have been a tie upon you. In future, if he should come without notice, he will take his chance of finding you, and it will be all the same to him if he does not. I undertook to tell you on my way. That’s all.’
With that, and ‘Good night,’ the Secretary lowers the window, and disappears. They listen, and hear his footsteps go back to the gate, and hear the gate close after him.
‘And for that individual, Mr Venus,’ remarks Wegg, when he is fully gone, ‘I have been passed over! Let me ask you what you think of him?’
Apparently, Mr Venus does not know what to think of him, for he makes sundry efforts to reply, without delivering himself of any other articulate utterance than that he has ‘a singular look’.
‘A double look, you mean, sir,’ rejoins Wegg, playing bitterly upon the word. ‘That’s his look. Any amount of singular look for me, but not a double look! That’s an under-handed mind, sir.’
‘Do you say there’s something against him?’ Venus asks.
‘Something against him?’ repeats Wegg. ‘Something? What would the relief be to my feelings—as a fellow-man—if I wasn’t the slave of truth, and didn’t feel myself compelled to answer, Everything!’
See into what wonderful maudlin refuges, featherless ostriches plunge their heads! It is such unspeakable moral compensation to Wegg, to be overcome by the consideration that Mr Rokesmith has an underhanded mind!
‘On this starlight night, Mr Venus,’ he remarks, when he is showing that friendly mover out across the yard, and both are something the worse for mixing again and again: ‘on this starlight night to think that talking-over strangers, and underhanded minds, can go walking home under the sky, as if they was all square!’
‘The spectacle of those orbs,’ says Mr Venus, gazing upward with his hat tumbling off; ‘brings heavy on me her crushing words that she did not wish to regard herself nor yet to be regarded in that—’
‘I know! I know! You needn’t repeat ‘em,’ says Wegg, pressing his hand. ‘But think how those stars steady me in the cause of the right against some that shall be nameless. It isn’t that I bear malice. But see how they glisten with old remembrances! Old remembrances of what, sir?’
Mr Venus begins drearily replying, ‘Of her words, in her own handwriting, that she does not wish to regard herself, nor yet—’ when Silas cuts him short with dignity.
‘No, sir! Remembrances of Our House, of Master George, of Aunt Jane, of Uncle Parker, all laid waste! All offered up sacrifices to the minion of fortune and the worm of the hour!’
Chapter 8.
In which an Innocent Elopement Occurs
The minion of fortune and the worm of the hour, or in less cutting language, Nicodemus Boffin, Esquire, the Golden Dustman, had become as much at home in his eminently aristocratic family mansion as he was likely ever to be. He could not but feel that, like an eminently aristocratic family cheese, it was much too large for his wants, and bred an infinite amount of parasites; but he was content to regard this drawback on his property as a sort of perpetual Legacy Duty. He felt the more resigned to it, forasmuch as Mrs Boffin enjoyed herself completely, and Miss Bella was delighted.
That young lady was, no doubt, an acquisition to the Boffins. She was far too pretty to be unattractive anywhere, and far too quick of perception to be below the tone of her new career. Whether it improved her heart might be a matter of taste that was open to question; but as touching another matter of taste, its improvement of her appearance and manner, there could be no question whatever.
And thus it soon came about that Miss Bella began to set Mrs Boffin right; and even further, that Miss Bella began to feel ill at ease, and as it were responsible, when she saw Mrs Boffin going wrong. Not that so sweet a disposition and so sound a nature could ever go very wrong even among the great visiting authorities who agreed that the Boffins were ‘charmingly vulgar’ (which for certain was not their own case in saying so), but that when she made a slip on the social ice on which all the children of Podsnappery, with genteel souls to be saved, are required to skate in circles, or to slide in long rows, she inevitably tripped Miss Bella up (so that young lady felt), and caused her to experience great confusion under the glances of the more skilful performers engaged in those ice-exercises.
At Miss Bella’s time of life it was not to be expected that she should examine herself very closely on the congruity or stability of her position in Mr Boffin’s house. And as she had never been sparing of complaints of her old home when she had no other to compare it with, so there was no novelty of ingratitude or disdain in her very much preferring her new one.
‘An invaluable man is Rokesmith,’ said Mr Boffin, after some two or three months. ‘But I can’t quite make him out.’
Neither could Bella, so she found the subject rather interesting.
‘He takes more care of my affairs, morning, noon, and night,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘than fifty other men put together either could or would; and yet he has ways of his own that are like tying a scaffolding-pole right across the road, and bringing me up short when I am almost a-walking arm in arm with him.’
‘May I ask how so, sir?’ inquired Bella.
‘Well, my dear,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘he won’t meet any company here, but you. When we have visitors, I should wish him to have his regular place at the table like ourselves; but no, he won’t take it.’
‘If he considers himself above it,’ said Miss Bella, with an airy toss of her head, ‘I should leave him alone.’
‘It ain’t that, my dear,’ replied Mr Boffin, thinking it over. ‘He don’t consider himself above it.’
‘Perhaps he considers himself beneath it,’ suggested Bella. ‘If so, he ought to know best.’
‘No, my dear; nor it ain’t that, neither. No,’ repeated Mr Boffin, with a shake of his head, after again thinking it over; ‘Rokesmith’s a modest man, but he don’t consider himself beneath it.’
‘Then what does he consider, sir?’ asked Bella.
‘Dashed if I know!’ said Mr Boffin. ‘It seemed at first as if it was only Lightwood that he objected to meet. And now it seems to be everybody, except you.’
Oho! thought Miss Bella. ‘In—deed! That’s it, is it!’ For Mr Mortimer Lightwood had dined there two or three times, and she had met him elsewhere, and he had shown her some attention. ‘Rather cool in a Secretary—and Pa’s lodger—to make me the subject of his jealousy!’
That Pa’s daughter should be so contemptuous of Pa’s lodger was odd; but there were odder anomalies than that in the mind of the spoilt girl: spoilt first by poverty, and then by wealth. Be it this history’s part, however, to leave them to unravel themselves.
‘A little too much, I think,’ Miss Bella reflected scornfully, ‘to have Pa’s lodger laying claim to me, and keeping eligible people off! A little too much, indeed, to have the opportunities opened to me by Mr and Mrs Boffin, appropriated by a mere Secretary and Pa’s lodger!’
Yet it was not so very long ago that Bella had been fluttered by the discovery that this same Secretary and lodger seem to like her. Ah! but the eminently aristocratic mansion and Mrs Boffin’s dressmaker had not come into play then.
In spite of his seemingly retiring manners a very intrusive person, this Secretary and lodger, in Miss Bella’s opinion. Always a light in his office-room when we came home from the play or Opera, and he always at the carriage-door to hand us out. Always a provoking radiance too on Mrs Boffin’s face, and an abominably cheerful reception of him, as