“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 nightcap.”
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 back, and hold me down. That’s all I ask, and surely that’s not unconscionable.”