Dombey and Son
It turned out, however, that Mrs MacStinger had already changed her
course, and that she headed, as the Captain had remarked she often did,
in quite a new direction. For when they got downstairs, they found that
exemplary woman beating the mats on the doorsteps, with Alexander,
still upon the paving-stone, dimly looming through a fog of dust; and
so absorbed was Mrs MacStinger in her household occupation, that when
Captain Cuttle and his visitors passed, she beat the harder, and
neither by word nor gesture showed any consciousness of their vicinity.
The Captain was so well pleased with this easy escape—although the
effect of the door-mats on him was like a copious administration of
snuff, and made him sneeze until the tears ran down his face—that he
could hardly believe his good fortune; but more than once, between the
door and the hackney-coach, looked over his shoulder, with an obvious
apprehension of Mrs MacStinger’s giving chase yet.
However, they got to the corner of Brig Place without any molestation
from that terrible fire-ship; and the Captain mounting the
coach-box—for his gallantry would not allow him to ride inside with the
ladies, though besought to do so—piloted the driver on his course for
Captain Bunsby’s vessel, which was called the Cautious Clara, and was
lying hard by Ratcliffe.
Arrived at the wharf off which this great commander’s ship was jammed
in among some five hundred companions, whose tangled rigging looked
like monstrous cobwebs half swept down, Captain Cuttle appeared at the
coach-window, and invited Florence and Miss Nipper to accompany him on
board; observing that Bunsby was to the last degree soft-hearted in
respect of ladies, and that nothing would so much tend to bring his
expansive intellect into a state of harmony as their presentation to
the Cautious Clara.
Florence readily consented; and the Captain, taking her little hand in
his prodigious palm, led her, with a mixed expression of patronage,
paternity, pride, and ceremony, that was pleasant to see, over several
very dirty decks, until, coming to the Clara, they found that cautious
craft (which lay outside the tier) with her gangway removed, and
half-a-dozen feet of river interposed between herself and her nearest
neighbour. It appeared, from Captain Cuttle’s explanation, that the
great Bunsby, like himself, was cruelly treated by his landlady, and
that when her usage of him for the time being was so hard that he could
bear it no longer, he set this gulf between them as a last resource.
“Clara a-hoy!” cried the Captain, putting a hand to each side of his
mouth.
“A-hoy!” cried a boy, like the Captain’s echo, tumbling up from below.
“Bunsby aboard?” cried the Captain, hailing the boy in a stentorian
voice, as if he were half-a-mile off instead of two yards.
“Ay, ay!” cried the boy, in the same tone.
The boy then shoved out a plank to Captain Cuttle, who adjusted it
carefully, and led Florence across: returning presently for Miss
Nipper. So they stood upon the deck of the Cautious Clara, in whose
standing rigging, divers fluttering articles of dress were curing, in
company with a few tongues and some mackerel.
Immediately there appeared, coming slowly up above the bulk-head of the
cabin, another bulk-head—human, and very large—with one stationary eye
in the mahogany face, and one revolving one, on the principle of some
lighthouses. This head was decorated with shaggy hair, like oakum,
which had no governing inclination towards the north, east, west, or
south, but inclined to all four quarters of the compass, and to every
point upon it. The head was followed by a perfect desert of chin, and
by a shirt-collar and neckerchief, and by a dreadnought pilot-coat, and
by a pair of dreadnought pilot-trousers, whereof the waistband was so
very broad and high, that it became a succedaneum for a waistcoat:
being ornamented near the wearer’s breastbone with some massive wooden
buttons, like backgammon men. As the lower portions of these pantaloons
became revealed, Bunsby stood confessed; his hands in their pockets,
which were of vast size; and his gaze directed, not to Captain Cuttle
or the ladies, but the mast-head.
The profound appearance of this philosopher, who was bulky and strong,
and on whose extremely red face an expression of taciturnity sat
enthroned, not inconsistent with his character, in which that quality
was proudly conspicuous, almost daunted Captain Cuttle, though on
familiar terms with him. Whispering to Florence that Bunsby had never
in his life expressed surprise, and was considered not to know what it
meant, the Captain watched him as he eyed his mast-head, and afterwards
swept the horizon; and when the revolving eye seemed to be coming round
in his direction, said:
“Bunsby, my lad, how fares it?”
A deep, gruff, husky utterance, which seemed to have no connexion with
Bunsby, and certainly had not the least effect upon his face, replied,
“Ay, ay, shipmet, how goes it?” At the same time Bunsby’s right hand
and arm, emerging from a pocket, shook the Captain’s, and went back
again.
“Bunsby,” said the Captain, striking home at once, “here you are; a man
of mind, and a man as can give an opinion. Here’s a young lady as wants
to take that opinion, in regard of my friend Wal”r; likewise my t’other
friend, Sol Gills, which is a character for you to come within hail of,
being a man of science, which is the mother of invention, and knows no
law. Bunsby, will you wear, to oblige me, and come along with us?”
The great commander, who seemed by expression of his visage to be
always on the look-out for something in the extremest distance, and to
have no ocular knowledge of anything within ten miles, made no reply
whatever.
“Here is a man,” said the Captain, addressing himself to his fair
auditors, and indicating the commander with his outstretched hook,
“that has fell down, more than any man alive; that has had more
accidents happen to his own self than the Seamen’s Hospital to all
hands; that took as many spars and bars and bolts about the outside of
his head when he was young, as you’d want a order for on Chatham-yard
to build a pleasure yacht with; and yet that his opinions in that way,
it’s my belief, for there ain’t nothing like ’em afloat or ashore.”
The stolid commander appeared by a very slight vibration in his elbows,
to express some satisfaction in this encomium; but if his face had been
as distant as his gaze was, it could hardly have enlightened the
beholders less in reference to anything that was passing in his
thoughts.
“Shipmet,” said Bunsby, all of a sudden, and stooping down to look out
under some interposing spar, “what’ll the ladies drink?”
Captain Cuttle, whose delicacy was shocked by such an inquiry in
connection with Florence, drew the sage aside, and seeming to explain
in his ear, accompanied him below; where, that he might not take
offence, the Captain drank a dram himself, which Florence and Susan,
glancing down the open skylight, saw the sage, with difficulty finding
room for himself between his berth and a very little brass fireplace,
serve out for self and friend. They soon reappeared on deck, and
Captain Cuttle, triumphing in the success of his enterprise, conducted
Florence back to the coach, while Bunsby followed, escorting Miss
Nipper, whom he hugged upon the way (much to that young lady’s
indignation) with his pilot-coated arm, like a blue bear.
The Captain put his oracle inside, and gloried so much in having
secured him, and having got that mind into a hackney-coach, that he
could not refrain from often peeping in at Florence through the little
window behind the driver, and testifying his delight in smiles, and
also in taps upon his forehead, to hint to her that the brain of Bunsby
was hard at it. In the meantime, Bunsby, still hugging Miss Nipper (for
his friend, the Captain, had not exaggerated the softness of his
heart), uniformly preserved his gravity of deportment, and showed no
other consciousness of her or anything.
Uncle Sol, who had come home, received them at the door, and ushered
them immediately into the little back parlour: strangely altered by the
absence of Walter. On the table, and about the room, were the charts
and maps on which the heavy-hearted Instrument-maker had again and
again tracked the missing vessel across the sea, and on which, with a
pair of compasses that he still had in his hand, he had been measuring,
a minute before, how far she must have driven, to have driven here or
there: and trying to demonstrate that a long time must elapse before
hope was exhausted.
“Whether she can have run,” said Uncle Sol, looking wistfully over the
chart; “but no, that’s almost impossible or whether she can have been
forced by stress of weather,—but that’s not reasonably likely. Or
whether there is any hope she so far changed her course as—but even I
can hardly hope that!” With such broken suggestions, poor old Uncle Sol
roamed over the great sheet before him, and could not find a speck of
hopeful probability in it large enough to set one small point of the
compasses upon.
Florence saw immediately—it would have been difficult to help
seeing—that there was a singular, indescribable change in the old man,
and that while his manner was far more restless and unsettled than
usual, there was yet a curious, contradictory decision in it, that
perplexed her very much. She fancied once that he spoke wildly, and at
random; for on her saying she regretted not to have seen him when she
had been there before that morning, he at first replied that he had
been to see her, and directly afterwards seemed to wish to recall that
answer.
“You have been to see me?” said Florence. “Today?”
“Yes, my dear young lady,” returned Uncle Sol, looking at her and away
from her in a confused manner. “I wished to see you with my own eyes,
and to hear you with my own ears, once more before—” There he stopped.
“Before when? Before what?” said Florence, putting her hand upon his
arm.
“Did I say ‘before?’” replied old Sol. “If I did, I must have meant
before we should have news of my dear boy.”
“You are not well,” said Florence, tenderly. “You have been so very
anxious I am sure you are not well.”
“I am as well,” returned the old man, shutting up his right hand, and
holding it out to show her: “as well and firm as any man at my time of
life can hope to be. See! It’s steady. Is its master not as capable of
resolution and fortitude as many a younger man? I think so. We shall
see.”
There was that in his manner more than in his words, though they
remained with her too, which impressed Florence so much, that she would
have confided her uneasiness to Captain Cuttle at that moment, if the
Captain had not seized that moment for expounding the state of
circumstance, on which the opinion of the sagacious Bunsby was
requested, and entreating that profound authority to deliver the same.
Bunsby, whose eye continued to be addressed to somewhere about the
half-way house between London and Gravesend, two or three times put out
his rough right arm, as seeking to wind it for inspiration round the
fair form of Miss Nipper; but that young female having withdrawn
herself, in displeasure, to the opposite side of the table, the soft
heart of the Commander of the Cautious Clara met with no response to
its impulses. After sundry failures in this wise, the Commander,
addressing himself to nobody, thus spake; or rather the voice within
him said of its own accord, and quite independent of himself, as if he
were possessed by a gruff spirit:
“My name’s Jack Bunsby!”
“He was christened John,” cried the delighted Captain Cuttle. “Hear
him!”
“And what I says,” pursued the voice, after some deliberation, “I
stands to.”