Our Mutual Friend: Book the Third

‘Now, old ‘un!’ cried Fascination, in his light raillery, ‘what dodgery are you up to next, sitting there with your eyes shut?'

‘That’s a good connexion! Bring out your vouchers, and don’t talk Jerusalem palaver.’

Mr Lammle, disclosing some alarm at the solemnity of this affectionate adjuration, demanded why the devil he ever should fall into the hands of Pubsey and Co.?

'Has he anything to do with the law?’
‘Nominally, I believe it his calling.’
‘I thought so. Name anything like Lightwood?’

‘Yes, it was truly sharp of you, godmother,’ resumed Miss Wren with great approbation, ‘to understand me. But, you see, you are so like the fairy godmother in the bright little books! You look so unlike the rest of people, and so much as if you had changed yourself into that shape, just this moment, with some benevolent object.'

The old man willingly put on his spectacles, and, standing at the little desk in the corner where Miss Abbey filed her receipts and kept her sample phials (customers’ scores were interdicted by the strict administration of the Porters), wrote out the copy in a fair round character.

While Miss Abbey partly delivered these directions to Bob—whom she seized by the hair, and whose head she knocked against the wall, as a general injunction to vigilance and presence of mind—and partly hailed the kitchen with them—the company in the public room, jostling one another, rushed out to the causeway, and the outer noise increased.

As his lineaments soften with life, their faces and their hearts harden to him.

‘The mind naturally falls,’ said Mrs Wilfer, ‘shall I say into a reverie, or shall I say into a retrospect? on a day like this.’

Mamma would appear to have had an indefinable foreboding of what afterwards happened, for she would frequently urge upon me, “Not a little man. Promise me, my child, not a little man. Never, never, never, marry a little man!”

For, not only was he exposed defenceless to the harangues of Mrs Wilfer, but he received the utmost contumely at the hands of Lavinia; who, partly to show Bella that she (Lavinia) could do what she liked with him, and partly to pay him off for still obviously admiring Bella’s beauty, led him the life of a dog.

For, not only was he exposed defenceless to the harangues of Mrs Wilfer, but he received the utmost contumely at the hands of Lavinia; who, partly to show Bella that she (Lavinia) could do what she liked with him, and partly to pay him off for still obviously admiring Bella’s beauty, led him the life of a dog.

Far less grand than the rest of the house, it was far more comfortable, being pervaded by a certain air of homely snugness, which upholstering despotism had banished to that spot when it inexorably set its face against Mr Boffin’s appeals for mercy in behalf of any other chamber.

‘Rokesmith, you are not proud, I hope?’ observed Mr Boffin, eyeing him askance.

A little vexed by a suspicion that she had spoken precipitately, and withal a little defiant of her own vexation, Bella determined not to retreat.

Many years ago, there lived at Cambridge a miserly old couple of the name of Jardine: they had two sons: the father was a perfect miser, and at his death one thousand guineas were discovered secreted in his bed. The two sons grew up as parsimonious as their sire.

It is said that they had no bed, and, to save the expense of one, always slept on a bundle of packing-cloths under the counter. In their housekeeping they were penurious in the extreme.

Mr Venus took the lead, towing Mr Wegg, in order that his refractory leg might be promptly extricated from any pitfalls it should dig for itself.

If, said Mr Wegg by way of peroration, he had erred in saying only ‘Halves!’ he trusted to his comrade, brother, and partner not to hesitate to set him right, and to reprove his weakness.

But the great serene mirror of the river seemed as if it might have reproduced all it had ever reflected between those placid banks, and brought nothing to the light save what was peaceful, pastoral, and blooming.

The wayward, playful, affectionate nature, giddy for want of the weight of some sustaining purpose, and capricious because it was always fluttering among little things, was yet a captivating one.

Miss Wren’s troublesome child was in the corner in deep disgrace, and exhibiting great wretchedness in the shivering stage of prostration from drink.

‘Which looks,’ remarked Eugene with much gravity, ‘like not knowing me. I hope it may not be my worthy friend Mr Aaron, for, to tell you the truth, Mortimer, I doubt he may have a prepossession against me.'

Bradley consumed the lonely hours, and consumed himself in haunting the spot where his careless rival lay a dreaming; little Miss Peecher wore them away in listening for the return home of the master of her heart, and in sorrowfully presaging that much was amiss with him.

‘I don’t know that I want anything for it. Or if I do want anything for it, I don’t know what it is.’ Bradley gave this answer in a stolid, vacant, and self-communing manner, which Mr Riderhood found very extraordinary.

They might have taken up their station in his breast, too, for he was blithe and merry.

How, in the course of years, he had reduced the principal by trifling sums, ‘having,’ said Twemlow, ‘always to observe great economy, being in the enjoyment of a fixed income limited in extent, and that depending on the munificence of a certain nobleman,’ and had always pinched the full interest out of himself with punctual pinches.

‘Not at all caring for, and indeed as it seems to me rather enjoying,’ said Fledgeby, with peculiar unction, ‘the precious kick-up and row that will come off between Mr Twemlow and the said great party?’

More than once or twice, more than twice or thrice, say half a dozen times, he took his stick from the arm on which he nursed it, and hit a straight sharp rap at the air with its head. Possibly the wooden countenance of Mr Silas Wegg was incorporeally before him at those moments, for he hit with intense satisfaction.

...here Mr Boffin clapped a finger against his nose, and tapped it several times with a sneaking air, as embodying Rokesmith confidentially confabulating with his own nose...

‘How do you reconcile that, with this young lady’s being a weak-spirited, improvident idiot, not knowing what was due to herself, flinging up her money to the church-weathercocks, and racing off at a splitting pace for the workhouse?’

‘Win her affections,’ retorted Mr Boffin, with ineffable contempt, ‘and possess her heart! Mew says the cat, Quack-quack says the duck, Bow-wow-wow says the dog! Win her affections and possess her heart! Mew, Quack-quack, Bow-wow!’

‘You slander the young lady; you with your affections and hearts and trumpery,’ returned Mr Boffin.

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.

‘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?’

‘And if my grandmamma wasn’t in her dotage when she took to insisting on people’s retiring to dark apartments, she ought to have been. A pretty exhibition my grandmamma must have made of herself! I wonder whether she ever insisted on people’s retiring into the ball of St Paul’s; and if she did, how she got them there!’

...Mr Twemlow feels a little queer on the sofa at his lodgings over the stable yard in Duke Street, Saint James’s, in consequence of having taken two advertised pills at about mid-day, on the faith of the printed representation accompanying the box (price one and a penny halfpenny, government stamp included), that the same ‘will be found highly salutary as a precautionary measure in connection with the pleasures of the table.’

‘Really,’ says the uneasy little gentleman, ‘really, Mrs Lammle, I should take it as a favour if you could excuse me from any further confidence. It has ever been one of the objects of my life—which, unfortunately, has not had many objects—to be inoffensive, and to keep out of cabals and interferences.’

It is the unfortunate destiny of Buffer to damage a cause by espousing it.

Then, the Analytical, perusing a scrap of paper lying on the salver, with the air of a literary Censor, adjusts it, takes his time about going to the table with it, and presents it to Mr Eugene Wrayburn.