Dombey and Son
that if Mr Dombey don’t know, Mrs Dombey does. This brings them to the
latter, of whom Cook says, She had a stately way though, hadn’t she?
But she was too high! They all agree that she was too high, and Mr
Towlinson’s old flame, the housemaid (who is very virtuous), entreats
that you will never talk to her any more about people who hold their
heads up, as if the ground wasn’t good enough for ’em.
Everything that is said and done about it, except by Mr Dombey, is done
in chorus. Mr Dombey and the world are alone together.
CHAPTER LII.
Secret Intelligence
Good Mrs Brown and her daughter Alice kept silent company together, in
their own dwelling. It was early in the evening, and late in the
spring. But a few days had elapsed since Mr Dombey had told Major
Bagstock of his singular intelligence, singularly obtained, which might
turn out to be valueless, and might turn out to be true; and the world
was not satisfied yet.
The mother and daughter sat for a long time without interchanging a
word: almost without motion. The old woman’s face was shrewdly anxious
and expectant; that of her daughter was expectant too, but in a less
sharp degree, and sometimes it darkened, as if with gathering
disappointment and incredulity. The old woman, without heeding these
changes in its expression, though her eyes were often turned towards
it, sat mumbling and munching, and listening confidently.
Their abode, though poor and miserable, was not so utterly wretched as
in the days when only Good Mrs Brown inhabited it. Some few attempts at
cleanliness and order were manifest, though made in a reckless, gipsy
way, that might have connected them, at a glance, with the younger
woman. The shades of evening thickened and deepened as the two kept
silence, until the blackened walls were nearly lost in the prevailing
gloom.
Then Alice broke the silence which had lasted so long, and said:
“You may give him up, mother. He’ll not come here.”
“Death give him up!” returned the old woman, impatiently. “He will come
here.”
“We shall see,” said Alice.
“We shall see him,” returned her mother.
“And doomsday,” said the daughter.
“You think I’m in my second childhood, I know!” croaked the old woman.
“That’s the respect and duty that I get from my own gal, but I’m wiser
than you take me for. He’ll come. T’other day when I touched his coat
in the street, he looked round as if I was a toad. But Lord, to see him
when I said their names, and asked him if he’d like to find out where
they was!”
“Was it so angry?” asked her daughter, roused to interest in a moment.
“Angry? ask if it was bloody. That’s more like the word. Angry? Ha, ha!
To call that only angry!” said the old woman, hobbling to the cupboard,
and lighting a candle, which displayed the workings of her mouth to
ugly advantage, as she brought it to the table. “I might as well call
your face only angry, when you think or talk about ’em.”
It was something different from that, truly, as she sat as still as a
crouched tigress, with her kindling eyes.
“Hark!” said the old woman, triumphantly. “I hear a step coming. It’s
not the tread of anyone that lives about here, or comes this way often.
We don’t walk like that. We should grow proud on such neighbours! Do
you hear him?”
“I believe you are right, mother,” replied Alice, in a low voice.
“Peace! open the door.”
As she drew herself within her shawl, and gathered it about her, the
old woman complied; and peering out, and beckoning, gave admission to
Mr Dombey, who stopped when he had set his foot within the door, and
looked distrustfully around.
“It’s a poor place for a great gentleman like your worship,” said the
old woman, curtseying and chattering. “I told you so, but there’s no
harm in it.”
“Who is that?” asked Mr Dombey, looking at her companion.
“That’s my handsome daughter,” said the old woman. “Your worship won’t
mind her. She knows all about it.”
A shadow fell upon his face not less expressive than if he had groaned
aloud, “Who does not know all about it!” but he looked at her steadily,
and she, without any acknowledgment of his presence, looked at him. The
shadow on his face was darker when he turned his glance away from her;
and even then it wandered back again, furtively, as if he were haunted
by her bold eyes, and some remembrance they inspired.
“Woman,” said Mr Dombey to the old witch who was chuckling and leering
close at his elbow, and who, when he turned to address her, pointed
stealthily at her daughter, and rubbed her hands, and pointed again,
“Woman! I believe that I am weak and forgetful of my station in coming
here, but you know why I come, and what you offered when you stopped me
in the street the other day. What is it that you have to tell me
concerning what I want to know; and how does it happen that I can find
voluntary intelligence in a hovel like this,” with a disdainful glance
about him, “when I have exerted my power and means to obtain it in
vain? I do not think,” he said, after a moment’s pause, during which he
had observed her, sternly, “that you are so audacious as to mean to
trifle with me, or endeavour to impose upon me. But if you have that
purpose, you had better stop on the threshold of your scheme. My humour
is not a trifling one, and my acknowledgment will be severe.”
“Oh a proud, hard gentleman!” chuckled the old woman, shaking her head,
and rubbing her shrivelled hands, “oh hard, hard, hard! But your
worship shall see with your own eyes and hear with your own ears; not
with ours—and if your worship’s put upon their track, you won’t mind
paying something for it, will you, honourable deary?”
“Money,” returned Mr Dombey, apparently relieved, and assured by this
inquiry, “will bring about unlikely things, I know. It may turn even
means as unexpected and unpromising as these, to account. Yes. For any
reliable information I receive, I will pay. But I must have the
information first, and judge for myself of its value.”
“Do you know nothing more powerful than money?” asked the younger
woman, without rising, or altering her attitude.
“Not here, I should imagine,” said Mr Dombey.
“You should know of something that is more powerful elsewhere, as I
judge,” she returned. “Do you know nothing of a woman’s anger?”
“You have a saucy tongue, Jade,” said Mr Dombey.
“Not usually,” she answered, without any show of emotion: “I speak to
you now, that you may understand us better, and rely more on us. A
woman’s anger is pretty much the same here, as in your fine house. I am
angry. I have been so, many years. I have as good cause for my anger as
you have for yours, and its object is the same man.”
He started, in spite of himself, and looked at her with astonishment.
“Yes,” she said, with a kind of laugh. “Wide as the distance may seem
between us, it is so. How it is so, is no matter; that is my story, and
I keep my story to myself. I would bring you and him together, because
I have a rage against him. My mother there, is avaricious and poor; and
she would sell any tidings she could glean, or anything, or anybody,
for money. It is fair enough, perhaps, that you should pay her some, if
she can help you to what you want to know. But that is not my motive. I
have told you what mine is, and it would be as strong and
all-sufficient with me if you haggled and bargained with her for a
sixpence. I have done. My saucy tongue says no more, if you wait here
till sunrise tomorrow.”
The old woman, who had shown great uneasiness during this speech, which
had a tendency to depreciate her expected gains, pulled Mr Dombey
softly by the sleeve, and whispered to him not to mind her. He glared
at them both, by turns, with a haggard look, and said, in a deeper
voice than was usual with him:
“Go on—what do you know?”
“Oh, not so fast, your worship! we must wait for someone,” answered the
old woman. “It’s to be got from someone else—wormed out—screwed and
twisted from him.”
“What do you mean?” said Mr Dombey.
“Patience,” she croaked, laying her hand, like a claw, upon his arm.
“Patience. I’ll get at it. I know I can! If he was to hold it back from
me,” said Good Mrs Brown, crooking her ten fingers, “I’d tear it out of
him!”
Mr Dombey followed her with his eyes as she hobbled to the door, and
looked out again: and then his glance sought her daughter; but she
remained impassive, silent, and regardless of him.
“Do you tell me, woman,” he said, when the bent figure of Mrs Brown
came back, shaking its head and chattering to itself, “that there is
another person expected here?”
“Yes!” said the old woman, looking up into his face, and nodding.
“From whom you are to exact the intelligence that is to be useful to
me?”
“Yes,” said the old woman, nodding again.
“A stranger?”
“Chut!” said the old woman, with a shrill laugh. “What signifies! Well,
well; no. No stranger to your worship. But he won’t see you. He’d be
afraid of you, and wouldn’t talk. You’ll stand behind that door, and
judge him for yourself. We don’t ask to be believed on trust What! Your
worship doubts the room behind the door? Oh the suspicion of you rich
gentlefolks! Look at it, then.”
Her sharp eye had detected an involuntary expression of this feeling on
his part, which was not unreasonable under the circumstances. In
satisfaction of it she now took the candle to the door she spoke of. Mr
Dombey looked in; assured himself that it was an empty, crazy room; and
signed to her to put the light back in its place.
“How long,” he asked, “before this person comes?”
“Not long,” she answered. “Would your worship sit down for a few odd
minutes?”
He made no answer; but began pacing the room with an irresolute air, as
if he were undecided whether to remain or depart, and as if he had some
quarrel with himself for being there at all. But soon his tread grew
slower and heavier, and his face more sternly thoughtful; as the object
with which he had come, fixed itself in his mind, and dilated there
again.
While he thus walked up and down with his eyes on the ground, Mrs
Brown, in the chair from which she had risen to receive him, sat
listening anew. The monotony of his step, or the uncertainty of age,
made her so slow of hearing, that a footfall without had sounded in her
daughter’s ears for some moments, and she had looked up hastily to warn
her mother of its approach, before the old woman was roused by it. But
then she started from her seat, and whispering “Here he is!” hurried
her visitor to his place of observation, and put a bottle and glass
upon the table, with such alacrity, as to be ready to fling her arms
round the neck of Rob the Grinder on his appearance at the door.
“And here’s my bonny boy,” cried Mrs Brown, “at last!—oho, oho! You’re
like my own son, Robby!”
“Oh! Misses Brown!” remonstrated the Grinder. “Don’t! Can’t you be fond
of a cove without squeedging and throttling of him? Take care of the
birdcage in my hand, will you?”
“Thinks of a birdcage, afore me!” cried the old woman, apostrophizing
the ceiling. “Me that feels more than a mother for him!”
“Well, I’m sure I’m very much obliged to you, Misses Brown,” said the
unfortunate youth, greatly aggravated; “but you’re so jealous of a
cove. I’m very fond of you myself, and all that, of course; but I don’t
smother you, do I, Misses Brown?”
He looked and spoke as if he would have been far from objecting to do
so, however, on a favourable occasion.
“And to talk about birdcages, too!” whimpered the Grinder. “As if that
was a crime! Why, look’ee here! Do you know who this belongs to?”
“To Master, dear?” said the old woman with a grin.
“Ah!” replied the Grinder, lifting a large cage tied up in a wrapper,
on the table, and untying it with his teeth and hands. “It’s our
parrot, this is.”