‘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.
For sufficient reasons, which this narrative will
itself unfold as it advances, a fictitious name must
be bestowed upon the old Cathedral town. Let
it stand in these pages as Cloisterham. It was
once possibly known to the Druids by another name,
and certainly to the Romans by another, and to the
Saxons by another, and to the Normans by another;
and a name more or less in the course of many centuries
can be of little moment to its dusty chronicles.
An ancient city, Cloisterham, and no meet dwelling-place
for any one with hankerings after the noisy world.
A monotonous, silent city, deriving an earthy flavour
throughout from its Cathedral crypt, and so abounding
in vestiges of monastic graves, that the Cloisterham
children grow small salad in the dust of abbots and
abbesses, and make dirt-pies of nuns and friars; while
every ploughman in its outlying fields renders to
once puissant Lord Treasurers, Archbishops, Bishops,
and such-like, the attention which the Ogre in the
story-book desired to render to his unbidden visitor,
and grinds their bones to make his bread.
A drowsy city, Cloisterham, whose inhabitants seem
to suppose, with an inconsistency more strange than
rare, that all its changes lie behind it, and that
there are no more to come. A queer moral to
derive from antiquity, yet older than any traceable
antiquity. So silent are the streets of Cloisterham
(though prone to echo on the smallest provocation),
that of a summer-day the sunblinds of its shops scarce
dare to flap in the south wind; while the sun-browned
tramps, who pass along and stare, quicken their limp
a little, that they may the sooner get beyond the
confines of its oppressive respectability. This
is a feat not difficult of achievement, seeing that
the streets of Cloisterham city are little more than
one narrow street by which you get into it and get
out of it: the rest being mostly disappointing
yards with pumps in them and no thoroughfare—exception
made of the Cathedral-close, and a paved Quaker settlement,
in colour and general confirmation very like a Quakeress’s
bonnet, up in a shady corner.
