Dombey and Son
clock as he went along. It was soon gone again to return no more that
day; and the bands of music and the straggling Punch’s shows going
after it, left it a prey to the most dismal of organs, and white mice;
with now and then a porcupine, to vary the entertainments; until the
butlers whose families were dining out, began to stand at the
house-doors in the twilight, and the lamp-lighter made his nightly
failure in attempting to brighten up the street with gas.
It was as blank a house inside as outside. When the funeral was over,
Mr Dombey ordered the furniture to be covered up—perhaps to preserve it
for the son with whom his plans were all associated—and the rooms to be
ungarnished, saving such as he retained for himself on the ground
floor. Accordingly, mysterious shapes were made of tables and chairs,
heaped together in the middle of rooms, and covered over with great
winding-sheets. Bell-handles, window-blinds, and looking-glasses, being
papered up in journals, daily and weekly, obtruded fragmentary accounts
of deaths and dreadful murders. Every chandelier or lustre, muffled in
holland, looked like a monstrous tear depending from the ceiling’s eye.
Odours, as from vaults and damp places, came out of the chimneys. The
dead and buried lady was awful in a picture-frame of ghastly bandages.
Every gust of wind that rose, brought eddying round the corner from the
neighbouring mews, some fragments of the straw that had been strewn
before the house when she was ill, mildewed remains of which were still
cleaving to the neighbourhood: and these, being always drawn by some
invisible attraction to the threshold of the dirty house to let
immediately opposite, addressed a dismal eloquence to Mr Dombey’s
windows.
The apartments which Mr Dombey reserved for his own inhabiting, were
attainable from the hall, and consisted of a sitting-room; a library,
which was in fact a dressing-room, so that the smell of hot-pressed
paper, vellum, morocco, and Russia leather, contended in it with the
smell of divers pairs of boots; and a kind of conservatory or little
glass breakfast-room beyond, commanding a prospect of the trees before
mentioned, and, generally speaking, of a few prowling cats. These three
rooms opened upon one another. In the morning, when Mr Dombey was at
his breakfast in one or other of the two first-mentioned of them, as
well as in the afternoon when he came home to dinner, a bell was rung
for Richards to repair to this glass chamber, and there walk to and fro
with her young charge. From the glimpses she caught of Mr Dombey at
these times, sitting in the dark distance, looking out towards the
infant from among the dark heavy furniture—the house had been inhabited
for years by his father, and in many of its appointments was
old-fashioned and grim—she began to entertain ideas of him in his
solitary state, as if he were a lone prisoner in a cell, or a strange
apparition that was not to be accosted or understood. Mr Dombey came to
be, in the course of a few days, invested in his own person, to her
simple thinking, with all the mystery and gloom of his house. As she
walked up and down the glass room, or sat hushing the baby there—which
she very often did for hours together, when the dusk was closing in,
too—she would sometimes try to pierce the gloom beyond, and make out
how he was looking and what he was doing. Sensible that she was plainly
to be seen by him, however, she never dared to pry in that direction
but very furtively and for a moment at a time. Consequently she made
out nothing, and Mr Dombey in his den remained a very shade.
Little Paul Dombey’s foster-mother had led this life herself, and had
carried little Paul through it for some weeks; and had returned
upstairs one day from a melancholy saunter through the dreary rooms of
state (she never went out without Mrs Chick, who called on fine
mornings, usually accompanied by Miss Tox, to take her and Baby for an
airing—or in other words, to march them gravely up and down the
pavement, like a walking funeral); when, as she was sitting in her own
room, the door was slowly and quietly opened, and a dark-eyed little
girl looked in.
“It’s Miss Florence come home from her aunt’s, no doubt,” thought
Richards, who had never seen the child before. “Hope I see you well,
Miss.”
“Is that my brother?” asked the child, pointing to the Baby.
“Yes, my pretty,” answered Richards. “Come and kiss him.”
But the child, instead of advancing, looked her earnestly in the face,
and said:
“What have you done with my Mama?”
“Lord bless the little creeter!” cried Richards, “what a sad question!
I done? Nothing, Miss.”
“What have they done with my Mama?” inquired the child, with exactly
the same look and manner.
“I never saw such a melting thing in all my life!” said Richards, who
naturally substituted for this child one of her own, inquiring for
herself in like circumstances. “Come nearer here, my dear Miss! Don’t
be afraid of me.”
“I am not afraid of you,” said the child, drawing nearer. “But I want
to know what they have done with my Mama.”
Her heart swelled so as she stood before the woman, looking into her
eyes, that she was fain to press her little hand upon her breast and
hold it there. Yet there was a purpose in the child that prevented both
her slender figure and her searching gaze from faltering.
“My darling,” said Richards, “you wear that pretty black frock in
remembrance of your Mama.”
“I can remember my Mama,” returned the child, with tears springing to
her eyes, “in any frock.”
“But people put on black, to remember people when they’re gone.”
“Where gone?” asked the child.
“Come and sit down by me,” said Richards, “and I’ll tell you a story.”
With a quick perception that it was intended to relate to what she had
asked, little Florence laid aside the bonnet she had held in her hand
until now, and sat down on a stool at the Nurse’s feet, looking up into
her face.
“Once upon a time,” said Richards, “there was a lady—a very good lady,
and her little daughter dearly loved her.”
“A very good lady and her little daughter dearly loved her,” repeated
the child.
“Who, when God thought it right that it should be so, was taken ill and
died.”
The child shuddered.
“Died, never to be seen again by anyone on earth, and was buried in the
ground where the trees grow.”
“The cold ground?” said the child, shuddering again.
“No! The warm ground,” returned Polly, seizing her advantage, “where
the ugly little seeds turn into beautiful flowers, and into grass, and
corn, and I don’t know what all besides. Where good people turn into
bright angels, and fly away to Heaven!”
The child, who had dropped her head, raised it again, and sat looking
at her intently.
“So; let me see,” said Polly, not a little flurried between this
earnest scrutiny, her desire to comfort the child, her sudden success,
and her very slight confidence in her own powers. “So, when this lady
died, wherever they took her, or wherever they put her, she went to
GOD! and she prayed to Him, this lady did,” said Polly, affecting
herself beyond measure; being heartily in earnest, “to teach her little
daughter to be sure of that in her heart: and to know that she was
happy there and loved her still: and to hope and try—Oh, all her
life—to meet her there one day, never, never, never to part any more.”
“It was my Mama!” exclaimed the child, springing up, and clasping her
round the neck.
“And the child’s heart,” said Polly, drawing her to her breast: “the
little daughter’s heart was so full of the truth of this, that even
when she heard it from a strange nurse that couldn’t tell it right, but
was a poor mother herself and that was all, she found a comfort in
it—didn’t feel so lonely—sobbed and cried upon her bosom—took kindly to
the baby lying in her lap—and—there, there, there!” said Polly,
smoothing the child’s curls and dropping tears upon them. “There, poor
dear!”
“Oh well, Miss Floy! And won’t your Pa be angry neither!” cried a quick
voice at the door, proceeding from a short, brown, womanly girl of
fourteen, with a little snub nose, and black eyes like jet beads. “When
it was “tickerlerly given out that you wasn’t to go and worrit the wet
nurse.”
“She don’t worry me,” was the surprised rejoinder of Polly. “I am very
fond of children.”
“Oh! but begging your pardon, Mrs Richards, that don’t matter, you
know,” returned the black-eyed girl, who was so desperately sharp and
biting that she seemed to make one’s eyes water. “I may be very fond of
pennywinkles, Mrs Richards, but it don’t follow that I’m to have ’em
for tea.”
“Well, it don’t matter,” said Polly.
“Oh, thank’ee, Mrs Richards, don’t it!” returned the sharp girl.
“Remembering, however, if you’ll be so good, that Miss Floy’s under my
charge, and Master Paul’s under your’n.”
“But still we needn’t quarrel,” said Polly.
“Oh no, Mrs Richards,” rejoined Spitfire. “Not at all, I don’t wish it,
we needn’t stand upon that footing, Miss Floy being a permanency,
Master Paul a temporary.” Spitfire made use of none but comma pauses;
shooting out whatever she had to say in one sentence, and in one
breath, if possible.
“Miss Florence has just come home, hasn’t she?” asked Polly.
“Yes, Mrs Richards, just come, and here, Miss Floy, before you’ve been
in the house a quarter of an hour, you go a smearing your wet face
against the expensive mourning that Mrs Richards is a wearing for your
Ma!” With this remonstrance, young Spitfire, whose real name was Susan
Nipper, detached the child from her new friend by a wrench—as if she
were a tooth. But she seemed to do it, more in the excessively sharp
exercise of her official functions, than with any deliberate
unkindness.
“She’ll be quite happy, now she has come home again,” said Polly,
nodding to her with an encouraging smile upon her wholesome face, “and
will be so pleased to see her dear Papa tonight.”
“Lork, Mrs Richards!” cried Miss Nipper, taking up her words with a
jerk. “Don’t. See her dear Papa indeed! I should like to see her do
it!”
“Won’t she then?” asked Polly.
“Lork, Mrs Richards, no, her Pa’s a deal too wrapped up in somebody
else, and before there was a somebody else to be wrapped up in she
never was a favourite, girls are thrown away in this house, Mrs
Richards, I assure you.”
The child looked quickly from one nurse to the other, as if she
understood and felt what was said.
“You surprise me!” cried Polly. “Hasn’t Mr Dombey seen her since—”
“No,” interrupted Susan Nipper. “Not once since, and he hadn’t hardly
set his eyes upon her before that for months and months, and I don’t
think he’d have known her for his own child if he had met her in the
streets, or would know her for his own child if he was to meet her in
the streets to-morrow, Mrs Richards, as to me,” said Spitfire, with a
giggle, “I doubt if he’s aweer of my existence.”
“Pretty dear!” said Richards; meaning, not Miss Nipper, but the little
Florence.
“Oh! there’s a Tartar within a hundred miles of where we’re now in
conversation, I can tell you, Mrs Richards, present company always
excepted too,” said Susan Nipper; “wish you good morning, Mrs Richards,
now Miss Floy, you come along with me, and don’t go hanging back like a
naughty wicked child that judgments is no example to, don’t!”
In spite of being thus adjured, and in spite also of some hauling on
the part of Susan Nipper, tending towards the dislocation of her right
shoulder, little Florence broke away, and kissed her new friend,
affectionately.
“Oh dear! after it was given out so “tickerlerly, that Mrs Richards
wasn’t to be made free with!” exclaimed Susan. “Very well, Miss Floy!”
“God bless the sweet thing!” said Richards, “Good-bye, dear!”