money going to the Monster that swallows up so much, when we all want—Everything. And if you say (as you want to say; I know you want to say so, pa) “that’s neither reasonable nor honest, Bella,” then I answer, “Maybe not, pa—very likely—but it’s one of the consequences of being poor, and of thoroughly hating and detesting to be poor, and that’s my case.” Now, you look lovely, pa; why don’t you always wear your hair like that? And here’s the cutlet! If it isn’t very brown, ma, I can’t eat it, and must have a bit put back to be done expressly.’
However, as it was brown, even to Bella’s taste, the young lady graciously partook of it without reconsignment to the frying-pan, and also, in due course, of the contents of the two bottles: whereof one held Scotch ale and the other rum. The latter perfume, with the fostering aid of boiling water and lemon-peel, diffused itself throughout the room, and became so highly concentrated around the warm fireside, that the wind passing over the house roof must have rushed off charged with a delicious whiff of it, after buzzing like a great bee at that particular chimneypot.
‘Pa,’ said Bella, sipping the fragrant mixture and warming her favourite ankle; ‘when old Mr Harmon made such a fool of me (not to mention himself, as he is dead), what do you suppose he did it for?’
‘Impossible to say, my dear. As I have told you time out of number since his will was brought to light, I doubt if I ever exchanged a hundred words with the old gentleman. If it was his whim to surprise us, his whim succeeded. For he certainly did it.’
‘And I was stamping my foot and screaming, when he first took notice of me; was I?’ said Bella, contemplating the ankle before mentioned.
‘You were stamping your little foot, my dear, and screaming with your little voice, and laying into me with your little bonnet, which you had snatched off for the purpose,’ returned her father, as if the remembrance gave a relish to the rum; ‘you were doing this one Sunday morning when I took you out, because I didn’t go the exact way you wanted, when the old gentleman, sitting on a seat near, said, “That’s a nice girl; that’s a very nice girl; a promising girl!” And so you were, my dear.’
‘And then he asked my name, did he, pa?’
‘Then he asked your name, my dear, and mine; and on other Sunday mornings, when we walked his way, we saw him again, and—and really that’s all.’
As that was all the rum and water too, or, in other words, as R. W. delicately signified that his glass was empty, by throwing back his head and standing the glass upside down on his nose and upper lip, it might have been charitable in Mrs Wilfer to suggest replenishment. But that heroine briefly suggesting ‘Bedtime’ instead, the bottles were put away, and the family retired; she cherubically escorted, like some severe saint in a painting, or merely human matron allegorically treated.
‘And by this time to-morrow,’ said Lavinia when the two girls were alone in their room, ‘we shall have Mr Rokesmith here, and shall be expecting to have our throats cut.’
‘You needn’t stand between me and the candle for all that,’ retorted Bella. ‘This is another of the consequences of being poor! The idea of a girl with a really fine head of hair, having to do it by one flat candle and a few inches of looking-glass!’
‘You caught George Sampson with it, Bella, bad as your means of dressing it are.’
‘You low little thing. Caught George Sampson with it! Don’t talk about catching people, miss, till your own time for catching—as you call it—comes.’
‘Perhaps it has come,’ muttered Lavvy, with a toss of her head.
‘What did you say?’ asked Bella, very sharply. ‘What did you say, miss?’
Lavvy declining equally to repeat or to explain, Bella gradually lapsed over her hair-dressing into a soliloquy on the miseries of being poor, as exemplified in having nothing to put on, nothing to go out in, nothing to dress by, only a nasty box to dress at instead of a commodious dressing-table, and being obliged to take in suspicious lodgers. On the last grievance as her climax, she laid great stress—and might have laid greater, had she known that if Mr Julius Handford had a twin brother upon earth, Mr John Rokesmith was the man.
Chapter 5.
Boffin’s Bower
Over against a London house, a corner house not far from Cavendish Square, a man with a wooden leg had sat for some years, with his remaining foot in a basket in cold weather, picking up a living on this wise:—Every morning at eight o’clock, he stumped to the corner, carrying a chair, a clothes-horse, a pair of trestles, a board, a basket, and an umbrella, all strapped together. Separating these, the board and trestles became a counter, the basket supplied the few small lots of fruit and sweets that he offered for sale upon it and became a foot-warmer, the unfolded clothes-horse displayed a choice collection of halfpenny ballads and became a screen, and the stool planted within it became his post for the rest of the day. All weathers saw the man at the post. This is to be accepted in a double sense, for he contrived a back to his wooden stool, by placing it against the lamp-post. When the weather was wet, he put up his umbrella over his stock in trade, not over himself; when the weather was dry, he furled that faded article, tied it round with a piece of yarn, and laid it cross-wise under the trestles: where it looked like an unwholesomely-forced lettuce that had lost in colour and crispness what it had gained in size.
He had established his right to the corner, by imperceptible prescription. He had never varied his ground an inch, but had in the beginning diffidently taken the corner upon which the side of the house gave. A howling corner in the winter time, a dusty corner in the summer time, an undesirable corner at the best of times. Shelterless fragments of straw and paper got up revolving storms there, when the main street was at peace; and the water-cart, as if it were drunk or short-sighted, came blundering and jolting round it, making it muddy when all else was clean.
On the front of his sale-board hung a little placard, like a kettle-holder, bearing the inscription in his own small text:
Errands gone
On with fi
Delity By
Ladies and Gentlemen
I remain
Your humble Servt:
Silas Wegg
He had not only settled it with himself in course of time, that he was errand-goer by appointment to the house at the corner (though he received such commissions not half a dozen times in a year, and then only as some servant’s deputy), but also that he was one of the house’s retainers and owed vassalage to it and was bound to leal and loyal interest in it. For this reason, he always spoke of it as ‘Our House,’ and, though his knowledge of its affairs was mostly speculative and all wrong, claimed to be in its confidence. On similar grounds he never beheld an inmate at any one of its windows but he touched his hat. Yet, he knew so little about the inmates that he gave them names of his own invention: as ‘Miss Elizabeth’, ‘Master George’, ‘Aunt Jane’, ‘Uncle Parker ‘—having no authority whatever for any such designations, but particularly the last—to which, as a natural consequence, he stuck with great obstinacy.
Over the house itself, he exercised the same imaginary power as over its inhabitants and their affairs. He had never been in it, the length of a piece
