said Bella, angrily, ‘you force me to say that I am truly sorry I did come home, and that I never will come home again, except when poor dear Pa is here. For, Pa is too magnanimous to feel envy and spite towards my generous friends, and Pa is delicate enough and gentle enough to remember the sort of little claim they thought I had upon them and the unusually trying position in which, through no act of my own, I had been placed. And I always did love poor dear Pa better than all the rest of you put together, and I always do and I always shall!’
Here Bella, deriving no comfort from her charming bonnet and her elegant dress, burst into tears.
‘I think, R.W.,’ cried Mrs Wilfer, lifting up her eyes and apostrophising the air, ‘that if you were present, it would be a trial to your feelings to hear your wife and the mother of your family depreciated in your name. But Fate has spared you this, R.W., whatever it may have thought proper to inflict upon her!’
Here Mrs Wilfer burst into tears.
‘I hate the Boffins!’ protested Miss Lavinia. ‘I don’t care who objects to their being called the Boffins. I will call ‘em the Boffins. The Boffins, the Boffins, the Boffins! And I say they are mischief-making Boffins, and I say the Boffins have set Bella against me, and I tell the Boffins to their faces:’ which was not strictly the fact, but the young lady was excited: ‘that they are detestable Boffins, disreputable Boffins, odious Boffins, beastly Boffins. There!’
Here Miss Lavinia burst into tears.
The front garden-gate clanked, and the Secretary was seen coming at a brisk pace up the steps. ‘Leave Me to open the door to him,’ said Mrs Wilfer, rising with stately resignation as she shook her head and dried her eyes; ‘we have at present no stipendiary girl to do so. We have nothing to conceal. If he sees these traces of emotion on our cheeks, let him construe them as he may.’
With those words she stalked out. In a few moments she stalked in again, proclaiming in her heraldic manner, ‘Mr Rokesmith is the bearer of a packet for Miss Bella Wilfer.’
Mr Rokesmith followed close upon his name, and of course saw what was amiss. But he discreetly affected to see nothing, and addressed Miss Bella.
‘Mr Boffin intended to have placed this in the carriage for you this morning. He wished you to have it, as a little keepsake he had prepared—it is only a purse, Miss Wilfer—but as he was disappointed in his fancy, I volunteered to come after you with it.’
Bella took it in her hand, and thanked him.
‘We have been quarrelling here a little, Mr Rokesmith, but not more than we used; you know our agreeable ways among ourselves. You find me just going. Good-bye, mamma. Good-bye, Lavvy!’ and with a kiss for each Miss Bella turned to the door. The Secretary would have attended her, but Mrs Wilfer advancing and saying with dignity, ‘Pardon me! Permit me to assert my natural right to escort my child to the equipage which is in waiting for her,’ he begged pardon and gave place. It was a very magnificent spectacle indeed, to see Mrs Wilfer throw open the house-door, and loudly demand with extended gloves, ‘The male domestic of Mrs Boffin!’ To whom presenting himself, she delivered the brief but majestic charge, ‘Miss Wilfer. Coming out!’ and so delivered her over, like a female Lieutenant of the Tower relinquishing a State Prisoner. The effect of this ceremonial was for some quarter of an hour afterwards perfectly paralyzing on the neighbours, and was much enhanced by the worthy lady airing herself for that term in a kind of splendidly serene trance on the top step.
When Bella was seated in the carriage, she opened the little packet in her hand. It contained a pretty purse, and the purse contained a bank note for fifty pounds. ‘This shall be a joyful surprise for poor dear Pa,’ said Bella, ‘and I’ll take it myself into the City!’
As she was uninformed respecting the exact locality of the place of business of Chicksey Veneering and Stobbles, but knew it to be near Mincing Lane, she directed herself to be driven to the corner of that darksome spot. Thence she despatched ‘the male domestic of Mrs Boffin,’ in search of the counting-house of Chicksey Veneering and Stobbles, with a message importing that if R. Wilfer could come out, there was a lady waiting who would be glad to speak with him. The delivery of these mysterious words from the mouth of a footman caused so great an excitement in the counting-house, that a youthful scout was instantly appointed to follow Rumty, observe the lady, and come in with his report. Nor was the agitation by any means diminished, when the scout rushed back with the intelligence that the lady was ‘a slap-up gal in a bang-up chariot.’
Rumty himself, with his pen behind his ear under his rusty hat, arrived at the carriage-door in a breathless condition, and had been fairly lugged into the vehicle by his cravat and embraced almost unto choking, before he recognized his daughter. ‘My dear child!’ he then panted, incoherently. ‘Good gracious me! What a lovely woman you are! I thought you had been unkind and forgotten your mother and sister.’
‘I have just been to see them, Pa dear.’
‘Oh! and how—how did you find your mother?’ asked R. W., dubiously.
‘Very disagreeable, Pa, and so was Lavvy.’
‘They are sometimes a little liable to it,’ observed the patient cherub; ‘but I hope you made allowances, Bella, my dear?’
‘No. I was disagreeable too, Pa; we were all of us disagreeable together. But I want you to come and dine with me somewhere, Pa.’
‘Why, my dear, I have already partaken of a—if one might mention such an article in this superb chariot—of a—Saveloy,’ replied R. Wilfer, modestly dropping his voice on the word, as he eyed the canary-coloured fittings.
‘Oh! That’s nothing, Pa!’
‘Truly, it ain’t as much as one could sometimes wish it to be, my dear,’ he admitted, drawing his hand across his mouth. ‘Still, when circumstances over which you have no control, interpose obstacles between yourself and Small Germans, you can’t do better than bring a contented mind to hear on’—again dropping his voice in deference to the chariot—‘Saveloys!’
‘You poor good Pa! Pa, do, I beg and pray, get leave for the rest of the day, and come and pass it with me!’
‘Well, my dear, I’ll cut back and ask for leave.’
‘But before you cut back,’ said Bella, who had already taken him by the chin, pulled his hat off, and begun to stick up his hair in her old way, ‘do say that you are sure I am giddy and inconsiderate, but have never really slighted you, Pa.’
‘My dear, I say it with all my heart. And might I likewise observe,’ her father delicately hinted, with a glance out at window, ‘that perhaps it might be calculated to attract attention, having one’s hair publicly done by a lovely woman in an elegant turn-out in Fenchurch Street?’
Bella laughed and put on his hat again. But when his boyish figure bobbed away, its shabbiness and cheerful patience smote the tears out of her eyes. ‘I hate that Secretary for thinking it of me,’ she said to herself, ‘and yet it seems half true!’
Back came her father, more like a boy than ever, in his release from school. ‘All right, my dear. Leave given at once. Really very handsomely done!’
‘Now where can we find some quiet place, Pa, in which I can wait for you while you go on an errand for me, if I send the carriage away?’
It demanded cogitation. ‘You see, my dear,’ he explained, ‘you really have become such a very lovely woman,
