I mean always to keep among none but grown-ups till I marry. I suppose I must make up my mind to marry, one of these days.’
She listened to a step outside that caught her ear, and there was a soft knock at the door. Pulling at a handle within her reach, she said, with a pleased laugh: ‘Now here, for instance, is a grown-up that’s my particular friend!’ and Lizzie Hexam in a black dress entered the room.
‘Charley! You!’
Taking him to her arms in the old way—of which he seemed a little ashamed—she saw no one else.
‘There, there, there, Liz, all right my dear. See! Here’s Mr Headstone come with me.’
Her eyes met those of the schoolmaster, who had evidently expected to see a very different sort of person, and a murmured word or two of salutation passed between them. She was a little flurried by the unexpected visit, and the schoolmaster was not at his ease. But he never was, quite.
‘I told Mr Headstone you were not settled, Liz, but he was so kind as to take an interest in coming, and so I brought him. How well you look!’
Bradley seemed to think so.
‘Ah! Don’t she, don’t she?’ cried the person of the house, resuming her occupation, though the twilight was falling fast. ‘I believe you she does! But go on with your chat, one and all:
You one two three,
My com-pa-nie,
And don’t mind me.’
—pointing this impromptu rhyme with three points of her thin fore-finger.
‘I didn’t expect a visit from you, Charley,’ said his sister. ‘I supposed that if you wanted to see me you would have sent to me, appointing me to come somewhere near the school, as I did last time. I saw my brother near the school, sir,’ to Bradley Headstone, ‘because it’s easier for me to go there, than for him to come here. I work about midway between the two places.’
‘You don’t see much of one another,’ said Bradley, not improving in respect of ease.
‘No.’ With a rather sad shake of her head. ‘Charley always does well, Mr Headstone?’
‘He could not do better. I regard his course as quite plain before him.’
‘I hoped so. I am so thankful. So well done of you, Charley dear! It is better for me not to come (except when he wants me) between him and his prospects. You think so, Mr Headstone?’
Conscious that his pupil-teacher was looking for his answer, that he himself had suggested the boy’s keeping aloof from this sister, now seen for the first time face to face, Bradley Headstone stammered:
‘Your brother is very much occupied, you know. He has to work hard. One cannot but say that the less his attention is diverted from his work, the better for his future. When he shall have established himself, why then—it will be another thing then.’
Lizzie shook her head again, and returned, with a quiet smile: ‘I always advised him as you advise him. Did I not, Charley?’
‘Well, never mind that now,’ said the boy. ‘How are you getting on?’
‘Very well, Charley. I want for nothing.’
‘You have your own room here?’
‘Oh yes. Upstairs. And it’s quiet, and pleasant, and airy.’
‘And she always has the use of this room for visitors,’ said the person of the house, screwing up one of her little bony fists, like an opera-glass, and looking through it, with her eyes and her chin in that quaint accordance. ‘Always this room for visitors; haven’t you, Lizzie dear?’
It happened that Bradley Headstone noticed a very slight action of Lizzie Hexam’s hand, as though it checked the doll’s dressmaker. And it happened that the latter noticed him in the same instant; for she made a double eyeglass of her two hands, looked at him through it, and cried, with a waggish shake of her head: ‘Aha! Caught you spying, did I?’
It might have fallen out so, any way; but Bradley Headstone also noticed that immediately after this, Lizzie, who had not taken off her bonnet, rather hurriedly proposed that as the room was getting dark they should go out into the air. They went out; the visitors saying good-night to the doll’s dressmaker, whom they left, leaning back in her chair with her arms crossed, singing to herself in a sweet thoughtful little voice.
‘I’ll saunter on by the river,’ said Bradley. ‘You will be glad to talk together.’
As his uneasy figure went on before them among the evening shadows, the boy said to his sister, petulantly:
‘When are you going to settle yourself in some Christian sort of place, Liz? I thought you were going to do it before now.’
‘I am very well where I am, Charley.’
‘Very well where you are! I am ashamed to have brought Mr Headstone with me. How came you to get into such company as that little witch’s?’
‘By chance at first, as it seemed, Charley. But I think it must have been by something more than chance, for that child—You remember the bills upon the walls at home?’
‘Confound the bills upon the walls at home! I want to forget the bills upon the walls at home, and it would be better for you to do the same,’ grumbled the boy. ‘Well; what of them?’
‘This child is the grandchild of the old man.’
‘What old man?’
‘The terrible drunken old man, in the list slippers and the night-cap.’
The boy asked, rubbing his nose in a manner that half expressed vexation at hearing so much, and half curiosity to hear more: ‘How came you to make that out? What a girl you are!’
‘The child’s father is employed by the house that employs me; that’s how I came to know it, Charley. The father is like his own father, a weak wretched trembling creature, falling to pieces, never sober. But a good workman too, at the work he does. The mother is dead. This poor ailing little creature has come to be what she is, surrounded by drunken people from her cradle—if she ever had one, Charley.’
‘I don’t see what you have to do with her, for all that,’ said the boy.
‘Don’t you, Charley?’
The boy looked doggedly at the river. They were at Millbank, and the river rolled on their left. His sister gently touched him on the shoulder, and pointed to it.
‘Any compensation—restitution—never mind the word, you know my meaning. Father’s grave.’
But he did not respond with any tenderness. After a moody silence he broke out in an ill-used tone:
‘It’ll be a very hard thing, Liz, if, when I am trying my best to get up in the world, you pull me back.’
‘I, Charley?’
‘Yes, you, Liz. Why can’t you let bygones be bygones? Why can’t you, as Mr Headstone said to me this very evening about another matter, leave well alone? What we have got to do, is, to turn our faces full in our new direction, and keep straight on.’
‘And never look back? Not even to try to make some amends?’
‘You are such a dreamer,’ said the boy, with his former petulance. ‘It was all very well when we sat before the fire—when we looked into the hollow down by the flare—but we are looking into the real world, now.’
‘Ah, we were looking into the real world then, Charley!’
‘I understand what you mean by that, but you are not justified in it. I don’t want, as I raise myself to shake you off, Liz. I want to carry you up with me. That’s what I want to do, and mean to do. I know what I owe you. I said to Mr Headstone this very evening, “After all, my sister got me here.” Well, then. Don’t pull me