Dombey and Son
other, seen and crushed when she last turned from him, and forgotten
among the ignominious and dead vermin of the ground.
He looked back, as he went out at the door, upon the well-lighted and
luxurious room, the beautiful and glittering objects everywhere
displayed, the shape of Edith in its rich dress seated before her
glass, and the face of Edith as the glass presented it to him; and
betook himself to his old chamber of cogitation, carrying away with him
a vivid picture in his mind of all these things, and a rambling and
unaccountable speculation (such as sometimes comes into a man’s head)
how they would all look when he saw them next.
For the rest, Mr Dombey was very taciturn, and very dignified, and very
confident of carrying out his purpose; and remained so.
He did not design accompanying the family to Brighton; but he
graciously informed Cleopatra at breakfast, on the morning of
departure, which arrived a day or two afterwards, that he might be
expected down, soon. There was no time to be lost in getting Cleopatra
to any place recommended as being salutary; for, indeed, she seemed
upon the wane, and turning of the earth, earthy.
Without having undergone any decided second attack of her malady, the
old woman seemed to have crawled backward in her recovery from the
first. She was more lean and shrunken, more uncertain in her
imbecility, and made stranger confusions in her mind and memory. Among
other symptoms of this last affliction, she fell into the habit of
confounding the names of her two sons-in-law, the living and the
deceased; and in general called Mr Dombey, either “Grangeby,” or
“Domber,” or indifferently, both.
But she was youthful, very youthful still; and in her youthfulness
appeared at breakfast, before going away, in a new bonnet made express,
and a travelling robe that was embroidered and braided like an old
baby’s. It was not easy to put her into a fly-away bonnet now, or to
keep the bonnet in its place on the back of her poor nodding head, when
it was got on. In this instance, it had not only the extraneous effect
of being always on one side, but of being perpetually tapped on the
crown by Flowers the maid, who attended in the background during
breakfast to perform that duty.
“Now, my dearest Grangeby,” said Mrs Skewton, “you must posively prom,”
she cut some of her words short, and cut out others altogether, “come
down very soon.”
“I said just now, Madam,” returned Mr Dombey, loudly and laboriously,
“that I am coming in a day or two.”
“Bless you, Domber!”
Here the Major, who was come to take leave of the ladies, and who was
staring through his apoplectic eyes at Mrs Skewton’s face with the
disinterested composure of an immortal being, said:
“Begad, Ma’am, you don’t ask old Joe to come!”
“Sterious wretch, who’s he?” lisped Cleopatra. But a tap on the bonnet
from Flowers seeming to jog her memory, she added, “Oh! You mean
yourself, you naughty creature!”
“Devilish queer, Sir,” whispered the Major to Mr Dombey. “Bad case.
Never did wrap up enough;” the Major being buttoned to the chin. “Why
who should J. B. mean by Joe, but old Joe Bagstock—Joseph—your
slave—Joe, Ma’am? Here! Here’s the man! Here are the Bagstock bellows,
Ma’am!” cried the Major, striking himself a sounding blow on the chest.
“My dearest Edith—Grangeby—it’s most trordinry thing,” said Cleopatra,
pettishly, “that Major—”
“Bagstock! J. B.!” cried the Major, seeing that she faltered for his
name.
“Well, it don’t matter,” said Cleopatra. “Edith, my love, you know I
never could remember names—what was it? oh!—most trordinry thing that
so many people want to come down to see me. I’m not going for long. I’m
coming back. Surely they can wait, till I come back!”
Cleopatra looked all round the table as she said it, and appeared very
uneasy.
“I won’t have visitors—really don’t want visitors,” she said; “little
repose—and all that sort of thing—is what I quire. No odious brutes
must proach me till I’ve shaken off this numbness;” and in a grisly
resumption of her coquettish ways, she made a dab at the Major with her
fan, but overset Mr Dombey’s breakfast cup instead, which was in quite
a different direction.
Then she called for Withers, and charged him to see particularly that
word was left about some trivial alterations in her room, which must be
all made before she came back, and which must be set about immediately,
as there was no saying how soon she might come back; for she had a
great many engagements, and all sorts of people to call upon. Withers
received these directions with becoming deference, and gave his
guarantee for their execution; but when he withdrew a pace or two
behind her, it appeared as if he couldn’t help looking strangely at the
Major, who couldn’t help looking strangely at Mr Dombey, who couldn’t
help looking strangely at Cleopatra, who couldn’t help nodding her
bonnet over one eye, and rattling her knife and fork upon her plate in
using them, as if she were playing castanets.
Edith alone never lifted her eyes to any face at the table, and never
seemed dismayed by anything her mother said or did. She listened to her
disjointed talk, or at least, turned her head towards her when
addressed; replied in a few low words when necessary; and sometimes
stopped her when she was rambling, or brought her thoughts back with a
monosyllable, to the point from which they had strayed. The mother,
however unsteady in other things, was constant in this—that she was
always observant of her. She would look at the beautiful face, in its
marble stillness and severity, now with a kind of fearful admiration;
now in a giggling foolish effort to move it to a smile; now with
capricious tears and jealous shakings of her head, as imagining herself
neglected by it; always with an attraction towards it, that never
fluctuated like her other ideas, but had constant possession of her.
From Edith she would sometimes look at Florence, and back again at
Edith, in a manner that was wild enough; and sometimes she would try to
look elsewhere, as if to escape from her daughter’s face; but back to
it she seemed forced to come, although it never sought hers unless
sought, or troubled her with one single glance.
The breakfast concluded, Mrs Skewton, affecting to lean girlishly upon
the Major’s arm, but heavily supported on the other side by Flowers the
maid, and propped up behind by Withers the page, was conducted to the
carriage, which was to take her, Florence, and Edith to Brighton.
“And is Joseph absolutely banished?” said the Major, thrusting in his
purple face over the steps. “Damme, Ma’am, is Cleopatra so hard-hearted
as to forbid her faithful Antony Bagstock to approach the presence?”
“Go along!” said Cleopatra, “I can’t bear you. You shall see me when I
come back, if you are very good.”
“Tell Joseph, he may live in hope, Ma’am,” said the Major; “or he’ll
die in despair.”
Cleopatra shuddered, and leaned back. “Edith, my dear,” she said. “Tell
him—”
“What?”
“Such dreadful words,” said Cleopatra. “He uses such dreadful words!”
Edith signed to him to retire, gave the word to go on, and left the
objectionable Major to Mr Dombey. To whom he returned, whistling.
“I’ll tell you what, Sir,” said the Major, with his hands behind him,
and his legs very wide asunder, “a fair friend of ours has removed to
Queer Street.”
“What do you mean, Major?” inquired Mr Dombey.
“I mean to say, Dombey,” returned the Major, “that you’ll soon be an
orphan-in-law.”
Mr Dombey appeared to relish this waggish description of himself so
very little, that the Major wound up with the horse’s cough, as an
expression of gravity.
“Damme, Sir,” said the Major, “there is no use in disguising a fact.
Joe is blunt, Sir. That’s his nature. If you take old Josh at all, you
take him as you find him; and a devilish rusty, old rasper, of a
close-toothed, J. B. file, you do find him. Dombey,” said the Major,
“your wife’s mother is on the move, Sir.”
“I fear,” returned Mr Dombey, with much philosophy, “that Mrs Skewton
is shaken.”
“Shaken, Dombey!” said the Major. “Smashed!”
“Change, however,” pursued Mr Dombey, “and attention, may do much yet.”
“Don’t believe it, Sir,” returned the Major. “Damme, Sir, she never
wrapped up enough. If a man don’t wrap up,” said the Major, taking in
another button of his buff waistcoat, “he has nothing to fall back
upon. But some people will die. They will do it. Damme, they will.
They’re obstinate. I tell you what, Dombey, it may not be ornamental;
it may not be refined; it may be rough and tough; but a little of the
genuine old English Bagstock stamina, Sir, would do all the good in the
world to the human breed.”
After imparting this precious piece of information, the Major, who was
certainly true-blue, whatever other endowments he may have had or
wanted, coming within the “genuine old English” classification, which
has never been exactly ascertained, took his lobster-eyes and his
apoplexy to the club, and choked there all day.
Cleopatra, at one time fretful, at another self-complacent, sometimes
awake, sometimes asleep, and at all times juvenile, reached Brighton
the same night, fell to pieces as usual, and was put away in bed; where
a gloomy fancy might have pictured a more potent skeleton than the
maid, who should have been one, watching at the rose-coloured curtains,
which were carried down to shed their bloom upon her.
It was settled in high council of medical authority that she should
take a carriage airing every day, and that it was important she should
get out every day, and walk if she could. Edith was ready to attend
her—always ready to attend her, with the same mechanical attention and
immovable beauty—and they drove out alone; for Edith had an uneasiness
in the presence of Florence, now that her mother was worse, and told
Florence, with a kiss, that she would rather they two went alone.
Mrs Skewton, on one particular day, was in the irresolute, exacting,
jealous temper that had developed itself on her recovery from her first
attack. After sitting silent in the carriage watching Edith for some
time, she took her hand and kissed it passionately. The hand was
neither given nor withdrawn, but simply yielded to her raising of it,
and being released, dropped down again, almost as if it were
insensible. At this she began to whimper and moan, and say what a
mother she had been, and how she was forgotten! This she continued to
do at capricious intervals, even when they had alighted: when she
herself was halting along with the joint support of Withers and a
stick, and Edith was walking by her side, and the carriage slowly
following at a little distance.
It was a bleak, lowering, windy day, and they were out upon the Downs
with nothing but a bare sweep of land between them and the sky. The
mother, with a querulous satisfaction in the monotony of her complaint,
was still repeating it in a low voice from time to time, and the proud
form of her daughter moved beside her slowly, when there came advancing
over a dark ridge before them, two other figures, which in the
distance, were so like an exaggerated imitation of their own, that
Edith stopped.
Almost as she stopped, the two figures stopped; and that one which to
Edith’s thinking was like a distorted shadow of her mother, spoke to
the other, earnestly, and with a pointing hand towards them. That one
seemed inclined to turn back, but the other, in which Edith recognised
enough that was like herself to strike her with an unusual feeling, not
quite free from fear, came on; and then they came on together.
The greater part of this observation, she made while walking towards
them, for her stoppage had been momentary. Nearer observation showed