It would be difficult to determine which was the more oppressed
with horror and amazement: Neville Landless, or John Jasper. But
that Jasper's position forced him to be active, while Neville's
forced him to be passive, there would have been nothing to choose
between them. Each was bowed down and broken.
With the earliest light of the next morning, men were at work upon
the river, and other men--most of whom volunteered for the service-
-were examining the banks. All the livelong day the search went
on; upon the river, with barge and pole, and drag and net; upon the
muddy and rushy shore, with jack-boots, hatchet, spade, rope, dogs,
and all imaginable appliances. Even at night, the river was
specked with lanterns, and lurid with fires; far-off creeks, into
which the tide washed as it changed, had their knots of watchers,
listening to the lapping of the stream, and looking out for any
burden it might bear; remote shingly causeways near the sea, and
lonely points off which there was a race of water, had their
unwonted flaring cressets and rough-coated figures when the next
day dawned; but no trace of Edwin Drood revisited the light of the
sun.
All that day, again, the search went on. Now, in barge and boat;
and now ashore among the osiers, or tramping amidst mud and stakes
and jagged stones in low-lying places, where solitary watermarks
and signals of strange shapes showed like spectres, John Jasper
worked and toiled.
Pages:
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237