Dombey and Son
bunged, and had received pepper, and had been made groggy, and had come
up piping, and had endured a complication of similar strange
inconveniences, until he had been gone into and finished.
After a good repast, and much hospitality, Susan set out for the
coach-office in another cabriolet, with Mr Toots inside, as before, and
the Chicken on the box, who, whatever distinction he conferred on the
little party by the moral weight and heroism of his character, was
scarcely ornamental to it, physically speaking, on account of his
plasters; which were numerous. But the Chicken had registered a vow, in
secret, that he would never leave Mr Toots (who was secretly pining to
get rid of him), for any less consideration than the good-will and
fixtures of a public-house; and being ambitious to go into that line,
and drink himself to death as soon as possible, he felt it his cue to
make his company unacceptable.
The night-coach by which Susan was to go, was on the point of
departure. Mr Toots having put her inside, lingered by the window,
irresolutely, until the driver was about to mount; when, standing on
the step, and putting in a face that by the light of the lamp was
anxious and confused, he said abruptly:
“I say, Susan! Miss Dombey, you know—”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Do you think she could—you know—eh?”
“I beg your pardon, Mr Toots,” said Susan, “but I don’t hear you.”
“Do you think she could be brought, you know—not exactly at once, but
in time—in a long time—to—to love me, you know? There!” said poor Mr
Toots.
“Oh dear no!” returned Susan, shaking her head. “I should say, never.
Never!”
“Thank’ee!” said Mr Toots. “It’s of no consequence. Good-night. It’s of
no consequence, thank’ee!”
CHAPTER XLV.
The Trusty Agent
Edith went out alone that day, and returned home early. It was but a
few minutes after ten o’clock, when her carriage rolled along the
street in which she lived.
There was the same enforced composure on her face, that there had been
when she was dressing; and the wreath upon her head encircled the same
cold and steady brow. But it would have been better to have seen its
leaves and flowers reft into fragments by her passionate hand, or
rendered shapeless by the fitful searches of a throbbing and bewildered
brain for any resting-place, than adorning such tranquillity. So
obdurate, so unapproachable, so unrelenting, one would have thought
that nothing could soften such a woman’s nature, and that everything in
life had hardened it.
Arrived at her own door, she was alighting, when some one coming
quietly from the hall, and standing bareheaded, offered her his arm.
The servant being thrust aside, she had no choice but to touch it; and
she then knew whose arm it was.
“How is your patient, Sir?” she asked, with a curled lip.
“He is better,” returned Carker. “He is doing very well. I have left
him for the night.”
She bent her head, and was passing up the staircase, when he followed
and said, speaking at the bottom:
“Madam! May I beg the favour of a minute’s audience?”
She stopped and turned her eyes back “It is an unseasonable time, Sir,
and I am fatigued. Is your business urgent?”
“It is very urgent, returned Carker. “As I am so fortunate as to have
met you, let me press my petition.”
She looked down for a moment at his glistening mouth; and he looked up
at her, standing above him in her stately dress, and thought, again,
how beautiful she was.
“Where is Miss Dombey?” she asked the servant, aloud.
“In the morning room, Ma’am.”
“Show the way there!” Turning her eyes again on the attentive gentleman
at the bottom of the stairs, and informing him with a slight motion of
her head, that he was at liberty to follow, she passed on.
“I beg your pardon! Madam! Mrs Dombey!” cried the soft and nimble
Carker, at her side in a moment. “May I be permitted to entreat that
Miss Dombey is not present?”
She confronted him, with a quick look, but with the same
self-possession and steadiness.
“I would spare Miss Dombey,” said Carker, in a low voice, “the
knowledge of what I have to say. At least, Madam, I would leave it to
you to decide whether she shall know of it or not. I owe that to you.
It is my bounden duty to you. After our former interview, it would be
monstrous in me if I did otherwise.”
She slowly withdrew her eyes from his face, and turning to the servant,
said, “Some other room.” He led the way to a drawing-room, which he
speedily lighted up and then left them. While he remained, not a word
was spoken. Edith enthroned herself upon a couch by the fire; and Mr
Carker, with his hat in his hand and his eyes bent upon the carpet,
stood before her, at some little distance.
“Before I hear you, Sir,” said Edith, when the door was closed, “I wish
you to hear me.”
“To be addressed by Mrs Dombey,” he returned, “even in accents of
unmerited reproach, is an honour I so greatly esteem, that although I
were not her servant in all things, I should defer to such a wish, most
readily.”
“If you are charged by the man whom you have just now left, Sir;” Mr
Carker raised his eyes, as if he were going to counterfeit surprise,
but she met them, and stopped him, if such were his intention; “with
any message to me, do not attempt to deliver it, for I will not receive
it. I need scarcely ask you if you are come on such an errand. I have
expected you some time.”
“It is my misfortune,” he replied, “to be here, wholly against my will,
for such a purpose. Allow me to say that I am here for two purposes.
That is one.”
“That one, Sir,” she returned, “is ended. Or, if you return to it—”
“Can Mrs Dombey believe,” said Carker, coming nearer, “that I would
return to it in the face of her prohibition? Is it possible that Mrs
Dombey, having no regard to my unfortunate position, is so determined
to consider me inseparable from my instructor as to do me great and
wilful injustice?”
“Sir,” returned Edith, bending her dark gaze full upon him, and
speaking with a rising passion that inflated her proud nostril and her
swelling neck, and stirred the delicate white down upon a robe she
wore, thrown loosely over shoulders that could bear its snowy
neighbourhood, “Why do you present yourself to me, as you have done,
and speak to me of love and duty to my husband, and pretend to think
that I am happily married, and that I honour him? How dare you venture
so to affront me, when you know—_I_ do not know better, Sir: I have
seen it in your every glance, and heard it in your every word—that in
place of affection between us there is aversion and contempt, and that
I despise him hardly less than I despise myself for being his!
Injustice! If I had done justice to the torment you have made me feel,
and to my sense of the insult you have put upon me, I should have slain
you!”
She had asked him why he did this. Had she not been blinded by her
pride and wrath, and self-humiliation,—which she was, fiercely as she
bent her gaze upon him,—she would have seen the answer in his face. To
bring her to this declaration.
She saw it not, and cared not whether it was there or no. She saw only
the indignities and struggles she had undergone and had to undergo, and
was writhing under them. As she sat looking fixedly at them, rather
than at him, she plucked the feathers from a pinion of some rare and
beautiful bird, which hung from her wrist by a golden thread, to serve
her as a fan, and rained them on the ground.
He did not shrink beneath her gaze, but stood, until such outward signs
of her anger as had escaped her control subsided, with the air of a man
who had his sufficient reply in reserve and would presently deliver it.
And he then spoke, looking straight into her kindling eyes.
“Madam,” he said, “I know, and knew before today, that I have found no
favour with you; and I knew why. Yes. I knew why. You have spoken so
openly to me; I am so relieved by the possession of your confidence—”
“Confidence!” she repeated, with disdain.
He passed it over.
“—that I will make no pretence of concealment. I did see from the
first, that there was no affection on your part for Mr Dombey—how could
it possibly exist between such different subjects? And I have seen,
since, that stronger feelings than indifference have been engendered in
your breast—how could that possibly be otherwise, either, circumstanced
as you have been? But was it for me to presume to avow this knowledge
to you in so many words?”
“Was it for you, Sir,” she replied, “to feign that other belief, and
audaciously to thrust it on me day by day?”
“Madam, it was,” he eagerly retorted. “If I had done less, if I had
done anything but that, I should not be speaking to you thus; and I
foresaw—who could better foresee, for who has had greater experience of
Mr Dombey than myself?—that unless your character should prove to be as
yielding and obedient as that of his first submissive lady, which I did
not believe—”
A haughty smile gave him reason to observe that he might repeat this.
“I say, which I did not believe,—the time was likely to come, when such
an understanding as we have now arrived at, would be serviceable.”
“Serviceable to whom, Sir?” she demanded scornfully.
“To you. I will not add to myself, as warning me to refrain even from
that limited commendation of Mr Dombey, in which I can honestly
indulge, in order that I may not have the misfortune of saying anything
distasteful to one whose aversion and contempt,” with great expression,
“are so keen.”
“Is it honest in you, Sir,” said Edith, “to confess to your ‘limited
commendation,’ and to speak in that tone of disparagement, even of him:
being his chief counsellor and flatterer!”
“Counsellor,—yes,” said Carker. “Flatterer,—no. A little reservation I
fear I must confess to. But our interest and convenience commonly
oblige many of us to make professions that we cannot feel. We have
partnerships of interest and convenience, friendships of interest and
convenience, dealings of interest and convenience, marriages of
interest and convenience, every day.”
She bit her blood-red lip; but without wavering in the dark, stern
watch she kept upon him.
“Madam,” said Mr Carker, sitting down in a chair that was near her,
with an air of the most profound and most considerate respect, “why
should I hesitate now, being altogether devoted to your service, to
speak plainly? It was natural that a lady, endowed as you are, should
think it feasible to change her husband’s character in some respects,
and mould him to a better form.”
“It was not natural to me, Sir,” she rejoined. “I had never any
expectation or intention of that kind.”
The proud undaunted face showed him it was resolute to wear no mask he
offered, but was set upon a reckless disclosure of itself, indifferent
to any aspect in which it might present itself to such as he.
“At least it was natural,” he resumed, “that you should deem it quite
possible to live with Mr Dombey as his wife, at once without submitting
to him, and without coming into such violent collision with him. But,
Madam, you did not know Mr Dombey (as you have since ascertained), when
you thought that. You did not know how exacting and how proud he is, or
how he is, if I may say so, the slave of his own greatness, and goes
yoked to his own triumphal car like a beast of burden, with no idea on
earth but that it is behind him and is to be drawn on, over everything
and through everything.”
His teeth gleamed through his malicious relish of this conceit, as he
went on talking:
“Mr Dombey is really capable of no more true consideration for you,
Madam, than for me. The comparison is an extreme one; I intend it to be
so; but quite just. Mr Dombey, in the plenitude of his power, asked
me—I had it from his own lips yesterday morning—to be his go-between to