Chapter XVI - Devoted

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

by Charles Dickens

When John Jasper recovered from his fit or swoon, he found himself
being tended by Mr. and Mrs. Tope, whom his visitor had summoned
for the purpose. His visitor, wooden of aspect, sat stiffly in a
chair, with his hands upon his knees, watching his recovery.

'There! You've come to nicely now, sir,' said the tearful Mrs.
Tope; 'you were thoroughly worn out, and no wonder!'

'A man,' said Mr. Grewgious, with his usual air of repeating a
lesson, 'cannot have his rest broken, and his mind cruelly
tormented, and his body overtaxed by fatigue, without being
thoroughly worn out.'

'I fear I have alarmed you?' Jasper apologised faintly, when he
was helped into his easy-chair.

'Not at all, I thank you,' answered Mr. Grewgious.

'You are too considerate.'

'Not at all, I thank you,' answered Mr. Grewgious again.

'You must take some wine, sir,' said Mrs. Tope, 'and the jelly
that I had ready for you, and that you wouldn't put your lips to at
noon, though I warned you what would come of it, you know, and you
not breakfasted; and you must have a wing of the roast fowl that has
been put back twenty times if it's been put back once. It shall all
be on table in five minutes, and this good gentleman belike will
stop and see you take it.'

This good gentleman replied with a snort, which might mean yes,
or no, or anything or nothing, and which Mrs. Tope would have found
highly mystifying, but that her attention was divided by the service
of the table.

'You will take something with me?' said Jasper, as the cloth was
laid.

'I couldn't get a morsel down my throat, I thank you,' answered
Mr. Grewgious.

Jasper both ate and drank almost voraciously. Combined with the
hurry in his mode of doing it, was an evident indifference to the
taste of what he took, suggesting that he ate and drank to fortify
himself against any other failure of the spirits, far more than to
gratify his palate. Mr. Grewgious in the meantime sat upright, with
no expression in his face, and a hard kind of imperturbably polite
protest all over him: as though he would have said, in reply to
some invitation to discourse; 'I couldn't originate the faintest
approach to an observation on any subject whatever, I thank you.'

'Do you know,' said Jasper, when he had pushed away his plate
and glass, and had sat meditating for a few minutes: 'do you know
that I find some crumbs of comfort in the communication with which
you have so much amazed me?'

'Do you?' returned Mr. Grewgious, pretty plainly adding the
unspoken clause: 'I don't, I thank you!'

'After recovering from the shock of a piece of news of my dear
boy, so entirely unexpected, and so destructive of all the castles I
had built for him; and after having had time to think of it;
yes.'

'I shall be glad to pick up your crumbs,' said Mr. Grewgious,
dryly.

'Is there not, or is there - if I deceive myself, tell me so,
and shorten my pain - is there not, or is there, hope that, finding
himself in this new position, and becoming sensitively alive to the
awkward burden of explanation, in this quarter, and that, and the
other, with which it would load him, he avoided the awkwardness, and
took to flight?'

'Such a thing might be,' said Mr. Grewgious, pondering.

'Such a thing has been. I have read of cases in which people,
rather than face a seven days' wonder, and have to account for
themselves to the idle and impertinent, have taken themselves away,
and been long unheard of.'

'I believe such things have happened,' said Mr. Grewgious,
pondering still.

'When I had, and could have, no suspicion,' pursued Jasper,
eagerly following the new track, 'that the dear lost boy had
withheld anything from me - most of all, such a leading matter as
this - what gleam of light was there for me in the whole black sky?
When I supposed that his intended wife was here, and his marriage
close at hand, how could I entertain the possibility of his
voluntarily leaving this place, in a manner that would be so
unaccountable, capricious, and cruel? But now that I know what you
have told me, is there no little chink through which day pierces?
Supposing him to have disappeared of his own act, is not his
disappearance more accountable and less cruel? The fact of his
having just parted from your ward, is in itself a sort of reason for
his going away. It does not make his mysterious departure the less
cruel to me, it is true; but it relieves it of cruelty to her.'

Mr. Grewgious could not but assent to this.

'And even as to me,' continued Jasper, still pursuing the new
track, with ardour, and, as he did so, brightening with hope: 'he
knew that you were coming to me; he knew that you were intrusted to
tell me what you have told me; if your doing so has awakened a new
train of thought in my perplexed mind, it reasonably follows that,
from the same premises, he might have foreseen the inferences that I
should draw. Grant that he did foresee them; and even the cruelty
to me - and who am I! - John Jasper, Music Master, vanishes!' -

Once more, Mr. Grewgious could not but assent to this.

'I have had my distrusts, and terrible distrusts they have
been,' said Jasper; 'but your disclosure, overpowering as it was at
first - showing me that my own dear boy had had a great
disappointing reservation from me, who so fondly loved him, kindles
hope within me. You do not extinguish it when I state it, but admit
it to be a reasonable hope. I begin to believe it possible:' here
he clasped his hands: 'that he may have disappeared from among us
of his own accord, and that he may yet be alive and well.'

Mr. Crisparkle came in at the moment. To whom Mr. Jasper
repeated:

'I begin to believe it possible that he may have disappeared of
his own accord, and may yet be alive and well.'

Mr. Crisparkle taking a seat, and inquiring: 'Why so?' Mr.
Jasper repeated the arguments he had just set forth. If they had
been less plausible than they were, the good Minor Canon's mind
would have been in a state of preparation to receive them, as
exculpatory of his unfortunate pupil. But he, too, did really
attach great importance to the lost young man's having been, so
immediately before his disappearance, placed in a new and
embarrassing relation towards every one acquainted with his projects
and affairs; and the fact seemed to him to present the question in a
new light.

'I stated to Mr. Sapsea, when we waited on him,' said Jasper:
as he really had done: 'that there was no quarrel or difference
between the two young men at their last meeting. We all know that
their first meeting was unfortunately very far from amicable; but
all went smoothly and quietly when they were last together at my
house. My dear boy was not in his usual spirits; he was depressed -
I noticed that - and I am bound henceforth to dwell upon the
circumstance the more, now that I know there was a special reason
for his being depressed: a reason, moreover, which may possibly
have induced him to absent himself.'

'I pray to Heaven it may turn out so!' exclaimed Mr.
Crisparkle.

'I pray to Heaven it may turn out so!' repeated Jasper. 'You
know - and Mr. Grewgious should now know likewise - that I took a
great prepossession against Mr. Neville Landless, arising out of his
furious conduct on that first occasion. You know that I came to
you, extremely apprehensive, on my dear boy's behalf, of his mad
violence. You know that I even entered in my Diary, and showed the
entry to you, that I had dark forebodings against him. Mr.
Grewgious ought to be possessed of the whole case. He shall not,
through any suppression of mine, be informed of a part of it, and
kept in ignorance of another part of it. I wish him to be good
enough to understand that the communication he has made to me has
hopefully influenced my mind, in spite of its having been, before
this mysterious occurrence took place, profoundly impressed against
young Landless.'

This fairness troubled the Minor Canon much. He felt that he
was not as open in his own dealing. He charged against himself
reproachfully that he had suppressed, so far, the two points of a
second strong outbreak of temper against Edwin Drood on the part of
Neville, and of the passion of jealousy having, to his own certain
knowledge, flamed up in Neville's breast against him. He was
convinced of Neville's innocence of any part in the ugly
disappearance; and yet so many little circumstances combined so
wofully against him, that he dreaded to add two more to their
cumulative weight. He was among the truest of men; but he had been
balancing in his mind, much to its distress, whether his
volunteering to tell these two fragments of truth, at this time,
would not be tantamount to a piecing together of falsehood in the
place of truth.

However, here was a model before him. He hesitated no longer.
Addressing Mr. Grewgious, as one placed in authority by the
revelation he had brought to bear on the mystery (and surpassingly
Angular Mr. Grewgious became when he found himself in that
unexpected position), Mr. Crisparkle bore his testimony to Mr.
Jasper's strict sense of justice, and, expressing his absolute
confidence in the complete clearance of his pupil from the least
taint of suspicion, sooner or later, avowed that his confidence in
that young gentleman had been formed, in spite of his confidential
knowledge that his temper was of the hottest and fiercest, and that
it was directly incensed against Mr. Jasper's nephew, by the
circumstance of his romantically supposing himself to be enamoured
of the same young lady. The sanguine reaction manifest in Mr.
Jasper was proof even against this unlooked-for declaration. It
turned him paler; but he repeated that he would cling to the hope he
had derived from Mr. Grewgious; and that if no trace of his dear boy
were found, leading to the dreadful inference that he had been made
away with, he would cherish unto the last stretch of possibility the
idea, that he might have absconded of his own wild will.

Now, it fell out that Mr. Crisparkle, going away from this
conference still very uneasy in his mind, and very much troubled on
behalf of the young man whom he held as a kind of prisoner in his
own house, took a memorable night walk.

He walked to Cloisterham Weir.

He often did so, and consequently there was nothing remarkable
in his footsteps tending that way. But the preoccupation of his
mind so hindered him from planning any walk, or taking heed of the
objects he passed, that his first consciousness of being near the
Weir, was derived from the sound of the falling water close at
hand.

'How did I come here!' was his first thought, as he stopped.

'Why did I come here!' was his second.

Then, he stood intently listening to the water. A familiar
passage in his reading, about airy tongues that syllable men's
names, rose so unbidden to his ear, that he put it from him with his
hand, as if it were tangible.

It was starlight. The Weir was full two miles above the spot to
which the young men had repaired to watch the storm. No search had
been made up here, for the tide had been running strongly down, at
that time of the night of Christmas Eve, and the likeliest places
for the discovery of a body, if a fatal accident had happened under
such circumstances, all lay - both when the tide ebbed, and when it
flowed again - between that spot and the sea. The water came over
the Weir, with its usual sound on a cold starlight night, and little
could be seen of it; yet Mr. Crisparkle had a strange idea that
something unusual hung about the place.

He reasoned with himself: What was it? Where was it? Put it
to the proof. Which sense did it address?

No sense reported anything unusual there. He listened again,
and his sense of hearing again checked the water coming over the
Weir, with its usual sound on a cold starlight night.

Knowing very well that the mystery with which his mind was
occupied, might of itself give the place this haunted air, he
strained those hawk's eyes of his for the correction of his sight.
He got closer to the Weir, and peered at its well-known posts and
timbers. Nothing in the least unusual was remotely shadowed forth.
But he resolved that he would come back early in the morning.

The Weir ran through his broken sleep, all night, and he was
back again at sunrise. It was a bright frosty morning. The whole
composition before him, when he stood where he had stood last night,
was clearly discernible in its minutest details. He had surveyed it
closely for some minutes, and was about to withdraw his eyes, when
they were attracted keenly to one spot.

He turned his back upon the Weir, and looked far away at the
sky, and at the earth, and then looked again at that one spot. It
caught his sight again immediately, and he concentrated his vision
upon it. He could not lose it now, though it was but such a speck
in the landscape. It fascinated his sight. His hands began
plucking off his coat. For it struck him that at that spot - a
corner of the Weir - something glistened, which did not move and
come over with the glistening water-drops, but remained
stationary.

He assured himself of this, he threw off his clothes, he plunged
into the icy water, and swam for the spot. Climbing the timbers,
he took from them, caught among their interstices by its chain, a
gold watch, bearing engraved upon its back E. D.

He brought the watch to the bank, swam to the Weir again,
climbed it, and dived off. He knew every hole and corner of all the
depths, and dived and dived and dived, until he could bear the cold
no more. His notion was, that he would find the body; he only found
a shirt-pin sticking in some mud and ooze.

With these discoveries he returned to Cloisterham, and, taking
Neville Landless with him, went straight to the Mayor. Mr. Jasper
was sent for, the watch and shirt-pin were identified, Neville was
detained, and the wildest frenzy and fatuity of evil report rose
against him. He was of that vindictive and violent nature, that but
for his poor sister, who alone had influence over him, and out of
whose sight he was never to be trusted, he would be in the daily
commission of murder. Before coming to England he had caused to be
whipped to death sundry 'Natives' - nomadic persons, encamping now
in Asia, now in Africa, now in the West Indies, and now at the North
Pole - vaguely supposed in Cloisterham to be always black, always of
great virtue, always calling themselves Me, and everybody else Massa
or Missie (according to sex), and always reading tracts of the
obscurest meaning, in broken English, but always accurately
understanding them in the purest mother tongue. He had nearly
brought Mrs. Crisparkle's grey hairs with sorrow to the grave.
(Those original expressions were Mr. Sapsea's.) He had repeatedly
said he would have Mr. Crisparkle's life. He had repeatedly said he
would have everybody's life, and become in effect the last man. He
had been brought down to Cloisterham, from London, by an eminent
Philanthropist, and why? Because that Philanthropist had expressly
declared: 'I owe it to my fellow-creatures that he should be, in
the words of Bentham, where he is the cause of the greatest danger
to the smallest number.'

These dropping shots from the blunderbusses of blunderheadedness
might not have hit him in a vital place. But he had to stand
against a trained and well-directed fire of arms of precision too.
He had notoriously threatened the lost young man, and had, according
to the showing of his own faithful friend and tutor who strove so
hard for him, a cause of bitter animosity (created by himself, and
stated by himself), against that ill-starred fellow. He had armed
himself with an offensive weapon for the fatal night, and he had
gone off early in the morning, after making preparations for
departure. He had been found with traces of blood on him; truly,
they might have been wholly caused as he represented, but they might
not, also. On a search-warrant being issued for the examination of
his room, clothes, and so forth, it was discovered that he had
destroyed all his papers, and rearranged all his possessions, on the
very afternoon of the disappearance. The watch found at the Weir
was challenged by the jeweller as one he had wound and set for Edwin
Drood, at twenty minutes past two on that same afternoon; and it had
run down, before being cast into the water; and it was the
jeweller's positive opinion that it had never been re-wound. This
would justify the hypothesis that the watch was taken from him not
long after he left Mr. Jasper's house at midnight, in company with
the last person seen with him, and that it had been thrown away
after being retained some hours. Why thrown away? If he had been
murdered, and so artfully disfigured, or concealed, or both, as that
the murderer hoped identification to be impossible, except from
something that he wore, assuredly the murderer would seek to remove
from the body the most lasting, the best known, and the most easily
recognisable, things upon it. Those things would be the watch and
shirt-pin. As to his opportunities of casting them into the river;
if he were the object of these suspicions, they were easy. For, he
had been seen by many persons, wandering about on that side of the
city - indeed on all sides of it - in a miserable and seemingly
half-distracted manner. As to the choice of the spot, obviously
such criminating evidence had better take its chance of being found
anywhere, rather than upon himself, or in his possession.
Concerning the reconciliatory nature of the appointed meeting
between the two young men, very little could be made of that in
young Landless's favour; for it distinctly appeared that the meeting
originated, not with him, but with Mr. Crisparkle, and that it had
been urged on by Mr. Crisparkle; and who could say how unwillingly,
or in what ill- conditioned mood, his enforced pupil had gone to it?
The more his case was looked into, the weaker it became in every
point. Even the broad suggestion that the lost young man had
absconded, was rendered additionally improbable on the showing of
the young lady from whom he had so lately parted; for; what did she
say, with great earnestness and sorrow, when interrogated? That he
had, expressly and enthusiastically, planned with her, that he would
await the arrival of her guardian, Mr. Grewgious. And yet, be it
observed, he disappeared before that gentleman appeared.

On the suspicions thus urged and supported, Neville was
detained, and re-detained, and the search was pressed on every hand,
and Jasper laboured night and day. But nothing more was found. No
discovery being made, which proved the lost man to be dead, it at
length became necessary to release the person suspected of having
made away with him. Neville was set at large. Then, a consequence
ensued which Mr. Crisparkle had too well foreseen. Neville must
leave the place, for the place shunned him and cast him out. Even
had it not been so, the dear old china shepherdess would have
worried herself to death with fears for her son, and with general
trepidation occasioned by their having such an inmate. Even had
that not been so, the authority to which the Minor Canon deferred
officially, would have settled the point.

'Mr. Crisparkle,' quoth the Dean, 'human justice may err, but it
must act according to its lights. The days of taking sanctuary are
past. This young man must not take sanctuary with us.'

'You mean that he must leave my house, sir?'

'Mr. Crisparkle,' returned the prudent Dean, 'I claim no
authority in your house. I merely confer with you, on the painful
necessity you find yourself under, of depriving this young man of
the great advantages of your counsel and instruction.'

'It is very lamentable, sir,' Mr. Crisparkle represented.

'Very much so,' the Dean assented.

'And if it be a necessity - ' Mr. Crisparkle faltered.

'As you unfortunately find it to be,' returned the Dean.

Mr. Crisparkle bowed submissively: 'It is hard to prejudge his
case, sir, but I am sensible that - '

'Just so. Perfectly. As you say, Mr. Crisparkle,' interposed
the Dean, nodding his head smoothly, 'there is nothing else to be
done. No doubt, no doubt. There is no alternative, as your good
sense has discovered.'

'I am entirely satisfied of his perfect innocence, sir,
nevertheless.'

'We-e-ell!' said the Dean, in a more confidential tone, and
slightly glancing around him, 'I would not say so, generally. Not
generally. Enough of suspicion attaches to him to - no, I think I
would not say so, generally.'

Mr. Crisparkle bowed again.

'It does not become us, perhaps,' pursued the Dean, 'to be
partisans. Not partisans. We clergy keep our hearts warm and our
heads cool, and we hold a judicious middle course.'

'I hope you do not object, sir, to my having stated in public,
emphatically, that he will reappear here, whenever any new suspicion
may be awakened, or any new circumstance may come to light in this
extraordinary matter?'

'Not at all,' returned the Dean. 'And yet, do you know, I don't
think,' with a very nice and neat emphasis on those two words: 'I
don't think I would state it emphatically. State it? Ye-e-es! But
emphatically? No-o-o. I think not. In point of fact, Mr.
Crisparkle, keeping our hearts warm and our heads cool, we clergy
need do nothing emphatically.'

So Minor Canon Row knew Neville Landless no more; and he went
whithersoever he would, or could, with a blight upon his name and
fame.

It was not until then that John Jasper silently resumed his
place in the choir. Haggard and red-eyed, his hopes plainly had
deserted him, his sanguine mood was gone, and all his worst
misgivings had come back. A day or two afterwards, while unrobing,
he took his Diary from a pocket of his coat, turned the leaves, and
with an impressive look, and without one spoken word, handed this
entry to Mr. Crisparkle to read:

'My dear boy is murdered. The discovery of the watch and
shirt-pin convinces me that he was murdered that night, and that his
jewellery was taken from him to prevent identification by its
means. All the delusive hopes I had founded on his separation from
his betrothed wife, I give to the winds. They perish before this
fatal discovery. I now swear, and record the oath on this page,
That I nevermore will discuss this mystery with any human creature
until I hold the clue to it in my hand. That I never will relax in
my secrecy or in my search. That I will fasten the crime of the
murder of my dear dead boy upon the murderer. And, That I devote
myself to his destruction.'