Mr. Cuming Walters guesses that Jasper was to aim a deadly blow (with his
left hand, to judge from the picture) at Helena, and that Neville “was to
give his life for hers.” But, manifestly, Neville was to lead the hunt
of Jasper up the spiral stair, as in Collins’s design, and was to be
dashed from the roof: his body beneath was to be “_that_, I never saw
before. _That_ must be real. Look what a poor mean miserable thing it
is!” as Jasper says in his vision.
Mr. Cuming Walters, pursuing his idea of Helena as both Datchery and also
as the owner of “the _young_ face” of the youth in the vault (and also of
the young hands, a young girl’s hands could never pass for those of “an
elderly buffer”), exclaims: “Imagine the intense power of the dramatic
climax, when Datchery, the elderly man, is re-transformed into Helena
Landless, the young and handsome woman; and when she reveals the
seemingly impenetrable secret which had been closed up in one guilty
man’s mind.”
The situations are startling, I admit, but how would Canon Crisparkle
like them? He is, we know, to marry Helena, “the young person, my dear,”
Miss Twinkleton would say, “who for months lived alone, at inns, wearing
a blue surtout, a buff waistcoat, and grey—” Here horror chokes the
utterance of Miss Twinkleton. “Then she was in the vault in _another_
disguise, not more womanly, at that awful scene when poor Mr. Jasper was
driven mad, so that he confessed all sorts of nonsense, for, my dear, all
the Close believes that it _was_ nonsense, and that Mr. Jasper was
reduced to insanity by persecution. And Mr. Crisparkle, with that
elegant dainty mother of his—it has broken her heart—is marrying this
half-caste gipsy _trollop_, with her blue surtout and grey—oh, it is a
disgrace to Cloisterham!”
The climax, in fact, as devised by Mr. Cuming Walters, is rather too
dramatic for the comfort of a minor canon. A humorist like Dickens ought
to have seen the absurdity of the situation. Mr. Walters _may_ be right,
Helena may be Datchery, but she ought not to be.