'Why, you don't mean to say, Miss Bella,' the Golden Dustman slowly remonstrated, 'that you set up Rokesmith against me?'
'I do!' said Bella. 'He is worth a Million of you.'
Very pretty she looked, though very angry, as she made herself as tall as she possibly could (which was not extremely tall), and utterly renounced her patron with a lofty toss of her rich brown head.
'I would rather he thought well of me,' said Bella, 'though he swept the street for bread, than that you did, though you splashed the mud upon him from the wheels of a chariot of pure gold.--There!'
'Well I'm sure!' cried Mr Boffin, staring.
'And for a long time past, when you have thought you set yourself above him, I have only seen you under his feet,' said Bella--'There! And throughout I saw in him the master, and I saw in you the man--There! And when you used him shamefully, I took his part and loved him--There! I boast of it!'
After which strong avowal Bella underwent reaction, and cried to any extent, with her face on the back of her chair.
'Now, look here,' said Mr Boffin, as soon as he could find an opening for breaking the silence and striking in. 'Give me your attention, Bella. I am not angry.'
'I AM!' said Bella.
'I say,' resumed the Golden Dustman, 'I am not angry, and I mean kindly to you, and I want to overlook this. So you'll stay where you are, and we'll agree to say no more about it.'
'No, I can't stay here,' cried Bella, rising hurriedly again; 'I can't think of staying here. I must go home for good.'
'Now, don't be silly,' Mr Boffin reasoned. 'Don't do what you can't undo; don't do what you're sure to be sorry for.'
'I shall never be sorry for it,' said Bella; 'and I should always be sorry, and should every minute of my life despise myself if I remained here after what has happened.'
'At least, Bella,' argued Mr Boffin, 'let there be no mistake about it. Look before you leap, you know. Stay where you are, and all's well, and all's as it was to be. Go away, and you can never come back.'
'I know that I can never come back, and that's what I mean,' said Bella.
'You mustn't expect,' Mr Boffin pursued, 'that I'm a-going to settle money on you, if you leave us like this, because I am not. No, Bella! Be careful! Not one brass farthing.'
'Expect!' said Bella, haughtily. 'Do you think that any power on earth could make me take it, if you did, sir?'
But there was Mrs Boffin to part from, and, in the full flush of her dignity, the impressible little soul collapsed again. Down upon her knees before that good woman, she rocked herself upon her breast, and cried, and sobbed, and folded her in her arms with all her might.
'You're a dear, a dear, the best of dears!' cried Bella. 'You're the best of human creatures. I can never be thankful enough to you, and I can never forget you. If I should live to be blind and deaf I know I shall see and hear you, in my fancy, to the last of my dim old days!'
Mrs Boffin wept most heartily, and embraced her with all fondness; but said not one single word except that she was her dear girl. She said that often enough, to be sure, for she said it over and over again; but not one word else.
Bella broke from her at length, and was going weeping out of the room, when in her own little queer affectionate way, she half relented towards Mr Boffin.
'I am very glad,' sobbed Bella, 'that I called you names, sir, because you richly deserved it. But I am very sorry that I called you names, because you used to be so different. Say good-bye!'
'Good-bye,' said Mr Boffin, shortly.
'If I knew which of your hands was the least spoilt, I would ask you to let me touch it,' said Bella, 'for the last time. But not because I repent of what I have said to you. For I don't. It's true!'
'Try the left hand,' said Mr Boffin, holding it out in a stolid manner; 'it's the least used.'
'You have been wonderfully good and kind to me,' said Bella, 'and I kiss it for that. You have been as bad as bad could be to Mr Rokesmith, and I throw it away for that. Thank you for myself, and good-bye!'
'Good-bye,' said Mr Boffin as before.
Bella caught him round the neck and kissed him, and ran out for ever.
She ran up-stairs, and sat down on the floor in her own room, and cried abundantly. But the day was declining and she had no time to lose. She opened all the places where she kept her dresses; selected only those she had brought with her, leaving all the rest; and made a great misshapen bundle of them, to be sent for afterwards.
'I won't take one of the others,' said Bella, tying the knots of the bundle very tight, in the severity of her resolution. 'I'll leave all the presents behind, and begin again entirely on my own account.' That the resolution might be thoroughly carried into practice, she even changed the dress she wore, for that in which she had come to the grand mansion. Even the bonnet she put on, was the bonnet that had mounted into the Boffin chariot at Holloway.
'Now, I am complete,' said Bella. 'It's a little trying, but I have steeped my eyes in cold water, and I won't cry any more. You have been a pleasant room to me, dear room. Adieu! We shall never see each other again.'
With a parting kiss of her fingers to it, she softly closed the door and went with a light foot down the great staircase, pausing and listening as she went, that she might meet none of the household. No one chanced to be about, and she got down to the hall in quiet. The door of the late Secretary's room stood open. She peeped in as she passed, and divined from the emptiness of his table, and the general appearance of things, that he was already gone. Softly opening the great hall door, and softly closing it upon herself, she turned and kissed it on the outside--insensible old combination of wood and iron that it was!--before she ran away from the house at a swift pace.
'That was well done!' panted Bella, slackening in the next street, and subsiding into a walk. 'If I had left myself any breath to cry with, I should have cried again. Now poor dear darling little Pa, you are going to see your lovely woman unexpectedly.'
Chapter 16
THE FEAST OF THE THREE HOBGOBLINS
The City looked unpromising enough, as Bella made her way along its gritty streets. Most of its money-mills were slackening sail, or had left off grinding for the day. The master-millers had already departed, and the journeymen were departing. There was a jaded aspect on the business lanes and courts, and the very pavements had a weary appearance, confused by the tread of a million of feet. There must be hours of night to temper down the day's distraction of so feverish a place. As yet the worry of the newly-stopped whirling and grinding on the part of the money-mills seemed to linger in the air, and the quiet was more like the prostration of a spent giant than the repose of one who was renewing his strength.
If Bella thought, as she glanced at the mighty Bank, how agreeable it would be to have an hour's gardening there, with a bright copper shovel, among the money, still she was not in an avaricious vein. Much improved in that respect, and with certain half-formed images which had little gold in their composition, dancing before her bright eyes, she arrived in the drug-flavoured region of Mincing Lane, with the sensation of having just opened a drawer in a chemist's shop.
The counting-house of Chicksey, Veneering, and Stobbles was pointed out by an elderly female accustomed to the care of offices, who dropped upon Bella out of a public-house, wiping her mouth, and accounted for its humidity on natural principles well known to the physical sciences, by explaining that she had looked in at the door to see what o'clock it was. The counting-house was a wall-eyed ground floor by a dark gateway, and Bella was considering, as she approached it, could there be any precedent in the City for her going in and asking for R. Wilfer, when whom should she see, sitting at one of the windows with the plate-glass sash raised, but R. Wilfer himself, preparing to take a slight refection.
On approaching nearer, Bella discerned that the refection had the appearance of a small cottage-loaf and a pennyworth of milk. Simultaneously with this discovery on her part, her father discovered her, and invoked the echoes of Minc
ing Lane to exclaim 'My gracious me!'
He then came cherubically flying out without a hat, and embraced her, and handed her in. 'For it's after hours and I am all alone, my dear,' he explained, 'and am having--as I sometimes do when they are all gone--a quiet tea.'
Looking round the office, as if her father were a captive and this his cell, Bella hugged him and choked him to her heart's content.
'I never was so surprised, my dear!' said her father. 'I couldn't believe my eyes. Upon my life, I thought they had taken to lying! The idea of your coming down the Lane yourself! Why didn't you send the footman down the Lane, my dear?'
'I have brought no footman with me, Pa.'
'Oh indeed! But you have brought the elegant turn-out, my love?'
'No, Pa.'
'You never can have walked, my dear?'
'Yes, I have, Pa.'
He looked so very much astonished, that Bella could not make up her mind to break it to him just yet.
'The consequence is, Pa, that your lovely woman feels a little faint, and would very much like to share your tea.'
The cottage loaf and the pennyworth of milk had been set forth on a sheet of paper on the window-seat. The cherubic pocket-knife, with the first bit of the loaf still on its point, lay beside them where it had been hastily thrown down. Bella took the bit off, and put it in her mouth. 'My dear child,' said her father, 'the idea of your partaking of such lowly fare! But at least you must have your own loaf and your own penn'orth. One moment, my dear. The Dairy is just over the way and round the corner.'
Regardless of Bella's dissuasions he ran out, and quickly returned with the new supply. 'My dear child,' he said, as he spread it on another piece of paper before her, 'the idea of a splendid--!' and then looked at her figure, and stopped short.
'What's the matter, Pa?'
'--of a splendid female,' he resumed more slowly, 'putting up with such accommodation as the present!--Is that a new dress you have on, my dear?'
'No, Pa, an old one. Don't you remember it?'
'Why, I THOUGHT I remembered it, my dear!'
'You should, for you bought it, Pa.'
'Yes, I THOUGHT I bought it my dear!' said the cherub, giving himself a little shake, as if to rouse his faculties.
'And have you grown so fickle that you don't like your own taste, Pa dear?'
'Well, my love,' he returned, swallowing a bit of the cottage loaf with considerable effort, for it seemed to stick by the way: 'I should have thought it was hardly sufficiently splendid for existing circumstances.'
'And so, Pa,' said Bella, moving coaxingly to his side instead of remaining opposite, 'you sometimes have a quiet tea here all alone? I am not in the tea's way, if I draw my arm over your shoulder like this, Pa?'
'Yes, my dear, and no, my dear. Yes to the first question, and Certainly Not to the second. Respecting the quiet tea, my dear, why you see the occupations of the day are sometimes a little wearing; and if there's nothing interposed between the day and your mother, why SHE is sometimes a little wearing, too.'
'I know, Pa.'
'Yes, my dear. So sometimes I put a quiet tea at the window here, with a little quiet contemplation of the Lane (which comes soothing), between the day, and domestic--'
'Bliss,' suggested Bella, sorrowfully.
'And domestic Bliss,' said her father, quite contented to accept the phrase.
Bella kissed him. 'And it is in this dark dingy place of captivity, poor dear, that you pass all the hours of your life when you are not at home?'
'Not at home, or not on the road there, or on the road here, my love. Yes. You see that little desk in the corner?'
'In the dark corner, furthest both from the light and from the fireplace? The shabbiest desk of all the desks?'
'Now, does it really strike you in that point of view, my dear?' said her father, surveying it artistically with his head on one side: 'that's mine. That's called Rumty's Perch.'
'Whose Perch?' asked Bella with great indignation.
'Rumty's. You see, being rather high and up two steps they call it a Perch. And they call ME Rumty.'
'How dare they!' exclaimed Bella.
'They're playful, Bella my dear; they're playful. They're more or less younger than I am, and they're playful. What does it matter? It might be Surly, or Sulky, or fifty disagreeable things that I really shouldn't like to be considered. But Rumty! Lor, why not Rumty?'
To inflict a heavy disappointment on this sweet nature, which had been, through all her caprices, the object of her recognition, love, and admiration from infancy, Bella felt to be the hardest task of her hard day. 'I should have done better,' she thought, 'to tell him at first; I should have done better to tell him just now, when he had some slight misgiving; he is quite happy again, and I shall make him wretched.'
He was falling back on his loaf and milk, with the pleasantest composure, and Bella stealing her arm a little closer about him, and at the same time sticking up his hair with an irresistible propensity to play with him founded on the habit of her whole life, had prepared herself to say: 'Pa dear, don't be cast down, but I must tell you something disagreeable!' when he interrupted her in an unlooked-for manner.
'My gracious me!' he exclaimed, invoking the Mincing Lane echoes as before. 'This is very extraordinary!'
'What is, Pa?'
'Why here's Mr Rokesmith now!'
'No, no, Pa, no,' cried Bella, greatly flurried. 'Surely not.'
'Yes there is! Look here!'
Sooth to say, Mr Rokesmith not only passed the window, but came into the counting-house. And not only came into the counting-house, but, finding himself alone there with Bella and her father, rushed at Bella and caught her in his arms, with the rapturous words 'My dear, dear girl; my gallant, generous, disinterested, courageous, noble girl!' And not only that even, (which one might have thought astonishment enough for one dose), but Bella, after hanging her head for a moment, lifted it up and laid it on his breast, as if that were her head's chosen and lasting resting-place!
'I knew you would come to him, and I followed you,' said Rokesmith. 'My love, my life! You ARE mine?'
To which Bella responded, 'Yes, I AM yours if you think me worth taking!' And after that, seemed to shrink to next to nothing in the clasp of his arms, partly because it was such a strong one on his part, and partly because there was such a yielding to it on hers.
The cherub, whose hair would have done for itself under the influence of this amazing spectacle, what Bella had just now done for it, staggered back into the window-seat from which he had risen, and surveyed the pair with his eyes dilated to their utmost.
'But we must think of dear Pa,' said Bella; 'I haven't told dear Pa; let us speak to Pa.' Upon which they turned to do so.
'I wish first, my dear,' remarked the cherub faintly, 'that you'd have the kindness to sprinkle me with a little milk, for I feel as if I was--Going.'
In fact, the good little fellow had become alarmingly limp, and his senses seemed to be rapidly escaping, from the knees upward. Bella sprinkled him with kisses instead of milk, but gave him a little of that article to drink; and he gradually revived under her caressing care.
'We'll break it to you gently, dearest Pa,' said Bella.
'My dear,' returned the cherub, looking at them both, 'you broke so much in the first--Gush, if I may so express myself--that I think I am equal to a good large breakage now.'
'Mr Wilfer,' said John Rokesmith, excitedly and joyfully, 'Bella takes me, though I have no fortune, even no present occupation; nothing but what I can get in the life before us. Bella takes me!'
'Yes, I should rather have inferred, my dear sir,' returned the cherub feebly, 'that Bella took you, from what I have within these few minutes remarked.'
'You don't know, Pa,' said Bella, 'how ill I have used him!'
'You don't know, sir,' said Rokesmith, 'what a heart she has!'
'You don't know, Pa,' said Bella, 'what a shocking creature I was growing, when he saved me from myself!
'
'You don't know, sir,' said Rokesmith, 'what a sacrifice she has made for me!'
'My dear Bella,' replied the cherub, still pathetically scared, 'and my dear John Rokesmith, if you will allow me so to call you--'
'Yes do, Pa, do!' urged Bella. 'I allow you, and my will is his law. Isn't it--dear John Rokesmith?'
There was an engaging shyness in Bella, coupled with an engaging tenderness of love and confidence and pride, in thus first calling him by name, which made it quite excusable in John Rokesmith to do what he did. What he did was, once more to give her the appearance of vanishing as aforesaid.
'I think, my dears,' observed the cherub, 'that if you could make it convenient to sit one on one side of me, and the other on the other, we should get on rather more consecutively, and make things rather plainer. John Rokesmith mentioned, a while ago, that he had no present occupation.'
'None,' said Rokesmith.
'No, Pa, none,' said Bella.
'From which I argue,' proceeded the cherub, 'that he has left Mr Boffin?'
'Yes, Pa. And so--'
'Stop a bit, my dear. I wish to lead up to it by degrees. And that Mr Boffin has not treated him well?'
'Has treated him most shamefully, dear Pa!' cried Bella with a flashing face.
'Of which,' pursued the cherub, enjoining patience with his hand, 'a certain mercenary young person distantly related to myself, could not approve? Am I leading up to it right?'
'Could not approve, sweet Pa,' said Bella, with a tearful laugh and a joyful kiss.
'Upon which,' pursued the cherub, 'the certain mercenary young person distantly related to myself, having previously observed and mentioned to myself that prosperity was spoiling Mr Boffin, felt that she must not sell her sense of what was right and what was wrong, and what was true and what was false, and what was just and what was unjust, for any price that could be paid to her by any one alive? Am I leading up to it right?'
With another tearful laugh Bella joyfully kissed him again.
'And therefore--and therefore,' the cherub went on in a glowing voice, as Bella's hand stole gradually up his waistcoat to his neck, 'this mercenary young person distantly related to myself, refused the price, took off the splendid fashions that were part of it, put on the comparatively poor dress that I had last given her, and trusting to my supporting her in what was right, came straight to me. Have I led up to it?'
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