Our Mutual Friend
the house gave a weird little laugh here, and gave them another look out
of the corners of her eyes. She had an elfin chin that was capable of
great expression; and whenever she gave this look, she hitched this chin
up. As if her eyes and her chin worked together on the same wires.
‘Are you always as busy as you are now?’
‘Busier. I’m slack just now. I finished a large mourning order the day
before yesterday. Doll I work for, lost a canary-bird.’ The person of
the house gave another little laugh, and then nodded her head several
times, as who should moralize, ‘Oh this world, this world!’
‘Are you alone all day?’ asked Bradley Headstone. ‘Don’t any of the
neighbouring children—?’
‘Ah, lud!’ cried the person of the house, with a little scream, as
if the word had pricked her. ‘Don’t talk of children. I can’t bear
children. I know their tricks and their manners.’ She said this with an
angry little shake of her tight fist close before her eyes.
Perhaps it scarcely required the teacher-habit, to perceive that the
doll’s dressmaker was inclined to be bitter on the difference between
herself and other children. But both master and pupil understood it so.
‘Always running about and screeching, always playing and fighting,
always skip-skip-skipping on the pavement and chalking it for their
games! Oh! I know their tricks and their manners!’ Shaking the little
fist as before. ‘And that’s not all. Ever so often calling names in
through a person’s keyhole, and imitating a person’s back and legs. Oh!
I know their tricks and their manners. And I’ll tell you what I’d do, to
punish ’em. There’s doors under the church in the Square—black doors,
leading into black vaults. Well! I’d open one of those doors, and I’d
cram ’em all in, and then I’d lock the door and through the keyhole I’d
blow in pepper.’
‘What would be the good of blowing in pepper?’ asked Charley Hexam.
‘To set ’em sneezing,’ said the person of the house, ‘and make their
eyes water. And when they were all sneezing and inflamed, I’d mock ’em
through the keyhole. Just as they, with their tricks and their manners,
mock a person through a person’s keyhole!’
An uncommonly emphatic shake of her little fist close before her eyes,
seemed to ease the mind of the person of the house; for she added
with recovered composure, ‘No, no, no. No children for me. Give me
grown-ups.’
It was difficult to guess the age of this strange creature, for her poor
figure furnished no clue to it, and her face was at once so young and so
old. Twelve, or at the most thirteen, might be near the mark.
‘I always did like grown-ups,’ she went on, ‘and always kept company
with them. So sensible. Sit so quiet. Don’t go prancing and capering
about! And I mean always to keep among none but grown-ups till I marry.
I suppose I must make up my mind to marry, one of these days.’
She listened to a step outside that caught her ear, and there was a soft
knock at the door. Pulling at a handle within her reach, she said,
with a pleased laugh: ‘Now here, for instance, is a grown-up that’s my
particular friend!’ and Lizzie Hexam in a black dress entered the room.
‘Charley! You!’
Taking him to her arms in the old way—of which he seemed a little
ashamed—she saw no one else.
‘There, there, there, Liz, all right my dear. See! Here’s Mr Headstone
come with me.’
Her eyes met those of the schoolmaster, who had evidently expected
to see a very different sort of person, and a murmured word or two
of salutation passed between them. She was a little flurried by the
unexpected visit, and the schoolmaster was not at his ease. But he never
was, quite.
‘I told Mr Headstone you were not settled, Liz, but he was so kind as to
take an interest in coming, and so I brought him. How well you look!’
Bradley seemed to think so.
‘Ah! Don’t she, don’t she?’ cried the person of the house, resuming her
occupation, though the twilight was falling fast. ‘I believe you she
does! But go on with your chat, one and all:
“You one two three,
My com-pa-nie,
And don’t mind me;”
—pointing this impromptu rhyme with three points of her thin
fore-finger.
‘I didn’t expect a visit from you, Charley,’ said his sister. ‘I
supposed that if you wanted to see me you would have sent to me,
appointing me to come somewhere near the school, as I did last time.
I saw my brother near the school, sir,’ to Bradley Headstone, ‘because
it’s easier for me to go there, than for him to come here. I work about
midway between the two places.’
‘You don’t see much of one another,’ said Bradley, not improving in
respect of ease.
‘No.’ With a rather sad shake of her head. ‘Charley always does well, Mr
Headstone?’
‘He could not do better. I regard his course as quite plain before him.’
‘I hoped so. I am so thankful. So well done of you, Charley dear! It is
better for me not to come (except when he wants me) between him and his
prospects. You think so, Mr Headstone?’
Conscious that his pupil-teacher was looking for his answer, that he
himself had suggested the boy’s keeping aloof from this sister, now seen
for the first time face to face, Bradley Headstone stammered:
‘Your brother is very much occupied, you know. He has to work hard. One
cannot but say that the less his attention is diverted from his work,
the better for his future. When he shall have established himself, why
then—it will be another thing then.’
Lizzie shook her head again, and returned, with a quiet smile: ‘I always
advised him as you advise him. Did I not, Charley?’
‘Well, never mind that now,’ said the boy. ‘How are you getting on?’
‘Very well, Charley. I want for nothing.’
‘You have your own room here?’
‘Oh yes. Upstairs. And it’s quiet, and pleasant, and airy.’
‘And she always has the use of this room for visitors,’ said the
person of the house, screwing up one of her little bony fists, like an
opera-glass, and looking through it, with her eyes and her chin in that
quaint accordance. ‘Always this room for visitors; haven’t you, Lizzie
dear?’
It happened that Bradley Headstone noticed a very slight action of
Lizzie Hexam’s hand, as though it checked the doll’s dressmaker. And it
happened that the latter noticed him in the same instant; for she made
a double eyeglass of her two hands, looked at him through it, and cried,
with a waggish shake of her head: ‘Aha! Caught you spying, did I?’
It might have fallen out so, any way; but Bradley Headstone also noticed
that immediately after this, Lizzie, who had not taken off her bonnet,
rather hurriedly proposed that as the room was getting dark they should
go out into the air. They went out; the visitors saying good-night to
the doll’s dressmaker, whom they left, leaning back in her chair with
her arms crossed, singing to herself in a sweet thoughtful little voice.
‘I’ll saunter on by the river,’ said Bradley. ‘You will be glad to talk
together.’
As his uneasy figure went on before them among the evening shadows, the
boy said to his sister, petulantly:
‘When are you going to settle yourself in some Christian sort of place,
Liz? I thought you were going to do it before now.’
‘I am very well where I am, Charley.’
‘Very well where you are! I am ashamed to have brought Mr Headstone with
me. How came you to get into such company as that little witch’s?’
‘By chance at first, as it seemed, Charley. But I think it must have
been by something more than chance, for that child—You remember the
bills upon the walls at home?’
‘Confound the bills upon the walls at home! I want to forget the bills
upon the walls at home, and it would be better for you to do the same,’
grumbled the boy. ‘Well; what of them?’
‘This child is the grandchild of the old man.’
‘What old man?’
‘The terrible drunken old man, in the list slippers and the night-cap.’
The boy asked, rubbing his nose in a manner that half expressed vexation
at hearing so much, and half curiosity to hear more: ‘How came you to
make that out? What a girl you are!’
‘The child’s father is employed by the house that employs me; that’s how
I came to know it, Charley. The father is like his own father, a weak
wretched trembling creature, falling to pieces, never sober. But a good
workman too, at the work he does. The mother is dead. This poor ailing
little creature has come to be what she is, surrounded by drunken people
from her cradle—if she ever had one, Charley.’
‘I don’t see what you have to do with her, for all that,’ said the boy.
‘Don’t you, Charley?’
The boy looked doggedly at the river. They were at Millbank, and
the river rolled on their left. His sister gently touched him on the
shoulder, and pointed to it.
‘Any compensation—restitution—never mind the word, you know my
meaning. Father’s grave.’
But he did not respond with any tenderness. After a moody silence he
broke out in an ill-used tone:
‘It’ll be a very hard thing, Liz, if, when I am trying my best to get up
in the world, you pull me back.’
‘I, Charley?’
‘Yes, you, Liz. Why can’t you let bygones be bygones? Why can’t you, as
Mr Headstone said to me this very evening about another matter, leave
well alone? What we have got to do, is, to turn our faces full in our
new direction, and keep straight on.’
‘And never look back? Not even to try to make some amends?’
‘You are such a dreamer,’ said the boy, with his former petulance. ‘It
was all very well when we sat before the fire—when we looked into the
hollow down by the flare—but we are looking into the real world, now.’
‘Ah, we were looking into the real world then, Charley!’
‘I understand what you mean by that, but you are not justified in it. I
don’t want, as I raise myself to shake you off, Liz. I want to carry you
up with me. That’s what I want to do, and mean to do. I know what I owe
you. I said to Mr Headstone this very evening, “After all, my sister got
me here.” Well, then. Don’t pull me back, and hold me down. That’s all I
ask, and surely that’s not unconscionable.’
She had kept a steadfast look upon him, and she answered with composure:
‘I am not here selfishly, Charley. To please myself I could not be too
far from that river.’
‘Nor could you be too far from it to please me. Let us get quit of it
equally. Why should you linger about it any more than I? I give it a
wide berth.’
‘I can’t get away from it, I think,’ said Lizzie, passing her hand
across her forehead. ‘It’s no purpose of mine that I live by it still.’
‘There you go, Liz! Dreaming again! You lodge yourself of your own
accord in a house with a drunken—tailor, I suppose—or something of the
sort, and a little crooked antic of a child, or old person, or whatever
it is, and then you talk as if you were drawn or driven there. Now, do
be more practical.’
She had been practical enough with him, in suffering and striving
for him; but she only laid her hand upon his shoulder—not
reproachfully—and tapped it twice or thrice. She had been used to
do so, to soothe him when she carried him about, a child as heavy as
herself. Tears started to his eyes.
‘Upon my word, Liz,’ drawing the back of his hand across them, ‘I mean
to be a good brother to you, and to prove that I know what I owe you.
All I say is, that I hope you’ll control your fancies a little, on my
account. I’ll get a school, and then you must come and live with me,
and you’ll have to control your fancies then, so why not now? Now, say I
haven’t vexed you.’
‘You haven’t, Charley, you haven’t.’
‘And say I haven’t hurt you.’
‘You haven’t, Charley.’ But this answer was less ready.
‘Say you are sure I didn’t mean to. Come! There’s Mr Headstone stopping
and looking over the wall at the tide, to hint that it’s time to go.
Kiss me, and tell me that you know I didn’t mean to hurt you.’