Our Mutual Friend
been so good a friend to Charley that I have no right to doubt it. I
have nothing to tell Charley, but that I accepted the help to which he
so much objects before he made any plans for me; or certainly before I
knew of any. It was considerately and delicately offered, and there were
reasons that had weight with me which should be as dear to Charley as to
me. I have no more to say to Charley on this subject.’
His lips trembled and stood apart, as he followed this repudiation of
himself; and limitation of her words to her brother.
‘I should have told Charley, if he had come to me,’ she resumed, as
though it were an after-thought, ‘that Jenny and I find our teacher very
able and very patient, and that she takes great pains with us. So much
so, that we have said to her we hope in a very little while to be able
to go on by ourselves. Charley knows about teachers, and I should also
have told him, for his satisfaction, that ours comes from an institution
where teachers are regularly brought up.’
‘I should like to ask you,’ said Bradley Headstone, grinding his words
slowly out, as though they came from a rusty mill; ‘I should like to
ask you, if I may without offence, whether you would have objected—no;
rather, I should like to say, if I may without offence, that I wish I
had had the opportunity of coming here with your brother and devoting my
poor abilities and experience to your service.’
‘Thank you, Mr Headstone.’
‘But I fear,’ he pursued, after a pause, furtively wrenching at the seat
of his chair with one hand, as if he would have wrenched the chair to
pieces, and gloomily observing her while her eyes were cast down, ‘that
my humble services would not have found much favour with you?’
She made no reply, and the poor stricken wretch sat contending with
himself in a heat of passion and torment. After a while he took out his
handkerchief and wiped his forehead and hands.
‘There is only one thing more I had to say, but it is the most
important. There is a reason against this matter, there is a personal
relation concerned in this matter, not yet explained to you. It might—I
don’t say it would—it might—induce you to think differently. To
proceed under the present circumstances is out of the question. Will you
please come to the understanding that there shall be another interview
on the subject?’
‘With Charley, Mr Headstone?’
‘With—well,’ he answered, breaking off, ‘yes! Say with him too.
Will you please come to the understanding that there must be another
interview under more favourable circumstances, before the whole case can
be submitted?’
‘I don’t,’ said Lizzie, shaking her head, ‘Understand your meaning, Mr
Headstone.’
‘Limit my meaning for the present,’ he interrupted, ‘to the whole case
being submitted to you in another interview.’
‘What case, Mr Headstone? What is wanting to it?’
‘You—you shall be informed in the other interview.’ Then he said, as
if in a burst of irrepressible despair, ‘I—I leave it all incomplete!
There is a spell upon me, I think!’ And then added, almost as if he
asked for pity, ‘Good-night!’
He held out his hand. As she, with manifest hesitation, not to say
reluctance, touched it, a strange tremble passed over him, and his face,
so deadly white, was moved as by a stroke of pain. Then he was gone.
The dolls’ dressmaker sat with her attitude unchanged, eyeing the door
by which he had departed, until Lizzie pushed her bench aside and sat
down near her. Then, eyeing Lizzie as she had previously eyed Bradley
and the door, Miss Wren chopped that very sudden and keen chop in which
her jaws sometimes indulged, leaned back in her chair with folded arms,
and thus expressed herself:
‘Humph! If he—I mean, of course, my dear, the party who is coming to
court me when the time comes—should be THAT sort of man, he may spare
himself the trouble. _He_ wouldn’t do to be trotted about and made
useful. He’d take fire and blow up while he was about it.’
‘And so you would be rid of him,’ said Lizzie, humouring her.
‘Not so easily,’ returned Miss Wren. ‘He wouldn’t blow up alone. He’d
carry me up with him. I know his tricks and his manners.’
‘Would he want to hurt you, do you mean?’ asked Lizzie.
‘Mightn’t exactly want to do it, my dear,’ returned Miss Wren; ‘but a
lot of gunpowder among lighted lucifer-matches in the next room might
almost as well be here.’
‘He is a very strange man,’ said Lizzie, thoughtfully.
‘I wish he was so very strange a man as to be a total stranger,’
answered the sharp little thing.
It being Lizzie’s regular occupation when they were alone of an evening
to brush out and smooth the long fair hair of the dolls’ dressmaker, she
unfastened a ribbon that kept it back while the little creature was at
her work, and it fell in a beautiful shower over the poor shoulders that
were much in need of such adorning rain. ‘Not now, Lizzie, dear,’ said
Jenny; ‘let us have a talk by the fire.’ With those words, she in her
turn loosened her friend’s dark hair, and it dropped of its own weight
over her bosom, in two rich masses. Pretending to compare the colours
and admire the contrast, Jenny so managed a mere touch or two of her
nimble hands, as that she herself laying a cheek on one of the dark
folds, seemed blinded by her own clustering curls to all but the fire,
while the fine handsome face and brow of Lizzie were revealed without
obstruction in the sombre light.
‘Let us have a talk,’ said Jenny, ‘about Mr Eugene Wrayburn.’
Something sparkled down among the fair hair resting on the dark hair;
and if it were not a star—which it couldn’t be—it was an eye; and
if it were an eye, it was Jenny Wren’s eye, bright and watchful as the
bird’s whose name she had taken.
‘Why about Mr Wrayburn?’ Lizzie asked.
‘For no better reason than because I’m in the humour. I wonder whether
he’s rich!’
‘No, not rich.’
‘Poor?’
‘I think so, for a gentleman.’
‘Ah! To be sure! Yes, he’s a gentleman. Not of our sort; is he?’ A shake
of the head, a thoughtful shake of the head, and the answer, softly
spoken, ‘Oh no, oh no!’
The dolls’ dressmaker had an arm round her friend’s waist. Adjusting the
arm, she slyly took the opportunity of blowing at her own hair where
it fell over her face; then the eye down there, under lighter shadows
sparkled more brightly and appeared more watchful.
‘When He turns up, he shan’t be a gentleman; I’ll very soon send him
packing, if he is. However, he’s not Mr Wrayburn; I haven’t captivated
HIM. I wonder whether anybody has, Lizzie!’
‘It is very likely.’
‘Is it very likely? I wonder who!’
‘Is it not very likely that some lady has been taken by him, and that he
may love her dearly?’
‘Perhaps. I don’t know. What would you think of him, Lizzie, if you were
a lady?’
‘I a lady!’ she repeated, laughing. ‘Such a fancy!’
‘Yes. But say: just as a fancy, and for instance.’
‘I a lady! I, a poor girl who used to row poor father on the river. I,
who had rowed poor father out and home on the very night when I saw him
for the first time. I, who was made so timid by his looking at me, that
I got up and went out!’
(‘He did look at you, even that night, though you were not a lady!’
thought Miss Wren.)
‘I a lady!’ Lizzie went on in a low voice, with her eyes upon the fire.
‘I, with poor father’s grave not even cleared of undeserved stain and
shame, and he trying to clear it for me! I a lady!’
‘Only as a fancy, and for instance,’ urged Miss Wren.
‘Too much, Jenny, dear, too much! My fancy is not able to get that far.’
As the low fire gleamed upon her, it showed her smiling, mournfully and
abstractedly.
‘But I am in the humour, and I must be humoured, Lizzie, because after
all I am a poor little thing, and have had a hard day with my bad child.
Look in the fire, as I like to hear you tell how you used to do when you
lived in that dreary old house that had once been a windmill. Look in
the—what was its name when you told fortunes with your brother that I
DON’T like?’
‘The hollow down by the flare?’
‘Ah! That’s the name! You can find a lady there, I know.’
‘More easily than I can make one of such material as myself, Jenny.’
The sparkling eye looked steadfastly up, as the musing face looked
thoughtfully down. ‘Well?’ said the dolls’ dressmaker, ‘We have found
our lady?’
Lizzie nodded, and asked, ‘Shall she be rich?’
‘She had better be, as he’s poor.’
‘She is very rich. Shall she be handsome?’
‘Even you can be that, Lizzie, so she ought to be.’
‘She is very handsome.’
‘What does she say about him?’ asked Miss Jenny, in a low voice:
watchful, through an intervening silence, of the face looking down at
the fire.
‘She is glad, glad, to be rich, that he may have the money. She is glad,
glad, to be beautiful, that he may be proud of her. Her poor heart—’
‘Eh? Her poor heart?’ said Miss Wren.
‘Her heart—is given him, with all its love and truth. She would
joyfully die with him, or, better than that, die for him. She knows he
has failings, but she thinks they have grown up through his being like
one cast away, for the want of something to trust in, and care for, and
think well of. And she says, that lady rich and beautiful that I can
never come near, “Only put me in that empty place, only try how little
I mind myself, only prove what a world of things I will do and bear for
you, and I hope that you might even come to be much better than you are,
through me who am so much worse, and hardly worth the thinking of beside
you.”’
As the face looking at the fire had become exalted and forgetful in the
rapture of these words, the little creature, openly clearing away
her fair hair with her disengaged hand, had gazed at it with earnest
attention and something like alarm. Now that the speaker ceased, the
little creature laid down her head again, and moaned, ‘O me, O me, O
me!’
‘In pain, dear Jenny?’ asked Lizzie, as if awakened.
‘Yes, but not the old pain. Lay me down, lay me down. Don’t go out of
my sight to-night. Lock the door and keep close to me.’ Then turning away
her face, she said in a whisper to herself, ‘My Lizzie, my poor Lizzie!
O my blessed children, come back in the long bright slanting rows, and
come for her, not me. She wants help more than I, my blessed children!’
She had stretched her hands up with that higher and better look, and
now she turned again, and folded them round Lizzie’s neck, and rocked
herself on Lizzie’s breast.
Chapter 12
MORE BIRDS OF PREY
Rogue Riderhood dwelt deep and dark in Limehouse Hole, among the
riggers, and the mast, oar and block makers, and the boat-builders, and
the sail-lofts, as in a kind of ship’s hold stored full of waterside
characters, some no better than himself, some very much better, and
none much worse. The Hole, albeit in a general way not over nice in
its choice of company, was rather shy in reference to the honour of
cultivating the Rogue’s acquaintance; more frequently giving him the
cold shoulder than the warm hand, and seldom or never drinking with him
unless at his own expense. A part of the Hole, indeed, contained so
much public spirit and private virtue that not even this strong leverage
could move it to good fellowship with a tainted accuser. But, there may
have been the drawback on this magnanimous morality, that its exponents
held a true witness before Justice to be the next unneighbourly and
accursed character to a false one.
Had it not been for the daughter whom he often mentioned, Mr Riderhood
might have found the Hole a mere grave as to any means it would yield
him of getting a living. But Miss Pleasant Riderhood had some little
position and connection in Limehouse Hole. Upon the smallest of small
scales, she was an unlicensed pawnbroker, keeping what was popularly