Disarmed by this glimpse of a woman’s nature
in the spoilt child, though for an instant disposed
to resent it as seeming to involve the enforced infliction
of himself upon her, Edwin Drood stands watching her
as she childishly cries and sobs, with both hands to
the handkerchief at her eyes, and then—she
becoming more composed, and indeed beginning in her
young inconstancy to laugh at herself for having been
so moved—leads her to a seat hard by, under
the elm-trees.
’One clear word of understanding, Pussy dear.
I am not clever out of my own line—now
I come to think of it, I don’t know that I am
particularly clever in it—but I want to
do right. There is not— there may
be—I really don’t see my way to what
I want to say, but I must say it before we part—there
is not any other young—’
‘O no, Eddy! It’s generous of you
to ask me; but no, no, no!’
They have come very near to the Cathedral windows,
and at this moment the organ and the choir sound out
sublimely. As they sit listening to the solemn
swell, the confidence of last night rises in young
Edwin Drood’s mind, and he thinks how unlike
this music is to that discordance.
‘I fancy I can distinguish Jack’s voice,’
is his remark in a low tone in connection with the
train of thought.
‘Take me back at once, please,’ urges
his Affianced, quickly laying her light hand upon
his wrist. ’They will all be coming out
directly; let us get away. O, what a resounding
chord! But don’t let us stop to listen
to it; let us get away!’
Her hurry is over as soon as they have passed out
of the Close. They go arm-in-arm now, gravely
and deliberately enough, along the old High-street,
to the Nuns’ House. At the gate, the street
being within sight empty, Edwin bends down his face
to Rosebud’s.
She remonstrates, laughing, and is a childish schoolgirl
again.
’Eddy, no! I’m too sticky to be
kissed. But give me your hand, and I’ll
blow a kiss into that.’
He does so. She breathes a light breath into
it and asks, retaining it and looking into it:-
‘Now say, what do you see?’
‘See, Rosa?’
’Why, I thought you Egyptian boys could look
into a hand and see all sorts of phantoms. Can’t
you see a happy Future?’
For certain, neither of them sees a happy Present,
as the gate opens and closes, and one goes in, and
the other goes away.
Accepting the Jackass as the type of self-sufficient
stupidity and conceit—a custom, perhaps,
like some few other customs, more conventional than
fair—then the purest jackass in Cloisterham
is Mr. Thomas Sapsea, Auctioneer.
