The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Charles Dickens [fox in socks read aloud txt] 📗

from you on that vital point, what is your platform resource? Instantly to turn upon me, charging that I have no sense of the enormity of the crime itself, but am its aider and abettor! So, another time—taking me as representing your opponent in other cases—you set up a platform credulity; a moved and seconded and carried-unanimously profession of faith in some ridiculous delusion or mischievous imposition. I decline to believe it, and you fall back upon your platform resource of proclaiming that I believe nothing; that because I will not bow down to a false God of your making, I deny the true God! Another time you make the platform discovery that War is a calamity, and you propose to abolish it by a string of twisted resolutions tossed into the air like the tail of a kite. I do not admit the discovery to be yours in the least, and I have not a grain of faith in your remedy. Again, your platform resource of representing me as revelling in the horrors of a battle-field like a fiend incarnate! Another time, in another of your undiscriminating platform rushes, you would punish the sober for the drunken. I claim consideration for the comfort, convenience, and refreshment of the sober; and you presently make platform proclamation that I have a depraved desire to turn Heaven’s creatures into swine and wild beasts! In all such cases your movers, and your seconders, and your supporters—your regular Professors of all degrees, run amuck like so many mad Malays; habitually attributing the lowest and basest motives with the utmost recklessness (let me call your attention to a recent instance in yourself for which you should blush), and quoting figures which you know to be as wilfully onesided as a statement of any complicated account that should be all Creditor side and no Debtor, or all Debtor side and no Creditor. Therefore it is, Mr. Honeythunder, that I consider the platform a sufficiently bad example and a sufficiently bad school, even in public life; but hold that, carried into private life, it becomes an unendurable nuisance.”

“These are strong words, sir!” exclaimed the Philanthropist.

“I hope so,” said Mr. Crisparkle. “Good morning.”

He walked out of the Haven at a great rate, but soon fell into his regular brisk pace, and soon had a smile upon his face as he went along, wondering what the china shepherdess would have said if she had seen him pounding Mr. Honeythunder in the late little lively affair. For Mr. Crisparkle had just enough of harmless vanity to hope that he had hit hard, and to glow with the belief that he had trimmed the Philanthropic Jacket pretty handsomely.

He took himself to Staple Inn, but not to P. J. T. and Mr. Grewgious. Full many a creaking stair he climbed before he reached some attic rooms in a corner, turned the latch of their unbolted door, and stood beside the table of Neville Landless.

An air of retreat and solitude hung about the rooms and about their inhabitant. He was much worn, and so were they. Their sloping ceilings, cumbrous rusty locks and grates, and heavy wooden bins and beams, slowly mouldering withal, had a prisonous look, and he had the haggard face of a prisoner. Yet the sunlight shone in at the ugly garret-window, which had a penthouse to itself thrust out among the tiles; and on the cracked and smoke-blackened parapet beyond, some of the deluded sparrows of the place rheumatically hopped, like little feathered cripples who had left their crutches in their nests; and there was a play of living leaves at hand that changed the air, and made an imperfect sort of music in it that would have been melody in the country.

The rooms were sparely furnished, but with good store of books. Everything expressed the abode of a poor student. That Mr. Crisparkle had been either chooser, lender, or donor of the books, or that he combined the three characters, might have been easily seen in the friendly beam of his eyes upon them as he entered.

“How goes it, Neville?”

“I am in good heart, Mr. Crisparkle, and working away.”

“I wish your eyes were not quite so large and not quite so bright,” said the Minor Canon, slowly releasing the hand he had taken in his.

“They brighten at the sight of you,” returned Neville. “If you were to fall away from me, they would soon be dull enough.”

“Rally, rally!” urged the other, in a stimulating tone. “Fight for it, Neville!”

“If I were dying, I feel as if a word from you would rally me; if my pulse had stopped, I feel as if your touch would make it beat again,” said Neville. “But I have rallied, and am doing famously.”

Mr. Crisparkle turned him with his face a little more towards the light.

“I want to see a ruddier touch here, Neville,” he said, indicating his own healthy cheek by way of pattern. “I want more sun to shine upon you.”

Neville drooped suddenly, as he replied in a lowered voice: “I am not hardy enough for that, yet. I may become so, but I cannot bear it yet. If you had gone through those Cloisterham streets as I did; if you had seen, as I did, those averted eyes, and the better sort of people silently giving me too much room to pass, that I might not touch them or come near them, you wouldn’t think it quite unreasonable that I cannot go about in the daylight.”

“My poor fellow!” said the Minor Canon, in a tone so purely sympathetic that the young man caught his hand, “I never said it was unreasonable; never thought so. But I should like you to do it.”

“And that would give me the strongest motive to do it. But I cannot yet. I cannot persuade myself that the eyes of even the stream of strangers I pass in this vast city look at me without suspicion. I feel marked and tainted, even when I go out—as I do only—at night. But the darkness covers me then, and I take courage from it.”

Mr. Crisparkle laid a hand upon his shoulder, and stood looking down at him.

“If I could have changed my name,” said Neville, “I would have done so. But as you wisely pointed out to me, I can’t do that, for it would look like guilt. If I could have gone to some distant place, I might have found relief in that, but the thing is not to be thought of, for the same reason. Hiding and escaping would be the construction in either case. It seems a little hard to be so tied to a stake, and innocent; but I don’t complain.”

“And you must expect no miracle to help you, Neville,” said Mr. Crisparkle, compassionately.

“No, sir, I know that. The ordinary fulness of time and circumstances is all I have to trust to.”

“It will right you at last, Neville.”

“So I believe, and I hope I may live to know it.”

But perceiving that the despondent mood into which he was falling cast a shadow on the Minor Canon, and (it may be) feeling that the broad hand upon his shoulder was not then quite as steady as its own natural strength had rendered it when it first touched him just now, he brightened and said:

“Excellent circumstances for study, anyhow! and you know, Mr. Crisparkle, what need I have of study in all ways. Not to mention that you have advised me to study for the difficult profession of the law, specially, and that of course I am guiding myself by the advice of such a friend and helper. Such a good friend and helper!”

He took the fortifying hand from his shoulder, and kissed it. Mr. Crisparkle beamed at the books, but not so brightly as when he had entered.

“I gather from your silence on the subject that my late guardian is adverse, Mr. Crisparkle?”

The Minor Canon answered: “Your late guardian is a—a most unreasonable person, and it signifies nothing to any reasonable person whether he is adverse, perverse, or the reverse.”

“Well for me that I have enough with economy to live upon,” sighed Neville, half wearily and half cheerily, “while I wait to be learned, and wait to be righted! Else I might have proved the proverb, that while the grass grows, the steed starves!”

He opened some books as he said it, and was soon immersed in their interleaved and annotated passages; while Mr. Crisparkle sat beside him, expounding, correcting, and advising. The Minor Canon’s Cathedral duties made these visits of his difficult to accomplish, and only to be compassed at intervals of many weeks. But they were as serviceable as they were precious to Neville Landless.

When they had got through such studies as they had in hand, they stood leaning on the window-sill, and looking down upon the patch of garden. “Next week,” said Mr. Crisparkle, “you will cease to be alone, and will have a devoted companion.”

“And yet,” returned Neville, “this seems an uncongenial place to bring my sister to.”

“I don’t think so,” said the Minor Canon. “There is duty to be done here; and there are womanly feeling, sense, and courage wanted here.”

“I meant,” explained Neville, “that the surroundings are so dull and unwomanly, and that Helena can have no suitable friend or society here.”

“You have only to remember,” said Mr. Crisparkle, “that you are here yourself, and that she has to draw you into the sunlight.”

They were silent for a little while, and then Mr. Crisparkle began anew.

“When we first spoke together, Neville, you told me that your sister had risen out of the disadvantages of your past lives as superior to you as the tower of Cloisterham Cathedral is higher than the chimneys of Minor Canon Corner. Do you remember that?”

“Right well!”

“I was inclined to think it at the time an enthusiastic flight. No matter what I think it now. What I would emphasise is, that under the head of Pride your sister is a great and opportune example to you.”

“Under all heads that are included in the composition of a fine character, she is.”

“Say so; but take this one. Your sister has learnt how to govern what is proud in her nature. She can dominate it even when it is wounded through her sympathy with you. No doubt she has suffered deeply in those same streets where you suffered deeply. No doubt her life is darkened by the cloud that darkens yours. But bending her pride into a grand composure that is not haughty or aggressive, but is a sustained confidence in you and in the truth, she has won her way through those streets until she passes along them as high in the general respect as any one who treads them. Every day and hour of her life since Edwin Drood’s disappearance, she has faced malignity and folly—for you—as only a brave nature well directed can. So it will be with her to the end. Another and weaker kind of pride might sink broken-hearted, but never such a pride as hers: which knows no shrinking, and can get no mastery over her.”

The pale cheek beside him flushed under the comparison, and the hint implied in it.

“I will do all I can to imitate her,” said Neville.

“Do so, and be a truly brave man, as she is a truly brave woman,” answered Mr. Crisparkle stoutly. “It is growing dark. Will you go my way with me, when it is quite dark? Mind! it is not I who wait for darkness.”

Neville replied, that he would accompany him directly. But Mr. Crisparkle said he had a moment’s call to make on Mr. Grewgious as an act of courtesy, and would run across to that gentleman’s chambers, and rejoin Neville on his own doorstep, if he would come down there to meet him.

Mr. Grewgious, bolt upright as usual, sat taking his wine in the dusk at his open window; his wineglass and decanter on the round table at his elbow; himself and his legs on the window-seat; only one hinge in his whole body, like a bootjack.

“How do you do, reverend sir?” said Mr. Grewgious, with abundant offers of hospitality, which were as cordially declined as made. “And how is your charge getting on over the way in the set that I had the pleasure of recommending to you as vacant and eligible?”

Mr. Crisparkle replied suitably.

“I am glad you approve of them,” said Mr. Grewgious, “because I entertain a sort of fancy for having him under my eye.”

As Mr. Grewgious had to turn his eye up considerably before he could see the chambers, the phrase was to be taken figuratively and not literally.

“And how did you leave Mr. Jasper, reverend sir?” said Mr. Grewgious.

Mr. Crisparkle had left him pretty well.

“And where did you leave Mr. Jasper, reverend sir?”