But where could she take refuge, and how could she go? She had never breathed her dread of him to any one but Helena. If she went to Helena, and told her what had passed, that very act might bring down the irreparable mischief that he threatened he had the power, and that she knew he had the will, to do. The more fearful he appeared to her excited memory and imagination, the more alarming her responsibility appeared; seeing that a slight mistake on her part, either in action or delay, might let his malevolence loose on Helena’s brother.
Rosa’s mind throughout the last six months had been stormily confused. A half-formed, wholly unexpressed suspicion tossed in it, now heaving itself up, and now sinking into the deep; now gaining palpability, and now losing it. Jasper’s self-absorption in his nephew when he was alive, and his unceasing pursuit of the inquiry how he came by his death, if he were dead, were themes so rife in the place, that no one appeared able to suspect the possibility of foul play at his hands. She had asked herself the question, “Am I so wicked in my thoughts as to conceive a wickedness that others cannot imagine?” Then she had considered, Did the suspicion come of her previous recoiling from him before the fact? And if so, was not that a proof of its baselessness? Then she had reflected, “What motive could he have, according to my accusation?” She was ashamed to answer in her mind, “The motive of gaining me!” And covered her face, as if the lightest shadow of the idea of founding murder on such an idle vanity were a crime almost as great.
She ran over in her mind again, all that he had said by the sun-dial in the garden. He had persisted in treating the disappearance as murder, consistently with his whole public course since the finding of the watch and shirt-pin. If he were afraid of the crime being traced out, would he not rather encourage the idea of a voluntary disappearance? He had even declared that if the ties between him and his nephew had been less strong, he might have swept “even him” away from her side. Was that like his having really done so? He had spoken of laying his six months’ labours in the cause of a just vengeance at her feet. Would he have done that, with that violence of passion, if they were a pretence? Would he have ranged them with his desolate heart and soul, his wasted life, his peace and his despair? The very first sacrifice that he represented himself as making for her, was his fidelity to his dear boy after death. Surely these facts were strong against a fancy that scarcely dared to hint itself. And yet he was so terrible a man! In short, the poor girl (for what could she know of the criminal intellect, which its own professed students perpetually misread, because they persist in trying to reconcile it with the average intellect of average men, instead of identifying it as a horrible wonder apart) could get by no road to any other conclusion than that he was a terrible man, and must be fled from.
She had been Helena’s stay and comfort during the whole time. She had constantly assured her of her full belief in her brother’s innocence, and of her sympathy with him in his misery. But she had never seen him since the disappearance, nor had Helena ever spoken one word of his avowal to Mr. Crisparkle in regard of Rosa, though as a part of the interest of the case it was well known far and wide. He was Helena’s unfortunate brother, to her, and nothing more. The assurance she had given her odious suitor was strictly true, though it would have been better (she considered now) if she could have restrained herself from so giving it. Afraid of him as the bright and delicate little creature was, her spirit swelled at the thought of his knowing it from her own lips.
But where was she to go? Anywhere beyond his reach, was no reply to the question. Somewhere must be thought of. She determined to go to her guardian, and to go immediately. The feeling she had imparted to Helena on the night of their first confidence, was so strong upon her—the feeling of not being safe from him, and of the solid walls of the old convent being powerless to keep out his ghostly following of her—that no reasoning of her own could calm her terrors. The fascination of repulsion had been upon her so long, and now culminated so darkly, that she felt as if he had power to bind her by a spell. Glancing out at window, even now, as she rose to dress, the sight of the sun-dial on which he had leaned when he declared himself, turned her cold, and made her shrink from it, as though he had invested it with some awful quality from his own nature.
She wrote a hurried note to Miss Twinkleton, saying that she had sudden reason for wishing to see her guardian promptly, and had gone to him; also, entreating the good lady not to be uneasy, for all was well with her. She hurried a few quite useless articles into a very little bag, left the note in a conspicuous place, and went out, softly closing the gate after her.
It was the first time she had ever been even in Cloisterham High Street alone. But knowing all its ways and windings very well, she hurried straight to the corner from which the omnibus departed. It was, at that very moment, going off.
“Stop and take me, if you please, Joe. I am obliged to go to London.”
In less than another minute she was on her road to the railway, under Joe’s protection. Joe waited on her when she got there, put her safely into the railway carriage, and handed in the very little bag after her, as though it were some enormous trunk, hundredweights heavy, which she must on no account endeavour to lift.
“Can you go round when you get back, and tell Miss Twinkleton that you saw me safely off, Joe?”
“It shall be done, Miss.”
“With my love, please, Joe.”
“Yes, Miss—and I wouldn’t mind having it myself!” But Joe did not articulate the last clause; only thought it.
Now that she was whirling away for London in real earnest, Rosa was at leisure to resume the thoughts which her personal hurry had checked. The indignant thought that his declaration of love soiled her; that she could only be cleansed from the stain of its impurity by appealing to the honest and true; supported her for a time against her fears, and confirmed her in her hasty resolution. But as the evening grew darker and darker, and the great city impended nearer and nearer, the doubts usual in such cases began to arise. Whether this was not a wild proceeding, after all; how Mr. Grewgious might regard it; whether she should find him at the journey’s end; how she would act if he were absent; what might become of her, alone, in a place so strange and crowded; how if she had but waited and taken counsel first; whether, if she could now go back, she would not do it thankfully; a multitude of such uneasy speculations disturbed her, more and more as they accumulated. At length the train came into London over the housetops; and down below lay the gritty streets with their yet un-needed lamps a-glow, on a hot, light, summer night.
“Hiram Grewgious, Esquire, Staple Inn, London.” This was all Rosa knew of her destination; but it was enough to send her rattling away again in a cab, through deserts of gritty streets, where many people crowded at the corner of courts and byways to get some air, and where many other people walked with a miserably monotonous noise of shuffling of feet on hot paving-stones, and where all the people and all their surroundings were so gritty and so shabby!
There was music playing here and there, but it did not enliven the case. No barrel-organ mended the matter, and no big drum beat dull care away. Like the chapel bells that were also going here and there, they only seemed to evoke echoes from brick surfaces, and dust from everything. As to the flat wind-instruments, they seemed to have cracked their hearts and souls in pining for the country.
Her jingling conveyance stopped at last at a fast-closed gateway, which appeared to belong to somebody who had gone to bed very early, and was much afraid of housebreakers; Rosa, discharging her conveyance, timidly knocked at this gateway, and was let in, very little bag and all, by a watchman.
“Does Mr. Grewgious live here?”
“Mr. Grewgious lives there, Miss,” said the watchman, pointing further in.
So Rosa went further in, and, when the clocks were striking ten, stood on P. J. T.”s doorsteps, wondering what P. J. T. had done with his street-door.
Guided by the painted name of Mr. Grewgious, she went up-stairs and softly tapped and tapped several times. But no one answering, and Mr. Grewgious’s door-handle yielding to her touch, she went in, and saw her guardian sitting on a window-seat at an open window, with a shaded lamp placed far from him on a table in a corner.
Rosa drew nearer to him in the twilight of the room. He saw her, and he said, in an undertone: “Good Heaven!”
Rosa fell upon his neck, with tears, and then he said, returning her embrace:
“My child, my child! I thought you were your mother!—But what, what, what,” he added, soothingly, “has happened? My dear, what has brought you here? Who has brought you here?”
“No one. I came alone.”
“Lord bless me!” ejaculated Mr. Grewgious. “Came alone! Why didn’t you write to me to come and fetch you?”
“I had no time. I took a sudden resolution. Poor, poor Eddy!”
“Ah, poor fellow, poor fellow!”
“His uncle has made love to me. I cannot bear it,” said Rosa, at once with a burst of tears, and a stamp of her little foot; “I shudder with horror of him, and I have come to you to protect me and all of us from him, if you will?”
“I will,” cried Mr. Grewgious, with a sudden rush of amazing energy. “Damn him!
‘Confound his politics!
Frustrate his knavish tricks!
On Thee his hopes to fix?
Damn him again!’”
After this most extraordinary outburst, Mr. Grewgious, quite beside himself, plunged about the room, to all appearance undecided whether he was in a fit of loyal enthusiasm, or combative denunciation.
He stopped and said, wiping his face: “I beg your pardon, my dear, but you will be glad to know I feel better. Tell me no more just now, or I might do it again. You must be refreshed and cheered. What did you take last? Was it breakfast, lunch, dinner, tea, or supper? And what will you take next? Shall it be breakfast, lunch, dinner, tea, or supper?”
The respectful tenderness with which, on one knee before her, he helped her to remove her hat, and disentangle her pretty hair from it, was quite a chivalrous sight. Yet who, knowing him only on the surface, would have expected chivalry—and of the true sort, too; not the spurious—from Mr. Grewgious?
“Your rest too must be provided for,” he went on; “and you shall have the prettiest chamber in Furnival’s. Your toilet must be provided for, and you shall have everything that an unlimited head chambermaid—by which expression I mean a head chambermaid not limited as to outlay—can procure. Is that a bag?” he looked hard at it; sooth to say, it required hard looking at to be seen at all in a dimly lighted room: “and is it your property, my dear?”
“Yes, sir. I brought it with me.”
“It is not an extensive bag,” said Mr. Grewgious, candidly, “though admirably calculated to contain a day’s provision for a canary-bird. Perhaps you brought a canary-bird?”
Rosa smiled and shook her head.
“If you had, he should have been made welcome,” said Mr. Grewgious, “and I think he would have been pleased to be hung upon a nail outside and pit himself against our Staple sparrows; whose execution must be admitted to be not quite equal to their intention. Which is the case with so many of us! You didn’t say what meal, my dear. Have a nice jumble of all meals.”
Rosa thanked him, but said she could only take a cup of tea. Mr. Grewgious, after several times running out, and in again, to mention such supplementary items as marmalade, eggs, watercresses, salted fish, and frizzled ham, ran across to Furnival’s without his hat, to give his various directions. And soon afterwards they were realised in practice, and the board was spread.
“Lord bless my soul,” cried Mr. Grewgious, putting the lamp upon it, and taking his seat opposite Rosa; “what a new sensation for a poor old Angular bachelor, to be sure!”
Rosa’s expressive little eyebrows asked him what he meant?
“The sensation of having a sweet young presence in the place, that whitewashes it, paints it, papers it, decorates it with gilding, and makes it Glorious!” said Mr. Grewgious. “Ah me! Ah me!”
As there was something mournful in his sigh, Rosa, in touching him with her tea-cup, ventured to touch him with her small hand too.
“Thank you, my dear,” said Mr. Grewgious. “Ahem! Let’s talk!”
“Do you always live here, sir?” asked Rosa.
“Yes, my dear.”
“And always alone?”
“Always alone; except that I have daily company in a gentleman by the name of Bazzard, my clerk.”
“He doesn’t live here?”
“No, he goes his way, after office hours. In fact, he is off duty here, altogether, just at present; and a firm down-stairs, with which I have business relations, lend me a substitute. But it would be extremely difficult to replace Mr. Bazzard.”
“He must be very fond of you,” said Rosa.
“He bears up against it with commendable fortitude if he is,” returned Mr. Grewgious, after considering the matter. “But I doubt if he is. Not particularly so. You see, he is discontented, poor fellow.”
“Why isn’t he contented?” was the natural inquiry.
“Misplaced,” said Mr. Grewgious, with great mystery.
Rosa’s eyebrows resumed their inquisitive and perplexed expression.
“So misplaced,” Mr. Grewgious went on, “that I feel constantly apologetic towards him. And he feels (though he doesn’t mention it) that I have reason to be.”
Mr. Grewgious had by this time grown so very mysterious, that Rosa did not know how to go on. While she was thinking about it Mr. Grewgious suddenly jerked out of himself for the second time:
“Let’s talk. We were speaking of Mr. Bazzard. It’s a secret, and moreover it is Mr. Bazzard’s secret; but the sweet presence at my table makes me so unusually expansive, that I feel I must impart it in inviolable confidence. What do you think Mr. Bazzard has done?”
“O dear!” cried Rosa, drawing her chair a little nearer, and her mind reverting to Jasper, “nothing dreadful, I hope?”
“He has written a play,” said Mr. Grewgious, in a solemn whisper. “A tragedy.”
Rosa seemed much relieved.
“And nobody,” pursued Mr. Grewgious in the same tone, “will hear, on any account whatever, of bringing it out.”
Rosa looked reflective, and nodded her head slowly; as who should say, “Such things are, and why are they!”
“Now, you know,” said Mr. Grewgious, “I couldn’t write a play.”
“Not a bad one, sir?” said Rosa, innocently, with her eyebrows again in action.
“No. If I was under sentence of decapitation, and was about to be instantly decapitated, and an express arrived with a pardon for the condemned convict Grewgious if he wrote a play, I should be under the necessity of resuming the block, and begging the executioner to proceed to extremities,—meaning,” said Mr. Grewgious, passing his hand under his chin, “the singular number, and this extremity.”
Rosa appeared to consider what she would do if the awkward supposititious case were hers.
“Consequently,” said Mr. Grewgious, “Mr. Bazzard would have a sense of my inferiority to himself under any circumstances; but when I am his master, you know, the case is greatly aggravated.”
Mr. Grewgious shook his head seriously, as if he felt the offence to be a little too much, though of his own committing.
“How came you to be his master, sir?” asked Rosa.
“A question that naturally follows,” said Mr. Grewgious. “Let’s talk. Mr. Bazzard’s father, being a Norfolk farmer, would have furiously laid about him with a flail, a pitch-fork, and every agricultural implement available for assaulting purposes, on the slightest hint of his son’s having written a play. So the son, bringing to me the father’s rent (which I receive), imparted his secret, and pointed out that he was determined to pursue his genius, and that it would put him in peril of starvation, and that he was not formed for it.”
“For pursuing his genius, sir?”
“No, my dear,” said Mr. Grewgious, “for starvation. It was impossible to deny the position, that Mr. Bazzard was not formed to be starved, and Mr. Bazzard then pointed out that it was desirable that I should stand between him and a fate so perfectly unsuited to his formation. In that way Mr. Bazzard became my clerk, and he feels it very much.”
“I am glad he is grateful,” said Rosa.
“I didn’t quite mean that, my dear. I mean, that he feels the degradation. There are some other geniuses that Mr. Bazzard has become acquainted with, who have also written tragedies, which likewise nobody will on any account whatever hear of bringing out, and these choice spirits dedicate their plays to one another in a highly panegyrical manner. Mr. Bazzard has been the subject of one of these dedications. Now, you know, I never had a play dedicated to me!”
Rosa looked at him as if she would have liked him to be the recipient of a thousand dedications.
“Which again, naturally, rubs against the grain of Mr. Bazzard,” said Mr. Grewgious. “He is very short with me sometimes, and then I feel that he is meditating, ‘This blockhead is my master! A fellow who couldn’t write a tragedy on pain of death, and who will never have one dedicated to him with the most complimentary congratulations on the high position he has taken in the eyes of posterity!’ Very trying, very trying. However, in giving him directions, I reflect beforehand: ‘Perhaps he may not like this,’ or ‘He might take it ill if I asked that;’ and so we get on very well. Indeed, better than I could have expected.”
“Is the tragedy named, sir?” asked Rosa.
“Strictly between ourselves,” answered Mr. Grewgious, “it has a dreadfully appropriate name. It is called The Thorn of Anxiety. But Mr. Bazzard hopes—and I hope—that it will come out at last.”
It was not hard to divine that Mr. Grewgious had related the Bazzard history thus fully, at least quite as much for the recreation of his ward’s mind from the subject that had driven her there, as for the gratification of his own tendency to be social and communicative.
“And now, my dear,” he said at this point, “if you are not too tired to tell me more of what passed to-day—but only if you feel quite able—I should be glad to hear it. I may digest it the better, if I sleep on it to-night.”
Rosa, composed now, gave him a faithful account of the interview. Mr. Grewgious often smoothed his head while it was in progress, and begged to be told a second time those parts which bore on Helena and Neville. When Rosa had finished, he sat grave, silent, and meditative for a while.
“Clearly narrated,” was his only remark at last, “and, I hope, clearly put away here,” smoothing his head again. “See, my dear,” taking her to the open window, “where they live! The dark windows over yonder.”
“I may go to Helena to-morrow?” asked Rosa.
“I should like to sleep on that question to-night,” he answered doubtfully. “But let me take you to your own rest, for you must need it.”
With that Mr. Grewgious helped her to get her hat on again, and hung upon his arm the very little bag that was of no earthly use, and led her by the hand (with a certain stately awkwardness, as if he were going to walk a minuet) across Holborn, and into Furnival’s Inn. At the hotel door, he confided her to the Unlimited head chambermaid, and said that while she went up to see her room, he would remain below, in case she should wish it exchanged for another, or should find that there was anything she wanted.
Rosa’s room was airy, clean, comfortable, almost gay. The Unlimited had laid in everything omitted from the very little bag (that is to say, everything she could possibly need), and Rosa tripped down the great many stairs again, to thank her guardian for his thoughtful and affectionate care of her.
“Not at all, my dear,” said Mr. Grewgious, infinitely gratified; “it is I who thank you for your charming confidence and for your charming company. Your breakfast will be provided for you in a neat, compact, and graceful little sitting-room (appropriate to your figure), and I will come to you at ten o’clock in the morning. I hope you don’t feel very strange indeed, in this strange place.”
“O no, I feel so safe!”
“Yes, you may be sure that the stairs are fire-proof,” said Mr. Grewgious, “and that any outbreak of the devouring element would be perceived and suppressed by the watchmen.”
“I did not mean that,” Rosa replied. “I mean, I feel so safe from him.”
“There is a stout gate of iron bars to keep him out,” said Mr. Grewgious, smiling; “and Furnival’s is fire-proof, and specially watched and lighted, and I live over the way!” In the stoutness of his knight-errantry, he seemed to think the last-named protection all sufficient. In the same spirit he said to the gate-porter as he went out, “If some one staying in the hotel should wish to send across the road to me in the night, a crown will be ready for the messenger.” In the same spirit, he walked up and down outside the iron gate for the best part of an hour, with some solicitude; occasionally looking in between the bars, as if he had laid a dove in a high roost in a cage of lions, and had it on his mind that she might tumble out.