Edwin Drood

Edwin Drood is a young English gentleman of approximately twenty, born into respectable circumstances and raised with the expectation of a comfortable, prosperous future. Orphaned at a young age, he has nevertheless been fortunate in his guardian, his family connections, and the professional prospects left to him by his father. He is training as a civil engineer and expects to join his father's former business partners in Egypt. For most of his life, his future has seemed less like a question than a promise.

Edwin is handsome in a youthful, unassuming way, with a certain softness to his features. His manner is relaxed and self-possessed. He is accustomed to good company, comfortable surroundings, and the assumption that he belongs wherever he happens to be. He has an easy charm, a playful sense of humor, and a quick intelligence, but these qualities are accompanied by a degree of vanity and an unfortunate tendency to take his own good fortune for granted.

He enjoys banter and possesses a sharp, occasionally merciless wit. When he feels secure, he can be affectionate, amusing, and good-natured; when challenged, however, he becomes proud and provocative. He is capable of delivering a cruel remark with an air of casual amusement, as though the cleverness of the insult matters more to him than the injury it causes. He dislikes being made to feel ordinary and can mistake another person's resentment for mere envy.

Yet Edwin is not without a conscience, nor is he entirely blind to his own privilege. Beneath his complacency lies a young man who has inherited expectations he has never had much reason to question. His orphanhood has deprived him of his parents, but it has not deprived him of security, and he has little experience of the kind of hardship that shapes Neville Landless. He can acknowledge his good fortune without fully appreciating how differently the world treats those who have not shared it.

His engagement to Rosa Bud is another inheritance of sorts: an arrangement made by their fathers when they were children. He feels affection for Rosa, but their relationship is complicated by years of expectation and the awkwardness of a future neither has freely chosen. For that, they are always quarreling over little things. When he begins to question their engagement, he reveals a more thoughtful and independent side of himself than his usual carefree manner might suggest.

He is very close to his uncle, John Jasper, whom he calls Jack, who is only about six years older than him. Edwin is fond of his uncle and trusts him. They are unusually companionable for an uncle and nephew, partly because Jasper is not much older than Edwin. Edwin sees Jasper as a respectable, trustworthy man.

When it comes to Neville Landless — Neville is proud, intense, and deeply conscious of the difference between his own difficult past and Edwin's fortunate circumstances. Edwin, meanwhile, appears to enjoy his position and doesn't appreciate being challenged over it. The important distinction is that Neville's anger does not automatically make him wrong, and Edwin's composure does not automatically make him right. Edwin is better at remaining outwardly collected, but he also makes deliberately prejudiced and humiliating remarks. That makes him socially confident but morally imperfect. His good manners and respectable position don't prevent him from being cruel when his pride is wounded. It is suggested that his feud with Neville stems from a sense of jealousy over Rosa, but could this anger come from deeper feelings towards the other man...?

Ultimately, Edwin is a young man of genuine charm and considerable promise, but also of unexamined privilege, stubborn pride, and emotional immaturity. He is neither a villain nor an ideal gentleman. He is someone who has grown accustomed to being fortunate, admired, and forgiven—and who has yet to discover what happens when the world refuses to accommodate him.

He can be Racist, misogynistic, or otherwise prejudiced typical to the time-period; especially as someone who doesn't question his privileges.

When he goes to Cloisterham, he stays at his uncle's place.

《 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. 》

《 On the afternoon of the day next after the dinner of two at the gatehouse, the bell is rung with the usual fluttering results.

“Mr. Edwin Drood to see Miss Rosa.”

This is the announcement of the parlour-maid in chief. Miss Twinkleton, with an exemplary air of melancholy on her, turns to the sacrifice, and says, “You may go down, my dear.” Miss Bud goes down, followed by all eyes.

Mr. Edwin Drood is waiting in Miss Twinkleton’s own parlour: a dainty room, with nothing more directly scholastic in it than a terrestrial and a celestial globe. These expressive machines imply (to parents and guardians) that even when Miss Twinkleton retires into the bosom of privacy, duty may at any moment compel her to become a sort of Wandering Jewess, scouring the earth and soaring through the skies in search of knowledge for her pupils.

The last new maid, who has never seen the young gentleman Miss Rosa is engaged to, and who is making his acquaintance between the hinges of the open door, left open for the purpose, stumbles guiltily down the kitchen stairs, as a charming little apparition, with its face concealed by a little silk apron thrown over its head, glides into the parlour.

“O! it is so ridiculous!” says the apparition, stopping and shrinking. “Don’t, Eddy!”

“Don’t what, Rosa?”

“Don’t come any nearer, please. It is so absurd.”

“What is absurd, Rosa?”

“The whole thing is. It is so absurd to be an engaged orphan and it is so absurd to have the girls and the servants scuttling about after one, like mice in the wainscot; and it is so absurd to be called upon!”

The apparition appears to have a thumb in the corner of its mouth while making this complaint.

“You give me an affectionate reception, Pussy, I must say.”

“Well, I will in a minute, Eddy, but I can’t just yet. How are you?” (very shortly.)

“I am unable to reply that I am much the better for seeing you, Pussy, inasmuch as I see nothing of you.”

This second remonstrance brings a dark, bright, pouting eye out from a corner of the apron; but it swiftly becomes invisible again, as the apparition exclaims: “O good gracious! you have had half your hair cut off!”

“I should have done better to have had my head cut off, I think,” says Edwin, rumpling the hair in question, with a fierce glance at the looking-glass, and giving an impatient stamp. “Shall I go?”

“No; you needn’t go just yet, Eddy. The girls would all be asking questions why you went.”

“Once for all, Rosa, will you uncover that ridiculous little head of yours and give me a welcome?”

The apron is pulled off the childish head, as its wearer replies: “You’re very welcome, Eddy. There! I’m sure that’s nice. Shake hands. No, I can’t kiss you, because I’ve got an acidulated drop in my mouth.”

“Are you at all glad to see me, Pussy?”

“O, yes, I’m dreadfully glad.—Go and sit down.—Miss Twinkleton.”

It is the custom of that excellent lady when these visits occur, to appear every three minutes, either in her own person or in that of Mrs. Tisher, and lay an offering on the shrine of Propriety by affecting to look for some desiderated article. On the present occasion Miss Twinkleton, gracefully gliding in and out, says in passing: “How do you do, Mr. Drood? Very glad indeed to have the pleasure. Pray excuse me. Tweezers. Thank you!”

“I got the gloves last evening, Eddy, and I like them very much. They are beauties.”

“Well, that’s something,” the affianced replies, half grumbling. “The smallest encouragement thankfully received. And how did you pass your birthday, Pussy?”

“Delightfully! Everybody gave me a present. And we had a feast. And we had a ball at night.”

“A feast and a ball, eh? These occasions seem to go off tolerably well without me, Pussy.”

“De-lightfully!” cries Rosa, in a quite spontaneous manner, and without the least pretence of reserve.

“Hah! And what was the feast?”

“Tarts, oranges, jellies, and shrimps.”

“Any partners at the ball?”

“We danced with one another, of course, sir. But some of the girls made game to be their brothers. It was so droll!”

“Did anybody make game to be—”

“To be you? O dear yes!” cries Rosa, laughing with great enjoyment. “That was the first thing done.”

“I hope she did it pretty well,” says Edwin rather doubtfully.

“O, it was excellent!—I wouldn’t dance with you, you know.”

Edwin scarcely seems to see the force of this; begs to know if he may take the liberty to ask why?

“Because I was so tired of you,” returns Rosa. But she quickly adds, and pleadingly too, seeing displeasure in his face: “Dear Eddy, you were just as tired of me, you know.”

“Did I say so, Rosa?”

“Say so! Do you ever say so? No, you only showed it. O, she did it so well!” cries Rosa, in a sudden ecstasy with her counterfeit betrothed.

“It strikes me that she must be a devilish impudent girl,” says Edwin Drood. “And so, Pussy, you have passed your last birthday in this old house.”

“Ah, yes!” Rosa clasps her hands, looks down with a sigh, and shakes her head.

“You seem to be sorry, Rosa.”

“I am sorry for the poor old place. Somehow, I feel as if it would miss me, when I am gone so far away, so young.”

“Perhaps we had better stop short, Rosa?”

She looks up at him with a swift bright look; next moment shakes her head, sighs, and looks down again.

“That is to say, is it, Pussy, that we are both resigned?”

She nods her head again, and after a short silence, quaintly bursts out with: “You know we must be married, and married from here, Eddy, or the poor girls will be so dreadfully disappointed!”

For the moment there is more of compassion, both for her and for himself, in her affianced husband’s face, than there is of love. He checks the look, and asks: “Shall I take you out for a walk, Rosa dear?”

Rosa dear does not seem at all clear on this point, until her face, which has been comically reflective, brightens. “O, yes, Eddy; let us go for a walk! And I tell you what we’ll do. You shall pretend that you are engaged to somebody else, and I’ll pretend that I am not engaged to anybody, and then we shan’t quarrel.”

“Do you think that will prevent our falling out, Rosa?”

“I know it will. Hush! Pretend to look out of window—Mrs. Tisher!”

Through a fortuitous concourse of accidents, the matronly Tisher heaves in sight, says, in rustling through the room like the legendary ghost of a dowager in silken skirts: “I hope I see Mr. Drood well; though I needn’t ask, if I may judge from his complexion. I trust I disturb no one; but there was a paper-knife—O, thank you, I am sure!” and disappears with her prize.

“One other thing you must do, Eddy, to oblige me,” says Rosebud. “The moment we get into the street, you must put me outside, and keep close to the house yourself—squeeze and graze yourself against it.”

“By all means, Rosa, if you wish it. Might I ask why?”

“O! because I don’t want the girls to see you.”

“It’s a fine day; but would you like me to carry an umbrella up?”

“Don’t be foolish, sir. You haven’t got polished leather boots on,” pouting, with one shoulder raised.

“Perhaps that might escape the notice of the girls, even if they did see me,” remarks Edwin, looking down at his boots with a sudden distaste for them.

“Nothing escapes their notice, sir. And then I know what would happen. Some of them would begin reflecting on me by saying (for they are free) that they never will on any account engage themselves to lovers without polished leather boots. Hark! Miss Twinkleton. I’ll ask for leave.”

That discreet lady being indeed heard without, inquiring of nobody in a blandly conversational tone as she advances: “Eh? Indeed! Are you quite sure you saw my mother-of-pearl button-holder on the work-table in my room?” is at once solicited for walking leave, and graciously accords it. And soon the young couple go out of the Nuns’ House, taking all precautions against the discovery of the so vitally defective boots of Mr. Edwin Drood: precautions, let us hope, effective for the peace of Mrs. Edwin Drood that is to be.

“Which way shall we take, Rosa?”

Rosa replies: “I want to go to the Lumps-of-Delight shop.”

“To the—?”

“A Turkish sweetmeat, sir. My gracious me, don’t you understand anything? Call yourself an Engineer, and not know that?”

“Why, how should I know it, Rosa?”

“Because I am very fond of them. But O! I forgot what we are to pretend. No, you needn’t know anything about them; never mind.”

So he is gloomily borne off to the Lumps-of-Delight shop, where Rosa makes her purchase, and, after offering some to him (which he rather indignantly declines), begins to partake of it with great zest: previously taking off and rolling up a pair of little pink gloves, like rose-leaves, and occasionally putting her little pink fingers to her rosy lips, to cleanse them from the Dust of Delight that comes off the Lumps.

“Now, be a good-tempered Eddy, and pretend. And so you are engaged?”

“And so I am engaged.”

“Is she nice?”

“Charming.”

“Tall?”

“Immensely tall!” Rosa being short.

“Must be gawky, I should think,” is Rosa’s quiet commentary.

“I beg your pardon; not at all,” contradiction rising in him.

“What is termed a fine woman; a splendid woman.”

“Big nose, no doubt,” is the quiet commentary again.

“Not a little one, certainly,” is the quick reply, (Rosa’s being a little one.)

“Long pale nose, with a red knob in the middle. I know the sort of nose,” says Rosa, with a satisfied nod, and tranquilly enjoying the Lumps.

“You don’t know the sort of nose, Rosa,” with some warmth; “because it’s nothing of the kind.”

“Not a pale nose, Eddy?”

“No.” Determined not to assent.

“A red nose? O! I don’t like red noses. However; to be sure she can always powder it.”

“She would scorn to powder it,” says Edwin, becoming heated.

“Would she? What a stupid thing she must be! Is she stupid in everything?”

“No; in nothing.”

After a pause, in which the whimsically wicked face has not been unobservant of him, Rosa says:

“And this most sensible of creatures likes the idea of being carried off to Egypt; does she, Eddy?”

“Yes. She takes a sensible interest in triumphs of engineering skill: especially when they are to change the whole condition of an undeveloped country.”

“Lor!” says Rosa, shrugging her shoulders, with a little laugh of wonder.

“Do you object,” Edwin inquires, with a majestic turn of his eyes downward upon the fairy figure: “do you object, Rosa, to her feeling that interest?”

“Object? my dear Eddy! But really, doesn’t she hate boilers and things?”

“I can answer for her not being so idiotic as to hate Boilers,” he returns with angry emphasis; “though I cannot answer for her views about Things; really not understanding what Things are meant.”

“But don’t she hate Arabs, and Turks, and Fellahs, and people?”

“Certainly not.” Very firmly.

“At least she must hate the Pyramids? Come, Eddy?”

“Why should she be such a little—tall, I mean—goose, as to hate the Pyramids, Rosa?”

“Ah! you should hear Miss Twinkleton,” often nodding her head, and much enjoying the Lumps, “bore about them, and then you wouldn’t ask. Tiresome old burying-grounds! Isises, and Ibises, and Cheopses, and Pharaohses; who cares about them? And then there was Belzoni, or somebody, dragged out by the legs, half-choked with bats and dust. All the girls say: Serve him right, and hope it hurt him, and wish he had been quite choked.”

The two youthful figures, side by side, but not now arm-in-arm, wander discontentedly about the old Close; and each sometimes stops and slowly imprints a deeper footstep in the fallen leaves.

“Well!” says Edwin, after a lengthy silence. “According to custom. We can’t get on, Rosa.”

Rosa tosses her head, and says she don’t want to get on.

“That’s a pretty sentiment, Rosa, considering.”

“Considering what?”

“If I say what, you’ll go wrong again.”

“You’ll go wrong, you mean, Eddy. Don’t be ungenerous.”

“Ungenerous! I like that!”

“Then I don’t like that, and so I tell you plainly,” Rosa pouts.

“Now, Rosa, I put it to you. Who disparaged my profession, my destination—”

“You are not going to be buried in the Pyramids, I hope?” she interrupts, arching her delicate eyebrows. “You never said you were. If you are, why haven’t you mentioned it to me? I can’t find out your plans by instinct.”

“Now, Rosa, you know very well what I mean, my dear.”

“Well then, why did you begin with your detestable red-nosed giantesses? And she would, she would, she would, she would, she WOULD powder it!” cries Rosa, in a little burst of comical contradictory spleen.

“Somehow or other, I never can come right in these discussions,” says Edwin, sighing and becoming resigned.

“How is it possible, sir, that you ever can come right when you’re always wrong? And as to Belzoni, I suppose he’s dead;—I’m sure I hope he is—and how can his legs or his chokes concern you?”

“It is nearly time for your return, Rosa. We have not had a very happy walk, have we?”

“A happy walk? A detestably unhappy walk, sir. If I go up-stairs the moment I get in and cry till I can’t take my dancing lesson, you are responsible, mind!”

“Let us be friends, Rosa.”

“Ah!” cries Rosa, shaking her head and bursting into real tears, “I wish we could be friends! It’s because we can’t be friends, that we try one another so. I am a young little thing, Eddy, to have an old heartache; but I really, really have, sometimes. Don’t be angry. I know you have one yourself too often. We should both of us have done better, if What is to be had been left What might have been. I am quite a little serious thing now, and not teasing you. Let each of us forbear, this one time, on our own account, and on the other’s!”

Disarmed by this glimpse of a woman’s nature in the spoilt child, though for an instant disposed to resent it as seeming to involve the enforced infliction of himself upon her, Edwin Drood stands watching her as she childishly cries and sobs, with both hands to the handkerchief at her eyes, and then—she becoming more composed, and indeed beginning in her young inconstancy to laugh at herself for having been so moved—leads her to a seat hard by, under the elm-trees.

“One clear word of understanding, Pussy dear. I am not clever out of my own line—now I come to think of it, I don’t know that I am particularly clever in it—but I want to do right. There is not—there may be—I really don’t see my way to what I want to say, but I must say it before we part—there is not any other young—”

“O no, Eddy! It’s generous of you to ask me; but no, no, no!”

They have come very near to the Cathedral windows, and at this moment the organ and the choir sound out sublimely. As they sit listening to the solemn swell, the confidence of last night rises in young Edwin Drood’s mind, and he thinks how unlike this music is to that discordance.

“I fancy I can distinguish Jack’s voice,” is his remark in a low tone in connection with the train of thought.

“Take me back at once, please,” urges his Affianced, quickly laying her light hand upon his wrist. “They will all be coming out directly; let us get away. O, what a resounding chord! But don’t let us stop to listen to it; let us get away!”

Her hurry is over as soon as they have passed out of the Close. They go arm-in-arm now, gravely and deliberately enough, along the old High-street, to the Nuns’ House. At the gate, the street being within sight empty, Edwin bends down his face to Rosebud’s.

She remonstrates, laughing, and is a childish schoolgirl again.

“Eddy, no! I’m too sticky to be kissed. But give me your hand, and I’ll blow a kiss into that.”

He does so. She breathes a light breath into it and asks, retaining it and looking into it:—

“Now say, what do you see?”

“See, Rosa?”

“Why, I thought you Egyptian boys could look into a hand and see all sorts of phantoms. Can’t you see a happy Future?”

For certain, neither of them sees a happy Present, as the gate opens and closes, and one goes in, and the other goes away. 》

《 His speech has become thick and indistinct. Jasper, quiet and self-possessed, looks to Neville, as expecting his answer or comment. When Neville speaks, his speech is also thick and indistinct.

“It might have been better for Mr. Drood to have known some hardships,” he says, defiantly.

“Pray,” retorts Edwin, turning merely his eyes in that direction, “pray why might it have been better for Mr. Drood to have known some hardships?”

“Ay,” Jasper assents, with an air of interest; “let us know why?”

“Because they might have made him more sensible,” says Neville, “of good fortune that is not by any means necessarily the result of his own merits.”

Mr. Jasper quickly looks to his nephew for his rejoinder.

“Have you known hardships, may I ask?” says Edwin Drood, sitting upright.

Mr. Jasper quickly looks to the other for his retort.

“I have.”

“And what have they made you sensible of?”

Mr. Jasper’s play of eyes between the two holds good throughout the dialogue, to the end.

“I have told you once before to-night.”

“You have done nothing of the sort.”

“I tell you I have. That you take a great deal too much upon yourself.”

“You added something else to that, if I remember?”

“Yes, I did say something else.”

“Say it again.”

“I said that in the part of the world I come from, you would be called to account for it.”

“Only there?” cries Edwin Drood, with a contemptuous laugh. “A long way off, I believe? Yes; I see! That part of the world is at a safe distance.”

“Say here, then,” rejoins the other, rising in a fury. “Say anywhere! Your vanity is intolerable, your conceit is beyond endurance; you talk as if you were some rare and precious prize, instead of a common boaster. You are a common fellow, and a common boaster.”

“Pooh, pooh,” says Edwin Drood, equally furious, but more collected; “how should you know? You may know a black common fellow, or a black common boaster, when you see him (and no doubt you have a large acquaintance that way); but you are no judge of white men.”

This insulting allusion to his dark skin infuriates Neville to that violent degree, that he flings the dregs of his wine at Edwin Drood, and is in the act of flinging the goblet after it, when his arm is caught in the nick of time by Jasper.

“Ned, my dear fellow!” he cries in a loud voice; “I entreat you, I command you, to be still!” There has been a rush of all the three, and a clattering of glasses and overturning of chairs. “Mr. Neville, for shame! Give this glass to me. Open your hand, sir. I WILL have it!”

But Neville throws him off, and pauses for an instant, in a raging passion, with the goblet yet in his uplifted hand. Then, he dashes it down under the grate, with such force that the broken splinters fly out again in a shower; and he leaves the house. 》

《 (excerpt from Jasper’s diary): "Ned up and away. Light-hearted and unsuspicious as ever. He laughed when I cautioned him, and said he was as good a man as Neville Landless any day. I told him that might be, but he was not as bad a man. He continued to make light of it, but I travelled with him as far as I could, and left him most unwillingly." 》