Dombey and Son
dallied as two ancient doves might do.
“Are you satisfied with that, or shall I finish it a little more?” said
Edith, showing the sketch to Mr Dombey.
Mr Dombey begged that it might not be touched; it was perfection.
“It is most extraordinary,” said Carker, bringing every one of his red
gums to bear upon his praise. “I was not prepared for anything so
beautiful, and so unusual altogether.”
This might have applied to the sketcher no less than to the sketch; but
Mr Carker’s manner was openness itself—not as to his mouth alone, but
as to his whole spirit. So it continued to be while the drawing was
laid aside for Mr Dombey, and while the sketching materials were put
up; then he handed in the pencils (which were received with a distant
acknowledgment of his help, but without a look), and tightening his
rein, fell back, and followed the carriage again.
Thinking, perhaps, as he rode, that even this trivial sketch had been
made and delivered to its owner, as if it had been bargained for and
bought. Thinking, perhaps, that although she had assented with such
perfect readiness to his request, her haughty face, bent over the
drawing, or glancing at the distant objects represented in it, had been
the face of a proud woman, engaged in a sordid and miserable
transaction. Thinking, perhaps, of such things: but smiling certainly,
and while he seemed to look about him freely, in enjoyment of the air
and exercise, keeping always that sharp corner of his eye upon the
carriage.
A stroll among the haunted ruins of Kenilworth, and more rides to more
points of view: most of which, Mrs Skewton reminded Mr Dombey, Edith
had already sketched, as he had seen in looking over her drawings:
brought the day’s expedition to a close. Mrs Skewton and Edith were
driven to their own lodgings; Mr Carker was graciously invited by
Cleopatra to return thither with Mr Dombey and the Major, in the
evening, to hear some of Edith’s music; and the three gentlemen
repaired to their hotel to dinner.
The dinner was the counterpart of yesterday’s, except that the Major
was twenty-four hours more triumphant and less mysterious. Edith was
toasted again. Mr Dombey was again agreeably embarrassed. And Mr Carker
was full of interest and praise.
There were no other visitors at Mrs Skewton’s. Edith’s drawings were
strewn about the room, a little more abundantly than usual perhaps; and
Withers, the wan page, handed round a little stronger tea. The harp was
there; the piano was there; and Edith sang and played. But even the
music was played by Edith to Mr Dombey’s order, as it were, in the same
uncompromising way. As thus.
“Edith, my dearest love,” said Mrs Skewton, half an hour after tea, “Mr
Dombey is dying to hear you, I know.”
“Mr Dombey has life enough left to say so for himself, Mama, I have no
doubt.”
“I shall be immensely obliged,” said Mr Dombey.
“What do you wish?”
“Piano?” hesitated Mr Dombey.
“Whatever you please. You have only to choose.”
Accordingly, she began with the piano. It was the same with the harp;
the same with her singing; the same with the selection of the pieces
that she sang and played. Such frigid and constrained, yet prompt and
pointed acquiescence with the wishes he imposed upon her, and on no one
else, was sufficiently remarkable to penetrate through all the
mysteries of picquet, and impress itself on Mr Carker’s keen attention.
Nor did he lose sight of the fact that Mr Dombey was evidently proud of
his power, and liked to show it.
Nevertheless, Mr Carker played so well—some games with the Major, and
some with Cleopatra, whose vigilance of eye in respect of Mr Dombey and
Edith no lynx could have surpassed—that he even heightened his position
in the lady-mother’s good graces; and when on taking leave he regretted
that he would be obliged to return to London next morning, Cleopatra
trusted: community of feeling not being met with every day: that it was
far from being the last time they would meet.
“I hope so,” said Mr Carker, with an expressive look at the couple in
the distance, as he drew towards the door, following the Major. “I
think so.”
Mr Dombey, who had taken a stately leave of Edith, bent, or made some
approach to a bend, over Cleopatra’s couch, and said, in a low voice:
“I have requested Mrs Granger’s permission to call on her to-morrow
morning—for a purpose—and she has appointed twelve o’clock. May I hope
to have the pleasure of finding you at home, Madam, afterwards?”
Cleopatra was so much fluttered and moved, by hearing this, of course,
incomprehensible speech, that she could only shut her eyes, and shake
her head, and give Mr Dombey her hand; which Mr Dombey, not exactly
knowing what to do with, dropped.
“Dombey, come along!” cried the Major, looking in at the door. “Damme,
Sir, old Joe has a great mind to propose an alteration in the name of
the Royal Hotel, and that it should be called the Three Jolly
Bachelors, in honour of ourselves and Carker.” With this, the Major
slapped Mr Dombey on the back, and winking over his shoulder at the
ladies, with a frightful tendency of blood to the head, carried him
off.
Mrs Skewton reposed on her sofa, and Edith sat apart, by her harp, in
silence. The mother, trifling with her fan, looked stealthily at the
daughter more than once, but the daughter, brooding gloomily with
downcast eyes, was not to be disturbed.
Thus they remained for a long hour, without a word, until Mrs Skewton’s
maid appeared, according to custom, to prepare her gradually for night.
At night, she should have been a skeleton, with dart and hour-glass,
rather than a woman, this attendant; for her touch was as the touch of
Death. The painted object shrivelled underneath her hand; the form
collapsed, the hair dropped off, the arched dark eyebrows changed to
scanty tufts of grey; the pale lips shrunk, the skin became cadaverous
and loose; an old, worn, yellow, nodding woman, with red eyes, alone
remained in Cleopatra’s place, huddled up, like a slovenly bundle, in a
greasy flannel gown.
The very voice was changed, as it addressed Edith, when they were alone
again.
“Why don’t you tell me,” it said sharply, “that he is coming here
to-morrow by appointment?”
“Because you know it,” returned Edith, “Mother.”
The mocking emphasis she laid on that one word!
“You know he has bought me,” she resumed. “Or that he will, to-morrow.
He has considered of his bargain; he has shown it to his friend; he is
even rather proud of it; he thinks that it will suit him, and may be
had sufficiently cheap; and he will buy to-morrow. God, that I have
lived for this, and that I feel it!”
Compress into one handsome face the conscious self-abasement, and the
burning indignation of a hundred women, strong in passion and in pride;
and there it hid itself with two white shuddering arms.
“What do you mean?” returned the angry mother. “Haven’t you from a
child—”
“A child!” said Edith, looking at her, “when was I a child? What
childhood did you ever leave to me? I was a woman—artful, designing,
mercenary, laying snares for men—before I knew myself, or you, or even
understood the base and wretched aim of every new display I learnt You
gave birth to a woman. Look upon her. She is in her pride tonight.”
And as she spoke, she struck her hand upon her beautiful bosom, as
though she would have beaten down herself.
“Look at me,” she said, “who have never known what it is to have an
honest heart, and love. Look at me, taught to scheme and plot when
children play; and married in my youth—an old age of design—to one for
whom I had no feeling but indifference. Look at me, whom he left a
widow, dying before his inheritance descended to him—a judgment on you!
well deserved!—and tell me what has been my life for ten years since.”
“We have been making every effort to endeavour to secure to you a good
establishment,” rejoined her mother. “That has been your life. And now
you have got it.”
“There is no slave in a market: there is no horse in a fair: so shown
and offered and examined and paraded, Mother, as I have been, for ten
shameful years,” cried Edith, with a burning brow, and the same bitter
emphasis on the one word. “Is it not so? Have I been made the bye-word
of all kinds of men? Have fools, have profligates, have boys, have
dotards, dangled after me, and one by one rejected me, and fallen off,
because you were too plain with all your cunning: yes, and too true,
with all those false pretences: until we have almost come to be
notorious? The licence of look and touch,” she said, with flashing
eyes, “have I submitted to it, in half the places of resort upon the
map of England? Have I been hawked and vended here and there, until the
last grain of self-respect is dead within me, and I loathe myself? Has
been my late childhood? I had none before. Do not tell me that I had,
tonight of all nights in my life!”
“You might have been well married,” said her mother, “twenty times at
least, Edith, if you had given encouragement enough.”
“No! Who takes me, refuse that I am, and as I well deserve to be,” she
answered, raising her head, and trembling in her energy of shame and
stormy pride, “shall take me, as this man does, with no art of mine put
forth to lure him. He sees me at the auction, and he thinks it well to
buy me. Let him! When he came to view me—perhaps to bid—he required to
see the roll of my accomplishments. I gave it to him. When he would
have me show one of them, to justify his purchase to his men, I require
of him to say which he demands, and I exhibit it. I will do no more. He
makes the purchase of his own will, and with his own sense of its
worth, and the power of his money; and I hope it may never disappoint
him. I have not vaunted and pressed the bargain; neither have you, so
far as I have been able to prevent you.
“You talk strangely tonight, Edith, to your own Mother.”
“It seems so to me; stranger to me than you,” said Edith. “But my
education was completed long ago. I am too old now, and have fallen too
low, by degrees, to take a new course, and to stop yours, and to help
myself. The germ of all that purifies a woman’s breast, and makes it
true and good, has never stirred in mine, and I have nothing else to
sustain me when I despise myself.” There had been a touching sadness in
her voice, but it was gone, when she went on to say, with a curled lip,
“So, as we are genteel and poor, I am content that we should be made
rich by these means; all I say is, I have kept the only purpose I have
had the strength to form—I had almost said the power, with you at my
side, Mother—and have not tempted this man on.”
“This man! You speak,” said her mother, “as if you hated him.”
“And you thought I loved him, did you not?” she answered, stopping on
her way across the room, and looking round. “Shall I tell you,” she
continued, with her eyes fixed on her mother, “who already knows us
thoroughly, and reads us right, and before whom I have even less of
self-respect or confidence than before my own inward self; being so
much degraded by his knowledge of me?”
“This is an attack, I suppose,” returned her mother coldly, “on poor,
unfortunate what’s-his-name—Mr Carker! Your want of self-respect and
confidence, my dear, in reference to that person (who is very
agreeable, it strikes me), is not likely to have much effect on your
establishment. Why do you look at me so hard? Are you ill?”
Edith suddenly let fall her face, as if it had been stung, and while
she pressed her hands upon it, a terrible tremble crept over her whole
frame. It was quickly gone; and with her usual step, she passed out of
the room.
The maid who should have been a skeleton, then reappeared, and giving
one arm to her mistress, who appeared to have taken off her manner with