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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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