Dombey and Son
“_My_ Lucretia Tox, my dear!” said Mr Chick, astounded.
“Yes,” retorted Mrs Chick, with great severity, “your Lucretia Tox—I
say how anybody can see that mother-in-law of Paul’s, and that haughty
wife of Paul’s, and these indecent old frights with their backs and
shoulders, and in short this at home generally, and hum—” on which word
Mrs Chick laid a scornful emphasis that made Mr Chick start, “is, I
thank Heaven, a mystery to me!”
Mr Chick screwed his mouth into a form irreconcilable with humming or
whistling, and looked very contemplative.
“But I hope I know what is due to myself,” said Mrs Chick, swelling
with indignation, “though Paul has forgotten what is due to me. I am
not going to sit here, a member of this family, to be taken no notice
of. I am not the dirt under Mrs Dombey’s feet, yet—not quite yet,” said
Mrs Chick, as if she expected to become so, about the day after
to-morrow. “And I shall go. I will not say (whatever I may think) that
this affair has been got up solely to degrade and insult me. I shall
merely go. I shall not be missed!”
Mrs Chick rose erect with these words, and took the arm of Mr Chick,
who escorted her from the room, after half an hour’s shady sojourn
there. And it is due to her penetration to observe that she certainly
was not missed at all.
But she was not the only indignant guest; for Mr Dombey’s list (still
constantly in difficulties) were, as a body, indignant with Mrs
Dombey’s list, for looking at them through eyeglasses, and audibly
wondering who all those people were; while Mrs Dombey’s list complained
of weariness, and the young thing with the shoulders, deprived of the
attentions of that gay youth Cousin Feenix (who went away from the
dinner-table), confidentially alleged to thirty or forty friends that
she was bored to death. All the old ladies with the burdens on their
heads, had greater or less cause of complaint against Mr Dombey; and
the Directors and Chairmen coincided in thinking that if Dombey must
marry, he had better have married somebody nearer his own age, not
quite so handsome, and a little better off. The general opinion among
this class of gentlemen was, that it was a weak thing in Dombey, and
he’d live to repent it. Hardly anybody there, except the mild men,
stayed, or went away, without considering himself or herself neglected
and aggrieved by Mr Dombey or Mrs Dombey; and the speechless female in
the black velvet hat was found to have been stricken mute, because the
lady in the crimson velvet had been handed down before her. The nature
even of the mild men got corrupted, either from their curdling it with
too much lemonade, or from the general inoculation that prevailed; and
they made sarcastic jokes to one another, and whispered disparagement
on stairs and in bye-places. The general dissatisfaction and discomfort
so diffused itself, that the assembled footmen in the hall were as well
acquainted with it as the company above. Nay, the very linkmen outside
got hold of it, and compared the party to a funeral out of mourning,
with none of the company remembered in the will.
At last, the guests were all gone, and the linkmen too; and the street,
crowded so long with carriages, was clear; and the dying lights showed
no one in the rooms, but Mr Dombey and Mr Carker, who were talking
together apart, and Mrs Dombey and her mother: the former seated on an
ottoman; the latter reclining in the Cleopatra attitude, awaiting the
arrival of her maid. Mr Dombey having finished his communication to
Carker, the latter advanced obsequiously to take leave.
“I trust,” he said, “that the fatigues of this delightful evening will
not inconvenience Mrs Dombey to-morrow.”
“Mrs Dombey,” said Mr Dombey, advancing, “has sufficiently spared
herself fatigue, to relieve you from any anxiety of that kind. I regret
to say, Mrs Dombey, that I could have wished you had fatigued yourself
a little more on this occasion.
She looked at him with a supercilious glance, that it seemed not worth
her while to protract, and turned away her eyes without speaking.
“I am sorry, Madam,” said Mr Dombey, “that you should not have thought
it your duty—”
She looked at him again.
“Your duty, Madam,” pursued Mr Dombey, “to have received my friends
with a little more deference. Some of those whom you have been pleased
to slight tonight in a very marked manner, Mrs Dombey, confer a
distinction upon you, I must tell you, in any visit they pay you.”
“Do you know that there is someone here?” she returned, now looking at
him steadily.
“No! Carker! I beg that you do not. I insist that you do not,” cried Mr
Dombey, stopping that noiseless gentleman in his withdrawal. “Mr
Carker, Madam, as you know, possesses my confidence. He is as well
acquainted as myself with the subject on which I speak. I beg to tell
you, for your information, Mrs Dombey, that I consider these wealthy
and important persons confer a distinction upon me:” and Mr Dombey drew
himself up, as having now rendered them of the highest possible
importance.
“I ask you,” she repeated, bending her disdainful, steady gaze upon
him, “do you know that there is someone here, Sir?”
“I must entreat,” said Mr Carker, stepping forward, “I must beg, I must
demand, to be released. Slight and unimportant as this difference is—”
Mrs Skewton, who had been intent upon her daughter’s face, took him up
here.
“My sweetest Edith,” she said, “and my dearest Dombey; our excellent
friend Mr Carker, for so I am sure I ought to mention him—”
Mr Carker murmured, “Too much honour.”
“—has used the very words that were in my mind, and that I have been
dying, these ages, for an opportunity of introducing. Slight and
unimportant! My sweetest Edith, and my dearest Dombey, do we not know
that any difference between you two—No, Flowers; not now.”
Flowers was the maid, who, finding gentlemen present, retreated with
precipitation.
“That any difference between you two,” resumed Mrs Skewton, “with the
Heart you possess in common, and the excessively charming bond of
feeling that there is between you, must be slight and unimportant? What
words could better define the fact? None. Therefore I am glad to take
this slight occasion—this trifling occasion, that is so replete with
Nature, and your individual characters, and all that—so truly
calculated to bring the tears into a parent’s eyes—to say that I attach
no importance to them in the least, except as developing these minor
elements of Soul; and that, unlike most Mamas-in-law (that odious
phrase, dear Dombey!) as they have been represented to me to exist in
this I fear too artificial world, I never shall attempt to interpose
between you, at such a time, and never can much regret, after all, such
little flashes of the torch of What’s-his-name—not Cupid, but the other
delightful creature.”
There was a sharpness in the good mother’s glance at both her children
as she spoke, that may have been expressive of a direct and
well-considered purpose hidden between these rambling words. That
purpose, providently to detach herself in the beginning from all the
clankings of their chain that were to come, and to shelter herself with
the fiction of her innocent belief in their mutual affection, and their
adaptation to each other.
“I have pointed out to Mrs Dombey,” said Mr Dombey, in his most stately
manner, “that in her conduct thus early in our married life, to which I
object, and which, I request, may be corrected. Carker,” with a nod of
dismissal, “good-night to you!”
Mr Carker bowed to the imperious form of the Bride, whose sparkling eye
was fixed upon her husband; and stopping at Cleopatra’s couch on his
way out, raised to his lips the hand she graciously extended to him, in
lowly and admiring homage.
If his handsome wife had reproached him, or even changed countenance,
or broken the silence in which she remained, by one word, now that they
were alone (for Cleopatra made off with all speed), Mr Dombey would
have been equal to some assertion of his case against her. But the
intense, unutterable, withering scorn, with which, after looking upon
him, she dropped her eyes, as if he were too worthless and indifferent
to her to be challenged with a syllable—the ineffable disdain and
haughtiness in which she sat before him—the cold inflexible resolve
with which her every feature seemed to bear him down, and put him
by—these, he had no resource against; and he left her, with her whole
overbearing beauty concentrated on despising him.
Was he coward enough to watch her, an hour afterwards, on the old well
staircase, where he had once seen Florence in the moonlight, toiling up
with Paul? Or was he in the dark by accident, when, looking up, he saw
her coming, with a light, from the room where Florence lay, and marked
again the face so changed, which he could not subdue?
But it could never alter as his own did. It never, in its uttermost
pride and passion, knew the shadow that had fallen on his, in the dark
corner, on the night of the return; and often since; and which deepened
on it now, as he looked up.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
More Warnings than One
Florence, Edith, and Mrs Skewton were together next day, and the
carriage was waiting at the door to take them out. For Cleopatra had
her galley again now, and Withers, no longer the wan, stood upright in
a pigeon-breasted jacket and military trousers, behind her wheel-less
chair at dinner-time and butted no more. The hair of Withers was
radiant with pomatum, in these days of down, and he wore kid gloves and
smelt of the water of Cologne.
They were assembled in Cleopatra’s room. The Serpent of old Nile (not
to mention her disrespectfully) was reposing on her sofa, sipping her
morning chocolate at three o’clock in the afternoon, and Flowers the
Maid was fastening on her youthful cuffs and frills, and performing a
kind of private coronation ceremony on her, with a peach-coloured
velvet bonnet; the artificial roses in which nodded to uncommon
advantage, as the palsy trifled with them, like a breeze.
“I think I am a little nervous this morning, Flowers,” said Mrs
Skewton. “My hand quite shakes.”
“You were the life of the party last night, Ma’am, you know,” returned
Flowers, “and you suffer for it today, you see.”
Edith, who had beckoned Florence to the window, and was looking out,
with her back turned on the toilet of her esteemed mother, suddenly
withdrew from it, as if it had lightened.
“My darling child,” cried Cleopatra, languidly, “_you_ are not nervous?
Don’t tell me, my dear Edith, that you, so enviably self-possessed, are
beginning to be a martyr too, like your unfortunately constituted
mother! Withers, someone at the door.”
“Card, Ma’am,” said Withers, taking it towards Mrs Dombey.
“I am going out,” she said without looking at it.
“My dear love,” drawled Mrs Skewton, “how very odd to send that message
without seeing the name! Bring it here, Withers. Dear me, my love; Mr
Carker, too! That very sensible person!”
“I am going out,” repeated Edith, in so imperious a tone that Withers,
going to the door, imperiously informed the servant who was waiting,
“Mrs Dombey is going out. Get along with you,” and shut it on him.
But the servant came back after a short absence, and whispered to
Withers again, who once more, and not very willingly, presented himself
before Mrs Dombey.
“If you please, Ma’am, Mr Carker sends his respectful compliments, and
begs you would spare him one minute, if you could—for business, Ma’am,
if you please.”
“Really, my love,” said Mrs Skewton in her mildest manner; for her
daughter’s face was threatening; “if you would allow me to offer a
word, I should recommend—”
“Show him this way,” said Edith. As Withers disappeared to execute the