Tope to his tea, and Mr. Jasper to his
piano. There, with no light but that of the fire, he sits chanting
choir-music in a low and beautiful voice, for two or three hours;
in short, until it has been for some time dark, and the moon is
about to rise.
Then he closes his piano softly, softly changes his coat for a pea-
jacket, with a goodly wicker-cased bottle in its largest pocket,
and putting on a low-crowned, flap-brimmed hat, goes softly out.
Why does he move so softly to-night? No outward reason is apparent
for it. Can there be any sympathetic reason crouching darkly
within him?
Repairing to Durdles's unfinished house, or hole in the city wall,
and seeing a light within it, he softly picks his course among the
gravestones, monuments, and stony lumber of the yard, already
touched here and there, sidewise, by the rising moon. The two
journeymen have left their two great saws sticking in their blocks
of stone; and two skeleton journeymen out of the Dance of Death
might be grinning in the shadow of their sheltering sentry-boxes,
about to slash away at cutting out the gravestones of the next two
people destined to die in Cloisterham. Likely enough, the two
think little of that now, being alive, and perhaps merry. Curious,
to make a guess at the two; - or say one of the two!
'Ho! Durdles!'
The light moves, and he appears with it at the door. He would seem
to have been 'cleaning himself' with the aid of a bottle, jug, and
tumbler; for no other cleansing instruments are visible in the bare
brick room with rafters overhead and no plastered ceiling, into
which he shows his visitor.
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