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 patch-work 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 bed-side; and there was the box upon it, in which the will had lain. A few old chairs with patch-work 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 for ever.'
'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 young lives and sorrowful deaths. We didn't want the rest.'
At the treasures of the yard, and at the outside of the house, and at the detached building which Mr Boffin pointed out as the residence of himself and his wife during the many years of their service, the Secretary looked with interest. It was not until Mr Boffin had shown him every wonder of the Bower twice over, that he remembered his having duties to discharge elsewhere.
'You have no instructions to give me, Mr Boffin, in reference to this place?'
'Not any, Rokesmith. No.'
'Might I ask, without seeming impertinent, whether you have any intention of selling it?'
'Certainly not. In remembrance of our old master, our old master's children, and our old service, me and Mrs Boffin mean to keep it up as it stands.'
The Secretary's eyes glanced with so much meaning in them at the Mounds, that Mr Boffin said, as if in answer to a remark:
'Ay, ay, 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. Iain'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.'
