Read Online The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens, Matthew Pearl - Free Book Online

discoverers being hanged
by the neck, on his evidence, until they are dead). “Say that hammer of mine's
a wall—my work. Two; four; and two is six,” measuring on the pavement. “Six
foot inside that wall is Mrs. Sapsea.”
     
  “Not really Mrs. Sapsea?”
     
  “Say Mrs. Sapsea. Her wall's thicker,
but say Mrs. Sapsea. Durdles taps, that wall represented by that hammer, and
says, after good sounding: “Something betwixt us!” Sure enough, some rubbish
has been left in that same six-foot space by Durdles's men!”
     
  Jasper opines that such accuracy “is a
gift.”
     
  “I wouldn't have it at a gift,” returns
Durdles, by no means receiving the observation in good part. “I worked it out
for myself. Durdles comes by HIS knowledge through grubbing deep for it, and
having it up by the roots when it don't want to come. —Holloa you Deputy!”
     
  “Widdy!” is Deputy's shrill response,
standing off again.
     
  “Catch that ha'penny. And don't let me
see any more of you tonight, after we come to the Travellers” Twopenny.”
     
  “Warning!” returns Deputy, having caught
the halfpenny, and appearing by this mystic word to express his assent to the
arrangement.
     
  They have but to cross what was once the
vineyard, belonging to what was once the Monastery, to come into the narrow
back lane wherein stands the crazy wooden house of two low stories currently
known as the Travellers” Twopenny:- a house all warped and distorted, like the
morals of the travellers, with scant remains of a lattice-work porch over the
door, and also of a rustic fence before its stamped-out garden; by reason of
the travellers being so bound to the premises by a tender sentiment (or so fond
of having a fire by the roadside in the course of the day), that they can never
be persuaded or threatened into departure, without violently possessing
themselves of some wooden forget-me-not, and bearing it off.
     
  The semblance of an inn is attempted to
be given to this wretched place by fragments of conventional red curtaining in
the windows, which rags are made muddily transparent in the night-season by
feeble lights of rush or cotton dip burning dully in the close air of the
inside. As Durdles and Jasper come near, they are addressed by an inscribed
paper lantern over the door, setting forth the purport of the house. They are
also addressed by some half-dozen other hideous small boys—whether twopenny lodgers
or followers or hangers-on of such, who knows!—who, as if attracted by some
carrion-scent of Deputy in the air, start into the moonlight, as vultures might
gather in the desert, and instantly fall to stoning him and one another.
     
  “Stop, you young brutes,” cries Jasper
angrily, “and let us go by!”
     
  This remonstrance being received with
yells and flying stones, according to a custom of late years comfortably
established among the police regulations of our English communities, where
Christians are stoned on all sides, as if the days of Saint Stephen were
revived, Durdles remarks of the young savages, with some point, that “they
haven't got an object,” and leads the way down the lane.
     
  At the corner of the lane, Jasper, hotly
enraged, checks his companion and looks back. All is silent. Next moment, a
stone coming rattling at his hat, and a distant yell of “Wake-Cock! Warning!”
followed by a crow, as from some infernally-hatched Chanticleer, apprising him
under whose victorious fire he stands, he turns the corner into safety, and
takes Durdles home: Durdles stumbling among the litter of his stony yard as if
he were going to turn head foremost into one of the unfinished tombs.
     
  John Jasper returns by another way to
his gatehouse, and entering softly with his key, finds his fire still burning.
He takes from a locked press a peculiar-looking pipe, which he fills—but not
with tobacco—and, having adjusted the contents of the bowl, very carefully,
with a little