Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens [top ten ebook reader .TXT] 📗

square forehead, as coarse in grain as the bark of an oak. A thorough contrast in all respects, to Mr Dombey, who was one of those close-shaved close-cut moneyed gentlemen who are glossy and crisp like new bank-notes, and who seem to be artificially braced and tightened as by the stimulating action of golden showerbaths.

‘You have a son, I believe?’ said Mr Dombey.

‘Four on ‘em, Sir. Four hims and a her. All alive!’

‘Why, it’s as much as you can afford to keep them!’ said Mr Dombey.

‘I couldn’t hardly afford but one thing in the world less, Sir.’

‘What is that?’

‘To lose ‘em, Sir.’

‘Can you read?’ asked Mr Dombey.

‘Why, not partick’ler, Sir.’

‘Write?’

‘With chalk, Sir?’

‘With anything?’

‘I could make shift to chalk a little bit, I think, if I was put to it,’ said Toodle after some reflection.

‘And yet,’ said Mr Dombey, ‘you are two or three and thirty, I suppose?’

‘Thereabouts, I suppose, Sir,’ answered Toodle, after more reflection

‘Then why don’t you learn?’ asked Mr Dombey.

‘So I’m a going to, Sir. One of my little boys is a going to learn me, when he’s old enough, and been to school himself.’

‘Well,’ said Mr Dombey, after looking at him attentively, and with no great favour, as he stood gazing round the room (principally round the ceiling) and still drawing his hand across and across his mouth. ‘You heard what I said to your wife just now?’

‘Polly heerd it,’ said Toodle, jerking his hat over his shoulder in the direction of the door, with an air of perfect confidence in his better half. ‘It’s all right.’

‘But I ask you if you heard it. You did, I suppose, and understood it?’ pursued Mr Dombey.

‘I heerd it,’ said Toodle, ‘but I don’t know as I understood it rightly Sir, ‘account of being no scholar, and the words being—ask your pardon—rayther high. But Polly heerd it. It’s all right.’

‘As you appear to leave everything to her,’ said Mr Dombey, frustrated in his intention of impressing his views still more distinctly on the husband, as the stronger character, ‘I suppose it is of no use my saying anything to you.’

‘Not a bit,’ said Toodle. ‘Polly heerd it. She’s awake, Sir.’

‘I won’t detain you any longer then,’ returned Mr Dombey, disappointed. ‘Where have you worked all your life?’

‘Mostly underground, Sir, ‘till I got married. I come to the level then. I’m a going on one of these here railroads when they comes into full play.’

As he added in one of his hoarse whispers, ‘We means to bring up little Biler to that line,’ Mr Dombey inquired haughtily who little Biler was.

‘The eldest on ‘em, Sir,’ said Toodle, with a smile. ‘It ain’t a common name. Sermuchser that when he was took to church the gen’lm’n said, it wam’t a chris’en one, and he couldn’t give it. But we always calls him Biler just the same. For we don’t mean no harm. Not we.’

‘Do you mean to say, Man,’ inquired Mr Dombey; looking at him with marked displeasure, ‘that you have called a child after a boiler?’

‘No, no, Sir,’ returned Toodle, with a tender consideration for his mistake. ‘I should hope not! No, Sir. Arter a BILER Sir. The Steamingine was a’most as good as a godfather to him, and so we called him Biler, don’t you see!’

As the last straw breaks the laden camel’s back, this piece of information crushed the sinking spirits of Mr Dombey. He motioned his child’s foster-father to the door, who departed by no means unwillingly: and then turning the key, paced up and down the room in solitary wretchedness.

It would be harsh, and perhaps not altogether true, to say of him that he felt these rubs and gratings against his pride more keenly than he had felt his wife’s death: but certainly they impressed that event upon him with new force, and communicated to it added weight and bitterness. It was a rude shock to his sense of property in his child, that these people—the mere dust of the earth, as he thought them—should be necessary to him; and it was natural that in proportion as he felt disturbed by it, he should deplore the occurrence which had made them so. For all his starched, impenetrable dignity and composure, he wiped blinding tears from his eyes as he paced up and down his room; and often said, with an emotion of which he would not, for the world, have had a witness, ‘Poor little fellow!’

It may have been characteristic of Mr Dombey’s pride, that he pitied himself through the child. Not poor me. Not poor widower, confiding by constraint in the wife of an ignorant Hind who has been working ‘mostly underground’ all his life, and yet at whose door Death had never knocked, and at whose poor table four sons daily sit—but poor little fellow!

Those words being on his lips, it occurred to him—and it is an instance of the strong attraction with which his hopes and fears and all his thoughts were tending to one centre—that a great temptation was being placed in this woman’s way. Her infant was a boy too. Now, would it be possible for her to change them?

Though he was soon satisfied that he had dismissed the idea as romantic and unlikely—though possible, there was no denying—he could not help pursuing it so far as to entertain within himself a picture of what his condition would be, if he should discover such an imposture when he was grown old. Whether a man so situated would be able to pluck away the result of so many years of usage, confidence, and belief, from the impostor, and endow a stranger with it?

But it was idle speculating thus. It couldn’t happen. In a moment afterwards he determined that it could, but that such women were constantly observed, and had no opportunity given them for the accomplishment of such a design, even when they were so wicked as to entertain it. In another moment, he was remembering how few such cases seemed to have ever happened. In another moment he was wondering whether they ever happened and were not found out.

As his unusual emotion subsided, these misgivings gradually melted away, though so much of their shadow remained behind, that he was constant in his resolution to look closely after Richards himself, without appearing to do so. Being now in an easier frame of mind, he regarded the woman’s station as rather an advantageous circumstance than otherwise, by placing, in itself, a broad distance between her and the child, and rendering their separation easy and natural. Thence he passed to the contemplation of the future glories of Dombey and Son, and dismissed the memory of his wife, for the time being, with a tributary sigh or two.

Meanwhile terms were ratified and agreed upon between Mrs Chick and Richards, with the assistance of Miss Tox; and Richards being with much ceremony invested with the Dombey baby, as if it were an Order, resigned her own, with many tears and kisses, to Jemima. Glasses of wine were then produced, to sustain the drooping spirits of the family; and Miss Tox, busying herself in dispensing ‘tastes’ to the younger branches, bred them up to their father’s business with such surprising expedition, that she made chokers of four of them in a quarter of a minute.

‘You’ll take a glass yourself, Sir, won’t you?’ said Miss Tox, as Toodle appeared.

‘Thankee, Mum,’ said Toodle, ‘since you are suppressing.’

‘And you’re very glad to leave your dear good wife in such a comfortable home, ain’t you, Sir?’ said Miss Tox, nodding and winking at him stealthily.

‘No, Mum,’ said Toodle. ‘Here’s wishing of her back agin.’

Polly cried more than ever at this. So Mrs Chick, who had her matronly apprehensions that this indulgence in grief might be prejudicial to the little Dombey (‘acid, indeed,’ she whispered Miss Tox), hastened to the rescue.

‘Your little child will thrive charmingly with your sister Jemima, Richards,’ said Mrs Chick; ‘and you have only to make an effort—this is a world of effort, you know, Richards—to be very happy indeed. You have been already measured for your mourning, haven’t you, Richards?’

‘Ye—es, Ma’am,’ sobbed Polly.

‘And it’ll fit beautifully. I know,’ said Mrs Chick, ‘for the same young person has made me many dresses. The very best materials, too!’

‘Lor, you’ll be so smart,’ said Miss Tox, ‘that your husband won’t know you; will you, Sir?’

‘I should know her,’ said Toodle, gruffly, ‘anyhows and anywheres.’

Toodle was evidently not to be bought over.

‘As to living, Richards, you know,’ pursued Mrs Chick, ‘why, the very best of everything will be at your disposal. You will order your little dinner every day; and anything you take a fancy to, I’m sure will be as readily provided as if you were a Lady.’

‘Yes to be sure!’ said Miss Tox, keeping up the ball with great sympathy. ‘And as to porter!—quite unlimited, will it not, Louisa?’

‘Oh, certainly!’ returned Mrs Chick in the same tone. ‘With a little abstinence, you know, my dear, in point of vegetables.’

‘And pickles, perhaps,’ suggested Miss Tox.

‘With such exceptions,’ said Louisa, ‘she’ll consult her choice entirely, and be under no restraint at all, my love.’

‘And then, of course, you know,’ said Miss Tox, ‘however fond she is of her own dear little child—and I’m sure, Louisa, you don’t blame her for being fond of it?’

‘Oh no!’ cried Mrs Chick, benignantly.

‘Still,’ resumed Miss Tox, ‘she naturally must be interested in her young charge, and must consider it a privilege to see a little cherub connected with the superior classes, gradually unfolding itself from day to day at one common fountain—is it not so, Louisa?’

‘Most undoubtedly!’ said Mrs Chick. ‘You see, my love, she’s already quite contented and comfortable, and means to say goodbye to her sister Jemima and her little pets, and her good honest husband, with a light heart and a smile; don’t she, my dear?’

‘Oh yes!’ cried Miss Tox. ‘To be sure she does!’

Notwithstanding which, however, poor Polly embraced them all round in great distress, and coming to her spouse at last, could not make up her mind to part from him, until he gently disengaged himself, at the close of the following allegorical piece of consolation:

‘Polly, old ‘ooman, whatever you do, my darling, hold up your head and fight low. That’s the only rule as I know on, that’ll carry anyone through life. You always have held up your head and fought low, Polly. Do it now, or Bricks is no longer so. God bless you, Polly! Me and J’mima will do your duty by you; and with relating to your’n, hold up your head and fight low, Polly, and you can’t go wrong!’

Fortified by this golden secret, Polly finally ran away to avoid any more particular leave-taking between herself and the children. But the stratagem hardly succeeded as well as it deserved; for the smallest boy but one divining her intent, immediately began swarming upstairs after her—if that word of doubtful etymology be admissible—on his arms and legs; while the eldest (known in the family by the name of Biler, in remembrance of the steam engine) beat a demoniacal tattoo with his boots, expressive of grief; in which he was joined by the rest of the family.

A quantity of oranges and halfpence thrust indiscriminately on each young Toodle, checked the first violence of their regret, and the family were speedily transported to their own home, by means of the hackney-coach kept in waiting for that purpose. The children, under the guardianship of Jemima, blocked up the window, and dropped out oranges and halfpence all the way along. Mr Toodle himself preferred to ride behind among the spikes, as being the mode of conveyance to which he was best accustomed.