Dombey and Son
I aspire to the distinction of believing that my confidence is
accepted, and that I am relieved from my responsibility?”
He long remembered the look she gave him—who could see it, and forget
it?—and the struggle that ensued within her. At last she said:
“I accept it, Sir You will please to consider this matter at an end,
and that it goes no farther.”
He bowed low, and rose. She rose too, and he took leave with all
humility. But Withers, meeting him on the stairs, stood amazed at the
beauty of his teeth, and at his brilliant smile; and as he rode away
upon his white-legged horse, the people took him for a dentist, such
was the dazzling show he made. The people took her, when she rode out
in her carriage presently, for a great lady, as happy as she was rich
and fine. But they had not seen her, just before, in her own room with
no one by; and they had not heard her utterance of the three words, “Oh
Florence, Florence!”
Mrs Skewton, reposing on her sofa, and sipping her chocolate, had heard
nothing but the low word business, for which she had a mortal aversion,
insomuch that she had long banished it from her vocabulary, and had
gone nigh, in a charming manner and with an immense amount of heart, to
say nothing of soul, to ruin divers milliners and others in
consequence. Therefore Mrs Skewton asked no questions, and showed no
curiosity. Indeed, the peach-velvet bonnet gave her sufficient
occupation out of doors; for being perched on the back of her head, and
the day being rather windy, it was frantic to escape from Mrs Skewton’s
company, and would be coaxed into no sort of compromise. When the
carriage was closed, and the wind shut out, the palsy played among the
artificial roses again like an almshouse-full of superannuated zephyrs;
and altogether Mrs Skewton had enough to do, and got on but
indifferently.
She got on no better towards night; for when Mrs Dombey, in her
dressing-room, had been dressed and waiting for her half an hour, and
Mr Dombey, in the drawing-room, had paraded himself into a state of
solemn fretfulness (they were all three going out to dinner), Flowers
the Maid appeared with a pale face to Mrs Dombey, saying:
“If you please, Ma’am, I beg your pardon, but I can’t do nothing with
Missis!”
“What do you mean?” asked Edith.
“Well, Ma’am,” replied the frightened maid, “I hardly know. She’s
making faces!”
Edith hurried with her to her mother’s room. Cleopatra was arrayed in
full dress, with the diamonds, short sleeves, rouge, curls, teeth, and
other juvenility all complete; but Paralysis was not to be deceived,
had known her for the object of its errand, and had struck her at her
glass, where she lay like a horrible doll that had tumbled down.
They took her to pieces in very shame, and put the little of her that
was real on a bed. Doctors were sent for, and soon came. Powerful
remedies were resorted to; opinions given that she would rally from
this shock, but would not survive another; and there she lay
speechless, and staring at the ceiling, for days; sometimes making
inarticulate sounds in answer to such questions as did she know who
were present, and the like: sometimes giving no reply either by sign or
gesture, or in her unwinking eyes.
At length she began to recover consciousness, and in some degree the
power of motion, though not yet of speech. One day the use of her right
hand returned; and showing it to her maid who was in attendance on her,
and appearing very uneasy in her mind, she made signs for a pencil and
some paper. This the maid immediately provided, thinking she was going
to make a will, or write some last request; and Mrs Dombey being from
home, the maid awaited the result with solemn feelings.
After much painful scrawling and erasing, and putting in of wrong
characters, which seemed to tumble out of the pencil of their own
accord, the old woman produced this document:
“Rose-coloured curtains.”
The maid being perfectly transfixed, and with tolerable reason,
Cleopatra amended the manuscript by adding two words more, when it
stood thus:
“Rose-coloured curtains for doctors.”
The maid now perceived remotely that she wished these articles to be
provided for the better presentation of her complexion to the faculty;
and as those in the house who knew her best, had no doubt of the
correctness of this opinion, which she was soon able to establish for
herself, the rose-coloured curtains were added to her bed, and she
mended with increased rapidity from that hour. She was soon able to sit
up, in curls and a laced cap and nightgown, and to have a little
artificial bloom dropped into the hollow caverns of her cheeks.
It was a tremendous sight to see this old woman in her finery leering
and mincing at Death, and playing off her youthful tricks upon him as
if he had been the Major; but an alteration in her mind that ensued on
the paralytic stroke was fraught with as much matter for reflection,
and was quite as ghastly.
Whether the weakening of her intellect made her more cunning and false
than before, or whether it confused her between what she had assumed to
be and what she really had been, or whether it had awakened any
glimmering of remorse, which could neither struggle into light nor get
back into total darkness, or whether, in the jumble of her faculties, a
combination of these effects had been shaken up, which is perhaps the
more likely supposition, the result was this:—That she became hugely
exacting in respect of Edith’s affection and gratitude and attention to
her; highly laudatory of herself as a most inestimable parent; and very
jealous of having any rival in Edith’s regard. Further, in place of
remembering that compact made between them for an avoidance of the
subject, she constantly alluded to her daughter’s marriage as a proof
of her being an incomparable mother; and all this, with the weakness
and peevishness of such a state, always serving for a sarcastic
commentary on her levity and youthfulness.
“Where is Mrs Dombey?” she would say to her maid.
“Gone out, Ma’am.”
“Gone out! Does she go out to shun her Mama, Flowers?”
“La bless you, no, Ma’am. Mrs Dombey has only gone out for a ride with
Miss Florence.”
“Miss Florence. Who’s Miss Florence? Don’t tell me about Miss Florence.
What’s Miss Florence to her, compared to me?”
The apposite display of the diamonds, or the peach-velvet bonnet (she
sat in the bonnet to receive visitors, weeks before she could stir out
of doors), or the dressing of her up in some gaud or other, usually
stopped the tears that began to flow hereabouts; and she would remain
in a complacent state until Edith came to see her; when, at a glance of
the proud face, she would relapse again.
“Well, I am sure, Edith!” she would cry, shaking her head.
“What is the matter, mother?”
“Matter! I really don’t know what is the matter. The world is coming to
such an artificial and ungrateful state, that I begin to think there’s
no Heart—or anything of that sort—left in it, positively. Withers is
more a child to me than you are. He attends to me much more than my own
daughter. I almost wish I didn’t look so young—and all that kind of
thing—and then perhaps I should be more considered.”
“What would you have, mother?”
“Oh, a great deal, Edith,” impatiently.
“Is there anything you want that you have not? It is your own fault if
there be.”
“My own fault!” beginning to whimper. “The parent I have been to you,
Edith: making you a companion from your cradle! And when you neglect
me, and have no more natural affection for me than if I was a
stranger—not a twentieth part of the affection that you have for
Florence—but I am only your mother, and should corrupt her in a
day!—you reproach me with its being my own fault.”
“Mother, mother, I reproach you with nothing. Why will you always dwell
on this?”
“Isn’t it natural that I should dwell on this, when I am all affection
and sensitiveness, and am wounded in the cruellest way, whenever you
look at me?”
“I do not mean to wound you, mother. Have you no remembrance of what
has been said between us? Let the Past rest.”
“Yes, rest! And let gratitude to me rest; and let affection for me
rest; and let me rest in my out-of-the-way room, with no society and no
attention, while you find new relations to make much of, who have no
earthly claim upon you! Good gracious, Edith, do you know what an
elegant establishment you are at the head of?”
“Yes. Hush!”
“And that gentlemanly creature, Dombey? Do you know that you are
married to him, Edith, and that you have a settlement and a position,
and a carriage, and I don’t know what?”
“Indeed, I know it, mother; well.”
“As you would have had with that delightful good soul—what did they
call him?—Granger—if he hadn’t died. And who have you to thank for all
this, Edith?”
“You, mother; you.”
“Then put your arms round my neck, and kiss me; and show me, Edith,
that you know there never was a better Mama than I have been to you.
And don’t let me become a perfect fright with teasing and wearing
myself at your ingratitude, or when I’m out again in society no soul
will know me, not even that hateful animal, the Major.”
But, sometimes, when Edith went nearer to her, and bending down her
stately head, put her cold cheek to hers, the mother would draw back as
If she were afraid of her, and would fall into a fit of trembling, and
cry out that there was a wandering in her wits. And sometimes she would
entreat her, with humility, to sit down on the chair beside her bed,
and would look at her (as she sat there brooding) with a face that even
the rose-coloured curtains could not make otherwise than scared and
wild.
The rose-coloured curtains blushed, in course of time, on Cleopatra’s
bodily recovery, and on her dress—more juvenile than ever, to repair
the ravages of illness—and on the rouge, and on the teeth, and on the
curls, and on the diamonds, and the short sleeves, and the whole
wardrobe of the doll that had tumbled down before the mirror. They
blushed, too, now and then, upon an indistinctness in her speech which
she turned off with a girlish giggle, and on an occasional failing in
her memory, that had no rule in it, but came and went fantastically, as
if in mockery of her fantastic self.
But they never blushed upon a change in the new manner of her thought
and speech towards her daughter. And though that daughter often came
within their influence, they never blushed upon her loveliness
irradiated by a smile, or softened by the light of filial love, in its
stern beauty.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
Miss Tox improves an Old Acquaintance
The forlorn Miss Tox, abandoned by her friend Louisa Chick, and bereft
of Mr Dombey’s countenance—for no delicate pair of wedding cards,
united by a silver thread, graced the chimney-glass in Princess’s
Place, or the harpsichord, or any of those little posts of display
which Lucretia reserved for holiday occupation—became depressed in her
spirits, and suffered much from melancholy. For a time the Bird Waltz
was unheard in Princess’s Place, the plants were neglected, and dust
collected on the miniature of Miss Tox’s ancestor with the powdered
head and pigtail.
Miss Tox, however, was not of an age or of a disposition long to
abandon herself to unavailing regrets. Only two notes of the
harpsichord were dumb from disuse when the Bird Waltz again warbled and
trilled in the crooked drawing-room: only one slip of geranium fell a
victim to imperfect nursing, before she was gardening at her green
baskets again, regularly every morning; the powdered-headed ancestor
had not been under a cloud for more than six weeks, when Miss Tox
breathed on his benignant visage, and polished him up with a piece of
wash-leather.
Still, Miss Tox was lonely, and at a loss. Her attachments, however