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
