Dombey and Son

CHAPTER 3. In which Mr Dombey, as a Man and a Father, is seen at the Head of the Home-Department

The funeral of the deceased lady having been ‘performed’ to the entire satisfaction of the undertaker, as well as of the neighbourhood at large, which is generally disposed to be captious on such a point, and is prone to take offence at any omissions or short-comings in the ceremonies, the various members of Mr Dombey’s household subsided into their several places in the domestic system. That small world, like the great one out of doors, had the capacity of easily forgetting its dead; and when the cook had said she was a quiet-tempered lady, and the house-keeper had said it was the common lot, and the butler had said who’d have thought it, and the housemaid had said she couldn’t hardly believe it, and the footman had said it seemed exactly like a dream, they had quite worn the subject out, and began to think their mourning was wearing rusty too.

On Richards, who was established upstairs in a state of honourable captivity, the dawn of her new life seemed to break cold and grey. Mr Dombey’s house was a large one, on the shady side of a tall, dark, dreadfully genteel street in the region between Portland Place and Bryanstone Square. It was a corner house, with great wide areas containing cellars frowned upon by barred windows, and leered at by crooked-eyed doors leading to dustbins. It was a house of dismal state, with a circular back to it, containing a whole suite of drawing-rooms looking upon a gravelled yard, where two gaunt trees, with blackened trunks and branches, rattled rather than rustled, their leaves were so smoked-dried. The summer sun was never on the street, but in the morning about breakfast-time, when it came with the water-carts and the old clothes men, and the people with geraniums, and the umbrella-mender, and the man who trilled the little bell of the Dutch clock as he went along. It was soon gone again to return no more that day; and the bands of music and the straggling Punch’s shows going after it, left it a prey to the most dismal of organs, and white mice; with now and then a porcupine, to vary the entertainments; until the butlers whose families were dining out, began to stand at the house-doors in the twilight, and the lamp-lighter made his nightly failure in attempting to brighten up the street with gas.

It was as blank a house inside as outside. When the funeral was over, Mr Dombey ordered the furniture to be covered up – perhaps to preserve it for the son with whom his plans were all associated – and the rooms to be ungarnished, saving such as he retained for himself on the ground floor. Accordingly, mysterious shapes were made of tables and chairs, heaped together in the middle of rooms, and covered over with great winding-sheets. Bell-handles, window-blinds, and looking-glasses, being papered up in journals, daily and weekly, obtruded fragmentary accounts of deaths and dreadful murders. Every chandelier or lustre, muffled in holland, looked like a monstrous tear depending from the ceiling’s eye. Odours, as from vaults and damp places, came out of the chimneys. The dead and buried lady was awful in a picture-frame of ghastly bandages. Every gust of wind that rose, brought eddying round the corner from the neighbouring mews, some fragments of the straw that had been strewn before the house when she was ill, mildewed remains of which were still cleaving to the neighbourhood: and these, being always drawn by some invisible attraction to the threshold of the dirty house to let immediately opposite, addressed a dismal eloquence to Mr Dombey’s windows.

The apartments which Mr Dombey reserved for his own inhabiting, were attainable from the hall, and consisted of a sitting-room; a library, which was in fact a dressing-room, so that the smell of hot-pressed paper, vellum, morocco, and Russia leather, contended in it with the smell of divers pairs of boots; and a kind of conservatory or little glass breakfast-room beyond, commanding a prospect of the trees before mentioned, and, generally speaking, of a few prowling cats. These three rooms opened upon one another. In the morning, when Mr Dombey was at his breakfast in one or other of the two first-mentioned of them, as well as in the afternoon when he came home to dinner, a bell was rung for Richards to repair to this glass chamber, and there walk to and fro with her young charge. From the glimpses she caught of Mr Dombey at these times, sitting in the dark distance, looking out towards the infant from among the dark heavy furniture – the house had been inhabited for years by his father, and in many of its appointments was old-fashioned and grim – she began to entertain ideas of him in his solitary state, as if he were a lone prisoner in a cell, or a strange apparition that was not to be accosted or understood. Mr Dombey came to be, in the course of a few days, invested in his own person, to her simple thinking, with all the mystery and gloom of his house. As she walked up and down the glass room, or sat hushing the baby there – which she very often did for hours together, when the dusk was closing in, too – she would sometimes try to pierce the gloom beyond, and make out how he was looking and what he was doing. Sensible that she was plainly to be seen by him, however, she never dared to pry in that direction but very furtively and for a moment at a time. Consequently she made out nothing, and Mr Dombey in his den remained a very shade.

Little Paul Dombey’s foster-mother had led this life herself, and had carried little Paul through it for some weeks; and had returned upstairs one day from a melancholy saunter through the dreary rooms of state (she never went out without Mrs Chick, who called on fine mornings, usually accompanied by Miss Tox, to take her and Baby for an airing – or in other words, to march them gravely up and down the pavement, like a walking funeral); when, as she was sitting in her own room, the door was slowly and quietly opened, and a dark-eyed little girl looked in.

‘It’s Miss Florence come home from her aunt’s, no doubt,’ thought Richards, who had never seen the child before. ‘Hope I see you well, Miss.’

‘Is that my brother?’ asked the child, pointing to the Baby.

‘Yes, my pretty,’ answered Richards. ‘Come and kiss him.’

But the child, instead of advancing, looked her earnestly in the face, and said:

‘What have you done with my Mama?’

‘Lord bless the little creeter!’ cried Richards, ‘what a sad question! I done? Nothing, Miss.’

‘What have they done with my Mama?’ inquired the child, with exactly the same look and manner.

‘I never saw such a melting thing in all my life!’ said Richards, who naturally substituted for this child one of her own, inquiring for herself in like circumstances. ‘Come nearer here, my dear Miss! Don’t be afraid of me.’

‘I am not afraid of you,’ said the child, drawing nearer. ‘But I want to know what they have done with my Mama.’

Her heart swelled so as she stood before the woman, looking into her eyes, that she was fain to press her little hand upon her breast and hold it there. Yet there was a purpose in the child that prevented both her slender figure and her searching gaze from faltering.

‘My darling,’ said Richards, ‘you wear that pretty black frock in remembrance of your Mama.’

‘I can remember my Mama,’ returned the child, with tears springing to her eyes, ‘in any frock.’

‘But people put on black, to remember people when they’re gone.’

‘Where gone?’ asked the child.

‘Come and sit down by me,’ said Richards, ‘and I’ll tell you a story.’

With a quick perception that it was intended to relate to what she had asked, little Florence laid aside the bonnet she had held in her hand until now, and sat down on a stool at the Nurse’s feet, looking up into her face.

‘Once upon a time,’ said Richards, ‘there was a lady – a very good lady, and her little daughter dearly loved her.’

‘A very good lady and her little daughter dearly loved her,’ repeated the child.

‘Who, when God thought it right that it should be so, was taken ill and died.’

The child shuddered.

‘Died, never to be seen again by anyone on earth, and was buried in the ground where the trees grow.’

‘The cold ground?’ said the child, shuddering again.

‘No! The warm ground,’ returned Polly, seizing her advantage, ‘where the ugly little seeds turn into beautiful flowers, and into grass, and corn, and I don’t know what all besides. Where good people turn into bright angels, and fly away to Heaven!’

The child, who had dropped her head, raised it again, and sat looking at her intently.

‘So; let me see,’ said Polly, not a little flurried between this earnest scrutiny, her desire to comfort the child, her sudden success, and her very slight confidence in her own powers. ‘So, when this lady died, wherever they took her, or wherever they put her, she went to GOD! and she prayed to Him, this lady did,’ said Polly, affecting herself beyond measure; being heartily in earnest, ‘to teach her little daughter to be sure of that in her heart: and to know that she was happy there and loved her still: and to hope and try – Oh, all her life – to meet her there one day, never, never, never to part any more.’

‘It was my Mama!’ exclaimed the child, springing up, and clasping her round the neck.

‘And the child’s heart,’ said Polly, drawing her to her breast: ‘the little daughter’s heart was so full of the truth of this, that even when she heard it from a strange nurse that couldn’t tell it right, but was a poor mother herself and that was all, she found a comfort in it – didn’t feel so lonely – sobbed and cried upon her bosom – took kindly to the baby lying in her lap – and – there, there, there!’ said Polly, smoothing the child’s curls and dropping tears upon them. ‘There, poor dear!’

‘Oh well, Miss Floy! And won’t your Pa be angry neither!’ cried a quick voice at the door, proceeding from a short, brown, womanly girl of fourteen, with a little snub nose, and black eyes like jet beads. ‘When it was ‘tickerlerly given out that you wasn’t to go and worrit the wet nurse.’

‘She don’t worry me,’ was the surprised rejoinder of Polly. ‘I am very fond of children.’

‘Oh! but begging your pardon, Mrs Richards, that don’t matter, you know,’ returned the black-eyed girl, who was so desperately sharp and biting that she seemed to make one’s eyes water. ‘I may be very fond of pennywinkles, Mrs Richards, but it don’t follow that I’m to have ‘em for tea.’

‘Well, it don’t matter,’ said Polly.

‘Oh, thank’ee, Mrs Richards, don’t it!’ returned the sharp girl. ‘Remembering, however, if you’ll be so good, that Miss Floy’s under my charge, and Master Paul’s under your’n.’

‘But still we needn’t quarrel,’ said Polly.

‘Oh no, Mrs Richards,’ rejoined Spitfire. ‘Not at all, I don’t wish it, we needn’t stand upon that footing, Miss Floy being a permanency, Master Paul a temporary.’ Spitfire made use of none but comma pauses; shooting out whatever she had to say in one sentence, and in one breath, if possible.

‘Miss Florence has just come home, hasn’t she?’ asked Polly.

‘Yes, Mrs Richards, just come, and here, Miss Floy, before you’ve been in the house a quarter of an hour, you go a smearing your wet face against the expensive mourning that Mrs Richards is a wearing for your Ma!’ With this remonstrance, young Spitfire, whose real name was Susan Nipper, detached the child from her new friend by a wrench – as if she were a tooth. But she seemed to do it, more in the excessively sharp exercise of her official functions, than with any deliberate unkindness.

‘She’ll be quite happy, now she has come home again,’ said Polly, nodding to her with an encouraging smile upon her wholesome face, ‘and will be so pleased to see her dear Papa to-night.’

‘Lork, Mrs Richards!’ cried Miss Nipper, taking up her words with a jerk. ‘Don’t. See her dear Papa indeed! I should like to see her do it!’

‘Won’t she then?’ asked Polly.

‘Lork, Mrs Richards, no, her Pa’s a deal too wrapped up in somebody else, and before there was a somebody else to be wrapped up in she never was a favourite, girls are thrown away in this house, Mrs Richards, I assure you.’

The child looked quickly from one nurse to the other, as if she understood and felt what was said.

‘You surprise me!’ cried Polly. ‘Hasn’t Mr Dombey seen her since – ’

‘No,’ interrupted Susan Nipper. ‘Not once since, and he hadn’t hardly set his eyes upon her before that for months and months, and I don’t think he’d have known her for his own child if he had met her in the streets, or would know her for his own child if he was to meet her in the streets to-morrow, Mrs Richards, as to me,’ said Spitfire, with a giggle, ‘I doubt if he’s aweer of my existence.’

‘Pretty dear!’ said Richards; meaning, not Miss Nipper, but the little Florence.