Dombey and Son
porridge.”
This the acrimonious Pipchin says with a flounce.
“But good gracious me!” cries Mrs Chick blandly. “How long is this to
last! If my brother will not make an effort, Mrs Pipchin, what is to
become of him? I am sure I should have thought he had seen enough of
the consequences of not making an effort, by this time, to be warned
against that fatal error.”
“Hoity toity!” says Mrs Pipchin, rubbing her nose. “There’s a great
fuss, I think, about it. It ain’t so wonderful a case. People have had
misfortunes before now, and been obliged to part with their furniture.
I’m sure I have!”
“My brother,” pursues Mrs Chick profoundly, “is so peculiar—so strange
a man. He is the most peculiar man I ever saw. Would anyone believe
that when he received news of the marriage and emigration of that
unnatural child—it’s a comfort to me, now, to remember that I always
said there was something extraordinary about that child: but nobody
minds me—would anybody believe, I say, that he should then turn round
upon me and say he had supposed, from my manner, that she had come to
my house? Why, my gracious! And would anybody believe that when I
merely say to him, ‘Paul, I may be very foolish, and I have no doubt I
am, but I cannot understand how your affairs can have got into this
state,’ he should actually fly at me, and request that I will come to
see him no more until he asks me! Why, my goodness!”
“Ah!” says Mrs Pipchin. “It’s a pity he hadn’t a little more to do with
mines. They’d have tried his temper for him.”
“And what,” resumes Mrs Chick, quite regardless of Mrs Pipchin’s
observations, “is it to end in? That’s what I want to know. What does
my brother mean to do? He must do something. It’s of no use remaining
shut up in his own rooms. Business won’t come to him. No. He must go to
it. Then why don’t he go? He knows where to go, I suppose, having been
a man of business all his life. Very good. Then why not go there?”
Mrs Chick, after forging this powerful chain of reasoning, remains
silent for a minute to admire it.
“Besides,” says the discreet lady, with an argumentative air, “who ever
heard of such obstinacy as his staying shut up here through all these
dreadful disagreeables? It’s not as if there was no place for him to go
to. Of course he could have come to our house. He knows he is at home
there, I suppose? Mr Chick has perfectly bored about it, and I said
with my own lips, ‘Why surely, Paul, you don’t imagine that because
your affairs have got into this state, you are the less at home to such
near relatives as ourselves? You don’t imagine that we are like the
rest of the world?’ But no; here he stays all through, and here he is.
Why, good gracious me, suppose the house was to be let! What would he
do then? He couldn’t remain here then. If he attempted to do so, there
would be an ejectment, an action for Doe, and all sorts of things; and
then he must go. Then why not go at first instead of at last? And that
brings me back to what I said just now, and I naturally ask what is to
be the end of it?”
“I know what’s to be the end of it, as far as I am concerned,” replies
Mrs Pipchin, “and that’s enough for me. I’m going to take myself off in
a jiffy.”
“In a which, Mrs Pipchin,” says Mrs Chick.
“In a jiffy,” retorts Mrs Pipchin sharply.
“Ah, well! really I can’t blame you, Mrs Pipchin,” says Mrs Chick, with
frankness.
“It would be pretty much the same to me, if you could,” replies the
sardonic Pipchin. “At any rate I’m going. I can’t stop here. I should
be dead in a week. I had to cook my own pork chop yesterday, and I’m
not used to it. My constitution will be giving way next. Besides, I had
a very fair connexion at Brighton when I came here—little Pankey’s
folks alone were worth a good eighty pounds a-year to me—and I can’t
afford to throw it away. I’ve written to my niece, and she expects me
by this time.”
“Have you spoken to my brother?” inquires Mrs Chick
“Oh, yes, it’s very easy to say speak to him,” retorts Mrs Pipchin.
“How is it done? I called out to him yesterday, that I was no use here,
and that he had better let me send for Mrs Richards. He grunted
something or other that meant yes, and I sent. Grunt indeed! If he had
been Mr Pipchin, he’d have had some reason to grunt. Yah! I’ve no
patience with it!”
Here this exemplary female, who has pumped up so much fortitude and
virtue from the depths of the Peruvian mines, rises from her cushioned
property to see Mrs Chick to the door. Mrs Chick, deploring to the last
the peculiar character of her brother, noiselessly retires, much
occupied with her own sagacity and clearness of head.
In the dusk of the evening Mr Toodle, being off duty, arrives with
Polly and a box, and leaves them, with a sounding kiss, in the hall of
the empty house, the retired character of which affects Mr Toodle’s
spirits strongly.
“I tell you what, Polly, me dear,” says Mr Toodle, “being now an
ingine-driver, and well to do in the world, I shouldn’t allow of your
coming here, to be made dull-like, if it warn’t for favours past. But
favours past, Polly, is never to be forgot. To them which is in
adversity, besides, your face is a cord’l. So let’s have another kiss
on it, my dear. You wish no better than to do a right act, I know; and
my views is, that it’s right and dutiful to do this. Good-night,
Polly!”
Mrs Pipchin by this time looms dark in her black bombazeen skirts,
black bonnet, and shawl; and has her personal property packed up; and
has her chair (late a favourite chair of Mr Dombey’s and the dead
bargain of the sale) ready near the street door; and is only waiting
for a fly-van, going tonight to Brighton on private service, which is
to call for her, by private contract, and convey her home.
Presently it comes. Mrs Pipchin’s wardrobe being handed in and stowed
away, Mrs Pipchin’s chair is next handed in, and placed in a convenient
corner among certain trusses of hay; it being the intention of the
amiable woman to occupy the chair during her journey. Mrs Pipchin
herself is next handed in, and grimly takes her seat. There is a snaky
gleam in her hard grey eye, as of anticipated rounds of buttered toast,
relays of hot chops, worryings and quellings of young children, sharp
snappings at poor Berry, and all the other delights of her Ogress’s
castle. Mrs Pipchin almost laughs as the fly-van drives off, and she
composes her black bombazeen skirts, and settles herself among the
cushions of her easy chair.
The house is such a ruin that the rats have fled, and there is not one
left.
But Polly, though alone in the deserted mansion—for there is no
companionship in the shut-up rooms in which its late master hides his
head—is not alone long. It is night; and she is sitting at work in the
housekeeper’s room, trying to forget what a lonely house it is, and
what a history belongs to it; when there is a knock at the hall door,
as loud sounding as any knock can be, striking into such an empty
place. Opening it, she returns across the echoing hall, accompanied by
a female figure in a close black bonnet. It is Miss Tox, and Miss Tox’s
eyes are red.
“Oh, Polly,” says Miss Tox, “when I looked in to have a little lesson
with the children just now, I got the message that you left for me; and
as soon as I could recover my spirits at all, I came on after you. Is
there no one here but you?”
“Ah! not a soul,” says Polly.
“Have you seen him?” whispers Miss Tox.
“Bless you,” returns Polly, “no; he has not been seen this many a day.
They tell me he never leaves his room.”
“Is he said to be ill?” inquires Miss Tox.
“No, Ma’am, not that I know of,” returns Polly, “except in his mind. He
must be very bad there, poor gentleman!”
Miss Tox’s sympathy is such that she can scarcely speak. She is no
chicken, but she has not grown tough with age and celibacy. Her heart
is very tender, her compassion very genuine, her homage very real.
Beneath the locket with the fishy eye in it, Miss Tox bears better
qualities than many a less whimsical outside; such qualities as will
outlive, by many courses of the sun, the best outsides and brightest
husks that fall in the harvest of the great reaper.
It is long before Miss Tox goes away, and before Polly, with a candle
flaring on the blank stairs, looks after her, for company, down the
street, and feels unwilling to go back into the dreary house, and jar
its emptiness with the heavy fastenings of the door, and glide away to
bed. But all this Polly does; and in the morning sets in one of those
darkened rooms such matters as she has been advised to prepare, and
then retires and enters them no more until next morning at the same
hour. There are bells there, but they never ring; and though she can
sometimes hear a footfall going to and fro, it never comes out.
Miss Tox returns early in the day. It then begins to be Miss Tox’s
occupation to prepare little dainties—or what are such to her—to be
carried into these rooms next morning. She derives so much satisfaction
from the pursuit, that she enters on it regularly from that time; and
brings daily in her little basket, various choice condiments selected
from the scanty stores of the deceased owner of the powdered head and
pigtail. She likewise brings, in sheets of curl-paper, morsels of cold
meats, tongues of sheep, halves of fowls, for her own dinner; and
sharing these collations with Polly, passes the greater part of her
time in the ruined house that the rats have fled from: hiding, in a
fright at every sound, stealing in and out like a criminal; only
desiring to be true to the fallen object of her admiration, unknown to
him, unknown to all the world but one poor simple woman.
The Major knows it; but no one is the wiser for that, though the Major
is much the merrier. The Major, in a fit of curiosity, has charged the
Native to watch the house sometimes, and find out what becomes of
Dombey. The Native has reported Miss Tox’s fidelity, and the Major has
nearly choked himself dead with laughter. He is permanently bluer from
that hour, and constantly wheezes to himself, his lobster eyes starting
out of his head, “Damme, Sir, the woman’s a born idiot!”
And the ruined man. How does he pass the hours, alone?
“Let him remember it in that room, years to come!” He did remember it.
It was heavy on his mind now; heavier than all the rest.
“Let him remember it in that room, years to come! The rain that falls
upon the roof, the wind that mourns outside the door, may have
foreknowledge in their melancholy sound. Let him remember it in that
room, years to come!”
He did remember it. In the miserable night he thought of it; in the
dreary day, the wretched dawn, the ghostly, memory-haunted twilight. He
did remember it. In agony, in sorrow, in remorse, in despair! “Papa!
Papa! Speak to me, dear Papa!” He heard the words again, and saw the
face. He saw it fall upon the trembling hands, and heard the one
prolonged low cry go upward.
He was fallen, never to be raised up any more. For the night of his
worldly ruin there was no to-morrow’s sun; for the stain of his
domestic shame there was no purification; nothing, thank Heaven, could
bring his dead child back to life. But that which he might have made so
different in all the Past—which might have made the Past itself so
different, though this he hardly thought of now—that which was his own
work, that which he could so easily have wrought into a blessing, and
had set himself so steadily for years to form into a curse: that was
the sharp grief of his soul.
Oh! He did remember it! The rain that fell upon the roof, the wind that
mourned outside the door that night, had had foreknowledge in their
melancholy sound. He knew, now, what he had done. He knew, now, that he