Dombey and Son
thought you might be jesting when you seemed to hint at it; for I know
you military men”—
The Major gave the horse’s cough, and shook his head and shoulders, as
much as to say, “Well! we are gay dogs, there’s no denying.” He then
seized Mr Carker by the button-hole, and with starting eyes whispered
in his ear, that she was a woman of extraordinary charms, Sir. That she
was a young widow, Sir. That she was of a fine family, Sir. That Dombey
was over head and ears in love with her, Sir, and that it would be a
good match on both sides; for she had beauty, blood, and talent, and
Dombey had fortune; and what more could any couple have? Hearing Mr
Dombey’s footsteps without, the Major cut himself short by saying, that
Mr Carker would see her tomorrow morning, and would judge for himself;
and between his mental excitement, and the exertion of saying all this
in wheezy whispers, the Major sat gurgling in the throat and watering
at the eyes, until dinner was ready.
The Major, like some other noble animals, exhibited himself to great
advantage at feeding-time. On this occasion, he shone resplendent at
one end of the table, supported by the milder lustre of Mr Dombey at
the other; while Carker on one side lent his ray to either light, or
suffered it to merge into both, as occasion arose.
During the first course or two, the Major was usually grave; for the
Native, in obedience to general orders, secretly issued, collected
every sauce and cruet round him, and gave him a great deal to do, in
taking out the stoppers, and mixing up the contents in his plate.
Besides which, the Native had private zests and flavours on a
side-table, with which the Major daily scorched himself; to say nothing
of strange machines out of which he spirited unknown liquids into the
Major’s drink. But on this occasion, Major Bagstock, even amidst these
many occupations, found time to be social; and his sociality consisted
in excessive slyness for the behoof of Mr Carker, and the betrayal of
Mr Dombey’s state of mind.
“Dombey,” said the Major, “you don’t eat; what’s the matter?”
“Thank you,” returned the gentleman, “I am doing very well; I have no
great appetite today.”
“Why, Dombey, what’s become of it?” asked the Major. “Where’s it gone?
You haven’t left it with our friends, I’ll swear, for I can answer for
their having none today at luncheon. I can answer for one of ’em, at
least: I won’t say which.”
Then the Major winked at Carker, and became so frightfully sly, that
his dark attendant was obliged to pat him on the back, without orders,
or he would probably have disappeared under the table.
In a later stage of the dinner: that is to say, when the Native stood
at the Major’s elbow ready to serve the first bottle of champagne: the
Major became still slyer.
“Fill this to the brim, you scoundrel,” said the Major, holding up his
glass. “Fill Mr Carker’s to the brim too. And Mr Dombey’s too. By Gad,
gentlemen,” said the Major, winking at his new friend, while Mr Dombey
looked into his plate with a conscious air, “we’ll consecrate this
glass of wine to a Divinity whom Joe is proud to know, and at a
distance humbly and reverently to admire. Edith,” said the Major, “is
her name; angelic Edith!”
“To angelic Edith!” cried the smiling Carker.
“Edith, by all means,” said Mr Dombey.
The entrance of the waiters with new dishes caused the Major to be
slyer yet, but in a more serious vein. “For though among ourselves, Joe
Bagstock mingles jest and earnest on this subject, Sir,” said the
Major, laying his finger on his lips, and speaking half apart to
Carker, “he holds that name too sacred to be made the property of these
fellows, or of any fellows. Not a word, Sir, while they are here!”
This was respectful and becoming on the Major’s part, and Mr Dombey
plainly felt it so. Although embarrassed in his own frigid way, by the
Major’s allusions, Mr Dombey had no objection to such rallying, it was
clear, but rather courted it. Perhaps the Major had been pretty near
the truth, when he had divined that morning that the great man who was
too haughty formally to consult with, or confide in his prime minister,
on such a matter, yet wished him to be fully possessed of it. Let this
be how it may, he often glanced at Mr Carker while the Major plied his
light artillery, and seemed watchful of its effect upon him.
But the Major, having secured an attentive listener, and a smiler who
had not his match in all the world—“in short, a devilish intelligent
and able fellow,” as he often afterwards declared—was not going to let
him off with a little slyness personal to Mr Dombey. Therefore, on the
removal of the cloth, the Major developed himself as a choice spirit in
the broader and more comprehensive range of narrating regimental
stories, and cracking regimental jokes, which he did with such prodigal
exuberance, that Carker was (or feigned to be) quite exhausted with
laughter and admiration: while Mr Dombey looked on over his starched
cravat, like the Major’s proprietor, or like a stately showman who was
glad to see his bear dancing well.
When the Major was too hoarse with meat and drink, and the display of
his social powers, to render himself intelligible any longer, they
adjourned to coffee. After which, the Major inquired of Mr Carker the
Manager, with little apparent hope of an answer in the affirmative, if
he played picquet.
“Yes, I play picquet a little,” said Mr Carker.
“Backgammon, perhaps?” observed the Major, hesitating.
“Yes, I play backgammon a little too,” replied the man of teeth.
“Carker plays at all games, I believe,” said Mr Dombey, laying himself
on a sofa like a man of wood, without a hinge or a joint in him; “and
plays them well.”
In sooth, he played the two in question, to such perfection, that the
Major was astonished, and asked him, at random, if he played chess.
“Yes, I play chess a little,” answered Carker. “I have sometimes
played, and won a game—it’s a mere trick—without seeing the board.”
“By Gad, Sir!” said the Major, staring, “you are a contrast to Dombey,
who plays nothing.”
“Oh! He!” returned the Manager. “He has never had occasion to acquire
such little arts. To men like me, they are sometimes useful. As at
present, Major Bagstock, when they enable me to take a hand with you.”
It might be only the false mouth, so smooth and wide; and yet there
seemed to lurk beneath the humility and subserviency of this short
speech, a something like a snarl; and, for a moment, one might have
thought that the white teeth were prone to bite the hand they fawned
upon. But the Major thought nothing about it; and Mr Dombey lay
meditating with his eyes half shut, during the whole of the play, which
lasted until bed-time.
By that time, Mr Carker, though the winner, had mounted high into the
Major’s good opinion, insomuch that when he left the Major at his own
room before going to bed, the Major as a special attention, sent the
Native—who always rested on a mattress spread upon the ground at his
master’s door—along the gallery, to light him to his room in state.
There was a faint blur on the surface of the mirror in Mr Carker’s
chamber, and its reflection was, perhaps, a false one. But it showed,
that night, the image of a man, who saw, in his fancy, a crowd of
people slumbering on the ground at his feet, like the poor Native at
his master’s door: who picked his way among them: looking down,
maliciously enough: but trod upon no upturned face—as yet.
CHAPTER XXVII.
Deeper Shadows
Mr Carker the Manager rose with the lark, and went out, walking in the
summer day. His meditations—and he meditated with contracted brows
while he strolled along—hardly seemed to soar as high as the lark, or
to mount in that direction; rather they kept close to their nest upon
the earth, and looked about, among the dust and worms. But there was
not a bird in the air, singing unseen, farther beyond the reach of
human eye than Mr Carker’s thoughts. He had his face so perfectly under
control, that few could say more, in distinct terms, of its expression,
than that it smiled or that it pondered. It pondered now, intently. As
the lark rose higher, he sank deeper in thought. As the lark poured out
her melody clearer and stronger, he fell into a graver and profounder
silence. At length, when the lark came headlong down, with an
accumulating stream of song, and dropped among the green wheat near
him, rippling in the breath of the morning like a river, he sprang up
from his reverie, and looked round with a sudden smile, as courteous
and as soft as if he had had numerous observers to propitiate; nor did
he relapse, after being thus awakened; but clearing his face, like one
who bethought himself that it might otherwise wrinkle and tell tales,
went smiling on, as if for practice.
Perhaps with an eye to first impressions, Mr Carker was very carefully
and trimly dressed, that morning. Though always somewhat formal, in his
dress, in imitation of the great man whom he served, he stopped short
of the extent of Mr Dombey’s stiffness: at once perhaps because he knew
it to be ludicrous, and because in doing so he found another means of
expressing his sense of the difference and distance between them. Some
people quoted him indeed, in this respect, as a pointed commentary, and
not a flattering one, on his icy patron—but the world is prone to
misconstruction, and Mr Carker was not accountable for its bad
propensity.
Clean and florid: with his light complexion, fading as it were, in the
sun, and his dainty step enhancing the softness of the turf: Mr Carker
the Manager strolled about meadows, and green lanes, and glided among
avenues of trees, until it was time to return to breakfast. Taking a
nearer way back, Mr Carker pursued it, airing his teeth, and said aloud
as he did so, “Now to see the second Mrs Dombey!”
He had strolled beyond the town, and re-entered it by a pleasant walk,
where there was a deep shade of leafy trees, and where there were a few
benches here and there for those who chose to rest. It not being a
place of general resort at any hour, and wearing at that time of the
still morning the air of being quite deserted and retired, Mr Carker
had it, or thought he had it, all to himself. So, with the whim of an
idle man, to whom there yet remained twenty minutes for reaching a
destination easily able in ten, Mr Carker threaded the great boles of
the trees, and went passing in and out, before this one and behind
that, weaving a chain of footsteps on the dewy ground.
But he found he was mistaken in supposing there was no one in the
grove, for as he softly rounded the trunk of one large tree, on which
the obdurate bark was knotted and overlapped like the hide of a
rhinoceros or some kindred monster of the ancient days before the
Flood, he saw an unexpected figure sitting on a bench near at hand,
about which, in another moment, he would have wound the chain he was
making.
It was that of a lady, elegantly dressed and very handsome, whose dark
proud eyes were fixed upon the ground, and in whom some passion or
struggle was raging. For as she sat looking down, she held a corner of
her under lip within her mouth, her bosom heaved, her nostril quivered,
her head trembled, indignant tears were on her cheek, and her foot was
set upon the moss as though she would have crushed it into nothing. And
yet almost the self-same glance that showed him this, showed him the
self-same lady rising with a scornful air of weariness and lassitude,
and turning away with nothing expressed in face or figure but careless
beauty and imperious disdain.
A withered and very ugly old woman, dressed not so much like a gipsy as
like any of that medley race of vagabonds who tramp about the country,