Our Mutual Friend
you was out and I was in,’ says that discreet young gentleman, standing
on tiptoe to whisper; ‘and I’ve brought him.’
‘Sharp boy. Where is he?’ asks Eugene.
‘He’s in a cab, sir, at the door. I thought it best not to show him, you
see, if it could be helped; for he’s a-shaking all over, like—Blight’s
simile is perhaps inspired by the surrounding dishes of sweets—‘like
Glue Monge.’
‘Sharp boy again,’ returns Eugene. ‘I’ll go to him.’
Goes out straightway, and, leisurely leaning his arms on the open window
of a cab in waiting, looks in at Mr Dolls: who has brought his own
atmosphere with him, and would seem from its odour to have brought it,
for convenience of carriage, in a rum-cask.
‘Now Dolls, wake up!’
‘Mist Wrayburn? Drection! Fifteen shillings!’
After carefully reading the dingy scrap of paper handed to him, and as
carefully tucking it into his waistcoat pocket, Eugene tells out the
money; beginning incautiously by telling the first shilling into Mr
Dolls’s hand, which instantly jerks it out of window; and ending by
telling the fifteen shillings on the seat.
‘Give him a ride back to Charing Cross, sharp boy, and there get rid of
him.’
Returning to the dining-room, and pausing for an instant behind the
screen at the door, Eugene overhears, above the hum and clatter, the
fair Tippins saying: ‘I am dying to ask him what he was called out for!’
‘Are you?’ mutters Eugene, ‘then perhaps if you can’t ask him, you’ll
die. So I’ll be a benefactor to society, and go. A stroll and a cigar,
and I can think this over. Think this over.’ Thus, with a thoughtful
face, he finds his hat and cloak, unseen of the Analytical, and goes his
way.
BOOK THE FOURTH — A TURNING
Chapter 1
SETTING TRAPS
Plashwater Weir Mill Lock looked tranquil and pretty on an evening in
the summer time. A soft air stirred the leaves of the fresh green trees,
and passed like a smooth shadow over the river, and like a smoother
shadow over the yielding grass. The voice of the falling water, like
the voices of the sea and the wind, were as an outer memory to a
contemplative listener; but not particularly so to Mr Riderhood, who sat
on one of the blunt wooden levers of his lock-gates, dozing. Wine must
be got into a butt by some agency before it can be drawn out; and the
wine of sentiment never having been got into Mr Riderhood by any agency,
nothing in nature tapped him.
As the Rogue sat, ever and again nodding himself off his balance, his
recovery was always attended by an angry stare and growl, as if, in the
absence of any one else, he had aggressive inclinations towards himself.
In one of these starts the cry of ‘Lock, ho! Lock!’ prevented his
relapse into a doze. Shaking himself as he got up like the surly brute
he was, he gave his growl a responsive twist at the end, and turned his
face down-stream to see who hailed.
It was an amateur-sculler, well up to his work though taking it easily,
in so light a boat that the Rogue remarked: ‘A little less on you, and
you’d a’most ha’ been a Wagerbut’; then went to work at his windlass
handles and sluices, to let the sculler in. As the latter stood in his
boat, holding on by the boat-hook to the woodwork at the lock side,
waiting for the gates to open, Rogue Riderhood recognized his ‘T’other
governor,’ Mr Eugene Wrayburn; who was, however, too indifferent or too
much engaged to recognize him.
The creaking lock-gates opened slowly, and the light boat passed in as
soon as there was room enough, and the creaking lock-gates closed upon
it, and it floated low down in the dock between the two sets of gates,
until the water should rise and the second gates should open and let it
out. When Riderhood had run to his second windlass and turned it, and
while he leaned against the lever of that gate to help it to swing
open presently, he noticed, lying to rest under the green hedge by the
towing-path astern of the Lock, a Bargeman.
The water rose and rose as the sluice poured in, dispersing the scum
which had formed behind the lumbering gates, and sending the boat up,
so that the sculler gradually rose like an apparition against the light
from the bargeman’s point of view. Riderhood observed that the bargeman
rose too, leaning on his arm, and seemed to have his eyes fastened on
the rising figure.
But, there was the toll to be taken, as the gates were now complaining
and opening. The T’other governor tossed it ashore, twisted in a piece
of paper, and as he did so, knew his man.
‘Ay, ay? It’s you, is it, honest friend?’ said Eugene, seating himself
preparatory to resuming his sculls. ‘You got the place, then?’
‘I got the place, and no thanks to you for it, nor yet none to Lawyer
Lightwood,’ gruffly answered Riderhood.
‘We saved our recommendation, honest fellow,’ said Eugene, ‘for the next
candidate—the one who will offer himself when you are transported or
hanged. Don’t be long about it; will you be so good?’
So imperturbable was the air with which he gravely bent to his work that
Riderhood remained staring at him, without having found a retort, until
he had rowed past a line of wooden objects by the weir, which showed
like huge teetotums standing at rest in the water, and was almost hidden
by the drooping boughs on the left bank, as he rowed away, keeping
out of the opposing current. It being then too late to retort with
any effect—if that could ever have been done—the honest man confined
himself to cursing and growling in a grim under-tone. Having then
got his gates shut, he crossed back by his plank lock-bridge to the
towing-path side of the river.
If, in so doing, he took another glance at the bargeman, he did it by
stealth. He cast himself on the grass by the Lock side, in an indolent
way, with his back in that direction, and, having gathered a few blades,
fell to chewing them. The dip of Eugene Wrayburn’s sculls had become
hardly audible in his ears when the bargeman passed him, putting the
utmost width that he could between them, and keeping under the hedge.
Then, Riderhood sat up and took a long look at his figure, and then
cried: ‘Hi—I—i! Lock, ho! Lock! Plashwater Weir Mill Lock!’
The bargeman stopped, and looked back.
‘Plashwater Weir Mill Lock, T’otherest gov—er—nor—or—or—or!’ cried
Mr Riderhood, with his hands to his mouth.
The bargeman turned back. Approaching nearer and nearer, the bargeman
became Bradley Headstone, in rough water-side second-hand clothing.
‘Wish I may die,’ said Riderhood, smiting his right leg, and laughing,
as he sat on the grass, ‘if you ain’t ha’ been a imitating me,
T’otherest governor! Never thought myself so good-looking afore!’
Truly, Bradley Headstone had taken careful note of the honest man’s
dress in the course of that night-walk they had had together. He must
have committed it to memory, and slowly got it by heart. It was
exactly reproduced in the dress he now wore. And whereas, in his own
schoolmaster clothes, he usually looked as if they were the clothes of
some other man, he now looked, in the clothes of some other man or men,
as if they were his own.
‘THIS your Lock?’ said Bradley, whose surprise had a genuine air; ‘they
told me, where I last inquired, it was the third I should come to. This
is only the second.’
‘It’s my belief, governor,’ returned Riderhood, with a wink and shake of
his head, ‘that you’ve dropped one in your counting. It ain’t Locks as
YOU’VE been giving your mind to. No, no!’
As he expressively jerked his pointing finger in the direction the boat
had taken, a flush of impatience mounted into Bradley’s face, and he
looked anxiously up the river.
‘It ain’t Locks as YOU’VE been a reckoning up,’ said Riderhood, when the
schoolmaster’s eyes came back again. ‘No, no!’
‘What other calculations do you suppose I have been occupied with?
Mathematics?’
‘I never heerd it called that. It’s a long word for it. Hows’ever,
p’raps you call it so,’ said Riderhood, stubbornly chewing his grass.
‘It. What?’
‘I’ll say them, instead of it, if you like,’ was the coolly growled
reply. ‘It’s safer talk too.’
‘What do you mean that I should understand by them?’
‘Spites, affronts, offences giv’ and took, deadly aggrawations, such
like,’ answered Riderhood.
Do what Bradley Headstone would, he could not keep that former flush of
impatience out of his face, or so master his eyes as to prevent their
again looking anxiously up the river.
‘Ha ha! Don’t be afeerd, T’otherest,’ said Riderhood. ‘The T’other’s got
to make way agin the stream, and he takes it easy. You can soon come up
with him. But wot’s the good of saying that to you! YOU know how fur
you could have outwalked him betwixt anywheres about where he lost the
tide—say Richmond—and this, if you had a mind to it.’
‘You think I have been following him?’ said Bradley.
‘I KNOW you have,’ said Riderhood.
‘Well! I have, I have,’ Bradley admitted. ‘But,’ with another anxious
look up the river, ‘he may land.’
‘Easy you! He won’t be lost if he does land,’ said Riderhood. ‘He must
leave his boat behind him. He can’t make a bundle or a parcel on it, and
carry it ashore with him under his arm.’
‘He was speaking to you just now,’ said Bradley, kneeling on one knee on
the grass beside the Lock-keeper. ‘What did he say?’
‘Cheek,’ said Riderhood.
‘What?’
‘Cheek,’ repeated Riderhood, with an angry oath; ‘cheek is what he said.
He can’t say nothing but cheek. I’d ha’ liked to plump down aboard of
him, neck and crop, with a heavy jump, and sunk him.’
Bradley turned away his haggard face for a few moments, and then said,
tearing up a tuft of grass:
‘Damn him!’
‘Hooroar!’ cried Riderhood. ‘Does you credit! Hooroar! I cry chorus to
the T’otherest.’
‘What turn,’ said Bradley, with an effort at self-repression that forced
him to wipe his face, ‘did his insolence take to-day?’
‘It took the turn,’ answered Riderhood, with sullen ferocity, ‘of hoping
as I was getting ready to be hanged.’
‘Let him look to that,’ cried Bradley. ‘Let him look to that! It will
be bad for him when men he has injured, and at whom he has jeered, are
thinking of getting hanged. Let HIM get ready for HIS fate, when that
comes about. There was more meaning in what he said than he knew of, or
he wouldn’t have had brains enough to say it. Let him look to it; let
him look to it! When men he has wronged, and on whom he has bestowed
his insolence, are getting ready to be hanged, there is a death-bell
ringing. And not for them.’
Riderhood, looking fixedly at him, gradually arose from his recumbent
posture while the schoolmaster said these words with the utmost
concentration of rage and hatred. So, when the words were all spoken,
he too kneeled on one knee on the grass, and the two men looked at one
another.
‘Oh!’ said Riderhood, very deliberately spitting out the grass he had
been chewing. ‘Then, I make out, T’otherest, as he is a-going to her?’
‘He left London,’ answered Bradley, ‘yesterday. I have hardly a doubt,
this time, that at last he is going to her.’
‘You ain’t sure, then?’
‘I am as sure here,’ said Bradley, with a clutch at the breast of his
coarse shirt, ‘as if it was written there;’ with a blow or a stab at the
sky.
‘Ah! But judging from the looks on you,’ retorted Riderhood, completely
ridding himself of his grass, and drawing his sleeve across his mouth,
‘you’ve made ekally sure afore, and have got disapinted. It has told
upon you.’
‘Listen,’ said Bradley, in a low voice, bending forward to lay his hand
upon the Lock-keeper’s shoulder. ‘These are my holidays.’
‘Are they, by George!’ muttered Riderhood, with his eyes on the
passion-wasted face. ‘Your working days must be stiff ’uns, if these is
your holidays.’
‘And I have never left him,’ pursued Bradley, waving the interruption