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

‘I am foolish to give way to faintness,’ Miss Tox faltered. ‘I shall be better presently.’

‘You will be better presently, Lucretia!’ repeated Mrs Chick, with exceeding scorn. ‘Do you suppose I am blind? Do you imagine I am in my second childhood? No, Lucretia! I am obliged to you!’

Miss Tox directed an imploring, helpless kind of look towards her friend, and put her handkerchief before her face.

‘If anyone had told me this yesterday,’ said Mrs Chick, with majesty, ‘or even half-an-hour ago, I should have been tempted, I almost believe, to strike them to the earth. Lucretia Tox, my eyes are opened to you all at once. The scales:’ here Mrs Chick cast down an imaginary pair, such as are commonly used in grocers’ shops: ‘have fallen from my sight. The blindness of my confidence is past, Lucretia. It has been abused and played, upon, and evasion is quite out of the question now, I assure you.’

‘Oh! to what do you allude so cruelly, my love?’ asked Miss Tox, through her tears.

‘Lucretia,’ said Mrs Chick, ‘ask your own heart. I must entreat you not to address me by any such familiar term as you have just used, if you please. I have some self-respect left, though you may think otherwise.’

‘Oh, Louisa!’ cried Miss Tox. ‘How can you speak to me like that?’

‘How can I speak to you like that?’ retorted Mrs Chick, who, in default of having any particular argument to sustain herself upon, relied principally on such repetitions for her most withering effects. ‘Like that! You may well say like that, indeed!’

Miss Tox sobbed pitifully.

‘The idea!’ said Mrs Chick, ‘of your having basked at my brother’s fireside, like a serpent, and wound yourself, through me, almost into his confidence, Lucretia, that you might, in secret, entertain designs upon him, and dare to aspire to contemplate the possibility of his uniting himself to you! Why, it is an idea,’ said Mrs Chick, with sarcastic dignity, ‘the absurdity of which almost relieves its treachery.’

‘Pray, Louisa,’ urged Miss Tox, ‘do not say such dreadful things.’

‘Dreadful things!’ repeated Mrs Chick. ‘Dreadful things! Is it not a fact, Lucretia, that you have just now been unable to command your feelings even before me, whose eyes you had so completely closed?’

‘I have made no complaint,’ sobbed Miss Tox. ‘I have said nothing. If I have been a little overpowered by your news, Louisa, and have ever had any lingering thought that Mr Dombey was inclined to be particular towards me, surely you will not condemn me.’

‘She is going to say,’ said Mrs Chick, addressing herself to the whole of the furniture, in a comprehensive glance of resignation and appeal, ‘She is going to say—I know it—that I have encouraged her!’

‘I don’t wish to exchange reproaches, dear Louisa,’ sobbed Miss Tox. ‘Nor do I wish to complain. But, in my own defence—’

‘Yes,’ cried Mrs Chick, looking round the room with a prophetic smile, ‘that’s what she’s going to say. I knew it. You had better say it. Say it openly! Be open, Lucretia Tox,’ said Mrs Chick, with desperate sternness, ‘whatever you are.’

‘In my own defence,’ faltered Miss Tox, ‘and only in my own defence against your unkind words, my dear Louisa, I would merely ask you if you haven’t often favoured such a fancy, and even said it might happen, for anything we could tell?’

‘There is a point,’ said Mrs Chick, rising, not as if she were going to stop at the floor, but as if she were about to soar up, high, into her native skies, ‘beyond which endurance becomes ridiculous, if not culpable. I can bear much; but not too much. What spell was on me when I came into this house this day, I don’t know; but I had a presentiment—a dark presentiment,’ said Mrs Chick, with a shiver, ‘that something was going to happen. Well may I have had that foreboding, Lucretia, when my confidence of many years is destroyed in an instant, when my eyes are opened all at once, and when I find you revealed in your true colours. Lucretia, I have been mistaken in you. It is better for us both that this subject should end here. I wish you well, and I shall ever wish you well. But, as an individual who desires to be true to herself in her own poor position, whatever that position may be, or may not be—and as the sister of my brother—and as the sister-in-law of my brother’s wife—and as a connexion by marriage of my brother’s wife’s mother—may I be permitted to add, as a Dombey?—I can wish you nothing else but good morning.’

These words, delivered with cutting suavity, tempered and chastened by a lofty air of moral rectitude, carried the speaker to the door. There she inclined her head in a ghostly and statue-like manner, and so withdrew to her carriage, to seek comfort and consolation in the arms of Mr Chick, her lord.

Figuratively speaking, that is to say; for the arms of Mr Chick were full of his newspaper. Neither did that gentleman address his eyes towards his wife otherwise than by stealth. Neither did he offer any consolation whatever. In short, he sat reading, and humming fag ends of tunes, and sometimes glancing furtively at her without delivering himself of a word, good, bad, or indifferent.

In the meantime Mrs Chick sat swelling and bridling, and tossing her head, as if she were still repeating that solemn formula of farewell to Lucretia Tox. At length, she said aloud, ‘Oh the extent to which her eyes had been opened that day!’

‘To which your eyes have been opened, my dear!’ repeated Mr Chick.

‘Oh, don’t talk to me!’ said Mrs Chic ‘if you can bear to see me in this state, and not ask me what the matter is, you had better hold your tongue for ever.’

‘What is the matter, my dear?’ asked Mr Chick

‘To think,’ said Mrs Chick, in a state of soliloquy, ‘that she should ever have conceived the base idea of connecting herself with our family by a marriage with Paul! To think that when she was playing at horses with that dear child who is now in his grave—I never liked it at the time—she should have been hiding such a double-faced design! I wonder she was never afraid that something would happen to her. She is fortunate if nothing does.’

‘I really thought, my dear,’ said Mr Chick slowly, after rubbing the bridge of his nose for some time with his newspaper, ‘that you had gone on the same tack yourself, all along, until this morning; and had thought it would be a convenient thing enough, if it could have been brought about.’

Mrs Chick instantly burst into tears, and told Mr Chick that if he wished to trample upon her with his boots, he had better do It.

‘But with Lucretia Tox I have done,’ said Mrs Chick, after abandoning herself to her feelings for some minutes, to Mr Chick’s great terror. ‘I can bear to resign Paul’s confidence in favour of one who, I hope and trust, may be deserving of it, and with whom he has a perfect right to replace poor Fanny if he chooses; I can bear to be informed, in Paul’s cool manner, of such a change in his plans, and never to be consulted until all is settled and determined; but deceit I can not bear, and with Lucretia Tox I have done. It is better as it is,’ said Mrs Chick, piously; ‘much better. It would have been a long time before I could have accommodated myself comfortably with her, after this; and I really don’t know, as Paul is going to be very grand, and these are people of condition, that she would have been quite presentable, and might not have compromised myself. There’s a providence in everything; everything works for the best; I have been tried today but on the whole I do not regret it.’

In which Christian spirit, Mrs Chick dried her eyes and smoothed her lap, and sat as became a person calm under a great wrong. Mr Chick feeling his unworthiness no doubt, took an early opportunity of being set down at a street corner and walking away whistling, with his shoulders very much raised, and his hands in his pockets.

While poor excommunicated Miss Tox, who, if she were a fawner and toad-eater, was at least an honest and a constant one, and had ever borne a faithful friendship towards her impeacher and had been truly absorbed and swallowed up in devotion to the magnificence of Mr Dombey—while poor excommunicated Miss Tox watered her plants with her tears, and felt that it was winter in Princess’s Place.