Our Mutual Friend
‘And did I say I wasn’t, miss? I am not setting up to be sentimental
about George Sampson. I only say George Sampson was better than
nothing.’
‘You didn’t show him that you thought even that,’ Lavinia again
interposed.
‘You are a chit and a little idiot,’ returned Bella, ‘or you wouldn’t
make such a dolly speech. What did you expect me to do? Wait till you
are a woman, and don’t talk about what you don’t understand. You only
show your ignorance!’ Then, whimpering again, and at intervals biting
the curls, and stopping to look how much was bitten off, ‘It’s a shame!
There never was such a hard case! I shouldn’t care so much if it wasn’t
so ridiculous. It was ridiculous enough to have a stranger coming over
to marry me, whether he liked it or not. It was ridiculous enough to
know what an embarrassing meeting it would be, and how we never
could pretend to have an inclination of our own, either of us. It was
ridiculous enough to know I shouldn’t like him—how COULD I like him,
left to him in a will, like a dozen of spoons, with everything cut and
dried beforehand, like orange chips. Talk of orange flowers indeed!
I declare again it’s a shame! Those ridiculous points would have been
smoothed away by the money, for I love money, and want money—want it
dreadfully. I hate to be poor, and we are degradingly poor, offensively
poor, miserably poor, beastly poor. But here I am, left with all the
ridiculous parts of the situation remaining, and, added to them all,
this ridiculous dress! And if the truth was known, when the Harmon
murder was all over the town, and people were speculating on its being
suicide, I dare say those impudent wretches at the clubs and places made
jokes about the miserable creature’s having preferred a watery grave to
me. It’s likely enough they took such liberties; I shouldn’t wonder! I
declare it’s a very hard case indeed, and I am a most unfortunate girl.
The idea of being a kind of a widow, and never having been married!
And the idea of being as poor as ever after all, and going into black,
besides, for a man I never saw, and should have hated—as far as HE was
concerned—if I had seen!’
The young lady’s lamentations were checked at this point by a knuckle,
knocking at the half-open door of the room. The knuckle had knocked two
or three times already, but had not been heard.
‘Who is it?’ said Mrs Wilfer, in her Act-of-Parliament manner. ‘Enter!’
A gentleman coming in, Miss Bella, with a short and sharp exclamation,
scrambled off the hearth-rug and massed the bitten curls together in
their right place on her neck.
‘The servant girl had her key in the door as I came up, and directed me
to this room, telling me I was expected. I am afraid I should have asked
her to announce me.’
‘Pardon me,’ returned Mrs Wilfer. ‘Not at all. Two of my daughters. R.
W., this is the gentleman who has taken your first-floor. He was so good
as to make an appointment for to-night, when you would be at home.’
A dark gentleman. Thirty at the utmost. An expressive, one might say
handsome, face. A very bad manner. In the last degree constrained,
reserved, diffident, troubled. His eyes were on Miss Bella for an
instant, and then looked at the ground as he addressed the master of the
house.
‘Seeing that I am quite satisfied, Mr Wilfer, with the rooms, and with
their situation, and with their price, I suppose a memorandum between us
of two or three lines, and a payment down, will bind the bargain? I wish
to send in furniture without delay.’
Two or three times during this short address, the cherub addressed had
made chubby motions towards a chair. The gentleman now took it, laying
a hesitating hand on a corner of the table, and with another hesitating
hand lifting the crown of his hat to his lips, and drawing it before his
mouth.
‘The gentleman, R. W.,’ said Mrs Wilfer, ‘proposes to take your
apartments by the quarter. A quarter’s notice on either side.’
‘Shall I mention, sir,’ insinuated the landlord, expecting it to be
received as a matter of course, ‘the form of a reference?’
‘I think,’ returned the gentleman, after a pause, ‘that a reference is
not necessary; neither, to say the truth, is it convenient, for I am
a stranger in London. I require no reference from you, and perhaps,
therefore, you will require none from me. That will be fair on both
sides. Indeed, I show the greater confidence of the two, for I will pay
in advance whatever you please, and I am going to trust my furniture
here. Whereas, if you were in embarrassed circumstances—this is merely
supposititious—’
Conscience causing R. Wilfer to colour, Mrs Wilfer, from a corner (she
always got into stately corners) came to the rescue with a deep-toned
‘Per-fectly.’
‘—Why then I—might lose it.’
‘Well!’ observed R. Wilfer, cheerfully, ‘money and goods are certainly
the best of references.’
‘Do you think they ARE the best, pa?’ asked Miss Bella, in a low voice,
and without looking over her shoulder as she warmed her foot on the
fender.
‘Among the best, my dear.’
‘I should have thought, myself, it was so easy to add the usual kind of
one,’ said Bella, with a toss of her curls.
The gentleman listened to her, with a face of marked attention, though
he neither looked up nor changed his attitude. He sat, still and silent,
until his future landlord accepted his proposals, and brought writing
materials to complete the business. He sat, still and silent, while the
landlord wrote.
When the agreement was ready in duplicate (the landlord having worked
at it like some cherubic scribe, in what is conventionally called a
doubtful, which means a not at all doubtful, Old Master), it was signed
by the contracting parties, Bella looking on as scornful witness. The
contracting parties were R. Wilfer, and John Rokesmith Esquire.
When it came to Bella’s turn to sign her name, Mr Rokesmith, who was
standing, as he had sat, with a hesitating hand upon the table, looked
at her stealthily, but narrowly. He looked at the pretty figure bending
down over the paper and saying, ‘Where am I to go, pa? Here, in this
corner?’ He looked at the beautiful brown hair, shading the coquettish
face; he looked at the free dash of the signature, which was a bold one
for a woman’s; and then they looked at one another.
‘Much obliged to you, Miss Wilfer.’
‘Obliged?’
‘I have given you so much trouble.’
‘Signing my name? Yes, certainly. But I am your landlord’s daughter,
sir.’
As there was nothing more to do but pay eight sovereigns in earnest of
the bargain, pocket the agreement, appoint a time for the arrival of his
furniture and himself, and go, Mr Rokesmith did that as awkwardly as it
might be done, and was escorted by his landlord to the outer air. When
R. Wilfer returned, candlestick in hand, to the bosom of his family, he
found the bosom agitated.
‘Pa,’ said Bella, ‘we have got a Murderer for a tenant.’
‘Pa,’ said Lavinia, ‘we have got a Robber.’
‘To see him unable for his life to look anybody in the face!’ said
Bella. ‘There never was such an exhibition.’
‘My dears,’ said their father, ‘he is a diffident gentleman, and I
should say particularly so in the society of girls of your age.’
‘Nonsense, our age!’ cried Bella, impatiently. ‘What’s that got to do
with him?’
‘Besides, we are not of the same age:—which age?’ demanded Lavinia.
‘Never YOU mind, Lavvy,’ retorted Bella; ‘you wait till you are of an
age to ask such questions. Pa, mark my words! Between Mr Rokesmith and
me, there is a natural antipathy and a deep distrust; and something will
come of it!’
‘My dear, and girls,’ said the cherub-patriarch, ‘between Mr Rokesmith
and me, there is a matter of eight sovereigns, and something for supper
shall come of it, if you’ll agree upon the article.’
This was a neat and happy turn to give the subject, treats being rare in
the Wilfer household, where a monotonous appearance of Dutch-cheese at
ten o’clock in the evening had been rather frequently commented on by
the dimpled shoulders of Miss Bella. Indeed, the modest Dutchman himself
seemed conscious of his want of variety, and generally came before the
family in a state of apologetic perspiration. After some discussion on
the relative merits of veal-cutlet, sweetbread, and lobster, a decision
was pronounced in favour of veal-cutlet. Mrs Wilfer then solemnly
divested herself of her handkerchief and gloves, as a preliminary
sacrifice to preparing the frying-pan, and R. W. himself went out
to purchase the viand. He soon returned, bearing the same in a fresh
cabbage-leaf, where it coyly embraced a rasher of ham. Melodious sounds
were not long in rising from the frying-pan on the fire, or in seeming,
as the firelight danced in the mellow halls of a couple of full bottles
on the table, to play appropriate dance-music.
The cloth was laid by Lavvy. Bella, as the acknowledged ornament of the
family, employed both her hands in giving her hair an additional
wave while sitting in the easiest chair, and occasionally threw in a
direction touching the supper: as, ‘Very brown, ma;’ or, to her sister,
‘Put the saltcellar straight, miss, and don’t be a dowdy little puss.’
Meantime her father, chinking Mr Rokesmith’s gold as he sat expectant
between his knife and fork, remarked that six of those sovereigns came
just in time for their landlord, and stood them in a little pile on the
white tablecloth to look at.
‘I hate our landlord!’ said Bella.
But, observing a fall in her father’s face, she went and sat down by him
at the table, and began touching up his hair with the handle of a fork.
It was one of the girl’s spoilt ways to be always arranging the family’s
hair—perhaps because her own was so pretty, and occupied so much of her
attention.
‘You deserve to have a house of your own; don’t you, poor pa?’
‘I don’t deserve it better than another, my dear.’
‘At any rate I, for one, want it more than another,’ said Bella, holding
him by the chin, as she stuck his flaxen hair on end, ‘and I grudge
this money going to the Monster that swallows up so much, when we all
want—Everything. And if you say (as you want to say; I know you want
to say so, pa) “that’s neither reasonable nor honest, Bella,” then I
answer, “Maybe not, pa—very likely—but it’s one of the consequences
of being poor, and of thoroughly hating and detesting to be poor, and
that’s my case.” Now, you look lovely, pa; why don’t you always wear
your hair like that? And here’s the cutlet! If it isn’t very brown, ma,
I can’t eat it, and must have a bit put back to be done expressly.’
However, as it was brown, even to Bella’s taste, the young lady
graciously partook of it without reconsignment to the frying-pan, and
also, in due course, of the contents of the two bottles: whereof
one held Scotch ale and the other rum. The latter perfume, with
the fostering aid of boiling water and lemon-peel, diffused itself
throughout the room, and became so highly concentrated around the warm
fireside, that the wind passing over the house roof must have rushed off
charged with a delicious whiff of it, after buzzing like a great bee at
that particular chimneypot.
‘Pa,’ said Bella, sipping the fragrant mixture and warming her favourite
ankle; ‘when old Mr Harmon made such a fool of me (not to mention
himself, as he is dead), what do you suppose he did it for?’
‘Impossible to say, my dear. As I have told you time out of number since
his will was brought to light, I doubt if I ever exchanged a hundred
words with the old gentleman. If it was his whim to surprise us, his
whim succeeded. For he certainly did it.’
‘And I was stamping my foot and screaming, when he first took notice of
me; was I?’ said Bella, contemplating the ankle before mentioned.
‘You were stamping your little foot, my dear, and screaming with your