Our Mutual Friend · Book the Second · Chapter 2 6 (2/2)

“Mr. Wrayburn,” proceeded the boy, “we not only know this that I have charged upon you, but we know more. It has not yet come to my sister’s knowledge that we have found it out, but we have. We had a plan, Mr. Headstone and I, for my sister’s education, and for its being advised and overlooked by Mr. Headstone, who is a much more competent authority, whatever you may pretend to think, as you smoke, than you could produce, if you tried. Then, what do we find? What do we find, Mr. Lightwood? Why, we find that my sister is already being taught, without our knowing it. We find that while my sister gives an unwilling and cold ear to our schemes for her advantage⁠—I, her brother, and Mr. Headstone, the most competent authority, as his certificates would easily prove, that could be produced⁠—she is wilfully and willingly profiting by other schemes. Ay, and taking pains, too, for I know what such pains are. And so does Mr. Headstone! Well! Somebody pays for this, is a thought that naturally occurs to us; who pays? We apply ourselves to find out, Mr. Lightwood, and we find that your friend, this Mr. Eugene Wrayburn, here, pays. Then I ask him what right has he to do it, and what does he mean by it, and how comes he to be taking such a liberty without my consent, when I am raising myself in the scale of society by my own exertions and Mr. Headstone’s aid, and have no right to have any darkness cast upon my prospects, or any imputation upon my respectability, through my sister?”

The boyish weakness of this speech, combined with its great selfishness, made it a poor one indeed. And yet Bradley Headstone, used to the little audience of a school, and unused to the larger ways of men, showed a kind of exultation in it.

“Now I tell Mr. Eugene Wrayburn,” pursued the boy, forced into the use of the third person by the hopelessness of addressing him in the first, “that I object to his having any acquaintance at all with my sister, and that I request him to drop it altogether. He is not to take it into his head that I am afraid of my sister’s caring for him⁠—”

(As the boy sneered, the Master sneered, and Eugene blew off the feathery ash again.)

—“But I object to it, and that’s enough. I am more important to my sister than he thinks. As I raise myself, I intend to raise her; she knows that, and she has to look to me for her prospects. Now I understand all this very well, and so does Mr. Headstone. My sister is an excellent girl, but she has some romantic notions; not about such things as your Mr. Eugene Wrayburns, but about the death of my father and other matters of that sort. Mr. Wrayburn encourages those notions to make himself of importance, and so she thinks she ought to be grateful to him, and perhaps even likes to be. Now I don’t choose her to be grateful to him, or to be grateful to anybody but me, except Mr. Headstone. And I tell Mr. Wrayburn that if he don’t take heed of what I say, it will be worse for her. Let him turn that over in his memory, and make sure of it. Worse for her!”

A pause ensued, in which the schoolmaster looked very awkward.

“May I suggest, Schoolmaster,” said Eugene, removing his fast-waning cigar from his lips to glance at it, “that you can now take your pupil away.”

“And Mr. Lightwood,” added the boy, with a burning face, under the flaming aggravation of getting no sort of answer or attention, “I hope you’ll take notice of what I have said to your friend, and of what your friend has heard me say, word by word, whatever he pretends to the contrary. You are bound to take notice of it, Mr. Lightwood, for, as I have already mentioned, you first brought your friend into my sister’s company, and but for you we never should have seen him. Lord knows none of us ever wanted him, any more than any of us will ever miss him. Now Mr. Headstone, as Mr. Eugene Wrayburn has been obliged to hear what I had to say, and couldn’t help himself, and as I have said it out to the last word, we have done all we wanted to do, and may go.”

“Go downstairs, and leave me a moment, Hexam,” he returned. The boy complying with an indignant look and as much noise as he could make, swung out of the room; and Lightwood went to the window, and leaned there, looking out.

“You think me of no more value than the dirt under your feet,” said Bradley to Eugene, speaking in a carefully weighed and measured tone, or he could not have spoken at all.

“I assure you, Schoolmaster,” replied Eugene, “I don’t think about you.”

“That’s not true,” returned the other; “you know better.”

“That’s coarse,” Eugene retorted; “but you don’t know better.”

“Mr. Wrayburn, at least I know very well that it would be idle to set myself against you in insolent words or overbearing manners. That lad who has just gone out could put you to shame in half-a-dozen branches of knowledge in half an hour, but you can throw him aside like an inferior. You can do as much by me, I have no doubt, beforehand.”

“Possibly,” remarked Eugene.

“But I am more than a lad,” said Bradley, with his clutching hand, “and I will be heard, sir.”

“As a schoolmaster,” said Eugene, “you are always being heard. That ought to content you.”

“But it does not content me,” replied the other, white with passion. “Do you suppose that a man, in forming himself for the duties I discharge, and in watching and repressing himself daily to discharge them well, dismisses a man’s nature?”

“I suppose you,” said Eugene, “judging from what I see as I look at you, to be rather too passionate for a good schoolmaster.” As he spoke, he tossed away the end of his cigar.

“Passionate with you, sir, I admit I am. Passionate with you, sir, I respect myself for being. But I have not devils for my pupils.”

“For your teachers, I should rather say,” replied Eugene.

“Mr. Wrayburn.”

“Schoolmaster.”

“Sir, my name is Bradley Headstone.”

“As you justly said, my good sir, your name cannot concern me. Now, what more?”

“This more. Oh, what a misfortune is mine,” cried Bradley, breaking off to wipe the starting perspiration from his face as he shook from head to foot, “that I cannot so control myself as to appear a stronger creature than this, when a man who has not felt in all his life what I have felt in a day can so command himself!” He said it in a very agony, and even followed it with an errant motion of his hands as if he could have torn himself.

Eugene Wrayburn looked on at him, as if he found him beginning to be rather an entertaining study.

“Mr. Wrayburn, I desire to say something to you on my own part.”

“Come, come, Schoolmaster,” returned Eugene, with a languid approach to impatience as the other again struggled with himself; “say what you have to say. And let me remind you that the door is standing open, and your young friend waiting for you on the stairs.”

“When I accompanied that youth here, sir, I did so with the purpose of adding, as a man whom you should not be permitted to put aside, in case you put him aside as a boy, that his instinct is correct and right.” 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 riverside 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!”