Our Mutual Friend
I hope you will think how respectable you might have been yourself and
will contemplate your blighted existence.’
Was it strange that the wretched man should take this heavily to
heart? Perhaps he had taken the boy to heart, first, through some
long laborious years; perhaps through the same years he had found
his drudgery lightened by communication with a brighter and more
apprehensive spirit than his own; perhaps a family resemblance of face
and voice between the boy and his sister, smote him hard in the gloom
of his fallen state. For whichsoever reason, or for all, he drooped his
devoted head when the boy was gone, and shrank together on the floor,
and grovelled there, with the palms of his hands tight-clasping his hot
temples, in unutterable misery, and unrelieved by a single tear.
Rogue Riderhood had been busy with the river that day. He had fished
with assiduity on the previous evening, but the light was short, and
he had fished unsuccessfully. He had fished again that day with better
luck, and had carried his fish home to Plashwater Weir Mill Lock-house,
in a bundle.
Chapter 8
A FEW GRAINS OF PEPPER
The dolls’ dressmaker went no more to the business-premises of Pubsey
and Co. in St Mary Axe, after chance had disclosed to her (as she
supposed) the flinty and hypocritical character of Mr Riah. She often
moralized over her work on the tricks and the manners of that venerable
cheat, but made her little purchases elsewhere, and lived a secluded
life. After much consultation with herself, she decided not to put
Lizzie Hexam on her guard against the old man, arguing that the
disappointment of finding him out would come upon her quite soon enough.
Therefore, in her communication with her friend by letter, she was
silent on this theme, and principally dilated on the backslidings of her
bad child, who every day grew worse and worse.
‘You wicked old boy,’ Miss Wren would say to him, with a menacing
forefinger, ‘you’ll force me to run away from you, after all, you will;
and then you’ll shake to bits, and there’ll be nobody to pick up the
pieces!’
At this foreshadowing of a desolate decease, the wicked old boy would
whine and whimper, and would sit shaking himself into the lowest of low
spirits, until such time as he could shake himself out of the house and
shake another threepennyworth into himself. But dead drunk or dead
sober (he had come to such a pass that he was least alive in the latter
state), it was always on the conscience of the paralytic scarecrow that
he had betrayed his sharp parent for sixty threepennyworths of rum,
which were all gone, and that her sharpness would infallibly detect his
having done it, sooner or later. All things considered therefore, and
addition made of the state of his body to the state of his mind, the bed
on which Mr Dolls reposed was a bed of roses from which the flowers
and leaves had entirely faded, leaving him to lie upon the thorns and
stalks.
On a certain day, Miss Wren was alone at her work, with the house-door
set open for coolness, and was trolling in a small sweet voice a
mournful little song which might have been the song of the doll she was
dressing, bemoaning the brittleness and meltability of wax, when whom
should she descry standing on the pavement, looking in at her, but Mr
Fledgeby.
‘I thought it was you?’ said Fledgeby, coming up the two steps.
‘Did you?’ Miss Wren retorted. ‘And I thought it was you, young man.
Quite a coincidence. You’re not mistaken, and I’m not mistaken. How
clever we are!’
‘Well, and how are you?’ said Fledgeby.
‘I am pretty much as usual, sir,’ replied Miss Wren. ‘A very unfortunate
parent, worried out of my life and senses by a very bad child.’
Fledgeby’s small eyes opened so wide that they might have passed for
ordinary-sized eyes, as he stared about him for the very young person
whom he supposed to be in question.
‘But you’re not a parent,’ said Miss Wren, ‘and consequently it’s of no
use talking to you upon a family subject.—To what am I to attribute the
honour and favour?’
‘To a wish to improve your acquaintance,’ Mr Fledgeby replied.
Miss Wren, stopping to bite her thread, looked at him very knowingly.
‘We never meet now,’ said Fledgeby; ‘do we?’
‘No,’ said Miss Wren, chopping off the word.
‘So I had a mind,’ pursued Fledgeby, ‘to come and have a talk with you
about our dodging friend, the child of Israel.’
‘So HE gave you my address; did he?’ asked Miss Wren.
‘I got it out of him,’ said Fledgeby, with a stammer.
‘You seem to see a good deal of him,’ remarked Miss Wren, with shrewd
distrust. ‘A good deal of him you seem to see, considering.’
‘Yes, I do,’ said Fledgeby. ‘Considering.’
‘Haven’t you,’ inquired the dressmaker, bending over the doll on which
her art was being exercised, ‘done interceding with him yet?’
‘No,’ said Fledgeby, shaking his head.
‘La! Been interceding with him all this time, and sticking to him
still?’ said Miss Wren, busy with her work.
‘Sticking to him is the word,’ said Fledgeby.
Miss Wren pursued her occupation with a concentrated air, and asked,
after an interval of silent industry:
‘Are you in the army?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Fledgeby, rather flattered by the question.
‘Navy?’ asked Miss Wren.
‘N—no,’ said Fledgeby. He qualified these two negatives, as if he were
not absolutely in either service, but was almost in both.
‘What are you then?’ demanded Miss Wren.
‘I am a gentleman, I am,’ said Fledgeby.
‘Oh!’ assented Jenny, screwing up her mouth with an appearance of
conviction. ‘Yes, to be sure! That accounts for your having so much
time to give to interceding. But only to think how kind and friendly a
gentleman you must be!’
Mr Fledgeby found that he was skating round a board marked Dangerous,
and had better cut out a fresh track. ‘Let’s get back to the dodgerest
of the dodgers,’ said he. ‘What’s he up to in the case of your friend
the handsome gal? He must have some object. What’s his object?’
‘Cannot undertake to say, sir, I am sure!’ returned Miss Wren,
composedly.
‘He won’t acknowledge where she’s gone,’ said Fledgeby; ‘and I have
a fancy that I should like to have another look at her. Now I know he
knows where she is gone.’
‘Cannot undertake to say, sir, I am sure!’ Miss Wren again rejoined.
‘And you know where she is gone,’ hazarded Fledgeby.
‘Cannot undertake to say, sir, really,’ replied Miss Wren.
The quaint little chin met Mr Fledgeby’s gaze with such a baffling
hitch, that that agreeable gentleman was for some time at a loss how to
resume his fascinating part in the dialogue. At length he said:
‘Miss Jenny!—That’s your name, if I don’t mistake?’
‘Probably you don’t mistake, sir,’ was Miss Wren’s cool answer; ‘because
you had it on the best authority. Mine, you know.’
‘Miss Jenny! Instead of coming up and being dead, let’s come out and
look alive. It’ll pay better, I assure you,’ said Fledgeby, bestowing
an inveigling twinkle or two upon the dressmaker. ‘You’ll find it pay
better.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Miss Jenny, holding out her doll at arm’s length, and
critically contemplating the effect of her art with her scissors on her
lips and her head thrown back, as if her interest lay there, and not in
the conversation; ‘perhaps you’ll explain your meaning, young man, which
is Greek to me.—You must have another touch of blue in your trimming,
my dear.’ Having addressed the last remark to her fair client, Miss
Wren proceeded to snip at some blue fragments that lay before her, among
fragments of all colours, and to thread a needle from a skein of blue
silk.
‘Look here,’ said Fledgeby.—‘Are you attending?’
‘I am attending, sir,’ replied Miss Wren, without the slightest
appearance of so doing. ‘Another touch of blue in your trimming, my
dear.’
‘Well, look here,’ said Fledgeby, rather discouraged by the
circumstances under which he found himself pursuing the conversation.
‘If you’re attending—’
(‘Light blue, my sweet young lady,’ remarked Miss Wren, in a sprightly
tone, ‘being best suited to your fair complexion and your flaxen
curls.’)
‘I say, if you’re attending,’ proceeded Fledgeby, ‘it’ll pay better in
this way. It’ll lead in a roundabout manner to your buying damage and
waste of Pubsey and Co. at a nominal price, or even getting it for
nothing.’
‘Aha!’ thought the dressmaker. ‘But you are not so roundabout, Little
Eyes, that I don’t notice your answering for Pubsey and Co. after all!
Little Eyes, Little Eyes, you’re too cunning by half.’
‘And I take it for granted,’ pursued Fledgeby, ‘that to get the most of
your materials for nothing would be well worth your while, Miss Jenny?’
‘You may take it for granted,’ returned the dressmaker with many knowing
nods, ‘that it’s always well worth my while to make money.’
‘Now,’ said Fledgeby approvingly, ‘you’re answering to a sensible
purpose. Now, you’re coming out and looking alive! So I make so free,
Miss Jenny, as to offer the remark, that you and Judah were too thick
together to last. You can’t come to be intimate with such a deep file
as Judah without beginning to see a little way into him, you know,’ said
Fledgeby with a wink.
‘I must own,’ returned the dressmaker, with her eyes upon her work,
‘that we are not good friends at present.’
‘I know you’re not good friends at present,’ said Fledgeby. ‘I know all
about it. I should like to pay off Judah, by not letting him have his
own deep way in everything. In most things he’ll get it by hook or
by crook, but—hang it all!—don’t let him have his own deep way in
everything. That’s too much.’ Mr Fledgeby said this with some display of
indignant warmth, as if he was counsel in the cause for Virtue.
‘How can I prevent his having his own way?’ began the dressmaker.
‘Deep way, I called it,’ said Fledgeby.
‘—His own deep way, in anything?’
‘I’ll tell you,’ said Fledgeby. ‘I like to hear you ask it, because
it’s looking alive. It’s what I should expect to find in one of your
sagacious understanding. Now, candidly.’
‘Eh?’ cried Miss Jenny.
‘I said, now candidly,’ Mr Fledgeby explained, a little put out.
‘Oh-h!’
‘I should be glad to countermine him, respecting the handsome gal, your
friend. He means something there. You may depend upon it, Judah means
something there. He has a motive, and of course his motive is a dark
motive. Now, whatever his motive is, it’s necessary to his motive’—Mr
Fledgeby’s constructive powers were not equal to the avoidance of some
tautology here—‘that it should be kept from me, what he has done with
her. So I put it to you, who know: What HAS he done with her? I ask no
more. And is that asking much, when you understand that it will pay?’
Miss Jenny Wren, who had cast her eyes upon the bench again after her
last interruption, sat looking at it, needle in hand but not working,
for some moments. She then briskly resumed her work, and said with a
sidelong glance of her eyes and chin at Mr Fledgeby:
‘Where d’ye live?’
‘Albany, Piccadilly,’ replied Fledgeby.
‘When are you at home?’
‘When you like.’
‘Breakfast-time?’ said Jenny, in her abruptest and shortest manner.
‘No better time in the day,’ said Fledgeby.
‘I’ll look in upon you to-morrow, young man. Those two ladies,’ pointing
to dolls, ‘have an appointment in Bond Street at ten precisely. When
I’ve dropped ’em there, I’ll drive round to you.’ With a weird little
laugh, Miss Jenny pointed to her crutch-stick as her equipage.
‘This is looking alive indeed!’ cried Fledgeby, rising.
‘Mark you! I promise you nothing,’ said the dolls’ dressmaker, dabbing
two dabs at him with her needle, as if she put out both his eyes.
‘No no. I understand,’ returned Fledgeby. ‘The damage and waste question
shall be settled first. It shall be made to pay; don’t you be afraid.