Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens [best black authors .txt] 📗

After despatching this second bolt with a still greater expenditure of force, Bella laughed and cried still more.

'Mr Rokesmith, pray stay one moment. Pray hear one word from me before you go! I am deeply sorry for the reproaches you have borne on my account. Out of the depths of my heart I earnestly and truly beg your pardon.'

As she stepped towards him, he met her. As she gave him her hand, he put it to his lips, and said, 'God bless you!' No laughing was mixed with Bella's crying then; her tears were pure and fervent.

'There is not an ungenerous word that I have heard addressed to you—heard with scorn and indignation, Mr Rokesmith—but it has wounded me far more than you, for I have deserved it, and you never have. Mr Rokesmith, it is to me you owe this perverted account of what passed between us that night. I parted with the secret, even while I was angry with myself for doing so. It was very bad in me, but indeed it was not wicked. I did it in a moment of conceit and folly—one of my many such moments—one of my many such hours—years. As I am punished for it severely, try to forgive it!'

'I do with all my soul.'

'Thank you. O thank you! Don't part from me till I have said one other word, to do you justice. The only fault you can be truly charged with, in having spoken to me as you did that night—with how much delicacy and how much forbearance no one but I can know or be grateful to you for—is, that you laid yourself open to be slighted by a worldly shallow girl whose head was turned, and who was quite unable to rise to the worth of what you offered her. Mr Rokesmith, that girl has often seen herself in a pitiful and poor light since, but never in so pitiful and poor a light as now, when the mean tone in which she answered you—sordid and vain girl that she was—has been echoed in her ears by Mr Boffin.'

He kissed her hand again.

'Mr Boffin's speeches were detestable to me, shocking to me,' said Bella, startling that gentleman with another stamp of her little foot. 'It is quite true that there was a time, and very lately, when I deserved to be so “righted,” Mr Rokesmith; but I hope that I shall never deserve it again!'

He once more put her hand to his lips, and then relinquished it, and left the room. Bella was hurrying back to the chair in which she had hidden her face so long, when, catching sight of Mrs Boffin by the way, she stopped at her. 'He is gone,' sobbed Bella indignantly, despairingly, in fifty ways at once, with her arms round Mrs Boffin's neck. 'He has been most shamefully abused, and most unjustly and most basely driven away, and I am the cause of it!'

All this time, Mr Boffin had been rolling his eyes over his loosened neckerchief, as if his fit were still upon him. Appearing now to think that he was coming to, he stared straight before him for a while, tied his neckerchief again, took several long inspirations, swallowed several times, and ultimately exclaimed with a deep sigh, as if he felt himself on the whole better: 'Well!'

No word, good or bad, did Mrs Boffin say; but she tenderly took care of Bella, and glanced at her husband as if for orders. Mr Boffin, without imparting any, took his seat on a chair over against them, and there sat leaning forward, with a fixed countenance, his legs apart, a hand on each knee, and his elbows squared, until Bella should dry her eyes and raise her head, which in the fulness of time she did.

'I must go home,' said Bella, rising hurriedly. 'I am very grateful to you for all you have done for me, but I can't stay here.'

'My darling girl!' remonstrated Mrs Boffin.

'No, I can't stay here,' said Bella; 'I can't indeed.—Ugh! you vicious old thing!' (This to Mr Boffin.)

'Don't be rash, my love,' urged Mrs Boffin. 'Think well of what you do.'

'Yes, you had better think well,' said Mr Boffin.

'I shall never more think well of you,' cried Bella, cutting him short, with intense defiance in her expressive little eyebrows, and championship of the late Secretary in every dimple. 'No! Never again! Your money has changed you to marble. You are a hard-hearted Miser. You are worse than Dancer, worse than Hopkins, worse than Blackberry Jones, worse than any of the wretches. And more!' proceeded Bella, breaking into tears again, 'you were wholly undeserving of the Gentleman you have lost.'

'Why, you don't mean to say, Miss Bella,' the Golden Dustman slowly remonstrated, 'that you set up Rokesmith against me?'

'I do!' said Bella. 'He is worth a Million of you.'

Very pretty she looked, though very angry, as she made herself as tall as she possibly could (which was not extremely tall), and utterly renounced her patron with a lofty toss of her rich brown head.

'I would rather he thought well of me,' said Bella, 'though he swept the street for bread, than that you did, though you splashed the mud upon him from the wheels of a chariot of pure gold.—There!'

'Well I'm sure!' cried Mr Boffin, staring.

'And for a long time past, when you have thought you set yourself above him, I have only seen you under his feet,' said Bella—'There! And throughout I saw in him the master, and I saw in you the man—There! And when you used him shamefully, I took his part and loved him—There! I boast of it!'

After which strong avowal Bella underwent reaction, and cried to any extent, with her face on the back of her chair.

'Now, look here,' said Mr Boffin, as soon as he could find an opening for breaking the silence and striking in. 'Give me your attention, Bella. I am not angry.'

'I am!' said Bella.

'I say,' resumed the Golden Dustman, 'I am not angry, and I mean kindly to you, and I want to overlook this. So you'll stay where you are, and we'll agree to say no more about it.'

'No, I can't stay here,' cried Bella, rising hurriedly again; 'I can't think of staying here. I must go home for good.'

'Now, don't be silly,' Mr Boffin reasoned. 'Don't do what you can't undo; don't do what you're sure to be sorry for.'

'I shall never be sorry for it,' said Bella; 'and I should always be sorry, and should every minute of my life despise myself if I remained here after what has happened.'

'At least, Bella,' argued Mr Boffin, 'let there be no mistake about it. Look before you leap, you know. Stay where you are, and all's well, and all's as it was to be. Go away, and you can never come back.'

'I know that I can never come back, and that's what I mean,' said Bella.

'You mustn't expect,' Mr Boffin pursued, 'that I'm a-going to settle money on you, if you leave us like this, because I am not. No, Bella! Be careful! Not one brass farthing.'

'Expect!' said Bella, haughtily. 'Do you think that any power on earth could make me take it, if you did, sir?'

But there was Mrs Boffin to part from, and, in the full flush of her dignity, the impressible little soul collapsed again. Down upon her knees before that good woman, she rocked herself upon her breast, and cried, and sobbed, and folded her in her arms with all her might.

'You're a dear, a dear, the best of dears!' cried Bella. 'You're the best of human creatures. I can never be thankful enough to you, and I can never forget you. If I should live to be blind and deaf I know I shall see and hear you, in my fancy, to the last of my dim old days!'

Mrs Boffin wept most heartily, and embraced her with all fondness; but said not one single word except that she was her dear girl. She said that often enough, to be sure, for she said it over and over again; but not one word else.

Bella broke from her at length, and was going weeping out of the room, when in her own little queer affectionate way, she half relented towards Mr Boffin.

'I am very glad,' sobbed Bella, 'that I called you names, sir, because you richly deserved it. But I am very sorry that I called you names, because you used to be so different. Say good-bye!'

'Good-bye,' said Mr Boffin, shortly.

'If I knew which of your hands was the least spoilt, I would ask you to let me touch it,' said Bella, 'for the last time. But not because I repent of what I have said to you. For I don't. It's true!'

'Try the left hand,' said Mr Boffin, holding it out in a stolid manner; 'it's the least used.'

'You have been wonderfully good and kind to me,' said Bella, 'and I kiss it for that. You have been as bad as bad could be to Mr Rokesmith, and I throw it away for that. Thank you for myself, and good-bye!'

'Good-bye,' said Mr Boffin as before.

Bella caught him round the neck and kissed him, and ran out for ever.

She ran up-stairs, and sat down on the floor in her own room, and cried abundantly. But the day was declining and she had no time to lose. She opened all the places where she kept her dresses; selected only those she had brought with her, leaving all the rest; and made a great misshapen bundle of them, to be sent for afterwards.

'I won't take one of the others,' said Bella, tying the knots of the bundle very tight, in the severity of her resolution. 'I'll leave all the presents behind, and begin again entirely on my own account.' That the resolution might be thoroughly carried into practice, she even changed the dress she wore, for that in which she had come to the grand mansion. Even the bonnet she put on, was the bonnet that had mounted into the Boffin chariot at Holloway.

'Now, I am complete,' said Bella. 'It's a little trying, but I have steeped my eyes in cold water, and I won't cry any more. You have been a pleasant room to me, dear room. Adieu! We shall never see each other again.'

With a parting kiss of her fingers to it, she softly closed the door and went with a light foot down the great staircase, pausing and listening as she went, that she might meet none of the household. No one chanced to be about, and she got down to the hall in quiet. The door of the late Secretary's room stood open. She peeped in as she passed, and divined from the emptiness of his table, and the general appearance of things, that he was already gone. Softly opening the great hall door, and softly closing it upon herself, she turned and kissed it on the outside—insensible old combination of wood and iron that it was!—before she ran away from the house at a swift pace.

'That was well done!' panted Bella, slackening in the next street, and subsiding into a walk. 'If I had left myself any breath to cry with, I should have cried again. Now poor dear darling little Pa, you are going to see your lovely woman unexpectedly.'