Free The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens, Matthew Pearl Page B

fresh
air, and come down with them, and return at night. So you are the Reverend Mr.
Septimus, are you?” surveying him on the whole with disappointment, and
twisting a double eyeglass by its ribbon, as if he were roasting it, but not
otherwise using it. “Hah! I expected to see you older, sir.”
     
  “I hope you will,” was the good-humoured
reply.
     
  “Eh?” demanded Mr. Honeythunder.
     
  “Only a poor little joke. Not worth
repeating.”
     
  “Joke? Ay; I never see a joke,” Mr.
Honeythunder frowningly retorted. “A joke is wasted upon me, sir. Where are
they? Helena and Neville, come here! Mr. Crisparkle has come down to meet you.”
     
  An unusually handsome lithe young
fellow, and an unusually handsome lithe girl; much alike; both very dark, and
very rich in colour; she of almost the gipsy type; something untamed about them
both; a certain air upon them of hunter and huntress; yet withal a certain air
of being the objects of the chase, rather than the followers. Slender, supple,
quick of eye and limb; half shy, half defiant; fierce of look; an indefinable
kind of pause coming and going on their whole expression, both of face and
form, which might be equally likened to the pause before a crouch or a bound.
The rough mental notes made in the first five minutes by Mr. Crisparkle would
have read thus, VERBATIM.
     
  He invited Mr. Honeythunder to dinner,
with a troubled mind (for the discomfiture of the dear old china shepherdess
lay heavy on it), and gave his arm to Helena Landless. Both she and her
brother, as they walked all together through the ancient streets, took great delight
in what he pointed out of the Cathedral and the Monastery ruin, and wondered—so
his notes ran on—much as if they were beautiful barbaric captives brought from
some wild tropical dominion. Mr. Honeythunder walked in the middle of the road,
shouldering the natives out of his way, and loudly developing a scheme he had,
for making a raid on all the unemployed persons in the United Kingdom, laying
them every one by the heels in jail, and forcing them, on pain of prompt
extermination, to become philanthropists.
     
  Mrs. Crisparkle had need of her own
share of philanthropy when she beheld this very large and very loud excrescence
on the little party. Always something in the nature of a Boil upon the face of
society, Mr. Honeythunder expanded into an inflammatory Wen in Minor Canon
Corner. Though it was not literally true, as was facetiously charged against
him by public unbelievers, that he called aloud to his fellow-creatures: “Curse
your souls and bodies, come here and be blessed!” still his philanthropy was of
that gunpowderous sort that the difference between it and animosity was hard to
determine. You were to abolish military force, but you were first to bring all
commanding officers who had done their duty, to trial by court-martial for that
offence, and shoot them. You were to abolish war, but were to make converts by
making war upon them, and charging them with loving war as the apple of their
eye. You were to have no capital punishment, but were first to sweep off the
face of the earth all legislators, jurists, and judges, who were of the contrary
opinion. You were to have universal concord, and were to get it by eliminating
all the people who wouldn't, or conscientiously couldn't, be concordant. You
were to love your brother as yourself, but after an indefinite interval of
maligning him (very much as if you hated him), and calling him all manner of
names. Above all things, you were to do nothing in private, or on your own
account. You were to go to the offices of the Haven of Philanthropy, and put
your name down as a Member and a Professing Philanthropist. Then, you were to
pay up your subscription, get your card of membership and your riband and
medal, and were evermore to live upon a platform, and evermore to say what Mr.
Honeythunder said, and what the Treasurer said, and what the