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 river-side 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