The Secretary stated to the schoolmaster how the object was, to send to him for certain occasional evening instruction, a youth whom Mr and Mrs Boffin wished to help to an industrious and useful place in life. The schoolmaster was willing to undertake the charge of such a pupil. The Secretary inquired on what terms? The schoolmaster stated on what terms. Agreed and disposed of.
“May I ask, sir,” said Bradley Headstone, “to whose good opinion I owe a recommendation to you?”
“You should know that I am not the principal here. I am Mr Boffin’s Secretary. Mr Boffin is a gentleman who inherited a property of which you may have heard some public mention; the Harmon property.”
“Mr Harmon,” said Bradley: who would have been a great deal more at a loss than he was, if he had known to whom he spoke: “was murdered, and found in the river.”
“Was murdered and found in the river.”
“It was not—”
“No,” interposed the Secretary, smiling, “it was not he who recommended you. Mr Boffin heard of you through a certain Mr Lightwood. I think you know Mr Lightwood, or know of him?”
“I know as much of him as I wish to know, sir. I have no acquaintance with Mr Lightwood, and I desire none. I have no objection to Mr Lightwood, but I have a particular objection to some of Mr Lightwood’s friends — in short, to one of Mr Lightwood’s friends. His great friend.”
He could hardly get the words out, even then and there, so fierce did he grow (though keeping himself down with infinite pains of repression), when the careless and contemptuous bearing of Eugene Wrayburn rose before his mind.
The Secretary saw there was a strong feeling here on some sore point, and he would have made a diversion from it, but for Bradley’s holding to it in his cumbersome way.
“I have no objection to mention the friend by name,” he said, doggedly. “The person I object to, is Mr Eugene Wrayburn.”
The Secretary remembered him. In his disturbed recollection of that night when he was striving against the drugged drink, there was but a dim image of Eugene’s person; but he remembered his name, and his manner of speaking, and how he had gone with them to view the body, and where he had stood, and what he had said.
“Pray, Mr Headstone, what is the name,” he asked, again trying to make a diversion, “of young Hexam’s sister?”
“Her name is Lizzie,” said the schoolmaster, with a strong contraction of his whole face.
“She is a young woman of a remarkable character; is she not?”
“She is sufficiently remarkable to be very superior to Mr Eugene Wrayburn — though an ordinary person might be that,” said the schoolmaster; “and I hope you will not think it impertinent in me, sir, to ask why you put the two names together?”
“By mere accident,” returned the Secretary. “Observing that Mr Wrayburn was a disagreeable subject with you, I tried to get away from it: though not very successfully, it would appear.”
“Do you know Mr Wrayburn, sir?”
“No.”