Our Mutual Friend
‘I am afraid, Lizzie,’ he openly answered, ‘that you left London to get
rid of me. It is not flattering to my self-love, but I am afraid you
did.’
‘I did.’
‘How could you be so cruel?’
‘O Mr Wrayburn,’ she answered, suddenly breaking into tears, ‘is the
cruelty on my side! O Mr Wrayburn, Mr Wrayburn, is there no cruelty in
your being here to-night!’
‘In the name of all that’s good—and that is not conjuring you in my
own name, for Heaven knows I am not good’—said Eugene, ‘don’t be
distressed!’
‘What else can I be, when I know the distance and the difference between
us? What else can I be, when to tell me why you came here, is to put me
to shame!’ said Lizzie, covering her face.
He looked at her with a real sentiment of remorseful tenderness and
pity. It was not strong enough to impell him to sacrifice himself and
spare her, but it was a strong emotion.
‘Lizzie! I never thought before, that there was a woman in the world who
could affect me so much by saying so little. But don’t be hard in your
construction of me. You don’t know what my state of mind towards you is.
You don’t know how you haunt me and bewilder me. You don’t know how the
cursed carelessness that is over-officious in helping me at every other
turning of my life, WON’T help me here. You have struck it dead, I
think, and I sometimes almost wish you had struck me dead along with
it.’
She had not been prepared for such passionate expressions, and they
awakened some natural sparks of feminine pride and joy in her breast. To
consider, wrong as he was, that he could care so much for her, and that
she had the power to move him so!
‘It grieves you to see me distressed, Mr Wrayburn; it grieves me to see
you distressed. I don’t reproach you. Indeed I don’t reproach you.
You have not felt this as I feel it, being so different from me, and
beginning from another point of view. You have not thought. But I
entreat you to think now, think now!’
‘What am I to think of?’ asked Eugene, bitterly.
‘Think of me.’
‘Tell me how NOT to think of you, Lizzie, and you’ll change me
altogether.’
‘I don’t mean in that way. Think of me, as belonging to another station,
and quite cut off from you in honour. Remember that I have no protector
near me, unless I have one in your noble heart. Respect my good name.
If you feel towards me, in one particular, as you might if I was a lady,
give me the full claims of a lady upon your generous behaviour. I am
removed from you and your family by being a working girl. How true a
gentleman to be as considerate of me as if I was removed by being a
Queen!’
He would have been base indeed to have stood untouched by her appeal.
His face expressed contrition and indecision as he asked:
‘Have I injured you so much, Lizzie?’
‘No, no. You may set me quite right. I don’t speak of the past, Mr
Wrayburn, but of the present and the future. Are we not here now,
because through two days you have followed me so closely where there
are so many eyes to see you, that I consented to this appointment as an
escape?’
‘Again, not very flattering to my self-love,’ said Eugene, moodily; ‘but
yes. Yes. Yes.’
‘Then I beseech you, Mr Wrayburn, I beg and pray you, leave this
neighbourhood. If you do not, consider to what you will drive me.’
He did consider within himself for a moment or two, and then retorted,
‘Drive you? To what shall I drive you, Lizzie?’
‘You will drive me away. I live here peacefully and respected, and I am
well employed here. You will force me to quit this place as I quitted
London, and—by following me again—will force me to quit the next place
in which I may find refuge, as I quitted this.’
‘Are you so determined, Lizzie—forgive the word I am going to use, for
its literal truth—to fly from a lover?’
‘I am so determined,’ she answered resolutely, though trembling, ‘to fly
from such a lover. There was a poor woman died here but a little while
ago, scores of years older than I am, whom I found by chance, lying on
the wet earth. You may have heard some account of her?’
‘I think I have,’ he answered, ‘if her name was Higden.’
‘Her name was Higden. Though she was so weak and old, she kept true to
one purpose to the very last. Even at the very last, she made me promise
that her purpose should be kept to, after she was dead, so settled
was her determination. What she did, I can do. Mr Wrayburn, if I
believed—but I do not believe—that you could be so cruel to me as
to drive me from place to place to wear me out, you should drive me to
death and not do it.’
He looked full at her handsome face, and in his own handsome face there
was a light of blended admiration, anger, and reproach, which she—who
loved him so in secret whose heart had long been so full, and he the
cause of its overflowing—drooped before. She tried hard to retain her
firmness, but he saw it melting away under his eyes. In the moment of
its dissolution, and of his first full knowledge of his influence upon
her, she dropped, and he caught her on his arm.
‘Lizzie! Rest so a moment. Answer what I ask you. If I had not been what
you call removed from you and cut off from you, would you have made this
appeal to me to leave you?’
‘I don’t know, I don’t know. Don’t ask me, Mr Wrayburn. Let me go back.’
‘I swear to you, Lizzie, you shall go directly. I swear to you, you
shall go alone. I’ll not accompany you, I’ll not follow you, if you will
reply.’
‘How can I, Mr Wrayburn? How can I tell you what I should have done, if
you had not been what you are?’
‘If I had not been what you make me out to be,’ he struck in, skilfully
changing the form of words, ‘would you still have hated me?’
‘O Mr Wrayburn,’ she replied appealingly, and weeping, ‘you know me
better than to think I do!’
‘If I had not been what you make me out to be, Lizzie, would you still
have been indifferent to me?’
‘O Mr Wrayburn,’ she answered as before, ‘you know me better than that
too!’
There was something in the attitude of her whole figure as he supported
it, and she hung her head, which besought him to be merciful and not
force her to disclose her heart. He was not merciful with her, and he
made her do it.
‘If I know you better than quite to believe (unfortunate dog though I
am!) that you hate me, or even that you are wholly indifferent to me,
Lizzie, let me know so much more from yourself before we separate. Let
me know how you would have dealt with me if you had regarded me as being
what you would have considered on equal terms with you.’
‘It is impossible, Mr Wrayburn. How can I think of you as being on equal
terms with me? If my mind could put you on equal terms with me, you
could not be yourself. How could I remember, then, the night when I
first saw you, and when I went out of the room because you looked at
me so attentively? Or, the night that passed into the morning when you
broke to me that my father was dead? Or, the nights when you used to
come to see me at my next home? Or, your having known how uninstructed
I was, and having caused me to be taught better? Or, my having so looked
up to you and wondered at you, and at first thought you so good to be at
all mindful of me?’
‘Only “at first” thought me so good, Lizzie? What did you think me after
“at first”? So bad?’
‘I don’t say that. I don’t mean that. But after the first wonder and
pleasure of being noticed by one so different from any one who had ever
spoken to me, I began to feel that it might have been better if I had
never seen you.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you WERE so different,’ she answered in a lower voice. ‘Because
it was so endless, so hopeless. Spare me!’
‘Did you think for me at all, Lizzie?’ he asked, as if he were a little
stung.
‘Not much, Mr Wrayburn. Not much until to-night.’
‘Will you tell me why?’
‘I never supposed until to-night that you needed to be thought for. But
if you do need to be; if you do truly feel at heart that you have indeed
been towards me what you have called yourself to-night, and that there
is nothing for us in this life but separation; then Heaven help you, and
Heaven bless you!’
The purity with which in these words she expressed something of her
own love and her own suffering, made a deep impression on him for the
passing time. He held her, almost as if she were sanctified to him by
death, and kissed her, once, almost as he might have kissed the dead.
‘I promised that I would not accompany you, nor follow you. Shall I keep
you in view? You have been agitated, and it’s growing dark.’
‘I am used to be out alone at this hour, and I entreat you not to do
so.’
‘I promise. I can bring myself to promise nothing more tonight, Lizzie,
except that I will try what I can do.’
‘There is but one means, Mr Wrayburn, of sparing yourself and of sparing
me, every way. Leave this neighbourhood to-morrow morning.’
‘I will try.’
As he spoke the words in a grave voice, she put her hand in his, removed
it, and went away by the river-side.
‘Now, could Mortimer believe this?’ murmured Eugene, still remaining,
after a while, where she had left him. ‘Can I even believe it myself?’
He referred to the circumstance that there were tears upon his hand,
as he stood covering his eyes. ‘A most ridiculous position this, to be
found out in!’ was his next thought. And his next struck its root in a
little rising resentment against the cause of the tears.
‘Yet I have gained a wonderful power over her, too, let her be as much
in earnest as she will!’
The reflection brought back the yielding of her face and form as she
had drooped under his gaze. Contemplating the reproduction, he seemed
to see, for the second time, in the appeal and in the confession of
weakness, a little fear.
‘And she loves me. And so earnest a character must be very earnest in
that passion. She cannot choose for herself to be strong in this fancy,
wavering in that, and weak in the other. She must go through with her
nature, as I must go through with mine. If mine exacts its pains and
penalties all round, so must hers, I suppose.’
Pursuing the inquiry into his own nature, he thought, ‘Now, if I married
her. If, outfacing the absurdity of the situation in correspondence with
M. R. F., I astonished M. R. F. to the utmost extent of his respected
powers, by informing him that I had married her, how would M. R. F.
reason with the legal mind? “You wouldn’t marry for some money and some
station, because you were frightfully likely to become bored. Are you
less frightfully likely to become bored, marrying for no money and no
station? Are you sure of yourself?” Legal mind, in spite of forensic
protestations, must secretly admit, “Good reasoning on the part of M. R.
F. NOT sure of myself.”’
In the very act of calling this tone of levity to his aid, he felt it to
be profligate and worthless, and asserted her against it.
‘And yet,’ said Eugene, ‘I should like to see the fellow (Mortimer
excepted) who would undertake to tell me that this was not a real
sentiment on my part, won out of me by her beauty and her worth,
in spite of myself, and that I would not be true to her. I should
particularly like to see the fellow to-night who would tell me so, or
who would tell me anything that could be construed to her disadvantage;
for I am wearily out of sorts with one Wrayburn who cuts a sorry figure,
and I would far rather be out of sorts with somebody else. “Eugene,
Eugene, Eugene, this is a bad business.” Ah! So go the Mortimer
Lightwood bells, and they sound melancholy to-night.’
Strolling on, he thought of something else to take himself to task for.
‘Where is the analogy, Brute Beast,’ he said impatiently, ‘between a
woman whom your father coolly finds out for you and a woman whom you
have found out for yourself, and have ever drifted after with more and