The Mystery of Edwin Drood Read Free

dear Jack! So glad to see you!”
     
  “Get off your greatcoat, bright boy, and
sit down here in your own corner. Your feet are not wet? Pull your boots off.
Do pull your boots off.”
     
  “My dear Jack, I am as dry as a bone.
Don't moddley-coddley, there's a good fellow. I like anything better than being
moddleycoddleyed.”
     
  With the check upon him of being
unsympathetically restrained in a genial outburst of enthusiasm, Mr. Jasper
stands still, and looks on intently at the young fellow, divesting himself of
his outward coat, hat, gloves, and so forth. Once for all, a look of intentness
and intensity—a look of hungry, exacting, watchful, and yet devoted
affection—is always, now and ever afterwards, on the Jasper face whenever the
Jasper face is addressed in this direction. And whenever it is so addressed, it
is never, on this occasion or on any other, dividedly addressed; it is always
concentrated.
     
  “Now I am right, and now I'll take my
corner, Jack. Any dinner, Jack?”
     
  Mr. Jasper opens a door at the upper end
of the room, and discloses a small inner room pleasantly lighted and prepared,
wherein a comely dame is in the act of setting dishes on table.
     
  “What a jolly old Jack it is!” cries the
young fellow, with a clap of his hands. “Look here, Jack; tell me; whose
birthday is it?”
     
  “Not yours, I know,” Mr. Jasper answers,
pausing to consider.
     
  “Not mine, you know? No; not mine, I
know! Pussy's!”
     
  Fixed as the look the young fellow
meets, is, there is yet in it some strange power of suddenly including the
sketch over the chimneypiece.
     
  “Pussy's, Jack! We must drink Many happy
returns to her. Come, uncle; take your dutiful and sharp-set nephew in to
dinner.”
     
  As the boy (for he is little more) lays
a hand on Jasper's shoulder, Jasper cordially and gaily lays a hand on HIS
shoulder, and so Marseillaise-wise they go in to dinner.
     
  “And, Lord! here's Mrs. Tope!” cries the
boy. “Lovelier than ever!”
     
  “Never you mind me, Master Edwin,”
retorts the Verger's wife; “I can take care of myself.”
     
  “You can't. You're much too handsome. Give
me a kiss because it's Pussy's birthday.”
     
  “I'd Pussy you, young man, if I was
Pussy, as you call her,” Mrs. Tope blushingly retorts, after being saluted.
“Your uncle's too much wrapt up in you, that's where it is. He makes so much of
you, that it's my opinion you think you've only to call your Pussys by the
dozen, to make “em come.”
     
  “You forget, Mrs. Tope,” Mr. Jasper
interposes, taking his place at the table with a genial smile, “and so do you,
Ned, that Uncle and Nephew are words prohibited here by common consent and
express agreement. For what we are going to receive His holy name be praised!”
     
  “Done like the Dean! Witness, Edwin
Drood! Please to carve, Jack, for I can't.”
     
  This sally ushers in the dinner. Little
to the present purpose, or to any purpose, is said, while it is in course of
being disposed of. At length the cloth is drawn, and a dish of walnuts and a
decanter of rich-coloured sherry are placed upon the table.
     
  “I say! Tell me, Jack,” the young fellow
then flows on: “do you really and truly feel as if the mention of our
relationship divided us at all? I don't.”
     
  “Uncles as a rule, Ned, are so much
older than their nephews,” is the reply, “that I have that feeling
instinctively.”
     
  “As a rule! Ah, may-be! But what is a
difference in age of halfa-dozen years or so? And some uncles, in large
families, are even younger than their nephews. By George, I wish it was the
case with us!”
     
  “Why?”
     
  “Because if it was, I'd take the lead
with you, Jack, and be as wise as Begone, dull Care! that turned a young man
gray, and Begone, dull Care! that turned an old man to clay. —Halloa, Jack!
Don't drink.”
     
  “Why not?”
     
  “Asks why