“Lor!” cried Mrs. Boffin. “What I say is, the world’s wide enough for all of us!”
“So it is, my dear,” said Mr. Boffin, “when not literary. But when so, not so. And I am bound to bear in mind that I took Wegg on, at a time when I had no thought of being fashionable or of leaving the Bower. To let him feel himself anyways slighted now, would be to be guilty of a meanness, and to act like having one’s head turned by the halls of dazzling light. Which Lord forbid! Rokesmith, what shall we say about your living in the house?”
“In this house?”
“No, no. I have got other plans for this house. In the new house?”
“That will be as you please, Mr. Boffin. I hold myself quite at your disposal. You know where I live at present.”
“Well!” said Mr. Boffin, after considering the point; “suppose you keep as you are for the present, and we’ll decide by-and-by. You’ll begin to take charge at once, of all that’s going on in the new house, will you?”
“Most willingly. I will begin this very day. Will you give me the address?”
Mr. Boffin repeated it, and the Secretary wrote it down in his pocketbook. Mrs. Boffin took the opportunity of his being so engaged, to get a better observation of his face than she had yet taken. It impressed her in his favour, for she nodded aside to Mr. Boffin, “I like him.”
“I will see directly that everything is in train, Mr. Boffin.”
“Thank’ee. Being here, would you care at all to look round the Bower?”
“I should greatly like it. I have heard so much of its story.”
“Come!” said Mr. Boffin. And he and Mrs. Boffin led the way.
A gloomy house the Bower, with sordid signs on it of having been, through its long existence as Harmony Jail, in miserly holding. Bare of paint, bare of paper on the walls, bare of furniture, bare of experience of human life. Whatever is built by man for man’s occupation, must, like natural creations, fulfil the intention of its existence, or soon perish. This old house had wasted—more from desuetude than it would have wasted from use, twenty years for one.
A certain leanness falls upon houses not sufficiently imbued with life (as if they were nourished upon it), which was very noticeable here. The staircase, balustrades, and rails, had a spare look—an air of being denuded to the bone—which the panels of the walls and the jambs of the doors and windows also bore. The scanty moveables partook of it; save for the cleanliness of the place, the dust—into which they were all resolving would have lain thick on the floors; and those, both in colour and in grain, were worn like old faces that had kept much alone.
The bedroom where the clutching old man had lost his grip on life, was left as he had left it. There was the old grisly four-post bedstead, without hangings, and with a jail-like upper rim of iron and spikes; and there was the old patchwork counterpane. There was the tight-clenched old bureau, receding atop like a bad and secret forehead; there was the cumbersome old table with twisted legs, at the bedside; and there was the box upon it, in which the will had lain. A few old chairs with patchwork covers, under which the more precious stuff to be preserved had slowly lost its quality of colour without imparting pleasure to any eye, stood against the wall. A hard family likeness was on all these things.
“The room was kept like this, Rokesmith,” said Mr. Boffin, “against the son’s return. In short, everything in the house was kept exactly as it came to us, for him to see and approve. Even now, nothing is changed but our own room below-stairs that you have just left. When the son came home for the last time in his life, and for the last time in his life saw his father, it was most likely in this room that they met.”
As the Secretary looked all round it, his eyes rested on a side door in a corner.
“Another staircase,” said Mr. Boffin, unlocking the door, “leading down into the yard. We’ll go down this way, as you may like to see the yard, and it’s all in the road. When the son was a little child, it was up and down these stairs that he mostly came and went to his father. He was very timid of his father. I’ve seen him sit on these stairs, in his shy way, poor child, many a time. Mr. and Mrs. Boffin have comforted him, sitting with his little book on these stairs, often.”
“Ah! And his poor sister too,” said Mrs. Boffin. “And here’s the sunny place on the white wall where they one day measured one another. Their own little hands wrote up their names here, only with a pencil; but the names are here still, and the poor dears gone forever.”
“We must take care of the names, old lady,” said Mr. Boffin. “We must take care of the names. They shan’t be rubbed out in our time, nor yet, if we can help it, in the time after us. Poor little children!”
“Ah, poor little children!” said Mrs. Boffin.
They had opened the door at the bottom of the staircase giving on the yard, and they stood in the sunlight, looking at the scrawl of the two unsteady childish hands two or three steps up the staircase. There was something in this simple memento of a blighted childhood, and in the tenderness of Mrs. Boffin, that touched the Secretary.
Mr. Boffin then showed his new man of business the mounds, and his own particular mound which had been left him as his legacy under the will before he acquired the whole estate.
“It would have been enough for us,” said Mr. Boffin, “in case it had pleased God to spare the last of those two
