Dombey and Son
tough, is J.B. Tough, and de-vilish sly!” over which reflection he
chuckled for the rest of the day.
But still, when that day and many other days were gone and past, it
seemed that Miss Tox took no heed whatever of the Major, and thought
nothing at all about him. She had been wont, once upon a time, to look
out at one of her little dark windows by accident, and blushingly
return the Major’s greeting; but now, she never gave the Major a
chance, and cared nothing at all whether he looked over the way or not.
Other changes had come to pass too. The Major, standing in the shade of
his own apartment, could make out that an air of greater smartness had
recently come over Miss Tox’s house; that a new cage with gilded wires
had been provided for the ancient little canary bird; that divers
ornaments, cut out of coloured card-boards and paper, seemed to
decorate the chimney-piece and tables; that a plant or two had suddenly
sprung up in the windows; that Miss Tox occasionally practised on the
harpsichord, whose garland of sweet peas was always displayed
ostentatiously, crowned with the Copenhagen and Bird Waltzes in a Music
Book of Miss Tox’s own copying.
Over and above all this, Miss Tox had long been dressed with uncommon
care and elegance in slight mourning. But this helped the Major out of
his difficulty; and he determined within himself that she had come into
a small legacy, and grown proud.
It was on the very next day after he had eased his mind by arriving at
this decision, that the Major, sitting at his breakfast, saw an
apparition so tremendous and wonderful in Miss Tox’s little
drawing-room, that he remained for some time rooted to his chair; then,
rushing into the next room, returned with a double-barrelled
opera-glass, through which he surveyed it intently for some minutes.
“It’s a Baby, Sir,” said the Major, shutting up the glass again, “for
fifty thousand pounds!”
The Major couldn’t forget it. He could do nothing but whistle, and
stare to that extent, that his eyes, compared with what they now
became, had been in former times quite cavernous and sunken. Day after
day, two, three, four times a week, this Baby reappeared. The Major
continued to stare and whistle. To all other intents and purposes he
was alone in Princess’s Place. Miss Tox had ceased to mind what he did.
He might have been black as well as blue, and it would have been of no
consequence to her.
The perseverance with which she walked out of Princess’s Place to fetch
this baby and its nurse, and walked back with them, and walked home
with them again, and continually mounted guard over them; and the
perseverance with which she nursed it herself, and fed it, and played
with it, and froze its young blood with airs upon the harpsichord, was
extraordinary. At about this same period too, she was seized with a
passion for looking at a certain bracelet; also with a passion for
looking at the moon, of which she would take long observations from her
chamber window. But whatever she looked at; sun, moon, stars, or
bracelet; she looked no more at the Major. And the Major whistled, and
stared, and wondered, and dodged about his room, and could make nothing
of it.
“You’ll quite win my brother Paul’s heart, and that’s the truth, my
dear,” said Mrs Chick, one day.
Miss Tox turned pale.
“He grows more like Paul every day,” said Mrs Chick.
Miss Tox returned no other reply than by taking the little Paul in her
arms, and making his cockade perfectly flat and limp with her caresses.
“His mother, my dear,” said Miss Tox, “whose acquaintance I was to have
made through you, does he at all resemble her?”
“Not at all,” returned Louisa
“She was—she was pretty, I believe?” faltered Miss Tox.
“Why, poor dear Fanny was interesting,” said Mrs Chick, after some
judicial consideration. “Certainly interesting. She had not that air of
commanding superiority which one would somehow expect, almost as a
matter of course, to find in my brother’s wife; nor had she that
strength and vigour of mind which such a man requires.”
Miss Tox heaved a deep sigh.
“But she was pleasing:” said Mrs Chick: “extremely so. And she
meant!—oh, dear, how well poor Fanny meant!”
“You Angel!” cried Miss Tox to little Paul. “You Picture of your own
Papa!”
If the Major could have known how many hopes and ventures, what a
multitude of plans and speculations, rested on that baby head; and
could have seen them hovering, in all their heterogeneous confusion and
disorder, round the puckered cap of the unconscious little Paul; he
might have stared indeed. Then would he have recognised, among the
crowd, some few ambitious motes and beams belonging to Miss Tox; then
would he perhaps have understood the nature of that lady’s faltering
investment in the Dombey Firm.
If the child himself could have awakened in the night, and seen,
gathered about his cradle-curtains, faint reflections of the dreams
that other people had of him, they might have scared him, with good
reason. But he slumbered on, alike unconscious of the kind intentions
of Miss Tox, the wonder of the Major, the early sorrows of his sister,
and the stern visions of his father; and innocent that any spot of
earth contained a Dombey or a Son.
CHAPTER VIII.
Paul’s Further Progress, Growth and Character
Beneath the watching and attentive eyes of Time—so far another
Major—Paul’s slumbers gradually changed. More and more light broke in
upon them; distincter and distincter dreams disturbed them; an
accumulating crowd of objects and impressions swarmed about his rest;
and so he passed from babyhood to childhood, and became a talking,
walking, wondering Dombey.
On the downfall and banishment of Richards, the nursery may be said to
have been put into commission: as a Public Department is sometimes,
when no individual Atlas can be found to support it The Commissioners
were, of course, Mrs Chick and Miss Tox: who devoted themselves to
their duties with such astonishing ardour that Major Bagstock had every
day some new reminder of his being forsaken, while Mr Chick, bereft of
domestic supervision, cast himself upon the gay world, dined at clubs
and coffee-houses, smelt of smoke on three different occasions, went to
the play by himself, and in short, loosened (as Mrs Chick once told
him) every social bond, and moral obligation.
Yet, in spite of his early promise, all this vigilance and care could
not make little Paul a thriving boy. Naturally delicate, perhaps, he
pined and wasted after the dismissal of his nurse, and, for a long
time, seemed but to wait his opportunity of gliding through their
hands, and seeking his lost mother. This dangerous ground in his
steeple-chase towards manhood passed, he still found it very rough
riding, and was grievously beset by all the obstacles in his course.
Every tooth was a break-neck fence, and every pimple in the measles a
stone wall to him. He was down in every fit of the hooping-cough, and
rolled upon and crushed by a whole field of small diseases, that came
trooping on each other’s heels to prevent his getting up again. Some
bird of prey got into his throat instead of the thrush; and the very
chickens turning ferocious—if they have anything to do with that infant
malady to which they lend their name—worried him like tiger-cats.
The chill of Paul’s christening had struck home, perhaps to some
sensitive part of his nature, which could not recover itself in the
cold shade of his father; but he was an unfortunate child from that
day. Mrs Wickam often said she never see a dear so put upon.
Mrs Wickam was a waiter’s wife—which would seem equivalent to being any
other man’s widow—whose application for an engagement in Mr Dombey’s
service had been favourably considered, on account of the apparent
impossibility of her having any followers, or anyone to follow; and
who, from within a day or two of Paul’s sharp weaning, had been engaged
as his nurse. Mrs Wickam was a meek woman, of a fair complexion, with
her eyebrows always elevated, and her head always drooping; who was
always ready to pity herself, or to be pitied, or to pity anybody else;
and who had a surprising natural gift of viewing all subjects in an
utterly forlorn and pitiable light, and bringing dreadful precedents to
bear upon them, and deriving the greatest consolation from the exercise
of that talent.
It is hardly necessary to observe, that no touch of this quality ever
reached the magnificent knowledge of Mr Dombey. It would have been
remarkable, indeed, if any had; when no one in the house—not even Mrs
Chick or Miss Tox—dared ever whisper to him that there had, on any one
occasion, been the least reason for uneasiness in reference to little
Paul. He had settled, within himself, that the child must necessarily
pass through a certain routine of minor maladies, and that the sooner
he did so the better. If he could have bought him off, or provided a
substitute, as in the case of an unlucky drawing for the militia, he
would have been glad to do so, on liberal terms. But as this was not
feasible, he merely wondered, in his haughty manner, now and then, what
Nature meant by it; and comforted himself with the reflection that
there was another milestone passed upon the road, and that the great
end of the journey lay so much the nearer. For the feeling uppermost in
his mind, now and constantly intensifying, and increasing in it as Paul
grew older, was impatience. Impatience for the time to come, when his
visions of their united consequence and grandeur would be triumphantly
realized.
Some philosophers tell us that selfishness is at the root of our best
loves and affections. Mr Dombey’s young child was, from the beginning,
so distinctly important to him as a part of his own greatness, or
(which is the same thing) of the greatness of Dombey and Son, that
there is no doubt his parental affection might have been easily traced,
like many a goodly superstructure of fair fame, to a very low
foundation. But he loved his son with all the love he had. If there
were a warm place in his frosty heart, his son occupied it; if its very
hard surface could receive the impression of any image, the image of
that son was there; though not so much as an infant, or as a boy, but
as a grown man—the “Son” of the Firm. Therefore he was impatient to
advance into the future, and to hurry over the intervening passages of
his history. Therefore he had little or no anxiety about them, in spite
of his love; feeling as if the boy had a charmed life, and must become
the man with whom he held such constant communication in his thoughts,
and for whom he planned and projected, as for an existing reality,
every day.
Thus Paul grew to be nearly five years old. He was a pretty little
fellow; though there was something wan and wistful in his small face,
that gave occasion to many significant shakes of Mrs Wickam’s head, and
many long-drawn inspirations of Mrs Wickam’s breath. His temper gave
abundant promise of being imperious in after-life; and he had as
hopeful an apprehension of his own importance, and the rightful
subservience of all other things and persons to it, as heart could
desire. He was childish and sportive enough at times, and not of a
sullen disposition; but he had a strange, old-fashioned, thoughtful
way, at other times, of sitting brooding in his miniature arm-chair,
when he looked (and talked) like one of those terrible little Beings in
the Fairy tales, who, at a hundred and fifty or two hundred years of
age, fantastically represent the children for whom they have been
substituted. He would frequently be stricken with this precocious mood
upstairs in the nursery; and would sometimes lapse into it suddenly,
exclaiming that he was tired: even while playing with Florence, or