EDITOR’S NOTE

THE fate of Edwin Drood, the last of Charles Dickens’ creations, has exercised the minds of not a few literary men of eminence. The best of them could but guess; and which has gone nearest will never be known. They were content to suggest the answer without troubling to work it out in detail as a continuation and finish of the story. This more difficult task was undertaken by “Gillan Vase,” whose luxuriant imagination led her not only to follow up the destinies of the characters which we owe in their inception to Dickens, but also to create several others.

As rather detracting from the value of a sequel in which it seemed desirable that only known Dickensian characters should appear, these new ones have been eliminated. The completion of the original story, the spirit and diction of which are, it is thought, pretty closely imitated, is now offered as an ingenious and probable solution of the mystery.

‘THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD’ SUMMARISED

(By kind permission of the Publishers, Messrs. Chapman and Hall. Ltd,)

IN Cloisterham, an English Cathedral town, the Dean was the most important personage, though Mr. Sapsea, mayor and auctioneer of the city, had doubts on the point. By strangers the one might be mistaken for the other, Mr. Sapsea, in dress and dignity of bearing, paying Mr. Dean the compliment of the sincerest form of flattery. He was more clerical indeed than the clergy, and the monument he had raised to his late wife testified to some of the admirable qualities which in him inhered. The most charming little person the city could boast was Miss Rosa Bud, who was being harboured at the scholastic establishment of Miss Twinkleton, preparatory to her approaching marriage with Mr. Edwin Drood, to whom she had, in a sort of way, been betrothed almost since childhood. That rather supercilious young gentleman took the prospect of his future happiness very much as a matter of course, a lofty state of the adolescent masculine mind which the lad did not try to hide from his dour, if loving, uncle, Mr. John Jasper, a man only a few years older than he, the relationship notwithstanding, and choirmaster of the Cathedral, his fine voice being not the least attractive part of the services. Within the Close lived the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle, a Minor Canon, whose tiny, timid mother kept house for him there, and was as dainty as a little china shepherdess, a figure which she oddly suggested. Very proud was she of her seventh and only surviving son, and he, in his stalwart manhood, no less so of his frail little ma.

It takes all sorts to make a world, and in the small one of the Cathedral and its precincts Durdles, the drunken stonemason, was fairly conspicuous, with his dinner bundled into a handkerchief and carried about all day and every day. A satellite of his was Deputy, a hideous small lad employed at a common lodging-house, whom he had hired to pelt him home with stones in case he was out too late in his cups, the bargain being that first he was to have a “widdy widdy warning” in the form of some doggerel verse. Durdles always spoke of himself in the third person, and his hobby was to go about tapping tombs and walls with his hammer, the answering sound telling him many things dulled to less sensitive ears. Even in sleepy Cloisterham events out of the common would happen occasionally, such as the arrival from Ceylon of Neville and Helena Landless, brother and sister, orphaned and of neglected up-bringing, so that the girl was to go to Miss Twinkleton and the youth to Mr. Crisparkle, for the bettering of their education. Both were dark and remarkably handsome, and both had been hurt to the soul by the harsh treatment of a conscienceless step-father.

Edwin and Neville met, and a mutual dislike was not long in manifesting itself. The newcomer resented Drood’s cavalier treatment of Rosa, with whom he himself was at sight in love. At a meeting brought about by John Jasper, with the avowed idea of a reconciliation, high words passed between the young fellows, and Neville drank more than was good for him. Jasper maladroitly or maliciously foments the quarrel while trying to smooth it over. Neville flings the dregs of a glass of wine in Drood’s face, and leaves the room in a rage, after Jasper has parted them. Later Mr. Crisparkle brings about the reconciliation between the two, and to mark it the choir-master for Christmas Eve invites them to supper. In his diary he has entered an account of the quarrel, which makes it look black against the passionate Neville.