Charles Dickens: Our Mutual Friend

BOOK THE SECOND: BIRDS OF A FEATHER Chapter 14: Strong of Purpose (continued)

The Secretary took that opportunity of touching on the practical question of Mr Sloppy's capabilities. He would have made a wonderful cabinet-maker, said Mrs Higden, 'if there had been the money to put him to it.' She had seen him handle tools that he had borrowed to mend the mangle, or to knock a broken piece of furniture together, in a surprising manner. As to constructing toys for the Minders, out of nothing, he had done that daily. And once as many as a dozen people had got together in the lane to see the neatness with which he fitted the broken pieces of a foreign monkey's musical instrument. 'That's well,' said the Secretary. 'It will not be hard to find a trade for him.'

John Harmon being buried under mountains now, the Secretary that very same day set himself to finish his affairs and have done with him. He drew up an ample declaration, to be signed by Rogue Riderhood (knowing he could get his signature to it, by making him another and much shorter evening call), and then considered to whom should he give the document? To Hexam's son, or daughter? Resolved speedily, to the daughter. But it would be safer to avoid seeing the daughter, because the son had seen Julius Handford, and--he could not be too careful--there might possibly be some comparison of notes between the son and daughter, which would awaken slumbering suspicion, and lead to consequences. 'I might even,' he reflected, 'be apprehended as having been concerned in my own murder!' Therefore, best to send it to the daughter under cover by the post. Pleasant Riderhood had undertaken to find out where she lived, and it was not necessary that it should be attended by a single word of explanation. So far, straight.

But, all that he knew of the daughter he derived from Mrs Boffin's accounts of what she heard from Mr Lightwood, who seemed to have a reputation for his manner of relating a story, and to have made this story quite his own. It interested him, and he would like to have the means of knowing more--as, for instance, that she received the exonerating paper, and that it satisfied her--by opening some channel altogether independent of Lightwood: who likewise had seen Julius Handford, who had publicly advertised for Julius Handford, and whom of all men he, the Secretary, most avoided. 'But with whom the common course of things might bring me in a moment face to face, any day in the week or any hour in the day.'