Our Mutual Friend
She told him so, and they embraced, and walked on and came up with the
schoolmaster.
‘But we go your sister’s way,’ he remarked, when the boy told him he was
ready. And with his cumbrous and uneasy action he stiffly offered her
his arm. Her hand was just within it, when she drew it back. He looked
round with a start, as if he thought she had detected something that
repelled her, in the momentary touch.
‘I will not go in just yet,’ said Lizzie. ‘And you have a distance
before you, and will walk faster without me.’
Being by this time close to Vauxhall Bridge, they resolved, in
consequence, to take that way over the Thames, and they left her;
Bradley Headstone giving her his hand at parting, and she thanking him
for his care of her brother.
The master and the pupil walked on, rapidly and silently. They had
nearly crossed the bridge, when a gentleman came coolly sauntering
towards them, with a cigar in his mouth, his coat thrown back, and his
hands behind him. Something in the careless manner of this person,
and in a certain lazily arrogant air with which he approached, holding
possession of twice as much pavement as another would have claimed,
instantly caught the boy’s attention. As the gentleman passed the boy
looked at him narrowly, and then stood still, looking after him.
‘Who is it that you stare after?’ asked Bradley.
‘Why!’ said the boy, with a confused and pondering frown upon his face,
‘It IS that Wrayburn one!’
Bradley Headstone scrutinized the boy as closely as the boy had
scrutinized the gentleman.
‘I beg your pardon, Mr Headstone, but I couldn’t help wondering what in
the world brought HIM here!’
Though he said it as if his wonder were past—at the same time resuming
the walk—it was not lost upon the master that he looked over his
shoulder after speaking, and that the same perplexed and pondering frown
was heavy on his face.
‘You don’t appear to like your friend, Hexam?’
‘I DON’T like him,’ said the boy.
‘Why not?’
‘He took hold of me by the chin in a precious impertinent way, the first
time I ever saw him,’ said the boy.
‘Again, why?’
‘For nothing. Or—it’s much the same—because something I happened to
say about my sister didn’t happen to please him.’
‘Then he knows your sister?’
‘He didn’t at that time,’ said the boy, still moodily pondering.
‘Does now?’
The boy had so lost himself that he looked at Mr Bradley Headstone
as they walked on side by side, without attempting to reply until the
question had been repeated; then he nodded and answered, ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Going to see her, I dare say.’
‘It can’t be!’ said the boy, quickly. ‘He doesn’t know her well enough.
I should like to catch him at it!’
When they had walked on for a time, more rapidly than before, the master
said, clasping the pupil’s arm between the elbow and the shoulder with
his hand:
‘You were going to tell me something about that person. What did you say
his name was?’
‘Wrayburn. Mr Eugene Wrayburn. He is what they call a barrister, with
nothing to do. The first time he came to our old place was when my
father was alive. He came on business; not that it was HIS business—HE
never had any business—he was brought by a friend of his.’
‘And the other times?’
‘There was only one other time that I know of. When my father was killed
by accident, he chanced to be one of the finders. He was mooning about,
I suppose, taking liberties with people’s chins; but there he was,
somehow. He brought the news home to my sister early in the morning, and
brought Miss Abbey Potterson, a neighbour, to help break it to her.
He was mooning about the house when I was fetched home in the
afternoon—they didn’t know where to find me till my sister could be
brought round sufficiently to tell them—and then he mooned away.’
‘And is that all?’
‘That’s all, sir.’
Bradley Headstone gradually released the boy’s arm, as if he were
thoughtful, and they walked on side by side as before. After a long
silence between them, Bradley resumed the talk.
‘I suppose—your sister—’ with a curious break both before and after
the words, ‘has received hardly any teaching, Hexam?’
‘Hardly any, sir.’
‘Sacrificed, no doubt, to her father’s objections. I remember them in
your case. Yet—your sister—scarcely looks or speaks like an ignorant
person.’
‘Lizzie has as much thought as the best, Mr Headstone. Too much,
perhaps, without teaching. I used to call the fire at home, her books,
for she was always full of fancies—sometimes quite wise fancies,
considering—when she sat looking at it.’
‘I don’t like that,’ said Bradley Headstone.
His pupil was a little surprised by this striking in with so sudden
and decided and emotional an objection, but took it as a proof of the
master’s interest in himself. It emboldened him to say:
‘I have never brought myself to mention it openly to you, Mr Headstone,
and you’re my witness that I couldn’t even make up my mind to take it
from you before we came out to-night; but it’s a painful thing to think
that if I get on as well as you hope, I shall be—I won’t say disgraced,
because I don’t mean disgraced—but—rather put to the blush if it was
known—by a sister who has been very good to me.’
‘Yes,’ said Bradley Headstone in a slurring way, for his mind scarcely
seemed to touch that point, so smoothly did it glide to another, ‘and
there is this possibility to consider. Some man who had worked his way
might come to admire—your sister—and might even in time bring himself
to think of marrying—your sister—and it would be a sad drawback and a
heavy penalty upon him, if; overcoming in his mind other inequalities of
condition and other considerations against it, this inequality and this
consideration remained in full force.’
‘That’s much my own meaning, sir.’
‘Ay, ay,’ said Bradley Headstone, ‘but you spoke of a mere brother.
Now, the case I have supposed would be a much stronger case; because an
admirer, a husband, would form the connexion voluntarily, besides being
obliged to proclaim it: which a brother is not. After all, you know, it
must be said of you that you couldn’t help yourself: while it would be
said of him, with equal reason, that he could.’
‘That’s true, sir. Sometimes since Lizzie was left free by father’s
death, I have thought that such a young woman might soon acquire more
than enough to pass muster. And sometimes I have even thought that
perhaps Miss Peecher—’
‘For the purpose, I would advise Not Miss Peecher,’ Bradley Headstone
struck in with a recurrence of his late decision of manner.
‘Would you be so kind as to think of it for me, Mr Headstone?’
‘Yes, Hexam, yes. I’ll think of it. I’ll think maturely of it. I’ll
think well of it.’
Their walk was almost a silent one afterwards, until it ended at the
school-house. There, one of neat Miss Peecher’s little windows, like the
eyes in needles, was illuminated, and in a corner near it sat Mary Anne
watching, while Miss Peecher at the table stitched at the neat little
body she was making up by brown paper pattern for her own wearing. N.B.
Miss Peecher and Miss Peecher’s pupils were not much encouraged in the
unscholastic art of needlework, by Government.
Mary Anne with her face to the window, held her arm up.
‘Well, Mary Anne?’
‘Mr Headstone coming home, ma’am.’
In about a minute, Mary Anne again hailed.
‘Yes, Mary Anne?’
‘Gone in and locked his door, ma’am.’
Miss Peecher repressed a sigh as she gathered her work together for bed,
and transfixed that part of her dress where her heart would have been if
she had had the dress on, with a sharp, sharp needle.
Chapter 2
STILL EDUCATIONAL
The person of the house, doll’s dressmaker and manufacturer of
ornamental pincushions and pen-wipers, sat in her quaint little low
arm-chair, singing in the dark, until Lizzie came back. The person
of the house had attained that dignity while yet of very tender years
indeed, through being the only trustworthy person IN the house.
‘Well Lizzie-Mizzie-Wizzie,’ said she, breaking off in her song, ‘what’s
the news out of doors?’
‘What’s the news in doors?’ returned Lizzie, playfully smoothing the
bright long fair hair which grew very luxuriant and beautiful on the
head of the doll’s dressmaker.
‘Let me see, said the blind man. Why the last news is, that I don’t mean
to marry your brother.’
‘No?’
‘No-o,’ shaking her head and her chin. ‘Don’t like the boy.’
‘What do you say to his master?’
‘I say that I think he’s bespoke.’
Lizzie finished putting the hair carefully back over the misshapen
shoulders, and then lighted a candle. It showed the little parlour to
be dingy, but orderly and clean. She stood it on the mantelshelf, remote
from the dressmaker’s eyes, and then put the room door open, and the
house door open, and turned the little low chair and its occupant
towards the outer air. It was a sultry night, and this was a
fine-weather arrangement when the day’s work was done. To complete
it, she seated herself in a chair by the side of the little chair, and
protectingly drew under her arm the spare hand that crept up to her.
‘This is what your loving Jenny Wren calls the best time in the day and
night,’ said the person of the house. Her real name was Fanny Cleaver;
but she had long ago chosen to bestow upon herself the appellation of
Miss Jenny Wren.
‘I have been thinking,’ Jenny went on, ‘as I sat at work to-day, what
a thing it would be, if I should be able to have your company till I am
married, or at least courted. Because when I am courted, I shall make
Him do some of the things that you do for me. He couldn’t brush my hair
like you do, or help me up and down stairs like you do, and he couldn’t
do anything like you do; but he could take my work home, and he could
call for orders in his clumsy way. And he shall too. I’LL trot him
about, I can tell him!’
Jenny Wren had her personal vanities—happily for her—and no intentions
were stronger in her breast than the various trials and torments that
were, in the fulness of time, to be inflicted upon ‘him.’
‘Wherever he may happen to be just at present, or whoever he may happen
to be,’ said Miss Wren, ‘I know his tricks and his manners, and I give
him warning to look out.’
‘Don’t you think you are rather hard upon him?’ asked her friend,
smiling, and smoothing her hair.
‘Not a bit,’ replied the sage Miss Wren, with an air of vast experience.
‘My dear, they don’t care for you, those fellows, if you’re NOT hard
upon ’em. But I was saying If I should be able to have your company. Ah!
What a large If! Ain’t it?’
‘I have no intention of parting company, Jenny.’
‘Don’t say that, or you’ll go directly.’
‘Am I so little to be relied upon?’
‘You’re more to be relied upon than silver and gold.’ As she said it,
Miss Wren suddenly broke off, screwed up her eyes and her chin, and
looked prodigiously knowing. ‘Aha!
Who comes here?
A Grenadier.
What does he want?
A pot of beer.
And nothing else in the world, my dear!’
A man’s figure paused on the pavement at the outer door. ‘Mr Eugene
Wrayburn, ain’t it?’ said Miss Wren.
‘So I am told,’ was the answer.
‘You may come in, if you’re good.’
‘I am not good,’ said Eugene, ‘but I’ll come in.’
He gave his hand to Jenny Wren, and he gave his hand to Lizzie, and he
stood leaning by the door at Lizzie’s side. He had been strolling with
his cigar, he said, (it was smoked out and gone by this time,) and he
had strolled round to return in that direction that he might look in as
he passed. Had she not seen her brother to-night?
‘Yes,’ said Lizzie, whose manner was a little troubled.
Gracious condescension on our brother’s part! Mr Eugene Wrayburn thought
he had passed my young gentleman on the bridge yonder. Who was his
friend with him?