The Mystery of Edwin Drood Read Free Page A

not, on Pussy's birthday, and
no Happy returns proposed! Pussy, Jack, and many of “em! Happy returns, I
mean.”
     
  Laying an affectionate and laughing
touch on the boy's extended hand, as if it were at once his giddy head and his
light heart, Mr. Jasper drinks the toast in silence.
     
  “Hip, hip, hip, and nine times nine, and
one to finish with, and all that, understood. Hooray, hooray, hooray!—And now,
Jack, let's have a little talk about Pussy. Two pairs of nut-crackers? Pass me
one, and take the other.” Crack. “How's Pussy getting on Jack?”
     
  “With her music? Fairly.”
     
  “What a dreadfully conscientious fellow
you are, Jack! But I know, Lord bless you! Inattentive, isn't she?”
     
  “She can learn anything, if she will.”
     
  “IF she will! Egad, that's it. But if
she won't?”
     
  Crack!—on Mr. Jasper's part.
     
  “How's she looking, Jack?”
     
  Mr. Jasper's concentrated face again
includes the portrait as he returns: “Very like your sketch indeed.”
     
  “I AM a little proud of it,” says the
young fellow, glancing up at the sketch with complacency, and then shutting one
eye, and taking a corrected prospect of it over a level bridge of nut-crackers
in the air: “Not badly hit off from memory. But I ought to have caught that
expression pretty well, for I have seen it often enough.”
     
  Crack!—on Edwin Drood's part.
     
  Crack!—on Mr. Jasper's part.
     
  “In point of fact,” the former resumes,
after some silent dipping among his fragments of walnut with an air of pique,
“I see it whenever I go to see Pussy. If I don't find it on her face, I leave
it there. —You know I do, Miss Scornful Pert. Booh!” With a twirl of the
nut-crackers at the portrait.
     
  Crack! crack! crack. Slowly, on Mr.
Jasper's part.
     
  Crack. Sharply on the part of Edwin
Drood.
     
  Silence on both sides.
     
  “Have you lost your tongue, Jack?”
     
  “Have you found yours, Ned?”
     
  “No, but really;—isn't it, you know,
after all—”
     
  Mr. Jasper lifts his dark eyebrows
inquiringly.
     
  “Isn't it unsatisfactory to be cut off
from choice in such a matter? There, Jack! I tell you! If I could choose, I
would choose Pussy from all the pretty girls in the world.”
     
  “But you have not got to choose.”
     
  “That's what I complain of. My dead and
gone father and Pussy's dead and gone father must needs marry us together by
anticipation. Why the—Devil, I was going to say, if it had been respectful to
their memory—couldn't they leave us alone?”
     
  “Tut, tut, dear boy,” Mr. Jasper
remonstrates, in a tone of gentle deprecation.
     
  “Tut, tut? Yes, 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