not be too far from that river.’
‘Nor could you be too far from it to please me. Let us get quit of it equally. Why should you linger about it any more than I? I give it a wide berth.’
‘I can’t get away from it, I think,’ said Lizzie, passing her hand across her forehead. ‘It’s no purpose of mine that I live by it still.’
‘There you go, Liz! Dreaming again! You lodge yourself of your own accord in a house with a drunken—tailor, I suppose—or something of the sort, and a little crooked antic of a child, or old person, or whatever it is, and then you talk as if you were drawn or driven there. Now, do be more practical.’
She had been practical enough with him, in suffering and striving for him; but she only laid her hand upon his shoulder—not reproachfully—and tapped it twice or thrice. She had been used to do so, to soothe him when she carried him about, a child as heavy as herself. Tears started to his eyes.
‘Upon my word, Liz,’ drawing the back of his hand across them, ‘I mean to be a good brother to you, and to prove that I know what I owe you. All I say is, that I hope you’ll control your fancies a little, on my account. I’ll get a school, and then you must come and live with me, and you’ll have to control your fancies then, so why not now? Now, say I haven’t vexed you.’
‘You haven’t, Charley, you haven’t.’
‘And say I haven’t hurt you.’
‘You haven’t, Charley.’ But this answer was less ready.
‘Say you are sure I didn’t mean to. Come! There’s Mr Headstone stopping and looking over the wall at the tide, to hint that it’s time to go. Kiss me, and tell me that you know I didn’t mean to hurt you.’
She told him so, and they embraced, and walked on and came up with the schoolmaster.
‘But we go your sister’s way,’ he remarked, when the boy told him he was ready. And with his cumbrous and uneasy action he stiffly offered her his arm. Her hand was just within it, when she drew it back. He looked round with a start, as if he thought she had detected something that repelled her, in the momentary touch.
‘I will not go in just yet,’ said Lizzie. ‘And you have a distance before you, and will walk faster without me.’
Being by this time close to Vauxhall Bridge, they resolved, in consequence, to take that way over the Thames, and they left her; Bradley Headstone giving her his hand at parting, and she thanking him for his care of her brother.
The master and the pupil walked on, rapidly and silently. They had nearly crossed the bridge, when a gentleman came coolly sauntering towards them, with a cigar in his mouth, his coat thrown back, and his hands behind him. Something in the careless manner of this person, and in a certain lazily arrogant air with which he approached, holding possession of twice as much pavement as another would have claimed, instantly caught the boy’s attention. As the gentleman passed the boy looked at him narrowly, and then stood still, looking after him.
‘Who is it that you stare after?’ asked Bradley.
‘Why!’ said the boy, with a confused and pondering frown upon his face, ‘It is that Wrayburn one!’
Bradley Headstone scrutinized the boy as closely as the boy had scrutinized the gentleman.
‘I beg your pardon, Mr Headstone, but I couldn’t help wondering what in the world brought him here!’
Though he said it as if his wonder were past—at the same time resuming the walk—it was not lost upon the master that he looked over his shoulder after speaking, and that the same perplexed and pondering frown was heavy on his face.
‘You don’t appear to like your friend, Hexam?’
‘I don’t like him,’ said the boy.
‘Why not?’
‘He took hold of me by the chin in a precious impertinent way, the first time I ever saw him,’ said the boy.
‘Again, why?’
‘For nothing. Or—it’s much the same—because something I happened to say about my sister didn’t happen to please him.’
‘Then he knows your sister?’
‘He didn’t at that time,’ said the boy, still moodily pondering.
‘Does now?’
The boy had so lost himself that he looked at Mr Bradley Headstone as they walked on side by side, without attempting to reply until the question had been repeated; then he nodded and answered, ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Going to see her, I dare say.’
‘It can’t be!’ said the boy, quickly. ‘He doesn’t know her well enough. I should like to catch him at it!’
When they had walked on for a time, more rapidly than before, the master said, clasping the pupil’s arm between the elbow and the shoulder with his hand:
‘You were going to tell me something about that person. What did you say his name was?’
‘Wrayburn. Mr Eugene Wrayburn. He is what they call a barrister, with nothing to do. The first time he came to our old place was when my father was alive. He came on business; not that it was his business—he never had any business—he was brought by a friend of his.’
‘And the other times?’
‘There was only one other time that I know of. When my father was killed by accident, he chanced to be one of the finders. He was mooning about, I suppose, taking liberties with people’s chins; but there he was, somehow. He brought the news home to my sister early in the morning, and brought Miss Abbey Potterson, a neighbour, to help break it to her. He was mooning about the house when I was fetched home in the afternoon—they didn’t know where to find me till my sister could be brought round sufficiently to tell them—and then he mooned away.’
‘And is that all?’
‘That’s all, sir.’
Bradley Headstone gradually released the boy’s arm, as if he were thoughtful, and they walked on side by side as before. After a long silence between them, Bradley resumed the talk.
‘I suppose—your sister—’ with a curious break both before and after the words, ‘has received hardly any teaching, Hexam?’
‘Hardly any, sir.’
‘Sacrificed, no doubt, to her father’s objections. I remember them in your case. Yet—your sister—scarcely looks or speaks like an ignorant person.’
‘Lizzie has as much thought as the best, Mr Headstone. Too much, perhaps, without teaching. I used to call the fire at home, her books, for she was always full of fancies—sometimes quite wise fancies, considering—when she sat looking at it.’
‘I don’t like that,’ said Bradley Headstone.
His pupil was a little surprised by this striking in with so sudden and decided and emotional an objection, but took it as a proof of the master’s interest in himself. It emboldened him to say:
‘I have never brought myself to mention it openly to you, Mr Headstone, and you’re my witness that I couldn’t even make up my mind to take it from you before we came out to-night; but it’s a painful thing to think that if I get on as well as you hope, I shall be—I won’t say disgraced, because I don’t mean disgraced-but—rather put to the blush if it was known—by a sister who has been very good to me.’
‘Yes,’ said Bradley Headstone in a slurring way, for his mind scarcely seemed to touch that point, so smoothly did it glide to another, ‘and there is this possibility to consider. Some man who had worked his way might come to admire—your sister—and might even in time bring himself to think of marrying—your sister—and it would be a sad drawback and a heavy penalty upon him, if; overcoming