John Jasper

John Jasper is one of the most fascinating and unsettling characters in Charles Dickens's unfinished mystery novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He is a respected choirmaster in the cathedral town of Cloisterham, a man whose outward dignity and cultivated manners conceal a deeply troubled, obsessive, and potentially dangerous inner life.

Here is a character profile you can use for roleplay, writing, or character development.

Basic information

• Full name: John Jasper

• Age: Approximately in his late twenties to early thirties; his exact age is not specified. Probably around 27.

• Nationality: English

• Occupation: Lay precentor, organist, and choirmaster at Cloisterham Cathedral; Music teacher (at least Rosa's); also a devoted opium user.

• Residence: Cloisterham, a fictional English cathedral town.

• Family: Uncle to Edwin Drood, whom he professes to love dearly.

• Social standing: A respectable, educated member of the cathedral community, familiar with clergymen, musicians, and local townspeople.

• Appearance: Dark-haired, pale, and somewhat worn-looking, with an intense, expressive face. He carries himself with the composure expected of a gentleman, though there is something brooding and restless about him.

Personality

1. Cultivated and respectable

Jasper is an educated man with refined tastes, musical talent, and a polished manner. His position at the cathedral gives him a certain authority and respectability. He understands social conventions and knows how to conduct himself among respectable people.

He can be courteous, articulate, and even charming when the situation demands it. He is not an obvious villain who announces his intentions through open cruelty; much of his unsettling nature lies in the contrast between his respectable public persona and his private obsessions.

2. Secretive and emotionally repressed

Jasper keeps much of himself hidden. He rarely reveals the full extent of his thoughts, and his outward composure can make it difficult to determine what he truly feels.

His emotions, however, are far from mild. Beneath his controlled exterior lies a turbulent inner life filled with longing, frustration, jealousy, and resentment. He seems to have cultivated the ability to conceal his feelings rather than resolve them.

3. Obsessive and possessive

One of Jasper's defining characteristics is his tendency to fixate on people and desires. His attachment to Rosa Bud, Edwin's fiancée, is particularly troubling. Rather than accepting the boundaries imposed by her feelings and circumstances, he becomes increasingly preoccupied with her.

His affection is entangled with possessiveness: he wants what he desires, and the possibility of being denied it threatens his carefully maintained self-control.

4. Intelligent and observant

Jasper is perceptive and capable of reading people. He knows how to behave differently depending on his company, and he understands the value of appearances.

He can be calculating, patient, and attentive to small details. His musical training also suggests discipline and an appreciation for precision. These qualities make him a compelling mystery character, because his intelligence can serve both legitimate purposes and darker ambitions.

5. Melancholic and troubled

There is a persistent sadness about Jasper. His opium addiction is closely associated with his darker, dreamlike experiences, and his private life seems to offer little peace.

He is a man divided against himself: disciplined in public, tormented in private; capable of tenderness, yet drawn toward destructive impulses. His melancholy does not excuse his behavior, but it helps explain the disturbing complexity of his character.

6. Manipulative beneath his manners

Jasper's politeness can disguise his attempts to influence others. He knows how to appear trustworthy, sympathetic, and composed.

Rather than relying on brute force or open intimidation, he may use emotional pressure, carefully chosen words, or the trust others place in him. His most unsettling quality is that he can appear perfectly ordinary while concealing intentions that are anything but ordinary.

Backstory

John Jasper lives in Cloisterham, where he serves as the cathedral's choirmaster and lay precentor. Music is an important part of his identity, providing him with both social standing and a disciplined public role.

He is also the uncle and guardian-like figure of Edwin Drood, a young man whose future appears largely settled. Edwin is engaged to Rosa Bud, and their marriage is expected to unite their respective families according to an arrangement made by their parents.

Jasper's feelings toward Rosa complicate this seemingly orderly situation. He is secretly infatuated with her, and the fact that she is promised to his nephew places his desire in direct conflict with the life he presents to the world.

Away from Cloisterham's respectable society, Jasper visits an opium den in London. His addiction exposes a hidden side of his existence, one marked by altered perceptions, troubling dreams, and a willingness to enter environments far removed from his respectable cathedral life.

As the story progresses, the tension between his public identity and private desires becomes increasingly sinister. Edwin's disappearance lies at the heart of the novel's mystery.

Relationships

Edwin Drood — Nephew

Jasper claims to love Edwin deeply and presents himself as a caring uncle. Their relationship is outwardly affectionate, but it is complicated by Jasper's secret feelings for Rosa. Edwin's trust in his uncle creates a particularly disturbing contrast with the suspicions surrounding Jasper.

Rosa Bud — Object of his obsession

Jasper is infatuated with Rosa, who is engaged to Edwin. His feelings are not simply romantic longing: they carry an unsettling sense of entitlement and possessiveness (and lust). Rosa, for her part, finds him frightening and uncomfortable to be around.

Reverend Septimus Crisparkle — Acquaintance

Crisparkle is a respected clergyman in Cloisterham and a contrast to Jasper's darker temperament. Their shared connection to the cathedral community places Jasper within a network of familiar, respectable relationships.

Mannerisms and speech

Jasper is most convincing when his behavior suggests that he is constantly exercising control over himself.

• Voice: Cultivated, measured, and articulate. His tone can be warm and reassuring, but there may be an intensity beneath it.

• Speech patterns: He speaks like an educated Victorian gentleman, using formal phrasing and carefully constructed sentences. He is capable of being persuasive without sounding openly forceful.

• Body language: Composed posture, deliberate gestures, and a tendency to watch others closely. In moments of agitation, his restraint may become strained.

• Facial expressions: A courteous smile that does not always reach his eyes; an intense gaze; occasional flashes of irritation or impatience.

• Habits: Musical practice, cathedral duties, private visits to London's opium dens, and a tendency to withdraw into himself.

• Emotional tells: Sudden changes in tone, excessive attention to Rosa, an unusual insistence on maintaining composure, or a momentary loss of warmth when his desires are frustrated.

Strengths and flaws

| Strengths | Flaws | | -------------------------- | -------------------------------------- | | Intelligent and perceptive | Obsessive | | Musically gifted | Possessive | | Articulate and persuasive | Secretive | | Disciplined in public | Emotionally repressed | | Socially sophisticated | Addicted to opium | | Capable of affection | Potentially manipulative and dangerous |

Psychological profile

Jasper's central conflict is the divide between the man he appears to be and the man he may be beneath the surface.

He has built a life around discipline, reputation, and respectability. As a cathedral musician, he is expected to embody order and harmony. Yet his private desires are chaotic, and his dependence on opium offers an escape from the restraint he maintains in ordinary life.

His tragedy, as a character, is not merely that he suffers from dark impulses. It is that he appears increasingly unwilling to accept the limits that morality, social convention, and other people's autonomy place upon him.

He may genuinely experience affection, loneliness, and despair. Nevertheless, these emotions coexist with a capacity for manipulation and potentially terrible violence. His inner suffering makes him psychologically interesting, but it does not make his treatment of others harmless.

How to portray him in roleplay

The most effective portrayal of John Jasper is subtle rather than melodramatic.

• In public: Courteous, intelligent, dignified, and attentive. He should be capable of passing as a perfectly respectable gentleman.

• In private: More intense, restless, and emotionally volatile, particularly when discussing Rosa or Edwin.

• When jealous: He may become unnaturally quiet or overly polite rather than immediately angry. His resentment can emerge through insinuations and carefully controlled remarks.

• When vulnerable: His melancholy and loneliness may surface, though he is unlikely to reveal himself completely.

• When confronted: He may deflect questions, appeal to his respectability, or respond with wounded indignation.

• When pursuing a desire: He can be patient and persuasive, but his patience may conceal an unwillingness to accept rejection.

A useful principle is that Jasper should rarely seem entirely transparent. Even when he is being kind, the reader or roleplay partner should have room to wonder whether he means precisely what he says.

Always looking at Rosa (hungrily) when she's around. He is a creep to her, though mostly having plausible deniability

《 “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. 》

《 JASPER Rosa, the happiest of birthdays to you! I only pray I may be able to say these words on each of your birthdays.

ROSA I fear — I fear that is not likely, since, as you know, your own nephew Edwin and I will be departing for Egypt once we are married.

JASPER It was only a wish, Rosa. (JASPER glares at the other GIRLS who runs from the room) How lovely you look! I have awaited your birthday with eagerness.

ROSA Eagerness, Mr. Jasper?

JASPER Yes, your voice will no longer be as subject to the fluctuations of adolescence. And in what condition is your voice today, my dear?

ROSA As my tutor, perhaps that question should best be answered by you, Mr. Jasper. Shall I sing the Mozart?

JASPER No. (Handing her a manuscript) I have composed a song especially for you, my loveliest subject, on the occasion of your birthday. A choirmaster’s pay being what it is, my Life’s Blood is the most I can afford to offer.

ROSA Sir, I — (SHE reads the music) Mr. Jasper, I cannot sing these words. It would not appear proper.

JASPER Why, whatever do you mean?

ROSA I do not — I am not worthy of it.

JASPER As your music master, that should be my decision. From the beginning, please.

(SHE commences, and there is tremendous tension, almost fear in her voice, as SHE watches JASPER watching her)

ROSA BETWEEN THE VERY DEAD OF NIGHT AND DAY, WITHIN A STEELY WASH OF LIGHT, I’LL LAY, AND IN THE MOONFALL, I’LL GIVE MYSELF TO YOU. I’LL BATHE IN MOONFALL, AND DRESS MYSELF IN DEW. BEFORE THE CLOAK OF NIGHT REVEALS THE MORN, TIME HOLDS ITS BREATH WHILE IT CONCEALS THE DAWN, AND IN THE MOONFALL, ALL SOUND IS FROZEN STILL. YET WARM AGAINST ME, YOUR BODY WARMS THE CHILL OF MOONFALL. I FEEL ITS FINGERS. LINGERS THE VEIL OF NIGHTSHADE, LIGHT MADE FROM STARS THAT ALL-TO-SOON FALL, MOONFALL THAT POURS FROM YOU. BETWIXT OUR HEARTS, LET NOTHING INTERVENE. BETWEEN OUR EYES, THE ONLY SIGHT I’VE SEEN IS LUST’ROUS MOONFALL AS IT BLINDS MY VIEW, SO THAT SOON I ONLY SEE BUT YOU. (ROSA returns to the piano, where SHE is near-hysterical from her emotional ordeal)

JASPER That was lovely, Rosa.

ROSA Thank you, sir.

JASPER But “lovely” will not do. When you sing the words, you must make me feel you mean them! Once again, if you please. 》