The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Helena answered in a low voice: ‘It is only known to us three who are here together.’

‘It is not at all known to the young lady, your friend?’

‘On my soul, no!’

‘I require you, then, to give me your similar and solemn pledge, Mr. Neville, that it shall remain the secret it is, and that you will take no other action whatsoever upon it than endeavouring (and that most earnestly) to erase it from your mind. I will not tell you that it will soon pass; I will not tell you that it is the fancy of the moment; I will not tell you that such caprices have their rise and fall among the young and ardent every hour; I will leave you undisturbed in the belief that it has few parallels or none, that it will abide with you a long time, and that it will be very difficult to conquer. So much the more weight shall I attach to the pledge I require from you, when it is unreservedly given.’

The young man twice or thrice essayed to speak, but failed.

‘Let me leave you with your sister, whom it is time you took home,’ said Mr. Crisparkle. ‘You will find me alone in my room by-and-by.’

‘Pray do not leave us yet,’ Helena implored him. ‘Another minute.’

‘I should not,’ said Neville, pressing his hand upon his face, ‘have needed so much as another minute, if you had been less patient with me, Mr. Crisparkle, less considerate of me, and less unpretendingly good and true. O, if in my childhood I had known such a guide!’

‘Follow your guide now, Neville,’ murmured Helena, ‘and follow him to Heaven!’

There was that in her tone which broke the good Minor Canon’s voice, or it would have repudiated her exaltation of him. As it was, he laid a finger on his lips, and looked towards her brother.

‘To say that I give both pledges, Mr. Crisparkle, out of my innermost heart, and to say that there is no treachery in it, is to say nothing!’ Thus Neville, greatly moved. ‘I beg your forgiveness for my miserable lapse into a burst of passion.’

‘Not mine, Neville, not mine. You know with whom forgiveness lies, as the highest attribute conceivable. Miss Helena, you and your brother are twin children. You came into this world with the same dispositions, and you passed your younger days together surrounded by the same adverse circumstances. What you have overcome in yourself, can you not overcome in him? You see the rock that lies in his course. Who but you can keep him clear of it?’

‘Who but you, sir?’ replied Helena. ‘What is my influence, or my weak wisdom, compared with yours!’

‘You have the wisdom of Love,’ returned the Minor Canon, ‘and it was the highest wisdom ever known upon this earth, remember. As to mine – but the less said of that commonplace commodity the better. Good night!’

She took the hand he offered her, and gratefully and almost reverently raised it to her lips.

‘Tut!’ said the Minor Canon softly, ‘I am much overpaid!’ and turned away.

Retracing his steps towards the Cathedral Close, he tried, as he went along in the dark, to think out the best means of bringing to pass what he had promised to effect, and what must somehow be done. ‘I shall probably be asked to marry them,’ he reflected, ‘and I would they were married and gone! But this presses first.’

He debated principally whether he should write to young Drood, or whether he should speak to Jasper. The consciousness of being popular with the whole Cathedral establishment inclined him to the latter course, and the well-timed sight of the lighted gatehouse decided him to take it. ‘I will strike while the iron is hot,’ he said, ‘and see him now.’

Jasper was lying asleep on a couch before the fire, when, having ascended the postern-stair, and received no answer to his knock at the door, Mr. Crisparkle gently turned the handle and looked in. Long afterwards he had cause to remember how Jasper sprang from the couch in a delirious state between sleeping and waking, and crying out: ‘What is the matter? Who did it?’

‘It is only I, Jasper. I am sorry to have disturbed you.’

The glare of his eyes settled down into a look of recognition, and he moved a chair or two, to make a way to the fireside.

‘I was dreaming at a great rate, and am glad to be disturbed from an indigestive after-dinner sleep. Not to mention that you are always welcome.’

‘Thank you. I am not confident,’ returned Mr. Crisparkle, as he sat himself down in the easy-chair placed for him, ‘that my subject will at first sight be quite as welcome as myself; but I am a minister of peace, and I pursue my subject in the interests of peace. In a word, Jasper, I want to establish peace between these two young fellows.’

A very perplexed expression took hold of Mr. Jasper’s face; a very perplexing expression too, for Mr. Crisparkle could make nothing of it.

‘How?’ was Jasper’s inquiry, in a low and slow voice, after a silence.

‘For the “How” I come to you. I want to ask you to do me the great favour and service of interposing with your nephew (I have already interposed with Mr. Neville), and getting him to write you a short note, in his lively way, saying that he is willing to shake hands. I know what a good-natured fellow he is, and what influence you have with him. And without in the least defending Mr. Neville, we must all admit that he was bitterly stung.’

Jasper turned that perplexed face towards the fire. Mr. Crisparkle continuing to observe it, found it even more perplexing than before, inasmuch as it seemed to denote (which could hardly be) some close internal calculation.

‘I know that you are not prepossessed in Mr. Neville’s favour,’ the Minor Canon was going on, when Jasper stopped him:

‘You have cause to say so. I am not, indeed.’

‘Undoubtedly; and I admit his lamentable violence of temper, though I hope he and I will get the better of it between us. But I have exacted a very solemn promise from him as to his future demeanour towards your nephew, if you do kindly interpose; and I am sure he will keep it.’

‘You are always responsible and trustworthy, Mr. Crisparkle. Do you really feel sure that you can answer for him so confidently?’

‘I do.’

The perplexed and perplexing look vanished.

‘Then you relieve my mind of a great dread, and a heavy weight,’ said Jasper; ‘I will do it.’

Mr. Crisparkle, delighted by the swiftness and completeness of his success, acknowledged it in the handsomest terms.

‘I will do it,’ repeated Jasper, ‘for the comfort of having your guarantee against my vague and unfounded fears. You will laugh – but do you keep a Diary?’

‘A line for a day; not more.’

‘A line for a day would be quite as much as my uneventful life would need, Heaven knows,’ said Jasper, taking a book from a desk, ‘but that my Diary is, in fact, a Diary of Ned’s life too. You will laugh at this entry; you will guess when it was made:

‘“Past midnight. – After what I have just now seen, I have a morbid dread upon me of some horrible consequences resulting to my dear boy, that I cannot reason with or in any way contend against. All my efforts are vain. The demoniacal passion of this Neville Landless, his strength in his fury, and his savage rage for the destruction of its object, appal me. So profound is the impression, that twice since I have gone into my dear boy’s room, to assure myself of his sleeping safely, and not lying dead in his blood.”

‘Here is another entry next morning:

‘“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. I am unable to shake off these dark intangible presentiments of evil – if feelings founded upon staring facts are to be so called.”

‘Again and again,’ said Jasper, in conclusion, twirling the leaves of the book before putting it by, ‘I have relapsed into these moods, as other entries show. But I have now your assurance at my back, and shall put it in my book, and make it an antidote to my black humours.’

‘Such an antidote, I hope,’ returned Mr. Crisparkle, ‘as will induce you before long to consign the black humours to the flames. I ought to be the last to find any fault with you this evening, when you have met my wishes so freely; but I must say, Jasper, that your devotion to your nephew has made you exaggerative here.’

‘You are my witness,’ said Jasper, shrugging his shoulders, ‘what my state of mind honestly was, that night, before I sat down to write, and in what words I expressed it. You remember objecting to a word I used, as being too strong? It was a stronger word than any in my Diary.’

‘Well, well. Try the antidote,’ rejoined Mr. Crisparkle; ‘and may it give you a brighter and better view of the case! We will discuss it no more now. I have to thank you for myself, thank you sincerely.’

‘You shall find,’ said Jasper, as they shook hands, ‘that I will not do the thing you wish me to do, by halves. I will take care that Ned, giving way at all, shall give way thoroughly.’

On the third day after this conversation, he called on Mr. Crisparkle with the following letter:

‘My dear Jack,

‘I am touched by your account of your interview with Mr. Crisparkle, whom I much respect and esteem. At once I openly say that I forgot myself on that occasion quite as much as Mr. Landless did, and that I wish that bygone to be a bygone, and all to be right again.

‘Look here, dear old boy. Ask Mr. Landless to dinner on Christmas Eve (the better the day the better the deed), and let there be only we three, and let us shake hands all round there and then, and say no more about it.