Dombey and Son
“I heerd it,” said Toodle, “but I don’t know as I understood it rightly
Sir, “account of being no scholar, and the words being—ask your
pardon—rayther high. But Polly heerd it. It’s all right.”
“As you appear to leave everything to her,” said Mr Dombey, frustrated
in his intention of impressing his views still more distinctly on the
husband, as the stronger character, “I suppose it is of no use my
saying anything to you.”
“Not a bit,” said Toodle. “Polly heerd it. She’s awake, Sir.”
“I won’t detain you any longer then,” returned Mr Dombey, disappointed.
“Where have you worked all your life?”
“Mostly underground, Sir, “till I got married. I come to the level
then. I’m a going on one of these here railroads when they comes into
full play.”
As he added in one of his hoarse whispers, “We means to bring up little
Biler to that line,” Mr Dombey inquired haughtily who little Biler was.
“The eldest on ’em, Sir,” said Toodle, with a smile. “It ain’t a common
name. Sermuchser that when he was took to church the gen’lm’n said, it
wamm’t a chris’en one, and he couldn’t give it. But we always calls him
Biler just the same. For we don’t mean no harm. Not we.”
“Do you mean to say, Man,” inquired Mr Dombey; looking at him with
marked displeasure, “that you have called a child after a boiler?”
“No, no, Sir,” returned Toodle, with a tender consideration for his
mistake. “I should hope not! No, Sir. Arter a BILER Sir. The
Steamingine was a’most as good as a godfather to him, and so we called
him Biler, don’t you see!”
As the last straw breaks the laden camel’s back, this piece of
information crushed the sinking spirits of Mr Dombey. He motioned his
child’s foster-father to the door, who departed by no means
unwillingly: and then turning the key, paced up and down the room in
solitary wretchedness.
It would be harsh, and perhaps not altogether true, to say of him that
he felt these rubs and gratings against his pride more keenly than he
had felt his wife’s death: but certainly they impressed that event upon
him with new force, and communicated to it added weight and bitterness.
It was a rude shock to his sense of property in his child, that these
people—the mere dust of the earth, as he thought them—should be
necessary to him; and it was natural that in proportion as he felt
disturbed by it, he should deplore the occurrence which had made them
so. For all his starched, impenetrable dignity and composure, he wiped
blinding tears from his eyes as he paced up and down his room; and
often said, with an emotion of which he would not, for the world, have
had a witness, “Poor little fellow!”
It may have been characteristic of Mr Dombey’s pride, that he pitied
himself through the child. Not poor me. Not poor widower, confiding by
constraint in the wife of an ignorant Hind who has been working “mostly
underground” all his life, and yet at whose door Death had never
knocked, and at whose poor table four sons daily sit—but poor little
fellow!
Those words being on his lips, it occurred to him—and it is an instance
of the strong attraction with which his hopes and fears and all his
thoughts were tending to one centre—that a great temptation was being
placed in this woman’s way. Her infant was a boy too. Now, would it be
possible for her to change them?
Though he was soon satisfied that he had dismissed the idea as romantic
and unlikely—though possible, there was no denying—he could not help
pursuing it so far as to entertain within himself a picture of what his
condition would be, if he should discover such an imposture when he was
grown old. Whether a man so situated would be able to pluck away the
result of so many years of usage, confidence, and belief, from the
impostor, and endow a stranger with it?
But it was idle speculating thus. It couldn’t happen. In a moment
afterwards he determined that it could, but that such women were
constantly observed, and had no opportunity given them for the
accomplishment of such a design, even when they were so wicked as to
entertain it. In another moment, he was remembering how few such cases
seemed to have ever happened. In another moment he was wondering
whether they ever happened and were not found out.
As his unusual emotion subsided, these misgivings gradually melted
away, though so much of their shadow remained behind, that he was
constant in his resolution to look closely after Richards himself,
without appearing to do so. Being now in an easier frame of mind, he
regarded the woman’s station as rather an advantageous circumstance
than otherwise, by placing, in itself, a broad distance between her and
the child, and rendering their separation easy and natural. Thence he
passed to the contemplation of the future glories of Dombey and Son,
and dismissed the memory of his wife, for the time being, with a
tributary sigh or two.
Meanwhile terms were ratified and agreed upon between Mrs Chick and
Richards, with the assistance of Miss Tox; and Richards being with much
ceremony invested with the Dombey baby, as if it were an Order,
resigned her own, with many tears and kisses, to Jemima. Glasses of
wine were then produced, to sustain the drooping spirits of the family;
and Miss Tox, busying herself in dispensing “tastes” to the younger
branches, bred them up to their father’s business with such surprising
expedition, that she made chokers of four of them in a quarter of a
minute.
“You’ll take a glass yourself, Sir, won’t you?” said Miss Tox, as
Toodle appeared.
“Thankee, Mum,” said Toodle, “since you are suppressing.”
“And you’re very glad to leave your dear good wife in such a
comfortable home, ain’t you, Sir?” said Miss Tox, nodding and winking
at him stealthily.
“No, Mum,” said Toodle. “Here’s wishing of her back agin.”
Polly cried more than ever at this. So Mrs Chick, who had her matronly
apprehensions that this indulgence in grief might be prejudicial to the
little Dombey (“acid, indeed,” she whispered Miss Tox), hastened to the
rescue.
“Your little child will thrive charmingly with your sister Jemima,
Richards,” said Mrs Chick; “and you have only to make an effort—this is
a world of effort, you know, Richards—to be very happy indeed. You have
been already measured for your mourning, haven’t you, Richards?”
“Ye—es, Ma’am,” sobbed Polly.
“And it’ll fit beautifully. I know,” said Mrs Chick, “for the same
young person has made me many dresses. The very best materials, too!”
“Lor, you’ll be so smart,” said Miss Tox, “that your husband won’t know
you; will you, Sir?”
“I should know her,” said Toodle, gruffly, “anyhows and anywheres.”
Toodle was evidently not to be bought over.
“As to living, Richards, you know,” pursued Mrs Chick, “why, the very
best of everything will be at your disposal. You will order your little
dinner every day; and anything you take a fancy to, I’m sure will be as
readily provided as if you were a Lady.”
“Yes to be sure!” said Miss Tox, keeping up the ball with great
sympathy. “And as to porter!—quite unlimited, will it not, Louisa?”
“Oh, certainly!” returned Mrs Chick in the same tone. “With a little
abstinence, you know, my dear, in point of vegetables.”
“And pickles, perhaps,” suggested Miss Tox.
“With such exceptions,” said Louisa, “she’ll consult her choice
entirely, and be under no restraint at all, my love.”
“And then, of course, you know,” said Miss Tox, “however fond she is of
her own dear little child—and I’m sure, Louisa, you don’t blame her for
being fond of it?”
“Oh no!” cried Mrs Chick, benignantly.
“Still,” resumed Miss Tox, “she naturally must be interested in her
young charge, and must consider it a privilege to see a little cherub
connected with the superior classes, gradually unfolding itself from
day to day at one common fountain—is it not so, Louisa?”
“Most undoubtedly!” said Mrs Chick. “You see, my love, she’s already
quite contented and comfortable, and means to say goodbye to her sister
Jemima and her little pets, and her good honest husband, with a light
heart and a smile; don’t she, my dear?”
“Oh yes!” cried Miss Tox. “To be sure she does!”
Notwithstanding which, however, poor Polly embraced them all round in
great distress, and coming to her spouse at last, could not make up her
mind to part from him, until he gently disengaged himself, at the close
of the following allegorical piece of consolation:
“Polly, old “ooman, whatever you do, my darling, hold up your head and
fight low. That’s the only rule as I know on, that’ll carry anyone
through life. You always have held up your head and fought low, Polly.
Do it now, or Bricks is no longer so. God bless you, Polly! Me and
J’mima will do your duty by you; and with relating to your’n, hold up
your head and fight low, Polly, and you can’t go wrong!”
Fortified by this golden secret, Polly finally ran away to avoid any
more particular leave-taking between herself and the children. But the
stratagem hardly succeeded as well as it deserved; for the smallest boy
but one divining her intent, immediately began swarming upstairs after
her—if that word of doubtful etymology be admissible—on his arms and
legs; while the eldest (known in the family by the name of Biler, in
remembrance of the steam engine) beat a demoniacal tattoo with his
boots, expressive of grief; in which he was joined by the rest of the
family.
A quantity of oranges and halfpence thrust indiscriminately on each
young Toodle, checked the first violence of their regret, and the
family were speedily transported to their own home, by means of the
hackney-coach kept in waiting for that purpose. The children, under the
guardianship of Jemima, blocked up the window, and dropped out oranges
and halfpence all the way along. Mr Toodle himself preferred to ride
behind among the spikes, as being the mode of conveyance to which he
was best accustomed.
CHAPTER III.
In which Mr Dombey, as a Man and a Father, is seen at the Head of the
Home-Department
The funeral of the deceased lady having been “performed” to the entire
satisfaction of the undertaker, as well as of the neighbourhood at
large, which is generally disposed to be captious on such a point, and
is prone to take offence at any omissions or short-comings in the
ceremonies, the various members of Mr Dombey’s household subsided into
their several places in the domestic system. That small world, like the
great one out of doors, had the capacity of easily forgetting its dead;
and when the cook had said she was a quiet-tempered lady, and the
house-keeper had said it was the common lot, and the butler had said
who’d have thought it, and the housemaid had said she couldn’t hardly
believe it, and the footman had said it seemed exactly like a dream,
they had quite worn the subject out, and began to think their mourning
was wearing rusty too.
On Richards, who was established upstairs in a state of honourable
captivity, the dawn of her new life seemed to break cold and grey. Mr
Dombey’s house was a large one, on the shady side of a tall, dark,
dreadfully genteel street in the region between Portland Place and
Bryanstone Square. It was a corner house, with great wide areas
containing cellars frowned upon by barred windows, and leered at by
crooked-eyed doors leading to dustbins. It was a house of dismal state,
with a circular back to it, containing a whole suite of drawing-rooms
looking upon a gravelled yard, where two gaunt trees, with blackened
trunks and branches, rattled rather than rustled, their leaves were so
smoked-dried. The summer sun was never on the street, but in the
morning about breakfast-time, when it came with the water-carts and the
old clothes men, and the people with geraniums, and the
umbrella-mender, and the man who trilled the little bell of the Dutch