Our Mutual Friend
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 a-glow, 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 to-night,
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 for ever
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 over-night 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 up-stairs.’
Much surprised, Mr Boffin went up stairs 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 to-night.’
‘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 down stairs?’
‘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 cock-loft. Not resting satisfied with giving that