Dombey and Son
It was quite late at night, and the brother was reading aloud while the
sister plied her needle, when they were interrupted by a knocking at
the door. In the atmosphere of vague anxiety and dread that lowered
about them in connexion with their fugitive brother, this sound,
unusual there, became almost alarming. The brother going to the door,
the sister sat and listened timidly. Someone spoke to him, and he
replied and seemed surprised; and after a few words, the two approached
together.
“Harriet,” said her brother, lighting in their late visitor, and
speaking in a low voice, “Mr Morfin—the gentleman so long in Dombey’s
House with James.”
His sister started back, as if a ghost had entered. In the doorway
stood the unknown friend, with the dark hair sprinkled with grey, the
ruddy face, the broad clear brow, and hazel eyes, whose secret she had
kept so long!
“John!” she said, half-breathless. “It is the gentleman I told you of,
today!”
“The gentleman, Miss Harriet,” said the visitor, coming in—for he had
stopped a moment in the doorway—“is greatly relieved to hear you say
that: he has been devising ways and means, all the way here, of
explaining himself, and has been satisfied with none. Mr John, I am not
quite a stranger here. You were stricken with astonishment when you saw
me at your door just now. I observe you are more astonished at present.
Well! That’s reasonable enough under existing circumstances. If we were
not such creatures of habit as we are, we shouldn’t have reason to be
astonished half so often.”
By this time, he had greeted Harriet with that able mingling of
cordiality and respect which she recollected so well, and had sat down
near her, pulled off his gloves, and thrown them into his hat upon the
table.
“There’s nothing astonishing,” he said, “in my having conceived a
desire to see your sister, Mr John, or in my having gratified it in my
own way. As to the regularity of my visits since (which she may have
mentioned to you), there is nothing extraordinary in that. They soon
grew into a habit; and we are creatures of habit—creatures of habit!”
Putting his hands into his pockets, and leaning back in his chair, he
looked at the brother and sister as if it were interesting to him to
see them together; and went on to say, with a kind of irritable
thoughtfulness: “It’s this same habit that confirms some of us, who are
capable of better things, in Lucifer’s own pride and stubbornness—that
confirms and deepens others of us in villainy—more of us in
indifference —that hardens us from day to day, according to the temper
of our clay, like images, and leaves us as susceptible as images to new
impressions and convictions. You shall judge of its influence on me,
John. For more years than I need name, I had my small, and exactly
defined share, in the management of Dombey’s House, and saw your
brother (who has proved himself a scoundrel! Your sister will forgive
my being obliged to mention it) extending and extending his influence,
until the business and its owner were his football; and saw you toiling
at your obscure desk every day; and was quite content to be as little
troubled as I might be, out of my own strip of duty, and to let
everything about me go on, day by day, unquestioned, like a great
machine—that was its habit and mine—and to take it all for granted, and
consider it all right. My Wednesday nights came regularly round, our
quartette parties came regularly off, my violoncello was in good tune,
and there was nothing wrong in my world—or if anything not much—or
little or much, it was no affair of mine.”
“I can answer for your being more respected and beloved during all that
time than anybody in the House, Sir,” said John Carker.
“Pooh! Good-natured and easy enough, I daresay,” returned the other, “a
habit I had. It suited the Manager; it suited the man he managed: it
suited me best of all. I did what was allotted to me to do, made no
court to either of them, and was glad to occupy a station in which none
was required. So I should have gone on till now, but that my room had a
thin wall. You can tell your sister that it was divided from the
Manager’s room by a wainscot partition.”
“They were adjoining rooms; had been one, Perhaps, originally; and were
separated, as Mr Morfin says,” said her brother, looking back to him
for the resumption of his explanation.
“I have whistled, hummed tunes, gone accurately through the whole of
Beethoven’s Sonata in B, to let him know that I was within hearing,”
said Mr Morfin; “but he never heeded me. It happened seldom enough that
I was within hearing of anything of a private nature, certainly. But
when I was, and couldn’t otherwise avoid knowing something of it, I
walked out. I walked out once, John, during a conversation between two
brothers, to which, in the beginning, young Walter Gay was a party. But
I overheard some of it before I left the room. You remember it
sufficiently, perhaps, to tell your sister what its nature was?”
“It referred, Harriet,” said her brother in a low voice, “to the past,
and to our relative positions in the House.”
“Its matter was not new to me, but was presented in a new aspect. It
shook me in my habit—the habit of nine-tenths of the world—of believing
that all was right about me, because I was used to it,” said their
visitor; “and induced me to recall the history of the two brothers, and
to ponder on it. I think it was almost the first time in my life when I
fell into this train of reflection—how will many things that are
familiar, and quite matters of course to us now, look, when we come to
see them from that new and distant point of view which we must all take
up, one day or other? I was something less good-natured, as the phrase
goes, after that morning, less easy and complacent altogether.”
He sat for a minute or so, drumming with one hand on the table; and
resumed in a hurry, as if he were anxious to get rid of his confession.
“Before I knew what to do, or whether I could do anything, there was a
second conversation between the same two brothers, in which their
sister was mentioned. I had no scruples of conscience in suffering all
the waifs and strays of that conversation to float to me as freely as
they would. I considered them mine by right. After that, I came here to
see the sister for myself. The first time I stopped at the garden gate,
I made a pretext of inquiring into the character of a poor neighbour;
but I wandered out of that tract, and I think Miss Harriet mistrusted
me. The second time I asked leave to come in; came in; and said what I
wished to say. Your sister showed me reasons which I dared not dispute,
for receiving no assistance from me then; but I established a means of
communication between us, which remained unbroken until within these
few days, when I was prevented, by important matters that have lately
devolved upon me, from maintaining them.”
“How little I have suspected this,” said John Carker, “when I have seen
you every day, Sir! If Harriet could have guessed your name—”
“Why, to tell you the truth, John,” interposed the visitor, “I kept it
to myself for two reasons. I don’t know that the first might have been
binding alone; but one has no business to take credit for good
intentions, and I made up my mind, at all events, not to disclose
myself until I should be able to do you some real service or other. My
second reason was, that I always hoped there might be some lingering
possibility of your brother’s relenting towards you both; and in that
case, I felt that where there was the chance of a man of his
suspicious, watchful character, discovering that you had been secretly
befriended by me, there was the chance of a new and fatal cause of
division. I resolved, to be sure, at the risk of turning his
displeasure against myself—which would have been no matter—to watch my
opportunity of serving you with the head of the House; but the
distractions of death, courtship, marriage, and domestic unhappiness,
have left us no head but your brother for this long, long time. And it
would have been better for us,” said the visitor, dropping his voice,
“to have been a lifeless trunk.”
He seemed conscious that these latter words had escaped him against his
will, and stretching out a hand to the brother, and a hand to the
sister, continued:
“All I could desire to say, and more, I have now said. All I mean goes
beyond words, as I hope you understand and believe. The time has come,
John—though most unfortunately and unhappily come—when I may help you
without interfering with that redeeming struggle, which has lasted
through so many years; since you were discharged from it today by no
act of your own. It is late; I need say no more tonight. You will
guard the treasure you have here, without advice or reminder from me.”
With these words he rose to go.
“But go you first, John,” he said goodhumouredly, “with a light,
without saying what you want to say, whatever that may be;” John
Carker’s heart was full, and he would have relieved it in speech, if he
could; “and let me have a word with your sister. We have talked alone
before, and in this room too; though it looks more natural with you
here.”
Following him out with his eyes, he turned kindly to Harriet, and said
in a lower voice, and with an altered and graver manner:
“You wish to ask me something of the man whose sister it is your
misfortune to be.”
“I dread to ask,” said Harriet.
“You have looked so earnestly at me more than once,” rejoined the
visitor, “that I think I can divine your question. Has he taken money?
Is it that?”
“Yes.”
“He has not.”
“I thank Heaven!” said Harriet. “For the sake of John.”
“That he has abused his trust in many ways,” said Mr Morfin; “that he
has oftener dealt and speculated to advantage for himself, than for the
House he represented; that he has led the House on, to prodigious
ventures, often resulting in enormous losses; that he has always
pampered the vanity and ambition of his employer, when it was his duty
to have held them in check, and shown, as it was in his power to do, to
what they tended here or there; will not, perhaps, surprise you now.
Undertakings have been entered on, to swell the reputation of the House
for vast resources, and to exhibit it in magnificent contrast to other
merchants’ Houses, of which it requires a steady head to contemplate
the possibly—a few disastrous changes of affairs might render them the
probably—ruinous consequences. In the midst of the many transactions of
the House, in most parts of the world: a great labyrinth of which only
he has held the clue: he has had the opportunity, and he seems to have
used it, of keeping the various results afloat, when ascertained, and
substituting estimates and generalities for facts. But latterly—you
follow me, Miss Harriet?”
“Perfectly, perfectly,” she answered, with her frightened face fixed on
his. “Pray tell me all the worst at once.”
“Latterly, he appears to have devoted the greatest pains to making
these results so plain and clear, that reference to the private books
enables one to grasp them, numerous and varying as they are, with
extraordinary ease. As if he had resolved to show his employer at one
broad view what has been brought upon him by ministration to his ruling
passion! That it has been his constant practice to minister to that
passion basely, and to flatter it corruptly, is indubitable. In that,
his criminality, as it is connected with the affairs of the House,
chiefly consists.”
“One other word before you leave me, dear Sir,” said Harriet. “There is
no danger in all this?”
“How danger?” he returned, with a little hesitation.
“To the credit of the House?”
“I cannot help answering you plainly, and trusting you completely,”