“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?”