Our Mutual Friend
in the way, if she could, and would be sure to strike in with something
impertinent. It was on that account that I proposed our going to the
City to-night and meeting my sister.’
‘So I supposed,’ said Bradley, getting his gloves on his nervous hands
as he walked. ‘So I supposed.’
‘Nobody but my sister,’ pursued Charley, ‘would have found out such an
extraordinary companion. She has done it in a ridiculous fancy of giving
herself up to another. She told me so, that night when we went there.’
‘Why should she give herself up to the dressmaker?’ asked Bradley.
‘Oh!’ said the boy, colouring. ‘One of her romantic ideas! I tried to
convince her so, but I didn’t succeed. However, what we have got to do,
is, to succeed to-night, Mr Headstone, and then all the rest follows.’
‘You are still sanguine, Hexam.’
‘Certainly I am, sir. Why, we have everything on our side.’
‘Except your sister, perhaps,’ thought Bradley. But he only gloomily
thought it, and said nothing.
‘Everything on our side,’ repeated the boy with boyish confidence.
‘Respectability, an excellent connexion for me, common sense,
everything!’
‘To be sure, your sister has always shown herself a devoted sister,’
said Bradley, willing to sustain himself on even that low ground of
hope.
‘Naturally, Mr Headstone, I have a good deal of influence with her.
And now that you have honoured me with your confidence and spoken to me
first, I say again, we have everything on our side.’
And Bradley thought again, ‘Except your sister, perhaps.’
A grey dusty withered evening in London city has not a hopeful aspect.
The closed warehouses and offices have an air of death about them, and
the national dread of colour has an air of mourning. The towers and
steeples of the many house-encompassed churches, dark and dingy as the
sky that seems descending on them, are no relief to the general gloom;
a sun-dial on a church-wall has the look, in its useless black shade,
of having failed in its business enterprise and stopped payment for
ever; melancholy waifs and strays of housekeepers and porters sweep
melancholy waifs and strays of papers and pins into the kennels, and
other more melancholy waifs and strays explore them, searching and
stooping and poking for anything to sell. The set of humanity outward
from the City is as a set of prisoners departing from gaol, and dismal
Newgate seems quite as fit a stronghold for the mighty Lord Mayor as
his own state-dwelling.
On such an evening, when the city grit gets into the hair and eyes and
skin, and when the fallen leaves of the few unhappy city trees grind
down in corners under wheels of wind, the schoolmaster and the pupil
emerged upon the Leadenhall Street region, spying eastward for Lizzie.
Being something too soon in their arrival, they lurked at a corner,
waiting for her to appear. The best-looking among us will not look very
well, lurking at a corner, and Bradley came out of that disadvantage
very poorly indeed.
‘Here she comes, Mr Headstone! Let us go forward and meet her.’
As they advanced, she saw them coming, and seemed rather troubled. But
she greeted her brother with the usual warmth, and touched the extended
hand of Bradley.
‘Why, where are you going, Charley, dear?’ she asked him then.
‘Nowhere. We came on purpose to meet you.’
‘To meet me, Charley?’
‘Yes. We are going to walk with you. But don’t let us take the great
leading streets where every one walks, and we can’t hear ourselves
speak. Let us go by the quiet backways. Here’s a large paved court by
this church, and quiet, too. Let us go up here.’
‘But it’s not in the way, Charley.’
‘Yes it is,’ said the boy, petulantly. ‘It’s in my way, and my way is
yours.’
She had not released his hand, and, still holding it, looked at him with
a kind of appeal. He avoided her eyes, under pretence of saying, ‘Come
along, Mr Headstone.’ Bradley walked at his side—not at hers—and the
brother and sister walked hand in hand. The court brought them to a
churchyard; a paved square court, with a raised bank of earth about
breast high, in the middle, enclosed by iron rails. Here, conveniently
and healthfully elevated above the level of the living, were the dead,
and the tombstones; some of the latter droopingly inclined from the
perpendicular, as if they were ashamed of the lies they told.
They paced the whole of this place once, in a constrained and
uncomfortable manner, when the boy stopped and said:
‘Lizzie, Mr Headstone has something to say to you. I don’t wish to be an
interruption either to him or to you, and so I’ll go and take a little
stroll and come back. I know in a general way what Mr Headstone intends
to say, and I very highly approve of it, as I hope—and indeed I do
not doubt—you will. I needn’t tell you, Lizzie, that I am under great
obligations to Mr Headstone, and that I am very anxious for Mr Headstone
to succeed in all he undertakes. As I hope—and as, indeed, I don’t
doubt—you must be.’
‘Charley,’ returned his sister, detaining his hand as he withdrew it, ‘I
think you had better stay. I think Mr Headstone had better not say what
he thinks of saying.’
‘Why, how do you know what it is?’ returned the boy.
‘Perhaps I don’t, but—’
‘Perhaps you don’t? No, Liz, I should think not. If you knew what
it was, you would give me a very different answer. There; let go; be
sensible. I wonder you don’t remember that Mr Headstone is looking on.’
She allowed him to separate himself from her, and he, after saying, ‘Now
Liz, be a rational girl and a good sister,’ walked away. She remained
standing alone with Bradley Headstone, and it was not until she raised
her eyes, that he spoke.
‘I said,’ he began, ‘when I saw you last, that there was something
unexplained, which might perhaps influence you. I have come this evening
to explain it. I hope you will not judge of me by my hesitating manner
when I speak to you. You see me at my greatest disadvantage. It is most
unfortunate for me that I wish you to see me at my best, and that I know
you see me at my worst.’
She moved slowly on when he paused, and he moved slowly on beside her.
‘It seems egotistical to begin by saying so much about myself,’ he
resumed, ‘but whatever I say to you seems, even in my own ears, below
what I want to say, and different from what I want to say. I can’t help
it. So it is. You are the ruin of me.’
She started at the passionate sound of the last words, and at the
passionate action of his hands, with which they were accompanied.
‘Yes! you are the ruin—the ruin—the ruin—of me. I have no resources
in myself, I have no confidence in myself, I have no government of
myself when you are near me or in my thoughts. And you are always in my
thoughts now. I have never been quit of you since I first saw you. Oh,
that was a wretched day for me! That was a wretched, miserable day!’
A touch of pity for him mingled with her dislike of him, and she said:
‘Mr Headstone, I am grieved to have done you any harm, but I have never
meant it.’
‘There!’ he cried, despairingly. ‘Now, I seem to have reproached you,
instead of revealing to you the state of my own mind! Bear with me. I am
always wrong when you are in question. It is my doom.’
Struggling with himself, and by times looking up at the deserted windows
of the houses as if there could be anything written in their grimy panes
that would help him, he paced the whole pavement at her side, before he
spoke again.
‘I must try to give expression to what is in my mind; it shall and must
be spoken. Though you see me so confounded—though you strike me so
helpless—I ask you to believe that there are many people who think well
of me; that there are some people who highly esteem me; that I have in
my way won a Station which is considered worth winning.’
‘Surely, Mr Headstone, I do believe it. Surely I have always known it
from Charley.’
‘I ask you to believe that if I were to offer my home such as it is, my
station such as it is, my affections such as they are, to any one of the
best considered, and best qualified, and most distinguished, among the
young women engaged in my calling, they would probably be accepted. Even
readily accepted.’
‘I do not doubt it,’ said Lizzie, with her eyes upon the ground.
‘I have sometimes had it in my thoughts to make that offer and to settle
down as many men of my class do: I on the one side of a school, my wife
on the other, both of us interested in the same work.’
‘Why have you not done so?’ asked Lizzie Hexam. ‘Why do you not do so?’
‘Far better that I never did! The only one grain of comfort I have had
these many weeks,’ he said, always speaking passionately, and, when
most emphatic, repeating that former action of his hands, which was
like flinging his heart’s blood down before her in drops upon the
pavement-stones; ‘the only one grain of comfort I have had these many
weeks is, that I never did. For if I had, and if the same spell had come
upon me for my ruin, I know I should have broken that tie asunder as if
it had been thread.’
She glanced at him with a glance of fear, and a shrinking gesture. He
answered, as if she had spoken.
‘No! It would not have been voluntary on my part, any more than it is
voluntary in me to be here now. You draw me to you. If I were shut up in
a strong prison, you would draw me out. I should break through the wall
to come to you. If I were lying on a sick bed, you would draw me up—to
stagger to your feet and fall there.’
The wild energy of the man, now quite let loose, was absolutely
terrible. He stopped and laid his hand upon a piece of the coping of the
burial-ground enclosure, as if he would have dislodged the stone.
‘No man knows till the time comes, what depths are within him. To some
men it never comes; let them rest and be thankful! To me, you brought
it; on me, you forced it; and the bottom of this raging sea,’ striking
himself upon the breast, ‘has been heaved up ever since.’
‘Mr Headstone, I have heard enough. Let me stop you here. It will be
better for you and better for me. Let us find my brother.’
‘Not yet. It shall and must be spoken. I have been in torments ever
since I stopped short of it before. You are alarmed. It is another of my
miseries that I cannot speak to you or speak of you without stumbling at
every syllable, unless I let the check go altogether and run mad. Here
is a man lighting the lamps. He will be gone directly. I entreat of you
let us walk round this place again. You have no reason to look alarmed;
I can restrain myself, and I will.’
She yielded to the entreaty—how could she do otherwise!—and they paced
the stones in silence. One by one the lights leaped up making the cold
grey church tower more remote, and they were alone again. He said no
more until they had regained the spot where he had broken off; there, he
again stood still, and again grasped the stone. In saying what he said
then, he never looked at her; but looked at it and wrenched at it.
‘You know what I am going to say. I love you. What other men may mean
when they use that expression, I cannot tell; what I mean is, that I am
under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted
in vain, and which overmasters me. You could draw me to fire, you could
draw me to water, you could draw me to the gallows, you could draw me to
any death, you could draw me to anything I have most avoided, you could
draw me to any exposure and disgrace. This and the confusion of my
thoughts, so that I am fit for nothing, is what I mean by your being the
ruin of me. But if you would return a favourable answer to my offer
of myself in marriage, you could draw me to any good—every good—with
equal force. My circumstances are quite easy, and you would want for
nothing. My reputation stands quite high, and would be a shield for