as it

were, his black mark upon the very face of day—that her flight is

arrested by horror as she looks at him.

“I do not forget how many windows command a view of us,” he says,

glancing towards them. “I will not touch you again; I will come no

nearer to you than I am. Sit down, and there will be no mighty wonder

in your music-master’s leaning idly against a pedestal and speaking

with you, remembering all that has happened, and our shares in it. Sit

down, my beloved.”

She would have gone once more—was all but gone—and once more his face,

darkly threatening what would follow if she went, has stopped her.

Looking at him with the expression of the instant frozen on her face,

she sits down on the seat again.

“Rosa, even when my dear boy was affianced to you, I loved you madly;

even when I thought his happiness in having you for his wife was

certain, I loved you madly; even when I strove to make him more

ardently devoted to you, I loved you madly; even when he gave me the

picture of your lovely face so carelessly traduced by him, which I

feigned to hang always in my sight for his sake, but worshipped in

torment for years, I loved you madly; in the distasteful work of the

day, in the wakeful misery of the night, girded by sordid realities, or

wandering through Paradises and Hells of visions into which I rushed,

carrying your image in my arms, I loved you madly.”

If anything could make his words more hideous to her than they are in

themselves, it would be the contrast between the violence of his look

and delivery, and the composure of his assumed attitude.

“I endured it all in silence. So long as you were his, or so long as I

supposed you to be his, I hid my secret loyally. Did I not?”

This lie, so gross, while the mere words in which it is told are so

true, is more than Rosa can endure. She answers with kindling

indignation: “You were as false throughout, sir, as you are now. You

were false to him, daily and hourly. You know that you made my life

unhappy by your pursuit of me. You know that you made me afraid to open

his generous eyes, and that you forced me, for his own trusting, good,

good sake, to keep the truth from him, that you were a bad, bad man!”

His preservation of his easy attitude rendering his working features

and his convulsive hands absolutely diabolical, he returns, with a

fierce extreme of admiration:

“How beautiful you are! You are more beautiful in anger than in repose.

I don’t ask you for your love; give me yourself and your hatred; give

me yourself and that pretty rage; give me yourself and that enchanting

scorn; it will be enough for me.”

Impatient tears rise to the eyes of the trembling little beauty, and

her face flames; but as she again rises to leave him in indignation,

and seek protection within the house, he stretches out his hand towards

the porch, as though he invited her to enter it.

“I told you, you rare charmer, you sweet witch, that you must stay and

hear me, or do more harm than can ever be undone. You asked me what

harm. Stay, and I will tell you. Go, and I will do it!”

Again Rosa quails before his threatening face, though innocent of its

meaning, and she remains. Her panting breathing comes and goes as if it

would choke her; but with a repressive hand upon her bosom, she

remains.

“I have made my confession that my love is mad. It is so mad, that had

the ties between me and my dear lost boy been one silken thread less

strong, I might have swept even him from your side, when you favoured

him.”

A film comes over the eyes she raises for an instant, as though he had

turned her faint.

“Even him,” he repeats. “Yes, even him! Rosa, you see me and you hear

me. Judge for yourself whether any other admirer shall love you and

live, whose life is in my hand.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“I mean to show you how mad my love is. It was hawked through the late

inquiries by Mr. Crisparkle, that young Landless had confessed to him

that he was a rival of my lost boy. That is an inexpiable offence in my

eyes. The same Mr. Crisparkle knows under my hand that I have devoted

myself to the murderer’s discovery and destruction, be he whom he

might, and that I determined to discuss the mystery with no one until I

should hold the clue in which to entangle the murderer as in a net. I

have since worked patiently to wind and wind it round him; and it is

slowly winding as I speak.”

[Illustration: Jasper’s sacrifices]

“Your belief, if you believe in the criminality of Mr. Landless, is not

Mr. Crisparkle’s belief, and he is a good man,” Rosa retorts.

“My belief is my own; and I reserve it, worshipped of my soul!

Circumstances may accumulate so strongly _even against an innocent

man_, that directed, sharpened, and pointed, they may slay him. One

wanting link discovered by perseverance against a guilty man, proves

his guilt, however slight its evidence before, and he dies. Young

Landless stands in deadly peril either way.”

“If you really suppose,” Rosa pleads with him, turning paler, “that I

favour Mr. Landless, or that Mr. Landless has ever in any way addressed

himself to me, you are wrong.”

He puts that from him with a slighting action of his hand and a curled

lip.

“I was going to show you how madly I love you. More madly now than

ever, for I am willing to renounce the second object that has arisen in

my life to divide it with you; and henceforth to have no object in

existence but you only. Miss Landless has become your bosom friend. You

care for her peace of mind?”

“I love her dearly.”

“You care for her good name?”

“I have said, sir, I love her dearly.”

“I am unconsciously,” he observes with a smile, as he folds his hands

upon the sun-dial and leans his chin upon them, so that his talk would

seem from the windows (faces occasionally come and go there) to be of

the airiest and playfullest—“I am unconsciously giving offence by

questioning again. I will simply make statements, therefore, and not

put questions. You do care for your bosom friend’s good name, and you

do care for her peace of mind. Then remove the shadow of the gallows

from her, dear one!”

“You dare propose to me to—”

“Darling, I dare propose to you. Stop there. If it be bad to idolise

you, I am the worst of men; if it be good, I am the best. My love for

you is above all other love, and my truth to you is above all other

truth. Let me have hope and favour, and I am a forsworn man for your

sake.”

Rosa puts her hands to her temples, and, pushing back her hair, looks

wildly and abhorrently at him, as though she were trying to piece

together what it is his deep purpose to present to her only in

fragments.

“Reckon up nothing at this moment, angel, but the sacrifices that I lay

at those dear feet, which I could fall down among the vilest ashes and

kiss, and put upon my head as a poor savage might. There is my fidelity

to my dear boy after death. Tread upon it!”

With an action of his hands, as though he cast down something precious.

“There is the inexpiable offence against my adoration of you. Spurn

it!”

With a similar action.

“There are my labours in the cause of a just vengeance for six toiling

months. Crush them!”

With another repetition of the action.

“There is my past and my present wasted life. There is the desolation

of my heart and my soul. There is my peace; there is my despair. Stamp

them into the dust; so that you take me, were it even mortally hating

me!”

The frightful vehemence of the man, now reaching its full height, so

additionally terrifies her as to break the spell that has held her to

the spot. She swiftly moves towards the porch; but in an instant he is

at her side, and speaking in her ear.

“Rosa, I am self-repressed again. I am walking calmly beside you to the

house. I shall wait for some encouragement and hope. I shall not strike

too soon. Give me a sign that you attend to me.”

She slightly and constrainedly moves her hand.

“Not a word of this to any one, or it will bring down the blow, as

certainly as night follows day. Another sign that you attend to me.”

She moves her hand once more.

“I love you, love you, love you! If you were to cast me off now—but you

will not—you would never be rid of me. No one should come between us. I

would pursue you to the death.”

The handmaid coming out to open the gate for him, he quietly pulls off

his hat as a parting salute, and goes away with no greater show of

agitation than is visible in the effigy of Mr. Sapsea’s father

opposite. Rosa faints in going up-stairs, and is carefully carried to

her room and laid down on her bed. A thunderstorm is coming on, the

maids say, and the hot and stifling air has overset the pretty dear: no

wonder; they have felt their own knees all of a tremble all day long.