Dombey and Son
yourself in my way? Haven’t you injured me enough already?”
“I have never injured you, James, wilfully.”
“You are my brother,” said the Manager. “That’s injury enough.”
“I wish I could undo it, James.”
“I wish you could and would.”
During this conversation, Walter had looked from one brother to the
other, with pain and amazement. He who was the Senior in years, and
Junior in the House, stood, with his eyes cast upon the ground, and his
head bowed, humbly listening to the reproaches of the other. Though
these were rendered very bitter by the tone and look with which they
were accompanied, and by the presence of Walter whom they so much
surprised and shocked, he entered no other protest against them than by
slightly raising his right hand in a deprecatory manner, as if he would
have said, “Spare me!” So, had they been blows, and he a brave man,
under strong constraint, and weakened by bodily suffering, he might
have stood before the executioner.
Generous and quick in all his emotions, and regarding himself as the
innocent occasion of these taunts, Walter now struck in, with all the
earnestness he felt.
“Mr Carker,” he said, addressing himself to the Manager. “Indeed,
indeed, this is my fault solely. In a kind of heedlessness, for which I
cannot blame myself enough, I have, I have no doubt, mentioned Mr
Carker the Junior much oftener than was necessary; and have allowed his
name sometimes to slip through my lips, when it was against your
expressed wish. But it has been my own mistake, Sir. We have never
exchanged one word upon the subject—very few, indeed, on any subject.
And it has not been,” added Walter, after a moment’s pause, “all
heedlessness on my part, Sir; for I have felt an interest in Mr Carker
ever since I have been here, and have hardly been able to help speaking
of him sometimes, when I have thought of him so much!”
Walter said this from his soul, and with the very breath of honour. For
he looked upon the bowed head, and the downcast eyes, and upraised
hand, and thought, “I have felt it; and why should I not avow it in
behalf of this unfriended, broken man!”
Mr Carker the Manager looked at him, as he spoke, and when he had
finished speaking, with a smile that seemed to divide his face into two
parts.
“You are an excitable youth, Gay,” he said; “and should endeavour to
cool down a little now, for it would be unwise to encourage feverish
predispositions. Be as cool as you can, Gay. Be as cool as you can. You
might have asked Mr John Carker himself (if you have not done so)
whether he claims to be, or is, an object of such strong interest.”
“James, do me justice,” said his brother. “I have claimed nothing; and
I claim nothing. Believe me, on my—”
“Honour?” said his brother, with another smile, as he warmed himself
before the fire.
“On my Me—on my fallen life!” returned the other, in the same low
voice, but with a deeper stress on his words than he had yet seemed
capable of giving them. “Believe me, I have held myself aloof, and kept
alone. This has been unsought by me. I have avoided him and everyone.
“Indeed, you have avoided me, Mr Carker,” said Walter, with the tears
rising to his eyes; so true was his compassion. “I know it, to my
disappointment and regret. When I first came here, and ever since, I am
sure I have tried to be as much your friend, as one of my age could
presume to be; but it has been of no use.
“And observe,” said the Manager, taking him up quickly, “it will be of
still less use, Gay, if you persist in forcing Mr John Carker’s name on
people’s attention. That is not the way to befriend Mr John Carker. Ask
him if he thinks it is.”
“It is no service to me,” said the brother. “It only leads to such a
conversation as the present, which I need not say I could have well
spared. No one can be a better friend to me:” he spoke here very
distinctly, as if he would impress it upon Walter: “than in forgetting
me, and leaving me to go my way, unquestioned and unnoticed.”
“Your memory not being retentive, Gay, of what you are told by others,”
said Mr Carker the Manager, warming himself with great and increased
satisfaction, “I thought it well that you should be told this from the
best authority,” nodding towards his brother. “You are not likely to
forget it now, I hope. That’s all, Gay. You can go.”
Walter passed out at the door, and was about to close it after him,
when, hearing the voices of the brothers again, and also the mention of
his own name, he stood irresolutely, with his hand upon the lock, and
the door ajar, uncertain whether to return or go away. In this position
he could not help overhearing what followed.
“Think of me more leniently, if you can, James,” said John Carker,
“when I tell you I have had—how could I help having, with my history,
written here”—striking himself upon the breast—“my whole heart awakened
by my observation of that boy, Walter Gay. I saw in him when he first
came here, almost my other self.”
“Your other self!” repeated the Manager, disdainfully.
“Not as I am, but as I was when I first came here too; as sanguine,
giddy, youthful, inexperienced; flushed with the same restless and
adventurous fancies; and full of the same qualities, fraught with the
same capacity of leading on to good or evil.”
“I hope not,” said his brother, with some hidden and sarcastic meaning
in his tone.
“You strike me sharply; and your hand is steady, and your thrust is
very deep,” returned the other, speaking (or so Walter thought) as if
some cruel weapon actually stabbed him as he spoke. “I imagined all
this when he was a boy. I believed it. It was a truth to me. I saw him
lightly walking on the edge of an unseen gulf where so many others walk
with equal gaiety, and from which—”
“The old excuse,” interrupted his brother, as he stirred the fire. “So
many. Go on. Say, so many fall.”
“From which ONE traveller fell,” returned the other, “who set forward,
on his way, a boy like him, and missed his footing more and more, and
slipped a little and a little lower; and went on stumbling still, until
he fell headlong and found himself below a shattered man. Think what I
suffered, when I watched that boy.”
“You have only yourself to thank for it,” returned the brother.
“Only myself,” he assented with a sigh. “I don’t seek to divide the
blame or shame.”
“You have divided the shame,” James Carker muttered through his teeth.
And, through so many and such close teeth, he could mutter well.
“Ah, James,” returned his brother, speaking for the first time in an
accent of reproach, and seeming, by the sound of his voice, to have
covered his face with his hands, “I have been, since then, a useful
foil to you. You have trodden on me freely in your climbing up. Don’t
spurn me with your heel!”
A silence ensued. After a time, Mr Carker the Manager was heard
rustling among his papers, as if he had resolved to bring the interview
to a conclusion. At the same time his brother withdrew nearer to the
door.
“That’s all,” he said. “I watched him with such trembling and such
fear, as was some little punishment to me, until he passed the place
where I first fell; and then, though I had been his father, I believe I
never could have thanked God more devoutly. I didn’t dare to warn him,
and advise him; but if I had seen direct cause, I would have shown him
my example. I was afraid to be seen speaking with him, lest it should
be thought I did him harm, and tempted him to evil, and corrupted him:
or lest I really should. There may be such contagion in me; I don’t
know. Piece out my history, in connexion with young Walter Gay, and
what he has made me feel; and think of me more leniently, James, if you
can.”
With these words he came out to where Walter was standing. He turned a
little paler when he saw him there, and paler yet when Walter caught
him by the hand, and said in a whisper:
“Mr Carker, pray let me thank you! Let me say how much I feel for you!
How sorry I am, to have been the unhappy cause of all this! How I
almost look upon you now as my protector and guardian! How very, very
much, I feel obliged to you and pity you!” said Walter, squeezing both
his hands, and hardly knowing, in his agitation, what he did or said.
Mr Morfin’s room being close at hand and empty, and the door wide open,
they moved thither by one accord: the passage being seldom free from
someone passing to or fro. When they were there, and Walter saw in Mr
Carker’s face some traces of the emotion within, he almost felt as if
he had never seen the face before; it was so greatly changed.
“Walter,” he said, laying his hand on his shoulder. “I am far removed
from you, and may I ever be. Do you know what I am?”
“What you are!” appeared to hang on Walter’s lips, as he regarded him
attentively.
“It was begun,” said Carker, “before my twenty-first birthday—led up
to, long before, but not begun till near that time. I had robbed them
when I came of age. I robbed them afterwards. Before my twenty-second
birthday, it was all found out; and then, Walter, from all men’s
society, I died.”
Again his last few words hung trembling upon Walter’s lips, but he
could neither utter them, nor any of his own.
“The House was very good to me. May Heaven reward the old man for his
forbearance! This one, too, his son, who was then newly in the Firm,
where I had held great trust! I was called into that room which is now
his—I have never entered it since—and came out, what you know me. For
many years I sat in my present seat, alone as now, but then a known and
recognised example to the rest. They were all merciful to me, and I
lived. Time has altered that part of my poor expiation; and I think,
except the three heads of the House, there is no one here who knows my
story rightly. Before the little boy grows up, and has it told to him,
my corner may be vacant. I would rather that it might be so! This is
the only change to me since that day, when I left all youth, and hope,
and good men’s company, behind me in that room. God bless you, Walter!
Keep you, and all dear to you, in honesty, or strike them dead!”
Some recollection of his trembling from head to foot, as if with
excessive cold, and of his bursting into tears, was all that Walter
could add to this, when he tried to recall exactly what had passed
between them.
When Walter saw him next, he was bending over his desk in his old
silent, drooping, humbled way. Then, observing him at his work, and
feeling how resolved he evidently was that no further intercourse
should arise between them, and thinking again and again on all he had
seen and heard that morning in so short a time, in connexion with the
history of both the Carkers, Walter could hardly believe that he was
under orders for the West Indies, and would soon be lost to Uncle Sol,
and Captain Cuttle, and to glimpses few and far between of Florence
Dombey—no, he meant Paul—and to all he loved, and liked, and looked
for, in his daily life.
But it was true, and the news had already penetrated to the outer
office; for while he sat with a heavy heart, pondering on these things,
and resting his head upon his arm, Perch the messenger, descending from
his mahogany bracket, and jogging his elbow, begged his pardon, but
wished to say in his ear, Did he think he could arrange to send home to
England a jar of preserved Ginger, cheap, for Mrs Perch’s own eating,
in the course of her recovery from her next confinement?
CHAPTER XIV.
Paul grows more and more Old-fashioned, and goes Home for the Holidays
When the Midsummer vacation approached, no indecent manifestations of
joy were exhibited by the leaden-eyed young gentlemen assembled at
Doctor Blimber’s. Any such violent expression as “breaking up,” would
have been quite inapplicable to that polite establishment. The young