Our Mutual Friend
the resolution might be thoroughly carried into practice, she even
changed the dress she wore, for that in which she had come to the grand
mansion. Even the bonnet she put on, was the bonnet that had mounted
into the Boffin chariot at Holloway.
‘Now, I am complete,’ said Bella. ‘It’s a little trying, but I have
steeped my eyes in cold water, and I won’t cry any more. You have been
a pleasant room to me, dear room. Adieu! We shall never see each other
again.’
With a parting kiss of her fingers to it, she softly closed the door and
went with a light foot down the great staircase, pausing and listening
as she went, that she might meet none of the household. No one chanced
to be about, and she got down to the hall in quiet. The door of the late
Secretary’s room stood open. She peeped in as she passed, and divined
from the emptiness of his table, and the general appearance of things,
that he was already gone. Softly opening the great hall door, and
softly closing it upon herself, she turned and kissed it on the
outside—insensible old combination of wood and iron that it
was!—before she ran away from the house at a swift pace.
‘That was well done!’ panted Bella, slackening in the next street, and
subsiding into a walk. ‘If I had left myself any breath to cry with, I
should have cried again. Now poor dear darling little Pa, you are going
to see your lovely woman unexpectedly.’
Chapter 16
THE FEAST OF THE THREE HOBGOBLINS
The City looked unpromising enough, as Bella made her way along its
gritty streets. Most of its money-mills were slackening sail, or had
left off grinding for the day. The master-millers had already departed,
and the journeymen were departing. There was a jaded aspect on
the business lanes and courts, and the very pavements had a weary
appearance, confused by the tread of a million of feet. There must be
hours of night to temper down the day’s distraction of so feverish a
place. As yet the worry of the newly-stopped whirling and grinding on
the part of the money-mills seemed to linger in the air, and the quiet
was more like the prostration of a spent giant than the repose of one
who was renewing his strength.
If Bella thought, as she glanced at the mighty Bank, how agreeable it
would be to have an hour’s gardening there, with a bright copper shovel,
among the money, still she was not in an avaricious vein. Much improved
in that respect, and with certain half-formed images which had little
gold in their composition, dancing before her bright eyes, she arrived
in the drug-flavoured region of Mincing Lane, with the sensation of
having just opened a drawer in a chemist’s shop.
The counting-house of Chicksey, Veneering, and Stobbles was pointed out
by an elderly female accustomed to the care of offices, who dropped upon
Bella out of a public-house, wiping her mouth, and accounted for its
humidity on natural principles well known to the physical sciences, by
explaining that she had looked in at the door to see what o’clock it
was. The counting-house was a wall-eyed ground floor by a dark gateway,
and Bella was considering, as she approached it, could there be any
precedent in the City for her going in and asking for R. Wilfer, when
whom should she see, sitting at one of the windows with the plate-glass
sash raised, but R. Wilfer himself, preparing to take a slight
refection.
On approaching nearer, Bella discerned that the refection had
the appearance of a small cottage-loaf and a pennyworth of milk.
Simultaneously with this discovery on her part, her father discovered
her, and invoked the echoes of Mincing Lane to exclaim ‘My gracious me!’
He then came cherubically flying out without a hat, and embraced her,
and handed her in. ‘For it’s after hours and I am all alone, my dear,’
he explained, ‘and am having—as I sometimes do when they are all
gone—a quiet tea.’
Looking round the office, as if her father were a captive and this his
cell, Bella hugged him and choked him to her heart’s content.
‘I never was so surprised, my dear!’ said her father. ‘I couldn’t
believe my eyes. Upon my life, I thought they had taken to lying! The
idea of your coming down the Lane yourself! Why didn’t you send the
footman down the Lane, my dear?’
‘I have brought no footman with me, Pa.’
‘Oh indeed! But you have brought the elegant turn-out, my love?’
‘No, Pa.’
‘You never can have walked, my dear?’
‘Yes, I have, Pa.’
He looked so very much astonished, that Bella could not make up her mind
to break it to him just yet.
‘The consequence is, Pa, that your lovely woman feels a little faint,
and would very much like to share your tea.’
The cottage loaf and the pennyworth of milk had been set forth on a
sheet of paper on the window-seat. The cherubic pocket-knife, with the
first bit of the loaf still on its point, lay beside them where it had
been hastily thrown down. Bella took the bit off, and put it in her
mouth. ‘My dear child,’ said her father, ‘the idea of your partaking of
such lowly fare! But at least you must have your own loaf and your own
penn’orth. One moment, my dear. The Dairy is just over the way and round
the corner.’
Regardless of Bella’s dissuasions he ran out, and quickly returned with
the new supply. ‘My dear child,’ he said, as he spread it on another
piece of paper before her, ‘the idea of a splendid—!’ and then looked
at her figure, and stopped short.
‘What’s the matter, Pa?’
‘—of a splendid female,’ he resumed more slowly, ‘putting up with
such accommodation as the present!—Is that a new dress you have on, my
dear?’
‘No, Pa, an old one. Don’t you remember it?’
‘Why, I THOUGHT I remembered it, my dear!’
‘You should, for you bought it, Pa.’
‘Yes, I THOUGHT I bought it my dear!’ said the cherub, giving himself a
little shake, as if to rouse his faculties.
‘And have you grown so fickle that you don’t like your own taste, Pa
dear?’
‘Well, my love,’ he returned, swallowing a bit of the cottage loaf with
considerable effort, for it seemed to stick by the way: ‘I should have
thought it was hardly sufficiently splendid for existing circumstances.’
‘And so, Pa,’ said Bella, moving coaxingly to his side instead of
remaining opposite, ‘you sometimes have a quiet tea here all alone? I
am not in the tea’s way, if I draw my arm over your shoulder like this,
Pa?’
‘Yes, my dear, and no, my dear. Yes to the first question, and Certainly
Not to the second. Respecting the quiet tea, my dear, why you see the
occupations of the day are sometimes a little wearing; and if there’s
nothing interposed between the day and your mother, why SHE is sometimes
a little wearing, too.’
‘I know, Pa.’
‘Yes, my dear. So sometimes I put a quiet tea at the window here, with
a little quiet contemplation of the Lane (which comes soothing), between
the day, and domestic—’
‘Bliss,’ suggested Bella, sorrowfully.
‘And domestic Bliss,’ said her father, quite contented to accept the
phrase.
Bella kissed him. ‘And it is in this dark dingy place of captivity,
poor dear, that you pass all the hours of your life when you are not at
home?’
‘Not at home, or not on the road there, or on the road here, my love.
Yes. You see that little desk in the corner?’
‘In the dark corner, furthest both from the light and from the
fireplace? The shabbiest desk of all the desks?’
‘Now, does it really strike you in that point of view, my dear?’ said
her father, surveying it artistically with his head on one side: ‘that’s
mine. That’s called Rumty’s Perch.’
‘Whose Perch?’ asked Bella with great indignation.
‘Rumty’s. You see, being rather high and up two steps they call it a
Perch. And they call ME Rumty.’
‘How dare they!’ exclaimed Bella.
‘They’re playful, Bella my dear; they’re playful. They’re more or less
younger than I am, and they’re playful. What does it matter? It might
be Surly, or Sulky, or fifty disagreeable things that I really shouldn’t
like to be considered. But Rumty! Lor, why not Rumty?’
To inflict a heavy disappointment on this sweet nature, which had been,
through all her caprices, the object of her recognition, love, and
admiration from infancy, Bella felt to be the hardest task of her hard
day. ‘I should have done better,’ she thought, ‘to tell him at first;
I should have done better to tell him just now, when he had some slight
misgiving; he is quite happy again, and I shall make him wretched.’
He was falling back on his loaf and milk, with the pleasantest
composure, and Bella stealing her arm a little closer about him, and at
the same time sticking up his hair with an irresistible propensity
to play with him founded on the habit of her whole life, had prepared
herself to say: ‘Pa dear, don’t be cast down, but I must tell you
something disagreeable!’ when he interrupted her in an unlooked-for
manner.
‘My gracious me!’ he exclaimed, invoking the Mincing Lane echoes as
before. ‘This is very extraordinary!’
‘What is, Pa?’
‘Why here’s Mr Rokesmith now!’
‘No, no, Pa, no,’ cried Bella, greatly flurried. ‘Surely not.’
‘Yes there is! Look here!’
Sooth to say, Mr Rokesmith not only passed the window, but came into the
counting-house. And not only came into the counting-house, but, finding
himself alone there with Bella and her father, rushed at Bella and
caught her in his arms, with the rapturous words ‘My dear, dear girl; my
gallant, generous, disinterested, courageous, noble girl!’ And not only
that even, (which one might have thought astonishment enough for one
dose), but Bella, after hanging her head for a moment, lifted it up and
laid it on his breast, as if that were her head’s chosen and lasting
resting-place!
‘I knew you would come to him, and I followed you,’ said Rokesmith. ‘My
love, my life! You ARE mine?’
To which Bella responded, ‘Yes, I AM yours if you think me worth
taking!’ And after that, seemed to shrink to next to nothing in the
clasp of his arms, partly because it was such a strong one on his part,
and partly because there was such a yielding to it on hers.
The cherub, whose hair would have done for itself under the influence of
this amazing spectacle, what Bella had just now done for it, staggered
back into the window-seat from which he had risen, and surveyed the pair
with his eyes dilated to their utmost.
‘But we must think of dear Pa,’ said Bella; ‘I haven’t told dear Pa; let
us speak to Pa.’ Upon which they turned to do so.
‘I wish first, my dear,’ remarked the cherub faintly, ‘that you’d have
the kindness to sprinkle me with a little milk, for I feel as if I
was—Going.’
In fact, the good little fellow had become alarmingly limp, and his
senses seemed to be rapidly escaping, from the knees upward. Bella
sprinkled him with kisses instead of milk, but gave him a little of that
article to drink; and he gradually revived under her caressing care.
‘We’ll break it to you gently, dearest Pa,’ said Bella.
‘My dear,’ returned the cherub, looking at them both, ‘you broke so much
in the first—Gush, if I may so express myself—that I think I am equal
to a good large breakage now.’
‘Mr Wilfer,’ said John Rokesmith, excitedly and joyfully, ‘Bella takes
me, though I have no fortune, even no present occupation; nothing but
what I can get in the life before us. Bella takes me!’
‘Yes, I should rather have inferred, my dear sir,’ returned the cherub
feebly, ‘that Bella took you, from what I have within these few minutes
remarked.’
‘You don’t know, Pa,’ said Bella, ‘how ill I have used him!’
‘You don’t know, sir,’ said Rokesmith, ‘what a heart she has!’
‘You don’t know, Pa,’ said Bella, ‘what a shocking creature I was
growing, when he saved me from myself!’
‘You don’t know, sir,’ said Rokesmith, ‘what a sacrifice she has made
for me!’