Our Mutual Friend
Thus Bradley Headstone, with great effort and difficulty.
‘Is that all?’ asked Eugene.
‘No, sir,’ said the other, flushed and fierce. ‘I strongly support him
in his disapproval of your visits to his sister, and in his objection to
your officiousness—and worse—in what you have taken upon yourself to
do for her.’
‘Is THAT all?’ asked Eugene.
‘No, sir. I determined to tell you that you are not justified in these
proceedings, and that they are injurious to his sister.’
‘Are you her schoolmaster as well as her brother’s?—Or perhaps you
would like to be?’ said Eugene.
It was a stab that the blood followed, in its rush to Bradley
Headstone’s face, as swiftly as if it had been dealt with a dagger.
‘What do you mean by that?’ was as much as he could utter.
‘A natural ambition enough,’ said Eugene, coolly. ‘Far be it from me
to say otherwise. The sister who is something too much upon your lips,
perhaps—is so very different from all the associations to which she had
been used, and from all the low obscure people about her, that it is a
very natural ambition.’
‘Do you throw my obscurity in my teeth, Mr Wrayburn?’
‘That can hardly be, for I know nothing concerning it, Schoolmaster, and
seek to know nothing.’
‘You reproach me with my origin,’ said Bradley Headstone; ‘you cast
insinuations at my bringing-up. But I tell you, sir, I have worked my
way onward, out of both and in spite of both, and have a right to be
considered a better man than you, with better reasons for being proud.’
‘How I can reproach you with what is not within my knowledge, or how
I can cast stones that were never in my hand, is a problem for the
ingenuity of a schoolmaster to prove,’ returned Eugene. ‘Is THAT all?’
‘No, sir. If you suppose that boy—’
‘Who really will be tired of waiting,’ said Eugene, politely.
‘If you suppose that boy to be friendless, Mr Wrayburn, you deceive
yourself. I am his friend, and you shall find me so.’
‘And you will find HIM on the stairs,’ remarked Eugene.
‘You may have promised yourself, sir, that you could do what you
chose here, because you had to deal with a mere boy, inexperienced,
friendless, and unassisted. But I give you warning that this mean
calculation is wrong. You have to do with a man also. You have to do
with me. I will support him, and, if need be, require reparation for
him. My hand and heart are in this cause, and are open to him.’
‘And—quite a coincidence—the door is open,’ remarked Eugene.
‘I scorn your shifty evasions, and I scorn you,’ said the schoolmaster.
‘In the meanness of your nature you revile me with the meanness of my
birth. I hold you in contempt for it. But if you don’t profit by this
visit, and act accordingly, you will find me as bitterly in earnest
against you as I could be if I deemed you worth a second thought on my
own account.’
With a consciously bad grace and stiff manner, as Wrayburn looked so
easily and calmly on, he went out with these words, and the heavy door
closed like a furnace-door upon his red and white heats of rage.
‘A curious monomaniac,’ said Eugene. ‘The man seems to believe that
everybody was acquainted with his mother!’
Mortimer Lightwood being still at the window, to which he had in
delicacy withdrawn, Eugene called to him, and he fell to slowly pacing
the room.
‘My dear fellow,’ said Eugene, as he lighted another cigar, ‘I fear my
unexpected visitors have been troublesome. If as a set-off (excuse the
legal phrase from a barrister-at-law) you would like to ask Tippins to
tea, I pledge myself to make love to her.’
‘Eugene, Eugene, Eugene,’ replied Mortimer, still pacing the room, ‘I am
sorry for this. And to think that I have been so blind!’
‘How blind, dear boy?’ inquired his unmoved friend.
‘What were your words that night at the river-side public-house?’ said
Lightwood, stopping. ‘What was it that you asked me? Did I feel like a
dark combination of traitor and pickpocket when I thought of that girl?’
‘I seem to remember the expression,’ said Eugene.
‘How do YOU feel when you think of her just now?’
His friend made no direct reply, but observed, after a few whiffs of his
cigar, ‘Don’t mistake the situation. There is no better girl in all this
London than Lizzie Hexam. There is no better among my people at home; no
better among your people.’
‘Granted. What follows?’
‘There,’ said Eugene, looking after him dubiously as he paced away to
the other end of the room, ‘you put me again upon guessing the riddle
that I have given up.’
‘Eugene, do you design to capture and desert this girl?’
‘My dear fellow, no.’
‘Do you design to marry her?’
‘My dear fellow, no.’
‘Do you design to pursue her?’
‘My dear fellow, I don’t design anything. I have no design whatever.
I am incapable of designs. If I conceived a design, I should speedily
abandon it, exhausted by the operation.’
‘Oh Eugene, Eugene!’
‘My dear Mortimer, not that tone of melancholy reproach, I entreat. What
can I do more than tell you all I know, and acknowledge my ignorance
of all I don’t know! How does that little old song go, which, under
pretence of being cheerful, is by far the most lugubrious I ever heard
in my life?
“Away with melancholy,
Nor doleful changes ring
On life and human folly,
But merrily merrily sing
Fal la!”
Don’t let us sing Fal la, my dear Mortimer (which is comparatively
unmeaning), but let us sing that we give up guessing the riddle
altogether.’
‘Are you in communication with this girl, Eugene, and is what these
people say true?’
‘I concede both admissions to my honourable and learned friend.’
‘Then what is to come of it? What are you doing? Where are you going?’
‘My dear Mortimer, one would think the schoolmaster had left behind him
a catechizing infection. You are ruffled by the want of another cigar.
Take one of these, I entreat. Light it at mine, which is in perfect
order. So! Now do me the justice to observe that I am doing all I can
towards self-improvement, and that you have a light thrown on those
household implements which, when you only saw them as in a glass darkly,
you were hastily—I must say hastily—inclined to depreciate. Sensible
of my deficiencies, I have surrounded myself with moral influences
expressly meant to promote the formation of the domestic virtues.
To those influences, and to the improving society of my friend from
boyhood, commend me with your best wishes.’
‘Ah, Eugene!’ said Lightwood, affectionately, now standing near him,
so that they both stood in one little cloud of smoke; ‘I would that you
answered my three questions! What is to come of it? What are you doing?
Where are you going?’
‘And my dear Mortimer,’ returned Eugene, lightly fanning away the smoke
with his hand for the better exposition of his frankness of face and
manner, ‘believe me, I would answer them instantly if I could. But
to enable me to do so, I must first have found out the troublesome
conundrum long abandoned. Here it is. Eugene Wrayburn.’ Tapping his
forehead and breast. ‘Riddle-me, riddle-me-ree, perhaps you can’t tell
me what this may be?—No, upon my life I can’t. I give it up!’
Chapter 7
IN WHICH A FRIENDLY MOVE IS ORIGINATED
The arrangement between Mr Boffin and his literary man, Mr Silas Wegg,
so far altered with the altered habits of Mr Boffin’s life, as that
the Roman Empire usually declined in the morning and in the eminently
aristocratic family mansion, rather than in the evening, as of yore,
and in Boffin’s Bower. There were occasions, however, when Mr Boffin,
seeking a brief refuge from the blandishments of fashion, would present
himself at the Bower after dark, to anticipate the next sallying
forth of Wegg, and would there, on the old settle, pursue the downward
fortunes of those enervated and corrupted masters of the world who were
by this time on their last legs. If Wegg had been worse paid for his
office, or better qualified to discharge it, he would have considered
these visits complimentary and agreeable; but, holding the position of
a handsomely-remunerated humbug, he resented them. This was quite
according to rule, for the incompetent servant, by whomsoever employed,
is always against his employer. Even those born governors, noble and
right honourable creatures, who have been the most imbecile in high
places, have uniformly shown themselves the most opposed (sometimes in
belying distrust, sometimes in vapid insolence) to THEIR employer. What
is in such wise true of the public master and servant, is equally true
of the private master and servant all the world over.
When Mr Silas Wegg did at last obtain free access to ‘Our House’, as he
had been wont to call the mansion outside which he had sat shelterless
so long, and when he did at last find it in all particulars as different
from his mental plans of it as according to the nature of things it
well could be, that far-seeing and far-reaching character, by way of
asserting himself and making out a case for compensation, affected to
fall into a melancholy strain of musing over the mournful past; as if
the house and he had had a fall in life together.
‘And this, sir,’ Silas would say to his patron, sadly nodding his head
and musing, ‘was once Our House! This, sir, is the building from which I
have so often seen those great creatures, Miss Elizabeth, Master
George, Aunt Jane, and Uncle Parker’—whose very names were of his own
inventing—‘pass and repass! And has it come to this, indeed! Ah dear
me, dear me!’
So tender were his lamentations, that the kindly Mr Boffin was quite
sorry for him, and almost felt mistrustful that in buying the house he
had done him an irreparable injury.
Two or three diplomatic interviews, the result of great subtlety on Mr
Wegg’s part, but assuming the mask of careless yielding to a fortuitous
combination of circumstances impelling him towards Clerkenwell, had
enabled him to complete his bargain with Mr Venus.
‘Bring me round to the Bower,’ said Silas, when the bargain was closed,
‘next Saturday evening, and if a sociable glass of old Jamaikey warm
should meet your views, I am not the man to begrudge it.’
‘You are aware of my being poor company, sir,’ replied Mr Venus, ‘but be
it so.’
It being so, here is Saturday evening come, and here is Mr Venus come,
and ringing at the Bower-gate.
Mr Wegg opens the gate, descries a sort of brown paper truncheon under
Mr Venus’s arm, and remarks, in a dry tone: ‘Oh! I thought perhaps you
might have come in a cab.’
‘No, Mr Wegg,’ replies Venus. ‘I am not above a parcel.’
‘Above a parcel! No!’ says Wegg, with some dissatisfaction. But does not
openly growl, ‘a certain sort of parcel might be above you.’
‘Here is your purchase, Mr Wegg,’ says Venus, politely handing it over,
‘and I am glad to restore it to the source from whence it—flowed.’
‘Thankee,’ says Wegg. ‘Now this affair is concluded, I may mention to
you in a friendly way that I’ve my doubts whether, if I had consulted a
lawyer, you could have kept this article back from me. I only throw it
out as a legal point.’
‘Do you think so, Mr Wegg? I bought you in open contract.’
‘You can’t buy human flesh and blood in this country, sir; not alive,
you can’t,’ says Wegg, shaking his head. ‘Then query, bone?’
‘As a legal point?’ asks Venus.
‘As a legal point.’
‘I am not competent to speak upon that, Mr Wegg,’ says Venus, reddening
and growing something louder; ‘but upon a point of fact I think myself
competent to speak; and as a point of fact I would have seen you—will
you allow me to say, further?’
‘I wouldn’t say more than further, if I was you,’ Mr Wegg suggests,
pacifically.
—‘Before I’d have given that packet into your hand without being paid