Dombey and Son
be!” and with that had struck his hand upon his forehead, and said,
“Leave me, Perch!” Then, in short, would Mr Perch, a victim to his
position, tell all manner of lies; affecting himself to tears by those
that were of a moving nature, and really believing that the inventions
of yesterday had, on repetition, a sort of truth about them today.
Mr Perch always closed these conferences by meekly remarking, that, of
course, whatever his suspicions might have been (as if he had ever had
any!) it wasn’t for _him_ to betray his trust, was it? Which sentiment
(there never being any creditors present) was received as doing great
honour to his feelings. Thus, he generally brought away a soothed
conscience and left an agreeable impression behind him, when he
returned to his bracket: again to sit watching the strange faces of the
accountants and others, making so free with the great mysteries, the
Books; or now and then to go on tiptoe into Mr Dombey’s empty room, and
stir the fire; or to take an airing at the door, and have a little more
doleful chat with any straggler whom he knew; or to propitiate, with
various small attentions, the head accountant: from whom Mr Perch had
expectations of a messengership in a Fire Office, when the affairs of
the House should be wound up.
To Major Bagstock, the bankruptcy was quite a calamity. The Major was
not a sympathetic character—his attention being wholly concentrated on
J. B.—nor was he a man subject to lively emotions, except in the
physical regards of gasping and choking. But he had so paraded his
friend Dombey at the club; had so flourished him at the heads of the
members in general, and so put them down by continual assertion of his
riches; that the club, being but human, was delighted to retort upon
the Major, by asking him, with a show of great concern, whether this
tremendous smash had been at all expected, and how his friend Dombey
bore it. To such questions, the Major, waxing very purple, would reply
that it was a bad world, Sir, altogether; that Joey knew a thing or
two, but had been done, Sir, done like an infant; that if you had
foretold this, Sir, to J. Bagstock, when he went abroad with Dombey and
was chasing that vagabond up and down France, J. Bagstock would have
pooh-pooh’d you—would have pooh-pooh’d you, Sir, by the Lord! That Joe
had been deceived, Sir, taken in, hoodwinked, blindfolded, but was
broad awake again and staring; insomuch, Sir, that if Joe’s father were
to rise up from the grave to-morrow, he wouldn’t trust the old blade
with a penny piece, but would tell him that his son Josh was too old a
soldier to be done again, Sir. That he was a suspicious, crabbed,
cranky, used-up, J. B. infidel, Sir; and that if it were consistent
with the dignity of a rough and tough old Major, of the old school, who
had had the honour of being personally known to, and commended by,
their late Royal Highnesses the Dukes of Kent and York, to retire to a
tub and live in it, by Gad! Sir, he’d have a tub in Pall Mall
to-morrow, to show his contempt for mankind!
Of all this, and many variations of the same tune, the Major would
deliver himself with so many apoplectic symptoms, such rollings of his
head, and such violent growls of ill usage and resentment, that the
younger members of the club surmised he had invested money in his
friend Dombey’s House, and lost it; though the older soldiers and
deeper dogs, who knew Joe better, wouldn’t hear of such a thing. The
unfortunate Native, expressing no opinion, suffered dreadfully; not
merely in his moral feelings, which were regularly fusilladed by the
Major every hour in the day, and riddled through and through, but in
his sensitiveness to bodily knocks and bumps, which was kept
continually on the stretch. For six entire weeks after the bankruptcy,
this miserable foreigner lived in a rainy season of boot-jacks and
brushes.
Mrs Chick had three ideas upon the subject of the terrible reverse. The
first was that she could not understand it. The second, that her
brother had not made an effort. The third, that if she had been invited
to dinner on the day of that first party, it never would have happened;
and that she had said so, at the time.
Nobody’s opinion stayed the misfortune, lightened it, or made it
heavier. It was understood that the affairs of the House were to be
wound up as they best could be; that Mr Dombey freely resigned
everything he had, and asked for no favour from anyone. That any
resumption of the business was out of the question, as he would listen
to no friendly negotiation having that compromise in view; that he had
relinquished every post of trust or distinction he had held, as a man
respected among merchants; that he was dying, according to some; that
he was going melancholy mad, according to others; that he was a broken
man, according to all.
The clerks dispersed after holding a little dinner of condolence among
themselves, which was enlivened by comic singing, and went off
admirably. Some took places abroad, and some engaged in other Houses at
home; some looked up relations in the country, for whom they suddenly
remembered they had a particular affection; and some advertised for
employment in the newspapers. Mr Perch alone remained of all the late
establishment, sitting on his bracket looking at the accountants, or
starting off it, to propitiate the head accountant, who was to get him
into the Fire Office. The Counting House soon got to be dirty and
neglected. The principal slipper and dogs’ collar seller, at the corner
of the court, would have doubted the propriety of throwing up his
forefinger to the brim of his hat, any more, if Mr Dombey had appeared
there now; and the ticket porter, with his hands under his white apron,
moralised good sound morality about ambition, which (he observed) was
not, in his opinion, made to rhyme to perdition, for nothing.
Mr Morfin, the hazel-eyed bachelor, with the hair and whiskers
sprinkled with grey, was perhaps the only person within the atmosphere
of the House—its head, of course, excepted—who was heartily and deeply
affected by the disaster that had befallen it. He had treated Mr Dombey
with due respect and deference through many years, but he had never
disguised his natural character, or meanly truckled to him, or pampered
his master passion for the advancement of his own purposes. He had,
therefore, no self-disrespect to avenge; no long-tightened springs to
release with a quick recoil. He worked early and late to unravel
whatever was complicated or difficult in the records of the
transactions of the House; was always in attendance to explain whatever
required explanation; sat in his old room sometimes very late at night,
studying points by his mastery of which he could spare Mr Dombey the
pain of being personally referred to; and then would go home to
Islington, and calm his mind by producing the most dismal and forlorn
sounds out of his violoncello before going to bed.
He was solacing himself with this melodious grumbler one evening, and,
having been much dispirited by the proceedings of the day, was scraping
consolation out of its deepest notes, when his landlady (who was
fortunately deaf, and had no other consciousness of these performances
than a sensation of something rumbling in her bones) announced a lady.
“In mourning,” she said.
The violoncello stopped immediately; and the performer, laying it on
the sofa with great tenderness and care, made a sign that the lady was
to come in. He followed directly, and met Harriet Carker on the stair.
“Alone!” he said, “and John here this morning! Is there anything the
matter, my dear? But no,” he added, “your face tells quite another
story.”
“I am afraid it is a selfish revelation that you see there, then,” she
answered.
“It is a very pleasant one,” said he; “and, if selfish, a novelty too,
worth seeing in you. But I don’t believe that.”
He had placed a chair for her by this time, and sat down opposite; the
violoncello lying snugly on the sofa between them.
“You will not be surprised at my coming alone, or at John’s not having
told you I was coming,” said Harriet; “and you will believe that, when
I tell you why I have come. May I do so now?”
“You can do nothing better.”
“You were not busy?”
He pointed to the violoncello lying on the sofa, and said “I have been,
all day. Here’s my witness. I have been confiding all my cares to it. I
wish I had none but my own to tell.”
“Is the House at an end?” said Harriet, earnestly.
“Completely at an end.”
“Will it never be resumed?”
“Never.”
The bright expression of her face was not overshadowed as her lips
silently repeated the word. He seemed to observe this with some little
involuntary surprise: and said again:
“Never. You remember what I told you. It has been, all along,
impossible to convince him; impossible to reason with him; sometimes,
impossible even to approach him. The worst has happened; and the House
has fallen, never to be built up any more.”
“And Mr Dombey, is he personally ruined?”
“Ruined.”
“Will he have no private fortune left? Nothing?”
A certain eagerness in her voice, and something that was almost joyful
in her look, seemed to surprise him more and more; to disappoint him
too, and jar discordantly against his own emotions. He drummed with the
fingers of one hand on the table, looking wistfully at her, and shaking
his head, said, after a pause:
“The extent of Mr Dombey’s resources is not accurately within my
knowledge; but though they are doubtless very large, his obligations
are enormous. He is a gentleman of high honour and integrity. Any man
in his position could, and many a man in his position would, have saved
himself, by making terms which would have very slightly, almost
insensibly, increased the losses of those who had had dealings with
him, and left him a remnant to live upon. But he is resolved on payment
to the last farthing of his means. His own words are, that they will
clear, or nearly clear, the House, and that no one can lose much. Ah,
Miss Harriet, it would do us no harm to remember oftener than we do,
that vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess! His pride
shows well in this.”
She heard him with little or no change in her expression, and with a
divided attention that showed her to be busy with something in her own
mind. When he was silent, she asked him hurriedly:
“Have you seen him lately?”
“No one sees him. When this crisis of his affairs renders it necessary
for him to come out of his house, he comes out for the occasion, and
again goes home, and shuts himself up, and will see no one. He has
written me a letter, acknowledging our past connexion in higher terms
than it deserved, and parting from me. I am delicate of obtruding
myself upon him now, never having had much intercourse with him in
better times; but I have tried to do so. I have written, gone there,
entreated. Quite in vain.”
He watched her, as in the hope that she would testify some greater
concern than she had yet shown; and spoke gravely and feelingly, as if
to impress her the more; but there was no change in her.
“Well, well, Miss Harriet,” he said, with a disappointed air, “this is
not to the purpose. You have not come here to hear this. Some other and
pleasanter theme is in your mind. Let it be in mine, too, and we shall
talk upon more equal terms. Come!”
“No, it is the same theme,” returned Harriet, with frank and quick
surprise. “Is it not likely that it should be? Is it not natural that
John and I should have been thinking and speaking very much of late of
these great changes? Mr Dombey, whom he served so many years—you know
upon what terms—reduced, as you describe; and we quite rich!”
Good, true face, as that face of hers was, and pleasant as it had been