Tales from Dickens Part 46

The next time the choir master visited the opium garret the old woman tracked him back to Cloisterham, with more success--with such success, indeed, that she heard him sing in the cathedral and found out his name from a stranger whom she encountered. This stranger was d.i.c.k Datchery, the detective, who discovered so much, before he left her, of Jasper's London habits that he went home in high good humor.

Datchery had a trick, whenever he was following a particular search, of marking each step of his progress by a chalk mark on a wall or door.

To-day he must have been highly pleased, for he drew a thick line from the very top of the cupboard door to the bottom!

_When Charles d.i.c.kens, the master story-teller, had told this tale thus far, he fell ill and died, and it was never finished. The mystery of the disappearance of Edwin Drood, what became of Rosebud and of Mr.

Crisparkle, how Neville and Helena fared and what was the end of Jasper, are matters for each one of us to guess. Many have tried to finish this story and they have ended it in various ways. Before d.i.c.kens died, however, he told to a friend the part of the story that remained unwritten, and this, the friend has recorded, was to be as follows_:

By means of the old woman of the opium den, Durdles, the tombstone maker, and The Deputy, the ragged stone-thrower, d.i.c.k Datchery unraveled the threads which finally, made into a net, caught Jasper, the murderer, in its meshes. Little by little, word by word, he was made at last to betray himself.

He had killed Edwin Drood, had hidden his body in one of the vaults and covered it with lime. But there had been one thing in the dead man's pocket which the lime could not destroy: this was the ring set with diamonds and rubies, that had been given to him by Mr. Grewgious. By this the murder was proven. Mr. Crisparkle and Mr. Grewgious worked hard to clear Neville Landless (of whose guilt, by the way, Mr. Honeythunder remained always sure), but poor Neville himself perished in aiding Lieutenant Tartar to seize the murderer.

Finding all hope of escape gone, Jasper confessed his crime in the cell in which he waited for death.

But, after all, the story closed happily, with the marriage of Mr.

Crisparkle to Neville's sister Helena, and that of Lieutenant Tartar to pretty little Rosebud.