Чарльз Диккенс
Our Mutual Friend
It very soon became unnecessary to tell Bella what to look for, and an understanding was established between her and Mr Boffin that she was always to look for Lives of Misers. Morning after morning they roamed about the town together, pursuing this singular research. Miserly literature not being abundant, the proportion of failures to successes may have been as a hundred to one; still Mr Boffin, never wearied, remained as avaricious for misers as he had been at the first onset. It was curious that Bella never saw the books about the house, nor did she ever hear from Mr Boffin one word of reference to their contents. He seemed to save up his Misers as they had saved up their money. As they had been greedy for it, and secret about it, and had hidden it, so he was greedy for them, and secret about them, and hid them. But beyond all doubt it was to be noticed, and was by Bella very clearly noticed, that, as he pursued the acquisition of those dismal records with the ardour of Don Quixote for his books of chivalry, he began to spend his money with a more sparing hand. And often when he came out of a shop with some new account of one of those wretched lunatics, she would almost shrink from the sly dry chuckle with which he would take her arm again and trot away. It did not appear that Mrs Boffin knew of this taste. He made no allusion to it, except in the morning walks when he and Bella were always alone; and Bella, partly under the impression that he took her into his confidence by implication, and partly in remembrance of Mrs Boffin’s anxious face that night, held the same reserve.
While these occurrences were in progress, Mrs Lammle made the discovery that Bella had a fascinating influence over her. The Lammles, originally presented by the dear Veneerings, visited the Boffins on all grand occasions, and Mrs Lammle had not previously found this out; but now the knowledge came upon her all at once. It was a most extraordinary thing (she said to Mrs Boffin); she was foolishly susceptible of the power of beauty, but it wasn’t altogether that; she never had been able to resist a natural grace of manner, but it wasn’t altogether that; it was more than that, and there was no name for the indescribable extent and degree to which she was captivated by this charming girl.
This charming girl having the words repeated to her by Mrs Boffin (who was proud of her being admired, and would have done anything to give her pleasure), naturally recognized in Mrs Lammle a woman of penetration and taste. Responding to the sentiments, by being very gracious to Mrs Lammle, she gave that lady the means of so improving her opportunity, as that the captivation became reciprocal, though always wearing an appearance of greater sobriety on Bella’s part than on the enthusiastic Sophronia’s. Howbeit, they were so much together that, for a time, the Boffin chariot held Mrs Lammle oftener than Mrs Boffin: a preference of which the latter worthy soul was not in the least jealous, placidly remarking, ‘Mrs Lammle is a younger companion for her than I am, and Lor! she’s more fashionable.’
But between Bella Wilfer and Georgiana Podsnap there was this one difference, among many others, that Bella was in no danger of being captivated by Alfred. She distrusted and disliked him. Indeed, her perception was so quick, and her observation so sharp, that after all she mistrusted his wife too, though with her giddy vanity and wilfulness she squeezed the mistrust away into a corner of her mind, and blocked it up there.
Mrs Lammle took the friendliest interest in Bella’s making a good match. Mrs Lammle said, in a sportive way, she really must show her beautiful Bella what kind of wealthy creatures she and Alfred had on hand, who would as one man fall at her feet enslaved. Fitting occasion made, Mrs Lammle accordingly produced the most passable of those feverish, boastful, and indefinably loose gentlemen who were always lounging in and out of the City on questions of the Bourse and Greek and Spanish and India and Mexican and par and premium and discount and three-quarters and seven-eighths. Who in their agreeable manner did homage to Bella as if she were a compound of fine girl, thorough-bred horse, well-built drag, and remarkable pipe. But without the least effect, though even Mr Fledgeby’s attractions were cast into the scale.
‘I fear, Bella dear,’ said Mrs Lammle one day in the chariot, ‘that you will be very hard to please.’
‘I don’t expect to be pleased, dear,’ said Bella, with a languid turn of her eyes.
‘Truly, my love,’ returned Sophronia, shaking her head, and smiling her best smile, ‘it would not be very easy to find a man worthy of your attractions.’
‘The question is not a man, my dear,’ said Bella, coolly, ‘but an establishment.’
‘My love,’ returned Mrs Lammle, ‘your prudence amazes me – where did you study life so well! – you are right. In such a case as yours, the object is a fitting establishment. You could not descend to an inadequate one from Mr Boffin’s house, and even if your beauty alone could not command it, it is to be assumed that Mr and Mrs Boffin will – ’
‘Oh! they have already,’ Bella interposed.
‘No! Have they really?’
A little vexed by a suspicion that she had spoken precipitately, and withal a little defiant of her own vexation, Bella determined not to retreat.
‘That is to say,’ she explained, ‘they have told me they mean to portion me as their adopted child, if you mean that. But don’t mention it.’
‘Mention it!’ replied Mrs Lammle, as if she were full of awakened feeling at the suggestion of such an impossibility. ‘Men-tion it!’
‘I don’t mind telling you, Mrs Lammle – ’ Bella began again.
‘My love, say Sophronia, or I must not say Bella.’
With a little short, petulant ‘Oh!’ Bella complied. ‘Oh! – Sophronia then – I don’t mind telling you, Sophronia, that I am convinced I have no heart, as people call it; and that I think that sort of thing is nonsense.’
‘Brave girl!’ murmured Mrs Lammle.
‘And so,’ pursued Bella, ‘as to seeking to please myself, I don’t; except in the one respect I have mentioned. I am indifferent otherwise.’
‘But you can’t help pleasing, Bella,’ said Mrs Lammle, rallying her with an arch look and her best smile, ‘you can’t help making a proud and an admiring husband. You may not care to please yourself, and you may not care to please him, but you are not a free agent as to pleasing: you are forced to do that, in spite of yourself, my dear; so it may be a question whether you may not as well please yourself too, if you can.’
Now, the very grossness of this flattery put Bella upon proving that she actually did please in spite of herself. She had a misgiving that she was doing wrong – though she had an indistinct foreshadowing that some harm might come of it thereafter, she little thought what consequences it would really bring about – but she went on with her confidence.
‘Don’t talk of pleasing in spite of one’s self, dear,’ said Bella. ‘I have had enough of that.’
‘Ay?’ cried Mrs Lammle. ‘Am I already corroborated, Bella?’
‘Never mind, Sophronia, we will not speak of it any more. Don’t ask me about it.’
This plainly meaning Do ask me about it, Mrs Lammle did as she was requested.
‘Tell me, Bella. Come, my dear. What provoking burr has been inconveniently attracted to the charming skirts, and with difficulty shaken off?’
‘Provoking indeed,’ said Bella, ‘and no burr to boast of! But don’t ask me.’
‘Shall I guess?’
‘You would never guess. What would you say to our Secretary?’
‘My dear! The hermit Secretary, who creeps up and down the back stairs, and is never seen!’
‘I don’t know about his creeping up and down the back stairs,’ said Bella, rather contemptuously, ‘further than knowing that he does no such thing; and as to his never being seen, I should be content never to have seen him, though he is quite as visible as you are. But I pleased him (for my sins) and he had the presumption to tell me so.’
‘The man never made a declaration to you, my dear Bella!’
‘Are you sure of that, Sophronia?’ said Bella. ‘I am not. In fact, I am sure of the contrary.’
‘The man must be mad,’ said Mrs Lammle, with a kind of resignation.
‘He appeared to be in his senses,’ returned Bella, tossing her head, ‘and he had plenty to say for himself. I told him my opinion of his declaration and his conduct, and dismissed him. Of course this has all been very inconvenient to me, and very disagreeable. It has remained a secret, however. That word reminds me to observe, Sophronia, that I have glided on into telling you the secret, and that I rely upon you never to mention it.’
‘Mention it!’ repeated Mrs Lammle with her former feeling. ‘Men-tion it!’
This time Sophronia was so much in earnest that she found it necessary to bend forward in the carriage and give Bella a kiss. A Judas order of kiss; for she thought, while she yet pressed Bella’s hand after giving it, ‘Upon your own showing, you vain heartless girl, puffed up by the doting folly of a dustman, I need have no relenting towards you. If my husband, who sends me here, should form any schemes for making you a victim, I should certainly not cross him again.’ In those very same moments, Bella was thinking, ‘Why am I always at war with myself? Why have I told, as if upon compulsion, what I knew all along I ought to have withheld? Why am I making a friend of this woman beside me, in spite of the whispers against her that I hear in my heart?’
As usual, there was no answer in the looking-glass when she got home and referred these questions to it. Perhaps if she had consulted some better oracle, the result might have been more satisfactory; but she did not, and all things consequent marched the march before them.
On one point connected with the watch she kept on Mr Boffin, she felt very inquisitive, and that was the question whether the Secretary watched him too, and followed the sure and steady change in him, as she did? Her very limited intercourse with Mr Rokesmith rendered this hard to find out. Their communication now, at no time extended beyond the preservation of commonplace appearances before Mr and Mrs Boffin; and if Bella and the Secretary were ever left alone together by any chance, he immediately withdrew. She consulted his face when she could do so covertly, as she worked or read, and could make nothing of it. He looked subdued; but he had acquired a strong command of feature, and, whenever Mr Boffin spoke to him in Bella’s presence, or whatever revelation of himself Mr Boffin made, the Secretary’s face changed no more than a wall. A slightly knitted brow, that expressed nothing but an almost mechanical attention, and a compression of the mouth, that might have been a guard against a scornful smile – these she saw from morning to night, from day to day, from week to week, monotonous, unvarying, set, as in a piece of sculpture.
The worst of the matter was, that it thus fell out insensibly – and most provokingly, as Bella complained to herself, in her impetuous little manner – that her observation of Mr Boffin involved a continual observation of Mr Rokesmith. ‘Won’t that extract a look from him?’ – ‘Can it be possible that makes no impression on him?’ Such questions Bella would propose to herself, often as many times in a day as there were hours in it. Impossible to know. Always the same fixed face.
‘Can he be so base as to sell his very nature for two hundred a year?’ Bella would think. And then, ‘But why not? It’s a mere question of price with others besides him. I suppose I would sell mine, if I could get enough for it.’ And so she would come round again to the war with herself.
A kind of illegibility, though a different kind, stole over Mr Boffin’s face. Its old simplicity of expression got masked by a certain craftiness that assimilated even his good-humour to itself. His very smile was cunning, as if he had been studying smiles among the portraits of his misers. Saving an occasional burst of impatience, or coarse assertion of his mastery, his good-humour remained to him, but it had now a sordid alloy of distrust; and though his eyes should twinkle and all his face should laugh, he would sit holding himself in his own arms, as if he had an inclination to hoard himself up, and must always grudgingly stand on the defensive.
What with taking heed of these two faces, and what with feeling conscious that the stealthy occupation must set some mark on her own, Bella soon began to think that there was not a candid or a natural face among them all but Mrs Boffin’s. None the less because it was far less radiant than of yore, faithfully reflecting in its anxiety and regret every line of change in the Golden Dustman’s.
‘Rokesmith,’ said Mr Boffin one evening when they were all in his room again, and he and the Secretary had been going over some accounts, ‘I am spending too much money. Or leastways, you are spending too much for me.’
‘You are rich, sir.’
‘I am not,’ said Mr Boffin.
The sharpness of the retort was next to telling the Secretary that he lied. But it brought no change of expression into the set face.
‘I tell you I am not rich,’ repeated Mr Boffin, ‘and I won’t have it.’
‘You are not rich, sir?’ repeated the Secretary, in measured words.
‘Well,’ returned Mr Boffin, ‘if I am, that’s my business. I am not going to spend at this rate, to please you, or anybody. You wouldn’t like it, if it was your money.’
‘Even in that impossible case, sir, I – ’
‘Hold your tongue!’ said Mr Boffin. ‘You oughtn’t to like it in any case. There! I didn’t mean to be rude, but you put me out so, and after all I’m master. I didn’t intend to tell you to hold your tongue. I beg your pardon. Don’t hold your tongue. Only, don’t contradict. Did you ever come across the life of Mr Elwes?’ referring to his favourite subject at last.
‘The miser?’
‘Ah, people called him a miser. People are always calling other people something. Did you ever read about him?’
‘I think so.’
‘He never owned to being rich, and yet he might have bought me twice over. Did you ever hear of Daniel Dancer?’
‘Another miser? Yes.’
‘He was a good ‘un,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘and he had a sister worthy of him. They never called themselves rich neither. If they had called themselves rich, most likely they wouldn’t have been so.’
‘They lived and died very miserably. Did they not, sir?’
‘No, I don’t know that they did,’ said Mr Boffin, curtly.
‘Then they are not the Misers I mean. Those abject wretches – ’
‘Don’t call names, Rokesmith,’ said Mr Boffin.
‘ – That exemplary brother and sister – lived and died in the foulest and filthiest degradation.’
‘They pleased themselves,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘and I suppose they could have done no more if they had spent their money. But however, I ain’t going to fling mine away. Keep the expenses down. The fact is, you ain’t enough here, Rokesmith. It wants constant attention in the littlest things. Some of us will be dying in a workhouse next.’
‘As the persons you have cited,’ quietly remarked the Secretary, ‘thought they would, if I remember, sir.’
‘And very creditable in ‘em too,’ said Mr Boffin. ‘Very independent in ‘em! But never mind them just now. Have you given notice to quit your lodgings?’
‘Under your direction, I have, sir.’
‘Then I tell you what,’ said Mr Boffin; ‘pay the quarter’s rent – pay the quarter’s rent, it’ll be the cheapest thing in the end – and come here at once, so that you may be always on the spot, day and night, and keep the expenses down. You’ll charge the quarter’s rent to me, and we must try and save it somewhere. You’ve got some lovely furniture; haven’t you?’
‘The furniture in my rooms is my own.’
‘Then we shan’t have to buy any for you. In case you was to think it,’ said Mr Boffin, with a look of peculiar shrewdness, ‘so honourably independent in you as to make it a relief to your mind, to make that furniture over to me in the light of a set-off against the quarter’s rent, why ease your mind, ease your mind. I don’t ask it, but I won’t stand in your way if you should consider it due to yourself. As to your room, choose any empty room at the top of the house.’
‘Any empty room will do for me,’ said the Secretary.
‘You can take your pick,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘and it’ll be as good as eight or ten shillings a week added to your income. I won’t deduct for it; I look to you to make it up handsomely by keeping the expenses down. Now, if you’ll show a light, I’ll come to your office-room and dispose of a letter or two.’
On that clear, generous face of Mrs Boffin’s, Bella had seen such traces of a pang at the heart while this dialogue was being held, that she had not the courage to turn her eyes to it when they were left alone. Feigning to be intent on her embroidery, she sat plying her needle until her busy hand was stopped by Mrs Boffin’s hand being lightly laid upon it. Yielding to the touch, she felt her hand carried to the good soul’s lips, and felt a tear fall on it.
‘Oh, my loved husband!’ said Mrs Boffin. ‘This is hard to see and hear. But my dear Bella, believe me that in spite of all the change in him, he is the best of men.’
He came back, at the moment when Bella had taken the hand comfortingly between her own.
‘Eh?’ said he, mistrustfully looking in at the door. ‘What’s she telling you?’
‘She is only praising you, sir,’ said Bella.
‘Praising me? You are sure? Not blaming me for standing on my own defence against a crew of plunderers, who could suck me dry by driblets? Not blaming me for getting a little hoard together?’
He came up to them, and his wife folded her hands upon his shoulder, and shook her head as she laid it on her hands.
‘There, there, there!’ urged Mr Boffin, not unkindly. ‘Don’t take on, old lady.’
‘But I can’t bear to see you so, my dear.’
‘Nonsense! Recollect we are not our old selves. Recollect, we must scrunch or be scrunched. Recollect, we must hold our own. Recollect, money makes money. Don’t you be uneasy, Bella, my child; don’t you be doubtful. The more I save, the more you shall have.’
Bella thought it was well for his wife that she was musing with her affectionate face on his shoulder; for there was a cunning light in his eyes as he said all this, which seemed to cast a disagreeable illumination on the change in him, and make it morally uglier.
Chapter 6
THE GOLDEN DUSTMAN FALLS INTO WORSE COMPANY
It had come to pass that Mr Silas Wegg now rarely attended the minion of fortune and the worm of the hour, at his (the worm’s and minion’s) own house, but lay under general instructions to await him within a certain margin of hours at the Bower. Mr Wegg took this arrangement in great dudgeon, because the appointed hours were evening hours, and those he considered precious to the progress of the friendly move. But it was quite in character, he bitterly remarked to Mr Venus, that the upstart who had trampled on those eminent creatures, Miss Elizabeth, Master George, Aunt Jane, and Uncle Parker, should oppress his literary man.
The Roman Empire having worked out its destruction, Mr Boffin next appeared in a cab with Rollin’s Ancient History, which valuable work being found to possess lethargic properties, broke down, at about the period when the whole of the army of Alexander the Macedonian (at that time about forty thousand strong) burst into tears simultaneously, on his being taken with a shivering fit after bathing. The Wars of the Jews, likewise languishing under Mr Wegg’s generalship, Mr Boffin arrived in another cab with Plutarch: whose Lives he found in the sequel extremely entertaining, though he hoped Plutarch might not expect him to believe them all. What to believe, in the course of his reading, was Mr Boffin’s chief literary difficulty indeed; for some time he was divided in his mind between half, all, or none; at length, when he decided, as a moderate man, to compound with half, the question still remained, which half? And that stumbling-block he never got over.
One evening, when Silas Wegg had grown accustomed to the arrival of his patron in a cab, accompanied by some profane historian charged with unutterable names of incomprehensible peoples, of impossible descent, waging wars any number of years and syllables long, and carrying illimitable hosts and riches about, with the greatest ease, beyond the confines of geography – one evening the usual time passed by, and no patron appeared. After half an hour’s grace, Mr Wegg proceeded to the outer gate, and there executed a whistle, conveying to Mr Venus, if perchance within hearing, the tidings of his being at home and disengaged. Forth from the shelter of a neighbouring wall, Mr Venus then emerged.
‘Brother in arms,’ said Mr Wegg, in excellent spirits, ‘welcome!’
In return, Mr Venus gave him a rather dry good evening.
‘Walk in, brother,’ said Silas, clapping him on the shoulder, ‘and take your seat in my chimley corner; for what says the ballad?
“No malice to dread, sir,
And no falsehood to fear,
But truth to delight me, Mr Venus,
And I forgot what to cheer.
Li toddle de om dee.
And something to guide,
My ain fireside, sir,
My ain fireside.”’
With this quotation (depending for its neatness rather on the spirit than the words), Mr Wegg conducted his guest to his hearth.
‘And you come, brother,’ said Mr Wegg, in a hospitable glow, ‘you come like I don’t know what – exactly like it – I shouldn’t know you from it – shedding a halo all around you.’
‘What kind of halo?’ asked Mr Venus.
‘’Ope sir,’ replied Silas. ‘That’s your halo.’
Mr Venus appeared doubtful on the point, and looked rather discontentedly at the fire.
‘We’ll devote the evening, brother,’ exclaimed Wegg, ‘to prosecute our friendly move. And arterwards, crushing a flowing wine-cup – which I allude to brewing rum and water – we’ll pledge one another. For what says the Poet?
“And you needn’t Mr Venus be your black bottle,
For surely I’ll be mine,
And we’ll take a glass with a slice of lemon in it to which
you’re partial,
For auld lang syne.”’
This flow of quotation and hospitality in Wegg indicated his observation of some little querulousness on the part of Venus.
‘Why, as to the friendly move,’ observed the last-named gentleman, rubbing his knees peevishly, ‘one of my objections to it is, that it don’t move.’
‘Rome, brother,’ returned Wegg: ‘a city which (it may not be generally known) originated in twins and a wolf; and ended in Imperial marble: wasn’t built in a day.’
‘Did I say it was?’ asked Venus.
‘No, you did not, brother. Well-inquired.’
‘But I do say,’ proceeded Venus, ‘that I am taken from among my trophies of anatomy, am called upon to exchange my human warious for mere coal-ashes warious, and nothing comes of it. I think I must give up.’
‘No, sir!’ remonstrated Wegg, enthusiastically. ‘No, Sir!
“Charge, Chester, charge,
On, Mr Venus, on!”
Never say die, sir! A man of your mark!’
‘It’s not so much saying it that I object to,’ returned Mr Venus, ‘as doing it. And having got to do it whether or no, I can’t afford to waste my time on groping for nothing in cinders.’
‘But think how little time you have given to the move, sir, after all,’ urged Wegg. ‘Add the evenings so occupied together, and what do they come to? And you, sir, harmonizer with myself in opinions, views, and feelings, you with the patience to fit together on wires the whole framework of society – I allude to the human skelinton – you to give in so soon!’
‘I don’t like it,’ returned Mr Venus moodily, as he put his head between his knees and stuck up his dusty hair. ‘And there’s no encouragement to go on.’
‘Not them Mounds without,’ said Mr Wegg, extending his right hand with an air of solemn reasoning, ‘encouragement? Not them Mounds now looking down upon us?’
‘They’re too big,’ grumbled Venus. ‘What’s a scratch here and a scrape there, a poke in this place and a dig in the other, to them. Besides; what have we found?’
‘What have we found?’ cried Wegg, delighted to be able to acquiesce. ‘Ah! There I grant you, comrade. Nothing. But on the contrary, comrade, what may we find? There you’ll grant me. Anything.’
‘I don’t like it,’ pettishly returned Venus as before. ‘I came into it without enough consideration. And besides again. Isn’t your own Mr Boffin well acquainted with the Mounds? And wasn’t he well acquainted with the deceased and his ways? And has he ever showed any expectation of finding anything?’
At that moment wheels were heard.
‘Now, I should be loth,’ said Mr Wegg, with an air of patient injury, ‘to think so ill of him as to suppose him capable of coming at this time of night. And yet it sounds like him.’
A ring at the yard bell.
‘It is him,’ said Mr Wegg, ‘and he is capable of it. I am sorry, because I could have wished to keep up a little lingering fragment of respect for him.’
Here Mr Boffin was heard lustily calling at the yard gate, ‘Halloa! Wegg! Halloa!’
‘Keep your seat, Mr Venus,’ said Wegg. ‘He may not stop.’ And then called out, ‘Halloa, sir! Halloa! I’m with you directly, sir! Half a minute, Mr Boffin. Coming, sir, as fast as my leg will bring me!’ And so with a show of much cheerful alacrity stumped out to the gate with a light, and there, through the window of a cab, descried Mr Boffin inside, blocked up with books.
‘Here! lend a hand, Wegg,’ said Mr Boffin excitedly, ‘I can’t get out till the way is cleared for me. This is the Annual Register, Wegg, in a cab-full of wollumes. Do you know him?’
‘Know the Animal Register, sir?’ returned the Impostor, who had caught the name imperfectly. ‘For a trifling wager, I think I could find any Animal in him, blindfold, Mr Boffin.’
‘And here’s Kirby’s Wonderful Museum,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘and Caulfield’s Characters, and Wilson’s. Such Characters, Wegg, such Characters! I must have one or two of the best of ‘em to-night. It’s amazing what places they used to put the guineas in, wrapped up in rags. Catch hold of that pile of wollumes, Wegg, or it’ll bulge out and burst into the mud. Is there anyone about, to help?’
‘There’s a friend of mine, sir, that had the intention of spending the evening with me when I gave you up – much against my will – for the night.’
‘Call him out,’ cried Mr Boffin in a bustle; ‘get him to bear a hand. Don’t drop that one under your arm. It’s Dancer. Him and his sister made pies of a dead sheep they found when they were out a walking. Where’s your friend? Oh, here’s your friend. Would you be so good as help Wegg and myself with these books? But don’t take Jemmy Taylor of Southwark, nor yet Jemmy Wood of Gloucester. These are the two Jemmys. I’ll carry them myself.’
Not ceasing to talk and bustle, in a state of great excitement, Mr Boffin directed the removal and arrangement of the books, appearing to be in some sort beside himself until they were all deposited on the floor, and the cab was dismissed.
‘There!’ said Mr Boffin, gloating over them. ‘There they are, like the four-and-twenty fiddlers – all of a row. Get on your spectacles, Wegg; I know where to find the best of ‘em, and we’ll have a taste at once of what we have got before us. What’s your friend’s name?’
Mr Wegg presented his friend as Mr Venus.
‘Eh?’ cried Mr Boffin, catching at the name. ‘Of Clerkenwell?’
‘Of Clerkenwell, sir,’ said Mr Venus.
‘Why, I’ve heard of you,’ cried Mr Boffin, ‘I heard of you in the old man’s time. You knew him. Did you ever buy anything of him?’ With piercing eagerness.
‘No, sir,’ returned Venus.
‘But he showed you things; didn’t he?’
Mr Venus, with a glance at his friend, replied in the affirmative.
‘What did he show you?’ asked Mr Boffin, putting his hands behind him, and eagerly advancing his head. ‘Did he show you boxes, little cabinets, pocket-books, parcels, anything locked or sealed, anything tied up?’
Mr Venus shook his head.
‘Are you a judge of china?’
Mr Venus again shook his head.
‘Because if he had ever showed you a teapot, I should be glad to know of it,’ said Mr Boffin. And then, with his right hand at his lips, repeated thoughtfully, ‘a Teapot, a Teapot’, and glanced over the books on the floor, as if he knew there was something interesting connected with a teapot, somewhere among them.
Mr Wegg and Mr Venus looked at one another wonderingly: and Mr Wegg, in fitting on his spectacles, opened his eyes wide, over their rims, and tapped the side of his nose: as an admonition to Venus to keep himself generally wide awake.
‘A Teapot,’ repeated Mr Boffin, continuing to muse and survey the books; ‘a Teapot, a Teapot. Are you ready, Wegg?’
‘I am at your service, sir,’ replied that gentleman, taking his usual seat on the usual settle, and poking his wooden leg under the table before it. ‘Mr Venus, would you make yourself useful, and take a seat beside me, sir, for the conveniency of snuffing the candles?’
Venus complying with the invitation while it was yet being given, Silas pegged at him with his wooden leg, to call his particular attention to Mr Boffin standing musing before the fire, in the space between the two settles.
‘Hem! Ahem!’ coughed Mr Wegg to attract his employer’s attention. ‘Would you wish to commence with an Animal, sir – from the Register?’
‘No,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘no, Wegg.’ With that, producing a little book from his breast-pocket, he handed it with great care to the literary gentlemen, and inquired, ‘What do you call that, Wegg?’
‘This, sir,’ replied Silas, adjusting his spectacles, and referring to the title-page, ‘is Merryweather’s Lives and Anecdotes of Misers. Mr Venus, would you make yourself useful and draw the candles a little nearer, sir?’ This to have a special opportunity of bestowing a stare upon his comrade.
‘Which of ‘em have you got in that lot?’ asked Mr Boffin. ‘Can you find out pretty easy?’
‘Well, sir,’ replied Silas, turning to the table of contents and slowly fluttering the leaves of the book, ‘I should say they must be pretty well all here, sir; here’s a large assortment, sir; my eye catches John Overs, sir, John Little, sir, Dick Jarrel, John Elwes, the Reverend Mr Jones of Blewbury, Vulture Hopkins, Daniel Dancer – ’
‘Give us Dancer, Wegg,’ said Mr Boffin.
