Dombey and Son
wood, was ever more solitary and deserted to the fancy, than was her
father’s mansion in its grim reality, as it stood lowering on the
street: always by night, when lights were shining from neighbouring
windows, a blot upon its scanty brightness; always by day, a frown upon
its never-smiling face.
There were not two dragon sentries keeping ward before the gate of this
above, as in magic legend are usually found on duty over the wronged
innocence imprisoned; but besides a glowering visage, with its thin
lips parted wickedly, that surveyed all comers from above the archway
of the door, there was a monstrous fantasy of rusty iron, curling and
twisting like a petrifaction of an arbour over threshold, budding in
spikes and corkscrew points, and bearing, one on either side, two
ominous extinguishers, that seemed to say, “Who enter here, leave light
behind!” There were no talismanic characters engraven on the portal,
but the house was now so neglected in appearance, that boys chalked the
railings and the pavement—particularly round the corner where the side
wall was—and drew ghosts on the stable door; and being sometimes driven
off by Mr Towlinson, made portraits of him, in return, with his ears
growing out horizontally from under his hat. Noise ceased to be, within
the shadow of the roof. The brass band that came into the street once a
week, in the morning, never brayed a note in at those windows; but all
such company, down to a poor little piping organ of weak intellect,
with an imbecile party of automaton dancers, waltzing in and out at
folding-doors, fell off from it with one accord, and shunned it as a
hopeless place.
The spell upon it was more wasting than the spell that used to set
enchanted houses sleeping once upon a time, but left their waking
freshness unimpaired.
The passive desolation of disuse was everywhere silently manifest about
it. Within doors, curtains, drooping heavily, lost their old folds and
shapes, and hung like cumbrous palls. Hecatombs of furniture, still
piled and covered up, shrunk like imprisoned and forgotten men, and
changed insensibly. Mirrors were dim as with the breath of years.
Patterns of carpets faded and became perplexed and faint, like the
memory of those years’ trifling incidents. Boards, starting at unwonted
footsteps, creaked and shook. Keys rusted in the locks of doors. Damp
started on the walls, and as the stains came out, the pictures seemed
to go in and secrete themselves. Mildew and mould began to lurk in
closets. Fungus trees grew in corners of the cellars. Dust accumulated,
nobody knew whence nor how; spiders, moths, and grubs were heard of
every day. An exploratory blackbeetle now and then was found immovable
upon the stairs, or in an upper room, as wondering how he got there.
Rats began to squeak and scuffle in the night time, through dark
galleries they mined behind the panelling.
The dreary magnificence of the state rooms, seen imperfectly by the
doubtful light admitted through closed shutters, would have answered
well enough for an enchanted abode. Such as the tarnished paws of
gilded lions, stealthily put out from beneath their wrappers; the
marble lineaments of busts on pedestals, fearfully revealing themselves
through veils; the clocks that never told the time, or, if wound up by
any chance, told it wrong, and struck unearthly numbers, which are not
upon the dial; the accidental tinklings among the pendant lustres, more
startling than alarm-bells; the softened sounds and laggard air that
made their way among these objects, and a phantom crowd of others,
shrouded and hooded, and made spectral of shape. But, besides, there
was the great staircase, where the lord of the place so rarely set his
foot, and by which his little child had gone up to Heaven. There were
other staircases and passages where no one went for weeks together;
there were two closed rooms associated with dead members of the family,
and with whispered recollections of them; and to all the house but
Florence, there was a gentle figure moving through the solitude and
gloom, that gave to every lifeless thing a touch of present human
interest and wonder.
For Florence lived alone in the deserted house, and day succeeded day,
and still she lived alone, and the cold walls looked down upon her with
a vacant stare, as if they had a Gorgon-like mind to stare her youth
and beauty into stone.
The grass began to grow upon the roof, and in the crevices of the
basement paving. A scaly crumbling vegetation sprouted round the
window-sills. Fragments of mortar lost their hold upon the insides of
the unused chimneys, and came dropping down. The two trees with the
smoky trunks were blighted high up, and the withered branches
domineered above the leaves, Through the whole building white had
turned yellow, yellow nearly black; and since the time when the poor
lady died, it had slowly become a dark gap in the long monotonous
street.
But Florence bloomed there, like the king’s fair daughter in the story.
Her books, her music, and her daily teachers, were her only real
companions, Susan Nipper and Diogenes excepted: of whom the former, in
her attendance on the studies of her young mistress, began to grow
quite learned herself, while the latter, softened possibly by the same
influences, would lay his head upon the window-ledge, and placidly open
and shut his eyes upon the street, all through a summer morning;
sometimes pricking up his head to look with great significance after
some noisy dog in a cart, who was barking his way along, and sometimes,
with an exasperated and unaccountable recollection of his supposed
enemy in the neighbourhood, rushing to the door, whence, after a
deafening disturbance, he would come jogging back with a ridiculous
complacency that belonged to him, and lay his jaw upon the window-ledge
again, with the air of a dog who had done a public service.
So Florence lived in her wilderness of a home, within the circle of her
innocent pursuits and thoughts, and nothing harmed her. She could go
down to her father’s rooms now, and think of him, and suffer her loving
heart humbly to approach him, without fear of repulse. She could look
upon the objects that had surrounded him in his sorrow, and could
nestle near his chair, and not dread the glance that she so well
remembered. She could render him such little tokens of her duty and
service, as putting everything in order for him with her own hands,
binding little nosegays for table, changing them as one by one they
withered and he did not come back, preparing something for him every
day, and leaving some timid mark of her presence near his usual seat.
Today, it was a little painted stand for his watch; tomorrow she would
be afraid to leave it, and would substitute some other trifle of her
making not so likely to attract his eye. Waking in the night, perhaps,
she would tremble at the thought of his coming home and angrily
rejecting it, and would hurry down with slippered feet and quickly
beating heart, and bring it away. At another time, she would only lay
her face upon his desk, and leave a kiss there, and a tear.
Still no one knew of this. Unless the household found it out when she
was not there—and they all held Mr Dombey’s rooms in awe—it was as deep
a secret in her breast as what had gone before it. Florence stole into
those rooms at twilight, early in the morning, and at times when meals
were served downstairs. And although they were in every nook the better
and the brighter for her care, she entered and passed out as quietly as
any sunbeam, opting that she left her light behind.
Shadowy company attended Florence up and down the echoing house, and
sat with her in the dismantled rooms. As if her life were an enchanted
vision, there arose out of her solitude ministering thoughts, that made
it fanciful and unreal. She imagined so often what her life would have
been if her father could have loved her and she had been a favourite
child, that sometimes, for the moment, she almost believed it was so,
and, borne on by the current of that pensive fiction, seemed to
remember how they had watched her brother in his grave together; how
they had freely shared his heart between them; how they were united in
the dear remembrance of him; how they often spoke about him yet; and
her kind father, looking at her gently, told her of their common hope
and trust in God. At other times she pictured to herself her mother yet
alive. And oh the happiness of falling on her neck, and clinging to her
with the love and confidence of all her soul! And oh the desolation of
the solitary house again, with evening coming on, and no one there!
But there was one thought, scarcely shaped out to herself, yet fervent
and strong within her, that upheld Florence when she strove and filled
her true young heart, so sorely tried, with constancy of purpose. Into
her mind, as into all others contending with the great affliction of
our mortal nature, there had stolen solemn wonderings and hopes,
arising in the dim world beyond the present life, and murmuring, like
faint music, of recognition in the far-off land between her brother and
her mother: of some present consciousness in both of her: some love and
commiseration for her: and some knowledge of her as she went her way
upon the earth. It was a soothing consolation to Florence to give
shelter to these thoughts, until one day—it was soon after she had last
seen her father in his own room, late at night—the fancy came upon her,
that, in weeping for his alienated heart, she might stir the spirits of
the dead against him. Wild, weak, childish, as it may have been to
think so, and to tremble at the half-formed thought, it was the impulse
of her loving nature; and from that hour Florence strove against the
cruel wound in her breast, and tried to think of him whose hand had
made it, only with hope.
Her father did not know—she held to it from that time—how much she
loved him. She was very young, and had no mother, and had never
learned, by some fault or misfortune, how to express to him that she
loved him. She would be patient, and would try to gain that art in
time, and win him to a better knowledge of his only child.
This became the purpose of her life. The morning sun shone down upon
the faded house, and found the resolution bright and fresh within the
bosom of its solitary mistress, Through all the duties of the day, it
animated her; for Florence hoped that the more she knew, and the more
accomplished she became, the more glad he would be when he came to know
and like her. Sometimes she wondered, with a swelling heart and rising
tear, whether she was proficient enough in anything to surprise him
when they should become companions. Sometimes she tried to think if
there were any kind of knowledge that would bespeak his interest more
readily than another. Always: at her books, her music, and her work: in
her morning walks, and in her nightly prayers: she had her engrossing
aim in view. Strange study for a child, to learn the road to a hard
parent’s heart!
There were many careless loungers through the street, as the summer
evening deepened into night, who glanced across the road at the sombre
house, and saw the youthful figure at the window, such a contrast to
it, looking upward at the stars as they began to shine, who would have
slept the worse if they had known on what design she mused so
steadfastly. The reputation of the mansion as a haunted house, would
not have been the gayer with some humble dwellers elsewhere, who were
struck by its external gloom in passing and repassing on their daily
avocations, and so named it, if they could have read its story in the
darkening face. But Florence held her sacred purpose, unsuspected and
unaided: and studied only how to bring her father to the understanding