Dombey and Son
cradle, by her departed mother. I couldn’t say how, nor I couldn’t say
when, nor I couldn’t say whether the dear child knew it or not, but
Betsey Jane had been watched by her mother, Miss Berry!” and Mrs
Wickam, with a very white face, and with watery eyes, and with a
tremulous voice, again looked fearfully round the room, and towards
Paul in bed.
“Nonsense!” cried Miss Berry—somewhat resentful of the idea.
“You may say nonsense! I ain’t offended, Miss. I hope you may be able
to think in your own conscience that it is nonsense; you’ll find your
spirits all the better for it in this—you’ll excuse my being so free—in
this burying-ground of a place; which is wearing of me down. Master
Paul’s a little restless in his sleep. Pat his back, if you please.”
“Of course you think,” said Berry, gently doing what she was asked,
“that he has been nursed by his mother, too?”
“Betsey Jane,” returned Mrs Wickam in her most solemn tones, “was put
upon as that child has been put upon, and changed as that child has
changed. I have seen her sit, often and often, think, think, thinking,
like him. I have seen her look, often and often, old, old, old, like
him. I have heard her, many a time, talk just like him. I consider that
child and Betsey Jane on the same footing entirely, Miss Berry.”
“Is your Uncle’s child alive?” asked Berry.
“Yes, Miss, she is alive,” returned Mrs Wickam with an air of triumph,
for it was evident. Miss Berry expected the reverse; “and is married to
a silver-chaser. Oh yes, Miss, SHE is alive,” said Mrs Wickam, laying
strong stress on her nominative case.
It being clear that somebody was dead, Mrs Pipchin’s niece inquired who
it was.
“I wouldn’t wish to make you uneasy,” returned Mrs Wickam, pursuing her
supper. “Don’t ask me.”
This was the surest way of being asked again. Miss Berry repeated her
question, therefore; and after some resistance, and reluctance, Mrs
Wickam laid down her knife, and again glancing round the room and at
Paul in bed, replied:
“She took fancies to people; whimsical fancies, some of them; others,
affections that one might expect to see—only stronger than common. They
all died.”
This was so very unexpected and awful to Mrs Pipchin’s niece, that she
sat upright on the hard edge of the bedstead, breathing short, and
surveying her informant with looks of undisguised alarm.
Mrs Wickam shook her left fore-finger stealthily towards the bed where
Florence lay; then turned it upside down, and made several emphatic
points at the floor; immediately below which was the parlour in which
Mrs Pipchin habitually consumed the toast.
“Remember my words, Miss Berry,” said Mrs Wickam, “and be thankful that
Master Paul is not too fond of you. I am, that he’s not too fond of me,
I assure you; though there isn’t much to live for—you’ll excuse my
being so free—in this jail of a house!”
Miss Berry’s emotion might have led to her patting Paul too hard on the
back, or might have produced a cessation of that soothing monotony, but
he turned in his bed just now, and, presently awaking, sat up in it
with his hair hot and wet from the effects of some childish dream, and
asked for Florence.
She was out of her own bed at the first sound of his voice; and bending
over his pillow immediately, sang him to sleep again. Mrs Wickam
shaking her head, and letting fall several tears, pointed out the
little group to Berry, and turned her eyes up to the ceiling.
“He’s asleep now, my dear,” said Mrs Wickam after a pause, “you’d
better go to bed again. Don’t you feel cold?”
“No, nurse,” said Florence, laughing. “Not at all.”
“Ah!” sighed Mrs Wickam, and she shook her head again, expressing to
the watchful Berry, “we shall be cold enough, some of us, by and by!”
Berry took the frugal supper-tray, with which Mrs Wickam had by this
time done, and bade her good-night.
“Good-night, Miss!” returned Wickam softly. “Good-night! Your aunt is
an old lady, Miss Berry, and it’s what you must have looked for,
often.”
This consolatory farewell, Mrs Wickam accompanied with a look of
heartfelt anguish; and being left alone with the two children again,
and becoming conscious that the wind was blowing mournfully, she
indulged in melancholy—that cheapest and most accessible of
luxuries—until she was overpowered by slumber.
Although the niece of Mrs Pipchin did not expect to find that exemplary
dragon prostrate on the hearth-rug when she went downstairs, she was
relieved to find her unusually fractious and severe, and with every
present appearance of intending to live a long time to be a comfort to
all who knew her. Nor had she any symptoms of declining, in the course
of the ensuing week, when the constitutional viands still continued to
disappear in regular succession, notwithstanding that Paul studied her
as attentively as ever, and occupied his usual seat between the black
skirts and the fender, with unwavering constancy.
But as Paul himself was no stronger at the expiration of that time than
he had been on his first arrival, though he looked much healthier in
the face, a little carriage was got for him, in which he could lie at
his ease, with an alphabet and other elementary works of reference, and
be wheeled down to the sea-side. Consistent in his odd tastes, the
child set aside a ruddy-faced lad who was proposed as the drawer of
this carriage, and selected, instead, his grandfather—a weazen, old,
crab-faced man, in a suit of battered oilskin, who had got tough and
stringy from long pickling in salt water, and who smelt like a weedy
sea-beach when the tide is out.
With this notable attendant to pull him along, and Florence always
walking by his side, and the despondent Wickam bringing up the rear, he
went down to the margin of the ocean every day; and there he would sit
or lie in his carriage for hours together: never so distressed as by
the company of children—Florence alone excepted, always.
“Go away, if you please,” he would say to any child who came to bear
him company. “Thank you, but I don’t want you.”
Some small voice, near his ear, would ask him how he was, perhaps.
“I am very well, I thank you,” he would answer. “But you had better go
and play, if you please.”
Then he would turn his head, and watch the child away, and say to
Florence, “We don’t want any others, do we? Kiss me, Floy.”
He had even a dislike, at such times, to the company of Wickam, and was
well pleased when she strolled away, as she generally did, to pick up
shells and acquaintances. His favourite spot was quite a lonely one,
far away from most loungers; and with Florence sitting by his side at
work, or reading to him, or talking to him, and the wind blowing on his
face, and the water coming up among the wheels of his bed, he wanted
nothing more.
“Floy,” he said one day, “where’s India, where that boy’s friends
live?”
“Oh, it’s a long, long distance off,” said Florence, raising her eyes
from her work.
“Weeks off?” asked Paul.
“Yes dear. Many weeks’ journey, night and day.”
“If you were in India, Floy,” said Paul, after being silent for a
minute, “I should—what is it that Mama did? I forget.”
“Loved me!” answered Florence.
“No, no. Don’t I love you now, Floy? What is it?—Died. If you were in
India, I should die, Floy.”
She hurriedly put her work aside, and laid her head down on his pillow,
caressing him. And so would she, she said, if he were there. He would
be better soon.
“Oh! I am a great deal better now!” he answered. “I don’t mean that. I
mean that I should die of being so sorry and so lonely, Floy!”
Another time, in the same place, he fell asleep, and slept quietly for
a long time. Awaking suddenly, he listened, started up, and sat
listening.
Florence asked him what he thought he heard.
“I want to know what it says,” he answered, looking steadily in her
face. “The sea” Floy, what is it that it keeps on saying?”
She told him that it was only the noise of the rolling waves.
“Yes, yes,” he said. “But I know that they are always saying something.
Always the same thing. What place is over there?” He rose up, looking
eagerly at the horizon.
She told him that there was another country opposite, but he said he
didn’t mean that: he meant further away—farther away!
Very often afterwards, in the midst of their talk, he would break off,
to try to understand what it was that the waves were always saying; and
would rise up in his couch to look towards that invisible region, far
away.
CHAPTER IX.
In which the Wooden Midshipman gets into Trouble
That spice of romance and love of the marvellous, of which there was a
pretty strong infusion in the nature of young Walter Gay, and which the
guardianship of his Uncle, old Solomon Gills, had not very much
weakened by the waters of stern practical experience, was the occasion
of his attaching an uncommon and delightful interest to the adventure
of Florence with Good Mrs Brown. He pampered and cherished it in his
memory, especially that part of it with which he had been associated:
until it became the spoiled child of his fancy, and took its own way,
and did what it liked with it.
The recollection of those incidents, and his own share in them, may
have been made the more captivating, perhaps, by the weekly dreamings
of old Sol and Captain Cuttle on Sundays. Hardly a Sunday passed,
without mysterious references being made by one or other of those
worthy chums to Richard Whittington; and the latter gentleman had even
gone so far as to purchase a ballad of considerable antiquity, that had
long fluttered among many others, chiefly expressive of maritime
sentiments, on a dead wall in the Commercial Road: which poetical
performance set forth the courtship and nuptials of a promising young
coal-whipper with a certain “lovely Peg,” the accomplished daughter of
the master and part-owner of a Newcastle collier. In this stirring
legend, Captain Cuttle descried a profound metaphysical bearing on the
case of Walter and Florence; and it excited him so much, that on very
festive occasions, as birthdays and a few other non-Dominical holidays,
he would roar through the whole song in the little back parlour; making
an amazing shake on the word Pe-e-eg, with which every verse concluded,
in compliment to the heroine of the piece.
But a frank, free-spirited, open-hearted boy, is not much given to
analysing the nature of his own feelings, however strong their hold
upon him: and Walter would have found it difficult to decide this
point. He had a great affection for the wharf where he had encountered
Florence, and for the streets (albeit not enchanting in themselves) by
which they had come home. The shoes that had so often tumbled off by
the way, he preserved in his own room; and, sitting in the little back
parlour of an evening, he had drawn a whole gallery of fancy portraits
of Good Mrs Brown. It may be that he became a little smarter in his
dress after that memorable occasion; and he certainly liked in his
leisure time to walk towards that quarter of the town where Mr Dombey’s
house was situated, on the vague chance of passing little Florence in
the street. But the sentiment of all this was as boyish and innocent as
could be. Florence was very pretty, and it is pleasant to admire a
pretty face. Florence was defenceless and weak, and it was a proud
thought that he had been able to render her any protection and
assistance. Florence was the most grateful little creature in the
world, and it was delightful to see her bright gratitude beaming in her
face. Florence was neglected and coldly looked upon, and his breast was
full of youthful interest for the slighted child in her dull, stately
home.
Thus it came about that, perhaps some half-a-dozen times in the course