Our Mutual Friend
Sloppy held it up, for his edification.
‘That Dutch bottle, scoundrel, contained the latest will of the many
wills made by my unhappy self-tormenting father. That will gives
everything absolutely to my noble benefactor and yours, Mr Boffin,
excluding and reviling me, and my sister (then already dead of a broken
heart), by name. That Dutch bottle was found by my noble benefactor and
yours, after he entered on possession of the estate. That Dutch bottle
distressed him beyond measure, because, though I and my sister were
both no more, it cast a slur upon our memory which he knew we had
done nothing in our miserable youth, to deserve. That Dutch bottle,
therefore, he buried in the Mound belonging to him, and there it lay
while you, you thankless wretch, were prodding and poking—often very
near it, I dare say. His intention was, that it should never see the
light; but he was afraid to destroy it, lest to destroy such a document,
even with his great generous motive, might be an offence at law. After
the discovery was made here who I was, Mr Boffin, still restless on the
subject, told me, upon certain conditions impossible for such a hound as
you to appreciate, the secret of that Dutch bottle. I urged upon him the
necessity of its being dug up, and the paper being legally produced and
established. The first thing you saw him do, and the second thing has
been done without your knowledge. Consequently, the paper now rattling
in your hand as I shake you—and I should like to shake the life out
of you—is worth less than the rotten cork of the Dutch bottle, do you
understand?’
Judging from the fallen countenance of Silas as his head wagged
backwards and forwards in a most uncomfortable manner, he did
understand.
‘Now, scoundrel,’ said John Harmon, taking another sailor-like turn on
his cravat and holding him in his corner at arms’ length, ‘I shall make
two more short speeches to you, because I hope they will torment you.
Your discovery was a genuine discovery (such as it was), for nobody had
thought of looking into that place. Neither did we know you had made it,
until Venus spoke to Mr Boffin, though I kept you under good observation
from my first appearance here, and though Sloppy has long made it
the chief occupation and delight of his life, to attend you like your
shadow. I tell you this, that you may know we knew enough of you to
persuade Mr Boffin to let us lead you on, deluded, to the last possible
moment, in order that your disappointment might be the heaviest possible
disappointment. That’s the first short speech, do you understand?’
Here, John Harmon assisted his comprehension with another shake.
‘Now, scoundrel,’ he pursued, ‘I am going to finish. You supposed me
just now, to be the possessor of my father’s property.—So I am. But
through any act of my father’s, or by any right I have? No. Through the
munificence of Mr Boffin. The conditions that he made with me, before
parting with the secret of the Dutch bottle, were, that I should take
the fortune, and that he should take his Mound and no more. I owe
everything I possess, solely to the disinterestedness, uprightness,
tenderness, goodness (there are no words to satisfy me) of Mr and Mrs
Boffin. And when, knowing what I knew, I saw such a mud-worm as you
presume to rise in this house against this noble soul, the wonder is,’
added John Harmon through his clenched teeth, and with a very ugly turn
indeed on Wegg’s cravat, ‘that I didn’t try to twist your head off,
and fling THAT out of window! So. That’s the last short speech, do you
understand?’
Silas, released, put his hand to his throat, cleared it, and looked as
if he had a rather large fishbone in that region. Simultaneously with
this action on his part in his corner, a singular, and on the surface
an incomprehensible, movement was made by Mr Sloppy: who began backing
towards Mr Wegg along the wall, in the manner of a porter or heaver who
is about to lift a sack of flour or coals.
‘I am sorry, Wegg,’ said Mr Boffin, in his clemency, ‘that my old lady
and I can’t have a better opinion of you than the bad one we are forced
to entertain. But I shouldn’t like to leave you, after all said and
done, worse off in life than I found you. Therefore say in a word,
before we part, what it’ll cost to set you up in another stall.’
‘And in another place,’ John Harmon struck in. ‘You don’t come outside
these windows.’
‘Mr Boffin,’ returned Wegg in avaricious humiliation: ‘when I first had
the honour of making your acquaintance, I had got together a collection
of ballads which was, I may say, above price.’
‘Then they can’t be paid for,’ said John Harmon, ‘and you had better not
try, my dear sir.’
‘Pardon me, Mr Boffin,’ resumed Wegg, with a malignant glance in the
last speaker’s direction, ‘I was putting the case to you, who, if my
senses did not deceive me, put the case to me. I had a very choice
collection of ballads, and there was a new stock of gingerbread in the
tin box. I say no more, but would rather leave it to you.’
‘But it’s difficult to name what’s right,’ said Mr Boffin uneasily, with
his hand in his pocket, ‘and I don’t want to go beyond what’s right,
because you really have turned out such a very bad fellow. So artful,
and so ungrateful you have been, Wegg; for when did I ever injure you?’
‘There was also,’ Mr Wegg went on, in a meditative manner, ‘a errand
connection, in which I was much respected. But I would not wish to be
deemed covetous, and I would rather leave it to you, Mr Boffin.’
‘Upon my word, I don’t know what to put it at,’ the Golden Dustman
muttered.
‘There was likewise,’ resumed Wegg, ‘a pair of trestles, for which alone
a Irish person, who was deemed a judge of trestles, offered five and
six—a sum I would not hear of, for I should have lost by it—and there
was a stool, a umbrella, a clothes-horse, and a tray. But I leave it to
you, Mr Boffin.’
The Golden Dustman seeming to be engaged in some abstruse calculation,
Mr Wegg assisted him with the following additional items.
‘There was, further, Miss Elizabeth, Master George, Aunt Jane, and Uncle
Parker. Ah! When a man thinks of the loss of such patronage as that;
when a man finds so fair a garden rooted up by pigs; he finds it hard
indeed, without going high, to work it into money. But I leave it wholly
to you, sir.’
Mr Sloppy still continued his singular, and on the surface his
incomprehensible, movement.
‘Leading on has been mentioned,’ said Wegg with a melancholy air, ‘and
it’s not easy to say how far the tone of my mind may have been lowered
by unwholesome reading on the subject of Misers, when you was leading me
and others on to think you one yourself, sir. All I can say is, that
I felt my tone of mind a lowering at the time. And how can a man put a
price upon his mind! There was likewise a hat just now. But I leave the
ole to you, Mr Boffin.’
‘Come!’ said Mr Boffin. ‘Here’s a couple of pound.’
‘In justice to myself, I couldn’t take it, sir.’
The words were but out of his mouth when John Harmon lifted his finger,
and Sloppy, who was now close to Wegg, backed to Wegg’s back, stooped,
grasped his coat collar behind with both hands, and deftly swung him
up like the sack of flour or coals before mentioned. A countenance of
special discontent and amazement Mr Wegg exhibited in this position,
with his buttons almost as prominently on view as Sloppy’s own, and
with his wooden leg in a highly unaccommodating state. But, not for many
seconds was his countenance visible in the room; for, Sloppy lightly
trotted out with him and trotted down the staircase, Mr Venus attending
to open the street door. Mr Sloppy’s instructions had been to deposit
his burden in the road; but, a scavenger’s cart happening to stand
unattended at the corner, with its little ladder planted against the
wheel, Mr S. found it impossible to resist the temptation of shooting Mr
Silas Wegg into the cart’s contents. A somewhat difficult feat, achieved
with great dexterity, and with a prodigious splash.
Chapter 15
WHAT WAS CAUGHT IN THE TRAPS THAT WERE SET
How Bradley Headstone had been racked and riven in his mind since the
quiet evening when by the river-side he had risen, as it were, out of
the ashes of the Bargeman, none but he could have told. Not even he
could have told, for such misery can only be felt.
First, he had to bear the combined weight of the knowledge of what he
had done, of that haunting reproach that he might have done it so much
better, and of the dread of discovery. This was load enough to crush
him, and he laboured under it day and night. It was as heavy on him in
his scanty sleep, as in his red-eyed waking hours. It bore him down with
a dread unchanging monotony, in which there was not a moment’s variety.
The overweighted beast of burden, or the overweighted slave, can for
certain instants shift the physical load, and find some slight respite
even in enforcing additional pain upon such a set of muscles or such
a limb. Not even that poor mockery of relief could the wretched man
obtain, under the steady pressure of the infernal atmosphere into which
he had entered.
Time went by, and no visible suspicion dogged him; time went by, and
in such public accounts of the attack as were renewed at intervals,
he began to see Mr Lightwood (who acted as lawyer for the injured man)
straying further from the fact, going wider of the issue, and evidently
slackening in his zeal. By degrees, a glimmering of the cause of this
began to break on Bradley’s sight. Then came the chance meeting with Mr
Milvey at the railway station (where he often lingered in his leisure
hours, as a place where any fresh news of his deed would be circulated,
or any placard referring to it would be posted), and then he saw in the
light what he had brought about.
For, then he saw that through his desperate attempt to separate those
two for ever, he had been made the means of uniting them. That he had
dipped his hands in blood, to mark himself a miserable fool and tool.
That Eugene Wrayburn, for his wife’s sake, set him aside and left him to
crawl along his blasted course. He thought of Fate, or Providence, or
be the directing Power what it might, as having put a fraud upon
him—overreached him—and in his impotent mad rage bit, and tore, and
had his fit.
New assurance of the truth came upon him in the next few following days,
when it was put forth how the wounded man had been married on his bed,
and to whom, and how, though always in a dangerous condition, he was a
shade better. Bradley would far rather have been seized for his murder,
than he would have read that passage, knowing himself spared, and
knowing why.
But, not to be still further defrauded and overreached—which he would
be, if implicated by Riderhood, and punished by the law for his abject
failure, as though it had been a success—he kept close in his school
during the day, ventured out warily at night, and went no more to the
railway station. He examined the advertisements in the newspapers for
any sign that Riderhood acted on his hinted threat of so summoning him
to renew their acquaintance, but found none. Having paid him handsomely
for the support and accommodation he had had at the Lock House, and
knowing him to be a very ignorant man who could not write, he began to
doubt whether he was to be feared at all, or whether they need ever meet
again.
All this time, his mind was never off the rack, and his raging sense of
having been made to fling himself across the chasm which divided those
two, and bridge it over for their coming together, never cooled down.
This horrible condition brought on other fits. He could not have said
how many, or when; but he saw in the faces of his pupils that they had