Boots and Brewer immediately perceive that it is immensely worth

mentioning, and become politely clamorous. Veneering is also visited by

a perception to the same effect. But it is understood that his attention

is now rather used up, and difficult to hold, that being the tone of the

House of Commons.

‘Pray don’t be at the trouble of composing yourselves to listen,’ says

Mortimer Lightwood, ‘because I shall have finished long before you have

fallen into comfortable attitudes. It’s like—’

‘It’s like,’ impatiently interrupts Eugene, ‘the children’s narrative:

“I’ll tell you a story

Of Jack a Manory,

And now my story’s begun;

I’ll tell you another

Of Jack and his brother,

And now my story is done.”

—Get on, and get it over!’

Eugene says this with a sound of vexation in his voice, leaning back in

his chair and looking balefully at Lady Tippins, who nods to him as

her dear Bear, and playfully insinuates that she (a self-evident

proposition) is Beauty, and he Beast.

‘The reference,’ proceeds Mortimer, ‘which I suppose to be made by my

honourable and fair enslaver opposite, is to the following circumstance.

Very lately, the young woman, Lizzie Hexam, daughter of the late Jesse

Hexam, otherwise Gaffer, who will be remembered to have found the body

of the man from somewhere, mysteriously received, she knew not from

whom, an explicit retraction of the charges made against her father, by

another water-side character of the name of Riderhood. Nobody believed

them, because little Rogue Riderhood—I am tempted into the paraphrase

by remembering the charming wolf who would have rendered society a great

service if he had devoured Mr Riderhood’s father and mother in their

infancy—had previously played fast and loose with the said charges,

and, in fact, abandoned them. However, the retraction I have mentioned

found its way into Lizzie Hexam’s hands, with a general flavour on it

of having been favoured by some anonymous messenger in a dark cloak and

slouched hat, and was by her forwarded, in her father’s vindication, to

Mr Boffin, my client. You will excuse the phraseology of the shop, but

as I never had another client, and in all likelihood never shall have, I

am rather proud of him as a natural curiosity probably unique.’

Although as easy as usual on the surface, Lightwood is not quite as easy

as usual below it. With an air of not minding Eugene at all, he feels

that the subject is not altogether a safe one in that connexion.

‘The natural curiosity which forms the sole ornament of my professional

museum,’ he resumes, ‘hereupon desires his Secretary—an individual

of the hermit-crab or oyster species, and whose name, I think, is

Chokesmith—but it doesn’t in the least matter—say Artichoke—to put

himself in communication with Lizzie Hexam. Artichoke professes his

readiness so to do, endeavours to do so, but fails.’

‘Why fails?’ asks Boots.

‘How fails?’ asks Brewer.

‘Pardon me,’ returns Lightwood, ‘I must postpone the reply for one

moment, or we shall have an anti-climax. Artichoke failing signally, my

client refers the task to me: his purpose being to advance the interests

of the object of his search. I proceed to put myself in communication

with her; I even happen to possess some special means,’ with a glance

at Eugene, ‘of putting myself in communication with her; but I fail too,

because she has vanished.’

‘Vanished!’ is the general echo.

‘Disappeared,’ says Mortimer. ‘Nobody knows how, nobody knows when,

nobody knows where. And so ends the story to which my honourable and

fair enslaver opposite referred.’

Tippins, with a bewitching little scream, opines that we shall every one

of us be murdered in our beds. Eugene eyes her as if some of us would

be enough for him. Mrs Veneering, W.M.P., remarks that these social

mysteries make one afraid of leaving Baby. Veneering, M.P., wishes to

be informed (with something of a second-hand air of seeing the Right

Honourable Gentleman at the head of the Home Department in his place)

whether it is intended to be conveyed that the vanished person has been

spirited away or otherwise harmed? Instead of Lightwood’s answering,

Eugene answers, and answers hastily and vexedly: ‘No, no, no; he doesn’t

mean that; he means voluntarily vanished—but utterly—completely.’

However, the great subject of the happiness of Mr and Mrs Lammle must

not be allowed to vanish with the other vanishments—with the vanishing

of the murderer, the vanishing of Julius Handford, the vanishing of

Lizzie Hexam,—and therefore Veneering must recall the present sheep

to the pen from which they have strayed. Who so fit to discourse of

the happiness of Mr and Mrs Lammle, they being the dearest and oldest

friends he has in the world; or what audience so fit for him to take

into his confidence as that audience, a noun of multitude or signifying

many, who are all the oldest and dearest friends he has in the world?

So Veneering, without the formality of rising, launches into a familiar

oration, gradually toning into the Parliamentary sing-song, in which he

sees at that board his dear friend Twemlow who on that day twelvemonth

bestowed on his dear friend Lammle the fair hand of his dear friend

Sophronia, and in which he also sees at that board his dear friends

Boots and Brewer whose rallying round him at a period when his dear

friend Lady Tippins likewise rallied round him—ay, and in the foremost

rank—he can never forget while memory holds her seat. But he is free

to confess that he misses from that board his dear old friend Podsnap,

though he is well represented by his dear young friend Georgiana. And he

further sees at that board (this he announces with pomp, as if exulting

in the powers of an extraordinary telescope) his friend Mr Fledgeby, if

he will permit him to call him so. For all of these reasons, and many

more which he right well knows will have occurred to persons of your

exceptional acuteness, he is here to submit to you that the time has

arrived when, with our hearts in our glasses, with tears in our eyes,

with blessings on our lips, and in a general way with a profusion of

gammon and spinach in our emotional larders, we should one and all drink

to our dear friends the Lammles, wishing them many years as happy as

the last, and many many friends as congenially united as themselves. And

this he will add; that Anastatia Veneering (who is instantly heard to

weep) is formed on the same model as her old and chosen friend Sophronia

Lammle, in respect that she is devoted to the man who wooed and won her,

and nobly discharges the duties of a wife.

Seeing no better way out of it, Veneering here pulls up his oratorical

Pegasus extremely short, and plumps down, clean over his head, with:

‘Lammle, God bless you!’

Then Lammle. Too much of him every way; pervadingly too much nose of a

coarse wrong shape, and his nose in his mind and his manners; too much

smile to be real; too much frown to be false; too many large teeth to be

visible at once without suggesting a bite. He thanks you, dear friends,

for your kindly greeting, and hopes to receive you—it may be on the

next of these delightful occasions—in a residence better suited to

your claims on the rites of hospitality. He will never forget that at

Veneering’s he first saw Sophronia. Sophronia will never forget that at

Veneering’s she first saw him. ‘They spoke of it soon after they

were married, and agreed that they would never forget it. In fact, to

Veneering they owe their union. They hope to show their sense of this

some day (‘No, no, from Veneering)—oh yes, yes, and let him rely

upon it, they will if they can! His marriage with Sophronia was not a

marriage of interest on either side: she had her little fortune, he had

his little fortune: they joined their little fortunes: it was a marriage

of pure inclination and suitability. Thank you! Sophronia and he are

fond of the society of young people; but he is not sure that their house

would be a good house for young people proposing to remain single, since

the contemplation of its domestic bliss might induce them to change

their minds. He will not apply this to any one present; certainly not

to their darling little Georgiana. Again thank you! Neither, by-the-by,

will he apply it to his friend Fledgeby. He thanks Veneering for the

feeling manner in which he referred to their common friend Fledgeby, for

he holds that gentleman in the highest estimation. Thank you. In fact

(returning unexpectedly to Fledgeby), the better you know him, the more

you find in him that you desire to know. Again thank you! In his dear

Sophronia’s name and in his own, thank you!

Mrs Lammle has sat quite still, with her eyes cast down upon the

table-cloth. As Mr Lammle’s address ends, Twemlow once more turns to her

involuntarily, not cured yet of that often recurring impression that she

is going to speak to him. This time she really is going to speak to him.

Veneering is talking with his other next neighbour, and she speaks in a

low voice.

‘Mr Twemlow.’

He answers, ‘I beg your pardon? Yes?’ Still a little doubtful, because

of her not looking at him.

‘You have the soul of a gentleman, and I know I may trust you. Will you

give me the opportunity of saying a few words to you when you come up

stairs?’

‘Assuredly. I shall be honoured.’

‘Don’t seem to do so, if you please, and don’t think it inconsistent if

my manner should be more careless than my words. I may be watched.’

Intensely astonished, Twemlow puts his hand to his forehead, and sinks

back in his chair meditating. Mrs Lammle rises. All rise. The ladies go

up stairs. The gentlemen soon saunter after them. Fledgeby has devoted

the interval to taking an observation of Boots’s whiskers, Brewer’s

whiskers, and Lammle’s whiskers, and considering which pattern of

whisker he would prefer to produce out of himself by friction, if the

Genie of the cheek would only answer to his rubbing.

In the drawing-room, groups form as usual. Lightwood, Boots, and Brewer,

flutter like moths around that yellow wax candle—guttering down,

and with some hint of a winding-sheet in it—Lady Tippins. Outsiders

cultivate Veneering, M P., and Mrs Veneering, W.M.P. Lammle stands with

folded arms, Mephistophelean in a corner, with Georgiana and Fledgeby.

Mrs Lammle, on a sofa by a table, invites Mr Twemlow’s attention to a

book of portraits in her hand.

Mr Twemlow takes his station on a settee before her, and Mrs Lammle

shows him a portrait.

‘You have reason to be surprised,’ she says softly, ‘but I wish you

wouldn’t look so.’

Disturbed Twemlow, making an effort not to look so, looks much more so.

‘I think, Mr Twemlow, you never saw that distant connexion of yours

before to-day?’

‘No, never.’

‘Now that you do see him, you see what he is. You are not proud of him?’

‘To say the truth, Mrs Lammle, no.’

‘If you knew more of him, you would be less inclined to acknowledge him.

Here is another portrait. What do you think of it?’

Twemlow has just presence of mind enough to say aloud: ‘Very like!

Uncommonly like!’

‘You have noticed, perhaps, whom he favours with his attentions? You

notice where he is now, and how engaged?’

‘Yes. But Mr Lammle—’

She darts a look at him which he cannot comprehend, and shows him

another portrait.

‘Very good; is it not?’

‘Charming!’ says Twemlow.

‘So like as to be almost a caricature?—Mr Twemlow, it is impossible

to tell you what the struggle in my mind has been, before I could bring

myself to speak to you as I do now. It is only in the conviction that I

may trust you never to betray me, that I can proceed. Sincerely promise

me that you never will betray my confidence—that you will respect it,

even though you may no longer respect me,—and I shall be as satisfied

as if you had sworn it.’

‘Madam, on the honour of a poor gentleman—’

‘Thank you. I can desire no more. Mr Twemlow, I implore you to save that

child!’

‘That child?’

‘Georgiana. She will be sacrificed. She will be inveigled and married

to that connexion of yours. It is a partnership affair, a

money-speculation. She has no strength of will or character to help

herself and she is on the brink of being sold into wretchedness for

life.’

‘Amazing! But what can I do to prevent it?’ demands Twemlow, shocked and

bewildered to the last degree.

‘Here is another portrait. And not good, is it?’

Aghast at the light manner of her throwing her head back to look at it

critically, Twemlow still dimly perceives the expediency of throwing his

own head back, and does so. Though he no more sees the portrait than if

it were in China.

‘Decidedly not good,’ says Mrs Lammle. ‘Stiff and exaggerated!’

‘And ex—’ But Twemlow, in his demolished state, cannot command the

word, and trails off into ‘—actly so.’

‘Mr Twemlow, your word will have weight with her pompous, self-blinded

father. You know how much he makes of your family. Lose no time. Warn

him.’

‘But warn him against whom?’

‘Against me.’

By great good fortune Twemlow receives a stimulant at this critical

instant. The stimulant is Lammle’s voice.

‘Sophronia, my dear, what portraits are you showing Twemlow?’

‘Public characters, Alfred.’

‘Show him the last of me.’

‘Yes, Alfred.’

She puts the book down, takes another book up, turns the leaves, and

presents the portrait to Twemlow.

‘That is the last of Mr Lammle. Do you think it good?—Warn her father

against me. I deserve it, for I have been in the scheme from the first.

It is my husband’s scheme, your connexion’s, and mine. I tell you this,

only to show you the necessity of the poor little foolish affectionate

creature’s being befriended and rescued. You will not repeat this to her

father. You will spare me so far, and spare my husband. For, though this

celebration of to-day is all a mockery, he is my husband, and we must

live.—Do you think it like?’

Twemlow, in a stunned condition, feigns to compare the portrait in his

hand with the original looking towards him from his Mephistophelean

corner.

‘Very well indeed!’ are at length the words which Twemlow with great

difficulty extracts from himself.

‘I am glad you think so. On the whole, I myself consider it the best.

The others are so dark. Now here, for instance, is another of Mr

Lammle—’

‘But I don’t understand; I don’t see my way,’ Twemlow stammers, as he

falters over the book with his glass at his eye. ‘How warn her father,

and not tell him? Tell him how much? Tell him how little? I—I—am

getting lost.’

‘Tell him I am a match-maker; tell him I am an artful and designing

woman; tell him you are sure his daughter is best out of my house and my

company. Tell him any such things of me; they will all be true. You know

what a puffed-up man he is, and how easily you can cause his vanity to

take the alarm. Tell him as much as will give him the alarm and make

him careful of her, and spare me the rest. Mr Twemlow, I feel my sudden

degradation in your eyes; familiar as I am with my degradation in my own

eyes, I keenly feel the change that must have come upon me in yours,

in these last few moments. But I trust to your good faith with me as

implicitly as when I began. If you knew how often I have tried to speak

to you to-day, you would almost pity me. I want no new promise from you

on my own account, for I am satisfied, and I always shall be satisfied,

with the promise you have given me. I can venture to say no more, for

I see that I am watched. If you would set my mind at rest with the

assurance that you will interpose with the father and save this harmless

girl, close that book before you return it to me, and I shall know what

you mean, and deeply thank you in my heart.—Alfred, Mr Twemlow thinks

the last one the best, and quite agrees with you and me.’

Alfred advances. The groups break up. Lady Tippins rises to go, and Mrs

Veneering follows her leader. For the moment, Mrs Lammle does not turn

to them, but remains looking at Twemlow looking at Alfred’s portrait

through his eyeglass. The moment past, Twemlow drops his eyeglass at its

ribbon’s length, rises, and closes the book with an emphasis which makes

that fragile nursling of the fairies, Tippins, start.

Then good-bye and good-bye, and charming occasion worthy of the Golden

Age, and more about the flitch of bacon, and the like of that; and

Twemlow goes staggering across Piccadilly with his hand to his forehead,

and is nearly run down by a flushed lettercart, and at last drops

safe in his easy-chair, innocent good gentleman, with his hand to his

forehead still, and his head in a whirl.

BOOK THE THIRD — A LONG LANE

Chapter 1

LODGERS IN QUEER STREET

It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and dark. Animate

London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing,

and choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose

between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither.

Gaslights flared in the shops with a haggard and unblest air, as knowing

themselves to be night-creatures that had no business abroad under the

sun; while the sun itself when it was for a few moments dimly indicated

through circling eddies of fog, showed as if it had gone out and were

collapsing flat and cold. Even in the surrounding country it was a foggy

day, but there the fog was grey, whereas in London it was, at about

the boundary line, dark yellow, and a little within it brown, and then

browner, and then browner, until at the heart of the City—which call

Saint Mary Axe—it was rusty-black. From any point of the high ridge of

land northward, it might have been discerned that the loftiest buildings

made an occasional struggle to get their heads above the foggy sea, and

especially that the great dome of Saint Paul’s seemed to die hard; but

this was not perceivable in the streets at their feet, where the whole

metropolis was a heap of vapour charged with muffled sound of wheels,

and enfolding a gigantic catarrh.

At nine o’clock on such a morning, the place of business of Pubsey and

Co. was not the liveliest object even in Saint Mary Axe—which is not a

very lively spot—with a sobbing gaslight in the counting-house window,

and a burglarious stream of fog creeping in to strangle it through the

keyhole of the main door. But the light went out, and the main door

opened, and Riah came forth with a bag under his arm.

Almost in the act of coming out at the door, Riah went into the fog, and

was lost to the eyes of Saint Mary Axe. But the eyes of this history

can follow him westward, by Cornhill, Cheapside, Fleet Street, and the

Strand, to Piccadilly and the Albany. Thither he went at his grave and

measured pace, staff in hand, skirt at heel; and more than one head,

turning to look back at his venerable figure already lost in the mist,

supposed it to be some ordinary figure indistinctly seen, which fancy

and the fog had worked into that passing likeness.

Arrived at the house in which his master’s chambers were on the

second floor, Riah proceeded up the stairs, and paused at Fascination

Fledgeby’s door. Making free with neither bell nor knocker, he struck

upon the door with the top of his staff, and, having listened, sat down

on the threshold. It was characteristic of his habitual submission,

that he sat down on the raw dark staircase, as many of his ancestors

had probably sat down in dungeons, taking what befell him as it might

befall.

After a time, when he had grown so cold as to be fain to blow upon his

fingers, he arose and knocked with his staff again, and listened again,

and again sat down to wait. Thrice he repeated these actions before his

listening ears were greeted by the voice of Fledgeby, calling from his

bed, ‘Hold your row!—I’ll come and open the door directly!’ But, in

lieu of coming directly, he fell into a sweet sleep for some quarter of

an hour more, during which added interval Riah sat upon the stairs and

waited with perfect patience.

At length the door stood open, and Mr Fledgeby’s retreating drapery

plunged into bed again. Following it at a respectful distance, Riah

passed into the bed-chamber, where a fire had been sometime lighted, and

was burning briskly.

‘Why, what time of night do you mean to call it?’ inquired Fledgeby,

turning away beneath the clothes, and presenting a comfortable rampart

of shoulder to the chilled figure of the old man.

‘Sir, it is full half-past ten in the morning.’

‘The deuce it is! Then it must be precious foggy?’

‘Very foggy, sir.’

‘And raw, then?’

‘Chill and bitter,’ said Riah, drawing out a handkerchief, and wiping

the moisture from his beard and long grey hair as he stood on the verge

of the rug, with his eyes on the acceptable fire.

With a plunge of enjoyment, Fledgeby settled himself afresh.

‘Any snow, or sleet, or slush, or anything of that sort?’ he asked.

‘No, sir, no. Not quite so bad as that. The streets are pretty clean.’

‘You needn’t brag about it,’ returned Fledgeby, disappointed in his

desire to heighten the contrast between his bed and the streets. ‘But

you’re always bragging about something. Got the books there?’

‘They are here, sir.’

‘All right. I’ll turn the general subject over in my mind for a minute

or two, and while I’m about it you can empty your bag and get ready for

me.’

With another comfortable plunge, Mr Fledgeby fell asleep again. The old

man, having obeyed his directions, sat down on the edge of a chair, and,

folding his hands before him, gradually yielded to the influence of the

warmth, and dozed. He was roused by Mr Fledgeby’s appearing erect at

the foot of the bed, in Turkish slippers, rose-coloured Turkish trousers

(got cheap from somebody who had cheated some other somebody out of

them), and a gown and cap to correspond. In that costume he would have

left nothing to be desired, if he had been further fitted out with a

bottomless chair, a lantern, and a bunch of matches.

‘Now, old ’un!’ cried Fascination, in his light raillery, ‘what dodgery

are you up to next, sitting there with your eyes shut? You ain’t asleep.

Catch a weasel at it, and catch a Jew!’

‘Truly, sir, I fear I nodded,’ said the old man.

‘Not you!’ returned Fledgeby, with a cunning look. ‘A telling move with

a good many, I dare say, but it won’t put ME off my guard. Not a bad

notion though, if you want to look indifferent in driving a bargain. Oh,

you are a dodger!’

The old man shook his head, gently repudiating the imputation, and

suppressed a sigh, and moved to the table at which Mr Fledgeby was now

pouring out for himself a cup of steaming and fragrant coffee from a pot

that had stood ready on the hob. It was an edifying spectacle, the young

man in his easy chair taking his coffee, and the old man with his grey

head bent, standing awaiting his pleasure.

‘Now!’ said Fledgeby. ‘Fork out your balance in hand, and prove by

figures how you make it out that it ain’t more. First of all, light that

candle.’

Riah obeyed, and then taking a bag from his breast, and referring to

the sum in the accounts for which they made him responsible, told it out

upon the table. Fledgeby told it again with great care, and rang every

sovereign.

‘I suppose,’ he said, taking one up to eye it closely, ‘you haven’t been

lightening any of these; but it’s a trade of your people’s, you know.

YOU understand what sweating a pound means, don’t you?’

‘Much as you do, sir,’ returned the old man, with his hands under

opposite cuffs of his loose sleeves, as he stood at the table,

deferentially observant of the master’s face. ‘May I take the liberty to

say something?’

‘You may,’ Fledgeby graciously conceded.

‘Do you not, sir—without intending it—of a surety without intending

it—sometimes mingle the character I fairly earn in your employment,

with the character which it is your policy that I should bear?’

‘I don’t find it worth my while to cut things so fine as to go into the

inquiry,’ Fascination coolly answered.

‘Not in justice?’

‘Bother justice!’ said Fledgeby.

‘Not in generosity?’

‘Jews and generosity!’ said Fledgeby. ‘That’s a good connexion! Bring

out your vouchers, and don’t talk Jerusalem palaver.’

The vouchers were produced, and for the next half-hour Mr Fledgeby

concentrated his sublime attention on them. They and the accounts were

all found correct, and the books and the papers resumed their places in

the bag.

‘Next,’ said Fledgeby, ‘concerning that bill-broking branch of the

business; the branch I like best. What queer bills are to be bought, and

at what prices? You have got your list of what’s in the market?’

‘Sir, a long list,’ replied Riah, taking out a pocket-book, and

selecting from its contents a folded paper, which, being unfolded,

became a sheet of foolscap covered with close writing.

‘Whew!’ whistled Fledgeby, as he took it in his hand. ‘Queer Street is

full of lodgers just at present! These are to be disposed of in parcels;

are they?’

‘In parcels as set forth,’ returned the old man, looking over his

master’s shoulder; ‘or the lump.’

‘Half the lump will be waste-paper, one knows beforehand,’ said

Fledgeby. ‘Can you get it at waste-paper price? That’s the question.’

Riah shook his head, and Fledgeby cast his small eyes down the list.

They presently began to twinkle, and he no sooner became conscious of

their twinkling, than he looked up over his shoulder at the grave face

above him, and moved to the chimney-piece. Making a desk of it, he stood

there with his back to the old man, warming his knees, perusing the list

at his leisure, and often returning to some lines of it, as though

they were particularly interesting. At those times he glanced in the

chimney-glass to see what note the old man took of him. He took none

that could be detected, but, aware of his employer’s suspicions, stood

with his eyes on the ground.

Mr Fledgeby was thus amiably engaged when a step was heard at the outer

door, and the door was heard to open hastily. ‘Hark! That’s your doing,

you Pump of Israel,’ said Fledgeby; ‘you can’t have shut it.’ Then the

step was heard within, and the voice of Mr Alfred Lammle called aloud,

‘Are you anywhere here, Fledgeby?’ To which Fledgeby, after cautioning

Riah in a low voice to take his cue as it should be given him, replied,

‘Here I am!’ and opened his bedroom door.

‘Come in!’ said Fledgeby. ‘This gentleman is only Pubsey and Co. of

Saint Mary Axe, that I am trying to make terms for an unfortunate friend

with in a matter of some dishonoured bills. But really Pubsey and Co.

are so strict with their debtors, and so hard to move, that I seem to be

wasting my time. Can’t I make ANY terms with you on my friend’s part, Mr

Riah?’

‘I am but the representative of another, sir,’ returned the Jew in a low

voice. ‘I do as I am bidden by my principal. It is not my capital that

is invested in the business. It is not my profit that arises therefrom.’

‘Ha ha!’ laughed Fledgeby. ‘Lammle?’

‘Ha ha!’ laughed Lammle. ‘Yes. Of course. We know.’

‘Devilish good, ain’t it, Lammle?’ said Fledgeby, unspeakably amused by

his hidden joke.

‘Always the same, always the same!’ said Lammle. ‘Mr—’

‘Riah, Pubsey and Co. Saint Mary Axe,’ Fledgeby put in, as he wiped away

the tears that trickled from his eyes, so rare was his enjoyment of his

secret joke.

‘Mr Riah is bound to observe the invariable forms for such cases made

and provided,’ said Lammle.

‘He is only the representative of another!’ cried Fledgeby. ‘Does as

he is told by his principal! Not his capital that’s invested in the

business. Oh, that’s good! Ha ha ha ha!’ Mr Lammle joined in the laugh

and looked knowing; and the more he did both, the more exquisite the

secret joke became for Mr Fledgeby.

‘However,’ said that fascinating gentleman, wiping his eyes again, ‘if

we go on in this way, we shall seem to be almost making game of Mr Riah,

or of Pubsey and Co. Saint Mary Axe, or of somebody: which is far from

our intention. Mr Riah, if you would have the kindness to step into the

next room for a few moments while I speak with Mr Lammle here, I should

like to try to make terms with you once again before you go.’

The old man, who had never raised his eyes during the whole transaction

of Mr Fledgeby’s joke, silently bowed and passed out by the door which

Fledgeby opened for him. Having closed it on him, Fledgeby returned to

Lammle, standing with his back to the bedroom fire, with one hand under

his coat-skirts, and all his whiskers in the other.

‘Halloa!’ said Fledgeby. ‘There’s something wrong!’

‘How do you know it?’ demanded Lammle.

‘Because you show it,’ replied Fledgeby in unintentional rhyme.

‘Well then; there is,’ said Lammle; ‘there IS something wrong; the whole

thing’s wrong.’

‘I say!’ remonstrated Fascination very slowly, and sitting down with his

hands on his knees to stare at his glowering friend with his back to the

fire.

‘I tell you, Fledgeby,’ repeated Lammle, with a sweep of his right arm,

‘the whole thing’s wrong. The game’s up.’

‘What game’s up?’ demanded Fledgeby, as slowly as before, and more

sternly.

‘THE game. OUR game. Read that.’

Fledgeby took a note from his extended hand and read it aloud. ‘Alfred

Lammle, Esquire. Sir: Allow Mrs Podsnap and myself to express our united

sense of the polite attentions of Mrs Alfred Lammle and yourself towards

our daughter, Georgiana. Allow us also, wholly to reject them for the

future, and to communicate our final desire that the two families

may become entire strangers. I have the honour to be, Sir, your most

obedient and very humble servant, JOHN PODSNAP.’ Fledgeby looked at the

three blank sides of this note, quite as long and earnestly as at the

first expressive side, and then looked at Lammle, who responded with

another extensive sweep of his right arm.

‘Whose doing is this?’ said Fledgeby.

‘Impossible to imagine,’ said Lammle.

‘Perhaps,’ suggested Fledgeby, after reflecting with a very discontented

brow, ‘somebody has been giving you a bad character.’

‘Or you,’ said Lammle, with a deeper frown.

Mr Fledgeby appeared to be on the verge of some mutinous expressions,

when his hand happened to touch his nose. A certain remembrance

connected with that feature operating as a timely warning, he took it

thoughtfully between his thumb and forefinger, and pondered; Lammle

meanwhile eyeing him with furtive eyes.

‘Well!’ said Fledgeby. ‘This won’t improve with talking about. If we

ever find out who did it, we’ll mark that person. There’s nothing more

to be said, except that you undertook to do what circumstances prevent

your doing.’

‘And that you undertook to do what you might have done by this time, if

you had made a prompter use of circumstances,’ snarled Lammle.

‘Hah! That,’ remarked Fledgeby, with his hands in the Turkish trousers,

‘is matter of opinion.’

‘Mr Fledgeby,’ said Lammle, in a bullying tone, ‘am I to understand that

you in any way reflect upon me, or hint dissatisfaction with me, in this

affair?’

‘No,’ said Fledgeby; ‘provided you have brought my promissory note in

your pocket, and now hand it over.’

Lammle produced it, not without reluctance. Fledgeby looked at it,

identified it, twisted it up, and threw it into the fire. They both

looked at it as it blazed, went out, and flew in feathery ash up the

chimney.

‘NOW, Mr Fledgeby,’ said Lammle, as before; ‘am I to understand that

you in any way reflect upon me, or hint dissatisfaction with me, in this

affair?’

‘No,’ said Fledgeby.

‘Finally and unreservedly no?’

‘Yes.’

‘Fledgeby, my hand.’

Mr Fledgeby took it, saying, ‘And if we ever find out who did this,

we’ll mark that person. And in the most friendly manner, let me mention

one thing more. I don’t know what your circumstances are, and I don’t

ask. You have sustained a loss here. Many men are liable to be involved

at times, and you may be, or you may not be. But whatever you do,

Lammle, don’t—don’t—don’t, I beg of you—ever fall into the hands of

Pubsey and Co. in the next room, for they are grinders. Regular flayers

and grinders, my dear Lammle,’ repeated Fledgeby with a peculiar relish,

‘and they’ll skin you by the inch, from the nape of your neck to the

sole of your foot, and grind every inch of your skin to tooth-powder.

You have seen what Mr Riah is. Never fall into his hands, Lammle, I beg

of you as a friend!’

Mr Lammle, disclosing some alarm at the solemnity of this affectionate

adjuration, demanded why the devil he ever should fall into the hands of

Pubsey and Co.?

‘To confess the fact, I was made a little uneasy,’ said the candid

Fledgeby, ‘by the manner in which that Jew looked at you when he heard

your name. I didn’t like his eye. But it may have been the heated

fancy of a friend. Of course if you are sure that you have no personal

security out, which you may not be quite equal to meeting, and which can

have got into his hands, it must have been fancy. Still, I didn’t like

his eye.’

The brooding Lammle, with certain white dints coming and going in his

palpitating nose, looked as if some tormenting imp were pinching it.

Fledgeby, watching him with a twitch in his mean face which did duty

there for a smile, looked very like the tormentor who was pinching.

‘But I mustn’t keep him waiting too long,’ said Fledgeby, ‘or he’ll

revenge it on my unfortunate friend. How’s your very clever and

agreeable wife? She knows we have broken down?’

‘I showed her the letter.’

‘Very much surprised?’ asked Fledgeby.

‘I think she would have been more so,’ answered Lammle, ‘if there had

been more go in YOU?’

‘Oh!—She lays it upon me, then?’

‘Mr Fledgeby, I will not have my words misconstrued.’

‘Don’t break out, Lammle,’ urged Fledgeby, in a submissive tone,

‘because there’s no occasion. I only asked a question. Then she don’t

lay it upon me? To ask another question.’

‘No, sir.’

‘Very good,’ said Fledgeby, plainly seeing that she did. ‘My compliments

to her. Good-bye!’

They shook hands, and Lammle strode out pondering. Fledgeby saw him

into the fog, and, returning to the fire and musing with his face to it,

stretched the legs of the rose-coloured Turkish trousers wide apart, and

meditatively bent his knees, as if he were going down upon them.

‘You have a pair of whiskers, Lammle, which I never liked,’ murmured

Fledgeby, ‘and which money can’t produce; you are boastful of your

manners and your conversation; you wanted to pull my nose, and you have

let me in for a failure, and your wife says I am the cause of it. I’ll

bowl you down. I will, though I have no whiskers,’ here he rubbed the

places where they were due, ‘and no manners, and no conversation!’

Having thus relieved his noble mind, he collected the legs of the

Turkish trousers, straightened himself on his knees, and called out

to Riah in the next room, ‘Halloa, you sir!’ At sight of the old man

re-entering with a gentleness monstrously in contrast with the character

he had given him, Mr Fledgeby was so tickled again, that he exclaimed,

laughing, ‘Good! Good! Upon my soul it is uncommon good!’

‘Now, old ’un,’ proceeded Fledgeby, when he had had his laugh out,

‘you’ll buy up these lots that I mark with my pencil—there’s a tick

there, and a tick there, and a tick there—and I wager two-pence you’ll

afterwards go on squeezing those Christians like the Jew you are. Now,

next you’ll want a cheque—or you’ll say you want it, though you’ve

capital enough somewhere, if one only knew where, but you’d be peppered

and salted and grilled on a gridiron before you’d own to it—and that

cheque I’ll write.’

When he had unlocked a drawer and taken a key from it to open another

drawer, in which was another key that opened another drawer, in which

was another key that opened another drawer, in which was the cheque

book; and when he had written the cheque; and when, reversing the key

and drawer process, he had placed his cheque book in safety again; he

beckoned the old man, with the folded cheque, to come and take it.

‘Old ’un,’ said Fledgeby, when the Jew had put it in his pocketbook, and

was putting that in the breast of his outer garment; ‘so much at present

for my affairs. Now a word about affairs that are not exactly mine.

Where is she?’

With his hand not yet withdrawn from the breast of his garment, Riah

started and paused.

‘Oho!’ said Fledgeby. ‘Didn’t expect it! Where have you hidden her?’

Showing that he was taken by surprise, the old man looked at his master

with some passing confusion, which the master highly enjoyed.

‘Is she in the house I pay rent and taxes for in Saint Mary Axe?’

demanded Fledgeby.

‘No, sir.’

‘Is she in your garden up atop of that house—gone up to be dead, or

whatever the game is?’ asked Fledgeby.

‘No, sir.’

‘Where is she then?’

Riah bent his eyes upon the ground, as if considering whether he could

answer the question without breach of faith, and then silently raised

them to Fledgeby’s face, as if he could not.

‘Come!’ said Fledgeby. ‘I won’t press that just now. But I want to know

this, and I will know this, mind you. What are you up to?’

The old man, with an apologetic action of his head and hands, as not

comprehending the master’s meaning, addressed to him a look of mute

inquiry.

‘You can’t be a gallivanting dodger,’ said Fledgeby. ‘For you’re a

“regular pity the sorrows”, you know—if you DO know any Christian

rhyme—“whose trembling limbs have borne him to”—et cetrer. You’re one

of the Patriarchs; you’re a shaky old card; and you can’t be in love

with this Lizzie?’

‘O, sir!’ expostulated Riah. ‘O, sir, sir, sir!’

‘Then why,’ retorted Fledgeby, with some slight tinge of a blush, ‘don’t

you out with your reason for having your spoon in the soup at all?’

‘Sir, I will tell you the truth. But (your pardon for the stipulation)

it is in sacred confidence; it is strictly upon honour.’

‘Honour too!’ cried Fledgeby, with a mocking lip. ‘Honour among Jews.

Well. Cut away.’

‘It is upon honour, sir?’ the other still stipulated, with respectful

firmness.

‘Oh, certainly. Honour bright,’ said Fledgeby.

The old man, never bidden to sit down, stood with an earnest hand laid

on the back of the young man’s easy chair. The young man sat looking at

the fire with a face of listening curiosity, ready to check him off and

catch him tripping.

‘Cut away,’ said Fledgeby. ‘Start with your motive.’

‘Sir, I have no motive but to help the helpless.’

Mr Fledgeby could only express the feelings to which this incredible

statement gave rise in his breast, by a prodigiously long derisive

sniff.

‘How I came to know, and much to esteem and to respect, this damsel, I

mentioned when you saw her in my poor garden on the house-top,’ said the

Jew.

‘Did you?’ said Fledgeby, distrustfully. ‘Well. Perhaps you did,

though.’

‘The better I knew her, the more interest I felt in her fortunes. They

gathered to a crisis. I found her beset by a selfish and ungrateful

brother, beset by an unacceptable wooer, beset by the snares of a more

powerful lover, beset by the wiles of her own heart.’

‘She took to one of the chaps then?’

‘Sir, it was only natural that she should incline towards him, for he

had many and great advantages. But he was not of her station, and to

marry her was not in his mind. Perils were closing round her, and the

circle was fast darkening, when I—being as you have said, sir, too

old and broken to be suspected of any feeling for her but a

father’s—stepped in, and counselled flight. I said, “My daughter, there

are times of moral danger when the hardest virtuous resolution to form

is flight, and when the most heroic bravery is flight.” She answered,

she had had this in her thoughts; but whither to fly without help she

knew not, and there were none to help her. I showed her there was one to

help her, and it was I. And she is gone.’

‘What did you do with her?’ asked Fledgeby, feeling his cheek.

‘I placed her,’ said the old man, ‘at a distance;’ with a grave smooth

outward sweep from one another of his two open hands at arm’s length;

‘at a distance—among certain of our people, where her industry would

serve her, and where she could hope to exercise it, unassailed from any

quarter.’

Fledgeby’s eyes had come from the fire to notice the action of his hands

when he said ‘at a distance.’ Fledgeby now tried (very unsuccessfully)

to imitate that action, as he shook his head and said, ‘Placed her in

that direction, did you? Oh you circular old dodger!’

With one hand across his breast and the other on the easy chair, Riah,

without justifying himself, waited for further questioning. But, that it

was hopeless to question him on that one reserved point, Fledgeby, with

his small eyes too near together, saw full well.

‘Lizzie,’ said Fledgeby, looking at the fire again, and then looking up.

‘Humph, Lizzie. You didn’t tell me the other name in your garden atop of

the house. I’ll be more communicative with you. The other name’s Hexam.’

Riah bent his head in assent.

‘Look here, you sir,’ said Fledgeby. ‘I have a notion I know something

of the inveigling chap, the powerful one. Has he anything to do with the

law?’

‘Nominally, I believe it his calling.’

‘I thought so. Name anything like Lightwood?’

‘Sir, not at all like.’

‘Come, old ’un,’ said Fledgeby, meeting his eyes with a wink, ‘say the

name.’

‘Wrayburn.’

‘By Jupiter!’ cried Fledgeby. ‘That one, is it? I thought it might be

the other, but I never dreamt of that one! I shouldn’t object to your

baulking either of the pair, dodger, for they are both conceited enough;

but that one is as cool a customer as ever I met with. Got a beard

besides, and presumes upon it. Well done, old ’un! Go on and prosper!’

Brightened by this unexpected commendation, Riah asked were there more

instructions for him?

‘No,’ said Fledgeby, ‘you may toddle now, Judah, and grope about on the

orders you have got.’ Dismissed with those pleasing words, the old man

took his broad hat and staff, and left the great presence: more as if he

were some superior creature benignantly blessing Mr Fledgeby, than the

poor dependent on whom he set his foot. Left alone, Mr Fledgeby locked

his outer door, and came back to his fire.

‘Well done you!’ said Fascination to himself. ‘Slow, you may be; sure,

you are!’ This he twice or thrice repeated with much complacency, as he

again dispersed the legs of the Turkish trousers and bent the knees.

‘A tidy shot that, I flatter myself,’ he then soliloquised. ‘And a Jew

brought down with it! Now, when I heard the story told at Lammle’s, I

didn’t make a jump at Riah. Not a hit of it; I got at him by degrees.’

Herein he was quite accurate; it being his habit, not to jump, or

leap, or make an upward spring, at anything in life, but to crawl at

everything.

‘I got at him,’ pursued Fledgeby, feeling for his whisker, ‘by degrees.

If your Lammles or your Lightwoods had got at him anyhow, they would

have asked him the question whether he hadn’t something to do with that

gal’s disappearance. I knew a better way of going to work. Having got

behind the hedge, and put him in the light, I took a shot at him and

brought him down plump. Oh! It don’t count for much, being a Jew, in a

match against ME!’

Another dry twist in place of a smile, made his face crooked here.

‘As to Christians,’ proceeded Fledgeby, ‘look out, fellow-Christians,

particularly you that lodge in Queer Street! I have got the run of Queer

Street now, and you shall see some games there. To work a lot of power

over you and you not know it, knowing as you think yourselves, would

be almost worth laying out money upon. But when it comes to squeezing a

profit out of you into the bargain, it’s something like!’

With this apostrophe Mr Fledgeby appropriately proceeded to divest

himself of his Turkish garments, and invest himself with Christian

attire. Pending which operation, and his morning ablutions, and his

anointing of himself with the last infallible preparation for the

production of luxuriant and glossy hair upon the human countenance

(quacks being the only sages he believed in besides usurers), the murky

fog closed about him and shut him up in its sooty embrace. If it had

never let him out any more, the world would have had no irreparable

loss, but could have easily replaced him from its stock on hand.

Chapter 2

A RESPECTED FRIEND IN A NEW ASPECT

In the evening of this same foggy day when the yellow window-blind of

Pubsey and Co. was drawn down upon the day’s work, Riah the Jew once

more came forth into Saint Mary Axe. But this time he carried no bag,

and was not bound on his master’s affairs. He passed over London Bridge,

and returned to the Middlesex shore by that of Westminster, and so, ever

wading through the fog, waded to the doorstep of the dolls’ dressmaker.

Miss Wren expected him. He could see her through the window by the light

of her low fire—carefully banked up with damp cinders that it might

last the longer and waste the less when she was out—sitting waiting

for him in her bonnet. His tap at the glass roused her from the musing

solitude in which she sat, and she came to the door to open it; aiding

her steps with a little crutch-stick.

‘Good evening, godmother!’ said Miss Jenny Wren.

The old man laughed, and gave her his arm to lean on.

‘Won’t you come in and warm yourself, godmother?’ asked Miss Jenny Wren.

‘Not if you are ready, Cinderella, my dear.’

‘Well!’ exclaimed Miss Wren, delighted. ‘Now you ARE a clever old boy!

If we gave prizes at this establishment (but we only keep blanks), you

should have the first silver medal, for taking me up so quick.’ As she

spake thus, Miss Wren removed the key of the house-door from the keyhole

and put it in her pocket, and then bustlingly closed the door, and tried

it as they both stood on the step. Satisfied that her dwelling was safe,

she drew one hand through the old man’s arm and prepared to ply her

crutch-stick with the other. But the key was an instrument of such

gigantic proportions, that before they started Riah proposed to carry

it.

‘No, no, no! I’ll carry it myself,’ returned Miss Wren. ‘I’m awfully

lopsided, you know, and stowed down in my pocket it’ll trim the ship. To

let you into a secret, godmother, I wear my pocket on my high side, o’

purpose.’

With that they began their plodding through the fog.

‘Yes, it was truly sharp of you, godmother,’ resumed Miss Wren with

great approbation, ‘to understand me. But, you see, you ARE so like the

fairy godmother in the bright little books! You look so unlike the rest

of people, and so much as if you had changed yourself into that shape,

just this moment, with some benevolent object. Boh!’ cried Miss Jenny,

putting her face close to the old man’s. ‘I can see your features,

godmother, behind the beard.’

‘Does the fancy go to my changing other objects too, Jenny?’

‘Ah! That it does! If you’d only borrow my stick and tap this piece of

pavement—this dirty stone that my foot taps—it would start up a coach

and six. I say! Let’s believe so!’

‘With all my heart,’ replied the good old man.

‘And I’ll tell you what I must ask you to do, godmother. I must ask you

to be so kind as give my child a tap, and change him altogether. O my

child has been such a bad, bad child of late! It worries me nearly

out of my wits. Not done a stroke of work these ten days. Has had the

horrors, too, and fancied that four copper-coloured men in red wanted to

throw him into a fiery furnace.’

‘But that’s dangerous, Jenny.’

‘Dangerous, godmother? My child is always dangerous, more or less. He

might’—here the little creature glanced back over her shoulder at the

sky—‘be setting the house on fire at this present moment. I don’t know

who would have a child, for my part! It’s no use shaking him. I have

shaken him till I have made myself giddy. “Why don’t you mind your

Commandments and honour your parent, you naughty old boy?” I said to him

all the time. But he only whimpered and stared at me.’

‘What shall be changed, after him?’ asked Riah in a compassionately

playful voice.

‘Upon my word, godmother, I am afraid I must be selfish next, and get

you to set me right in the back and the legs. It’s a little thing to you

with your power, godmother, but it’s a great deal to poor weak aching

me.’

There was no querulous complaining in the words, but they were not the

less touching for that.

‘And then?’

‘Yes, and then—YOU know, godmother. We’ll both jump up into the coach

and six and go to Lizzie. This reminds me, godmother, to ask you a

serious question. You are as wise as wise can be (having been brought

up by the fairies), and you can tell me this: Is it better to have had a

good thing and lost it, or never to have had it?’

‘Explain, god-daughter.’

‘I feel so much more solitary and helpless without Lizzie now, than I

used to feel before I knew her.’ (Tears were in her eyes as she said

so.)

‘Some beloved companionship fades out of most lives, my dear,’ said the

Jew,—‘that of a wife, and a fair daughter, and a son of promise, has

faded out of my own life—but the happiness was.’

‘Ah!’ said Miss Wren thoughtfully, by no means convinced, and chopping

the exclamation with that sharp little hatchet of hers; ‘then I tell you

what change I think you had better begin with, godmother. You had better

change Is into Was and Was into Is, and keep them so.’

‘Would that suit your case? Would you not be always in pain then?’ asked

the old man tenderly.

‘Right!’ exclaimed Miss Wren with another chop. ‘You have changed me

wiser, godmother.—Not,’ she added with the quaint hitch of her chin and

eyes, ‘that you need be a very wonderful godmother to do that deed.’

Thus conversing, and having crossed Westminster Bridge, they traversed

the ground that Riah had lately traversed, and new ground likewise; for,

when they had recrossed the Thames by way of London Bridge, they struck

down by the river and held their still foggier course that way.

But previously, as they were going along, Jenny twisted her venerable

friend aside to a brilliantly-lighted toy-shop window, and said: ‘Now

look at ’em! All my work!’

This referred to a dazzling semicircle of dolls in all the colours of

the rainbow, who were dressed for presentation at court, for going to

balls, for going out driving, for going out on horseback, for going out

walking, for going to get married, for going to help other dolls to get

married, for all the gay events of life.

‘Pretty, pretty, pretty!’ said the old man with a clap of his hands.

‘Most elegant taste!’

‘Glad you like ’em,’ returned Miss Wren, loftily. ‘But the fun is,

godmother, how I make the great ladies try my dresses on. Though it’s

the hardest part of my business, and would be, even if my back were not

bad and my legs queer.’

He looked at her as not understanding what she said.

‘Bless you, godmother,’ said Miss Wren, ‘I have to scud about town at

all hours. If it was only sitting at my bench, cutting out and sewing,

it would be comparatively easy work; but it’s the trying-on by the great

ladies that takes it out of me.’

‘How, the trying-on?’ asked Riah.

‘What a mooney godmother you are, after all!’ returned Miss Wren. ‘Look

here. There’s a Drawing Room, or a grand day in the Park, or a Show, or

a Fete, or what you like. Very well. I squeeze among the crowd, and I

look about me. When I see a great lady very suitable for my business, I

say “You’ll do, my dear!” and I take particular notice of her, and run

home and cut her out and baste her. Then another day, I come scudding

back again to try on, and then I take particular notice of her again.

Sometimes she plainly seems to say, ‘How that little creature is

staring!’ and sometimes likes it and sometimes don’t, but much more

often yes than no. All the time I am only saying to myself, “I must

hollow out a bit here; I must slope away there;” and I am making a

perfect slave of her, with making her try on my doll’s dress. Evening

parties are severer work for me, because there’s only a doorway for a

full view, and what with hobbling among the wheels of the carriages

and the legs of the horses, I fully expect to be run over some night.

However, there I have ’em, just the same. When they go bobbing into the

hall from the carriage, and catch a glimpse of my little physiognomy

poked out from behind a policeman’s cape in the rain, I dare say they

think I am wondering and admiring with all my eyes and heart, but they

little think they’re only working for my dolls! There was Lady Belinda

Whitrose. I made her do double duty in one night. I said when she came

out of the carriage, “YOU’ll do, my dear!” and I ran straight home and

cut her out and basted her. Back I came again, and waited behind the men

that called the carriages. Very bad night too. At last, “Lady Belinda

Whitrose’s carriage! Lady Belinda Whitrose coming down!” And I made her

try on—oh! and take pains about it too—before she got seated. That’s

Lady Belinda hanging up by the waist, much too near the gaslight for a

wax one, with her toes turned in.’

When they had plodded on for some time nigh the river, Riah asked

the way to a certain tavern called the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters.

Following the directions he received, they arrived, after two or three

puzzled stoppages for consideration, and some uncertain looking about

them, at the door of Miss Abbey Potterson’s dominions. A peep through

the glass portion of the door revealed to them the glories of the bar,

and Miss Abbey herself seated in state on her snug throne, reading the

newspaper. To whom, with deference, they presented themselves.

Taking her eyes off her newspaper, and pausing with a suspended

expression of countenance, as if she must finish the paragraph in hand

before undertaking any other business whatever, Miss Abbey demanded,

with some slight asperity: ‘Now then, what’s for you?’

‘Could we see Miss Potterson?’ asked the old man, uncovering his head.

‘You not only could, but you can and you do,’ replied the hostess.

‘Might we speak with you, madam?’

By this time Miss Abbey’s eyes had possessed themselves of the small

figure of Miss Jenny Wren. For the closer observation of which, Miss

Abbey laid aside her newspaper, rose, and looked over the half-door of

the bar. The crutch-stick seemed to entreat for its owner leave to come

in and rest by the fire; so, Miss Abbey opened the half-door, and said,

as though replying to the crutch-stick:

‘Yes, come in and rest by the fire.’

‘My name is Riah,’ said the old man, with courteous action, ‘and my

avocation is in London city. This, my young companion—’

‘Stop a bit,’ interposed Miss Wren. ‘I’ll give the lady my card.’ She

produced it from her pocket with an air, after struggling with the

gigantic door-key which had got upon the top of it and kept it down.

Miss Abbey, with manifest tokens of astonishment, took the diminutive

document, and found it to run concisely thus:—

MISS JENNY WREN

DOLLS’ DRESSMAKER.

Dolls attended at their own residences.

‘Lud!’ exclaimed Miss Potterson, staring. And dropped the card.

‘We take the liberty of coming, my young companion and I, madam,’ said

Riah, ‘on behalf of Lizzie Hexam.’

Miss Potterson was stooping to loosen the bonnet-strings of the dolls’

dressmaker. She looked round rather angrily, and said: ‘Lizzie Hexam is

a very proud young woman.’

‘She would be so proud,’ returned Riah, dexterously, ‘to stand well in

your good opinion, that before she quitted London for—’

‘For where, in the name of the Cape of Good Hope?’ asked Miss Potterson,

as though supposing her to have emigrated.

‘For the country,’ was the cautious answer,—‘she made us promise to

come and show you a paper, which she left in our hands for that special

purpose. I am an unserviceable friend of hers, who began to know her

after her departure from this neighbourhood. She has been for some time

living with my young companion, and has been a helpful and a comfortable

friend to her. Much needed, madam,’ he added, in a lower voice. ‘Believe

me; if you knew all, much needed.’

‘I can believe that,’ said Miss Abbey, with a softening glance at the

little creature.

‘And if it’s proud to have a heart that never hardens, and a temper

that never tires, and a touch that never hurts,’ Miss Jenny struck in,

flushed, ‘she is proud. And if it’s not, she is NOT.’

Her set purpose of contradicting Miss Abbey point blank, was so far from

offending that dread authority, as to elicit a gracious smile. ‘You do

right, child,’ said Miss Abbey, ‘to speak well of those who deserve well

of you.’

‘Right or wrong,’ muttered Miss Wren, inaudibly, with a visible hitch of

her chin, ‘I mean to do it, and you may make up your mind to THAT, old

lady.’

‘Here is the paper, madam,’ said the Jew, delivering into Miss

Potterson’s hands the original document drawn up by Rokesmith, and

signed by Riderhood. ‘Will you please to read it?’

‘But first of all,’ said Miss Abbey, ‘—did you ever taste shrub,

child?’

Miss Wren shook her head.

‘Should you like to?’

‘Should if it’s good,’ returned Miss Wren.

‘You shall try. And, if you find it good, I’ll mix some for you with hot

water. Put your poor little feet on the fender. It’s a cold, cold night,

and the fog clings so.’ As Miss Abbey helped her to turn her chair, her

loosened bonnet dropped on the floor. ‘Why, what lovely hair!’ cried

Miss Abbey. ‘And enough to make wigs for all the dolls in the world.

What a quantity!’

‘Call THAT a quantity?’ returned Miss Wren. ‘Poof! What do you say to

the rest of it?’ As she spoke, she untied a band, and the golden stream

fell over herself and over the chair, and flowed down to the ground.

Miss Abbey’s admiration seemed to increase her perplexity. She beckoned

the Jew towards her, as she reached down the shrub-bottle from its

niche, and whispered:

‘Child, or woman?’

‘Child in years,’ was the answer; ‘woman in self-reliance and trial.’

‘You are talking about Me, good people,’ thought Miss Jenny, sitting in

her golden bower, warming her feet. ‘I can’t hear what you say, but I

know your tricks and your manners!’

The shrub, when tasted from a spoon, perfectly harmonizing with Miss

Jenny’s palate, a judicious amount was mixed by Miss Potterson’s skilful

hands, whereof Riah too partook. After this preliminary, Miss Abbey read

the document; and, as often as she raised her eyebrows in so doing,

the watchful Miss Jenny accompanied the action with an expressive and

emphatic sip of the shrub and water.

‘As far as this goes,’ said Miss Abbey Potterson, when she had read it

several times, and thought about it, ‘it proves (what didn’t much need

proving) that Rogue Riderhood is a villain. I have my doubts whether he

is not the villain who solely did the deed; but I have no expectation of

those doubts ever being cleared up now. I believe I did Lizzie’s father

wrong, but never Lizzie’s self; because when things were at the worst I

trusted her, had perfect confidence in her, and tried to persuade her

to come to me for a refuge. I am very sorry to have done a man wrong,

particularly when it can’t be undone. Be kind enough to let Lizzie know

what I say; not forgetting that if she will come to the Porters, after

all, bygones being bygones, she will find a home at the Porters, and a

friend at the Porters. She knows Miss Abbey of old, remind her, and she

knows what-like the home, and what-like the friend, is likely to turn

out. I am generally short and sweet—or short and sour, according as it

may be and as opinions vary—’ remarked Miss Abbey, ‘and that’s about

all I have got to say, and enough too.’

But before the shrub and water was sipped out, Miss Abbey bethought

herself that she would like to keep a copy of the paper by her. ‘It’s

not long, sir,’ said she to Riah, ‘and perhaps you wouldn’t mind just

jotting it down.’ The old man willingly put on his spectacles, and,

standing at the little desk in the corner where Miss Abbey filed her

receipts and kept her sample phials (customers’ scores were interdicted

by the strict administration of the Porters), wrote out the copy in

a fair round character. As he stood there, doing his methodical

penmanship, his ancient scribelike figure intent upon the work, and the

little dolls’ dressmaker sitting in her golden bower before the fire,

Miss Abbey had her doubts whether she had not dreamed those two rare

figures into the bar of the Six Jolly Fellowships, and might not wake

with a nod next moment and find them gone.

Miss Abbey had twice made the experiment of shutting her eyes and

opening them again, still finding the figures there, when, dreamlike,

a confused hubbub arose in the public room. As she started up, and they

all three looked at one another, it became a noise of clamouring voices

and of the stir of feet; then all the windows were heard to be hastily

thrown up, and shouts and cries came floating into the house from

the river. A moment more, and Bob Gliddery came clattering along the

passage, with the noise of all the nails in his boots condensed into

every separate nail.

‘What is it?’ asked Miss Abbey.

‘It’s summut run down in the fog, ma’am,’ answered Bob. ‘There’s ever so

many people in the river.’

‘Tell ’em to put on all the kettles!’ cried Miss Abbey. ‘See that the

boiler’s full. Get a bath out. Hang some blankets to the fire. Heat some

stone bottles. Have your senses about you, you girls down stairs, and

use ’em.’

While Miss Abbey partly delivered these directions to Bob—whom she

seized by the hair, and whose head she knocked against the wall, as a

general injunction to vigilance and presence of mind—and partly hailed

the kitchen with them—the company in the public room, jostling one

another, rushed out to the causeway, and the outer noise increased.

‘Come and look,’ said Miss Abbey to her visitors. They all three hurried

to the vacated public room, and passed by one of the windows into the

wooden verandah overhanging the river.

‘Does anybody down there know what has happened?’ demanded Miss Abbey,

in her voice of authority.

‘It’s a steamer, Miss Abbey,’ cried one blurred figure in the fog.

‘It always IS a steamer, Miss Abbey,’ cried another.

‘Them’s her lights, Miss Abbey, wot you see a-blinking yonder,’ cried

another.

‘She’s a-blowing off her steam, Miss Abbey, and that’s what makes the

fog and the noise worse, don’t you see?’ explained another.

Boats were putting off, torches were lighting up, people were rushing

tumultuously to the water’s edge. Some man fell in with a splash, and

was pulled out again with a roar of laughter. The drags were called for.

A cry for the life-buoy passed from mouth to mouth. It was impossible to

make out what was going on upon the river, for every boat that put off

sculled into the fog and was lost to view at a boat’s length. Nothing

was clear but that the unpopular steamer was assailed with reproaches

on all sides. She was the Murderer, bound for Gallows Bay; she was the

Manslaughterer, bound for Penal Settlement; her captain ought to be

tried for his life; her crew ran down men in row-boats with a relish;

she mashed up Thames lightermen with her paddles; she fired property

with her funnels; she always was, and she always would be, wreaking

destruction upon somebody or something, after the manner of all her

kind. The whole bulk of the fog teemed with such taunts, uttered in

tones of universal hoarseness. All the while, the steamer’s lights moved

spectrally a very little, as she lay-to, waiting the upshot of whatever

accident had happened. Now, she began burning blue-lights. These made a

luminous patch about her, as if she had set the fog on fire, and in the

patch—the cries changing their note, and becoming more fitful and more

excited—shadows of men and boats could be seen moving, while voices

shouted: ‘There!’ ‘There again!’ ‘A couple more strokes a-head!’

‘Hurrah!’ ‘Look out!’ ‘Hold on!’ ‘Haul in!’ and the like. Lastly, with

a few tumbling clots of blue fire, the night closed in dark again,

the wheels of the steamer were heard revolving, and her lights glided

smoothly away in the direction of the sea.

It appeared to Miss Abbey and her two companions that a considerable

time had been thus occupied. There was now as eager a set towards the

shore beneath the house as there had been from it; and it was only

on the first boat of the rush coming in that it was known what had

occurred.

‘If that’s Tom Tootle,’ Miss Abbey made proclamation, in her most

commanding tones, ‘let him instantly come underneath here.’

The submissive Tom complied, attended by a crowd.

‘What is it, Tootle?’ demanded Miss Abbey.

‘It’s a foreign steamer, miss, run down a wherry.’

‘How many in the wherry?’

‘One man, Miss Abbey.’

‘Found?’

‘Yes. He’s been under water a long time, Miss; but they’ve grappled up

the body.’

‘Let ’em bring it here. You, Bob Gliddery, shut the house-door and stand

by it on the inside, and don’t you open till I tell you. Any police down

there?’

‘Here, Miss Abbey,’ was official rejoinder.

‘After they have brought the body in, keep the crowd out, will you? And

help Bob Gliddery to shut ’em out.’

‘All right, Miss Abbey.’

The autocratic landlady withdrew into the house with Riah and Miss

Jenny, and disposed those forces, one on either side of her, within the

half-door of the bar, as behind a breastwork.

‘You two stand close here,’ said Miss Abbey, ‘and you’ll come to no

hurt, and see it brought in. Bob, you stand by the door.’

That sentinel, smartly giving his rolled shirt-sleeves an extra and a

final tuck on his shoulders, obeyed.

Sound of advancing voices, sound of advancing steps. Shuffle and talk

without. Momentary pause. Two peculiarly blunt knocks or pokes at the

door, as if the dead man arriving on his back were striking at it with

the soles of his motionless feet.

‘That’s the stretcher, or the shutter, whichever of the two they are

carrying,’ said Miss Abbey, with experienced ear. ‘Open, you Bob!’

Door opened. Heavy tread of laden men. A halt. A rush. Stoppage of rush.

Door shut. Baffled boots from the vexed souls of disappointed outsiders.

‘Come on, men!’ said Miss Abbey; for so potent was she with her subjects

that even then the bearers awaited her permission. ‘First floor.’

The entry being low, and the staircase being low, they so took up the

burden they had set down, as to carry that low. The recumbent figure, in

passing, lay hardly as high as the half door.

Miss Abbey started back at sight of it. ‘Why, good God!’ said she,

turning to her two companions, ‘that’s the very man who made the

declaration we have just had in our hands. That’s Riderhood!’

Chapter 3

THE SAME RESPECTED FRIEND IN MORE ASPECTS THAN ONE

In sooth, it is Riderhood and no other, or it is the outer husk and

shell of Riderhood and no other, that is borne into Miss Abbey’s

first-floor bedroom. Supple to twist and turn as the Rogue has ever

been, he is sufficiently rigid now; and not without much shuffling of

attendant feet, and tilting of his bier this way and that way, and

peril even of his sliding off it and being tumbled in a heap over the

balustrades, can he be got up stairs.

‘Fetch a doctor,’ quoth Miss Abbey. And then, ‘Fetch his daughter.’ On

both of which errands, quick messengers depart.

The doctor-seeking messenger meets the doctor halfway, coming under

convoy of police. Doctor examines the dank carcase, and pronounces, not

hopefully, that it is worth while trying to reanimate the same. All the

best means are at once in action, and everybody present lends a hand,

and a heart and soul. No one has the least regard for the man; with them

all, he has been an object of avoidance, suspicion, and aversion; but

the spark of life within him is curiously separable from himself now,

and they have a deep interest in it, probably because it IS life, and

they are living and must die.

In answer to the doctor’s inquiry how did it happen, and was anyone to

blame, Tom Tootle gives in his verdict, unavoidable accident and no one

to blame but the sufferer. ‘He was slinking about in his boat,’ says

Tom, ‘which slinking were, not to speak ill of the dead, the manner of

the man, when he come right athwart the steamer’s bows and she cut him

in two.’ Mr Tootle is so far figurative, touching the dismemberment, as

that he means the boat, and not the man. For, the man lies whole before

them.

Captain Joey, the bottle-nosed regular customer in the glazed hat, is a

pupil of the much-respected old school, and (having insinuated himself

into the chamber, in the execution of the important service of carrying

the drowned man’s neck-kerchief) favours the doctor with a sagacious

old-scholastic suggestion that the body should be hung up by the heels,

‘sim’lar’, says Captain Joey, ‘to mutton in a butcher’s shop,’ and

should then, as a particularly choice manoeuvre for promoting easy

respiration, be rolled upon casks. These scraps of the wisdom of the

captain’s ancestors are received with such speechless indignation by

Miss Abbey, that she instantly seizes the Captain by the collar, and

without a single word ejects him, not presuming to remonstrate, from the

scene.

There then remain, to assist the doctor and Tom, only those three other

regular customers, Bob Glamour, William Williams, and Jonathan (family

name of the latter, if any, unknown to man-kind), who are quite enough.

Miss Abbey having looked in to make sure that nothing is wanted,

descends to the bar, and there awaits the result, with the gentle Jew

and Miss Jenny Wren.

If you are not gone for good, Mr Riderhood, it would be something to

know where you are hiding at present. This flabby lump of mortality that

we work so hard at with such patient perseverance, yields no sign of

you. If you are gone for good, Rogue, it is very solemn, and if you are

coming back, it is hardly less so. Nay, in the suspense and mystery of

the latter question, involving that of where you may be now, there is a

solemnity even added to that of death, making us who are in attendance

alike afraid to look on you and to look off you, and making those below

start at the least sound of a creaking plank in the floor.

Stay! Did that eyelid tremble? So the doctor, breathing low, and closely

watching, asks himself.

No.

Did that nostril twitch?

No.

This artificial respiration ceasing, do I feel any faint flutter under

my hand upon the chest?

No.

Over and over again No. No. But try over and over again, nevertheless.

See! A token of life! An indubitable token of life! The spark may

smoulder and go out, or it may glow and expand, but see! The four

rough fellows, seeing, shed tears. Neither Riderhood in this world, nor

Riderhood in the other, could draw tears from them; but a striving human

soul between the two can do it easily.

He is struggling to come back. Now, he is almost here, now he is far

away again. Now he is struggling harder to get back. And yet—like us

all, when we swoon—like us all, every day of our lives when we wake—he

is instinctively unwilling to be restored to the consciousness of this

existence, and would be left dormant, if he could.

Bob Gliddery returns with Pleasant Riderhood, who was out when sought

for, and hard to find. She has a shawl over her head, and her first

action, when she takes it off weeping, and curtseys to Miss Abbey, is to

wind her hair up.

‘Thank you, Miss Abbey, for having father here.’

‘I am bound to say, girl, I didn’t know who it was,’ returns Miss Abbey;

‘but I hope it would have been pretty much the same if I had known.’

Poor Pleasant, fortified with a sip of brandy, is ushered into the

first-floor chamber. She could not express much sentiment about her

father if she were called upon to pronounce his funeral oration, but she

has a greater tenderness for him than he ever had for her, and crying

bitterly when she sees him stretched unconscious, asks the doctor, with

clasped hands: ‘Is there no hope, sir? O poor father! Is poor father

dead?’

To which the doctor, on one knee beside the body, busy and watchful,

only rejoins without looking round: ‘Now, my girl, unless you have the

self-command to be perfectly quiet, I cannot allow you to remain in the

room.’

Pleasant, consequently, wipes her eyes with her back-hair, which is in

fresh need of being wound up, and having got it out of the way, watches

with terrified interest all that goes on. Her natural woman’s aptitude

soon renders her able to give a little help. Anticipating the doctor’s

want of this or that, she quietly has it ready for him, and so by

degrees is intrusted with the charge of supporting her father’s head

upon her arm.

It is something so new to Pleasant to see her father an object of

sympathy and interest, to find any one very willing to tolerate his

society in this world, not to say pressingly and soothingly entreating

him to belong to it, that it gives her a sensation she never experienced

before. Some hazy idea that if affairs could remain thus for a long time

it would be a respectable change, floats in her mind. Also some vague

idea that the old evil is drowned out of him, and that if he should

happily come back to resume his occupation of the empty form that lies

upon the bed, his spirit will be altered. In which state of mind she

kisses the stony lips, and quite believes that the impassive hand she

chafes will revive a tender hand, if it revive ever.

Sweet delusion for Pleasant Riderhood. But they minister to him with

such extraordinary interest, their anxiety is so keen, their vigilance

is so great, their excited joy grows so intense as the signs of life

strengthen, that how can she resist it, poor thing! And now he begins

to breathe naturally, and he stirs, and the doctor declares him to have

come back from that inexplicable journey where he stopped on the dark

road, and to be here.

Tom Tootle, who is nearest to the doctor when he says this, grasps

the doctor fervently by the hand. Bob Glamour, William Williams, and

Jonathan of the no surname, all shake hands with one another round, and

with the doctor too. Bob Glamour blows his nose, and Jonathan of the

no surname is moved to do likewise, but lacking a pocket handkerchief

abandons that outlet for his emotion. Pleasant sheds tears deserving her

own name, and her sweet delusion is at its height.

There is intelligence in his eyes. He wants to ask a question. He

wonders where he is. Tell him.

‘Father, you were run down on the river, and are at Miss Abbey

Potterson’s.’

He stares at his daughter, stares all around him, closes his eyes, and

lies slumbering on her arm.

The short-lived delusion begins to fade. The low, bad, unimpressible

face is coming up from the depths of the river, or what other depths, to

the surface again. As he grows warm, the doctor and the four men cool.

As his lineaments soften with life, their faces and their hearts harden

to him.

‘He will do now,’ says the doctor, washing his hands, and looking at the

patient with growing disfavour.

‘Many a better man,’ moralizes Tom Tootle with a gloomy shake of the

head, ‘ain’t had his luck.’

‘It’s to be hoped he’ll make a better use of his life,’ says Bob

Glamour, ‘than I expect he will.’

‘Or than he done afore,’ adds William Williams.

‘But no, not he!’ says Jonathan of the no surname, clinching the

quartette.

They speak in a low tone because of his daughter, but she sees that they

have all drawn off, and that they stand in a group at the other end of

the room, shunning him. It would be too much to suspect them of being

sorry that he didn’t die when he had done so much towards it, but they

clearly wish that they had had a better subject to bestow their pains

on. Intelligence is conveyed to Miss Abbey in the bar, who reappears on

the scene, and contemplates from a distance, holding whispered discourse

with the doctor. The spark of life was deeply interesting while it was

in abeyance, but now that it has got established in Mr Riderhood, there

appears to be a general desire that circumstances had admitted of its

being developed in anybody else, rather than that gentleman.

‘However,’ says Miss Abbey, cheering them up, ‘you have done your duty

like good and true men, and you had better come down and take something

at the expense of the Porters.’

This they all do, leaving the daughter watching the father. To whom, in

their absence, Bob Gliddery presents himself.

‘His gills looks rum; don’t they?’ says Bob, after inspecting the

patient.

Pleasant faintly nods.

‘His gills’ll look rummer when he wakes; won’t they?’ says Bob.

Pleasant hopes not. Why?

‘When he finds himself here, you know,’ Bob explains. ‘Cause Miss Abbey

forbid him the house and ordered him out of it. But what you may call

the Fates ordered him into it again. Which is rumness; ain’t it?’

‘He wouldn’t have come here of his own accord,’ returns poor Pleasant,

with an effort at a little pride.

‘No,’ retorts Bob. ‘Nor he wouldn’t have been let in, if he had.’

The short delusion is quite dispelled now. As plainly as she sees on her

arm the old father, unimproved, Pleasant sees that everybody there will

cut him when he recovers consciousness. ‘I’ll take him away ever so soon

as I can,’ thinks Pleasant with a sigh; ‘he’s best at home.’

Presently they all return, and wait for him to become conscious that

they will all be glad to get rid of him. Some clothes are got together

for him to wear, his own being saturated with water, and his present

dress being composed of blankets.

Becoming more and more uncomfortable, as though the prevalent dislike

were finding him out somewhere in his sleep and expressing itself to

him, the patient at last opens his eyes wide, and is assisted by his

daughter to sit up in bed.

‘Well, Riderhood,’ says the doctor, ‘how do you feel?’

He replies gruffly, ‘Nothing to boast on.’ Having, in fact, returned to

life in an uncommonly sulky state.

‘I don’t mean to preach; but I hope,’ says the doctor, gravely shaking

his head, ‘that this escape may have a good effect upon you, Riderhood.’

The patient’s discontented growl of a reply is not intelligible; his

daughter, however, could interpret, if she would, that what he says is,

he ‘don’t want no Poll-Parroting’.

Mr Riderhood next demands his shirt; and draws it on over his head (with

his daughter’s help) exactly as if he had just had a Fight.

‘Warn’t it a steamer?’ he pauses to ask her.

‘Yes, father.’

‘I’ll have the law on her, bust her! and make her pay for it.’

He then buttons his linen very moodily, twice or thrice stopping to

examine his arms and hands, as if to see what punishment he has received

in the Fight. He then doggedly demands his other garments, and slowly

gets them on, with an appearance of great malevolence towards his late

opponent and all the spectators. He has an impression that his nose is

bleeding, and several times draws the back of his hand across it, and

looks for the result, in a pugilistic manner, greatly strengthening that

incongruous resemblance.

‘Where’s my fur cap?’ he asks in a surly voice, when he has shuffled his

clothes on.

‘In the river,’ somebody rejoins.

‘And warn’t there no honest man to pick it up? O’ course there was

though, and to cut off with it arterwards. You are a rare lot, all on

you!’

Thus, Mr Riderhood: taking from the hands of his daughter, with special

ill-will, a lent cap, and grumbling as he pulls it down over his ears.

Then, getting on his unsteady legs, leaning heavily upon her, and

growling, ‘Hold still, can’t you? What! You must be a staggering next,

must you?’ he takes his departure out of the ring in which he has had

that little turn-up with Death.

Chapter 4

A HAPPY RETURN OF THE DAY

Mr and Mrs Wilfer had seen a full quarter of a hundred more

anniversaries of their wedding day than Mr and Mrs Lammle had seen of

theirs, but they still celebrated the occasion in the bosom of

their family. Not that these celebrations ever resulted in anything

particularly agreeable, or that the family was ever disappointed by that

circumstance on account of having looked forward to the return of the

auspicious day with sanguine anticipations of enjoyment. It was kept

morally, rather as a Fast than a Feast, enabling Mrs Wilfer to hold

a sombre darkling state, which exhibited that impressive woman in her

choicest colours.

The noble lady’s condition on these delightful occasions was one

compounded of heroic endurance and heroic forgiveness. Lurid indications

of the better marriages she might have made, shone athwart the awful

gloom of her composure, and fitfully revealed the cherub as a little

monster unaccountably favoured by Heaven, who had possessed himself of a

blessing for which many of his superiors had sued and contended in vain.

So firmly had this his position towards his treasure become established,

that when the anniversary arrived, it always found him in an apologetic

state. It is not impossible that his modest penitence may have even gone

the length of sometimes severely reproving him for that he ever took the

liberty of making so exalted a character his wife.

As for the children of the union, their experience of these festivals

had been sufficiently uncomfortable to lead them annually to wish, when

out of their tenderest years, either that Ma had married somebody else

instead of much-teased Pa, or that Pa had married somebody else instead

of Ma. When there came to be but two sisters left at home, the daring

mind of Bella on the next of these occasions scaled the height of

wondering with droll vexation ‘what on earth Pa ever could have seen in

Ma, to induce him to make such a little fool of himself as to ask her to

have him.’

The revolving year now bringing the day round in its orderly sequence,

Bella arrived in the Boffin chariot to assist at the celebration. It was

the family custom when the day recurred, to sacrifice a pair of fowls

on the altar of Hymen; and Bella had sent a note beforehand, to intimate

that she would bring the votive offering with her. So, Bella and the

fowls, by the united energies of two horses, two men, four wheels, and a

plum-pudding carriage dog with as uncomfortable a collar on as if he

had been George the Fourth, were deposited at the door of the parental

dwelling. They were there received by Mrs Wilfer in person, whose

dignity on this, as on most special occasions, was heightened by a

mysterious toothache.

‘I shall not require the carriage at night,’ said Bella. ‘I shall walk

back.’

The male domestic of Mrs Boffin touched his hat, and in the act of

departure had an awful glare bestowed upon him by Mrs Wilfer, intended

to carry deep into his audacious soul the assurance that, whatever his

private suspicions might be, male domestics in livery were no rarity

there.

‘Well, dear Ma,’ said Bella, ‘and how do you do?’

‘I am as well, Bella,’ replied Mrs Wilfer, ‘as can be expected.’

‘Dear me, Ma,’ said Bella; ‘you talk as if one was just born!’

‘That’s exactly what Ma has been doing,’ interposed Lavvy, over the

maternal shoulder, ‘ever since we got up this morning. It’s all very

well to laugh, Bella, but anything more exasperating it is impossible to

conceive.’

Mrs Wilfer, with a look too full of majesty to be accompanied by any

words, attended both her daughters to the kitchen, where the sacrifice

was to be prepared.

‘Mr Rokesmith,’ said she, resignedly, ‘has been so polite as to place

his sitting-room at our disposal to-day. You will therefore, Bella, be

entertained in the humble abode of your parents, so far in accordance

with your present style of living, that there will be a drawing-room for

your reception as well as a dining-room. Your papa invited Mr Rokesmith

to partake of our lowly fare. In excusing himself on account of a

particular engagement, he offered the use of his apartment.’

Bella happened to know that he had no engagement out of his own room at

Mr Boffin’s, but she approved of his staying away. ‘We should only have

put one another out of countenance,’ she thought, ‘and we do that quite

often enough as it is.’

Yet she had sufficient curiosity about his room, to run up to it with

the least possible delay, and make a close inspection of its contents.

It was tastefully though economically furnished, and very neatly

arranged. There were shelves and stands of books, English, French, and

Italian; and in a portfolio on the writing-table there were sheets upon

sheets of memoranda and calculations in figures, evidently referring to

the Boffin property. On that table also, carefully backed with canvas,

varnished, mounted, and rolled like a map, was the placard descriptive

of the murdered man who had come from afar to be her husband. She shrank

from this ghostly surprise, and felt quite frightened as she rolled and

tied it up again. Peeping about here and there, she came upon a print, a

graceful head of a pretty woman, elegantly framed, hanging in the corner

by the easy chair. ‘Oh, indeed, sir!’ said Bella, after stopping to

ruminate before it. ‘Oh, indeed, sir! I fancy I can guess whom you

think THAT’S like. But I’ll tell you what it’s much more like—your

impudence!’ Having said which she decamped: not solely because she was

offended, but because there was nothing else to look at.

‘Now, Ma,’ said Bella, reappearing in the kitchen with some remains of a

blush, ‘you and Lavvy think magnificent me fit for nothing, but I intend

to prove the contrary. I mean to be Cook today.’

‘Hold!’ rejoined her majestic mother. ‘I cannot permit it. Cook, in that

dress!’

‘As for my dress, Ma,’ returned Bella, merrily searching in a

dresser-drawer, ‘I mean to apron it and towel it all over the front; and

as to permission, I mean to do without.’

‘YOU cook?’ said Mrs Wilfer. ‘YOU, who never cooked when you were at

home?’

‘Yes, Ma,’ returned Bella; ‘that is precisely the state of the case.’

She girded herself with a white apron, and busily with knots and pins

contrived a bib to it, coming close and tight under her chin, as if it

had caught her round the neck to kiss her. Over this bib her dimples

looked delightful, and under it her pretty figure not less so. ‘Now,

Ma,’ said Bella, pushing back her hair from her temples with both hands,

‘what’s first?’

‘First,’ returned Mrs Wilfer solemnly, ‘if you persist in what I cannot

but regard as conduct utterly incompatible with the equipage in which

you arrived—’

(‘Which I do, Ma.’)

‘First, then, you put the fowls down to the fire.’

‘To—be—sure!’ cried Bella; ‘and flour them, and twirl them round, and

there they go!’ sending them spinning at a great rate. ‘What’s next,

Ma?’

‘Next,’ said Mrs Wilfer with a wave of her gloves, expressive of

abdication under protest from the culinary throne, ‘I would recommend

examination of the bacon in the saucepan on the fire, and also of the

potatoes by the application of a fork. Preparation of the greens will

further become necessary if you persist in this unseemly demeanour.’

‘As of course I do, Ma.’

Persisting, Bella gave her attention to one thing and forgot the

other, and gave her attention to the other and forgot the third, and

remembering the third was distracted by the fourth, and made amends

whenever she went wrong by giving the unfortunate fowls an extra spin,

which made their chance of ever getting cooked exceedingly doubtful. But

it was pleasant cookery too. Meantime Miss Lavinia, oscillating between

the kitchen and the opposite room, prepared the dining-table in the

latter chamber. This office she (always doing her household spiriting

with unwillingness) performed in a startling series of whisks and bumps;

laying the table-cloth as if she were raising the wind, putting down

the glasses and salt-cellars as if she were knocking at the door, and

clashing the knives and forks in a skirmishing manner suggestive of

hand-to-hand conflict.

‘Look at Ma,’ whispered Lavinia to Bella when this was done, and they

stood over the roasting fowls. ‘If one was the most dutiful child in

existence (of course on the whole one hopes one is), isn’t she enough

to make one want to poke her with something wooden, sitting there bolt

upright in a corner?’

‘Only suppose,’ returned Bella, ‘that poor Pa was to sit bolt upright in

another corner.’

‘My dear, he couldn’t do it,’ said Lavvy. ‘Pa would loll directly. But

indeed I do not believe there ever was any human creature who could keep

so bolt upright as Ma, ‘or put such an amount of aggravation into one

back! What’s the matter, Ma? Ain’t you well, Ma?’

‘Doubtless I am very well,’ returned Mrs Wilfer, turning her eyes upon

her youngest born, with scornful fortitude. ‘What should be the matter

with Me?’

‘You don’t seem very brisk, Ma,’ retorted Lavvy the bold.

‘Brisk?’ repeated her parent, ‘Brisk? Whence the low expression,

Lavinia? If I am uncomplaining, if I am silently contented with my lot,

let that suffice for my family.’

‘Well, Ma,’ returned Lavvy, ‘since you will force it out of me, I must

respectfully take leave to say that your family are no doubt under

the greatest obligations to you for having an annual toothache on your

wedding day, and that it’s very disinterested in you, and an immense

blessing to them. Still, on the whole, it is possible to be too boastful

even of that boon.’

‘You incarnation of sauciness,’ said Mrs Wilfer, ‘do you speak like that

to me? On this day, of all days in the year? Pray do you know what

would have become of you, if I had not bestowed my hand upon R. W., your

father, on this day?’

‘No, Ma,’ replied Lavvy, ‘I really do not; and, with the greatest

respect for your abilities and information, I very much doubt if you do

either.’

Whether or no the sharp vigour of this sally on a weak point of Mrs

Wilfer’s entrenchments might have routed that heroine for the time, is

rendered uncertain by the arrival of a flag of truce in the person of

Mr George Sampson: bidden to the feast as a friend of the family, whose

affections were now understood to be in course of transference from

Bella to Lavinia, and whom Lavinia kept—possibly in remembrance of his

bad taste in having overlooked her in the first instance—under a course

of stinging discipline.

‘I congratulate you, Mrs Wilfer,’ said Mr George Sampson, who had

meditated this neat address while coming along, ‘on the day.’ Mrs Wilfer

thanked him with a magnanimous sigh, and again became an unresisting

prey to that inscrutable toothache.

‘I am surprised,’ said Mr Sampson feebly, ‘that Miss Bella condescends

to cook.’

Here Miss Lavinia descended on the ill-starred young gentleman with a

crushing supposition that at all events it was no business of his. This

disposed of Mr Sampson in a melancholy retirement of spirit, until the

cherub arrived, whose amazement at the lovely woman’s occupation was

great.

However, she persisted in dishing the dinner as well as cooking it, and

then sat down, bibless and apronless, to partake of it as an illustrious

guest: Mrs Wilfer first responding to her husband’s cheerful ‘For what

we are about to receive—’ with a sepulchral Amen, calculated to cast a

damp upon the stoutest appetite.

‘But what,’ said Bella, as she watched the carving of the fowls, ‘makes

them pink inside, I wonder, Pa! Is it the breed?’

‘No, I don’t think it’s the breed, my dear,’ returned Pa. ‘I rather

think it is because they are not done.’

‘They ought to be,’ said Bella.

‘Yes, I am aware they ought to be, my dear,’ rejoined her father, ‘but

they—ain’t.’

So, the gridiron was put in requisition, and the good-tempered cherub,

who was often as un-cherubically employed in his own family as if he had

been in the employment of some of the Old Masters, undertook to grill

the fowls. Indeed, except in respect of staring about him (a branch of

the public service to which the pictorial cherub is much addicted), this

domestic cherub discharged as many odd functions as his prototype; with

the difference, say, that he performed with a blacking-brush on the

family’s boots, instead of performing on enormous wind instruments and

double-basses, and that he conducted himself with cheerful alacrity to

much useful purpose, instead of foreshortening himself in the air with

the vaguest intentions.

Bella helped him with his supplemental cookery, and made him very happy,

but put him in mortal terror too by asking him when they sat down at

table again, how he supposed they cooked fowls at the Greenwich dinners,

and whether he believed they really were such pleasant dinners as people

said? His secret winks and nods of remonstrance, in reply, made the

mischievous Bella laugh until she choked, and then Lavinia was obliged

to slap her on the back, and then she laughed the more.

But her mother was a fine corrective at the other end of the table; to

whom her father, in the innocence of his good-fellowship, at intervals

appealed with: ‘My dear, I am afraid you are not enjoying yourself?’

‘Why so, R. W.?’ she would sonorously reply.

‘Because, my dear, you seem a little out of sorts.’

‘Not at all,’ would be the rejoinder, in exactly the same tone.

‘Would you take a merry-thought, my dear?’

‘Thank you. I will take whatever you please, R. W.’

‘Well, but my dear, do you like it?’

‘I like it as well as I like anything, R. W.’ The stately woman would

then, with a meritorious appearance of devoting herself to the general

good, pursue her dinner as if she were feeding somebody else on high

public grounds.

Bella had brought dessert and two bottles of wine, thus shedding

unprecedented splendour on the occasion. Mrs Wilfer did the honours of

the first glass by proclaiming: ‘R. W. I drink to you.

‘Thank you, my dear. And I to you.’

‘Pa and Ma!’ said Bella.

‘Permit me,’ Mrs Wilfer interposed, with outstretched glove. ‘No. I

think not. I drank to your papa. If, however, you insist on including

me, I can in gratitude offer no objection.’

‘Why, Lor, Ma,’ interposed Lavvy the bold, ‘isn’t it the day that made

you and Pa one and the same? I have no patience!’

‘By whatever other circumstance the day may be marked, it is not the

day, Lavinia, on which I will allow a child of mine to pounce upon me.

I beg—nay, command!—that you will not pounce. R. W., it is appropriate

to recall that it is for you to command and for me to obey. It is your

house, and you are master at your own table. Both our healths!’ Drinking

the toast with tremendous stiffness.

‘I really am a little afraid, my dear,’ hinted the cherub meekly, ‘that

you are not enjoying yourself?’

‘On the contrary,’ returned Mrs Wilfer, ‘quite so. Why should I not?’

‘I thought, my dear, that perhaps your face might—’

‘My face might be a martyrdom, but what would that import, or who should

know it, if I smiled?’

And she did smile; manifestly freezing the blood of Mr George Sampson

by so doing. For that young gentleman, catching her smiling eye, was so

very much appalled by its expression as to cast about in his thoughts

concerning what he had done to bring it down upon himself.

‘The mind naturally falls,’ said Mrs Wilfer, ‘shall I say into a

reverie, or shall I say into a retrospect? on a day like this.’

Lavvy, sitting with defiantly folded arms, replied (but not audibly),

‘For goodness’ sake say whichever of the two you like best, Ma, and get

it over.’

‘The mind,’ pursued Mrs Wilfer in an oratorical manner, ‘naturally

reverts to Papa and Mamma—I here allude to my parents—at a period

before the earliest dawn of this day. I was considered tall; perhaps I

was. Papa and Mamma were unquestionably tall. I have rarely seen a finer

woman than my mother; never than my father.’

The irrepressible Lavvy remarked aloud, ‘Whatever grandpapa was, he

wasn’t a female.’

‘Your grandpapa,’ retorted Mrs Wilfer, with an awful look, and in an

awful tone, ‘was what I describe him to have been, and would have struck

any of his grandchildren to the earth who presumed to question it. It

was one of mamma’s cherished hopes that I should become united to a

tall member of society. It may have been a weakness, but if so, it was

equally the weakness, I believe, of King Frederick of Prussia.’ These

remarks being offered to Mr George Sampson, who had not the courage to

come out for single combat, but lurked with his chest under the table

and his eyes cast down, Mrs Wilfer proceeded, in a voice of increasing

sternness and impressiveness, until she should force that skulker

to give himself up. ‘Mamma would appear to have had an indefinable

foreboding of what afterwards happened, for she would frequently urge

upon me, “Not a little man. Promise me, my child, not a little man.

Never, never, never, marry a little man!” Papa also would remark to me

(he possessed extraordinary humour), “that a family of whales must not

ally themselves with sprats.” His company was eagerly sought, as may

be supposed, by the wits of the day, and our house was their continual

resort. I have known as many as three copper-plate engravers exchanging

the most exquisite sallies and retorts there, at one time.’ (Here Mr

Sampson delivered himself captive, and said, with an uneasy movement on

his chair, that three was a large number, and it must have been highly

entertaining.) ‘Among the most prominent members of that distinguished

circle, was a gentleman measuring six feet four in height. HE was NOT

an engraver.’ (Here Mr Sampson said, with no reason whatever, Of course

not.) ‘This gentleman was so obliging as to honour me with attentions

which I could not fail to understand.’ (Here Mr Sampson murmured that

when it came to that, you could always tell.) ‘I immediately announced

to both my parents that those attentions were misplaced, and that I

could not favour his suit. They inquired was he too tall? I replied it

was not the stature, but the intellect was too lofty. At our house,

I said, the tone was too brilliant, the pressure was too high, to be

maintained by me, a mere woman, in every-day domestic life. I well

remember mamma’s clasping her hands, and exclaiming “This will end in

a little man!”’ (Here Mr Sampson glanced at his host and shook his head

with despondency.) ‘She afterwards went so far as to predict that it

would end in a little man whose mind would be below the average, but

that was in what I may denominate a paroxysm of maternal disappointment.

Within a month,’ said Mrs Wilfer, deepening her voice, as if she were

relating a terrible ghost story, ‘within a-month, I first saw R. W. my

husband. Within a year, I married him. It is natural for the mind to

recall these dark coincidences on the present day.’

Mr Sampson at length released from the custody of Mrs Wilfer’s eye, now

drew a long breath, and made the original and striking remark that there

was no accounting for these sort of presentiments. R. W. scratched his

head and looked apologetically all round the table until he came to his

wife, when observing her as it were shrouded in a more sombre veil than

before, he once more hinted, ‘My dear, I am really afraid you are not

altogether enjoying yourself?’ To which she once more replied, ‘On the

contrary, R. W. Quite so.’

The wretched Mr Sampson’s position at this agreeable entertainment

was truly pitiable. For, not only was he exposed defenceless to the

harangues of Mrs Wilfer, but he received the utmost contumely at the

hands of Lavinia; who, partly to show Bella that she (Lavinia) could do

what she liked with him, and partly to pay him off for still obviously

admiring Bella’s beauty, led him the life of a dog. Illuminated on the

one hand by the stately graces of Mrs Wilfer’s oratory, and shadowed

on the other by the checks and frowns of the young lady to whom he

had devoted himself in his destitution, the sufferings of this young

gentleman were distressing to witness. If his mind for the moment reeled

under them, it may be urged, in extenuation of its weakness, that it

was constitutionally a knock-knee’d mind and never very strong upon its

legs.

The rosy hours were thus beguiled until it was time for Bella to have

Pa’s escort back. The dimples duly tied up in the bonnet-strings and the

leave-taking done, they got out into the air, and the cherub drew a long

breath as if he found it refreshing.

‘Well, dear Pa,’ said Bella, ‘the anniversary may be considered over.’

‘Yes, my dear,’ returned the cherub, ‘there’s another of ’em gone.’

Bella drew his arm closer through hers as they walked along, and gave it

a number of consolatory pats. ‘Thank you, my dear,’ he said, as if

she had spoken; ‘I am all right, my dear. Well, and how do you get on,

Bella?’

‘I am not at all improved, Pa.’

‘Ain’t you really though?’

‘No, Pa. On the contrary, I am worse.’

‘Lor!’ said the cherub.

‘I am worse, Pa. I make so many calculations how much a year I must have

when I marry, and what is the least I can manage to do with, that I am

beginning to get wrinkles over my nose. Did you notice any wrinkles over

my nose this evening, Pa?’

Pa laughing at this, Bella gave him two or three shakes.

‘You won’t laugh, sir, when you see your lovely woman turning haggard.

You had better be prepared in time, I can tell you. I shall not be able

to keep my greediness for money out of my eyes long, and when you see it

there you’ll be sorry, and serve you right for not being warned in time.

Now, sir, we entered into a bond of confidence. Have you anything to

impart?’

‘I thought it was you who was to impart, my love.’

‘Oh! did you indeed, sir? Then why didn’t you ask me, the moment we came

out? The confidences of lovely women are not to be slighted. However, I

forgive you this once, and look here, Pa; that’s’—Bella laid the

little forefinger of her right glove on her lip, and then laid it on her

father’s lip—‘that’s a kiss for you. And now I am going seriously

to tell you—let me see how many—four secrets. Mind! Serious, grave,

weighty secrets. Strictly between ourselves.’

‘Number one, my dear?’ said her father, settling her arm comfortably and

confidentially.

‘Number one,’ said Bella, ‘will electrify you, Pa. Who do you think

has’—she was confused here in spite of her merry way of beginning ‘has

made an offer to me?’

Pa looked in her face, and looked at the ground, and looked in her face

again, and declared he could never guess.

‘Mr Rokesmith.’

‘You don’t tell me so, my dear!’

‘Mis—ter Roke—smith, Pa,’ said Bella separating the syllables for

emphasis. ‘What do you say to THAT?’

Pa answered quietly with the counter-question, ‘What did YOU say to

that, my love?’

‘I said No,’ returned Bella sharply. ‘Of course.’

‘Yes. Of course,’ said her father, meditating.

‘And I told him why I thought it a betrayal of trust on his part, and an

affront to me,’ said Bella.

‘Yes. To be sure. I am astonished indeed. I wonder he committed himself

without seeing more of his way first. Now I think of it, I suspect he

always has admired you though, my dear.’

‘A hackney coachman may admire me,’ remarked Bella, with a touch of her

mother’s loftiness.

‘It’s highly probable, my love. Number two, my dear?’

‘Number two, Pa, is much to the same purpose, though not so

preposterous. Mr Lightwood would propose to me, if I would let him.’

‘Then I understand, my dear, that you don’t intend to let him?’

Bella again saying, with her former emphasis, ‘Why, of course not!’ her

father felt himself bound to echo, ‘Of course not.’

‘I don’t care for him,’ said Bella.

‘That’s enough,’ her father interposed.

‘No, Pa, it’s NOT enough,’ rejoined Bella, giving him another shake or

two. ‘Haven’t I told you what a mercenary little wretch I am? It

only becomes enough when he has no money, and no clients, and no

expectations, and no anything but debts.’

‘Hah!’ said the cherub, a little depressed. ‘Number three, my dear?’

‘Number three, Pa, is a better thing. A generous thing, a noble thing, a

delightful thing. Mrs Boffin has herself told me, as a secret, with her

own kind lips—and truer lips never opened or closed in this life, I am

sure—that they wish to see me well married; and that when I marry with

their consent they will portion me most handsomely.’ Here the grateful

girl burst out crying very heartily.

‘Don’t cry, my darling,’ said her father, with his hand to his eyes;

‘it’s excusable in me to be a little overcome when I find that my dear

favourite child is, after all disappointments, to be so provided for

and so raised in the world; but don’t YOU cry, don’t YOU cry. I am very

thankful. I congratulate you with all my heart, my dear.’ The good soft

little fellow, drying his eyes, here, Bella put her arms round his neck

and tenderly kissed him on the high road, passionately telling him

he was the best of fathers and the best of friends, and that on her

wedding-morning she would go down on her knees to him and beg his pardon

for having ever teased him or seemed insensible to the worth of such

a patient, sympathetic, genial, fresh young heart. At every one of her

adjectives she redoubled her kisses, and finally kissed his hat off, and

then laughed immoderately when the wind took it and he ran after it.

When he had recovered his hat and his breath, and they were going on

again once more, said her father then: ‘Number four, my dear?’

Bella’s countenance fell in the midst of her mirth. ‘After all, perhaps

I had better put off number four, Pa. Let me try once more, if for never

so short a time, to hope that it may not really be so.’

The change in her, strengthened the cherub’s interest in number four,

and he said quietly: ‘May not be so, my dear? May not be how, my dear?’

Bella looked at him pensively, and shook her head.

‘And yet I know right well it is so, Pa. I know it only too well.’

‘My love,’ returned her father, ‘you make me quite uncomfortable. Have

you said No to anybody else, my dear?’

‘No, Pa.’

‘Yes to anybody?’ he suggested, lifting up his eyebrows.

‘No, Pa.’

‘Is there anybody else who would take his chance between Yes and No, if

you would let him, my dear?’

‘Not that I know of, Pa.’

‘There can’t be somebody who won’t take his chance when you want him

to?’ said the cherub, as a last resource.

‘Why, of course not, Pa,’ said Bella, giving him another shake or two.

‘No, of course not,’ he assented. ‘Bella, my dear, I am afraid I must

either have no sleep to-night, or I must press for number four.’

‘Oh, Pa, there is no good in number four! I am so sorry for it, I am so

unwilling to believe it, I have tried so earnestly not to see it, that

it is very hard to tell, even to you. But Mr Boffin is being spoilt by

prosperity, and is changing every day.’

‘My dear Bella, I hope and trust not.’

‘I have hoped and trusted not too, Pa; but every day he changes for

the worse, and for the worse. Not to me—he is always much the same

to me—but to others about him. Before my eyes he grows suspicious,

capricious, hard, tyrannical, unjust. If ever a good man were ruined by

good fortune, it is my benefactor. And yet, Pa, think how terrible the

fascination of money is! I see this, and hate this, and dread this, and

don’t know but that money might make a much worse change in me. And yet

I have money always in my thoughts and my desires; and the whole life I

place before myself is money, money, money, and what money can make of

life!’

Chapter 5

THE GOLDEN DUSTMAN FALLS INTO BAD COMPANY

Were Bella Wilfer’s bright and ready little wits at fault, or was the

Golden Dustman passing through the furnace of proof and coming out

dross? Ill news travels fast. We shall know full soon.

On that very night of her return from the Happy Return, something

chanced which Bella closely followed with her eyes and ears. There was

an apartment at the side of the Boffin mansion, known as Mr Boffin’s

room. Far less grand than the rest of the house, it was far more

comfortable, being pervaded by a certain air of homely snugness, which

upholstering despotism had banished to that spot when it inexorably set

its face against Mr Boffin’s appeals for mercy in behalf of any other

chamber. Thus, although a room of modest situation—for its windows gave

on Silas Wegg’s old corner—and of no pretensions to velvet, satin, or

gilding, it had got itself established in a domestic position analogous

to that of an easy dressing-gown or pair of slippers; and whenever the

family wanted to enjoy a particularly pleasant fireside evening, they

enjoyed it, as an institution that must be, in Mr Boffin’s room.

Mr and Mrs Boffin were reported sitting in this room, when Bella got

back. Entering it, she found the Secretary there too; in official

attendance it would appear, for he was standing with some papers in his

hand by a table with shaded candles on it, at which Mr Boffin was seated

thrown back in his easy chair.

‘You are busy, sir,’ said Bella, hesitating at the door.

‘Not at all, my dear, not at all. You’re one of ourselves. We never

make company of you. Come in, come in. Here’s the old lady in her usual

place.’

Mrs Boffin adding her nod and smile of welcome to Mr Boffin’s words,

Bella took her book to a chair in the fireside corner, by Mrs Boffin’s

work-table. Mr Boffin’s station was on the opposite side.

‘Now, Rokesmith,’ said the Golden Dustman, so sharply rapping the table

to bespeak his attention as Bella turned the leaves of her book, that

she started; ‘where were we?’

‘You were saying, sir,’ returned the Secretary, with an air of some

reluctance and a glance towards those others who were present, ‘that you

considered the time had come for fixing my salary.’

‘Don’t be above calling it wages, man,’ said Mr Boffin, testily. ‘What

the deuce! I never talked of any salary when I was in service.’

‘My wages,’ said the Secretary, correcting himself.

‘Rokesmith, you are not proud, I hope?’ observed Mr Boffin, eyeing him

askance.

‘I hope not, sir.’

‘Because I never was, when I was poor,’ said Mr Boffin. ‘Poverty and

pride don’t go at all well together. Mind that. How can they go well

together? Why it stands to reason. A man, being poor, has nothing to be

proud of. It’s nonsense.’

With a slight inclination of his head, and a look of some surprise,

the Secretary seemed to assent by forming the syllables of the word

‘nonsense’ on his lips.

‘Now, concerning these same wages,’ said Mr Boffin. ‘Sit down.’

The Secretary sat down.

‘Why didn’t you sit down before?’ asked Mr Boffin, distrustfully. ‘I

hope that wasn’t pride? But about these wages. Now, I’ve gone into the

matter, and I say two hundred a year. What do you think of it? Do you

think it’s enough?’

‘Thank you. It is a fair proposal.’

‘I don’t say, you know,’ Mr Boffin stipulated, ‘but what it may be more

than enough. And I’ll tell you why, Rokesmith. A man of property, like

me, is bound to consider the market-price. At first I didn’t enter into

that as much as I might have done; but I’ve got acquainted with other

men of property since, and I’ve got acquainted with the duties of

property. I mustn’t go putting the market-price up, because money may

happen not to be an object with me. A sheep is worth so much in the

market, and I ought to give it and no more. A secretary is worth so much

in the market, and I ought to give it and no more. However, I don’t mind

stretching a point with you.’

‘Mr Boffin, you are very good,’ replied the Secretary, with an effort.

‘Then we put the figure,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘at two hundred a year.

Then the figure’s disposed of. Now, there must be no misunderstanding

regarding what I buy for two hundred a year. If I pay for a sheep, I buy

it out and out. Similarly, if I pay for a secretary, I buy HIM out and

out.’

‘In other words, you purchase my whole time?’

‘Certainly I do. Look here,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘it ain’t that I want to

occupy your whole time; you can take up a book for a minute or two when

you’ve nothing better to do, though I think you’ll a’most always find

something useful to do. But I want to keep you in attendance. It’s

convenient to have you at all times ready on the premises. Therefore,

betwixt your breakfast and your supper,—on the premises I expect to

find you.’

The Secretary bowed.