Dombey and Son
I wish I was the electric fluency,” muttered the bewildered Grinder.
“I’d have a shock at somebody, that would settle their business.”
“What do you say?” asked the old woman, with a grin.
“I’m wishing my love to you, Misses Brown,” returned the false Rob,
seeking consolation in the glass. “Where did they go to first was it?
Him and her, do you mean?”
“Ah!” said the old woman, eagerly. “Them two.”
“Why, they didn’t go nowhere—not together, I mean,” answered Rob.
The old woman looked at him, as though she had a strong impulse upon
her to make another clutch at his head and throat, but was restrained
by a certain dogged mystery in his face.
“That was the art of it,” said the reluctant Grinder; “that’s the way
nobody saw ’em go, or has been able to say how they did go. They went
different ways, I tell you Misses Brown.”
“Ay, ay, ay! To meet at an appointed place,” chuckled the old woman,
after a moment’s silent and keen scrutiny of his face.
“Why, if they weren’t a going to meet somewhere, I suppose they might
as well have stayed at home, mightn’t they, Brown?” returned the
unwilling Grinder.
“Well, Rob? Well?” said the old woman, drawing his arm yet tighter
through her own, as if, in her eagerness, she were afraid of his
slipping away.
“What, haven’t we talked enough yet, Misses Brown?” returned the
Grinder, who, between his sense of injury, his sense of liquor, and his
sense of being on the rack, had become so lachrymose, that at almost
every answer he scooped his coats into one or other of his eyes, and
uttered an unavailing whine of remonstrance. “Did she laugh that night,
was it? Didn’t you ask if she laughed, Misses Brown?”
“Or cried?” added the old woman, nodding assent.
“Neither,” said the Grinder. “She kept as steady when she and me—oh, I
see you will have it out of me, Misses Brown! But take your solemn oath
now, that you’ll never tell anybody.”
This Mrs Brown very readily did: being naturally Jesuitical; and having
no other intention in the matter than that her concealed visitor should
hear for himself.
“She kept as steady, then, when she and me went down to Southampton,”
said the Grinder, “as a image. In the morning she was just the same,
Misses Brown. And when she went away in the packet before daylight, by
herself—me pretending to be her servant, and seeing her safe aboard—she
was just the same. Now, are you contented, Misses Brown?”
“No, Rob. Not yet,” answered Mrs Brown, decisively.
“Oh, here’s a woman for you!” cried the unfortunate Rob, in an outburst
of feeble lamentation over his own helplessness. “What did you wish to
know next, Misses Brown?”
“What became of Master? Where did he go?” she inquired, still holding
him tight, and looking close into his face, with her sharp eyes.
“Upon my soul, I don’t know, Misses Brown,” answered Rob. “Upon my soul
I don’t know what he did, nor where he went, nor anything about him I
only know what he said to me as a caution to hold my tongue, when we
parted; and I tell you this, Misses Brown, as a friend, that sooner
than ever repeat a word of what we’re saying now, you had better take
and shoot yourself, or shut yourself up in this house, and set it
a-fire, for there’s nothing he wouldn’t do, to be revenged upon you.
You don’t know him half as well as I do, Misses Brown. You’re never
safe from him, I tell you.”
“Haven’t I taken an oath,” retorted the old woman, “and won’t I keep
it?”
“Well, I’m sure I hope you will, Misses Brown,” returned Rob, somewhat
doubtfully, and not without a latent threatening in his manner. “For
your own sake, quite as much as mine.”
He looked at her as he gave her this friendly caution, and emphasized
it with a nodding of his head; but finding it uncomfortable to
encounter the yellow face with its grotesque action, and the ferret
eyes with their keen old wintry gaze, so close to his own, he looked
down uneasily and sat skulking in his chair, as if he were trying to
bring himself to a sullen declaration that he would answer no more
questions. The old woman, still holding him as before, took this
opportunity of raising the forefinger of her right hand, in the air, as
a stealthy signal to the concealed observer to give particular
attention to what was about to follow.
“Rob,” she said, in her most coaxing tone.
“Good gracious, Misses Brown, what’s the matter now?” returned the
exasperated Grinder.
“Rob! where did the lady and Master appoint to meet?”
Rob shuffled more and more, and looked up and looked down, and bit his
thumb, and dried it on his waistcoat, and finally said, eyeing his
tormentor askance, “How should I know, Misses Brown?”
The old woman held up her finger again, as before, and replying, “Come,
lad! It’s no use leading me to that, and there leaving me. I want to
know” waited for his answer. Rob, after a discomfited pause, suddenly
broke out with, “How can I pronounce the names of foreign places, Mrs
Brown? What an unreasonable woman you are!”
“But you have heard it said, Robby,” she retorted firmly, “and you know
what it sounded like. Come!”
“I never heard it said, Misses Brown,” returned the Grinder.
“Then,” retorted the old woman quickly, “you have seen it written, and
you can spell it.”
Rob, with a petulant exclamation between laughing and crying—for he was
penetrated with some admiration of Mrs Brown’s cunning, even through
this persecution—after some reluctant fumbling in his waistcoat pocket,
produced from it a little piece of chalk. The old woman’s eyes sparkled
when she saw it between his thumb and finger, and hastily clearing a
space on the deal table, that he might write the word there, she once
more made her signal with a shaking hand.
“Now I tell you beforehand what it is, Misses Brown,” said Rob, “it’s
no use asking me anything else. I won’t answer anything else; I can’t.
How long it was to be before they met, or whose plan it was that they
was to go away alone, I don’t know no more than you do. I don’t know
any more about it. If I was to tell you how I found out this word,
you’d believe that. Shall I tell you, Misses Brown?”
“Yes, Rob.”
“Well then, Misses Brown. The way—now you won’t ask any more, you
know?” said Rob, turning his eyes, which were now fast getting drowsy
and stupid, upon her.
“Not another word,” said Mrs Brown.
“Well then, the way was this. When a certain person left the lady with
me, he put a piece of paper with a direction written on it in the
lady’s hand, saying it was in case she should forget. She wasn’t afraid
of forgetting, for she tore it up as soon as his back was turned, and
when I put up the carriage steps, I shook out one of the pieces—she
sprinkled the rest out of the window, I suppose, for there was none
there afterwards, though I looked for ’em. There was only one word on
it, and that was this, if you must and will know. But remember! You’re
upon your oath, Misses Brown!”
Mrs Brown knew that, she said. Rob, having nothing more to say, began
to chalk, slowly and laboriously, on the table.
“‘D,’” the old woman read aloud, when he had formed the letter.
“Will you hold your tongue, Misses Brown?” he exclaimed, covering it
with his hand, and turning impatiently upon her. “I won’t have it read
out. Be quiet, will you!”
“Then write large, Rob,” she returned, repeating her secret signal;
“for my eyes are not good, even at print.”
Muttering to himself, and returning to his work with an ill will, Rob
went on with the word. As he bent his head down, the person for whose
information he so unconsciously laboured, moved from the door behind
him to within a short stride of his shoulder, and looked eagerly
towards the creeping track of his hand upon the table. At the same
time, Alice, from her opposite chair, watched it narrowly as it shaped
the letters, and repeated each one on her lips as he made it, without
articulating it aloud. At the end of every letter her eyes and Mr
Dombey’s met, as if each of them sought to be confirmed by the other;
and thus they both spelt D.I.J.O.N.
“There!” said the Grinder, moistening the palm of his hand hastily, to
obliterate the word; and not content with smearing it out, rubbing and
planing all trace of it away with his coat-sleeve, until the very
colour of the chalk was gone from the table. “Now, I hope you’re
contented, Misses Brown!”
The old woman, in token of her being so, released his arm and patted
his back; and the Grinder, overcome with mortification,
cross-examination, and liquor, folded his arms on the table, laid his
head upon them, and fell asleep.
Not until he had been heavily asleep some time, and was snoring
roundly, did the old woman turn towards the door where Mr Dombey stood
concealed, and beckon him to come through the room, and pass out. Even
then, she hovered over Rob, ready to blind him with her hands, or
strike his head down, if he should raise it while the secret step was
crossing to the door. But though her glance took sharp cognizance of
the sleeper, it was sharp too for the waking man; and when he touched
her hand with his, and in spite of all his caution, made a chinking,
golden sound, it was as bright and greedy as a raven’s.
The daughter’s dark gaze followed him to the door, and noted well how
pale he was, and how his hurried tread indicated that the least delay
was an insupportable restraint upon him, and how he was burning to be
active and away. As he closed the door behind him, she looked round at
her mother. The old woman trotted to her; opened her hand to show what
was within; and, tightly closing it again in her jealousy and avarice,
whispered:
“What will he do, Ally?”
“Mischief,” said the daughter.
“Murder?” asked the old woman.
“He’s a madman, in his wounded pride, and may do that, for anything we
can say, or he either.”
Her glance was brighter than her mother’s, and the fire that shone in
it was fiercer; but her face was colourless, even to her lips.
They said no more, but sat apart; the mother communing with her money;
the daughter with her thoughts; the glance of each, shining in the
gloom of the feebly lighted room. Rob slept and snored. The disregarded
parrot only was in action. It twisted and pulled at the wires of its
cage, with its crooked beak, and crawled up to the dome, and along its
roof like a fly, and down again head foremost, and shook, and bit, and
rattled at every slender bar, as if it knew its master’s danger, and
was wild to force a passage out, and fly away to warn him of it.
CHAPTER LIII.
More Intelligence
There were two of the traitor’s own blood—his renounced brother and
sister—on whom the weight of his guilt rested almost more heavily, at
this time, than on the man whom he had so deeply injured. Prying and
tormenting as the world was, it did Mr Dombey the service of nerving
him to pursuit and revenge. It roused his passion, stung his pride,
twisted the one idea of his life into a new shape, and made some
gratification of his wrath, the object into which his whole
intellectual existence resolved itself. All the stubbornness and
implacability of his nature, all its hard impenetrable quality, all its
gloom and moroseness, all its exaggerated sense of personal importance,
all its jealous disposition to resent the least flaw in the ample
recognition of his importance by others, set this way like many streams
united into one, and bore him on upon their tide. The most impetuously
passionate and violently impulsive of mankind would have been a milder
enemy to encounter than the sullen Mr Dombey wrought to this. A wild
beast would have been easier turned or soothed than the grave gentleman
without a wrinkle in his starched cravat.
But the very intensity of his purpose became almost a substitute for