Dombey and Son
“It’s not my gal!” cried the old woman, tossing up her arms, and
clasping her hands above her head. “Where’s my Alice? Where’s my
handsome daughter? They’ve been the death of her!”
“They’ve not been the death of her yet, if your name’s Marwood,” said
the visitor.
“Have you seen my gal, then?” cried the old woman. “Has she wrote to
me?”
“She said you couldn’t read,” returned the other.
“No more I can!” exclaimed the old woman, wringing her hands.
“Have you no light here?” said the other, looking round the room.
The old woman, mumbling and shaking her head, and muttering to herself
about her handsome daughter, brought a candle from a cupboard in the
corner, and thrusting it into the fire with a trembling hand, lighted
it with some difficulty and set it on the table. Its dirty wick burnt
dimly at first, being choked in its own grease; and when the bleared
eyes and failing sight of the old woman could distinguish anything by
its light, her visitor was sitting with her arms folded, her eyes
turned downwards, and a handkerchief she had worn upon her head lying
on the table by her side.
“She sent to me by word of mouth then, my gal, Alice?” mumbled the old
woman, after waiting for some moments. “What did she say?”
“Look,” returned the visitor.
The old woman repeated the word in a scared uncertain way; and, shading
her eyes, looked at the speaker, round the room, and at the speaker
once again.
“Alice said look again, mother;” and the speaker fixed her eyes upon
her.
Again the old woman looked round the room, and at her visitor, and
round the room once more. Hastily seizing the candle, and rising from
her seat, she held it to the visitor’s face, uttered a loud cry, set
down the light, and fell upon her neck!
“It’s my gal! It’s my Alice! It’s my handsome daughter, living and come
back!” screamed the old woman, rocking herself to and fro upon the
breast that coldly suffered her embrace. “It’s my gal! It’s my Alice!
It’s my handsome daughter, living and come back!” she screamed again,
dropping on the floor before her, clasping her knees, laying her head
against them, and still rocking herself to and fro with every frantic
demonstration of which her vitality was capable.
“Yes, mother,” returned Alice, stooping forward for a moment and
kissing her, but endeavouring, even in the act, to disengage herself
from her embrace. “I am here, at last. Let go, mother; let go. Get up,
and sit in your chair. What good does this do?”
“She’s come back harder than she went!” cried the mother, looking up in
her face, and still holding to her knees. “She don’t care for me! after
all these years, and all the wretched life I’ve led!”
“Why, mother!” said Alice, shaking her ragged skirts to detach the old
woman from them: “there are two sides to that. There have been years
for me as well as you, and there has been wretchedness for me as well
as you. Get up, get up!”
Her mother rose, and cried, and wrung her hands, and stood at a little
distance gazing on her. Then she took the candle again, and going round
her, surveyed her from head to foot, making a low moaning all the time.
Then she put the candle down, resumed her chair, and beating her hands
together to a kind of weary tune, and rolling herself from side to
side, continued moaning and wailing to herself.
Alice got up, took off her wet cloak, and laid it aside. That done, she
sat down as before, and with her arms folded, and her eyes gazing at
the fire, remained silently listening with a contemptuous face to her
old mother’s inarticulate complainings.
“Did you expect to see me return as youthful as I went away, mother?”
she said at length, turning her eyes upon the old woman. “Did you think
a foreign life, like mine, was good for good looks? One would believe
so, to hear you!”
“It ain’t that!” cried the mother. “She knows it!”
“What is it then?” returned the daughter. “It had best be something
that don’t last, mother, or my way out is easier than my way in.”
“Hear that!” exclaimed the mother. “After all these years she threatens
to desert me in the moment of her coming back again!”
“I tell you, mother, for the second time, there have been years for me
as well as you,” said Alice. “Come back harder? Of course I have come
back harder. What else did you expect?”
“Harder to me! To her own dear mother!” cried the old woman
“I don’t know who began to harden me, if my own dear mother didn’t,”
she returned, sitting with her folded arms, and knitted brows, and
compressed lips as if she were bent on excluding, by force, every
softer feeling from her breast. “Listen, mother, to a word or two. If
we understand each other now, we shall not fall out any more, perhaps.
I went away a girl, and have come back a woman. I went away undutiful
enough, and have come back no better, you may swear. But have you been
very dutiful to me?”
“I!” cried the old woman. “To my gal! A mother dutiful to her own
child!”
“It sounds unnatural, don’t it?” returned the daughter, looking coldly
on her with her stern, regardless, hardy, beautiful face; “but I have
thought of it sometimes, in the course of my lone years, till I have
got used to it. I have heard some talk about duty first and last; but
it has always been of my duty to other people. I have wondered now and
then—to pass away the time—whether no one ever owed any duty to me.”
Her mother sat mowing, and mumbling, and shaking her head, but whether
angrily or remorsefully, or in denial, or only in her physical
infirmity, did not appear.
“There was a child called Alice Marwood,” said the daughter, with a
laugh, and looking down at herself in terrible derision of herself,
“born, among poverty and neglect, and nursed in it. Nobody taught her,
nobody stepped forward to help her, nobody cared for her.”
“Nobody!” echoed the mother, pointing to herself, and striking her
breast.
“The only care she knew,” returned the daughter, “was to be beaten, and
stinted, and abused sometimes; and she might have done better without
that. She lived in homes like this, and in the streets, with a crowd of
little wretches like herself; and yet she brought good looks out of
this childhood. So much the worse for her. She had better have been
hunted and worried to death for ugliness.”
“Go on! go on!” exclaimed the mother.
“I am going on,” returned the daughter. “There was a girl called Alice
Marwood. She was handsome. She was taught too late, and taught all
wrong. She was too well cared for, too well trained, too well helped
on, too much looked after. You were very fond of her—you were better
off then. What came to that girl comes to thousands every year. It was
only ruin, and she was born to it.”
“After all these years!” whined the old woman. “My gal begins with
this.”
“She’ll soon have ended,” said the daughter. “There was a criminal
called Alice Marwood—a girl still, but deserted and an outcast. And she
was tried, and she was sentenced. And lord, how the gentlemen in the
Court talked about it! and how grave the judge was on her duty, and on
her having perverted the gifts of nature—as if he didn’t know better
than anybody there, that they had been made curses to her!—and how he
preached about the strong arm of the Law—so very strong to save her,
when she was an innocent and helpless little wretch!—and how solemn and
religious it all was! I have thought of that, many times since, to be
sure!”
She folded her arms tightly on her breast, and laughed in a tone that
made the howl of the old woman musical.
“So Alice Marwood was transported, mother,” she pursued, “and was sent
to learn her duty, where there was twenty times less duty, and more
wickedness, and wrong, and infamy, than here. And Alice Marwood is come
back a woman. Such a woman as she ought to be, after all this. In good
time, there will be more solemnity, and more fine talk, and more strong
arm, most likely, and there will be an end of her; but the gentlemen
needn’t be afraid of being thrown out of work. There’s crowds of little
wretches, boy and girl, growing up in any of the streets they live in,
that’ll keep them to it till they’ve made their fortunes.”
The old woman leaned her elbows on the table, and resting her face upon
her two hands, made a show of being in great distress—or really was,
perhaps.
“There! I have done, mother,” said the daughter, with a motion of her
head, as if in dismissal of the subject. “I have said enough. Don’t let
you and I talk of being dutiful, whatever we do. Your childhood was
like mine, I suppose. So much the worse for both of us. I don’t want to
blame you, or to defend myself; why should I? That’s all over long ago.
But I am a woman—not a girl, now—and you and I needn’t make a show of
our history, like the gentlemen in the Court. We know all about it,
well enough.”
Lost and degraded as she was, there was a beauty in her, both of face
and form, which, even in its worst expression, could not but be
recognised as such by anyone regarding her with the least attention. As
she subsided into silence, and her face which had been harshly
agitated, quieted down; while her dark eyes, fixed upon the fire,
exchanged the reckless light that had animated them, for one that was
softened by something like sorrow; there shone through all her wayworn
misery and fatigue, a ray of the departed radiance of the fallen angel.
Her mother, after watching her for some time without speaking, ventured
to steal her withered hand a little nearer to her across the table; and
finding that she permitted this, to touch her face, and smooth her
hair. With the feeling, as it seemed, that the old woman was at least
sincere in this show of interest, Alice made no movement to check her;
so, advancing by degrees, she bound up her daughter’s hair afresh, took
off her wet shoes, if they deserved the name, spread something dry upon
her shoulders, and hovered humbly about her, muttering to herself, as
she recognised her old features and expression more and more.
“You are very poor, mother, I see,” said Alice, looking round, when she
had sat thus for some time.
“Bitter poor, my deary,” replied the old woman.
She admired her daughter, and was afraid of her. Perhaps her
admiration, such as it was, had originated long ago, when she first
found anything that was beautiful appearing in the midst of the squalid
fight of her existence. Perhaps her fear was referable, in some sort,
to the retrospect she had so lately heard. Be this as it might, she
stood, submissively and deferentially, before her child, and inclined
her head, as if in a pitiful entreaty to be spared any further
reproach.
“How have you lived?”
“By begging, my deary.
“And pilfering, mother?”
“Sometimes, Ally—in a very small way. I am old and timid. I have taken
trifles from children now and then, my deary, but not often. I have
tramped about the country, pet, and I know what I know. I have
watched.”
“Watched?” returned the daughter, looking at her.
“I have hung about a family, my deary,” said the mother, even more
humbly and submissively than before.
“What family?”
“Hush, darling. Don’t be angry with me. I did it for the love of you.
In memory of my poor gal beyond seas.” She put out her hand
deprecatingly, and drawing it back again, laid it on her lips.
“Years ago, my deary,” she pursued, glancing timidly at the attentive
and stern face opposed to her, “I came across his little child, by
chance.”
“Whose child?”
“Not his, Alice deary; don’t look at me like that; not his. How could
it be his? You know he has none.”
“Whose then?” returned the daughter. “You said his.”
“Hush, Ally; you frighten me, deary. Mr Dombey’s—only Mr Dombey’s.
Since then, darling, I have seen them often. I have seen _him_.”