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lynx-eyed vigilance now increased twenty-fold. Not only did his weary watch
keep pace with every present point that every day presented to him in some
new form, but in the midst of these engrossing occupations he found leisure
- that is, he made it - to review the past transactions of the Firm, and his
share in them, during a long series of years. Frequently when the clerks
were all gone, the offices dark and empty, and all similar places of
business shut up, Mr Carker, with the whole anatomy of the iron room laid
bare before him, would explore the mysteries of books and papers, with the
patient progress of a man who was dissecting the minutest nerves and fibres
of his subject. Perch, the messenger, who usually remained on these
occasions, to entertain himself with the perusal of the Price Current by the
light of one candle, or to doze over the fire in the outer office, at the
imminent risk every moment of diving head foremost into the coal-box, could
not withhold the tribute of his admiration from this zealous conduct,
although it much contracted his domestic enjoyments; and again, and again,
expatiated to Mrs Perch (now nursing twins) on the industry and acuteness of
their managing gentleman in the City.
The same increased and sharp attention that Mr Carker bestowed on the
business of the House, he applied to his own personal affairs. Though not a
partner in the concern - a distinction hitherto reserved solely to
inheritors of the great name of Dombey - he was in the receipt of some
percentage on its dealings; and, participating in all its facilities for the
employment of money to advantage, was considered, by the minnows among the
tritons of the East, a rich man. It began to be said, among these shrewd
observers, that Jem Carker, of Dombey's, was looking about him to see what
he was worth; and that he was calling in his money at a good time, like the
long-headed fellow he was; and bets were even offered on the Stock Exchange
that Jem was going to marry a rich widow.
Yet these cares did not in the least interfere with Mr Carker's
watching of his chief, or with his cleanness, neatness, sleekness, or any
cat-like quality he possessed. It was not so much that there was a change in
him, in reference to any of his habits, as that the whole man was
intensified. Everything that had been observable in him before, was
observable now, but with a greater amount of concentration. He did each
single thing, as if he did nothing else - a pretty certain indication in a
man of that range of ability and purpose, that he is doing something which
sharpens and keeps alive his keenest powers.
The only decided alteration in him was, that as he rode to and fro
along the streets, he would fall into deep fits of musing, like that in
which he had come away from Mr Dombey's house, on the morning of that
gentleman's disaster. At such times, he would keep clear of the obstacles in
his way, mechanically; and would appear to see and hear nothing until
arrival at his destination, or some sudden chance or effort roused him.
Walking his white-legged horse thus, to the counting-house of Dombey
and Son one day, he was as unconscious of the observation of two pairs of
women's eyes, as of the fascinated orbs of Rob the Grinder, who, in waiting
a street's length from the appointed place, as a demonstration of
punctuality, vainly touched and retouched his hat to attract attention, and
trotted along on foot, by his master's side, prepared to hold his stirrup
when he should alight.
'See where he goes!' cried one of these two women, an old creature, who
stretched out her shrivelled arm to point him out to her companion, a young
woman, who stood close beside her, withdrawn like herself into a gateway.
Mrs Brown's daughter looked out, at this bidding on the part of Mrs
Brown; and there were wrath and vengeance in her face.
'I never thought to look at him again,' she said, in a low voice; 'but
it's well I should, perhaps. I see. I see!'
'Not changed!' said the old woman, with a look of eager malice.
'He changed!' returned the other. 'What for? What has he suffered?
There is change enough for twenty in me. Isn't that enough?'
'See where he goes!' muttered the old woman, watching her daughter with
her red eyes; 'so easy and so trim a-horseback, while we are in the mud.'
'And of it,' said her daughter impatiently. 'We are mud, underneath his
horse's feet. What should we be?'
In the intentness with which she looked after him again, she made a
hasty gesture with her hand when the old woman began to reply, as if her
view could be obstructed by mere sound. Her mother watching her, and not
him, remained silent; until her kindling glance subsided, and she drew a
long breath, as if in the relief of his being gone.
'Deary!' said the old woman then. 'Alice! Handsome gall Ally!' She
gently shook her sleeve to arouse her attention. 'Will you let him go like
that, when you can wring money from him? Why, it's a wickedness, my
daughter.'
'Haven't I told you, that I will not have money from him?' she
returned. 'And don't you yet believe me? Did I take his sister's money?
Would I touch a penny, if I knew it, that had gone through his white hands -
unless it was, indeed, that I could poison it, and send it back to him?
Peace, mother, and come away.
'And him so rich?' murmured the old woman. 'And us so poor!'
'Poor in not being able to pay him any of the harm we owe him,'
returned her daughter. 'Let him give me that sort of riches, and I'll take
them from him, and use them. Come away. Its no good looking at his horse.
Come away, mother!'
But the old woman, for whom the spectacle of Rob the Grinder returning
down the street, leading the riderless horse, appeared to have some
extraneous interest that it did not possess in itself, surveyed that young
man with the utmost earnestness; and seeming to have whatever doubts she
entertained, resolved as he drew nearer, glanced at her daughter with
brightened eyes and with her finger on her lip, and emerging from the
gateway at the moment of his passing, touched him on the shoulder.
'Why, where's my sprightly Rob been, all this time!' she said, as he
turned round.
The sprightly Rob, whose sprightliness was very much diminished by the
salutation, looked exceedingly dismayed, and said, with the water rising in
his eyes:
'Oh! why can't you leave a poor cove alone, Misses Brown, when he's
getting an honest livelihood and conducting himself respectable? What do you
come and deprive a cove of his character for, by talking to him in the
streets, when he's taking his master's horse to a honest stable - a horse
you'd go and sell for cats' and dogs' meat if you had your way! Why, I
thought,' said the Grinder, producing his concluding remark as if it were
the climax of all his injuries, 'that you was dead long ago!'
'This is the way,' cried the old woman, appealing to her daughter,
'that he talks to me, who knew him weeks and months together, my deary, and
have stood his friend many and many a time among the pigeon-fancying tramps
and bird-catchers.'
'Let the birds be, will you, Misses Brown?' retorted Rob, in a tone of
the acutest anguish. 'I think a cove had better have to do with lions than
them little creeturs, for they're always flying back in your face when you
least expect it. Well, how d'ye do and what do you want?' These polite
inquiries the Grinder uttered, as it were under protest, and with great
exasperation and vindictiveness.
'Hark how he speaks to an old friend, my deary!' said Mrs Brown, again
appealing to her daughter. 'But there's some of his old friends not so
patient as me. If I was to tell some that he knows, and has spotted and
cheated with, where to find him - '
'Will you hold your tongue, Misses Brown?' interrupted the miserable
Grinder, glancing quickly round, as though he expected to see his master's
teeth shining at his elbow. 'What do you take a pleasure in ruining a cove
for? At your time of life too! when you ought to be thinking of a variety of
things!'
'What a gallant horse!' said the old woman, patting the animal's neck.
'Let him alone, will you, Misses Brown?' cried Rob, pushing away her
hand. 'You're enough to drive a penitent cove mad!'
'Why, what hurt do I do him, child?' returned the old woman.
'Hurt?' said Rob. 'He's got a master that would find it out if he was
touched with a straw.' And he blew upon the place where the old woman's hand
had rested for a moment, and smoothed it gently with his finger, as if he
seriously believed what he said.
The old woman looking back to mumble and mouth at her daughter, who
followed, kept close to Rob's heels as he walked on with the bridle in his
hand; and pursued the conversation.
'A good place, Rob, eh?' said she. 'You're in luck, my child.'
'Oh don't talk about luck, Misses Brown,' returned the wretched
Grinder, facing round and stopping. 'If you'd never come, or if you'd go
away, then indeed a cove might be considered tolerable lucky. Can't you go
along, Misses Brown, and not foller me!' blubbered Rob, with sudden
defiance. 'If the young woman's a friend of yours, why don't she take you
away, instead of letting you make yourself so disgraceful!'
'What!' croaked the old woman, putting her face close to his, with a
malevolent grin upon it that puckered up the loose skin down in her very
throat. 'Do you deny your old chum! Have you lurked to my house fifty times,
and slept sound in a corner when you had no other bed but the paving-stones,
and do you talk to me like this! Have I bought and sold with you, and helped
you in my way of business, schoolboy, sneak, and what not, and do you tell
me to go along? Could I raise a crowd of old company about you to-morrow
morning, that would follow you to ruin like copies of your own shadow, and
do you turn on me with your bold looks! I'll go. Come, Alice.'
'Stop, Misses Brown!' cried the distracted Grinder. 'What are you doing
of? Don't put yourself in a passion! Don't let her go, if you please. I
haven't meant any offence. I said "how d'ye do," at first, didn't I? But you
wouldn't answer. How you do? Besides,' said Rob piteously, 'look here! How
can a cove stand talking in the street with his master's prad a wanting to
be took to be rubbed down, and his master up to every individgle thing that
happens!'
The old woman made a show of being partially appeased, but shook her
head, and mouthed and muttered still.
'Come along to the stables, and have a glass of something that's good
for you, Misses Brown, can't you?' said Rob, 'instead of going on, like
that, which is no good to you, nor anybody else. Come along with her, will
you be so kind?' said Rob. 'I'm sure I'm delighted to see her, if it wasn't
for the horse!'
With this apology, Rob turned away, a rueful picture of despair, and
walked his charge down a bye street' The old woman, mouthing at her
daughter, followed close upon him. The daughter followed.
Turning into a silent little square or court-yard that had a great
church tower rising above it, and a packer's warehouse, and a bottle-maker's
warehouse, for its places of business, Rob the Grinder delivered the
white-legged horse to the hostler of a quaint stable at the corner; and
inviting Mrs Brown and her daughter to seat themselves upon a stone bench at
the gate of that establishment, soon reappeared from a neighbouring
public-house with a pewter measure and a glass.
'Here's master - Mr Carker, child!' said the old woman, slowly, as her
sentiment before drinking. 'Lord bless him!'
'Why, I didn't tell you who he was,' observed Rob, with staring eyes.
'We know him by sight,' said Mrs Brown, whose working mouth and nodding
head stopped for the moment, in the fixedness of her attention. 'We saw him
pass this morning, afore he got off his horse; when you were ready to take
it.'
'Ay, ay,' returned Rob, appearing to wish that his readiness had
carried him to any other place. - 'What's the matter with her? Won't she
drink?'
This inquiry had reference to Alice, who, folded in her cloak, sat a
little apart, profoundly inattentive to his offer of the replenished glass.
The old woman shook her head. 'Don't mind her,' she said; 'she's a
strange creetur, if you know'd her, Rob. But Mr Carker
'Hush!' said Rob, glancing cautiously up at the packer's, and at the
bottle-maker's, as if, from any one of the tiers of warehouses, Mr Carker
might be looking down. 'Softly.'
'Why, he ain't here!' cried Mrs Brown.
'I don't know that,' muttered Rob, whose glance even wandered to the
church tower, as if he might be there, with a supernatural power of hearing.
'Good master?' inquired Mrs Brown.
Rob nodded; and added, in a low voice, 'precious sharp.'
'Lives out of town, don't he, lovey?' said the old woman.
'When he's at home,' returned Rob; 'but we don't live at home just
now.'
'Where then?' asked the old woman.
'Lodgings; up near Mr Dombey's,' returned Rob.
The younger woman fixed her eyes so searchingly upon him, and so
suddenly, that Rob was quite confounded, and offered the glass again, but
with no more effect upon her than before.
'Mr Dombey - you and I used to talk about him, sometimes, you know,'
said Rob to Mrs Brown. 'You used to get me to talk about him.'
The old woman nodded.
'Well, Mr Dombey, he's had a fall from his horse,' said Rob,
unwillingly; 'and my master has to be up there, more than usual, either with
him, or Mrs Dombey, or some of 'em; and so we've come to town.'
'Are they good friends, lovey?'asked the old woman.
'Who?' retorted Rob.
'He and she?'
'What, Mr and Mrs Dombey?' said Rob. 'How should I know!'
'Not them - Master and Mrs Dombey, chick,' replied the old woman,
coaxingly.
'I don't know,' said Rob, looking round him again. 'I suppose so. How
curious you are, Misses Brown! Least said, soonest mended.'
'Why there's no harm in it!' exclaimed the old woman, with a laugh, and
a clap of her hands. 'Sprightly Rob, has grown tame since he has been well
off! There's no harm in It.
'No, there's no harm in it, I know,' returned Rob, with the same
distrustful glance at the packer's and the bottle-maker's, and the church;
'but blabbing, if it's only about the number of buttons on my master's coat,
won't do. I tell you it won't do with him. A cove had better drown himself.
He says so. I shouldn't have so much as told you what his name was, if you
hadn't known it. Talk about somebody else.'
As Rob took another cautious survey of the yard, the old woman made a
secret motion to her daughter. It was momentary, but the daughter, with a
slight look of intelligence, withdrew her eyes from the boy's face, and sat
folded in her cloak as before.
'Rob, lovey!' said the old woman, beckoning him to the other end of the
bench. 'You were always a pet and favourite of mine. Now, weren't you? Don't
you know you were?'
'Yes, Misses Brown,' replied the Grinder, with a very bad grace.
'And you could leave me!' said the old woman, flinging her arms about
his neck. 'You could go away, and grow almost out of knowledge, and never
come to tell your poor old friend how fortunate you were, proud lad! Oho,
Oho!'
'Oh here's a dreadful go for a cove that's got a master wide awake in
the neighbourhood!' exclaimed the wretched Grinder. 'To be howled over like
this here!'
'Won't you come and see me, Robby?' cried Mrs Brown. 'Oho, won't you
ever come and see me?'
'Yes, I tell you! Yes, I will!' returned the Grinder.
'That's my own Rob! That's my lovey!' said Mrs Brown, drying the tears
upon her shrivelled face, and giving him a tender squeeze. 'At the old
place, Rob?'
'Yes,' replied the Grinder.
'Soon, Robby dear?' cried Mrs Brown; 'and often?'
'Yes. Yes. Yes,' replied Rob. 'I will indeed, upon my soul and body.'
'And then,' said Mrs Brown, with her arms uplifted towards the sky, and
her head thrown back and shaking, 'if he's true to his word, I'll never come
a-near him though I know where he is, and never breathe a syllable about
him! Never!'
This ejaculation seemed a drop of comfort to the miserable Grinder, who
shook Mrs Brown by the hand upon it, and implored her with tears in his
eyes, to leave a cove and not destroy his prospects. Mrs Brown, with another
fond embrace, assented; but in the act of following her daughter, turned
back, with her finger stealthily raised, and asked in a hoarse whisper for
some money.
'A shilling, dear!' she said, with her eager avaricious face, 'or
sixpence! For old acquaintance sake. I'm so poor. And my handsome gal' -
looking over her shoulder - 'she's my gal, Rob - half starves me.
But as the reluctant Grinder put it in her hand, her daughter, coming
quietly back, caught the hand in hen, and twisted out the coin.
'What,' she said, 'mother! always money! money from the first, and to
the last' Do you mind so little what I said but now? Here. Take it!'
The old woman uttered a moan as the money was restored, but without in
any other way opposing its restoration, hobbled at her daughter's side out
of the yard, and along the bye street upon which it opened. The astonished
and dismayed Rob staring after them, saw that they stopped, and fell to
earnest conversation very soon; and more than once observed a darkly
threatening action of the younger woman's hand (obviously having reference
to someone of whom they spoke), and a crooning feeble imitation of it on the
part of Mrs Brown, that made him earnestly hope he might not be the subject
of their discourse.
With the present consolation that they were gone, and with the
prospective comfort that Mrs Brown could not live for ever, and was not
likely to live long to trouble him, the Grinder, not otherwise regretting
his misdeeds than as they were attended with such disagreeable incidental
consequences, composed his ruffled features to a more serene expression by
thinking of the admirable manner in which he had disposed of Captain Cuttle
(a reflection that seldom failed to put him in a flow of spirits), and went
to the Dombey Counting House to receive his master's orders.
There his master, so subtle and vigilant of eye, that Rob quaked before
him, more than half expecting to be taxed with Mrs Brown, gave him the usual
morning's box of papers for Mr Dombey, and a note for Mrs Dombey: merely
nodding his head as an enjoinder to be careful, and to use dispatch - a
mysterious admonition, fraught in the Grinder's imagination with dismal
warnings and threats; and more powerful with him than any words.
Alone again, in his own room, Mr Carker applied himself to work, and
worked all day. He saw many visitors; overlooked a number of documents; went
in and out, to and from, sundry places of mercantile resort; and indulged in
no more abstraction until the day's business was done. But, when the usual
clearance of papers from his table was made at last, he fell into his
thoughtful mood once more.
He was standing in his accustomed place and attitude, with his eyes
intently fixed upon the ground, when his brother entered to bring back some
letters that had been taken out in the course of the day. He put them
quietly on the table, and was going immediately, when Mr Carker the Manager,
whose eyes had rested on him, on his entrance, as if they had all this time
had him for the subject of their contemplation, instead of the office-floor,
said:
'Well, John Carker, and what brings you here?'
His brother pointed to the letters, and was again withdrawing.
'I wonder,' said the Manager, 'that you can come and go, without
inquiring how our master is'.
'We had word this morning in the Counting House, that Mr Dombey was
doing well,' replied his brother.
'You are such a meek fellow,' said the Manager, with a smile, - 'but
you have grown so, in the course of years - that if any harm came to him,
you'd be miserable, I dare swear now.'
'I should be truly sorry, James,' returned the other.
'He would be sorry!' said the Manager, pointing at him, as if there
were some other person present to whom he was appealing. 'He would be truly
sorry! This brother of mine! This junior of the place, this slighted piece
of lumber, pushed aside with his face to the wall, like a rotten picture,
and left so, for Heaven knows how many years he's all gratitude and respect,
and devotion too, he would have me believe!'
'I would have you believe nothing, James,' returned the other. 'Be as
just to me as you would to any other man below you. You ask a question, and
I answer it.'
'And have you nothing, Spaniel,' said the Manager, with unusual
irascibility, 'to complain of in him? No proud treatment to resent, no
insolence, no foolery of state, no exaction of any sort! What the devil! are
you man or mouse?'
'It would be strange if any two persons could be together for so many
years, especially as superior and inferior, without each having something to
complain of in the other - as he thought, at all events, replied John
Carker. 'But apart from my history here - '
'His history here!' exclaimed the Manager. 'Why, there it is. The very
fact that makes him an extreme case, puts him out of the whole chapter!
Well?'
'Apart from that, which, as you hint, gives me a reason to be thankful
that I alone (happily for all the rest) possess, surely there is no one in
the House who would not say and feel at least as much. You do not think that
anybody here would be indifferent to a mischance or misfortune happening to
the head of the House, or anything than truly sorry for it?'
'You have good reason to be bound to him too!' said the Manager,
contemptuously. 'Why, don't you believe that you are kept here, as a cheap
example, and a famous instance of the clemency of Dombey and Son, redounding
to the credit of the illustrious House?'
'No,' replied his brother, mildly, 'I have long believed that I am kept
here for more kind and disinterested reasons.
'But you were going,' said the Manager, with the snarl of a tiger-cat,
'to recite some Christian precept, I observed.'
'Nay, James,' returned the other, 'though the tie of brotherhood
between us has been long broken and thrown away - '
'Who broke it, good Sir?' said the Manager.
'I, by my misconduct. I do not charge it upon you.'
The Manager replied, with that mute action of his bristling mouth, 'Oh,
you don't charge it upon me!' and bade him go on.
'I say, though there is not that tie between us, do not, I entreat,
assail me with unnecessary taunts, or misinterpret what I say, or would say.
I was only going to suggest to you that it would be a mistake to suppose
that it is only you, who have been selected here, above all others, for
advancement, confidence and distinction (selected, in the beginning, I know,
for your great ability and trustfulness), and who communicate more freely
with Mr Dombey than anyone, and stand, it may be said, on equal terms with
him, and have been favoured and enriched by him - that it would be a mistake
to suppose that it is only you who are tender of his welfare and reputation.
There is no one in the House, from yourself down to the lowest, I sincerely
believe, who does not participate in that feeling.'
'You lie!' said the Manager, red with sudden anger. 'You're a
hypocrite, John Carker, and you lie.'
'James!' cried the other, flushing in his turn. 'What do you mean by
these insulting words? Why do you so basely use them to me, unprovoked?'
'I tell you,' said the Manager, 'that your hypocrisy and meekness -
that all the hypocrisy and meekness of this place - is not worth that to
me,' snapping his thumb and finger, 'and that I see through it as if it were
air! There is not a man employed here, standing between myself and the
lowest in place (of whom you are very considerate, and with reason, for he
is not far off), who wouldn't be glad at heart to see his master humbled:
who does not hate him, secretly: who does not wish him evil rather than
good: and who would not turn upon him, if he had the power and boldness. The
nearer to his favour, the nearer to his insolence; the closer to him, the
farther from him. That's the creed here!'
'I don't know,' said his brother, whose roused feelings had soon
yielded to surprise, 'who may have abused your ear with such
representations; or why you have chosen to try me, rather than another. But
that you have been trying me, and tampering with me, I am now sure. You have
a different manner and a different aspect from any that I ever saw m you. I
will only say to you, once more, you are deceived.'
'I know I am,' said the Manager. 'I have told you so.'
'Not by me,' returned his brother. 'By your informant, if you have one.
If not, by your own thoughts and suspicions.'
'I have no suspicions,' said the Manager. 'Mine are certainties. You
pusillanimous, abject, cringing dogs! All making the same show, all canting
the same story, all whining the same professions, all harbouring the same
transparent secret.'
His brother withdrew, without saying more, and shut the door as he
concluded. Mr Carker the Manager drew a chair close before the fire, and
fell to beating the coals softly with the poker.
'The faint-hearted, fawning knaves,' he muttered, with his two shining
rows of teeth laid bare. 'There's not one among them, who wouldn't feign to
be so shocked and outraged - ! Bah! There's not one among them, but if he
had at once the power, and the wit and daring to use it, would scatter
Dombey's pride and lay it low, as ruthlessly as I rake out these ashes.'
As he broke them up and strewed them in the grate, he looked on with a
thoughtful smile at what he was doing. 'Without the same queen beckoner
too!' he added presently; 'and there is pride there, not to be forgotten -
witness our own acquaintance!' With that he fell into a deeper reverie, and
sat pondering over the blackening grate, until he rose up like a man who had
been absorbed in a book, and looking round him took his hat and gloves, went
to where his horse was waiting, mounted, and rode away through the lighted
streets, for it was evening.
He rode near Mr Dombey's house; and falling into a walk as he
approached it, looked up at the windows The window where he had once seen
Florence sitting with her dog attracted his attention first, though there
was no light in it; but he smiled as he carried his eyes up the tall front
of the house, and seemed to leave that object superciliously behind.
'Time was,' he said, 'when it was well to watch even your rising little
star, and know in what quarter there were clouds, to shadow you if needful.
But a planet has arisen, and you are lost in its light.'
He turned the white-legged horse round the street corner, and sought
one shining window from among those at the back of the house. Associated
with it was a certain stately presence, a gloved hand, the remembrance how
the feathers of a beautiful bird's wing had been showered down upon the
floor, and how the light white down upon a robe had stirred and rustled, as
in the rising of a distant storm. These were the things he carried with him
as he turned away again, and rode through the darkening and deserted Parks
at a quick rate.
In fatal truth, these were associated with a woman, a proud woman, who
hated him, but who by slow and sure degrees had been led on by his craft,
and her pride and resentment, to endure his company, and little by little to
receive him as one who had the privilege to talk to her of her own defiant
disregard of her own husband, and her abandonment of high consideration for
herself. They were associated with a woman who hated him deeply, and who
knew him, and who mistrusted him because she knew him, and because he knew
her; but who fed her fierce resentment by suffering him to draw nearer and
yet nearer to her every day, in spite of the hate she cherished for him. In
spite of it! For that very reason; since in its depths, too far down for her
threatening eye to pierce, though she could see into them dimly, lay the
dark retaliation, whose faintest shadow seen once and shuddered at, and
never seen again, would have been sufficient stain upon her soul.
Did the phantom of such a woman flit about him on his ride; true to the
reality, and obvious to him?
Yes. He saw her in his mind, exactly as she was. She bore him company
with her pride, resentment, hatred, all as plain to him as her beauty; with
nothing plainer to him than her hatred of him. He saw her sometimes haughty
and repellent at his side, and some times down among his horse's feet,
fallen and in the dust. But he always saw her as she was, without disguise,
and watched her on the dangerous way that she was going.
And when his ride was over, and he was newly dressed, and came into the
light of her bright room with his bent head, soft voice, and soothing smile,
he saw her yet as plainly. He even suspected the mystery of the gloved hand,
and held it all the longer in his own for that suspicion. Upon the dangerous
way that she was going, he was, still; and not a footprint did she mark upon
it, but he set his own there, straight'
The Thunderbolt
The barrier between Mr Dombey and his wife was not weakened by time.
Ill-assorted couple, unhappy in themselves and in each other, bound together
by no tie but the manacle that joined their fettered hands, and straining
that so harshly, in their shrinking asunder, that it wore and chafed to the
bone, Time, consoler of affliction and softener of anger, could do nothing
to help them. Their pride, however different in kind and object, was equal
in degree; and, in their flinty opposition, struck out fire between them
which might smoulder or might blaze, as circumstances were, but burned up
everything within their mutual reach, and made their marriage way a road of
ashes.
Let us be just to him. In the monstrous delusion of his life, swelling
with every grain of sand that shifted in its glass, he urged her on, he
little thought to what, or considered how; but still his feeling towards
her, such as it was, remained as at first. She had the grand demerit of
unaccountably putting herself in opposition to the recognition of his vast
importance, and to the acknowledgment of her complete submission to it, and
so far it was necessary to correct and reduce her; but otherwise he still
considered her, in his cold way, a lady capable of doing honour, if she
would, to his choice and name, and of reflecting credit on his
proprietorship.
Now, she, with all her might of passionate and proud resentment, bent
her dark glance from day to day, and hour to hour - from that night in her
own chamber, when she had sat gazing at the shadows on the wall, to the
deeper night fast coming - upon one figure directing a crowd of humiliations
and exasperations against her; and that figure, still her husband's.
Was Mr Dombey's master-vice, that ruled him so inexorably, an unnatural
characteristic? It might be worthwhile, sometimes, to inquire what Nature
is, and how men work to change her, and whether, in the enforced distortions
so produced, it is not natural to be unnatural. Coop any son or daughter of
our mighty mother within narrow range, and bind the prisoner to one idea,
and foster it by servile worship of it on the part of the few timid or
designing people standing round, and what is Nature to the willing captive
who has never risen up upon the wings of a free mind - drooping and useless
soon - to see her in her comprehensive truth!
Alas! are there so few things in the world, about us, most unnatural,
and yet most natural in being so? Hear the magistrate or judge admonish the
unnatural outcasts of society; unnatural in brutal habits, unnatural in want
of decency, unnatural in losing and confounding all distinctions between
good and evil; unnatural in ignorance, in vice, in recklessness, in
contumacy, in mind, in looks, in everything. But follow the good clergyman
or doctor, who, with his life imperilled at every breath he draws, goes down
into their dens, lying within the echoes of our carriage wheels and daily
tread upon the pavement stones. Look round upon the world of odious sights -
millions of immortal creatures have no other world on earth - at the
lightest mention of which humanity revolts, and dainty delicacy living in
the next street, stops her ears, and lisps 'I don't believe it!' Breathe the
polluted air, foul with every impurity that is poisonous to health and life;
and have every sense, conferred upon our race for its delight and happiness,
offended, sickened and disgusted, and made a channel by which misery and
death alone can enter. Vainly attempt to think of any simple plant, or
flower, or wholesome weed, that, set in this foetid bed, could have its
natural growth, or put its little leaves off to the sun as GOD designed it.
And then, calling up some ghastly child, with stunted form and wicked face,
hold forth on its unnatural sinfulness, and lament its being, so early, far
away from Heaven - but think a little of its having been conceived, and born
and bred, in Hell!
Those who study the physical sciences, and bring them to bear upon the
health of Man, tell us that if the noxious particles that rise from vitiated
air were palpable to the sight, we should see them lowering in a dense black
cloud above such haunts, and rolling slowly on to corrupt the better
portions of a town. But if the moral pestilence that rises with them, and in
the eternal laws of our Nature, is inseparable from them, could be made
discernible too, how terrible the revelation! Then should we see depravity,
impiety, drunkenness, theft, murder, and a long train of nameless sins
against the natural affections and repulsions of mankind, overhanging the
devoted spots, and creeping on, to blight the innocent and spread contagion
among the pure. Then should we see how the same poisoned fountains that flow
into our hospitals and lazar-houses, inundate the jails, and make the
convict-ships swim deep, and roll across the seas, and over-run vast
continents with crime. Then should we stand appalled to know, that where we
generate disease to strike our children down and entail itself on unborn
generations, there also we breed, by the same certain process, infancy that
knows no innocence, youth without modesty or shame, maturity that is mature
in nothing but in suffering and guilt, blasted old age that is a scandal on
the form we bear. unnatural humanity! When we shall gather grapes from
thorns, and figs from thistles; when fields of grain shall spring up from
the offal in the bye-ways of our wicked cities, and roses bloom in the fat
churchyards that they cherish; then we may look for natural humanity, and
find it growing from such seed.
Oh for a good spirit who would take the house-tops off, with a mole
potent and benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale, and show a
Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes, to swell
the retinue of the Destroying Angel as he moves forth among them! For only
one night's view of the pale phantoms rising from the scenes of our too-long
neglect; and from the thick and sullen air where Vice and Fever propagate
together, raining the tremendous social retributions which are ever pouring
down, and ever coming thicker! Bright and blest the morning that should rise
on such a night: for men, delayed no more by stumbling-blocks of their own
making, which are but specks of dust upon the path between them and
eternity, would then apply themselves, like creatures of one common origin,
owing one duty to the Father of one family, and tending to one common end,
to make the world a better place!
Not the less bright and blest would that day be for rousing some who
never have looked out upon the world of human life around them, to a
knowledge of their own relation to it, and for making them acquainted with a
perversion of nature in their own contracted sympathies and estimates; as
great, and yet as natural in its development when once begun, as the lowest
degradation known.'
But no such day had ever dawned on Mr Dombey, or his wife; and the
course of each was taken.
Through six months that ensued upon his accident, they held the same
relations one towards the other. A marble rock could not have stood more
obdurately in his way than she; and no chilled spring, lying uncheered by
any ray of light in the depths of a deep cave, could be more sullen or more
cold than he.
The hope that had fluttered within her when the promise of her new home
dawned, was quite gone from the heart of Florence now. That home was nearly
two years old; and even the patient trust that was in her, could not survive
the daily blight of such experience. If she had any lingering fancy in the
nature of hope left, that Edith and her father might be happier together, in
some distant time, she had none, now, that her father would ever love her.
The little interval in which she had imagined that she saw some small
relenting in him, was forgotten in the long remembrance of his coldness
since and before, or only remembered as a sorrowful delusion.
Florence loved him still, but, by degrees, had come to love him rather
as some dear one who had been, or who might have been, than as the hard
reality before her eyes. Something of the softened sadness with which she
loved the memory of little Paul, or of her mother, seemed to enter now into
her thoughts of him, and to make them, as it were, a dear remembrance.
Whether it was that he was dead to her, and that partly for this reason,
partly for his share in those old objects of her affection, and partly for
the long association of him with hopes that were withered and tendernesses
he had frozen, she could not have told; but the father whom she loved began
to be a vague and dreamy idea to her: hardly more substantially connected
with her real life, than the image she would sometimes conjure up, of her
dear brother yet alive, and growing to be a man, who would protect and
cherish her.
The change, if it may be called one, had stolen on her like the change
from childhood to womanhood, and had come with it. Florence was almost
seventeen, when, in her lonely musings, she was conscious of these
thoughts.'
She was often alone now, for the old association between her and her
Mama was greatly changed. At the time of her father's accident, and when he
was lying in his room downstairs, Florence had first observed that Edith
avoided her. Wounded and shocked, and yet unable to reconcile this with her
affection when they did meet, she sought her in her own room at night, once
more.
'Mama,' said Florence, stealing softly to her side, 'have I offended
you?'
Edith answered 'No.'
'I must have done something,' said Florence. 'Tell me what it is. You
have changed your manner to me, dear Mama. I cannot say how instantly I feel
the least change; for I love you with my whole heart.'
'As I do you,' said Edith. 'Ah, Florence, believe me never more than
now!'
'Why do you go away from me so often, and keep away?' asked Florence.
'And why do you sometimes look so strangely on me, dear Mama? You do so, do
you not?'
Edith signified assent with her dark eyes.
'Why?' returned Florence imploringly. 'Tell me why, that I may know how
to please you better; and tell me this shall not be so any more.
'My Florence,' answered Edith, taking the hand that embraced her neck,
and looking into the eyes that looked into hers so lovingly, as Florence
knelt upon the ground before her; 'why it is, I cannot tell you. It is
neither for me to say, nor you to hear; but that it is, and that it must be,
I know. Should I do it if I did not?'
'Are we to be estranged, Mama?' asked Florence, gazing at her like one
frightened.
Edith's silent lips formed 'Yes.'
Florence looked at her with increasing fear and wonder, until she could
see her no more through the blinding tears that ran down her face.
'Florence! my life!' said Edith, hurriedly, 'listen to me. I cannot
bear to see this grief. Be calmer. You see that I am composed, and is it
nothing to me?'
She resumed her steady voice and manner as she said the latter words,
and added presently:
'Not wholly estranged. Partially: and only that, in appearance,
Florence, for in my own breast I am still the same to you, and ever will be.
But what I do is not done for myself.'
'Is it for me, Mama?' asked Florence.
'It is enough,' said Edith, after a pause, 'to know what it is; why,
matters little. Dear Florence, it is better - it is necessary - it must be -
that our association should be less frequent. The confidence there has been
between us must be broken off.'
'When?' cried Florence. 'Oh, Mama, when?'
'Now,' said Edith.
'For all time to come?' asked Florence.
'I do not say that,' answered Edith. 'I do not know that. Nor will I
say that companionship between us is, at the best, an ill-assorted and
unholy union, of which I might have known no good could come. My way here
has been through paths that you will never tread, and my way henceforth may
lie - God knows - I do not see it - '
Her voice died away into silence; and she sat, looking at Florence, and
almost shrinking from her, with the same strange dread and wild avoidance
that Florence had noticed once before. The same dark pride and rage
succeeded, sweeping over her form and features like an angry chord across
the strings of a wild harp. But no softness or humility ensued on that. She
did not lay her head down now, and weep, and say that she had no hope but in
Florence. She held it up as if she were a beautiful Medusa, looking on him,
face to face, to strike him dead. Yes, and she would have done it, if she
had had the charm.
'Mama,' said Florence, anxiously, 'there is a change in you, in more
than what you say to me, which alarms me. Let me stay with you a little.'
'No,' said Edith, 'no, dearest. I am best left alone now, and I do best
to keep apart from you, of all else. Ask me no questions, but believe that
what I am when I seem fickle or capricious to you, I am not of my own will,
or for myself. Believe, though we are stranger to each other than we have
been, that I am unchanged to you within. Forgive me for having ever darkened
your dark home - I am a shadow on it, I know well - and let us never speak
of this again.'
'Mama,' sobbed Florence, 'we are not to part?'
'We do this that we may not part,' said Edith. 'Ask no more. Go,
Florence! My love and my remorse go with you!'
She embraced her, and dismissed her; and as Florence passed out of her
room, Edith looked on the retiring figure, as if her good angel went out in
that form, and left her to the haughty and indignant passions that now
claimed her for their own, and set their seal upon her brow.
From that hour, Florence and she were, as they had been, no more. For
days together, they would seldom meet, except at table, and when Mr Dombey
was present. Then Edith, imperious, inflexible, and silent, never looked at
her. Whenever Mr Carker was of the party, as he often was, during the
progress of Mr Dombey's recovery, and afterwards, Edith held herself more
removed from her, and was more distant towards her, than at other times. Yet
she and Florence never encountered, when there was no one by, but she would
embrace her as affectionately as of old, though not with the same relenting
of her proud aspect; and often, when she had been out late, she would steal
up to Florence's room, as she had been used to do, in the dark, and whisper
'Good-night,' on her pillow. When unconscious, in her slumber, of such
visits, Florence would sometimes awake, as from a dream of those words,
softly spoken, and would seem to feel the touch of lips upon her face. But
less and less often as the months went on.
And now the void in Florence's own heart began again, indeed, to make a
solitude around her. As the image of the father whom she loved had
insensibly become a mere abstraction, so Edith, following the fate of all
the rest about whom her affections had entwined themselves, was fleeting,
fading, growing paler in the distance, every day. Little by little, she
keep pace with every present point that every day presented to him in some
new form, but in the midst of these engrossing occupations he found leisure
- that is, he made it - to review the past transactions of the Firm, and his
share in them, during a long series of years. Frequently when the clerks
were all gone, the offices dark and empty, and all similar places of
business shut up, Mr Carker, with the whole anatomy of the iron room laid
bare before him, would explore the mysteries of books and papers, with the
patient progress of a man who was dissecting the minutest nerves and fibres
of his subject. Perch, the messenger, who usually remained on these
occasions, to entertain himself with the perusal of the Price Current by the
light of one candle, or to doze over the fire in the outer office, at the
imminent risk every moment of diving head foremost into the coal-box, could
not withhold the tribute of his admiration from this zealous conduct,
although it much contracted his domestic enjoyments; and again, and again,
expatiated to Mrs Perch (now nursing twins) on the industry and acuteness of
their managing gentleman in the City.
The same increased and sharp attention that Mr Carker bestowed on the
business of the House, he applied to his own personal affairs. Though not a
partner in the concern - a distinction hitherto reserved solely to
inheritors of the great name of Dombey - he was in the receipt of some
percentage on its dealings; and, participating in all its facilities for the
employment of money to advantage, was considered, by the minnows among the
tritons of the East, a rich man. It began to be said, among these shrewd
observers, that Jem Carker, of Dombey's, was looking about him to see what
he was worth; and that he was calling in his money at a good time, like the
long-headed fellow he was; and bets were even offered on the Stock Exchange
that Jem was going to marry a rich widow.
Yet these cares did not in the least interfere with Mr Carker's
watching of his chief, or with his cleanness, neatness, sleekness, or any
cat-like quality he possessed. It was not so much that there was a change in
him, in reference to any of his habits, as that the whole man was
intensified. Everything that had been observable in him before, was
observable now, but with a greater amount of concentration. He did each
single thing, as if he did nothing else - a pretty certain indication in a
man of that range of ability and purpose, that he is doing something which
sharpens and keeps alive his keenest powers.
The only decided alteration in him was, that as he rode to and fro
along the streets, he would fall into deep fits of musing, like that in
which he had come away from Mr Dombey's house, on the morning of that
gentleman's disaster. At such times, he would keep clear of the obstacles in
his way, mechanically; and would appear to see and hear nothing until
arrival at his destination, or some sudden chance or effort roused him.
Walking his white-legged horse thus, to the counting-house of Dombey
and Son one day, he was as unconscious of the observation of two pairs of
women's eyes, as of the fascinated orbs of Rob the Grinder, who, in waiting
a street's length from the appointed place, as a demonstration of
punctuality, vainly touched and retouched his hat to attract attention, and
trotted along on foot, by his master's side, prepared to hold his stirrup
when he should alight.
'See where he goes!' cried one of these two women, an old creature, who
stretched out her shrivelled arm to point him out to her companion, a young
woman, who stood close beside her, withdrawn like herself into a gateway.
Mrs Brown's daughter looked out, at this bidding on the part of Mrs
Brown; and there were wrath and vengeance in her face.
'I never thought to look at him again,' she said, in a low voice; 'but
it's well I should, perhaps. I see. I see!'
'Not changed!' said the old woman, with a look of eager malice.
'He changed!' returned the other. 'What for? What has he suffered?
There is change enough for twenty in me. Isn't that enough?'
'See where he goes!' muttered the old woman, watching her daughter with
her red eyes; 'so easy and so trim a-horseback, while we are in the mud.'
'And of it,' said her daughter impatiently. 'We are mud, underneath his
horse's feet. What should we be?'
In the intentness with which she looked after him again, she made a
hasty gesture with her hand when the old woman began to reply, as if her
view could be obstructed by mere sound. Her mother watching her, and not
him, remained silent; until her kindling glance subsided, and she drew a
long breath, as if in the relief of his being gone.
'Deary!' said the old woman then. 'Alice! Handsome gall Ally!' She
gently shook her sleeve to arouse her attention. 'Will you let him go like
that, when you can wring money from him? Why, it's a wickedness, my
daughter.'
'Haven't I told you, that I will not have money from him?' she
returned. 'And don't you yet believe me? Did I take his sister's money?
Would I touch a penny, if I knew it, that had gone through his white hands -
unless it was, indeed, that I could poison it, and send it back to him?
Peace, mother, and come away.
'And him so rich?' murmured the old woman. 'And us so poor!'
'Poor in not being able to pay him any of the harm we owe him,'
returned her daughter. 'Let him give me that sort of riches, and I'll take
them from him, and use them. Come away. Its no good looking at his horse.
Come away, mother!'
But the old woman, for whom the spectacle of Rob the Grinder returning
down the street, leading the riderless horse, appeared to have some
extraneous interest that it did not possess in itself, surveyed that young
man with the utmost earnestness; and seeming to have whatever doubts she
entertained, resolved as he drew nearer, glanced at her daughter with
brightened eyes and with her finger on her lip, and emerging from the
gateway at the moment of his passing, touched him on the shoulder.
'Why, where's my sprightly Rob been, all this time!' she said, as he
turned round.
The sprightly Rob, whose sprightliness was very much diminished by the
salutation, looked exceedingly dismayed, and said, with the water rising in
his eyes:
'Oh! why can't you leave a poor cove alone, Misses Brown, when he's
getting an honest livelihood and conducting himself respectable? What do you
come and deprive a cove of his character for, by talking to him in the
streets, when he's taking his master's horse to a honest stable - a horse
you'd go and sell for cats' and dogs' meat if you had your way! Why, I
thought,' said the Grinder, producing his concluding remark as if it were
the climax of all his injuries, 'that you was dead long ago!'
'This is the way,' cried the old woman, appealing to her daughter,
'that he talks to me, who knew him weeks and months together, my deary, and
have stood his friend many and many a time among the pigeon-fancying tramps
and bird-catchers.'
'Let the birds be, will you, Misses Brown?' retorted Rob, in a tone of
the acutest anguish. 'I think a cove had better have to do with lions than
them little creeturs, for they're always flying back in your face when you
least expect it. Well, how d'ye do and what do you want?' These polite
inquiries the Grinder uttered, as it were under protest, and with great
exasperation and vindictiveness.
'Hark how he speaks to an old friend, my deary!' said Mrs Brown, again
appealing to her daughter. 'But there's some of his old friends not so
patient as me. If I was to tell some that he knows, and has spotted and
cheated with, where to find him - '
'Will you hold your tongue, Misses Brown?' interrupted the miserable
Grinder, glancing quickly round, as though he expected to see his master's
teeth shining at his elbow. 'What do you take a pleasure in ruining a cove
for? At your time of life too! when you ought to be thinking of a variety of
things!'
'What a gallant horse!' said the old woman, patting the animal's neck.
'Let him alone, will you, Misses Brown?' cried Rob, pushing away her
hand. 'You're enough to drive a penitent cove mad!'
'Why, what hurt do I do him, child?' returned the old woman.
'Hurt?' said Rob. 'He's got a master that would find it out if he was
touched with a straw.' And he blew upon the place where the old woman's hand
had rested for a moment, and smoothed it gently with his finger, as if he
seriously believed what he said.
The old woman looking back to mumble and mouth at her daughter, who
followed, kept close to Rob's heels as he walked on with the bridle in his
hand; and pursued the conversation.
'A good place, Rob, eh?' said she. 'You're in luck, my child.'
'Oh don't talk about luck, Misses Brown,' returned the wretched
Grinder, facing round and stopping. 'If you'd never come, or if you'd go
away, then indeed a cove might be considered tolerable lucky. Can't you go
along, Misses Brown, and not foller me!' blubbered Rob, with sudden
defiance. 'If the young woman's a friend of yours, why don't she take you
away, instead of letting you make yourself so disgraceful!'
'What!' croaked the old woman, putting her face close to his, with a
malevolent grin upon it that puckered up the loose skin down in her very
throat. 'Do you deny your old chum! Have you lurked to my house fifty times,
and slept sound in a corner when you had no other bed but the paving-stones,
and do you talk to me like this! Have I bought and sold with you, and helped
you in my way of business, schoolboy, sneak, and what not, and do you tell
me to go along? Could I raise a crowd of old company about you to-morrow
morning, that would follow you to ruin like copies of your own shadow, and
do you turn on me with your bold looks! I'll go. Come, Alice.'
'Stop, Misses Brown!' cried the distracted Grinder. 'What are you doing
of? Don't put yourself in a passion! Don't let her go, if you please. I
haven't meant any offence. I said "how d'ye do," at first, didn't I? But you
wouldn't answer. How you do? Besides,' said Rob piteously, 'look here! How
can a cove stand talking in the street with his master's prad a wanting to
be took to be rubbed down, and his master up to every individgle thing that
happens!'
The old woman made a show of being partially appeased, but shook her
head, and mouthed and muttered still.
'Come along to the stables, and have a glass of something that's good
for you, Misses Brown, can't you?' said Rob, 'instead of going on, like
that, which is no good to you, nor anybody else. Come along with her, will
you be so kind?' said Rob. 'I'm sure I'm delighted to see her, if it wasn't
for the horse!'
With this apology, Rob turned away, a rueful picture of despair, and
walked his charge down a bye street' The old woman, mouthing at her
daughter, followed close upon him. The daughter followed.
Turning into a silent little square or court-yard that had a great
church tower rising above it, and a packer's warehouse, and a bottle-maker's
warehouse, for its places of business, Rob the Grinder delivered the
white-legged horse to the hostler of a quaint stable at the corner; and
inviting Mrs Brown and her daughter to seat themselves upon a stone bench at
the gate of that establishment, soon reappeared from a neighbouring
public-house with a pewter measure and a glass.
'Here's master - Mr Carker, child!' said the old woman, slowly, as her
sentiment before drinking. 'Lord bless him!'
'Why, I didn't tell you who he was,' observed Rob, with staring eyes.
'We know him by sight,' said Mrs Brown, whose working mouth and nodding
head stopped for the moment, in the fixedness of her attention. 'We saw him
pass this morning, afore he got off his horse; when you were ready to take
it.'
'Ay, ay,' returned Rob, appearing to wish that his readiness had
carried him to any other place. - 'What's the matter with her? Won't she
drink?'
This inquiry had reference to Alice, who, folded in her cloak, sat a
little apart, profoundly inattentive to his offer of the replenished glass.
The old woman shook her head. 'Don't mind her,' she said; 'she's a
strange creetur, if you know'd her, Rob. But Mr Carker
'Hush!' said Rob, glancing cautiously up at the packer's, and at the
bottle-maker's, as if, from any one of the tiers of warehouses, Mr Carker
might be looking down. 'Softly.'
'Why, he ain't here!' cried Mrs Brown.
'I don't know that,' muttered Rob, whose glance even wandered to the
church tower, as if he might be there, with a supernatural power of hearing.
'Good master?' inquired Mrs Brown.
Rob nodded; and added, in a low voice, 'precious sharp.'
'Lives out of town, don't he, lovey?' said the old woman.
'When he's at home,' returned Rob; 'but we don't live at home just
now.'
'Where then?' asked the old woman.
'Lodgings; up near Mr Dombey's,' returned Rob.
The younger woman fixed her eyes so searchingly upon him, and so
suddenly, that Rob was quite confounded, and offered the glass again, but
with no more effect upon her than before.
'Mr Dombey - you and I used to talk about him, sometimes, you know,'
said Rob to Mrs Brown. 'You used to get me to talk about him.'
The old woman nodded.
'Well, Mr Dombey, he's had a fall from his horse,' said Rob,
unwillingly; 'and my master has to be up there, more than usual, either with
him, or Mrs Dombey, or some of 'em; and so we've come to town.'
'Are they good friends, lovey?'asked the old woman.
'Who?' retorted Rob.
'He and she?'
'What, Mr and Mrs Dombey?' said Rob. 'How should I know!'
'Not them - Master and Mrs Dombey, chick,' replied the old woman,
coaxingly.
'I don't know,' said Rob, looking round him again. 'I suppose so. How
curious you are, Misses Brown! Least said, soonest mended.'
'Why there's no harm in it!' exclaimed the old woman, with a laugh, and
a clap of her hands. 'Sprightly Rob, has grown tame since he has been well
off! There's no harm in It.
'No, there's no harm in it, I know,' returned Rob, with the same
distrustful glance at the packer's and the bottle-maker's, and the church;
'but blabbing, if it's only about the number of buttons on my master's coat,
won't do. I tell you it won't do with him. A cove had better drown himself.
He says so. I shouldn't have so much as told you what his name was, if you
hadn't known it. Talk about somebody else.'
As Rob took another cautious survey of the yard, the old woman made a
secret motion to her daughter. It was momentary, but the daughter, with a
slight look of intelligence, withdrew her eyes from the boy's face, and sat
folded in her cloak as before.
'Rob, lovey!' said the old woman, beckoning him to the other end of the
bench. 'You were always a pet and favourite of mine. Now, weren't you? Don't
you know you were?'
'Yes, Misses Brown,' replied the Grinder, with a very bad grace.
'And you could leave me!' said the old woman, flinging her arms about
his neck. 'You could go away, and grow almost out of knowledge, and never
come to tell your poor old friend how fortunate you were, proud lad! Oho,
Oho!'
'Oh here's a dreadful go for a cove that's got a master wide awake in
the neighbourhood!' exclaimed the wretched Grinder. 'To be howled over like
this here!'
'Won't you come and see me, Robby?' cried Mrs Brown. 'Oho, won't you
ever come and see me?'
'Yes, I tell you! Yes, I will!' returned the Grinder.
'That's my own Rob! That's my lovey!' said Mrs Brown, drying the tears
upon her shrivelled face, and giving him a tender squeeze. 'At the old
place, Rob?'
'Yes,' replied the Grinder.
'Soon, Robby dear?' cried Mrs Brown; 'and often?'
'Yes. Yes. Yes,' replied Rob. 'I will indeed, upon my soul and body.'
'And then,' said Mrs Brown, with her arms uplifted towards the sky, and
her head thrown back and shaking, 'if he's true to his word, I'll never come
a-near him though I know where he is, and never breathe a syllable about
him! Never!'
This ejaculation seemed a drop of comfort to the miserable Grinder, who
shook Mrs Brown by the hand upon it, and implored her with tears in his
eyes, to leave a cove and not destroy his prospects. Mrs Brown, with another
fond embrace, assented; but in the act of following her daughter, turned
back, with her finger stealthily raised, and asked in a hoarse whisper for
some money.
'A shilling, dear!' she said, with her eager avaricious face, 'or
sixpence! For old acquaintance sake. I'm so poor. And my handsome gal' -
looking over her shoulder - 'she's my gal, Rob - half starves me.
But as the reluctant Grinder put it in her hand, her daughter, coming
quietly back, caught the hand in hen, and twisted out the coin.
'What,' she said, 'mother! always money! money from the first, and to
the last' Do you mind so little what I said but now? Here. Take it!'
The old woman uttered a moan as the money was restored, but without in
any other way opposing its restoration, hobbled at her daughter's side out
of the yard, and along the bye street upon which it opened. The astonished
and dismayed Rob staring after them, saw that they stopped, and fell to
earnest conversation very soon; and more than once observed a darkly
threatening action of the younger woman's hand (obviously having reference
to someone of whom they spoke), and a crooning feeble imitation of it on the
part of Mrs Brown, that made him earnestly hope he might not be the subject
of their discourse.
With the present consolation that they were gone, and with the
prospective comfort that Mrs Brown could not live for ever, and was not
likely to live long to trouble him, the Grinder, not otherwise regretting
his misdeeds than as they were attended with such disagreeable incidental
consequences, composed his ruffled features to a more serene expression by
thinking of the admirable manner in which he had disposed of Captain Cuttle
(a reflection that seldom failed to put him in a flow of spirits), and went
to the Dombey Counting House to receive his master's orders.
There his master, so subtle and vigilant of eye, that Rob quaked before
him, more than half expecting to be taxed with Mrs Brown, gave him the usual
morning's box of papers for Mr Dombey, and a note for Mrs Dombey: merely
nodding his head as an enjoinder to be careful, and to use dispatch - a
mysterious admonition, fraught in the Grinder's imagination with dismal
warnings and threats; and more powerful with him than any words.
Alone again, in his own room, Mr Carker applied himself to work, and
worked all day. He saw many visitors; overlooked a number of documents; went
in and out, to and from, sundry places of mercantile resort; and indulged in
no more abstraction until the day's business was done. But, when the usual
clearance of papers from his table was made at last, he fell into his
thoughtful mood once more.
He was standing in his accustomed place and attitude, with his eyes
intently fixed upon the ground, when his brother entered to bring back some
letters that had been taken out in the course of the day. He put them
quietly on the table, and was going immediately, when Mr Carker the Manager,
whose eyes had rested on him, on his entrance, as if they had all this time
had him for the subject of their contemplation, instead of the office-floor,
said:
'Well, John Carker, and what brings you here?'
His brother pointed to the letters, and was again withdrawing.
'I wonder,' said the Manager, 'that you can come and go, without
inquiring how our master is'.
'We had word this morning in the Counting House, that Mr Dombey was
doing well,' replied his brother.
'You are such a meek fellow,' said the Manager, with a smile, - 'but
you have grown so, in the course of years - that if any harm came to him,
you'd be miserable, I dare swear now.'
'I should be truly sorry, James,' returned the other.
'He would be sorry!' said the Manager, pointing at him, as if there
were some other person present to whom he was appealing. 'He would be truly
sorry! This brother of mine! This junior of the place, this slighted piece
of lumber, pushed aside with his face to the wall, like a rotten picture,
and left so, for Heaven knows how many years he's all gratitude and respect,
and devotion too, he would have me believe!'
'I would have you believe nothing, James,' returned the other. 'Be as
just to me as you would to any other man below you. You ask a question, and
I answer it.'
'And have you nothing, Spaniel,' said the Manager, with unusual
irascibility, 'to complain of in him? No proud treatment to resent, no
insolence, no foolery of state, no exaction of any sort! What the devil! are
you man or mouse?'
'It would be strange if any two persons could be together for so many
years, especially as superior and inferior, without each having something to
complain of in the other - as he thought, at all events, replied John
Carker. 'But apart from my history here - '
'His history here!' exclaimed the Manager. 'Why, there it is. The very
fact that makes him an extreme case, puts him out of the whole chapter!
Well?'
'Apart from that, which, as you hint, gives me a reason to be thankful
that I alone (happily for all the rest) possess, surely there is no one in
the House who would not say and feel at least as much. You do not think that
anybody here would be indifferent to a mischance or misfortune happening to
the head of the House, or anything than truly sorry for it?'
'You have good reason to be bound to him too!' said the Manager,
contemptuously. 'Why, don't you believe that you are kept here, as a cheap
example, and a famous instance of the clemency of Dombey and Son, redounding
to the credit of the illustrious House?'
'No,' replied his brother, mildly, 'I have long believed that I am kept
here for more kind and disinterested reasons.
'But you were going,' said the Manager, with the snarl of a tiger-cat,
'to recite some Christian precept, I observed.'
'Nay, James,' returned the other, 'though the tie of brotherhood
between us has been long broken and thrown away - '
'Who broke it, good Sir?' said the Manager.
'I, by my misconduct. I do not charge it upon you.'
The Manager replied, with that mute action of his bristling mouth, 'Oh,
you don't charge it upon me!' and bade him go on.
'I say, though there is not that tie between us, do not, I entreat,
assail me with unnecessary taunts, or misinterpret what I say, or would say.
I was only going to suggest to you that it would be a mistake to suppose
that it is only you, who have been selected here, above all others, for
advancement, confidence and distinction (selected, in the beginning, I know,
for your great ability and trustfulness), and who communicate more freely
with Mr Dombey than anyone, and stand, it may be said, on equal terms with
him, and have been favoured and enriched by him - that it would be a mistake
to suppose that it is only you who are tender of his welfare and reputation.
There is no one in the House, from yourself down to the lowest, I sincerely
believe, who does not participate in that feeling.'
'You lie!' said the Manager, red with sudden anger. 'You're a
hypocrite, John Carker, and you lie.'
'James!' cried the other, flushing in his turn. 'What do you mean by
these insulting words? Why do you so basely use them to me, unprovoked?'
'I tell you,' said the Manager, 'that your hypocrisy and meekness -
that all the hypocrisy and meekness of this place - is not worth that to
me,' snapping his thumb and finger, 'and that I see through it as if it were
air! There is not a man employed here, standing between myself and the
lowest in place (of whom you are very considerate, and with reason, for he
is not far off), who wouldn't be glad at heart to see his master humbled:
who does not hate him, secretly: who does not wish him evil rather than
good: and who would not turn upon him, if he had the power and boldness. The
nearer to his favour, the nearer to his insolence; the closer to him, the
farther from him. That's the creed here!'
'I don't know,' said his brother, whose roused feelings had soon
yielded to surprise, 'who may have abused your ear with such
representations; or why you have chosen to try me, rather than another. But
that you have been trying me, and tampering with me, I am now sure. You have
a different manner and a different aspect from any that I ever saw m you. I
will only say to you, once more, you are deceived.'
'I know I am,' said the Manager. 'I have told you so.'
'Not by me,' returned his brother. 'By your informant, if you have one.
If not, by your own thoughts and suspicions.'
'I have no suspicions,' said the Manager. 'Mine are certainties. You
pusillanimous, abject, cringing dogs! All making the same show, all canting
the same story, all whining the same professions, all harbouring the same
transparent secret.'
His brother withdrew, without saying more, and shut the door as he
concluded. Mr Carker the Manager drew a chair close before the fire, and
fell to beating the coals softly with the poker.
'The faint-hearted, fawning knaves,' he muttered, with his two shining
rows of teeth laid bare. 'There's not one among them, who wouldn't feign to
be so shocked and outraged - ! Bah! There's not one among them, but if he
had at once the power, and the wit and daring to use it, would scatter
Dombey's pride and lay it low, as ruthlessly as I rake out these ashes.'
As he broke them up and strewed them in the grate, he looked on with a
thoughtful smile at what he was doing. 'Without the same queen beckoner
too!' he added presently; 'and there is pride there, not to be forgotten -
witness our own acquaintance!' With that he fell into a deeper reverie, and
sat pondering over the blackening grate, until he rose up like a man who had
been absorbed in a book, and looking round him took his hat and gloves, went
to where his horse was waiting, mounted, and rode away through the lighted
streets, for it was evening.
He rode near Mr Dombey's house; and falling into a walk as he
approached it, looked up at the windows The window where he had once seen
Florence sitting with her dog attracted his attention first, though there
was no light in it; but he smiled as he carried his eyes up the tall front
of the house, and seemed to leave that object superciliously behind.
'Time was,' he said, 'when it was well to watch even your rising little
star, and know in what quarter there were clouds, to shadow you if needful.
But a planet has arisen, and you are lost in its light.'
He turned the white-legged horse round the street corner, and sought
one shining window from among those at the back of the house. Associated
with it was a certain stately presence, a gloved hand, the remembrance how
the feathers of a beautiful bird's wing had been showered down upon the
floor, and how the light white down upon a robe had stirred and rustled, as
in the rising of a distant storm. These were the things he carried with him
as he turned away again, and rode through the darkening and deserted Parks
at a quick rate.
In fatal truth, these were associated with a woman, a proud woman, who
hated him, but who by slow and sure degrees had been led on by his craft,
and her pride and resentment, to endure his company, and little by little to
receive him as one who had the privilege to talk to her of her own defiant
disregard of her own husband, and her abandonment of high consideration for
herself. They were associated with a woman who hated him deeply, and who
knew him, and who mistrusted him because she knew him, and because he knew
her; but who fed her fierce resentment by suffering him to draw nearer and
yet nearer to her every day, in spite of the hate she cherished for him. In
spite of it! For that very reason; since in its depths, too far down for her
threatening eye to pierce, though she could see into them dimly, lay the
dark retaliation, whose faintest shadow seen once and shuddered at, and
never seen again, would have been sufficient stain upon her soul.
Did the phantom of such a woman flit about him on his ride; true to the
reality, and obvious to him?
Yes. He saw her in his mind, exactly as she was. She bore him company
with her pride, resentment, hatred, all as plain to him as her beauty; with
nothing plainer to him than her hatred of him. He saw her sometimes haughty
and repellent at his side, and some times down among his horse's feet,
fallen and in the dust. But he always saw her as she was, without disguise,
and watched her on the dangerous way that she was going.
And when his ride was over, and he was newly dressed, and came into the
light of her bright room with his bent head, soft voice, and soothing smile,
he saw her yet as plainly. He even suspected the mystery of the gloved hand,
and held it all the longer in his own for that suspicion. Upon the dangerous
way that she was going, he was, still; and not a footprint did she mark upon
it, but he set his own there, straight'
The Thunderbolt
The barrier between Mr Dombey and his wife was not weakened by time.
Ill-assorted couple, unhappy in themselves and in each other, bound together
by no tie but the manacle that joined their fettered hands, and straining
that so harshly, in their shrinking asunder, that it wore and chafed to the
bone, Time, consoler of affliction and softener of anger, could do nothing
to help them. Their pride, however different in kind and object, was equal
in degree; and, in their flinty opposition, struck out fire between them
which might smoulder or might blaze, as circumstances were, but burned up
everything within their mutual reach, and made their marriage way a road of
ashes.
Let us be just to him. In the monstrous delusion of his life, swelling
with every grain of sand that shifted in its glass, he urged her on, he
little thought to what, or considered how; but still his feeling towards
her, such as it was, remained as at first. She had the grand demerit of
unaccountably putting herself in opposition to the recognition of his vast
importance, and to the acknowledgment of her complete submission to it, and
so far it was necessary to correct and reduce her; but otherwise he still
considered her, in his cold way, a lady capable of doing honour, if she
would, to his choice and name, and of reflecting credit on his
proprietorship.
Now, she, with all her might of passionate and proud resentment, bent
her dark glance from day to day, and hour to hour - from that night in her
own chamber, when she had sat gazing at the shadows on the wall, to the
deeper night fast coming - upon one figure directing a crowd of humiliations
and exasperations against her; and that figure, still her husband's.
Was Mr Dombey's master-vice, that ruled him so inexorably, an unnatural
characteristic? It might be worthwhile, sometimes, to inquire what Nature
is, and how men work to change her, and whether, in the enforced distortions
so produced, it is not natural to be unnatural. Coop any son or daughter of
our mighty mother within narrow range, and bind the prisoner to one idea,
and foster it by servile worship of it on the part of the few timid or
designing people standing round, and what is Nature to the willing captive
who has never risen up upon the wings of a free mind - drooping and useless
soon - to see her in her comprehensive truth!
Alas! are there so few things in the world, about us, most unnatural,
and yet most natural in being so? Hear the magistrate or judge admonish the
unnatural outcasts of society; unnatural in brutal habits, unnatural in want
of decency, unnatural in losing and confounding all distinctions between
good and evil; unnatural in ignorance, in vice, in recklessness, in
contumacy, in mind, in looks, in everything. But follow the good clergyman
or doctor, who, with his life imperilled at every breath he draws, goes down
into their dens, lying within the echoes of our carriage wheels and daily
tread upon the pavement stones. Look round upon the world of odious sights -
millions of immortal creatures have no other world on earth - at the
lightest mention of which humanity revolts, and dainty delicacy living in
the next street, stops her ears, and lisps 'I don't believe it!' Breathe the
polluted air, foul with every impurity that is poisonous to health and life;
and have every sense, conferred upon our race for its delight and happiness,
offended, sickened and disgusted, and made a channel by which misery and
death alone can enter. Vainly attempt to think of any simple plant, or
flower, or wholesome weed, that, set in this foetid bed, could have its
natural growth, or put its little leaves off to the sun as GOD designed it.
And then, calling up some ghastly child, with stunted form and wicked face,
hold forth on its unnatural sinfulness, and lament its being, so early, far
away from Heaven - but think a little of its having been conceived, and born
and bred, in Hell!
Those who study the physical sciences, and bring them to bear upon the
health of Man, tell us that if the noxious particles that rise from vitiated
air were palpable to the sight, we should see them lowering in a dense black
cloud above such haunts, and rolling slowly on to corrupt the better
portions of a town. But if the moral pestilence that rises with them, and in
the eternal laws of our Nature, is inseparable from them, could be made
discernible too, how terrible the revelation! Then should we see depravity,
impiety, drunkenness, theft, murder, and a long train of nameless sins
against the natural affections and repulsions of mankind, overhanging the
devoted spots, and creeping on, to blight the innocent and spread contagion
among the pure. Then should we see how the same poisoned fountains that flow
into our hospitals and lazar-houses, inundate the jails, and make the
convict-ships swim deep, and roll across the seas, and over-run vast
continents with crime. Then should we stand appalled to know, that where we
generate disease to strike our children down and entail itself on unborn
generations, there also we breed, by the same certain process, infancy that
knows no innocence, youth without modesty or shame, maturity that is mature
in nothing but in suffering and guilt, blasted old age that is a scandal on
the form we bear. unnatural humanity! When we shall gather grapes from
thorns, and figs from thistles; when fields of grain shall spring up from
the offal in the bye-ways of our wicked cities, and roses bloom in the fat
churchyards that they cherish; then we may look for natural humanity, and
find it growing from such seed.
Oh for a good spirit who would take the house-tops off, with a mole
potent and benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale, and show a
Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes, to swell
the retinue of the Destroying Angel as he moves forth among them! For only
one night's view of the pale phantoms rising from the scenes of our too-long
neglect; and from the thick and sullen air where Vice and Fever propagate
together, raining the tremendous social retributions which are ever pouring
down, and ever coming thicker! Bright and blest the morning that should rise
on such a night: for men, delayed no more by stumbling-blocks of their own
making, which are but specks of dust upon the path between them and
eternity, would then apply themselves, like creatures of one common origin,
owing one duty to the Father of one family, and tending to one common end,
to make the world a better place!
Not the less bright and blest would that day be for rousing some who
never have looked out upon the world of human life around them, to a
knowledge of their own relation to it, and for making them acquainted with a
perversion of nature in their own contracted sympathies and estimates; as
great, and yet as natural in its development when once begun, as the lowest
degradation known.'
But no such day had ever dawned on Mr Dombey, or his wife; and the
course of each was taken.
Through six months that ensued upon his accident, they held the same
relations one towards the other. A marble rock could not have stood more
obdurately in his way than she; and no chilled spring, lying uncheered by
any ray of light in the depths of a deep cave, could be more sullen or more
cold than he.
The hope that had fluttered within her when the promise of her new home
dawned, was quite gone from the heart of Florence now. That home was nearly
two years old; and even the patient trust that was in her, could not survive
the daily blight of such experience. If she had any lingering fancy in the
nature of hope left, that Edith and her father might be happier together, in
some distant time, she had none, now, that her father would ever love her.
The little interval in which she had imagined that she saw some small
relenting in him, was forgotten in the long remembrance of his coldness
since and before, or only remembered as a sorrowful delusion.
Florence loved him still, but, by degrees, had come to love him rather
as some dear one who had been, or who might have been, than as the hard
reality before her eyes. Something of the softened sadness with which she
loved the memory of little Paul, or of her mother, seemed to enter now into
her thoughts of him, and to make them, as it were, a dear remembrance.
Whether it was that he was dead to her, and that partly for this reason,
partly for his share in those old objects of her affection, and partly for
the long association of him with hopes that were withered and tendernesses
he had frozen, she could not have told; but the father whom she loved began
to be a vague and dreamy idea to her: hardly more substantially connected
with her real life, than the image she would sometimes conjure up, of her
dear brother yet alive, and growing to be a man, who would protect and
cherish her.
The change, if it may be called one, had stolen on her like the change
from childhood to womanhood, and had come with it. Florence was almost
seventeen, when, in her lonely musings, she was conscious of these
thoughts.'
She was often alone now, for the old association between her and her
Mama was greatly changed. At the time of her father's accident, and when he
was lying in his room downstairs, Florence had first observed that Edith
avoided her. Wounded and shocked, and yet unable to reconcile this with her
affection when they did meet, she sought her in her own room at night, once
more.
'Mama,' said Florence, stealing softly to her side, 'have I offended
you?'
Edith answered 'No.'
'I must have done something,' said Florence. 'Tell me what it is. You
have changed your manner to me, dear Mama. I cannot say how instantly I feel
the least change; for I love you with my whole heart.'
'As I do you,' said Edith. 'Ah, Florence, believe me never more than
now!'
'Why do you go away from me so often, and keep away?' asked Florence.
'And why do you sometimes look so strangely on me, dear Mama? You do so, do
you not?'
Edith signified assent with her dark eyes.
'Why?' returned Florence imploringly. 'Tell me why, that I may know how
to please you better; and tell me this shall not be so any more.
'My Florence,' answered Edith, taking the hand that embraced her neck,
and looking into the eyes that looked into hers so lovingly, as Florence
knelt upon the ground before her; 'why it is, I cannot tell you. It is
neither for me to say, nor you to hear; but that it is, and that it must be,
I know. Should I do it if I did not?'
'Are we to be estranged, Mama?' asked Florence, gazing at her like one
frightened.
Edith's silent lips formed 'Yes.'
Florence looked at her with increasing fear and wonder, until she could
see her no more through the blinding tears that ran down her face.
'Florence! my life!' said Edith, hurriedly, 'listen to me. I cannot
bear to see this grief. Be calmer. You see that I am composed, and is it
nothing to me?'
She resumed her steady voice and manner as she said the latter words,
and added presently:
'Not wholly estranged. Partially: and only that, in appearance,
Florence, for in my own breast I am still the same to you, and ever will be.
But what I do is not done for myself.'
'Is it for me, Mama?' asked Florence.
'It is enough,' said Edith, after a pause, 'to know what it is; why,
matters little. Dear Florence, it is better - it is necessary - it must be -
that our association should be less frequent. The confidence there has been
between us must be broken off.'
'When?' cried Florence. 'Oh, Mama, when?'
'Now,' said Edith.
'For all time to come?' asked Florence.
'I do not say that,' answered Edith. 'I do not know that. Nor will I
say that companionship between us is, at the best, an ill-assorted and
unholy union, of which I might have known no good could come. My way here
has been through paths that you will never tread, and my way henceforth may
lie - God knows - I do not see it - '
Her voice died away into silence; and she sat, looking at Florence, and
almost shrinking from her, with the same strange dread and wild avoidance
that Florence had noticed once before. The same dark pride and rage
succeeded, sweeping over her form and features like an angry chord across
the strings of a wild harp. But no softness or humility ensued on that. She
did not lay her head down now, and weep, and say that she had no hope but in
Florence. She held it up as if she were a beautiful Medusa, looking on him,
face to face, to strike him dead. Yes, and she would have done it, if she
had had the charm.
'Mama,' said Florence, anxiously, 'there is a change in you, in more
than what you say to me, which alarms me. Let me stay with you a little.'
'No,' said Edith, 'no, dearest. I am best left alone now, and I do best
to keep apart from you, of all else. Ask me no questions, but believe that
what I am when I seem fickle or capricious to you, I am not of my own will,
or for myself. Believe, though we are stranger to each other than we have
been, that I am unchanged to you within. Forgive me for having ever darkened
your dark home - I am a shadow on it, I know well - and let us never speak
of this again.'
'Mama,' sobbed Florence, 'we are not to part?'
'We do this that we may not part,' said Edith. 'Ask no more. Go,
Florence! My love and my remorse go with you!'
She embraced her, and dismissed her; and as Florence passed out of her
room, Edith looked on the retiring figure, as if her good angel went out in
that form, and left her to the haughty and indignant passions that now
claimed her for their own, and set their seal upon her brow.
From that hour, Florence and she were, as they had been, no more. For
days together, they would seldom meet, except at table, and when Mr Dombey
was present. Then Edith, imperious, inflexible, and silent, never looked at
her. Whenever Mr Carker was of the party, as he often was, during the
progress of Mr Dombey's recovery, and afterwards, Edith held herself more
removed from her, and was more distant towards her, than at other times. Yet
she and Florence never encountered, when there was no one by, but she would
embrace her as affectionately as of old, though not with the same relenting
of her proud aspect; and often, when she had been out late, she would steal
up to Florence's room, as she had been used to do, in the dark, and whisper
'Good-night,' on her pillow. When unconscious, in her slumber, of such
visits, Florence would sometimes awake, as from a dream of those words,
softly spoken, and would seem to feel the touch of lips upon her face. But
less and less often as the months went on.
And now the void in Florence's own heart began again, indeed, to make a
solitude around her. As the image of the father whom she loved had
insensibly become a mere abstraction, so Edith, following the fate of all
the rest about whom her affections had entwined themselves, was fleeting,
fading, growing paler in the distance, every day. Little by little, she