Dombey and Son
unquestionable, that it would have been cruel to refuse him. Florence,
with an instinctive delicacy, forbore to urge the least obstacle,
though she did not forbear to overpower him with thanks; and Mr Toots
proudly took the commission upon himself for immediate execution.
“Miss Dombey,” said Mr Toots, touching her proffered hand, with a pang
of hopeless love visibly shooting through him, and flashing out in his
face, “Good-bye! Allow me to take the liberty of saying, that your
misfortunes make me perfectly wretched, and that you may trust me, next
to Captain Gills himself. I am quite aware, Miss Dombey, of my own
deficiencies—they’re not of the least consequence, thank you—but I am
entirely to be relied upon, I do assure you, Miss Dombey.”
With that Mr Toots came out of the room, again accompanied by the
Captain, who, standing at a little distance, holding his hat under his
arm and arranging his scattered locks with his hook, had been a not
uninterested witness of what passed. And when the door closed behind
them, the light of Mr Toots’s life was darkly clouded again.
“Captain Gills,” said that gentleman, stopping near the bottom of the
stairs, and turning round, “to tell you the truth, I am not in a frame
of mind at the present moment, in which I could see Lieutenant Walters
with that entirely friendly feeling towards him that I should wish to
harbour in my breast. We cannot always command our feelings, Captain
Gills, and I should take it as a particular favour if you’d let me out
at the private door.”
“Brother,” returned the Captain, “you shall shape your own course.
Wotever course you take, is plain and seamanlike, I’m wery sure.”
“Captain Gills,” said Mr Toots, “you’re extremely kind. Your good
opinion is a consolation to me. There is one thing,” said Mr Toots,
standing in the passage, behind the half-opened door, “that I hope
you’ll bear in mind, Captain Gills, and that I should wish Lieutenant
Walters to be made acquainted with. I have quite come into my property
now, you know, and—and I don’t know what to do with it. If I could be
at all useful in a pecuniary point of view, I should glide into the
silent tomb with ease and smoothness.”
Mr Toots said no more, but slipped out quietly and shut the door upon
himself, to cut the Captain off from any reply.
Florence thought of this good creature, long after he had left her,
with mingled emotions of pain and pleasure. He was so honest and
warm-hearted, that to see him again and be assured of his truth to her
in her distress, was a joy and comfort beyond all price; but for that
very reason, it was so affecting to think that she caused him a
moment’s unhappiness, or ruffled, by a breath, the harmless current of
his life, that her eyes filled with tears, and her bosom overflowed
with pity. Captain Cuttle, in his different way, thought much of Mr
Toots too; and so did Walter; and when the evening came, and they were
all sitting together in Florence’s new room, Walter praised him in a
most impassioned manner, and told Florence what he had said on leaving
the house, with every graceful setting-off in the way of comment and
appreciation that his own honesty and sympathy could surround it with.
Mr Toots did not return upon the next day, or the next, or for several
days; and in the meanwhile Florence, without any new alarm, lived like
a quiet bird in a cage, at the top of the old Instrument-maker’s house.
But Florence drooped and hung her head more and more plainly, as the
days went on; and the expression that had been seen in the face of the
dead child, was often turned to the sky from her high window, as if it
sought his angel out, on the bright shore of which he had spoken: lying
on his little bed.
Florence had been weak and delicate of late, and the agitation she had
undergone was not without its influences on her health. But it was no
bodily illness that affected her now. She was distressed in mind; and
the cause of her distress was Walter.
Interested in her, anxious for her, proud and glad to serve her, and
showing all this with the enthusiasm and ardour of his character,
Florence saw that he avoided her. All the long day through, he seldom
approached her room. If she asked for him, he came, again for the
moment as earnest and as bright as she remembered him when she was a
lost child in the staring streets; but he soon became constrained—her
quick affection was too watchful not to know it—and uneasy, and soon
left her. Unsought, he never came, all day, between the morning and the
night. When the evening closed in, he was always there, and that was
her happiest time, for then she half believed that the old Walter of
her childhood was not changed. But, even then, some trivial word, look,
or circumstance would show her that there was an indefinable division
between them which could not be passed.
And she could not but see that these revealings of a great alteration
in Walter manifested themselves in despite of his utmost efforts to
hide them. In his consideration for her, she thought, and in the
earnestness of his desire to spare her any wound from his kind hand, he
resorted to innumerable little artifices and disguises. So much the
more did Florence feel the greatness of the alteration in him; so much
the oftener did she weep at this estrangement of her brother.
The good Captain—her untiring, tender, ever zealous friend—saw it, too,
Florence thought, and it pained him. He was less cheerful and hopeful
than he had been at first, and would steal looks at her and Walter, by
turns, when they were all three together of an evening, with quite a
sad face.
Florence resolved, at last, to speak to Walter. She believed she knew
now what the cause of his estrangement was, and she thought it would be
a relief to her full heart, and would set him more at ease, if she told
him she had found it out, and quite submitted to it, and did not
reproach him.
It was on a certain Sunday afternoon, that Florence took this
resolution. The faithful Captain, in an amazing shirt-collar, was
sitting by her, reading with his spectacles on, and she asked him where
Walter was.
“I think he’s down below, my lady lass,” returned the Captain.
“I should like to speak to him,” said Florence, rising hurriedly as if
to go downstairs.
“I’ll rouse him up here, Beauty,” said the Captain, “in a trice.”
Thereupon the Captain, with much alacrity, shouldered his book—for he
made it a point of duty to read none but very large books on a Sunday,
as having a more staid appearance: and had bargained, years ago, for a
prodigious volume at a book-stall, five lines of which utterly
confounded him at any time, insomuch that he had not yet ascertained of
what subject it treated—and withdrew. Walter soon appeared.
“Captain Cuttle tells me, Miss Dombey,” he eagerly began on coming
in—but stopped when he saw her face.
“You are not so well today. You look distressed. You have been
weeping.”
He spoke so kindly, and with such a fervent tremor in his voice, that
the tears gushed into her eyes at the sound of his words.
“Walter,” said Florence, gently, “I am not quite well, and I have been
weeping. I want to speak to you.”
He sat down opposite to her, looking at her beautiful and innocent
face; and his own turned pale, and his lips trembled.
“You said, upon the night when I knew that you were saved—and oh! dear
Walter, what I felt that night, and what I hoped!—”
He put his trembling hand upon the table between them, and sat looking
at her.
“—that I was changed. I was surprised to hear you say so, but I
understand, now, that I am. Don’t be angry with me, Walter. I was too
much overjoyed to think of it, then.”
She seemed a child to him again. It was the ingenuous, confiding,
loving child he saw and heard. Not the dear woman, at whose feet he
would have laid the riches of the earth.
“You remember the last time I saw you, Walter, before you went away?”
He put his hand into his breast, and took out a little purse.
“I have always worn it round my neck! If I had gone down in the deep,
it would have been with me at the bottom of the sea.”
“And you will wear it still, Walter, for my old sake?”
“Until I die!”
She laid her hand on his, as fearlessly and simply, as if not a day had
intervened since she gave him the little token of remembrance.
“I am glad of that. I shall be always glad to think so, Walter. Do you
recollect that a thought of this change seemed to come into our minds
at the same time that evening, when we were talking together?”
“No!” he answered, in a wondering tone.
“Yes, Walter. I had been the means of injuring your hopes and prospects
even then. I feared to think so, then, but I know it now. If you were
able, then, in your generosity, to hide from me that you knew it too,
you cannot do so now, although you try as generously as before. You do.
I thank you for it, Walter, deeply, truly; but you cannot succeed. You
have suffered too much in your own hardships, and in those of your
dearest relation, quite to overlook the innocent cause of all the peril
and affliction that has befallen you. You cannot quite forget me in
that character, and we can be brother and sister no longer. But, dear
Walter, do not think that I complain of you in this. I might have known
it—ought to have known it—but forgot it in my joy. All I hope is that
you may think of me less irksomely when this feeling is no more a
secret one; and all I ask is, Walter, in the name of the poor child who
was your sister once, that you will not struggle with yourself, and
pain yourself, for my sake, now that I know all!”
Walter had looked upon her while she said this, with a face so full of
wonder and amazement, that it had room for nothing else. Now he caught
up the hand that touched his, so entreatingly, and held it between his
own.
“Oh, Miss Dombey,” he said, “is it possible that while I have been
suffering so much, in striving with my sense of what is due to you, and
must be rendered to you, I have made you suffer what your words
disclose to me? Never, never, before Heaven, have I thought of you but
as the single, bright, pure, blessed recollection of my boyhood and my
youth. Never have I from the first, and never shall I to the last,
regard your part in my life, but as something sacred, never to be
lightly thought of, never to be esteemed enough, never, until death, to
be forgotten. Again to see you look, and hear you speak, as you did on
that night when we parted, is happiness to me that there are no words
to utter; and to be loved and trusted as your brother, is the next gift
I could receive and prize!”
“Walter,” said Florence, looking at him earnestly, but with a changing
face, “what is that which is due to me, and must be rendered to me, at
the sacrifice of all this?”
“Respect,” said Walter, in a low tone. “Reverence.”
The colour dawned in her face, and she timidly and thoughtfully
withdrew her hand; still looking at him with unabated earnestness.
“I have not a brother’s right,” said Walter. “I have not a brother’s
claim. I left a child. I find a woman.”
The colour overspread her face. She made a gesture as if of entreaty
that he would say no more, and her face dropped upon her hands.
They were both silent for a time; she weeping.
“I owe it to a heart so trusting, pure, and good,” said Walter, “even
to tear myself from it, though I rend my own. How dare I say it is my
sister’s!”
She was weeping still.
“If you had been happy; surrounded as you should be by loving and
admiring friends, and by all that makes the station you were born to
enviable,” said Walter; “and if you had called me brother, then, in
your affectionate remembrance of the past, I could have answered to the
name from my distant place, with no inward assurance that I wronged