Dombey and Son
opened it and read as follows:—
“‘My dear Ned Cuttle. Enclosed is my will!’” The Captain turned it
over, with a doubtful look—“"and Testament’—Where’s the Testament?”
said the Captain, instantly impeaching the ill-fated Grinder. “What
have you done with that, my lad?”
“I never see it,” whimpered Rob. “Don’t keep on suspecting an innocent
lad, Captain. I never touched the Testament.”
Captain Cuttle shook his head, implying that somebody must be made
answerable for it; and gravely proceeded:
“‘Which don’t break open for a year, or until you have decisive
intelligence of my dear Walter, who is dear to you, Ned, too, I am
sure.’” The Captain paused and shook his head in some emotion; then, as
a re-establishment of his dignity in this trying position, looked with
exceeding sternness at the Grinder. “‘If you should never hear of me,
or see me more, Ned, remember an old friend as he will remember you to
the last—kindly; and at least until the period I have mentioned has
expired, keep a home in the old place for Walter. There are no debts,
the loan from Dombey’s House is paid off and all my keys I send with
this. Keep this quiet, and make no inquiry for me; it is useless. So no
more, dear Ned, from your true friend, Solomon Gills.’” The Captain
took a long breath, and then read these words written below: “‘The boy
Rob, well recommended, as I told you, from Dombey’s House. If all else
should come to the hammer, take care, Ned, of the little Midshipman.’”
To convey to posterity any idea of the manner in which the Captain,
after turning this letter over and over, and reading it a score of
times, sat down in his chair, and held a court-martial on the subject
in his own mind, would require the united genius of all the great men,
who, discarding their own untoward days, have determined to go down to
posterity, and have never got there. At first the Captain was too much
confounded and distressed to think of anything but the letter itself;
and even when his thoughts began to glance upon the various attendant
facts, they might, perhaps, as well have occupied themselves with their
former theme, for any light they reflected on them. In this state of
mind, Captain Cuttle having the Grinder before the court, and no one
else, found it a great relief to decide, generally, that he was an
object of suspicion: which the Captain so clearly expressed in his
visage, that Rob remonstrated.
“Oh, don’t, Captain!” cried the Grinder. “I wonder how you can! what
have I done to be looked at, like that?”
“My lad,” said Captain Cuttle, “don’t you sing out afore you’re hurt.
And don’t you commit yourself, whatever you do.”
“I haven’t been and committed nothing, Captain!” answered Rob.
“Keep her free, then,” said the Captain, impressively, “and ride easy.”
With a deep sense of the responsibility imposed upon him, and the
necessity of thoroughly fathoming this mysterious affair as became a
man in his relations with the parties, Captain Cuttle resolved to go
down and examine the premises, and to keep the Grinder with him.
Considering that youth as under arrest at present, the Captain was in
some doubt whether it might not be expedient to handcuff him, or tie
his ankles together, or attach a weight to his legs; but not being
clear as to the legality of such formalities, the Captain decided
merely to hold him by the shoulder all the way, and knock him down if
he made any objection.
However, he made none, and consequently got to the Instrument-maker’s
house without being placed under any more stringent restraint. As the
shutters were not yet taken down, the Captain’s first care was to have
the shop opened; and when the daylight was freely admitted, he
proceeded, with its aid, to further investigation.
The Captain’s first care was to establish himself in a chair in the
shop, as President of the solemn tribunal that was sitting within him;
and to require Rob to lie down in his bed under the counter, show
exactly where he discovered the keys and packet when he awoke, how he
found the door when he went to try it, how he started off to Brig
Place—cautiously preventing the latter imitation from being carried
farther than the threshold—and so on to the end of the chapter. When
all this had been done several times, the Captain shook his head and
seemed to think the matter had a bad look.
Next, the Captain, with some indistinct idea of finding a body,
instituted a strict search over the whole house; groping in the cellars
with a lighted candle, thrusting his hook behind doors, bringing his
head into violent contact with beams, and covering himself with
cobwebs. Mounting up to the old man’s bed-room, they found that he had
not been in bed on the previous night, but had merely lain down on the
coverlet, as was evident from the impression yet remaining there.
“And I think, Captain,” said Rob, looking round the room, “that when Mr
Gills was going in and out so often, these last few days, he was taking
little things away, piecemeal, not to attract attention.”
“Ay!” said the Captain, mysteriously. “Why so, my lad?”
“Why,” returned Rob, looking about, “I don’t see his shaving tackle.
Nor his brushes, Captain. Nor no shirts. Nor yet his shoes.”
As each of these articles was mentioned, Captain Cuttle took particular
notice of the corresponding department of the Grinder, lest he should
appear to have been in recent use, or should prove to be in present
possession thereof. But Rob had no occasion to shave, was not brushed,
and wore the clothes he had on for a long time past, beyond all
possibility of a mistake.
“And what should you say,” said the Captain—“not committing
yourself—about his time of sheering off? Hey?”
“Why, I think, Captain,” returned Rob, “that he must have gone pretty
soon after I began to snore.”
“What o’clock was that?” said the Captain, prepared to be very
particular about the exact time.
“How can I tell, Captain!” answered Rob. “I only know that I’m a heavy
sleeper at first, and a light one towards morning; and if Mr Gills had
come through the shop near daybreak, though ever so much on tiptoe, I’m
pretty sure I should have heard him shut the door at all events.”
On mature consideration of this evidence, Captain Cuttle began to think
that the Instrument-maker must have vanished of his own accord; to
which logical conclusion he was assisted by the letter addressed to
himself, which, as being undeniably in the old man’s handwriting, would
seem, with no great forcing, to bear the construction, that he arranged
of his own will to go, and so went. The Captain had next to consider
where and why? and as there was no way whatsoever that he saw to the
solution of the first difficulty, he confined his meditations to the
second.
Remembering the old man’s curious manner, and the farewell he had taken
of him; unaccountably fervent at the time, but quite intelligible now:
a terrible apprehension strengthened on the Captain, that, overpowered
by his anxieties and regrets for Walter, he had been driven to commit
suicide. Unequal to the wear and tear of daily life, as he had often
professed himself to be, and shaken as he no doubt was by the
uncertainty and deferred hope he had undergone, it seemed no violently
strained misgiving, but only too probable.
Free from debt, and with no fear for his personal liberty, or the
seizure of his goods, what else but such a state of madness could have
hurried him away alone and secretly? As to his carrying some apparel
with him, if he had really done so—and they were not even sure of
that—he might have done so, the Captain argued, to prevent inquiry, to
distract attention from his probable fate, or to ease the very mind
that was now revolving all these possibilities. Such, reduced into
plain language, and condensed within a small compass, was the final
result and substance of Captain Cuttle’s deliberations: which took a
long time to arrive at this pass, and were, like some more public
deliberations, very discursive and disorderly.
Dejected and despondent in the extreme, Captain Cuttle felt it just to
release Rob from the arrest in which he had placed him, and to enlarge
him, subject to a kind of honourable inspection which he still resolved
to exercise; and having hired a man, from Brogley the Broker, to sit in
the shop during their absence, the Captain, taking Rob with him, issued
forth upon a dismal quest after the mortal remains of Solomon Gills.
Not a station-house, or bone-house, or work-house in the metropolis
escaped a visitation from the hard glazed hat. Along the wharves, among
the shipping on the bank-side, up the river, down the river, here,
there, everywhere, it went gleaming where men were thickest, like the
hero’s helmet in an epic battle. For a whole week the Captain read of
all the found and missing people in all the newspapers and handbills,
and went forth on expeditions at all hours of the day to identify
Solomon Gills, in poor little ship-boys who had fallen overboard, and
in tall foreigners with dark beards who had taken poison—“to make
sure,” Captain Cuttle said, “that it wam’t him.” It is a sure thing
that it never was, and that the good Captain had no other satisfaction.
Captain Cuttle at last abandoned these attempts as hopeless, and set
himself to consider what was to be done next. After several new
perusals of his poor friend’s letter, he considered that the
maintenance of “a home in the old place for Walter” was the primary
duty imposed upon him. Therefore, the Captain’s decision was, that he
would keep house on the premises of Solomon Gills himself, and would go
into the instrument-business, and see what came of it.
But as this step involved the relinquishment of his apartments at Mrs
MacStinger’s, and he knew that resolute woman would never hear of his
deserting them, the Captain took the desperate determination of running
away.
“Now, look ye here, my lad,” said the Captain to Rob, when he had
matured this notable scheme, “to-morrow, I shan’t be found in this here
roadstead till night—not till arter midnight p’rhaps. But you keep
watch till you hear me knock, and the moment you do, turn-to, and open
the door.”
“Very good, Captain,” said Rob.
“You’ll continue to be rated on these here books,” pursued the Captain
condescendingly, “and I don’t say but what you may get promotion, if
you and me should pull together with a will. But the moment you hear me
knock to-morrow night, whatever time it is, turn-to and show yourself
smart with the door.”
“I’ll be sure to do it, Captain,” replied Rob.
“Because you understand,” resumed the Captain, coming back again to
enforce this charge upon his mind, “there may be, for anything I can
say, a chase; and I might be took while I was waiting, if you didn’t
show yourself smart with the door.”
Rob again assured the Captain that he would be prompt and wakeful; and
the Captain having made this prudent arrangement, went home to Mrs
MacStinger’s for the last time.
The sense the Captain had of its being the last time, and of the awful
purpose hidden beneath his blue waistcoat, inspired him with such a
mortal dread of Mrs MacStinger, that the sound of that lady’s foot
downstairs at any time of the day, was sufficient to throw him into a
fit of trembling. It fell out, too, that Mrs MacStinger was in a
charming temper—mild and placid as a house—lamb; and Captain Cuttle’s
conscience suffered terrible twinges, when she came up to inquire if
she could cook him nothing for his dinner.
“A nice small kidney-pudding now, Cap’en Cuttle,” said his landlady:
“or a sheep’s heart. Don’t mind my trouble.”
“No thank’ee, Ma’am,” returned the Captain.
“Have a roast fowl,” said Mrs MacStinger, “with a bit of weal stuffing
and some egg sauce. Come, Cap’en Cuttle! Give yourself a little treat!”