Tales from Dickens

He was a hard-hearted man and when his daughter would not marry as he wished he turned her out of the house on a winter's night. The poor girl died soon after, and her younger brother (a boy of only fourteen), indignant at his father's cruelty, ran away to a foreign country, where for years he was not heard of.

The old man, hard-hearted as he was, and though he never spoke of the son save with anger and curses, felt this keenly, for in his own way he had loved the boy.

A Mr. Boffin was foreman of Harmon's dust business, and both he and his wife had loved the two children. Being kind and just people, they did not hesitate to let the father know how wicked they considered his action, and they never ceased to grieve for the poor little John who had run away. So, though they did not guess it, the old man made up his mind they were an honest and deserving pair.

One morning the dust collector was discovered dead in his bed, and then it was found that he had left a very curious will. The will bequeathed all his vast fortune to the son who had run away, on one condition: that he marry a young lady by the name of Bella Wilfer, the daughter of a poor London clerk.

The son had never seen Bella in his life, and in fact the old man himself had seen her only a few times – and that was a long, long time before, when she was a very little girl. He was sitting in the park one Sunday morning, and the baby Bella, because her father would not go the exact way she wanted, was screaming and stamping her little foot. Old Mr. Harmon, having such a stubborn temper himself, admired it in the little child, and came to watch for her. Then, for some strange reason, which nobody ever could guess, he had put the baby's name in his will, declaring that his son John should get his money only by marrying this little girl. And the will declared, moreover, that if the son, John Harmon, should die, or should refuse to marry Bella, all the fortune should go to Mr. Boffin.

The lawyers had great trouble in finding where John Harmon was, but finally they did so, and received word that he would return at once to England.

The ship he sailed on reached London, but the passenger it carried did not appear. A few days later, a riverman named Hexam found a body floating in the River Thames, which flows through the middle of London. In his pockets were the letters the lawyers had written to John Harmon, and there seemed no doubt that the unfortunate young man had been murdered and his body thrown into the river.

The night the body was found, while it lay at the police station, a young man, very much excited, came and asked to see it. He would not tell who he was, and his whole appearance was most wild and strange. The police wondered, but they saw no reason to detain the stranger, so after looking at the body, he went away again very hastily.

A great stir was made about the case, and the police tried their best to discover the murderer, but they were unsuccessful. Then it occurred to them that there was something suspicious in the appearance of the young man that night. They tried to find him, but he seemed to have disappeared.

At last the fortune was turned over to Mr. Boffin, and all but a few people thought no more about the murder.

Now, it was not really true that John Harmon had been drowned. This is what had happened:

The young man had come back to England unwillingly, though he was coming to such wealth. Having left his father so long before in anger, he hardly liked to touch the money. And he dreaded having to marry a young lady he had never seen, with whom all his life he might be most unhappy.

On the ship was a seaman about his own age whose face somewhat resembled his own. With this man Harmon became friendly and before the ship reached England he had told him his trouble and his dread. The other proposed that Harmon disguise himself in sailor's clothes, go into the neighborhood where Miss Bella Wilfer lived, and see if she was one whom he could love.

Now the man whom Harmon was thus trusting was a villain, who, while he had been listening to the other's story, had been planning a crime against him. He had made up his mind to kill Harmon, and, as he looked so much like him, to marry Bella himself and claim the fortune.

Near the docks where the ship came in was a sailors' boarding-house owned by a riverman of bad reputation named "Rogue" Riderhood. Riderhood had once been the partner of Hexam, the man who found the floating body, but one day he was caught trying to rob a live man and Hexam had cast him off. The seaman took Harmon to this house and there he secretly got from Riderhood some poison. Last he persuaded Harmon to change clothes with him.

All that remained now was to get rid of the real Harmon. To do this he put the poison in a cup of coffee, and Harmon, drinking this, became insensible.

The lodging-house hung out over the river and the wicked man had intended throwing the other's body, dressed now in seaman's clothing, into the water. But fate was quickly to spoil his plan. He and some others fell to quarreling over the money found in the clothing of the unconscious man. The result was a desperate fight, and when it was over there were two bodies thrown from the window into the black river – the drugged man and the seaman who had planned his murder.

The shock of the cold water brought the drugged Harmon to his senses. He struck out, and after a terrible struggle succeeded in reaching shore. The exposure and the poison made him very ill and he lay abed in an inn for some days. While he was lying helpless there the drowned body of the seaman was found by Hexam, the riverman. As it wore the clothes of John Harmon, and had his papers in its pockets, every one supposed, of course, that it was the body of the missing heir.

The first thing John Harmon saw after he was well enough to walk was a printed notice announcing the finding of his own dead body – which gave him a very queer sensation. Lying there he had had time to think over the adventure and he had guessed pretty nearly how it all had happened. He went at once to the police station to look at the corpse and saw it was that of his false friend, who had tried to lure him to his death. So it was the real John Harmon who had so excitedly appeared that night to the police inspectors, and had vanished immediately, and whom they had searched for so long in vain, under the suspicion that he himself was the murderer.

He had a very good reason for not letting the police find him, too. Now that the world considered him dead, he had determined, before he came to life, to carry out his first plan, and to find out for himself just what kind of person the Bella Wilfer he was expected to marry was, and whether Mr. and Mrs. Boffin, who had been so kind to him in his childhood, would still be as true to his memory in their wealth. For this reason he did not correct the error that had been made. He took the name of John Rokesmith, and, to get acquainted with Bella, hired lodgings in her own father's house.

Mr. Wilfer was a clerk for a Mr. Veneering, a man who had made a big fortune in the drug business and wanted now to get into Parliament. Everything the Veneerings had was brand new. They spent a great deal of money entertaining society people at dinners, but Mr. Veneering spent very little on his clerks. Bella's father, though he was always as happy as a cherub, was so poor that he never had been able to buy a whole new suit at once. His hat was shabby before he could afford a coat, and his trousers were worn before he got to new shoes. So he was glad enough indeed to get a lodger.

Mr. and Mrs. Boffin, to be sure, now had the great fortune. They bought a fine house, and everybody called Mr. Boffin "The Golden Dustman," because he was so rich. Mrs. Boffin wore velvet dresses, and Mr. Boffin, thinking that now he was rich he ought to know a great deal about books, bought a big volume of the History of the Roman Empire and hired a man with a wooden leg who kept a ballad shop near by to come and read to him in the evenings.

But in spite of all their fine things, Mr. and Mrs. Boffin remained the same good, kind-hearted couple they had always been. John Harmon (or John Rokesmith, as he now called himself), soon found this out, for he cleverly got a position as Mr. Boffin's secretary, taking charge of all his papers and preventing many dishonest people from cheating him. And Mr. and Mrs. Boffin, never suspecting who he really was, instead of "secretary," called him "Our Mutual Friend," and soon grew fond of him.

Nor did they forget Bella Wilfer (for whose disappointment, at not getting the rich husband she had expected, they felt very sorry), and soon invited her to live with them. Bella was a good-tempered, pretty girl, though inclined to be somewhat selfish and spoiled, and she was not sure, after all, that she would have liked a husband who had been willed to her like a dozen silver spoons; so she did not grieve greatly, and accepted Mr. and Mrs. Boffin's offer gratefully.

So now the secretary, John Rokesmith, beside being constantly with Mr. and Mrs. Boffin, whom he had always loved, had a chance to see Bella every day, and he was not long in finding out that it would be very easy, indeed, for him to fall in love with her.

II

LIZZIE HEXAM AND THE DOLLS' DRESSMAKER

Hexam, the riverman who had found the body floating in the Thames, made a living by watching in his boat for drowned bodies, and getting any rewards that might be offered for finding them. He had two children – a daughter, Lizzie, who used to row the boat for him, and a younger son, Charley.

Lizzie was a beautiful girl and a good daughter, and she never ceased to beseech her father to quit this ghastly business. She saved every cent she could get to give her brother some schooling, and kept urging the boy until he left home and became a teacher in a respectable school. For her own part she chose to stay by her father, hoping, in spite of her hatred of his calling, to make him sometime something better.

The night Hexam found the body the lawyers who had the Harmon will in charge came to his house to see about it. One of them, a careless young man by the name of Eugene Wrayburn, was greatly struck with the beauty of Lizzie, and pitied her because of the life she was obliged to live, and this interest in her made him even more deeply interested in the case of the odd will and the strange murder.

Now Mr. and Mrs. Boffin, since they were rich, had offered a great reward for the arrest of the murderer of John Harmon. To get this reward and at the same time to avenge himself on his old partner Hexam for casting him off, Rogue Riderhood went to the lawyers and declared that it was Hexam himself who had really killed the man whose body he had found. Riderhood swore that Hexam had confessed the crime to him.

Wrayburn, knowing what a shock this charge against her father would be for Lizzie, went with the officers sent to seize him. But they made no arrest, for that night Hexam himself was drowned by accidentally falling from his own boat.

But the false charge against him lay heavy on Lizzie's mind. She hated the river and all that was connected with it, and soon found herself a decent lodging in another part of London.

Here she lived with a weird little dwarf of a girl, so deformed that she could scarcely walk at all.

"I can't get up," she used to say to strangers, "because my back's bad and my legs are queer."

She had an odd face, with sharp gray eyes, and her wits were sharper yet. She worked at the strangest trade in the world. She had visiting cards on which was printed:

MISS JENNIE WRENDOLLS' DRESSMAKERDolls Attended at Their Own Residence

She was really and truly a dolls' dressmaker and sat all day long making tiny frocks out of silk and ribbon. Every evening she would hobble out to the door of the theater or of a house where a ball was going on and wait until a lady came out in a beautiful costume; then she would take careful note of it and go home and dress a doll just like it. She even made a minister doll, in clerical collar and surplice, and used to rent him out for doll weddings.

But in spite of her trade she disliked children, because the rude ones of the neighborhood called her names through her keyhole and mimicked her bent back and crooked legs.

"Don't talk to me of children," she often said; "I know their tricks and their manners!" and when she said this she would make a fierce little jab in the air with her needle, as if she were putting out somebody's eyes.

Jennie Wren had a miserable drunkard of a father, whom she called her "troublesome child."

"He is enough to break his mother's heart," she would say when he staggered in. "I wish I had never brought him up. Ugh! You muddling, disgraceful, prodigal old son! I can't bear to look at you. Go into your corner this minute." And the wretched creature, whining and maudlin, would shuffle into his corner in disgrace, not daring to disobey her.

The odd little dolls' dressmaker was cheerful and merry with all her trials and loved Lizzie Hexam very much. Wrayburn, the young lawyer, used to come to see them, but she did not approve of him. She saw almost before Lizzie did herself that the latter was falling in love with Wrayburn, and the wise little creature feared that this would only bring pain to Lizzie, because she was an uneducated girl and Wrayburn a gentleman, who, when he married, would be expected to marry a lady far above Lizzie's station. Lizzie knew this, too, but she could not help loving Wrayburn, and as for the lawyer, he thought nothing of what the outcome might be.

Meanwhile Lizzie's brother Charley, for whom she had worked so hard, was doing well at school, but now that he was getting up in the world he had turned out to be a selfish boy and was afraid that his sister might draw him down.

One day he came to visit her, bringing with him the master of his school. The master's name was Headstone. He was a gloomy, passionate, revengeful man who dressed always in black and had no friends. Unfortunately enough, the first time he saw Lizzie he fell in love with her. It was unfortunate in more ways than one, for Lizzie disliked him greatly, and he was, as it proved, a man who would stop at nothing – not even at the worst of crimes – to attain an object.

When Lizzie's brother found Headstone wanted to marry her, in his selfishness he saw only what a fine thing it would be for himself, and when she refused, he said many harsh things and finally left her in anger, telling her she was no longer a sister of his.

This was not the worst either, for she knew Headstone had been made almost angry by her dislike, and she was in dreadful fear lest he do harm to Eugene Wrayburn, whom he suspected she loved.

In her anxiety Lizzie left her lodging with the dolls' dressmaker, and found employment in a paper-mill in a village on the river, some miles from London, letting neither Wrayburn nor Headstone know where she had gone.

The schoolmaster imagined that the lawyer (whom he now hated with a deadly hatred) knew where she was, and in order to discover if he visited her he began to dog the other's footsteps. At night, after teaching all day in school, Headstone would lie in wait outside the lawyer's door and whenever he came out would follow him.

Wrayburn soon discovered this and delighted to fool his enemy. Every night he would take a new direction and lead his pursuer for hours about the city. So that in a few weeks Headstone became almost insane with murderous anger and disappointment.

So things went on for a long while. Lizzie continued to love Eugene Wrayburn, who kept trying in every way to find her. Headstone, the schoolmaster, kept watching him and meditating evil. The little dolls' dressmaker worked on cheerily every day in the city, and in their fine house Mr. and Mrs. Boffin grew fonder and fonder of Miss Bella, whom John Rokesmith, the secretary, thought more beautiful every day.

III

THE RISE AND FALL OF SILAS WEGG

The wooden-legged ballad seller whom Mr. Boffin had hired to read to him was a sly, dishonest rascal named Silas Wegg, who soon made up his mind to get all the money he could out of his employer.

There is an old story of a camel who once asked a shopkeeper to let him put his nose in at the shop door to warm it. The shopkeeper consented, and little by little the camel got his head, then his neck, then his shoulders and at last his whole body into the shop, so that there was no room for the poor shopkeeper, who had to sit outside in the cold. Wegg soon began to act like the camel and took such advantage of easy-going Mr. Boffin that the latter at last let him live rent-free in the house amid the dust heaps, which he himself had occupied before he got old Harmon's money.

Wegg imagined the mounds contained treasures hidden by the old man and thought it would be a fine thing to cheat Mr. Boffin out of them. So every night he spent hours prodding the heaps. Finally he persuaded a Mr. Venus (a man who had been disappointed in love and made a melancholy living by stringing skeletons together on wires), to become his partner in the search.

One day Wegg really did find something. It was a parchment hidden in an empty pump, and he soon saw that it was a second will of old Harmon's, later than the one already known, leaving the whole fortune, not to the son at all, but to the Crown.

When Wegg saw this his hypocritical soul swelled with joy, for he thought, sooner than give up all the money to the Crown, Mr. Boffin would pay him a great deal to destroy this new will. He was such a rascal himself that it never occurred to him that maybe Mr. Boffin would prefer to be honest. He took it for granted everybody else was as bad as he was himself, yet all the while he tried to make himself believe that he was upright and noble in all he did, as hypocrites generally do.

The only point Wegg could not make up his mind about was how much he could squeeze out of his benefactor, Mr. Boffin. At first he had thought of asking for half, but the more he hugged his secret the lesser the half seemed. At last he determined to demand for himself, as the price for giving up the will, all but a very small share of the whole fortune.

Now Mr. Venus, though he had yielded at first to the rosy temptations of Wegg, was after all quite honest at heart, and his conscience troubled him so that at last he went and told Mr. Boffin all about Wegg's discovery.

The Golden Dustman at first thought Mr. Venus had some underhanded plan, so he pretended he was terribly frightened for fear of Wegg and the will he had found.

As a matter of fact, sly old Mr. Boffin was not afraid in the least, because he knew something that neither Wegg nor Venus, nor even John Rokesmith, the secretary, knew. This was, that the old original dustman, Harmon, had made still a third will, later than either of the others. The first will found was the one that had called the son back to England to marry Bella. The second will was the one leaving all his fortune to the Crown, which Wegg had found in the empty pump. The third and last one gave all the money to Mr. Boffin, no matter whom the son married, and gave none to any one else. And this third and last will, the one that was the true will, The Golden Dustman had long ago found himself, buried in a bottle in one of the dust heaps.

Mr. Boffin had never told any one about this last will, because he had all the fortune anyway. Now, however, seeing how Wegg had planned to act, he was very glad he had found it. And when he was convinced that Mr. Venus was really honest and wanted no reward whatever, Mr. Boffin determined to fool the rascally Wegg up to the very last moment.

Wegg's plan was not to demand the money until he had fully searched all the dust mounds. Mr. Boffin spurred Wegg on in this regard by making him read to him in the evenings from a book called The Lives of Famous Misers which he had bought: about the famous Mr. Dancer who had warmed his dinner by sitting on it and died naked in a sack, and yet had gold and bank-notes hidden in the crevices of the walls and in cracked jugs and tea-pots; of an old apple woman in whose house a fortune was found wrapped up in little scraps of paper; of "Vulture Hopkins" and "Blewbury Jones" and many others whose riches after their death were found hidden in strange places. While Wegg read, Mr. Boffin would pretend to get tremendously excited about his dust mounds, so that Wegg grew surer and surer there must be riches hidden in them.

Finally The Golden Dustman sold the mounds and had them carted away little by little, Wegg watching every shovelful for fear he would miss something.

Mr. Boffin hired a foreman to manage the removal of the dust who wore Wegg down to skin and bone. He worked by daylight and torchlight, too. Just as Wegg, tired out by watching all day in the rain, would crawl into bed, the foreman, like a goblin, would reappear and go to work again. Sometimes Wegg would be waked in the middle of the night, and sometimes kept at his post for as much as forty-eight hours at a stretch, till he grew so gaunt and haggard that even his wooden leg looked chubby in comparison.

At last he could not keep quiet any longer and he told Mr. Boffin what he had found. Mr. Boffin pretended the most abject dread. Wegg bullied and browbeat him to his heart's content, and ended by ordering him, like a slave, to be ready to receive him on a certain morning, and to have the money ready to pay him.

When he went to the fine Boffin house to keep this appointment he entered insolently, whistling and with his hat on. A servant showed him into the library where Mr. Boffin and the secretary sat waiting, and where the secretary at once astonished him by taking off the hat and throwing it out of the window.

In another moment Wegg found himself seized by the cravat, shaken till his teeth rattled, and pinned in a corner of the room, where the secretary knocked his head against the wall while he told him in a few words what a scoundrel he was.

When he learned that the will he had discovered was worthless paper, Wegg lost all his bullying air and cringed before them. Mr. Boffin was disposed to be merciful and offered to make good his loss of his ballad business, but Wegg, grasping and mean to the last, set its value at such a ridiculously high figure that Mr. Boffin put his money back into his pocket.

Then, at a sign from John Rokesmith, one of the servants caught Wegg by the collar, hoisted him on his back, ran down to the street with him and threw him into a garbage cart, where he disappeared from view with a tremendous splash.

And that, so far as this story is concerned, was the end of Silas Wegg.

IV

BELLA AND THE GOLDEN DUSTMAN

It was not long before John Rokesmith, the secretary, was very much in love with Bella indeed. Bella saw this plainly, but the fine house and costly clothes had quite spoiled her, and, thinking him only a poor secretary and her father's lodger, she treated him almost with contempt.

Yet he would not tell her who he was, for he did not want her to marry him merely because of the money it would bring her. She hurt his feelings often, but in spite of it she could not help being attracted to him. He had a way, too, of looking at her that made her feel how proud and unjust she was, and sometimes made her quite despise herself.

But having had a taste of the pleasures and comforts that wealth would bring, Bella had quite determined when she married to marry nobody but a very rich man. Mr. and Mrs. Boffin both noticed how changed she was growing from her own sweet self and regretted it, for they liked Bella and they liked the secretary, too, and they could easily see that the latter was in love with her.

One day Mrs. Boffin went to the secretary's room for something. As she entered, Rokesmith, who was sitting sadly over the fire, looked up with a peculiar expression that told the good woman all in a flash who he was.

"I know you now," she cried, "you're little John Harmon!"

In the joy and surprise she almost fainted, but he caught her and set her down beside him. Just then in came Mr. Boffin, and the secretary told them the whole story, and how he now loved Bella, but would not declare himself because of her contempt.

Both Mr. and Mrs. Boffin were so glad to know he was really alive they fell to crying with joy. The Golden Dustman declared that, no matter how the last will read, John should have the fortune for his own. Rokesmith (or Harmon) at first refused to do this, but Mr. Boffin swore that if he did not he himself would not touch the money, and it would have to go to the Crown anyway. So at last it was agreed that Mr. Boffin should keep a small portion for his own, but that the other should take all the rest.