Our Mutual Friend. Чарльз Диккенс
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that’s another thing. I may sell them, though I should be sorry to see the neighbourhood deprived of ‘em too. It’ll look but a poor dead flat without the Mounds. Still I don’t say that I’m going to keep ‘em always there, for the sake of the beauty of the landscape. There’s no hurry about it; that’s all I say at present. I ain’t a scholar in much, Rokesmith, but I’m a pretty fair scholar in dust. I can price the Mounds to a fraction, and I know how they can be best disposed of; and likewise that they take no harm by standing where they do. You’ll look in to-morrow, will you be so kind?’
‘Every day. And the sooner I can get you into your new house, complete, the better you will be pleased, sir?’
‘Well, it ain’t that I’m in a mortal hurry,’ said Mr Boffin; ‘only when you do pay people for looking alive, it’s as well to know that they are looking alive. Ain’t that your opinion?’
‘Quite!’ replied the Secretary; and so withdrew.
‘Now,’ said Mr Boffin to himself; subsiding into his regular series of turns in the yard, ‘if I can make it comfortable with Wegg, my affairs will be going smooth.’
The man of low cunning had, of course, acquired a mastery over the man of high simplicity. The mean man had, of course, got the better of the generous man. How long such conquests last, is another matter; that they are achieved, is every-day experience, not even to be flourished away by Podsnappery itself. The undesigning Boffin had become so far immeshed by the wily Wegg that his mind misgave him he was a very designing man indeed in purposing to do more for Wegg. It seemed to him (so skilful was Wegg) that he was plotting darkly, when he was contriving to do the very thing that Wegg was plotting to get him to do. And thus, while he was mentally turning the kindest of kind faces on Wegg this morning, he was not absolutely sure but that he might somehow deserve the charge of turning his back on him.
For these reasons Mr Boffin passed but anxious hours until evening came, and with it Mr Wegg, stumping leisurely to the Roman Empire. At about this period Mr Boffin had become profoundly interested in the fortunes of a great military leader known to him as Bully Sawyers, but perhaps better known to fame and easier of identification by the classical student, under the less Britannic name of Belisarius. Even this general’s career paled in interest for Mr Boffin before the clearing of his conscience with Wegg; and hence, when that literary gentleman had according to custom eaten and drunk until he was all a-glow, and when he took up his book with the usual chirping introduction, ‘And now, Mr Boffin, sir, we’ll decline and we’ll fall!’ Mr Boffin stopped him.
‘You remember, Wegg, when I first told you that I wanted to make a sort of offer to you?’
‘Let me get on my considering cap, sir,’ replied that gentleman, turning the open book face downward. ‘When you first told me that you wanted to make a sort of offer to me? Now let me think.’ (as if there were the least necessity) ‘Yes, to be sure I do, Mr Boffin. It was at my corner. To be sure it was! You had first asked me whether I liked your name, and Candour had compelled a reply in the negative case. I little thought then, sir, how familiar that name would come to be!’
‘I hope it will be more familiar still, Wegg.’
‘Do you, Mr Boffin? Much obliged to you, I’m sure. Is it your pleasure, sir, that we decline and we fall?’ with a feint of taking up the book.
‘Not just yet awhile, Wegg. In fact, I have got another offer to make you.’
Mr Wegg (who had had nothing else in his mind for several nights) took off his spectacles with an air of bland surprise.
‘And I hope you’ll like it, Wegg.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ returned that reticent individual. ‘I hope it may prove so. On all accounts, I am sure.’ (This, as a philanthropic aspiration.)
‘What do you think,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘of not keeping a stall, Wegg?’
‘I think, sir,’ replied Wegg, ‘that I should like to be shown the gentleman prepared to make it worth my while!’
‘Here he is,’ said Mr Boffin.
Mr Wegg was going to say, My Benefactor, and had said My Bene, when a grandiloquent change came over him.
‘No, Mr Boffin, not you sir. Anybody but you. Do not fear, Mr Boffin, that I shall contaminate the premises which your gold has bought, with my lowly pursuits. I am aware, sir, that it would not become me to carry on my little traffic under the windows of your mansion. I have already thought of that, and taken my measures. No need to be bought out, sir. Would Stepney Fields be considered intrusive? If not remote enough, I can go remoter. In the words of the poet’s song, which I do not quite remember:
Thrown on the wide world, doom’d to wander and roam,
Bereft of my parents, bereft of a home,
A stranger to something and what’s his name joy,
Behold little Edmund the poor Peasant boy.
– And equally,’ said Mr Wegg, repairing the want of direct application in the last line, ‘behold myself on a similar footing!’
‘Now, Wegg, Wegg, Wegg,’ remonstrated the excellent Boffin. ‘You are too sensitive.’
‘I know I am, sir,’ returned Wegg, with obstinate magnanimity. ‘I am acquainted with my faults. I always was, from a child, too sensitive.’
‘But listen,’ pursued the Golden Dustman; ‘hear me out, Wegg. You have taken it into your head that I mean to pension you off.’
‘True, sir,’ returned Wegg, still with an obstinate magnanimity. ‘I am acquainted with my faults. Far be it from me to deny them. I have taken it into my head.’
‘But I don’t mean it.’
The assurance seemed hardly as comforting to Mr Wegg, as Mr Boffin intended it to be. Indeed, an appreciable elongation of his visage might have been observed as he replied:
‘Don’t you, indeed, sir?’
‘No,’ pursued Mr Boffin; ‘because that would express, as I understand it, that you were not going to do anything to deserve your money. But you are; you are.’
‘That, sir,’ replied Mr Wegg, cheering up bravely, ‘is quite another pair of shoes. Now, my independence as a man is again elevated. Now, I no longer
Weep for the hour,
When to Boffinses bower,
The Lord of the valley with offers came;
Neither does the moon hide her light
From the heavens to-night,
And weep behind her clouds o’er any individual in the present
Company’s shame.
– Please to proceed, Mr Boffin.’
‘Thank’ee, Wegg, both for your confidence in me and for your frequent dropping into poetry; both of which is friendly. Well, then; my idea is, that you should give up your stall, and that I should put you into the Bower here, to keep it for us. It’s a pleasant spot; and a man with coals and candles and a pound a week might be in clover here.’
‘Hem! Would that man, sir – we will say that man, for the purposes of argueyment;’ Mr Wegg made a smiling demonstration of great perspicuity here; ‘would that man, sir, be expected to throw any other capacity in, or would any other capacity be considered extra? Now let us (for the purposes of argueyment) suppose that man to be engaged as a reader: say (for the purposes of argueyment) in the evening. Would that man’s pay as a reader in the evening, be added to the other amount, which, adopting your language, we will call clover; or would it merge into that amount, or clover?’
‘Well,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘I suppose it would be added.’
‘I suppose it would, sir. You are right, sir. Exactly my own views, Mr Boffin.’ Here Wegg rose, and balancing himself on his wooden leg, fluttered