Our Mutual Friend

‘Pardon me,’ said Mrs Wilfer, ‘no!’

It was one of the worthy woman’s specialities that she had an amazing power of gratifying her splenetic or worldly-minded humours by extolling her own family: which she thus proceeded, in the present case, to do.

‘No, R. W. Lavinia has not known the trial that Bella has known. The trial that your daughter Bella has undergone, is, perhaps, without a parallel, and has been borne, I will say, Nobly. When you see your daughter Bella in her black dress, which she alone of all the family wears, and when you remember the circumstances which have led to her wearing it, and when you know how those circumstances have been sustained, then, R. W., lay your head upon your pillow and say, “Poor Lavinia!”’

Here, Miss Lavinia, from her kneeling situation under the table, put in that she didn’t want to be ‘poored by pa’, or anybody else.

‘I am sure you do not, my dear,’ returned her mother, ‘for you have a fine brave spirit. And your sister Cecilia has a fine brave spirit of another kind, a spirit of pure devotion, a beau-ti-ful spirit! The self-sacrifice of Cecilia reveals a pure and womanly character, very seldom equalled, never surpassed. I have now in my pocket a letter from your sister Cecilia, received this morning – received three months after her marriage, poor child! – in which she tells me that her husband must unexpectedly shelter under their roof his reduced aunt. “But I will be true to him, mamma,” she touchingly writes, “I will not leave him, I must not forget that he is my husband. Let his aunt come!” If this is not pathetic, if this is not woman’s devotion – !’ The good lady waved her gloves in a sense of the impossibility of saying more, and tied the pocket-handkerchief over her head in a tighter knot under her chin.

Bella, who was now seated on the rug to warm herself, with her brown eyes on the fire and a handful of her brown curls in her mouth, laughed at this, and then pouted and half cried.

‘I am sure,’ said she, ‘though you have no feeling for me, pa, I am one of the most unfortunate girls that ever lived. You know how poor we are’ (it is probable he did, having some reason to know it!), ‘and what a glimpse of wealth I had, and how it melted away, and how I am here in this ridiculous mourning – which I hate! – a kind of a widow who never was married. And yet you don’t feel for me. – Yes you do, yes you do.’

This abrupt change was occasioned by her father’s face. She stopped to pull him down from his chair in an attitude highly favourable to strangulation, and to give him a kiss and a pat or two on the cheek.

‘But you ought to feel for me, you know, pa.’

‘My dear, I do.’

‘Yes, and I say you ought to. If they had only left me alone and told me nothing about it, it would have mattered much less. But that nasty Mr Lightwood feels it his duty, as he says, to write and tell me what is in reserve for me, and then I am obliged to get rid of George Sampson.’

Here, Lavinia, rising to the surface with the last draughtman rescued, interposed, ‘You never cared for George Sampson, Bella.’

‘And did I say I did, miss?’ Then, pouting again, with the curls in her mouth; ‘George Sampson was very fond of me, and admired me very much, and put up with everything I did to him.’

‘You were rude enough to him,’ Lavinia again interposed.

‘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.’