Our Mutual Friend
and of every face he saw, but was under a spell which very commonly
falls upon the shedder of blood, and had no suspicion of the real danger
that lurked in his life, and would have it yet. Riderhood was much
in his thoughts—had never been out of his thoughts since the
night-adventure of their first meeting; but Riderhood occupied a very
different place there, from the place of pursuer; and Bradley had been
at the pains of devising so many means of fitting that place to him, and
of wedging him into it, that his mind could not compass the possibility
of his occupying any other. And this is another spell against which
the shedder of blood for ever strives in vain. There are fifty doors by
which discovery may enter. With infinite pains and cunning, he double
locks and bars forty-nine of them, and cannot see the fiftieth standing
wide open.
Now, too, was he cursed with a state of mind more wearing and more
wearisome than remorse. He had no remorse; but the evildoer who can hold
that avenger at bay, cannot escape the slower torture of incessantly
doing the evil deed again and doing it more efficiently. In the
defensive declarations and pretended confessions of murderers, the
pursuing shadow of this torture may be traced through every lie they
tell. If I had done it as alleged, is it conceivable that I would have
made this and this mistake? If I had done it as alleged, should I have
left that unguarded place which that false and wicked witness against me
so infamously deposed to? The state of that wretch who continually finds
the weak spots in his own crime, and strives to strengthen them when
it is unchangeable, is a state that aggravates the offence by doing
the deed a thousand times instead of once; but it is a state, too, that
tauntingly visits the offence upon a sullen unrepentant nature with its
heaviest punishment every time.
Bradley toiled on, chained heavily to the idea of his hatred and his
vengeance, and thinking how he might have satiated both in many better
ways than the way he had taken. The instrument might have been better,
the spot and the hour might have been better chosen. To batter a man
down from behind in the dark, on the brink of a river, was well enough,
but he ought to have been instantly disabled, whereas he had turned and
seized his assailant; and so, to end it before chance-help came, and
to be rid of him, he had been hurriedly thrown backward into the river
before the life was fully beaten out of him. Now if it could be done
again, it must not be so done. Supposing his head had been held down
under water for a while. Supposing the first blow had been truer.
Supposing he had been shot. Supposing he had been strangled. Suppose
this way, that way, the other way. Suppose anything but getting
unchained from the one idea, for that was inexorably impossible.
The school reopened next day. The scholars saw little or no change in
their master’s face, for it always wore its slowly labouring expression.
But, as he heard his classes, he was always doing the deed and doing it
better. As he paused with his piece of chalk at the black board before
writing on it, he was thinking of the spot, and whether the water was
not deeper and the fall straighter, a little higher up, or a little
lower down. He had half a mind to draw a line or two upon the board, and
show himself what he meant. He was doing it again and improving on
the manner, at prayers, in his mental arithmetic, all through his
questioning, all through the day.
Charley Hexam was a master now, in another school, under another head.
It was evening, and Bradley was walking in his garden observed from
behind a blind by gentle little Miss Peecher, who contemplated offering
him a loan of her smelling salts for headache, when Mary Anne, in
faithful attendance, held up her arm.
‘Yes, Mary Anne?’
‘Young Mr Hexam, if you please, ma’am, coming to see Mr Headstone.’
‘Very good, Mary Anne.’
Again Mary Anne held up her arm.
‘You may speak, Mary Anne?’
‘Mr Headstone has beckoned young Mr Hexam into his house, ma’am, and he
has gone in himself without waiting for young Mr Hexam to come up, and
now HE has gone in too, ma’am, and has shut the door.’
‘With all my heart, Mary Anne.’
Again Mary Anne’s telegraphic arm worked.
‘What more, Mary Anne?’
‘They must find it rather dull and dark, Miss Peecher, for the parlour
blind’s down, and neither of them pulls it up.’
‘There is no accounting,’ said good Miss Peecher with a little sad sigh
which she repressed by laying her hand on her neat methodical boddice,
‘there is no accounting for tastes, Mary Anne.’
Charley, entering the dark room, stopped short when he saw his old
friend in its yellow shade.
‘Come in, Hexam, come in.’
Charley advanced to take the hand that was held out to him; but stopped
again, short of it. The heavy, bloodshot eyes of the schoolmaster,
rising to his face with an effort, met his look of scrutiny.
‘Mr Headstone, what’s the matter?’
‘Matter? Where?’
‘Mr Headstone, have you heard the news? This news about the fellow, Mr
Eugene Wrayburn? That he is killed?’
‘He is dead, then!’ exclaimed Bradley.
Young Hexam standing looking at him, he moistened his lips with his
tongue, looked about the room, glanced at his former pupil, and looked
down. ‘I heard of the outrage,’ said Bradley, trying to constrain his
working mouth, ‘but I had not heard the end of it.’
‘Where were you,’ said the boy, advancing a step as he lowered his
voice, ‘when it was done? Stop! I don’t ask that. Don’t tell me. If you
force your confidence upon me, Mr Headstone, I’ll give up every word of
it. Mind! Take notice. I’ll give up it, and I’ll give up you. I will!’
The wretched creature seemed to suffer acutely under this renunciation.
A desolate air of utter and complete loneliness fell upon him, like a
visible shade.
‘It’s for me to speak, not you,’ said the boy. ‘If you do, you’ll do
it at your peril. I am going to put your selfishness before you, Mr
Headstone—your passionate, violent, and ungovernable selfishness—to
show you why I can, and why I will, have nothing more to do with you.’
He looked at young Hexam as if he were waiting for a scholar to go on
with a lesson that he knew by heart and was deadly tired of. But he had
said his last word to him.
‘If you had any part—I don’t say what—in this attack,’ pursued the
boy; ‘or if you know anything about it—I don’t say how much—or if you
know who did it—I go no closer—you did an injury to me that’s never
to be forgiven. You know that I took you with me to his chambers in the
Temple when I told him my opinion of him, and made myself responsible
for my opinion of you. You know that I took you with me when I was
watching him with a view to recovering my sister and bringing her to her
senses; you know that I have allowed myself to be mixed up with you, all
through this business, in favouring your desire to marry my sister. And
how do you know that, pursuing the ends of your own violent temper, you
have not laid me open to suspicion? Is that your gratitude to me, Mr
Headstone?’
Bradley sat looking steadily before him at the vacant air. As often
as young Hexam stopped, he turned his eyes towards him, as if he were
waiting for him to go on with the lesson, and get it done. As often as
the boy resumed, Bradley resumed his fixed face.
‘I am going to be plain with you, Mr Headstone,’ said young Hexam,
shaking his head in a half-threatening manner, ‘because this is no time
for affecting not to know things that I do know—except certain things
at which it might not be very safe for you, to hint again. What I mean
is this: if you were a good master, I was a good pupil. I have done you
plenty of credit, and in improving my own reputation I have improved
yours quite as much. Very well then. Starting on equal terms, I want to
put before you how you have shown your gratitude to me, for doing all
I could to further your wishes with reference to my sister. You have
compromised me by being seen about with me, endeavouring to counteract
this Mr Eugene Wrayburn. That’s the first thing you have done. If my
character, and my now dropping you, help me out of that, Mr Headstone,
the deliverance is to be attributed to me, and not to you. No thanks to
you for it!’
The boy stopping again, he moved his eyes again.
‘I am going on, Mr Headstone, don’t you be afraid. I am going on to the
end, and I have told you beforehand what the end is. Now, you know my
story. You are as well aware as I am, that I have had many disadvantages
to leave behind me in life. You have heard me mention my father, and you
are sufficiently acquainted with the fact that the home from which I, as
I may say, escaped, might have been a more creditable one than it was.
My father died, and then it might have been supposed that my way to
respectability was pretty clear. No. For then my sister begins.’
He spoke as confidently, and with as entire an absence of any tell-tale
colour in his cheek, as if there were no softening old time behind him.
Not wonderful, for there WAS none in his hollow empty heart. What is
there but self, for selfishness to see behind it?
‘When I speak of my sister, I devoutly wish that you had never seen
her, Mr Headstone. However, you did see her, and that’s useless now. I
confided in you about her. I explained her character to you, and how she
interposed some ridiculous fanciful notions in the way of our being as
respectable as I tried for. You fell in love with her, and I favoured
you with all my might. She could not be induced to favour you, and so
we came into collision with this Mr Eugene Wrayburn. Now, what have you
done? Why, you have justified my sister in being firmly set against you
from first to last, and you have put me in the wrong again! And why
have you done it? Because, Mr Headstone, you are in all your passions
so selfish, and so concentrated upon yourself that you have not bestowed
one proper thought on me.’
The cool conviction with which the boy took up and held his position,
could have been derived from no other vice in human nature.
‘It is,’ he went on, actually with tears, ‘an extraordinary circumstance
attendant on my life, that every effort I make towards perfect
respectability, is impeded by somebody else through no fault of mine!
Not content with doing what I have put before you, you will drag my name
into notoriety through dragging my sister’s—which you are pretty sure
to do, if my suspicions have any foundation at all—and the worse you
prove to be, the harder it will be for me to detach myself from being
associated with you in people’s minds.’
When he had dried his eyes and heaved a sob over his injuries, he began
moving towards the door.
‘However, I have made up my mind that I will become respectable in the
scale of society, and that I will not be dragged down by others. I have
done with my sister as well as with you. Since she cares so little for
me as to care nothing for undermining my respectability, she shall go
her way and I will go mine. My prospects are very good, and I mean to
follow them alone. Mr Headstone, I don’t say what you have got upon your
conscience, for I don’t know. Whatever lies upon it, I hope you will see
the justice of keeping wide and clear of me, and will find a consolation
in completely exonerating all but yourself. I hope, before many years
are out, to succeed the master in my present school, and the mistress
being a single woman, though some years older than I am, I might even
marry her. If it is any comfort to you to know what plans I may work out
by keeping myself strictly respectable in the scale of society, these
are the plans at present occurring to me. In conclusion, if you feel a
sense of having injured me, and a desire to make some small reparation,