The Mystery of Edwin Drood

An ancient English Cathedral Tower? How can the ancient English Cathedral tower be here! The well-known massive gray square tower of its old Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect. What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe, it is set up by the Sultan’s orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in number and attendants. Still, the Cathedral Tower rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike. Stay! Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on the top of a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry? Some vague period of drowsy laughter must be devoted to the consideration of this possibility.

“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.”

squared, and his hands on his knees, compressing the driver into a most uncomfortably small compass, and glowering about him with a strongly marked face.

“Is this Cloisterham?” demanded the passenger, in a tremendous voice.

“It is,” replied the driver, rubbing himself as if he ached, after throwing the reins to the ostler. “And I never was so glad to see it.”

“Tell your master to make his box seat wider, then,” returned the passenger. “Your master is morally bound⁠—and ought to be legally, under ruinous penalties⁠—to provide for the comfort of his fellow-man.”

The driver instituted, with the palms of his hands, a superficial perquisition into the state of his skeleton; which seemed to make him anxious.

“Have I sat upon you?” asked the passenger.

“You have,” said the driver, as if he didn’t like it at all.

“Take that card, my friend.”

“I think I won’t deprive you on it,” returned the driver, casting his eyes over it with no great favour, without taking it. “What’s the good of it to me?”

“Be a Member of that Society,” said the passenger.

“What shall I get by it?” asked the driver.

“Brotherhood,” returned the passenger, in a ferocious voice.

“Thankee,” said the driver, very deliberately, as he got down; “my mother was contented with myself, and so am I. I don’t want no brothers.”

“But you must have them,” replied the passenger, also descending, “whether you like it or not. I am your brother.”

“Who is Mr. Jasper?”

Rosa turned aside her head in answering: “Eddy’s uncle, and my music-master.”

“You do not love him?”

“Ugh!” She put her hands up to her face, and shook with fear or horror.

“You know that he loves you?”

“O, don’t, don’t, don’t!” cried Rosa, dropping on her knees, and clinging to her new resource. “Don’t tell me of it! He terrifies me. He haunts my thoughts, like a dreadful ghost. I feel that I am never safe from him. I feel as if he could pass in through the wall when he is spoken of.” She actually did look round, as if she dreaded to see him standing in the shadow behind her.

“Try to tell me more about it, darling.”

“Yes, I will, I will. Because you are so strong. But hold me the while, and stay with me afterwards.”

“My child! You speak as if he had threatened you in some dark way.”

“He has never spoken to me about⁠—that. Never.”

“What has he done?”

“He has made a slave of me with his looks. He has forced me to understand him, without his saying a word; and he has forced me to keep silence, without his uttering a threat. When I play, he never moves his eyes from my hands. When I sing, he never moves his eyes from my lips.

At about this time, a stranger appeared in Cloisterham; a white-haired personage with black eyebrows. Being buttoned up in a tightish blue surtout, with a buff waistcoat and gray trousers, he had something of a military air, but he announced himself at the Crozier (the orthodox hotel, where he put up with a portmanteau) as an idle dog who lived upon his means; and he farther announced that he had a mind to take a lodging in the picturesque old city for a month or two, with a view of settling down there altogether. Both announcements were made in the coffee-room of the Crozier, to all whom it might, or might not, concern, by the stranger as he stood with his back to the empty fireplace, waiting for his fried sole, veal cutlet, and pint of sherry. And the waiter (business being chronically slack at the Crozier) represented all whom it might or might not concern, and absorbed the whole of the information.

This gentleman’s white head was unusually large, and his shock of white hair was unusually thick and ample. “I suppose, waiter,” he said, shaking his shock of hair, as a Newfoundland dog might shake his before sitting down to dinner, “that a fair lodging for a single buffer might be found in these parts, eh?”

The waiter had no doubt of it.

“Something old,” said the gentleman. “Take my hat down for a moment from that peg, will you? No, I don’t want it; look into it. What do you see written there?”

The waiter read: “Datchery.”

“Now you know my name,” said the gentleman; “Dick Datchery. Hang it up again. I was saying something old is what I should prefer, something odd and out of the way; something venerable, architectural, and inconvenient.”