The Mystery of Edwin Drood | Page 6

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