tide of busy life." In other words, Jasper is supposed by those who pass along that tide, to be in his room in the gatehouse, engaged in quiet study; for it is the lamp behind his curtain that is as a lighthouse over the archway, beyond which pass at night no waves of busy life. "It comes on to blow a boisterous gale. The precincts are never particularly well lighted; but the strong blasts of wind blowing out many of the lamps, they are unusually dark to-night. The darkness is augmented and confused by flying dust from the earth, dry twigs from the trees, and great ragged fragments from the rooks' nests up in the tower. The trees themselves so toss and creak, that they seem in peril of being torn out of the earth; while ever and again a crack and a rushing fall denote that some large branch has yielded to the storm." A night on which the fall of a ton's weight from the great tower of the cathedral might well pass unnoticed. "No such power of wind has blown for many a wintry night. Chimneys topple in the street, and people hold to posts and corners, and to one another, to keep themselves upon their feet " ... "Still the red light burns steadily. Nothing is steady but the red light." "All through the night the wind blows, and abates not. But early in the morning, when there is barely enough light in the east to dim the stars, it begins to lull. From that time, with occasional wild charges like a wounded monster dying, it drops and sinks; and at full daylight it is dead.” * It is then seen that the hands of the cathedral clock are torn off; that lead from the roof has been stripped off, rolled away, and blown into the Close; and that some stones have been displaced upon the summit of the great tower. It is as the workmen, led by Durdles are going aloft to ascertain the extent of the damage, that Jasper breaks in upon the crowd gathered to watch for the appearance of the workmen on the tower, with the cry, "Where is my nephew?” Edwin Drood has disappeared in the night. * Dickens's descriptive power, assuredly his far most striking characteristic as a writer, is finely displayed in this passage. CHAPTER III. MURDER? PRECISELY What happened on that stormy night it would be vain to guess. In many ways the event which the author seems to suggest-the actual murder of Drood by Jasper, the closing up of his body within the Sapsea monument, to be followed by the destruction of all trace of him except the ring of jewels-might have been brought about; in more ways than one, also, Jasper's plot might have failed, while yet he deemed it to have succeeded. About the details of that night's occurrences it must be as idle to guess as about the precise events which happened during the sleep of Durdles on the night of the preceding Sunday. The interest of the story would have been lost if such details could have been learned at this stage of the narrative. But it does not follow that we cannot guess how the mystery, in the broader sense, was to have been explained, though we may not guess what were to be the actual circumstances of the attack on Edwin. Let us consider how the matter stands. In the first place, it is clear that Dickens has intended to convey the impression that Edwin Drood is murdered, his body and clothes consumed. Jasper had first taken his watch and chain and shirt-pin, which cannot have been thrown into the river till the night of Christmas day, since the watch, wound up at twenty minutes past two on Christmas Eve, had run down when found in the river. Possibly more was to have depended on this point, by the way; for Jasper would suppose that the watch had been wound up late on the 23rd. Be this as it may, the clearness with which we seem to recognise that the murder has been successfully accomplished, the words "Poor youth! poor youth!" when Edwin is taking his last look "at the old landmarks," and again, "He called her Pussy no more: never again," and so forth, only make it more probable that what seems thus clearly suggested is not what has actually happened. Let me digress for a moment to consider a parallel case. There are many features in which "No Thoroughfare" resembles the "Mystery of Edwin Drood." Obenreizer reminds us of Jasper; George Vendale, in his utter absence of suspicion, as also in some points of character, resembles Edwin Drood. Now nothing can be clearer than the suggestions in the earlier part of "No Thoroughfare" that Vendale is to be murdered, or than the apparent evidence in the third act (entirely by Dickens, be it remembered) that Vendale has been murdered. If Dickens did not write the whole of the scene in which a clot of the gloomy ragged growth of dark fungus, in colour like blood, falls on Vendale's breast, just after Joey Ladle has said that "the man that gets by accident a piece of that dark growth right in his breast will for sure and certain die by murder," style counts for nothing; since there is not a line in the passage which is not as like Dickens's style as it is utterly |