Dombey and Son
Her glance fell haughtily upon him in the doorway; but he looked at
Florence—though only in the act of bending his head, as he came in—with
some irrepressible expression of the new power he held; and it was his
triumph to see the glance droop and falter, and to see that Edith half
rose up to receive him.
He was very sorry, he was deeply grieved; he couldn’t say with what
unwillingness he came to prepare her for the intelligence of a very
slight accident. He entreated Mrs Dombey to compose herself. Upon his
sacred word of honour, there was no cause of alarm. But Mr Dombey—
Florence uttered a sudden cry. He did not look at her, but at Edith.
Edith composed and reassured her. She uttered no cry of distress. No,
no.
Mr Dombey had met with an accident in riding. His horse had slipped,
and he had been thrown.
Florence wildly exclaimed that he was badly hurt; that he was killed!
No. Upon his honour, Mr Dombey, though stunned at first, was soon
recovered, and though certainly hurt was in no kind of danger. If this
were not the truth, he, the distressed intruder, never could have had
the courage to present himself before Mrs Dombey. It was the truth
indeed, he solemnly assured her.
All this he said as if he were answering Edith, and not Florence, and
with his eyes and his smile fastened on Edith.
He then went on to tell her where Mr Dombey was lying, and to request
that a carriage might be placed at his disposal to bring him home.
“Mama,” faltered Florence in tears, “if I might venture to go!”
Mr Carker, having his eyes on Edith when he heard these words, gave her
a secret look and slightly shook his head. He saw how she battled with
herself before she answered him with her handsome eyes, but he wrested
the answer from her—he showed her that he would have it, or that he
would speak and cut Florence to the heart—and she gave it to him. As he
had looked at the picture in the morning, so he looked at her
afterwards, when she turned her eyes away.
“I am directed to request,” he said, “that the new housekeeper—Mrs
Pipchin, I think, is the name—”
Nothing escaped him. He saw, in an instant, that she was another slight
of Mr Dombey’s on his wife.
“—may be informed that Mr Dombey wishes to have his bed prepared in his
own apartments downstairs, as he prefers those rooms to any other. I
shall return to Mr Dombey almost immediately. That every possible
attention has been paid to his comfort, and that he is the object of
every possible solicitude, I need not assure you, Madam. Let me again
say, there is no cause for the least alarm. Even you may be quite at
ease, believe me.”
He bowed himself out, with his extremest show of deference and
conciliation; and having returned to Mr Dombey’s room, and there
arranged for a carriage being sent after him to the City, mounted his
horse again, and rode slowly thither. He was very thoughtful as he went
along, and very thoughtful there, and very thoughtful in the carriage
on his way back to the place where Mr Dombey had been left. It was only
when sitting by that gentleman’s couch that he was quite himself again,
and conscious of his teeth.
About the time of twilight, Mr Dombey, grievously afflicted with aches
and pains, was helped into his carriage, and propped with cloaks and
pillows on one side of it, while his confidential agent bore him
company upon the other. As he was not to be shaken, they moved at
little more than a foot pace; and hence it was quite dark when he was
brought home. Mrs Pipchin, bitter and grim, and not oblivious of the
Peruvian mines, as the establishment in general had good reason to
know, received him at the door, and freshened the domestics with
several little sprinklings of wordy vinegar, while they assisted in
conveying him to his room. Mr Carker remained in attendance until he
was safe in bed, and then, as he declined to receive any female
visitor, but the excellent Ogress who presided over his household,
waited on Mrs Dombey once more, with his report on her lord’s
condition.
He again found Edith alone with Florence, and he again addressed the
whole of his soothing speech to Edith, as if she were a prey to the
liveliest and most affectionate anxieties. So earnest he was in his
respectful sympathy, that on taking leave, he ventured—with one more
glance towards Florence at the moment—to take her hand, and bending
over it, to touch it with his lips.
Edith did not withdraw the hand, nor did she strike his fair face with
it, despite the flush upon her cheek, the bright light in her eyes, and
the dilation of her whole form. But when she was alone in her own room,
she struck it on the marble chimney-shelf, so that, at one blow, it was
bruised, and bled; and held it from her, near the shining fire, as if
she could have thrust it in and burned it.
Far into the night she sat alone, by the sinking blaze, in dark and
threatening beauty, watching the murky shadows looming on the wall, as
if her thoughts were tangible, and cast them there. Whatever shapes of
outrage and affront, and black foreshadowings of things that might
happen, flickered, indistinct and giant-like, before her, one resented
figure marshalled them against her. And that figure was her husband.
CHAPTER XLIII.
The Watches of the Night
Florence, long since awakened from her dream, mournfully observed the
estrangement between her father and Edith, and saw it widen more and
more, and knew that there was greater bitterness between them every
day. Each day’s added knowledge deepened the shade upon her love and
hope, roused up the old sorrow that had slumbered for a little time,
and made it even heavier to bear than it had been before.
It had been hard—how hard may none but Florence ever know!—to have the
natural affection of a true and earnest nature turned to agony; and
slight, or stern repulse, substituted for the tenderest protection and
the dearest care. It had been hard to feel in her deep heart what she
had felt, and never know the happiness of one touch of response. But it
was much more hard to be compelled to doubt either her father or Edith,
so affectionate and dear to her, and to think of her love for each of
them, by turns, with fear, distrust, and wonder.
Yet Florence now began to do so; and the doing of it was a task imposed
upon her by the very purity of her soul, as one she could not fly from.
She saw her father cold and obdurate to Edith, as to her; hard,
inflexible, unyielding. Could it be, she asked herself with starting
tears, that her own dear mother had been made unhappy by such
treatment, and had pined away and died? Then she would think how proud
and stately Edith was to everyone but her, with what disdain she
treated him, how distantly she kept apart from him, and what she had
said on the night when they came home; and quickly it would come on
Florence, almost as a crime, that she loved one who was set in
opposition to her father, and that her father knowing of it, must think
of her in his solitary room as the unnatural child who added this wrong
to the old fault, so much wept for, of never having won his fatherly
affection from her birth. The next kind word from Edith, the next kind
glance, would shake these thoughts again, and make them seem like black
ingratitude; for who but she had cheered the drooping heart of
Florence, so lonely and so hurt, and been its best of comforters! Thus,
with her gentle nature yearning to them both, feeling for the misery of
both, and whispering doubts of her own duty to both, Florence in her
wider and expanded love, and by the side of Edith, endured more than
when she had hoarded up her undivided secret in the mournful house, and
her beautiful Mama had never dawned upon it.
One exquisite unhappiness that would have far outweighed this, Florence
was spared. She never had the least suspicion that Edith by her
tenderness for her widened the separation from her father, or gave him
new cause of dislike. If Florence had conceived the possibility of such
an effect being wrought by such a cause, what grief she would have
felt, what sacrifice she would have tried to make, poor loving girl,
how fast and sure her quiet passage might have been beneath it to the
presence of that higher Father who does not reject his children’s love,
or spurn their tried and broken hearts, Heaven knows! But it was
otherwise, and that was well.
No word was ever spoken between Florence and Edith now, on these
subjects. Edith had said there ought to be between them, in that wise,
a division and a silence like the grave itself: and Florence felt she
was right.
In this state of affairs her father was brought home, suffering and
disabled; and gloomily retired to his own rooms, where he was tended by
servants, not approached by Edith, and had no friend or companion but
Mr Carker, who withdrew near midnight.
“And nice company he is, Miss Floy,” said Susan Nipper. “Oh, he’s a
precious piece of goods! If ever he wants a character don’t let him
come to me whatever he does, that’s all I tell him.”
“Dear Susan,” urged Florence, “don’t!”
“Oh, it’s very well to say ‘don’t’ Miss Floy,” returned the Nipper,
much exasperated; “but raly begging your pardon we’re coming to such
passes that it turns all the blood in a person’s body into pins and
needles, with their pints all ways. Don’t mistake me, Miss Floy, I
don’t mean nothing again your ma-in-law who has always treated me as a
lady should though she is rather high I must say not that I have any
right to object to that particular, but when we come to Mrs Pipchinses
and having them put over us and keeping guard at your Pa’s door like
crocodiles (only make us thankful that they lay no eggs!) we are a
growing too outrageous!”
“Papa thinks well of Mrs Pipchin, Susan,” returned Florence, “and has a
right to choose his housekeeper, you know. Pray don’t!”
“Well Miss Floy,” returned the Nipper, “when you say don’t, I never do
I hope but Mrs Pipchin acts like early gooseberries upon me Miss, and
nothing less.”
Susan was unusually emphatic and destitute of punctuation in her
discourse on this night, which was the night of Mr Dombey’s being
brought home, because, having been sent downstairs by Florence to
inquire after him, she had been obliged to deliver her message to her
mortal enemy Mrs Pipchin; who, without carrying it in to Mr Dombey, had
taken upon herself to return what Miss Nipper called a huffish answer,
on her own responsibility. This, Susan Nipper construed into
presumption on the part of that exemplary sufferer by the Peruvian
mines, and a deed of disparagement upon her young lady, that was not to
be forgiven; and so far her emphatic state was special. But she had
been in a condition of greatly increased suspicion and distrust, ever
since the marriage; for, like most persons of her quality of mind, who
form a strong and sincere attachment to one in the different station
which Florence occupied, Susan was very jealous, and her jealousy
naturally attached to Edith, who divided her old empire, and came
between them. Proud and glad as Susan Nipper truly was, that her young
mistress should be advanced towards her proper place in the scene of
her old neglect, and that she should have her father’s handsome wife
for her companion and protectress, she could not relinquish any part of
her own dominion to the handsome wife, without a grudge and a vague
feeling of ill-will, for which she did not fail to find a disinterested
justification in her sharp perception of the pride and passion of the
lady’s character. From the background to which she had necessarily
retired somewhat, since the marriage, Miss Nipper looked on, therefore,
at domestic affairs in general, with a resolute conviction that no good
would come of Mrs Dombey: always being very careful to publish on all