Dombey and Son
the fierce impetuous rush was in the air! He felt it come up, and go
darting by; and even when he had hurried to the window, and saw what it
was, he stood, shrinking from it, as if it were not safe to look.
A curse upon the fiery devil, thundering along so smoothly, tracked
through the distant valley by a glare of light and lurid smoke, and
gone! He felt as if he had been plucked out of its path, and saved from
being torn asunder. It made him shrink and shudder even now, when its
faintest hum was hushed, and when the lines of iron road he could trace
in the moonlight, running to a point, were as empty and as silent as a
desert.
Unable to rest, and irresistibly attracted—or he thought so—to this
road, he went out, and lounged on the brink of it, marking the way the
train had gone, by the yet smoking cinders that were lying in its
track. After a lounge of some half hour in the direction by which it
had disappeared, he turned and walked the other way—still keeping to
the brink of the road—past the inn garden, and a long way down; looking
curiously at the bridges, signals, lamps, and wondering when another
Devil would come by.
A trembling of the ground, and quick vibration in his ears; a distant
shriek; a dull light advancing, quickly changed to two red eyes, and a
fierce fire, dropping glowing coals; an irresistible bearing on of a
great roaring and dilating mass; a high wind, and a rattle—another come
and gone, and he holding to a gate, as if to save himself!
He waited for another, and for another. He walked back to his former
point, and back again to that, and still, through the wearisome vision
of his journey, looked for these approaching monsters. He loitered
about the station, waiting until one should stay to call there; and
when one did, and was detached for water, he stood parallel with it,
watching its heavy wheels and brazen front, and thinking what a cruel
power and might it had. Ugh! To see the great wheels slowly turning,
and to think of being run down and crushed!
Disordered with wine and want of rest—that want which nothing, although
he was so weary, would appease—these ideas and objects assumed a
diseased importance in his thoughts. When he went back to his room,
which was not until near midnight, they still haunted him, and he sat
listening for the coming of another.
So in his bed, whither he repaired with no hope of sleep. He still lay
listening; and when he felt the trembling and vibration, got up and
went to the window, to watch (as he could from its position) the dull
light changing to the two red eyes, and the fierce fire dropping
glowing coals, and the rush of the giant as it fled past, and the track
of glare and smoke along the valley. Then he would glance in the
direction by which he intended to depart at sunrise, as there was no
rest for him there; and would lie down again, to be troubled by the
vision of his journey, and the old monotony of bells and wheels and
horses’ feet, until another came. This lasted all night. So far from
resuming the mastery of himself, he seemed, if possible, to lose it
more and more, as the night crept on. When the dawn appeared, he was
still tormented with thinking, still postponing thought until he should
be in a better state; the past, present, and future all floated
confusedly before him, and he had lost all power of looking steadily at
any one of them.
“At what time,” he asked the man who had waited on him over-night, now
entering with a candle, “do I leave here, did you say?”
“About a quarter after four, Sir. Express comes through at four,
Sir.—It don’t stop.”
He passed his hand across his throbbing head, and looked at his watch.
Nearly half-past three.
“Nobody going with you, Sir, probably,” observed the man. “Two
gentlemen here, Sir, but they’re waiting for the train to London.”
“I thought you said there was nobody here,” said Carker, turning upon
him with the ghost of his old smile, when he was angry or suspicious.
“Not then, sir. Two gentlemen came in the night by the short train that
stops here, Sir. Warm water, Sir?”
“No; and take away the candle. There’s day enough for me.”
Having thrown himself upon the bed, half-dressed he was at the window
as the man left the room. The cold light of morning had succeeded to
night and there was already, in the sky, the red suffusion of the
coming sun. He bathed his head and face with water—there was no cooling
influence in it for him—hurriedly put on his clothes, paid what he
owed, and went out.
The air struck chill and comfortless as it breathed upon him. There was
a heavy dew; and, hot as he was, it made him shiver. After a glance at
the place where he had walked last night, and at the signal-lights
burning in the morning, and bereft of their significance, he turned to
where the sun was rising, and beheld it, in its glory, as it broke upon
the scene.
So awful, so transcendent in its beauty, so divinely solemn. As he cast
his faded eyes upon it, where it rose, tranquil and serene, unmoved by
all the wrong and wickedness on which its beams had shone since the
beginning of the world, who shall say that some weak sense of virtue
upon Earth, and its in Heaven, did not manifest itself, even to him? If
ever he remembered sister or brother with a touch of tenderness and
remorse, who shall say it was not then?
He needed some such touch then. Death was on him. He was marked off—the
living world, and going down into his grave.
He paid the money for his journey to the country-place he had thought
of; and was walking to and fro, alone, looking along the lines of iron,
across the valley in one direction, and towards a dark bridge near at
hand in the other; when, turning in his walk, where it was bounded by
one end of the wooden stage on which he paced up and down, he saw the
man from whom he had fled, emerging from the door by which he himself
had entered. And their eyes met.
In the quick unsteadiness of the surprise, he staggered, and slipped on
to the road below him. But recovering his feet immediately, he stepped
back a pace or two upon that road, to interpose some wider space
between them, and looked at his pursuer, breathing short and quick.
He heard a shout—another—saw the face change from its vindictive
passion to a faint sickness and terror—felt the earth tremble—knew in a
moment that the rush was come—uttered a shriek—looked round—saw the red
eyes, bleared and dim, in the daylight, close upon him—was beaten down,
caught up, and whirled away upon a jagged mill, that spun him round and
round, and struck him limb from limb, and licked his stream of life up
with its fiery heat, and cast his mutilated fragments in the air.
When the traveller, who had been recognised, recovered from a swoon, he
saw them bringing from a distance something covered, that lay heavy and
still, upon a board, between four men, and saw that others drove some
dogs away that sniffed upon the road, and soaked his blood up, with a
train of ashes.
CHAPTER LVI.
Several People delighted, and the Game Chicken disgusted
The Midshipman was all alive. Mr Toots and Susan had arrived at last.
Susan had run upstairs like a young woman bereft of her senses, and Mr
Toots and the Chicken had gone into the Parlour.
“Oh my own pretty darling sweet Miss Floy!” cried the Nipper, running
into Florence’s room, “to think that it should come to this and I
should find you here my own dear dove with nobody to wait upon you and
no home to call your own but never never will I go away again Miss Floy
for though I may not gather moss I’m not a rolling stone nor is my
heart a stone or else it wouldn’t bust as it is busting now oh dear oh
dear!”
Pouring out these words, without the faintest indication of a stop, of
any sort, Miss Nipper, on her knees beside her mistress, hugged her
close.
“Oh love!” cried Susan, “I know all that’s past I know it all my tender
pet and I’m a choking give me air!”
“Susan, dear good Susan!” said Florence.
“Oh bless her! I that was her little maid when she was a little child!
and is she really, really truly going to be married?” exclaimed Susan,
in a burst of pain and pleasure, pride and grief, and Heaven knows how
many other conflicting feelings.
“Who told you so?” said Florence.
“Oh gracious me! that innocentest creetur Toots,” returned Susan
hysterically. “I knew he must be right my dear, because he took on so.
He’s the devotedest and innocentest infant! And is my darling,” pursued
Susan, with another close embrace and burst of tears, “really really
going to be married!”
The mixture of compassion, pleasure, tenderness, protection, and regret
with which the Nipper constantly recurred to this subject, and at every
such once, raised her head to look in the young face and kiss it, and
then laid her head again upon her mistress’s shoulder, caressing her
and sobbing, was as womanly and good a thing, in its way, as ever was
seen in the world.
“There, there!” said the soothing voice of Florence presently. “Now
you’re quite yourself, dear Susan!”
Miss Nipper, sitting down upon the floor, at her mistress’s feet,
laughing and sobbing, holding her pocket-handkerchief to her eyes with
one hand, and patting Diogenes with the other as he licked her face,
confessed to being more composed, and laughed and cried a little more
in proof of it.
“I-I-I never did see such a creetur as that Toots,” said Susan, “in all
my born days never!”
“So kind,” suggested Florence.
“And so comic!” Susan sobbed. “The way he’s been going on inside with
me with that disrespectable Chicken on the box!”
“About what, Susan?” inquired Florence, timidly.
“Oh about Lieutenant Walters, and Captain Gills, and you my dear Miss
Floy, and the silent tomb,” said Susan.
“The silent tomb!” repeated Florence.
“He says,” here Susan burst into a violent hysterical laugh, “that
he’ll go down into it now immediately and quite comfortable, but bless
your heart my dear Miss Floy he won’t, he’s a great deal too happy in
seeing other people happy for that, he may not be a Solomon,” pursued
the Nipper, with her usual volubility, “nor do I say he is but this I
do say a less selfish human creature human nature never knew!”
Miss Nipper being still hysterical, laughed immoderately after making
this energetic declaration, and then informed Florence that he was
waiting below to see her; which would be a rich repayment for the
trouble he had had in his late expedition.
Florence entreated Susan to beg of Mr Toots as a favour that she might
have the pleasure of thanking him for his kindness; and Susan, in a few
moments, produced that young gentleman, still very much dishevelled in
appearance, and stammering exceedingly.
“Miss Dombey,” said Mr Toots. “To be again permitted to—to—gaze—at
least, not to gaze, but—I don’t exactly know what I was going to say,
but it’s of no consequence.”
“I have to thank you so often,” returned Florence, giving him both her
hands, with all her innocent gratitude beaming in her face, “that I
have no words left, and don’t know how to do it.”
“Miss Dombey,” said Mr Toots, in an awful voice, “if it was possible
that you could, consistently with your angelic nature, Curse me, you
would—if I may be allowed to say so—floor me infinitely less, than by
these undeserved expressions of kindness Their effect upon me—is—but,”
said Mr Toots, abruptly, “this is a digression, and of no consequence
at all.”
As there seemed to be no means of replying to this, but by thanking him
again, Florence thanked him again.
“I could wish,” said Mr Toots, “to take this opportunity, Miss Dombey,
if I might, of entering into a word of explanation. I should have had
the pleasure of—of returning with Susan at an earlier period; but, in