Is she stupid in everything?”
“No. In nothing.”
After a pause, in which the whimsically wicked face has not been unobservant of him, Rosa says:
“And this most sensible of creatures likes the idea of being carried off to Egypt; does she, Eddy?”
“Yes. She takes a sensible interest in triumphs of engineering skill: especially when they are to change the whole condition of an undeveloped country.”
“Lor!” says Rosa, shrugging her shoulders, with a little laugh of wonder.
“Do you object,” Edwin inquires, with a majestic turn of his eyes downward upon the fairy figure: “do you object, Rosa, to her feeling that interest?”
“Object? My dear Eddy! But really. Doesn’t she hate boilers and things?”
“I can answer for her not being so idiotic as to hate Boilers,” he returns with angry emphasis; “though I cannot answer for her views about Things; really not understanding what Things are meant.”
“But don’t she hate Arabs, and Turks, and Fellahs, and people?”
“Certainly not.” Very firmly.
“At least, she musthate the Pyramids? Come, Eddy?”
“Why should she be such a little—tall, I mean—Goose, as to hate the Pyramids, Rosa?”
“Ah! you should hear Miss Twinkleton,” often nodding her head, and much enjoying the Lumps, “bore about them, and then you wouldn’t ask. Tiresome old burying-grounds! Isises, and Ibises, and Cheopses, and Pharaohses; who cares about them? And then there was Belzoni or somebody, dragged out by the legs, half choked with bats and dust. All the girls say serve him right, and hope it hurt him, and wish he had been quite choked.”
The two youthful figures, side by side, but not now arm-in-arm, wander discontentedly about the old Close; and each sometimes stops and slowly imprints a deeper footstep in the fallen leaves.
“Well!” says Edwin, after a lengthy silence. “According to custom. We can’t get on, Rosa.”
Rosa tosses her head, and says she don’t want to get on.
“That’s a pretty sentiment, Rosa, considering.”
“Considering what?”
“If I say what, you’ll go wrong again.”
“You’ll go wrong, you mean, Eddy. Don’t be ungenerous.”
“Ungenerous! I like that!”
“Then I don’tlike that, and so I tell you plainly,” Rosa pouts.
“Now, Rosa, I put it to you. Who disparaged my profession, my destination—”
“You are not going to be buried in the Pyramids, I hope?” she interrupts, arching her delicate eyebrows. “You never said you were. If you are, why haven’t you mentioned it to me? I can’t find out your plans by instinct.”
“Now, Rosa; you know very well what I mean, my dear.”
“Well then, why did you begin with your detestable red-nosed Giantesses? And she would, she would, she would, she would, she WOULDpowder it!” cries Rosa, in a little burst of comical contradictory spleen.
“Somehow or other, I never can come right in these discussions,” says Edwin, sighing and becoming resigned.
“How is it possible, sir, that you ever can come right when you’re always wrong? And as to Belzoni, I suppose he’s dead;—I’m sure I hope he is—and how can his legs, or his chokes concern you?”
“It is nearly time for your return, Rosa. We have not had a very happy walk, have we?”
“A happy walk? A detestably unhappy walk, sir. If I go up stairs the moment I get in and cry till I can’t take my dancing-lesson, you are responsible, mind!”
“Let us be friends, Rosa.”
“Ah!” cries Rosa, shaking her head and bursting into real tears. “I wish we couldbe friends! It’s because we can’t be friends, that we try one another so. I am a young little thing, Eddy, to have an old heartache; but I really, really have, sometimes. Don’t be angry. I know you have one yourself, too often. We should both of us have done better, if What is to be had been left, What might have been. I am quite a serious little thing now, and not teasing you. Let each of us forbear, this one time, on our own account, and on the other’s!”
Disarmed by this glimpse of a woman’s nature in the spoilt child, though for an instant disposed to resent it as seeming to involve the enforced infliction of himself upon her, Edwin Drood stands watching her as she childishly cries and sobs, with both hands to the handkerchief at her eyes, and then—she becoming more composed, and indeed beginning in her young inconstancy to laugh at herself for having been so moved—leads her to a seat hard by, under the elm trees.
“One clear word of understanding, Pussy dear. I am not clever out of my own line—now I come to think of it I don’t know that I am particularly clever in it—but I want to do right. There is not—there may be—I really don’t see my way to what I want to say, but I must say it before we part—there is not any other young—?”
“Oh no, Eddy! It’s generous of you to ask me; but no, no, no!”
They have come very near to the Cathedral windows, and at this moment the organ and the choir sound out sublimely. As they sit listening to the solemn swell, the confidence of last night rises in young Edwin Drood’s mind, and he thinks how unlike this music is, to that discordance.
“I fancy I can distinguish Jack’s voice,” is his remark in a low tone in connexion with the train of thought.
“Take me back at once, please,” urges his Affianced, quickly laying her light hand upon his wrist. “They will all be coming out directly; let us get away. Oh, what a resounding chord! But don’t let us stop to listen to it; let us get away!”
Her hurry is over, as soon as they have passed out of the Close. They go, arm-in-arm now, gravely and deliberately enough, along the old High Street, to the Nuns’ House. At the gate, the street being within sight empty, Edwin bends down his face to Rosebud’s.
She remonstrates, laughing, and is a childish schoolgirl again.
“Eddy, no! I’m too stickey to be kissed. But give me your hand, and I’ll blow a kiss into that.”
He does so. She breathes a light breath into it, and asks, retaining it and looking into it:
“Now say, what do you see?”
UNDER THE TREES
“See, Rosa?”
“Why, I thought you Egyptian boys could look into a hand and see all sorts of phantoms? Can’t you see a happy Future?”
For certain, neither of them sees a happy Present, as the gate opens and closes, and one goes in and the other goes away.