Dombey and Son
He rode near Mr Dombey’s house; and falling into a walk as he
approached it, looked up at the windows The window where he had once
seen Florence sitting with her dog attracted his attention first,
though there was no light in it; but he smiled as he carried his eyes
up the tall front of the house, and seemed to leave that object
superciliously behind.
“Time was,” he said, “when it was well to watch even your rising little
star, and know in what quarter there were clouds, to shadow you if
needful. But a planet has arisen, and you are lost in its light.”
He turned the white-legged horse round the street corner, and sought
one shining window from among those at the back of the house.
Associated with it was a certain stately presence, a gloved hand, the
remembrance how the feathers of a beautiful bird’s wing had been
showered down upon the floor, and how the light white down upon a robe
had stirred and rustled, as in the rising of a distant storm. These
were the things he carried with him as he turned away again, and rode
through the darkening and deserted Parks at a quick rate.
In fatal truth, these were associated with a woman, a proud woman, who
hated him, but who by slow and sure degrees had been led on by his
craft, and her pride and resentment, to endure his company, and little
by little to receive him as one who had the privilege to talk to her of
her own defiant disregard of her own husband, and her abandonment of
high consideration for herself. They were associated with a woman who
hated him deeply, and who knew him, and who mistrusted him because she
knew him, and because he knew her; but who fed her fierce resentment by
suffering him to draw nearer and yet nearer to her every day, in spite
of the hate she cherished for him. In spite of it! For that very
reason; since in its depths, too far down for her threatening eye to
pierce, though she could see into them dimly, lay the dark retaliation,
whose faintest shadow seen once and shuddered at, and never seen again,
would have been sufficient stain upon her soul.
Did the phantom of such a woman flit about him on his ride; true to the
reality, and obvious to him?
Yes. He saw her in his mind, exactly as she was. She bore him company
with her pride, resentment, hatred, all as plain to him as her beauty;
with nothing plainer to him than her hatred of him. He saw her
sometimes haughty and repellent at his side, and some times down among
his horse’s feet, fallen and in the dust. But he always saw her as she
was, without disguise, and watched her on the dangerous way that she
was going.
And when his ride was over, and he was newly dressed, and came into the
light of her bright room with his bent head, soft voice, and soothing
smile, he saw her yet as plainly. He even suspected the mystery of the
gloved hand, and held it all the longer in his own for that suspicion.
Upon the dangerous way that she was going, he was, still; and not a
footprint did she mark upon it, but he set his own there, straight.
CHAPTER XLVII.
The Thunderbolt
The barrier between Mr Dombey and his wife was not weakened by time.
Ill-assorted couple, unhappy in themselves and in each other, bound
together by no tie but the manacle that joined their fettered hands,
and straining that so harshly, in their shrinking asunder, that it wore
and chafed to the bone, Time, consoler of affliction and softener of
anger, could do nothing to help them. Their pride, however different in
kind and object, was equal in degree; and, in their flinty opposition,
struck out fire between them which might smoulder or might blaze, as
circumstances were, but burned up everything within their mutual reach,
and made their marriage way a road of ashes.
Let us be just to him. In the monstrous delusion of his life, swelling
with every grain of sand that shifted in its glass, he urged her on, he
little thought to what, or considered how; but still his feeling
towards her, such as it was, remained as at first. She had the grand
demerit of unaccountably putting herself in opposition to the
recognition of his vast importance, and to the acknowledgment of her
complete submission to it, and so far it was necessary to correct and
reduce her; but otherwise he still considered her, in his cold way, a
lady capable of doing honour, if she would, to his choice and name, and
of reflecting credit on his proprietorship.
Now, she, with all her might of passionate and proud resentment, bent
her dark glance from day to day, and hour to hour—from that night in
her own chamber, when she had sat gazing at the shadows on the wall, to
the deeper night fast coming—upon one figure directing a crowd of
humiliations and exasperations against her; and that figure, still her
husband’s.
Was Mr Dombey’s master-vice, that ruled him so inexorably, an unnatural
characteristic? It might be worthwhile, sometimes, to inquire what
Nature is, and how men work to change her, and whether, in the enforced
distortions so produced, it is not natural to be unnatural. Coop any
son or daughter of our mighty mother within narrow range, and bind the
prisoner to one idea, and foster it by servile worship of it on the
part of the few timid or designing people standing round, and what is
Nature to the willing captive who has never risen up upon the wings of
a free mind—drooping and useless soon—to see her in her comprehensive
truth!
Alas! are there so few things in the world, about us, most unnatural,
and yet most natural in being so? Hear the magistrate or judge admonish
the unnatural outcasts of society; unnatural in brutal habits,
unnatural in want of decency, unnatural in losing and confounding all
distinctions between good and evil; unnatural in ignorance, in vice, in
recklessness, in contumacy, in mind, in looks, in everything. But
follow the good clergyman or doctor, who, with his life imperilled at
every breath he draws, goes down into their dens, lying within the
echoes of our carriage wheels and daily tread upon the pavement stones.
Look round upon the world of odious sights—millions of immortal
creatures have no other world on earth—at the lightest mention of which
humanity revolts, and dainty delicacy living in the next street, stops
her ears, and lisps “I don’t believe it!” Breathe the polluted air,
foul with every impurity that is poisonous to health and life; and have
every sense, conferred upon our race for its delight and happiness,
offended, sickened and disgusted, and made a channel by which misery
and death alone can enter. Vainly attempt to think of any simple plant,
or flower, or wholesome weed, that, set in this foetid bed, could have
its natural growth, or put its little leaves off to the sun as GOD
designed it. And then, calling up some ghastly child, with stunted form
and wicked face, hold forth on its unnatural sinfulness, and lament its
being, so early, far away from Heaven—but think a little of its having
been conceived, and born and bred, in Hell!
Those who study the physical sciences, and bring them to bear upon the
health of Man, tell us that if the noxious particles that rise from
vitiated air were palpable to the sight, we should see them lowering in
a dense black cloud above such haunts, and rolling slowly on to corrupt
the better portions of a town. But if the moral pestilence that rises
with them, and in the eternal laws of our Nature, is inseparable from
them, could be made discernible too, how terrible the revelation! Then
should we see depravity, impiety, drunkenness, theft, murder, and a
long train of nameless sins against the natural affections and
repulsions of mankind, overhanging the devoted spots, and creeping on,
to blight the innocent and spread contagion among the pure. Then should
we see how the same poisoned fountains that flow into our hospitals and
lazar-houses, inundate the jails, and make the convict-ships swim deep,
and roll across the seas, and over-run vast continents with crime. Then
should we stand appalled to know, that where we generate disease to
strike our children down and entail itself on unborn generations, there
also we breed, by the same certain process, infancy that knows no
innocence, youth without modesty or shame, maturity that is mature in
nothing but in suffering and guilt, blasted old age that is a scandal
on the form we bear, unnatural humanity! When we shall gather grapes
from thorns, and figs from thistles; when fields of grain shall spring
up from the offal in the bye-ways of our wicked cities, and roses bloom
in the fat churchyards that they cherish; then we may look for natural
humanity, and find it growing from such seed.
Oh for a good spirit who would take the house-tops off, with a more
potent and benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale, and show a
Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes, to
swell the retinue of the Destroying Angel as he moves forth among them!
For only one night’s view of the pale phantoms rising from the scenes
of our too-long neglect; and from the thick and sullen air where Vice
and Fever propagate together, raining the tremendous social
retributions which are ever pouring down, and ever coming thicker!
Bright and blest the morning that should rise on such a night: for men,
delayed no more by stumbling-blocks of their own making, which are but
specks of dust upon the path between them and eternity, would then
apply themselves, like creatures of one common origin, owing one duty
to the Father of one family, and tending to one common end, to make the
world a better place!
Not the less bright and blest would that day be for rousing some who
never have looked out upon the world of human life around them, to a
knowledge of their own relation to it, and for making them acquainted
with a perversion of nature in their own contracted sympathies and
estimates; as great, and yet as natural in its development when once
begun, as the lowest degradation known.
But no such day had ever dawned on Mr Dombey, or his wife; and the
course of each was taken.
Through six months that ensued upon his accident, they held the same
relations one towards the other. A marble rock could not have stood
more obdurately in his way than she; and no chilled spring, lying
uncheered by any ray of light in the depths of a deep cave, could be
more sullen or more cold than he.
The hope that had fluttered within her when the promise of her new home
dawned, was quite gone from the heart of Florence now. That home was
nearly two years old; and even the patient trust that was in her, could
not survive the daily blight of such experience. If she had any
lingering fancy in the nature of hope left, that Edith and her father
might be happier together, in some distant time, she had none, now,
that her father would ever love her. The little interval in which she
had imagined that she saw some small relenting in him, was forgotten in
the long remembrance of his coldness since and before, or only
remembered as a sorrowful delusion.
Florence loved him still, but, by degrees, had come to love him rather
as some dear one who had been, or who might have been, than as the hard
reality before her eyes. Something of the softened sadness with which
she loved the memory of little Paul, or of her mother, seemed to enter
now into her thoughts of him, and to make them, as it were, a dear
remembrance. Whether it was that he was dead to her, and that partly
for this reason, partly for his share in those old objects of her
affection, and partly for the long association of him with hopes that
were withered and tendernesses he had frozen, she could not have told;
but the father whom she loved began to be a vague and dreamy idea to
her: hardly more substantially connected with her real life, than the