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[pg 338] 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[pg 339] 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[pg 340] 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;[pg 341] 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[pg 342] 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.
