Our Mutual Friend · Book the First · Chapter 1 15 (2/2)

At the treasures of the yard, and at the outside of the house, and at the detached building which Mr. Boffin pointed out as the residence of himself and his wife during the many years of their service, the Secretary looked with interest. It was not until Mr. Boffin had shown him every wonder of the Bower twice over, that he remembered his having duties to discharge elsewhere.

“You have no instructions to give me, Mr. Boffin, in reference to this place?”

“Not any, Rokesmith. No.”

“Might I ask, without seeming impertinent, whether you have any intention of selling it?”

“Certainly not. In remembrance of our old master, our old master’s children, and our old service, me and Mrs. Boffin mean to keep it up as it stands.”

The Secretary’s eyes glanced with so much meaning in them at the mounds, that Mr. Boffin said, as if in answer to a remark:

“Ay, ay, that’s another thing. I may sell them, though I should be sorry to see the neighbourhood deprived of ’em too. It’ll look but a poor dead flat without the mounds. Still I don’t say that I’m going to keep ’em always there, for the sake of the beauty of the landscape. There’s no hurry about it; that’s all I say at present. I ain’t a scholar in much, Rokesmith, but I’m a pretty fair scholar in dust. I can price the mounds to a fraction, and I know how they can be best disposed of; and likewise that they take no harm by standing where they do. You’ll look in tomorrow, will you be so kind?”

“Every day. And the sooner I can get you into your new house, complete, the better you will be pleased, sir?”

“Well, it ain’t that I’m in a mortal hurry,” said Mr. Boffin; “only when you do pay people for looking alive, it’s as well to know that they are looking alive. Ain’t that your opinion?”

“Quite!” replied the Secretary; and so withdrew.

“Now,” said Mr. Boffin to himself; subsiding into his regular series of turns in the yard, “if I can make it comfortable with Wegg, my affairs will be going smooth.”

The man of low cunning had, of course, acquired a mastery over the man of high simplicity. The mean man had, of course, got the better of the generous man. How long such conquests last, is another matter; that they are achieved, is everyday experience, not even to be flourished away by Podsnappery itself. The undesigning Boffin had become so far immeshed by the wily Wegg that his mind misgave him he was a very designing man indeed in purposing to do more for Wegg. It seemed to him (so skilful was Wegg) that he was plotting darkly, when he was contriving to do the very thing that Wegg was plotting to get him to do. And thus, while he was mentally turning the kindest of kind faces on Wegg this morning, he was not absolutely sure but that he might somehow deserve the charge of turning his back on him.

For these reasons Mr. Boffin passed but anxious hours until evening came, and with it Mr. Wegg, stumping leisurely to the Roman Empire. At about this period Mr. Boffin had become profoundly interested in the fortunes of a great military leader known to him as Bully Sawyers, but perhaps better known to fame and easier of identification by the classical student, under the less Britannic name of Belisarius. Even this general’s career paled in interest for Mr. Boffin before the clearing of his conscience with Wegg; and hence, when that literary gentleman had according to custom eaten and drunk until he was all aglow, and when he took up his book with the usual chirping introduction, “And now, Mr. Boffin, sir, we’ll decline and we’ll fall!” Mr. Boffin stopped him.

“You remember, Wegg, when I first told you that I wanted to make a sort of offer to you?”

“Let me get on my considering cap, sir,” replied that gentleman, turning the open book face downward. “When you first told me that you wanted to make a sort of offer to me? Now let me think.” (as if there were the least necessity) “Yes, to be sure I do, Mr. Boffin. It was at my corner. To be sure it was! You had first asked me whether I liked your name, and candour had compelled a reply in the negative case. I little thought then, sir, how familiar that name would come to be!”

“I hope it will be more familiar still, Wegg.”

“Do you, Mr. Boffin? Much obliged to you, I’m sure. Is it your pleasure, sir, that we decline and we fall?” with a feint of taking up the book.

“Not just yet awhile, Wegg. In fact, I have got another offer to make you.”

Mr. Wegg (who had had nothing else in his mind for several nights) took off his spectacles with an air of bland surprise.

“And I hope you’ll like it, Wegg.”

“Thank you, sir,” returned that reticent individual. “I hope it may prove so. On all accounts, I am sure.” (This, as a philanthropic aspiration.)

“What do you think,” said Mr. Boffin, “of not keeping a stall, Wegg?”

“I think, sir,” replied Wegg, “that I should like to be shown the gentleman prepared to make it worth my while!”

“Here he is,” said Mr. Boffin.

Mr. Wegg was going to say, My Benefactor, and had said My Bene, when a grandiloquent change came over him.

“No, Mr. Boffin, not you sir. Anybody but you. Do not fear, Mr. Boffin, that I shall contaminate the premises which your gold has bought, with my lowly pursuits. I am aware, sir, that it would not become me to carry on my little traffic under the windows of your mansion. I have already thought of that, and taken my measures. No need to be bought out, sir. Would Stepney Fields be considered intrusive? If not remote enough, I can go remoter. In the words of the poet’s song, which I do not quite remember:

Thrown on the wide world, doom’d to wander and roam,

Bereft of my parents, bereft of a home,

A stranger to something and what’s his name joy,

Behold little Edmund the poor peasant boy.

—And equally,” said Mr. Wegg, repairing the want of direct application in the last line, “behold myself on a similar footing!”

“Now, Wegg, Wegg, Wegg,” remonstrated the excellent Boffin. “You are too sensitive.”

“I know I am, sir,” returned Wegg, with obstinate magnanimity. “I am acquainted with my faults. I always was, from a child, too sensitive.”

“But listen,” pursued the Golden Dustman; “hear me out, Wegg. You have taken it into your head that I mean to pension you off.”

“True, sir,” returned Wegg, still with an obstinate magnanimity. “I am acquainted with my faults. Far be it from me to deny them. I have taken it into my head.”

“But I don’t mean it.”

The assurance seemed hardly as comforting to Mr. Wegg, as Mr. Boffin intended it to be. Indeed, an appreciable elongation of his visage might have been observed as he replied:

“Don’t you, indeed, sir?”

“No,” pursued Mr. Boffin; “because that would express, as I understand it, that you were not going to do anything to deserve your money. But you are; you are.”

“That, sir,” replied Mr. Wegg, cheering up bravely, “is quite another pair of shoes. Now, my independence as a man is again elevated. Now, I no longer

Weep for the hour,

When to Boffinses bower,

The Lord of the valley with offers came;

Neither does the moon hide her light

From the heavens tonight,

And weep behind her clouds o’er any individual in the present company’s shame.

—Please to proceed, Mr. Boffin.”

“Thank’ee, Wegg, both for your confidence in me and for your frequent dropping into poetry; both of which is friendly. Well, then; my idea is, that you should give up your stall, and that I should put you into the Bower here, to keep it for us. It’s a pleasant spot; and a man with coals and candles and a pound a week might be in clover here.”

“Hem! Would that man, sir⁠—we will say that man, for the purposes of argueyment;” Mr. Wegg made a smiling demonstration of great perspicuity here; “would that man, sir, be expected to throw any other capacity in, or would any other capacity be considered extra? Now let us (for the purposes of argueyment) suppose that man to be engaged as a reader: say (for the purposes of argueyment) in the evening. Would that man’s pay as a reader in the evening, be added to the other amount, which, adopting your language, we will call clover; or would it merge into that amount, or clover?”

“Well,” said Mr. Boffin, “I suppose it would be added.”

“I suppose it would, sir. You are right, sir. Exactly my own views, Mr. Boffin.” Here Wegg rose, and balancing himself on his wooden leg, fluttered over his prey with extended hand. “Mr. Boffin, consider it done. Say no more, sir, not a word more. My stall and I are forever parted. The collection of ballads will in future be reserved for private study, with the object of making poetry tributary,”⁠—Wegg was so proud of having found this word, that he said it again, with a capital letter⁠—“Tributary, to friendship. Mr. Boffin, don’t allow yourself to be made uncomfortable by the pang it gives me to part from my stock and stall. Similar emotion was undergone by my own father when promoted for his merits from his occupation as a waterman to a situation under Government. His Christian name was Thomas. His words at the time (I was then an infant, but so deep was their impression on me, that I committed them to memory) were:

Then farewell my trim-built wherry,

Oars and coat and badge farewell!

Never more at Chelsea Ferry,

Shall your Thomas take a spell!

—My father got over it, Mr. Boffin, and so shall I.”

While delivering these valedictory observations, Wegg continually disappointed Mr. Boffin of his hand by flourishing it in the air. He now darted it at his patron, who took it, and felt his mind relieved of a great weight: observing that as they had arranged their joint affairs so satisfactorily, he would now be glad to look into those of Bully Sawyers. Which, indeed, had been left overnight in a very unpromising posture, and for whose impending expedition against the Persians the weather had been by no means favourable all day.

Mr. Wegg resumed his spectacles therefore. But Sawyers was not to be of the party that night; for, before Wegg had found his place, Mrs. Boffin’s tread was heard upon the stairs, so unusually heavy and hurried, that Mr. Boffin would have started up at the sound, anticipating some occurrence much out of the common course, even though she had not also called to him in an agitated tone.

Mr. Boffin hurried out, and found her on the dark staircase, panting, with a lighted candle in her hand.

“What’s the matter, my dear?”

“I don’t know; I don’t know; but I wish you’d come upstairs.”

Much surprised, Mr. Boffin went upstairs and accompanied Mrs. Boffin into their own room: a second large room on the same floor as the room in which the late proprietor had died. Mr. Boffin looked all round him, and saw nothing more unusual than various articles of folded linen on a large chest, which Mrs. Boffin had been sorting.

“What is it, my dear? Why, you’re frightened! You frightened?”

“I am not one of that sort certainly,” said Mrs. Boffin, as she sat down in a chair to recover herself, and took her husband’s arm; “but it’s very strange!”

“What is, my dear?”

“Noddy, the faces of the old man and the two children are all over the house tonight.”

“My dear?” exclaimed Mr. Boffin. But not without a certain uncomfortable sensation gliding down his back.

“I know it must sound foolish, and yet it is so.”

“Where did you think you saw them?”

“I don’t know that I think I saw them anywhere. I felt them.”

“Touched them?”

“No. Felt them in the air. I was sorting those things on the chest, and not thinking of the old man or the children, but singing to myself, when all in a moment I felt there was a face growing out of the dark.”

“What face?” asked her husband, looking about him.

“For a moment it was the old man’s, and then it got younger. For a moment it was both the children’s, and then it got older. For a moment it was a strange face, and then it was all the faces.”

“And then it was gone?”

“Yes; and then it was gone.”

“Where were you then, old lady?”

“Here, at the chest. Well; I got the better of it, and went on sorting, and went on singing to myself. ‘Lor!’ I says, ‘I’ll think of something else⁠—something comfortable⁠—and put it out of my head.’ So I thought of the new house and Miss Bella Wilfer, and was thinking at a great rate with that sheet there in my hand, when all of a sudden, the faces seemed to be hidden in among the folds of it and I let it drop.”

As it still lay on the floor where it had fallen, Mr. Boffin picked it up and laid it on the chest.

“And then you ran downstairs?”

“No. I thought I’d try another room, and shake it off. I says to myself, ‘I’ll go and walk slowly up and down the old man’s room three times, from end to end, and then I shall have conquered it.’ I went in with the candle in my hand; but the moment I came near the bed, the air got thick with them.”

“With the faces?”

“Yes, and I even felt that they were in the dark behind the side-door, and on the little staircase, floating away into the yard. Then, I called you.”

Mr. Boffin, lost in amazement, looked at Mrs. Boffin. Mrs. Boffin, lost in her own fluttered inability to make this out, looked at Mr. Boffin.

“I think, my dear,” said the Golden Dustman, “I’ll at once get rid of Wegg for the night, because he’s coming to inhabit the Bower, and it might be put into his head or somebody else’s, if he heard this and it got about that the house is haunted. Whereas we know better. Don’t we?”

“I never had the feeling in the house before,” said Mrs. Boffin; “and I have been about it alone at all hours of the night. I have been in the house when death was in it, and I have been in the house when murder was a new part of its adventures, and I never had a fright in it yet.”

“And won’t again, my dear,” said Mr. Boffin. “Depend upon it, it comes of thinking and dwelling on that dark spot.”

“Yes; but why didn’t it come before?” asked Mrs. Boffin.

This draft on Mr. Boffin’s philosophy could only be met by that gentleman with the remark that everything that is at all, must begin at some time. Then, tucking his wife’s arm under his own, that she might not be left by herself to be troubled again, he descended to release Wegg. Who, being something drowsy after his plentiful repast, and constitutionally of a shirking temperament, was well enough pleased to stump away, without doing what he had come to do, and was paid for doing.

Mr. Boffin then put on his hat, and Mrs. Boffin her shawl; and the pair, further provided with a bunch of keys and a lighted lantern, went all over the dismal house⁠—dismal everywhere, but in their own two rooms⁠—from cellar to cockloft. Not resting satisfied with giving that much chase to Mrs. Boffin’s fancies, they pursued them into the yard and outbuildings, and under the mounds. And setting the lantern, when all was done, at the foot of one of the mounds, they comfortably trotted to and fro for an evening walk, to the end that the murky cobwebs in Mrs. Boffin’s brain might be blown away.

“There, my dear!” said Mr. Boffin when they came in to supper. “That was the treatment, you see. Completely worked round, haven’t you?”

“Yes, deary,” said Mrs. Boffin, laying aside her shawl. “I’m not nervous any more. I’m not a bit troubled now. I’d go anywhere about the house the same as ever. But⁠—”

“Eh!” said Mr. Boffin.

“But I’ve only to shut my eyes.”

“And what then?”

“Why then,” said Mrs. Boffin, speaking with her eyes closed, and her left hand thoughtfully touching her brow, “then, there they are! The old man’s face, and it gets younger. The two children’s faces, and they get older. A face that I don’t know. And then all the faces!”

Opening her eyes again, and seeing her husband’s face across the table, she leaned forward to give it a pat on the cheek, and sat down to supper, declaring it to be the best face in the world.