Our Mutual Friend
apoplexy—besides iron-moulding your linen—and you’ll break my heart.’
Mr Boffin embraced his spouse for these words of wisdom, and then,
congratulating John Rokesmith on the brilliancy of his achievements,
gave him his hand in pledge of their new relations. So did Mrs Boffin.
‘Now,’ said Mr Boffin, who, in his frankness, felt that it did not
become him to have a gentleman in his employment five minutes, without
reposing some confidence in him, ‘you must be let a little more into our
affairs, Rokesmith. I mentioned to you, when I made your acquaintance,
or I might better say when you made mine, that Mrs Boffin’s inclinations
was setting in the way of Fashion, but that I didn’t know how
fashionable we might or might not grow. Well! Mrs Boffin has carried the
day, and we’re going in neck and crop for Fashion.’
‘I rather inferred that, sir,’ replied John Rokesmith, ‘from the scale
on which your new establishment is to be maintained.’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘it’s to be a Spanker. The fact is, my
literary man named to me that a house with which he is, as I may say,
connected—in which he has an interest—’
‘As property?’ inquired John Rokesmith.
‘Why no,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘not exactly that; a sort of a family tie.’
‘Association?’ the Secretary suggested.
‘Ah!’ said Mr Boffin. ‘Perhaps. Anyhow, he named to me that the house
had a board up, “This Eminently Aristocratic Mansion to be let or sold.”
Me and Mrs Boffin went to look at it, and finding it beyond a doubt
Eminently Aristocratic (though a trifle high and dull, which after all
may be part of the same thing) took it. My literary man was so friendly
as to drop into a charming piece of poetry on that occasion, in which he
complimented Mrs Boffin on coming into possession of—how did it go, my
dear?’
Mrs Boffin replied:
‘“The gay, the gay and festive scene,
The halls, the halls of dazzling light.”’
‘That’s it! And it was made neater by there really being two halls
in the house, a front ’un and a back ’un, besides the servants’.
He likewise dropped into a very pretty piece of poetry to be sure,
respecting the extent to which he would be willing to put himself out
of the way to bring Mrs Boffin round, in case she should ever get low
in her spirits in the house. Mrs Boffin has a wonderful memory. Will you
repeat it, my dear?’
Mrs Boffin complied, by reciting the verses in which this obliging offer
had been made, exactly as she had received them.
‘“I’ll tell thee how the maiden wept, Mrs Boffin,
When her true love was slain ma’am,
And how her broken spirit slept, Mrs Boffin,
And never woke again ma’am.
I’ll tell thee (if agreeable to Mr Boffin) how the steed drew
nigh,
And left his lord afar;
And if my tale (which I hope Mr Boffin might excuse) should
make you sigh,
I’ll strike the light guitar.”’
‘Correct to the letter!’ said Mr Boffin. ‘And I consider that the poetry
brings us both in, in a beautiful manner.’
The effect of the poem on the Secretary being evidently to astonish
him, Mr Boffin was confirmed in his high opinion of it, and was greatly
pleased.
‘Now, you see, Rokesmith,’ he went on, ‘a literary man—WITH a wooden
leg—is liable to jealousy. I shall therefore cast about for comfortable
ways and means of not calling up Wegg’s jealousy, but of keeping you in
your department, and keeping him in his.’
‘Lor!’ cried Mrs Boffin. ‘What I say is, the world’s wide enough for all
of us!’
‘So it is, my dear,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘when not literary. But when so,
not so. And I am bound to bear in mind that I took Wegg on, at a time
when I had no thought of being fashionable or of leaving the Bower. To
let him feel himself anyways slighted now, would be to be guilty of
a meanness, and to act like having one’s head turned by the halls of
dazzling light. Which Lord forbid! Rokesmith, what shall we say about
your living in the house?’
‘In this house?’
‘No, no. I have got other plans for this house. In the new house?’
‘That will be as you please, Mr Boffin. I hold myself quite at your
disposal. You know where I live at present.’
‘Well!’ said Mr Boffin, after considering the point; ‘suppose you keep
as you are for the present, and we’ll decide by-and-by. You’ll begin to
take charge at once, of all that’s going on in the new house, will you?’
‘Most willingly. I will begin this very day. Will you give me the
address?’
Mr Boffin repeated it, and the Secretary wrote it down in his
pocket-book. Mrs Boffin took the opportunity of his being so engaged,
to get a better observation of his face than she had yet taken. It
impressed her in his favour, for she nodded aside to Mr Boffin, ‘I like
him.’
‘I will see directly that everything is in train, Mr Boffin.’
‘Thank’ee. Being here, would you care at all to look round the Bower?’
‘I should greatly like it. I have heard so much of its story.’
‘Come!’ said Mr Boffin. And he and Mrs Boffin led the way.
A gloomy house the Bower, with sordid signs on it of having been,
through its long existence as Harmony Jail, in miserly holding. Bare of
paint, bare of paper on the walls, bare of furniture, bare of experience
of human life. Whatever is built by man for man’s occupation, must,
like natural creations, fulfil the intention of its existence, or soon
perish. This old house had wasted—more from desuetude than it would
have wasted from use, twenty years for one.
A certain leanness falls upon houses not sufficiently imbued with life
(as if they were nourished upon it), which was very noticeable here.
The staircase, balustrades, and rails, had a spare look—an air of being
denuded to the bone—which the panels of the walls and the jambs of the
doors and windows also bore. The scanty moveables partook of it; save
for the cleanliness of the place, the dust into which they were all
resolving would have lain thick on the floors; and those, both in colour
and in grain, were worn like old faces that had kept much alone.
The bedroom where the clutching old man had lost his grip on life, was
left as he had left it. There was the old grisly four-post bedstead,
without hangings, and with a jail-like upper rim of iron and spikes; and
there was the old patch-work counterpane. There was the tight-clenched
old bureau, receding atop like a bad and secret forehead; there was the
cumbersome old table with twisted legs, at the bed-side; and there
was the box upon it, in which the will had lain. A few old chairs with
patch-work covers, under which the more precious stuff to be preserved
had slowly lost its quality of colour without imparting pleasure to any
eye, stood against the wall. A hard family likeness was on all these
things.
‘The room was kept like this, Rokesmith,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘against the
son’s return. In short, everything in the house was kept exactly as it
came to us, for him to see and approve. Even now, nothing is changed
but our own room below-stairs that you have just left. When the son came
home for the last time in his life, and for the last time in his life
saw his father, it was most likely in this room that they met.’
As the Secretary looked all round it, his eyes rested on a side door in
a corner.
‘Another staircase,’ said Mr Boffin, unlocking the door, ‘leading down
into the yard. We’ll go down this way, as you may like to see the yard,
and it’s all in the road. When the son was a little child, it was up
and down these stairs that he mostly came and went to his father. He was
very timid of his father. I’ve seen him sit on these stairs, in his
shy way, poor child, many a time. Mr and Mrs Boffin have comforted him,
sitting with his little book on these stairs, often.’
‘Ah! And his poor sister too,’ said Mrs Boffin. ‘And here’s the sunny
place on the white wall where they one day measured one another. Their
own little hands wrote up their names here, only with a pencil; but the
names are here still, and the poor dears gone for ever.’
‘We must take care of the names, old lady,’ said Mr Boffin. ‘We must
take care of the names. They shan’t be rubbed out in our time, nor yet,
if we can help it, in the time after us. Poor little children!’
‘Ah, poor little children!’ said Mrs Boffin.
They had opened the door at the bottom of the staircase giving on the
yard, and they stood in the sunlight, looking at the scrawl of the two
unsteady childish hands two or three steps up the staircase. There was
something in this simple memento of a blighted childhood, and in the
tenderness of Mrs Boffin, that touched the Secretary.
Mr Boffin then showed his new man of business the Mounds, and his own
particular Mound which had been left him as his legacy under the will
before he acquired the whole estate.
‘It would have been enough for us,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘in case it had
pleased God to spare the last of those two young lives and sorrowful
deaths. We didn’t want the rest.’
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
to-morrow, 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 every-day 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,