LII. Secret Intelligence…

LII. Secret Intelligence

Good Mrs Brown and her daughter Alice kept silent company together, in their own dwelling. It was early in the evening, and late in the spring. But a few days had elapsed since Mr Dombey had told Major Bagstock of his singular intelligence, singularly obtained, which might turn out to be valueless, and might turn out to be true; and the world was not satisfied yet.

The mother and daughter sat for a long time without interchanging a word: almost without motion. The old woman’s face was shrewdly anxious and expectant; that of her daughter was expectant too, but in a less sharp degree, and sometimes it darkened, as if with gathering disappointment and incredulity. The old woman, without heeding these changes in its expression, though her eyes were often turned towards it, sat mumbling and munching, and listening confidently.

Their abode, though poor and miserable, was not so utterly wretched as in the days when only Good Mrs Brown inhabited it. Some few attempts at cleanliness and order were manifest, though made in a reckless, gipsy way, that might have connected them, at a glance, with the younger woman. The shades of evening thickened and deepened as the two kept silence, until the blackened walls were nearly lost in the prevailing gloom.

Then Alice broke the silence which had lasted so long, and said:

“You may give him up, mother. He’ll not come here.”

“Death give him up!” returned the old woman, impatiently. “He will come here.”

“We shall see,” said Alice.

“We shall see him,” returned her mother.

“And doomsday,” said the daughter.

“You think I’m in my second childhood, I know!” croaked the old woman. “That’s the respect and duty that I get from my own gal, but I’m wiser than you take me for. He’ll come. T’other day when I touched his coat in the street, he looked round as if I was a toad. But Lord, to see him when I said their names, and asked him if he’d like to find out where they was!”

“Was it so angry?” asked her daughter, roused to interest in a moment.

“Angry? ask if it was bloody. That’s more like the word. Angry? Ha, ha! To call that only angry!” said the old woman, hobbling to the cupboard, and lighting a candle, which displayed the workings of her mouth to ugly advantage, as she brought it to the table. “I might as well call your face only angry, when you think or talk about ’em.”

It was something different from that, truly, as she sat as still as a crouched tigress, with her kindling eyes.

“Hark!” said the old woman, triumphantly. “I hear a step coming. It’s not the tread of anyone that lives about here, or comes this way often. We don’t walk like that. We should grow proud on such neighbours! Do you hear him?”

“I believe you are right, mother,” replied Alice, in a low voice. “Peace! open the door.”

As she drew herself within her shawl, and gathered it about her, the old woman complied; and peering out, and beckoning, gave admission to Mr Dombey, who stopped when he had set his foot within the door, and looked distrustfully around.

“It’s a poor place for a great gentleman like your worship,” said the old woman, curtseying and chattering. “I told you so, but there’s no harm in it.”

“Who is that?” asked Mr Dombey, looking at her companion.

“That’s my handsome daughter,” said the old woman. “Your worship won’t mind her. She knows all about it.”

A shadow fell upon his face not less expressive than if he had groaned aloud, “Who does not know all about it!” but he looked at her steadily, and she, without any acknowledgment of his presence, looked at him. The shadow on his face was darker when he turned his glance away from her; and even then it wandered back again, furtively, as if he were haunted by her bold eyes, and some remembrance they inspired.

“Woman,” said Mr Dombey to the old witch who was chuckling and leering close at his elbow, and who, when he turned to address her, pointed stealthily at her daughter, and rubbed her hands, and pointed again, “Woman! I believe that I am weak and forgetful of my station in coming here, but you know why I come, and what you offered when you stopped me in the street the other day. What is it that you have to tell me concerning what I want to know; and how does it happen that I can find voluntary intelligence in a hovel like this,” with a disdainful glance about him, “when I have exerted my power and means to obtain it in vain? I do not think,” he said, after a moment’s pause, during which he had observed her, sternly, “that you are so audacious as to mean to trifle with me, or endeavour to impose upon me. But if you have that purpose, you had better stop on the threshold of your scheme. My humour is not a trifling one, and my acknowledgment will be severe.”

“Oh a proud, hard gentleman!” chuckled the old woman, shaking her head, and rubbing her shrivelled hands, “oh hard, hard, hard! But your worship shall see with your own eyes and hear with your own ears; not with ours—and if your worship’s put upon their track, you won’t mind paying something for it, will you, honourable deary?”

“Money,” returned Mr Dombey, apparently relieved, and assured by this inquiry, “will bring about unlikely things, I know. It may turn even means as unexpected and unpromising as these, to account. Yes. For any reliable information I receive, I will pay. But I must have the information first, and judge for myself of its value.”

“Do you know nothing more powerful than money?” asked the younger woman, without rising, or altering her attitude.

“Not here, I should imagine,” said Mr Dombey.

“You should know of something that is more powerful elsewhere, as I judge,” she returned. “Do you know nothing of a woman’s anger?”

“You have a saucy tongue, Jade,” said Mr Dombey.

“Not usually,” she answered, without any show of emotion: “I speak to you now, that you may understand us better, and rely more on us. A woman’s anger is pretty much the same here, as in your fine house. I am angry. I have been so, many years. I have as good cause for my anger as you have for yours, and its object is the same man.”

He started, in spite of himself, and looked at her with astonishment.

“Yes,” she said, with a kind of laugh. “Wide as the distance may seem between us, it is so. How it is so, is no matter; that is my story, and I keep my story to myself. I would bring you and him together, because I have a rage against him. My mother there, is avaricious and poor; and she would sell any tidings she could glean, or anything, or anybody, for money. It is fair enough, perhaps, that you should pay her some, if she can help you to what you want to know. But that is not my motive. I have told you what mine is, and it would be as strong and all-sufficient with me if you haggled and bargained with her for a sixpence. I have done. My saucy tongue says no more, if you wait here till sunrise tomorrow.”

The old woman, who had shown great uneasiness during this speech, which had a tendency to depreciate her expected gains, pulled Mr Dombey softly by the sleeve, and whispered to him not to mind her. He glared at them both, by turns, with a haggard look, and said, in a deeper voice than was usual with him:

“Go on—what do you know?”

“Oh, not so fast, your worship! we must wait for someone,” answered the old woman. “It’s to be got from someone else—wormed out—screwed and twisted from him.”

“What do you mean?” said Mr Dombey.

“Patience,” she croaked, laying her hand, like a claw, upon his arm. “Patience. I’ll get at it. I know I can! If he was to hold it back from me,” said Good Mrs Brown, crooking her ten fingers, “I’d tear it out of him!”

Mr Dombey followed her with his eyes as she hobbled to the door, and looked out again: and then his glance sought her daughter; but she remained impassive, silent, and regardless of him.

“Do you tell me, woman,” he said, when the bent figure of Mrs Brown came back, shaking its head and chattering to itself, “that there is another person expected here?”

“Yes!” said the old woman, looking up into his face, and nodding.

“From whom you are to exact the intelligence that is to be useful to me?”

“Yes,” said the old woman, nodding again.

“A stranger?”

“Chut!” said the old woman, with a shrill laugh. “What signifies! Well, well; no. No stranger to your worship. But he won’t see you. He’d be afraid of you, and wouldn’t talk. You’ll stand behind that door, and judge him for yourself. We don’t ask to be believed on trust What! Your worship doubts the room behind the door? Oh the suspicion of you rich gentlefolks! Look at it, then.”

Her sharp eye had detected an involuntary expression of this feeling on his part, which was not unreasonable under the circumstances. In satisfaction of it she now took the candle to the door she spoke of. Mr Dombey looked in; assured himself that it was an empty, crazy room; and signed to her to put the light back in its place.

“How long,” he asked, “before this person comes?”

“Not long,” she answered. “Would your worship sit down for a few odd minutes?”

He made no answer; but began pacing the room with an irresolute air, as if he were undecided whether to remain or depart, and as if he had some quarrel with himself for being there at all. But soon his tread grew slower and heavier, and his face more sternly thoughtful; as the object with which he had come, fixed itself in his mind, and dilated there again.

While he thus walked up and down with his eyes on the ground, Mrs Brown, in the chair from which she had risen to receive him, sat listening anew. The monotony of his step, or the uncertainty of age, made her so slow of hearing, that a footfall without had sounded in her daughter’s ears for some moments, and she had looked up hastily to warn her mother of its approach, before the old woman was roused by it. But then she started from her seat, and whispering “Here he is!” hurried her visitor to his place of observation, and put a bottle and glass upon the table, with such alacrity, as to be ready to fling her arms round the neck of Rob the Grinder on his appearance at the door.

“And here’s my bonny boy,” cried Mrs Brown, “at last!—oho, oho! You’re like my own son, Robby!”

“Oh! Misses Brown!” remonstrated the Grinder. “Don’t! Can’t you be fond of a cove without squeedging and throttling of him? Take care of the birdcage in my hand, will you?”

“Thinks of a birdcage, afore me!” cried the old woman, apostrophizing the ceiling. “Me that feels more than a mother for him!”

“Well, I’m sure I’m very much obliged to you, Misses Brown,” said the unfortunate youth, greatly aggravated; “but you’re so jealous of a cove. I’m very fond of you myself, and all that, of course; but I don’t smother you, do I, Misses Brown?”

He looked and spoke as if he would have been far from objecting to do so, however, on a favourable occasion.

“And to talk about birdcages, too!” whimpered the Grinder. “As if that was a crime! Why, look’ee here! Do you know who this belongs to?”

“To Master, dear?” said the old woman with a grin.

“Ah!” replied the Grinder, lifting a large cage tied up in a wrapper, on the table, and untying it with his teeth and hands. “It’s our parrot, this is.”

“Mr Carker’s parrot, Rob?”

“Will you hold your tongue, Misses Brown?” returned the goaded Grinder. “What do you go naming names for? I’m blest,” said Rob, pulling his hair with both hands in the exasperation of his feelings, “if she ain’t enough to make a cove run wild!”

“What! Do you snub me, thankless boy!” cried the old woman, with ready vehemence.

“Good gracious, Misses Brown, no!” returned the Grinder, with tears in his eyes. “Was there ever such a—! Don’t I dote upon you, Misses Brown?”

“Do you, sweet Rob? Do you truly, chickabiddy?” With that, Mrs Brown held him in her fond embrace once more; and did not release him until he had made several violent and ineffectual struggles with his legs, and his hair was standing on end all over his head.

“Oh!” returned the Grinder, “what a thing it is to be perfectly pitched into with affection like this here. I wish she was—How have you been, Misses Brown?”

“Ah! Not here since this night week!” said the old woman, contemplating him with a look of reproach.

“Good gracious, Misses Brown,” returned the Grinder, “I said tonight’s a week, that I’d come tonight, didn’t I? And here I am. How you do go on! I wish you’d be a little rational, Misses Brown. I’m hoarse with saying things in my defence, and my very face is shiny with being hugged!” He rubbed it hard with his sleeve, as if to remove the tender polish in question.

“Drink a little drop to comfort you, my Robin,” said the old woman, filling the glass from the bottle and giving it to him.

“Thank’ee, Misses Brown,” returned the Grinder. “Here’s your health. And long may you—et ceterer.” Which, to judge from the expression of his face, did not include any very choice blessings. “And here’s her health,” said the Grinder, glancing at Alice, who sat with her eyes fixed, as it seemed to him, on the wall behind him, but in reality on Mr Dombey’s face at the door, “and wishing her the same and many of ’em!”

He drained the glass to these two sentiments, and set it down.

“Well, I say, Misses Brown!” he proceeded. “To go on a little rational now. You’re a judge of birds, and up to their ways, as I know to my cost.”

“Cost!” repeated Mrs Brown.

“Satisfaction, I mean,” returned the Grinder. “How you do take up a cove, Misses Brown! You’ve put it all out of my head again.”

“Judge of birds, Robby,” suggested the old woman.

“Ah!” said the Grinder. “Well, I’ve got to take care of this parrot—certain things being sold, and a certain establishment broke up—and as I don’t want no notice took at present, I wish you’d attend to her for a week or so, and give her board and lodging, will you? If I must come backwards and forwards,” mused the Grinder with a dejected face, “I may as well have something to come for.”

“Something to come for?” screamed the old woman.

“Besides you, I mean, Misses Brown,” returned the craven Rob. “Not that I want any inducement but yourself, Misses Brown, I’m sure. Don’t begin again, for goodness’ sake.”

“He don’t care for me! He don’t care for me, as I care for him!” cried Mrs Brown, lifting up her skinny hands. “But I’ll take care of his bird.”

“Take good care of it too, you know, Mrs Brown,” said Rob, shaking his head. “If you was so much as to stroke its feathers once the wrong way, I believe it would be found out.”

“Ah, so sharp as that, Rob?” said Mrs Brown, quickly.

“Sharp, Misses Brown!” repeated Rob. “But this is not to be talked about.”

Checking himself abruptly, and not without a fearful glance across the room, Rob filled the glass again, and having slowly emptied it, shook his head, and began to draw his fingers across and across the wires of the parrot’s cage by way of a diversion from the dangerous theme that had just been broached.

The old woman eyed him slily, and hitching her chair nearer his, and looking in at the parrot, who came down from the gilded dome at her call, said:

“Out of place now, Robby?”

“Never you mind, Misses Brown,” returned the Grinder, shortly.

“Board wages, perhaps, Rob?” said Mrs Brown.

“Pretty Polly!” said the Grinder.

The old woman darted a glance at him that might have warned him to consider his ears in danger, but it was his turn to look in at the parrot now, and however expressive his imagination may have made her angry scowl, it was unseen by his bodily eyes.

“I wonder Master didn’t take you with him, Rob,” said the old woman, in a wheedling voice, but with increased malignity of aspect.

Rob was so absorbed in contemplation of the parrot, and in trolling his forefinger on the wires, that he made no answer.

The old woman had her clutch within a hair’s breadth of his shock of hair as it stooped over the table; but she restrained her fingers, and said, in a voice that choked with its efforts to be coaxing:

“Robby, my child.”

“Well, Misses Brown,” returned the Grinder.

“I say I wonder Master didn’t take you with him, dear.”

“Never you mind, Misses Brown,” returned the Grinder.

Mrs Brown instantly directed the clutch of her right hand at his hair, and the clutch of her left hand at his throat, and held on to the object of her fond affection with such extraordinary fury, that his face began to blacken in a moment.

“Misses Brown!” exclaimed the Grinder, “let go, will you? What are you doing of? Help, young woman! Misses Brow—Brow—!”

The young woman, however, equally unmoved by his direct appeal to her, and by his inarticulate utterance, remained quite neutral, until, after struggling with his assailant into a corner, Rob disengaged himself, and stood there panting and fenced in by his own elbows, while the old woman, panting too, and stamping with rage and eagerness, appeared to be collecting her energies for another swoop upon him. At this crisis Alice interposed her voice, but not in the Grinder’s favour, by saying,

“Well done, mother. Tear him to pieces!”

“What, young woman!” blubbered Rob; “are you against me too? What have I been and done? What am I to be tore to pieces for, I should like to know? Why do you take and choke a cove who has never done you any harm, neither of you? Call yourselves females, too!” said the frightened and afflicted Grinder, with his coat-cuff at his eye. “I’m surprised at you! Where’s your feminine tenderness?”

“You thankless dog!” gasped Mrs Brown. “You impudent insulting dog!”

“What have I been and done to go and give you offence, Misses Brown?” retorted the fearful Rob. “You was very much attached to me a minute ago.”

“To cut me off with his short answers and his sulky words,” said the old woman. “Me! Because I happen to be curious to have a little bit of gossip about Master and the lady, to dare to play at fast and loose with me! But I’ll talk to you no more, my lad. Now go!”

“I’m sure, Misses Brown,” returned the abject Grinder, “I never insiniwated that I wished to go. Don’t talk like that, Misses Brown, if you please.”

“I won’t talk at all,” said Mrs Brown, with an action of her crooked fingers that made him shrink into half his natural compass in the corner. “Not another word with him shall pass my lips. He’s an ungrateful hound. I cast him off. Now let him go! And I’ll slip those after him that shall talk too much; that won’t be shook away; that’ll hang to him like leeches, and slink arter him like foxes. What! He knows ’em. He knows his old games and his old ways. If he’s forgotten ’em, they’ll soon remind him. Now let him go, and see how he’ll do Master’s business, and keep Master’s secrets, with such company always following him up and down. Ha, ha, ha! He’ll find ’em a different sort from you and me, Ally; Close as he is with you and me. Now let him go, now let him go!”

The old woman, to the unspeakable dismay of the Grinder, walked her twisted figure round and round, in a ring of some four feet in diameter, constantly repeating these words, and shaking her fist above her head, and working her mouth about.

“Misses Brown,” pleaded Rob, coming a little out of his corner, “I’m sure you wouldn’t injure a cove, on second thoughts, and in cold blood, would you?”

“Don’t talk to me,” said Mrs Brown, still wrathfully pursuing her circle. “Now let him go, now let him go!”

“Misses Brown,” urged the tormented Grinder, “I didn’t mean to—Oh, what a thing it is for a cove to get into such a line as this!—I was only careful of talking, Misses Brown, because I always am, on account of his being up to everything; but I might have known it wouldn’t have gone any further. I’m sure I’m quite agreeable,” with a wretched face, “for any little bit of gossip, Misses Brown. Don’t go on like this, if you please. Oh, couldn’t you have the goodness to put in a word for a miserable cove, here?” said the Grinder, appealing in desperation to the daughter.

“Come, mother, you hear what he says,” she interposed, in her stern voice, and with an impatient action of her head; “try him once more, and if you fall out with him again, ruin him, if you like, and have done with him.”

Mrs Brown, moved as it seemed by this very tender exhortation, presently began to howl; and softening by degrees, took the apologetic Grinder to her arms, who embraced her with a face of unutterable woe, and like a victim as he was, resumed his former seat, close by the side of his venerable friend, whom he suffered, not without much constrained sweetness of countenance, combating very expressive physiognomical revelations of an opposite character to draw his arm through hers, and keep it there.

“And how’s Master, deary dear?” said Mrs Brown, when, sitting in this amicable posture, they had pledged each other.

“Hush! If you’d be so good, Misses Brown, as to speak a little lower,” Rob implored. “Why, he’s pretty well, thank’ee, I suppose.”

“You’re not out of place, Robby?” said Mrs Brown, in a wheedling tone.

“Why, I’m not exactly out of place, nor in,” faltered Rob. “I—I’m still in pay, Misses Brown.”

“And nothing to do, Rob?”

“Nothing particular to do just now, Misses Brown, but to—keep my eyes open,” said the Grinder, rolling them in a forlorn way.

“Master abroad, Rob?”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Misses Brown, couldn’t you gossip with a cove about anything else?” cried the Grinder, in a burst of despair.

The impetuous Mrs Brown rising directly, the tortured Grinder detained her, stammering “Ye-es, Misses Brown, I believe he’s abroad. What’s she staring at?” he added, in allusion to the daughter, whose eyes were fixed upon the face that now again looked out behind.

“Don’t mind her, lad,” said the old woman, holding him closer to prevent his turning round. “It’s her way—her way. Tell me, Rob. Did you ever see the lady, deary?”

“Oh, Misses Brown, what lady?” cried the Grinder in a tone of piteous supplication.

“What lady?” she retorted. “The lady; Mrs Dombey.”

“Yes, I believe I see her once,” replied Rob.

“The night she went away, Robby, eh?” said the old woman in his ear, and taking note of every change in his face. “Aha! I know it was that night.”

“Well, if you know it was that night, you know, Misses Brown,” replied Rob, “it’s no use putting pinchers into a cove to make him say so.

“Where did they go that night, Rob? Straight away? How did they go? Where did you see her? Did she laugh? Did she cry? Tell me all about it,” cried the old hag, holding him closer yet, patting the hand that was drawn through his arm against her other hand, and searching every line in his face with her bleared eyes. “Come! Begin! I want to be told all about it. What, Rob, boy! You and me can keep a secret together, eh? We’ve done so before now. Where did they go first, Rob?”

The wretched Grinder made a gasp, and a pause.

“Are you dumb?” said the old woman, angrily.

“Lord, Misses Brown, no! You expect a cove to be a flash of lightning. I wish I was the electric fluency,” muttered the bewildered Grinder. “I’d have a shock at somebody, that would settle their business.”

“What do you say?” asked the old woman, with a grin.

“I’m wishing my love to you, Misses Brown,” returned the false Rob, seeking consolation in the glass. “Where did they go to first was it? Him and her, do you mean?”

“Ah!” said the old woman, eagerly. “Them two.”

“Why, they didn’t go nowhere—not together, I mean,” answered Rob.

The old woman looked at him, as though she had a strong impulse upon her to make another clutch at his head and throat, but was restrained by a certain dogged mystery in his face.

“That was the art of it,” said the reluctant Grinder; “that’s the way nobody saw ’em go, or has been able to say how they did go. They went different ways, I tell you Misses Brown.”

“Ay, ay, ay! To meet at an appointed place,” chuckled the old woman, after a moment’s silent and keen scrutiny of his face.

“Why, if they weren’t a going to meet somewhere, I suppose they might as well have stayed at home, mightn’t they, Brown?” returned the unwilling Grinder.

“Well, Rob? Well?” said the old woman, drawing his arm yet tighter through her own, as if, in her eagerness, she were afraid of his slipping away.

“What, haven’t we talked enough yet, Misses Brown?” returned the Grinder, who, between his sense of injury, his sense of liquor, and his sense of being on the rack, had become so lachrymose, that at almost every answer he scooped his coats into one or other of his eyes, and uttered an unavailing whine of remonstrance. “Did she laugh that night, was it? Didn’t you ask if she laughed, Misses Brown?”

“Or cried?” added the old woman, nodding assent.

“Neither,” said the Grinder. “She kept as steady when she and me—oh, I see you will have it out of me, Misses Brown! But take your solemn oath now, that you’ll never tell anybody.”

This Mrs Brown very readily did: being naturally Jesuitical; and having no other intention in the matter than that her concealed visitor should hear for himself.

“She kept as steady, then, when she and me went down to Southampton,” said the Grinder, “as a image. In the morning she was just the same, Misses Brown. And when she went away in the packet before daylight, by herself—me pretending to be her servant, and seeing her safe aboard—she was just the same. Now, are you contented, Misses Brown?”

“No, Rob. Not yet,” answered Mrs Brown, decisively.

“Oh, here’s a woman for you!” cried the unfortunate Rob, in an outburst of feeble lamentation over his own helplessness. “What did you wish to know next, Misses Brown?”

“What became of Master? Where did he go?” she inquired, still holding him tight, and looking close into his face, with her sharp eyes.

“Upon my soul, I don’t know, Misses Brown,” answered Rob. “Upon my soul I don’t know what he did, nor where he went, nor anything about him I only know what he said to me as a caution to hold my tongue, when we parted; and I tell you this, Misses Brown, as a friend, that sooner than ever repeat a word of what we’re saying now, you had better take and shoot yourself, or shut yourself up in this house, and set it a-fire, for there’s nothing he wouldn’t do, to be revenged upon you. You don’t know him half as well as I do, Misses Brown. You’re never safe from him, I tell you.”

“Haven’t I taken an oath,” retorted the old woman, “and won’t I keep it?”

“Well, I’m sure I hope you will, Misses Brown,” returned Rob, somewhat doubtfully, and not without a latent threatening in his manner. “For your own sake, quite as much as mine.”

He looked at her as he gave her this friendly caution, and emphasized it with a nodding of his head; but finding it uncomfortable to encounter the yellow face with its grotesque action, and the ferret eyes with their keen old wintry gaze, so close to his own, he looked down uneasily and sat skulking in his chair, as if he were trying to bring himself to a sullen declaration that he would answer no more questions. The old woman, still holding him as before, took this opportunity of raising the forefinger of her right hand, in the air, as a stealthy signal to the concealed observer to give particular attention to what was about to follow.

“Rob,” she said, in her most coaxing tone.

“Good gracious, Misses Brown, what’s the matter now?” returned the exasperated Grinder.

“Rob! where did the lady and Master appoint to meet?”

Rob shuffled more and more, and looked up and looked down, and bit his thumb, and dried it on his waistcoat, and finally said, eyeing his tormentor askance, “How should I know, Misses Brown?”

The old woman held up her finger again, as before, and replying, “Come, lad! It’s no use leading me to that, and there leaving me. I want to know” waited for his answer. Rob, after a discomfited pause, suddenly broke out with, “How can I pronounce the names of foreign places, Mrs Brown? What an unreasonable woman you are!”

“But you have heard it said, Robby,” she retorted firmly, “and you know what it sounded like. Come!”

“I never heard it said, Misses Brown,” returned the Grinder.

“Then,” retorted the old woman quickly, “you have seen it written, and you can spell it.”

Rob, with a petulant exclamation between laughing and crying—for he was penetrated with some admiration of Mrs Brown’s cunning, even through this persecution—after some reluctant fumbling in his waistcoat pocket, produced from it a little piece of chalk. The old woman’s eyes sparkled when she saw it between his thumb and finger, and hastily clearing a space on the deal table, that he might write the word there, she once more made her signal with a shaking hand.

“Now I tell you beforehand what it is, Misses Brown,” said Rob, “it’s no use asking me anything else. I won’t answer anything else; I can’t. How long it was to be before they met, or whose plan it was that they was to go away alone, I don’t know no more than you do. I don’t know any more about it. If I was to tell you how I found out this word, you’d believe that. Shall I tell you, Misses Brown?”

“Yes, Rob.”

“Well then, Misses Brown. The way—now you won’t ask any more, you know?” said Rob, turning his eyes, which were now fast getting drowsy and stupid, upon her.

“Not another word,” said Mrs Brown.

“Well then, the way was this. When a certain person left the lady with me, he put a piece of paper with a direction written on it in the lady’s hand, saying it was in case she should forget. She wasn’t afraid of forgetting, for she tore it up as soon as his back was turned, and when I put up the carriage steps, I shook out one of the pieces—she sprinkled the rest out of the window, I suppose, for there was none there afterwards, though I looked for ’em. There was only one word on it, and that was this, if you must and will know. But remember! You’re upon your oath, Misses Brown!”

Mrs Brown knew that, she said. Rob, having nothing more to say, began to chalk, slowly and laboriously, on the table.

“‘D,’” the old woman read aloud, when he had formed the letter.

“Will you hold your tongue, Misses Brown?” he exclaimed, covering it with his hand, and turning impatiently upon her. “I won’t have it read out. Be quiet, will you!”

“Then write large, Rob,” she returned, repeating her secret signal; “for my eyes are not good, even at print.”

Muttering to himself, and returning to his work with an ill will, Rob went on with the word. As he bent his head down, the person for whose information he so unconsciously laboured, moved from the door behind him to within a short stride of his shoulder, and looked eagerly towards the creeping track of his hand upon the table. At the same time, Alice, from her opposite chair, watched it narrowly as it shaped the letters, and repeated each one on her lips as he made it, without articulating it aloud. At the end of every letter her eyes and Mr Dombey’s met, as if each of them sought to be confirmed by the other; and thus they both spelt D.I.J.O.N.

“There!” said the Grinder, moistening the palm of his hand hastily, to obliterate the word; and not content with smearing it out, rubbing and planing all trace of it away with his coat-sleeve, until the very colour of the chalk was gone from the table. “Now, I hope you’re contented, Misses Brown!”

The old woman, in token of her being so, released his arm and patted his back; and the Grinder, overcome with mortification, cross-examination, and liquor, folded his arms on the table, laid his head upon them, and fell asleep.

Not until he had been heavily asleep some time, and was snoring roundly, did the old woman turn towards the door where Mr Dombey stood concealed, and beckon him to come through the room, and pass out. Even then, she hovered over Rob, ready to blind him with her hands, or strike his head down, if he should raise it while the secret step was crossing to the door. But though her glance took sharp cognizance of the sleeper, it was sharp too for the waking man; and when he touched her hand with his, and in spite of all his caution, made a chinking, golden sound, it was as bright and greedy as a raven’s.

The daughter’s dark gaze followed him to the door, and noted well how pale he was, and how his hurried tread indicated that the least delay was an insupportable restraint upon him, and how he was burning to be active and away. As he closed the door behind him, she looked round at her mother. The old woman trotted to her; opened her hand to show what was within; and, tightly closing it again in her jealousy and avarice, whispered:

“What will he do, Ally?”

“Mischief,” said the daughter.

“Murder?” asked the old woman.

“He’s a madman, in his wounded pride, and may do that, for anything we can say, or he either.”

Her glance was brighter than her mother’s, and the fire that shone in it was fiercer; but her face was colourless, even to her lips.

They said no more, but sat apart; the mother communing with her money; the daughter with her thoughts; the glance of each, shining in the gloom of the feebly lighted room. Rob slept and snored. The disregarded parrot only was in action. It twisted and pulled at the wires of its cage, with its crooked beak, and crawled up to the dome, and along its roof like a fly, and down again head foremost, and shook, and bit, and rattled at every slender bar, as if it knew its master’s danger, and was wild to force a passage out, and fly away to warn him of it.

LIII. More Intelligence

There were two of the traitor’s own blood—his renounced brother and sister—on whom the weight of his guilt rested almost more heavily, at this time, than on the man whom he had so deeply injured. Prying and tormenting as the world was, it did Mr Dombey the service of nerving him to pursuit and revenge. It roused his passion, stung his pride, twisted the one idea of his life into a new shape, and made some gratification of his wrath, the object into which his whole intellectual existence resolved itself. All the stubbornness and implacability of his nature, all its hard impenetrable quality, all its gloom and moroseness, all its exaggerated sense of personal importance, all its jealous disposition to resent the least flaw in the ample recognition of his importance by others, set this way like many streams united into one, and bore him on upon their tide. The most impetuously passionate and violently impulsive of mankind would have been a milder enemy to encounter than the sullen Mr Dombey wrought to this. A wild beast would have been easier turned or soothed than the grave gentleman without a wrinkle in his starched cravat.

But the very intensity of his purpose became almost a substitute for action in it. While he was yet uninformed of the traitor’s retreat, it served to divert his mind from his own calamity, and to entertain it with another prospect. The brother and sister of his false favourite had no such relief; everything in their history, past and present, gave his delinquency a more afflicting meaning to them.

The sister may have sometimes sadly thought that if she had remained with him, the companion and friend she had been once, he might have escaped the crime into which he had fallen. If she ever thought so, it was still without regret for what she had done, without the least doubt of her duty, without any pricing or enhancing of her self-devotion. But when this possibility presented itself to the erring and repentant brother, as it sometimes did, it smote upon his heart with such a keen, reproachful touch as he could hardly bear. No idea of retort upon his cruel brother came into his mind. New accusation of himself, fresh inward lamentings over his own unworthiness, and the ruin in which it was at once his consolation and his self-reproach that he did not stand alone, were the sole kind of reflections to which the discovery gave rise in him.

It was on the very same day whose evening set upon the last chapter, and when Mr Dombey’s world was busiest with the elopement of his wife, that the window of the room in which the brother and sister sat at their early breakfast, was darkened by the unexpected shadow of a man coming to the little porch: which man was Perch the Messenger.

“I’ve stepped over from Balls Pond at a early hour,” said Mr Perch, confidentially looking in at the room door, and stopping on the mat to wipe his shoes all round, which had no mud upon them, “agreeable to my instructions last night. They was, to be sure and bring a note to you, Mr Carker, before you went out in the morning. I should have been here a good hour and a half ago,” said Mr Perch, meekly, “but for the state of health of Mrs P., who I thought I should have lost in the night, I do assure you, five distinct times.”

“Is your wife so ill?” asked Harriet.

“Why, you see,” said Mr Perch, first turning round to shut the door carefully, “she takes what has happened in our House so much to heart, Miss. Her nerves is so very delicate, you see, and soon unstrung. Not but what the strongest nerves had good need to be shook, I’m sure. You feel it very much yourself, no doubts.”

Harriet repressed a sigh, and glanced at her brother.

“I’m sure I feel it myself, in my humble way,” Mr Perch went on to say, with a shake of his head, “in a manner I couldn’t have believed if I hadn’t been called upon to undergo. It has almost the effect of drink upon me. I literally feels every morning as if I had been taking more than was good for me over-night.”

Mr Perch’s appearance corroborated this recital of his symptoms. There was an air of feverish lassitude about it, that seemed referable to drams; and, which, in fact, might no doubt have been traced to those numerous discoveries of himself in the bars of public-houses, being treated and questioned, which he was in the daily habit of making.

“Therefore I can judge,” said Mr Perch, shaking his head and speaking in a silvery murmur, “of the feelings of such as is at all peculiarly sitiwated in this most painful rewelation.”

Here Mr Perch waited to be confided in; and receiving no confidence, coughed behind his hand. This leading to nothing, he coughed behind his hat; and that leading to nothing, he put his hat on the ground and sought in his breast pocket for the letter.

“If I rightly recollect, there was no answer,” said Mr Perch, with an affable smile; “but perhaps you’ll be so good as cast your eye over it, Sir.”

John Carker broke the seal, which was Mr Dombey’s, and possessing himself of the contents, which were very brief, replied, “No. No answer is expected.”

“Then I shall wish you good morning, Miss,” said Perch, taking a step toward the door, and hoping, I’m sure, that you’ll not permit yourself to be more reduced in mind than you can help, by the late painful rewelation. The Papers,” said Mr Perch, taking two steps back again, and comprehensively addressing both the brother and sister in a whisper of increased mystery, “is more eager for news of it than you’d suppose possible. One of the Sunday ones, in a blue cloak and a white hat, that had previously offered for to bribe me—need I say with what success?—was dodging about our court last night as late as twenty minutes after eight o’clock. I see him myself, with his eye at the counting-house keyhole, which being patent is impervious. Another one,” said Mr Perch, “with military frogs, is in the parlour of the King’s Arms all the blessed day. I happened, last week, to let a little obserwation fall there, and next morning, which was Sunday, I see it worked up in print, in a most surprising manner.”

Mr Perch resorted to his breast pocket, as if to produce the paragraph but receiving no encouragement, pulled out his beaver gloves, picked up his hat, and took his leave; and before it was high noon, Mr Perch had related to several select audiences at the King’s Arms and elsewhere, how Miss Carker, bursting into tears, had caught him by both hands, and said, “Oh! dear dear Perch, the sight of you is all the comfort I have left!” and how Mr John Carker had said, in an awful voice, “Perch, I disown him. Never let me hear him mentioned as a brother more!”

“Dear John,” said Harriet, when they were left alone, and had remained silent for some few moments. “There are bad tidings in that letter.”

“Yes. But nothing unexpected,” he replied. “I saw the writer yesterday.”

“The writer?”

“Mr Dombey. He passed twice through the Counting House while I was there. I had been able to avoid him before, but of course could not hope to do that long. I know how natural it was that he should regard my presence as something offensive; I felt it must be so, myself.”

“He did not say so?”

“No; he said nothing: but I saw that his glance rested on me for a moment, and I was prepared for what would happen—for what has happened. I am dismissed!”

She looked as little shocked and as hopeful as she could, but it was distressing news, for many reasons.

“‘I need not tell you,’” said John Carker, reading the letter, “‘why your name would henceforth have an unnatural sound, in however remote a connexion with mine, or why the daily sight of anyone who bears it, would be unendurable to me. I have to notify the cessation of all engagements between us, from this date, and to request that no renewal of any communication with me, or my establishment, be ever attempted by you.’—Enclosed is an equivalent in money to a generously long notice, and this is my discharge. Heaven knows, Harriet, it is a lenient and considerate one, when we remember all!”

“If it be lenient and considerate to punish you at all, John, for the misdeed of another,” she replied gently, “yes.”

“We have been an ill-omened race to him,” said John Carker. “He has reason to shrink from the sound of our name, and to think that there is something cursed and wicked in our blood. I should almost think it too, Harriet, but for you.”

“Brother, don’t speak like this. If you have any special reason, as you say you have, and think you have—though I say, No!—to love me, spare me the hearing of such wild mad words!”

He covered his face with both his hands; but soon permitted her, coming near him, to take one in her own.

“After so many years, this parting is a melancholy thing, I know,” said his sister, “and the cause of it is dreadful to us both. We have to live, too, and must look about us for the means. Well, well! We can do so, undismayed. It is our pride, not our trouble, to strive, John, and to strive together!”

A smile played on her lips, as she kissed his cheek, and entreated him to be of good cheer.

“Oh, dearest sister! Tied, of your own noble will, to a ruined man! whose reputation is blighted; who has no friend himself, and has driven every friend of yours away!”

“John!” she laid her hand hastily upon his lips, “for my sake! In remembrance of our long companionship!” He was silent “Now, let me tell you, dear,” quietly sitting by his side, “I have, as you have, expected this; and when I have been thinking of it, and fearing that it would happen, and preparing myself for it, as well as I could, I have resolved to tell you, if it should be so, that I have kept a secret from you, and that we have a friend.”

“What’s our friend’s name, Harriet?” he answered with a sorrowful smile.

“Indeed, I don’t know, but he once made a very earnest protestation to me of his friendship and his wish to serve us: and to this day I believe him.”

“Harriet!” exclaimed her wondering brother, “where does this friend live?”

“Neither do I know that,” she returned. “But he knows us both, and our history—all our little history, John. That is the reason why, at his own suggestion, I have kept the secret of his coming, here, from you, lest his acquaintance with it should distress you.”

“Here! Has he been here, Harriet?”

“Here, in this room. Once.”

“What kind of man?”

“Not young. ‘Grey-headed,’ as he said, ‘and fast growing greyer.’ But generous, and frank, and good, I am sure.”

“And only seen once, Harriet?”

“In this room only once,” said his sister, with the slightest and most transient glow upon her cheek; “but when here, he entreated me to suffer him to see me once a week as he passed by, in token of our being well, and continuing to need nothing at his hands. For I told him, when he proffered us any service he could render—which was the object of his visit—that we needed nothing.”

“And once a week—”

“Once every week since then, and always on the same day, and at the same hour, he his gone past; always on foot; always going in the same direction—towards London; and never pausing longer than to bow to me, and wave his hand cheerfully, as a kind guardian might. He made that promise when he proposed these curious interviews, and has kept it so faithfully and pleasantly, that if I ever felt any trifling uneasiness about them in the beginning (which I don’t think I did, John; his manner was so plain and true) it very soon vanished, and left me quite glad when the day was coming. Last Monday—the first since this terrible event—he did not go by; and I have wondered whether his absence can have been in any way connected with what has happened.”

“How?” inquired her brother.

“I don’t know how. I have only speculated on the coincidence; I have not tried to account for it. I feel sure he will return. When he does, dear John, let me tell him that I have at last spoken to you, and let me bring you together. He will certainly help us to a new livelihood. His entreaty was that he might do something to smooth my life and yours; and I gave him my promise that if we ever wanted a friend, I would remember him. Then his name was to be no secret.”

“Harriet,” said her brother, who had listened with close attention, “describe this gentleman to me. I surely ought to know one who knows me so well.”

His sister painted, as vividly as she could, the features, stature, and dress of her visitor; but John Carker, either from having no knowledge of the original, or from some fault in her description, or from some abstraction of his thoughts as he walked to and fro, pondering, could not recognise the portrait she presented to him.

However, it was agreed between them that he should see the original when he next appeared. This concluded, the sister applied herself, with a less anxious breast, to her domestic occupations; and the grey-haired man, late Junior of Dombey’s, devoted the first day of his unwonted liberty to working in the garden.

It was quite late at night, and the brother was reading aloud while the sister plied her needle, when they were interrupted by a knocking at the door. In the atmosphere of vague anxiety and dread that lowered about them in connexion with their fugitive brother, this sound, unusual there, became almost alarming. The brother going to the door, the sister sat and listened timidly. Someone spoke to him, and he replied and seemed surprised; and after a few words, the two approached together.

“Harriet,” said her brother, lighting in their late visitor, and speaking in a low voice, “Mr Morfin—the gentleman so long in Dombey’s House with James.”

His sister started back, as if a ghost had entered. In the doorway stood the unknown friend, with the dark hair sprinkled with grey, the ruddy face, the broad clear brow, and hazel eyes, whose secret she had kept so long!

“John!” she said, half-breathless. “It is the gentleman I told you of, today!”

“The gentleman, Miss Harriet,” said the visitor, coming in—for he had stopped a moment in the doorway—“is greatly relieved to hear you say that: he has been devising ways and means, all the way here, of explaining himself, and has been satisfied with none. Mr John, I am not quite a stranger here. You were stricken with astonishment when you saw me at your door just now. I observe you are more astonished at present. Well! That’s reasonable enough under existing circumstances. If we were not such creatures of habit as we are, we shouldn’t have reason to be astonished half so often.”

By this time, he had greeted Harriet with that able mingling of cordiality and respect which she recollected so well, and had sat down near her, pulled off his gloves, and thrown them into his hat upon the table.

“There’s nothing astonishing,” he said, “in my having conceived a desire to see your sister, Mr John, or in my having gratified it in my own way. As to the regularity of my visits since (which she may have mentioned to you), there is nothing extraordinary in that. They soon grew into a habit; and we are creatures of habit—creatures of habit!”

Putting his hands into his pockets, and leaning back in his chair, he looked at the brother and sister as if it were interesting to him to see them together; and went on to say, with a kind of irritable thoughtfulness: “It’s this same habit that confirms some of us, who are capable of better things, in Lucifer’s own pride and stubbornness—that confirms and deepens others of us in villainy—more of us in indifference —that hardens us from day to day, according to the temper of our clay, like images, and leaves us as susceptible as images to new impressions and convictions. You shall judge of its influence on me, John. For more years than I need name, I had my small, and exactly defined share, in the management of Dombey’s House, and saw your brother (who has proved himself a scoundrel! Your sister will forgive my being obliged to mention it) extending and extending his influence, until the business and its owner were his football; and saw you toiling at your obscure desk every day; and was quite content to be as little troubled as I might be, out of my own strip of duty, and to let everything about me go on, day by day, unquestioned, like a great machine—that was its habit and mine—and to take it all for granted, and consider it all right. My Wednesday nights came regularly round, our quartette parties came regularly off, my violoncello was in good tune, and there was nothing wrong in my world—or if anything not much—or little or much, it was no affair of mine.”

“I can answer for your being more respected and beloved during all that time than anybody in the House, Sir,” said John Carker.

“Pooh! Good-natured and easy enough, I daresay,” returned the other, “a habit I had. It suited the Manager; it suited the man he managed: it suited me best of all. I did what was allotted to me to do, made no court to either of them, and was glad to occupy a station in which none was required. So I should have gone on till now, but that my room had a thin wall. You can tell your sister that it was divided from the Manager’s room by a wainscot partition.”

“They were adjoining rooms; had been one, Perhaps, originally; and were separated, as Mr Morfin says,” said her brother, looking back to him for the resumption of his explanation.

“I have whistled, hummed tunes, gone accurately through the whole of Beethoven’s Sonata in B, to let him know that I was within hearing,” said Mr Morfin; “but he never heeded me. It happened seldom enough that I was within hearing of anything of a private nature, certainly. But when I was, and couldn’t otherwise avoid knowing something of it, I walked out. I walked out once, John, during a conversation between two brothers, to which, in the beginning, young Walter Gay was a party. But I overheard some of it before I left the room. You remember it sufficiently, perhaps, to tell your sister what its nature was?”

“It referred, Harriet,” said her brother in a low voice, “to the past, and to our relative positions in the House.”

“Its matter was not new to me, but was presented in a new aspect. It shook me in my habit—the habit of nine-tenths of the world—of believing that all was right about me, because I was used to it,” said their visitor; “and induced me to recall the history of the two brothers, and to ponder on it. I think it was almost the first time in my life when I fell into this train of reflection—how will many things that are familiar, and quite matters of course to us now, look, when we come to see them from that new and distant point of view which we must all take up, one day or other? I was something less good-natured, as the phrase goes, after that morning, less easy and complacent altogether.”

He sat for a minute or so, drumming with one hand on the table; and resumed in a hurry, as if he were anxious to get rid of his confession.

“Before I knew what to do, or whether I could do anything, there was a second conversation between the same two brothers, in which their sister was mentioned. I had no scruples of conscience in suffering all the waifs and strays of that conversation to float to me as freely as they would. I considered them mine by right. After that, I came here to see the sister for myself. The first time I stopped at the garden gate, I made a pretext of inquiring into the character of a poor neighbour; but I wandered out of that tract, and I think Miss Harriet mistrusted me. The second time I asked leave to come in; came in; and said what I wished to say. Your sister showed me reasons which I dared not dispute, for receiving no assistance from me then; but I established a means of communication between us, which remained unbroken until within these few days, when I was prevented, by important matters that have lately devolved upon me, from maintaining them.”

“How little I have suspected this,” said John Carker, “when I have seen you every day, Sir! If Harriet could have guessed your name—”

“Why, to tell you the truth, John,” interposed the visitor, “I kept it to myself for two reasons. I don’t know that the first might have been binding alone; but one has no business to take credit for good intentions, and I made up my mind, at all events, not to disclose myself until I should be able to do you some real service or other. My second reason was, that I always hoped there might be some lingering possibility of your brother’s relenting towards you both; and in that case, I felt that where there was the chance of a man of his suspicious, watchful character, discovering that you had been secretly befriended by me, there was the chance of a new and fatal cause of division. I resolved, to be sure, at the risk of turning his displeasure against myself—which would have been no matter—to watch my opportunity of serving you with the head of the House; but the distractions of death, courtship, marriage, and domestic unhappiness, have left us no head but your brother for this long, long time. And it would have been better for us,” said the visitor, dropping his voice, “to have been a lifeless trunk.”

He seemed conscious that these latter words had escaped him against his will, and stretching out a hand to the brother, and a hand to the sister, continued:

“All I could desire to say, and more, I have now said. All I mean goes beyond words, as I hope you understand and believe. The time has come, John—though most unfortunately and unhappily come—when I may help you without interfering with that redeeming struggle, which has lasted through so many years; since you were discharged from it today by no act of your own. It is late; I need say no more tonight. You will guard the treasure you have here, without advice or reminder from me.”

With these words he rose to go.

“But go you first, John,” he said goodhumouredly, “with a light, without saying what you want to say, whatever that may be;” John Carker’s heart was full, and he would have relieved it in speech, if he could; “and let me have a word with your sister. We have talked alone before, and in this room too; though it looks more natural with you here.”

Following him out with his eyes, he turned kindly to Harriet, and said in a lower voice, and with an altered and graver manner:

“You wish to ask me something of the man whose sister it is your misfortune to be.”

“I dread to ask,” said Harriet.

“You have looked so earnestly at me more than once,” rejoined the visitor, “that I think I can divine your question. Has he taken money? Is it that?”

“Yes.”

“He has not.”

“I thank Heaven!” said Harriet. “For the sake of John.”

“That he has abused his trust in many ways,” said Mr Morfin; “that he has oftener dealt and speculated to advantage for himself, than for the House he represented; that he has led the House on, to prodigious ventures, often resulting in enormous losses; that he has always pampered the vanity and ambition of his employer, when it was his duty to have held them in check, and shown, as it was in his power to do, to what they tended here or there; will not, perhaps, surprise you now. Undertakings have been entered on, to swell the reputation of the House for vast resources, and to exhibit it in magnificent contrast to other merchants’ Houses, of which it requires a steady head to contemplate the possibly—a few disastrous changes of affairs might render them the probably—ruinous consequences. In the midst of the many transactions of the House, in most parts of the world: a great labyrinth of which only he has held the clue: he has had the opportunity, and he seems to have used it, of keeping the various results afloat, when ascertained, and substituting estimates and generalities for facts. But latterly—you follow me, Miss Harriet?”

“Perfectly, perfectly,” she answered, with her frightened face fixed on his. “Pray tell me all the worst at once.”

“Latterly, he appears to have devoted the greatest pains to making these results so plain and clear, that reference to the private books enables one to grasp them, numerous and varying as they are, with extraordinary ease. As if he had resolved to show his employer at one broad view what has been brought upon him by ministration to his ruling passion! That it has been his constant practice to minister to that passion basely, and to flatter it corruptly, is indubitable. In that, his criminality, as it is connected with the affairs of the House, chiefly consists.”

“One other word before you leave me, dear Sir,” said Harriet. “There is no danger in all this?”

“How danger?” he returned, with a little hesitation.

“To the credit of the House?”

“I cannot help answering you plainly, and trusting you completely,” said Mr Morfin, after a moment’s survey of her face.

“You may. Indeed you may!”

“I am sure I may. Danger to the House’s credit? No; none There may be difficulty, greater or less difficulty, but no danger, unless—unless, indeed—the head of the House, unable to bring his mind to the reduction of its enterprises, and positively refusing to believe that it is, or can be, in any position but the position in which he has always represented it to himself, should urge it beyond its strength. Then it would totter.”

“But there is no apprehension of that?” said Harriet.

“There shall be no half-confidence,” he replied, shaking her hand, “between us. Mr Dombey is unapproachable by anyone, and his state of mind is haughty, rash, unreasonable, and ungovernable, now. But he is disturbed and agitated now beyond all common bounds, and it may pass. You now know all, both worst and best. No more tonight, and good-night!”

With that he kissed her hand, and, passing out to the door where her brother stood awaiting his coming, put him cheerfully aside when he essayed to speak; told him that, as they would see each other soon and often, he might speak at another time, if he would, but there was no leisure for it then; and went away at a round pace, in order that no word of gratitude might follow him.

The brother and sister sat conversing by the fireside, until it was almost day; made sleepless by this glimpse of the new world that opened before them, and feeling like two people shipwrecked long ago, upon a solitary coast, to whom a ship had come at last, when they were old in resignation, and had lost all thought of any other home. But another and different kind of disquietude kept them waking too. The darkness out of which this light had broken on them gathered around; and the shadow of their guilty brother was in the house where his foot had never trod.

Nor was it to be driven out, nor did it fade before the sun. Next morning it was there; at noon; at night Darkest and most distinct at night, as is now to be told.

John Carker had gone out, in pursuance of a letter of appointment from their friend, and Harriet was left in the house alone. She had been alone some hours. A dull, grave evening, and a deepening twilight, were not favourable to the removal of the oppression on her spirits. The idea of this brother, long unseen and unknown, flitted about her in frightful shapes. He was dead, dying, calling to her, staring at her, frowning on her. The pictures in her mind were so obtrusive and exact that, as the twilight deepened, she dreaded to raise her head and look at the dark corners of the room, lest his wraith, the offspring of her excited imagination, should be waiting there, to startle her. Once she had such a fancy of his being in the next room, hiding—though she knew quite well what a distempered fancy it was, and had no belief in it—that she forced herself to go there, for her own conviction. But in vain. The room resumed its shadowy terrors, the moment she left it; and she had no more power to divest herself of these vague impressions of dread, than if they had been stone giants, rooted in the solid earth.

It was almost dark, and she was sitting near the window, with her head upon her hand, looking down, when, sensible of a sudden increase in the gloom of the apartment, she raised her eyes, and uttered an involuntary cry. Close to the glass, a pale scared face gazed in; vacantly, for an instant, as searching for an object; then the eyes rested on herself, and lighted up.

“Let me in! Let me in! I want to speak to you!” and the hand rattled on the glass.

She recognised immediately the woman with the long dark hair, to whom she had given warmth, food, and shelter, one wet night. Naturally afraid of her, remembering her violent behaviour, Harriet, retreating a little from the window, stood undecided and alarmed.

“Let me in! Let me speak to you! I am thankful—quiet—humble—anything you like. But let me speak to you.”

The vehement manner of the entreaty, the earnest expression of the face, the trembling of the two hands that were raised imploringly, a certain dread and terror in the voice akin to her own condition at the moment, prevailed with Harriet. She hastened to the door and opened it.

“May I come in, or shall I speak here?” said the woman, catching at her hand.

“What is it that you want? What is it that you have to say?”

“Not much, but let me say it out, or I shall never say it. I am tempted now to go away. There seem to be hands dragging me from the door. Let me come in, if you can trust me for this once!”

Her energy again prevailed, and they passed into the firelight of the little kitchen, where she had before sat, and ate, and dried her clothes.

“Sit there,” said Alice, kneeling down beside her, “and look at me. You remember me?”

“I do.”

“You remember what I told you I had been, and where I came from, ragged and lame, with the fierce wind and weather beating on my head?”

“Yes.”

“You know how I came back that night, and threw your money in the dirt, and you and your race. Now, see me here, upon my knees. Am I less earnest now, than I was then?”

“If what you ask,” said Harriet, gently, “is forgiveness—”

“But it’s not!” returned the other, with a proud, fierce look “What I ask is to be believed. Now you shall judge if I am worthy of belief, both as I was, and as I am.”

Still upon her knees, and with her eyes upon the fire, and the fire shining on her ruined beauty and her wild black hair, one long tress of which she pulled over her shoulder, and wound about her hand, and thoughtfully bit and tore while speaking, she went on:

“When I was young and pretty, and this,” plucking contemptuously at the hair she held, “was only handled delicately, and couldn’t be admired enough, my mother, who had not been very mindful of me as a child, found out my merits, and was fond of me, and proud of me. She was covetous and poor, and thought to make a sort of property of me. No great lady ever thought that of a daughter yet, I’m sure, or acted as if she did—it’s never done, we all know—and that shows that the only instances of mothers bringing up their daughters wrong, and evil coming of it, are among such miserable folks as us.”

Looking at the fire, as if she were forgetful, for the moment, of having any auditor, she continued in a dreamy way, as she wound the long tress of hair tight round and round her hand.

“What came of that, I needn’t say. Wretched marriages don’t come of such things, in our degree; only wretchedness and ruin. Wretchedness and ruin came on me—came on me.”

Raising her eyes swiftly from their moody gaze upon the fire, to Harriet’s face, she said:

“I am wasting time, and there is none to spare; yet if I hadn’t thought of all, I shouldn’t be here now. Wretchedness and ruin came on me, I say. I was made a short-lived toy, and flung aside more cruelly and carelessly than even such things are. By whose hand do you think?”

“Why do you ask me?” said Harriet.

“Why do you tremble?” rejoined Alice, with an eager look. “His usage made a Devil of me. I sunk in wretchedness and ruin, lower and lower yet. I was concerned in a robbery—in every part of it but the gains—and was found out, and sent to be tried, without a friend, without a penny. Though I was but a girl, I would have gone to Death, sooner than ask him for a word, if a word of his could have saved me. I would! To any death that could have been invented. But my mother, covetous always, sent to him in my name, told the true story of my case, and humbly prayed and petitioned for a small last gift—for not so many pounds as I have fingers on this hand. Who was it, do you think, who snapped his fingers at me in my misery, lying, as he believed, at his feet, and left me without even this poor sign of remembrance; well satisfied that I should be sent abroad, beyond the reach of farther trouble to him, and should die, and rot there? Who was this, do you think?”

“Why do you ask me?” repeated Harriet.

“Why do you tremble?” said Alice, laying her hand upon her arm, and looking in her face, “but that the answer is on your lips! It was your brother James.”

Harriet trembled more and more, but did not avert her eyes from the eager look that rested on them.

“When I knew you were his sister—which was on that night—I came back, weary and lame, to spurn your gift. I felt that night as if I could have travelled, weary and lame, over the whole world, to stab him, if I could have found him in a lonely place with no one near. Do you believe that I was earnest in all that?”

“I do! Good Heaven, why are you come again?”

“Since then,” said Alice, with the same grasp of her arm, and the same look in her face, “I have seen him! I have followed him with my eyes. In the broad day. If any spark of my resentment slumbered in my bosom, it sprung into a blaze when my eyes rested on him. You know he has wronged a proud man, and made him his deadly enemy. What if I had given information of him to that man?”

“Information!” repeated Harriet.

“What if I had found out one who knew your brother’s secret; who knew the manner of his flight, who knew where he and the companion of his flight were gone? What if I had made him utter all his knowledge, word by word, before his enemy, concealed to hear it? What if I had sat by at the time, looking into this enemy’s face, and seeing it change till it was scarcely human? What if I had seen him rush away, mad, in pursuit? What if I knew, now, that he was on his road, more fiend than man, and must, in so many hours, come up with him?”

“Remove your hand!” said Harriet, recoiling. “Go away! Your touch is dreadful to me!”

“I have done this,” pursued the other, with her eager look, regardless of the interruption. “Do I speak and look as if I really had? Do you believe what I am saying?”

“I fear I must. Let my arm go!”

“Not yet. A moment more. You can think what my revengeful purpose must have been, to last so long, and urge me to do this?”

“Dreadful!” said Harriet.

“Then when you see me now,” said Alice hoarsely, “here again, kneeling quietly on the ground, with my touch upon your arm, with my eyes upon your face, you may believe that there is no common earnestness in what I say, and that no common struggle has been battling in my breast. I am ashamed to speak the words, but I relent. I despise myself; I have fought with myself all day, and all last night; but I relent towards him without reason, and wish to repair what I have done, if it is possible. I wouldn’t have them come together while his pursuer is so blind and headlong. If you had seen him as he went out last night, you would know the danger better.”

“How can it be prevented? What can I do?” cried Harriet.

“All night long,” pursued the other, hurriedly, “I had dreams of him—and yet I didn’t sleep—in his blood. All day, I have had him near me.”

“What can I do?” cried Harriet, shuddering at these words.

“If there is anyone who’ll write, or send, or go to him, let them lose no time. He is at Dijon. Do you know the name, and where it is?”

“Yes.”

“Warn him that the man he has made his enemy is in a frenzy, and that he doesn’t know him if he makes light of his approach. Tell him that he is on the road—I know he is!—and hurrying on. Urge him to get away while there is time—if there is time—and not to meet him yet. A month or so will make years of difference. Let them not encounter, through me. Anywhere but there! Any time but now! Let his foe follow him, and find him for himself, but not through me! There is enough upon my head without.”

The fire ceased to be reflected in her jet black hair, uplifted face, and eager eyes; her hand was gone from Harriet’s arm; and the place where she had been was empty.

LIV. The Fugitives

Tea-time, an hour short of midnight; the place, a French apartment, comprising some half-dozen rooms;—a dull cold hall or corridor, a dining-room, a drawing-room, a bed-room, and an inner drawingroom, or boudoir, smaller and more retired than the rest. All these shut in by one large pair of doors on the main staircase, but each room provided with two or three pairs of doors of its own, establishing several means of communication with the remaining portion of the apartment, or with certain small passages within the wall, leading, as is not unusual in such houses, to some back stairs with an obscure outlet below. The whole situated on the first floor of so large an Hotel, that it did not absorb one entire row of windows upon one side of the square court-yard in the centre, upon which the whole four sides of the mansion looked.

An air of splendour, sufficiently faded to be melancholy, and sufficiently dazzling to clog and embarrass the details of life with a show of state, reigned in these rooms. The walls and ceilings were gilded and painted; the floors were waxed and polished; crimson drapery hung in festoons from window, door, and mirror; and candelabra, gnarled and intertwisted like the branches of trees, or horns of animals, stuck out from the panels of the wall. But in the day-time, when the lattice-blinds (now closely shut) were opened, and the light let in, traces were discernible among this finery, of wear and tear and dust, of sun and damp and smoke, and lengthened intervals of want of use and habitation, when such shows and toys of life seem sensitive like life, and waste as men shut up in prison do. Even night, and clusters of burning candles, could not wholly efface them, though the general glitter threw them in the shade.

The glitter of bright tapers, and their reflection in looking-glasses, scraps of gilding and gay colours, were confined, on this night, to one room—that smaller room within the rest, just now enumerated. Seen from the hall, where a lamp was feebly burning, through the dark perspective of open doors, it looked as shining and precious as a gem. In the heart of its radiance sat a beautiful woman—Edith.

She was alone. The same defiant, scornful woman still. The cheek a little worn, the eye a little larger in appearance, and more lustrous, but the haughty bearing just the same. No shame upon her brow; no late repentance bending her disdainful neck. Imperious and stately yet, and yet regardless of herself and of all else, she sat with her dark eyes cast down, waiting for someone.

No book, no work, no occupation of any kind but her own thought, beguiled the tardy time. Some purpose, strong enough to fill up any pause, possessed her. With her lips pressed together, and quivering if for a moment she released them from her control; with her nostril inflated; her hands clasped in one another; and her purpose swelling in her breast; she sat, and waited.

At the sound of a key in the outer door, and a footstep in the hall, she started up, and cried “Who’s that?” The answer was in French, and two men came in with jingling trays, to make preparation for supper.

“Who had bade them to do so?” she asked.

“Monsieur had commanded it, when it was his pleasure to take the apartment. Monsieur had said, when he stayed there for an hour, en route, and left the letter for Madame—Madame had received it surely?”

“Yes.”

“A thousand pardons! The sudden apprehension that it might have been forgotten had struck him;” a bald man, with a large beard from a neighbouring restaurant; “with despair! Monsieur had said that supper was to be ready at that hour: also that he had forewarned Madame of the commands he had given, in his letter. Monsieur had done the Golden Head the honour to request that the supper should be choice and delicate. Monsieur would find that his confidence in the Golden Head was not misplaced.”

Edith said no more, but looked on thoughtfully while they prepared the table for two persons, and set the wine upon it. She arose before they had finished, and taking a lamp, passed into the bed-chamber and into the drawing-room, where she hurriedly but narrowly examined all the doors; particularly one in the former room that opened on the passage in the wall. From this she took the key, and put it on the outer side. She then came back.

The men—the second of whom was a dark, bilious subject, in a jacket, close shaved, and with a black head of hair close cropped—had completed their preparation of the table, and were standing looking at it. He who had spoken before, inquired whether Madame thought it would be long before Monsieur arrived?

“She couldn’t say. It was all one.”

“Pardon! There was the supper! It should be eaten on the instant. Monsieur (who spoke French like an Angel—or a Frenchman—it was all the same) had spoken with great emphasis of his punctuality. But the English nation had so grand a genius for punctuality. Ah! what noise! Great Heaven, here was Monsieur. Behold him!”

In effect, Monsieur, admitted by the other of the two, came, with his gleaming teeth, through the dark rooms, like a mouth; and arriving in that sanctuary of light and colour, a figure at full length, embraced Madame, and addressed her in the French tongue as his charming wife.

“My God! Madame is going to faint. Madame is overcome with joy!” The bald man with the beard observed it, and cried out.

Madame had only shrunk and shivered. Before the words were spoken, she was standing with her hand upon the velvet back of a great chair; her figure drawn up to its full height, and her face immoveable.

“Francois has flown over to the Golden Head for supper. He flies on these occasions like an angel or a bird. The baggage of Monsieur is in his room. All is arranged. The supper will be here this moment.” These facts the bald man notified with bows and smiles, and presently the supper came.

The hot dishes were on a chafing-dish; the cold already set forth, with the change of service on a sideboard. Monsieur was satisfied with this arrangement. The supper table being small, it pleased him very well. Let them set the chafing-dish upon the floor, and go. He would remove the dishes with his own hands.

“Pardon!” said the bald man, politely. “It was impossible!”

Monsieur was of another opinion. He required no further attendance that night.

“But Madame—” the bald man hinted.

“Madame,” replied Monsieur, “had her own maid. It was enough.”

“A million pardons! No! Madame had no maid!”

“I came here alone,” said Edith “It was my choice to do so. I am well used to travelling; I want no attendance. They need send nobody to me.

Monsieur accordingly, persevering in his first proposed impossibility, proceeded to follow the two attendants to the outer door, and secure it after them for the night. The bald man turning round to bow, as he went out, observed that Madame still stood with her hand upon the velvet back of the great chair, and that her face was quite regardless of him, though she was looking straight before her.

As the sound of Carker’s fastening the door resounded through the intermediate rooms, and seemed to come hushed and stilled into that last distant one, the sound of the Cathedral clock striking twelve mingled with it, in Edith’s ears. She heard him pause, as if he heard it too and listened; and then came back towards her, laying a long train of footsteps through the silence, and shutting all the doors behind him as he came along. Her hand, for a moment, left the velvet chair to bring a knife within her reach upon the table; then she stood as she had stood before.

“How strange to come here by yourself, my love!” he said as he entered.

“What?” she returned.

Her tone was so harsh; the quick turn of her head so fierce; her attitude so repellent; and her frown so black; that he stood, with the lamp in his hand, looking at her, as if she had struck him motionless.

“I say,” he at length repeated, putting down the lamp, and smiling his most courtly smile, “how strange to come here alone! It was unnecessary caution surely, and might have defeated itself. You were to have engaged an attendant at Havre or Rouen, and have had abundance of time for the purpose, though you had been the most capricious and difficult (as you are the most beautiful, my love) of women.”

Her eyes gleamed strangely on him, but she stood with her hand resting on the chair, and said not a word.

“I have never,” resumed Carker, “seen you look so handsome, as you do tonight. Even the picture I have carried in my mind during this cruel probation, and which I have contemplated night and day, is exceeded by the reality.”

Not a word. Not a look Her eyes completely hidden by their drooping lashes, but her head held up.

“Hard, unrelenting terms they were!” said Carker, with a smile, “but they are all fulfilled and passed, and make the present more delicious and more safe. Sicily shall be the place of our retreat. In the idlest and easiest part of the world, my soul, we’ll both seek compensation for old slavery.”

He was coming gaily towards her, when, in an instant, she caught the knife up from the table, and started one pace back.

“Stand still!” she said, “or I shall murder you!”

The sudden change in her, the towering fury and intense abhorrence sparkling in her eyes and lighting up her brow, made him stop as if a fire had stopped him.

“Stand still!” she said, “come no nearer me, upon your life!”

They both stood looking at each other. Rage and astonishment were in his face, but he controlled them, and said lightly,

“Come, come! Tush, we are alone, and out of everybody’s sight and hearing. Do you think to frighten me with these tricks of virtue?”

“Do you think to frighten me,” she answered fiercely, “from any purpose that I have, and any course I am resolved upon, by reminding me of the solitude of this place, and there being no help near? Me, who am here alone, designedly? If I feared you, should I not have avoided you? If I feared you, should I be here, in the dead of night, telling you to your face what I am going to tell?”

“And what is that,” he said, “you handsome shrew? Handsomer so, than any other woman in her best humour?”

“I tell you nothing,” she returned, until you go back to that chair—except this, once again—Don’t come near me! Not a step nearer. I tell you, if you do, as Heaven sees us, I shall murder you!”

“Do you mistake me for your husband?” he retorted, with a grin.

Disdaining to reply, she stretched her arm out, pointing to the chair. He bit his lip, frowned, laughed, and sat down in it, with a baffled, irresolute, impatient air, he was unable to conceal; and biting his nail nervously, and looking at her sideways, with bitter discomfiture, even while he feigned to be amused by her caprice.

She put the knife down upon the table, and touching her bosom with her hand, said:

“I have something lying here that is no love trinket, and sooner than endure your touch once more, I would use it on you—and you know it, while I speak—with less reluctance than I would on any other creeping thing that lives.”

He affected to laugh jestingly, and entreated her to act her play out quickly, for the supper was growing cold. But the secret look with which he regarded her, was more sullen and lowering, and he struck his foot once upon the floor with a muttered oath.

“How many times,” said Edith, bending her darkest glance upon him, “has your bold knavery assailed me with outrage and insult? How many times in your smooth manner, and mocking words and looks, have I been twitted with my courtship and my marriage? How many times have you laid bare my wound of love for that sweet, injured girl and lacerated it? How often have you fanned the fire on which, for two years, I have writhed; and tempted me to take a desperate revenge, when it has most tortured me?”

“I have no doubt, Ma’am,” he replied, “that you have kept a good account, and that it’s pretty accurate. Come, Edith. To your husband, poor wretch, this was well enough—”

“Why, if,” she said, surveying him with a haughty contempt and disgust, that he shrunk under, let him brave it as he would, “if all my other reasons for despising him could have been blown away like feathers, his having you for his counsellor and favourite, would have almost been enough to hold their place.”

“Is that a reason why you have run away with me?” he asked her, tauntingly.

“Yes, and why we are face to face for the last time. Wretch! We meet tonight, and part tonight. For not one moment after I have ceased to speak, will I stay here!”

He turned upon her with his ugliest look, and gripped the table with his hand; but neither rose, nor otherwise answered or threatened her.

“I am a woman,” she said, confronting him steadfastly, “who from her childhood has been shamed and steeled. I have been offered and rejected, put up and appraised, until my very soul has sickened. I have not had an accomplishment or grace that might have been a resource to me, but it has been paraded and vended to enhance my value, as if the common crier had called it through the streets. My poor, proud friends, have looked on and approved; and every tie between us has been deadened in my breast. There is not one of them for whom I care, as I could care for a pet dog. I stand alone in the world, remembering well what a hollow world it has been to me, and what a hollow part of it I have been myself. You know this, and you know that my fame with it is worthless to me.”

“Yes; I imagined that,” he said.

“And calculated on it,” she rejoined, “and so pursued me. Grown too indifferent for any opposition but indifference, to the daily working of the hands that had moulded me to this; and knowing that my marriage would at least prevent their hawking of me up and down; I suffered myself to be sold, as infamously as any woman with a halter round her neck is sold in any market-place. You know that.”

“Yes,” he said, showing all his teeth “I know that.”

“And calculated on it,” she rejoined once more, “and so pursued me. From my marriage day, I found myself exposed to such new shame—to such solicitation and pursuit (expressed as clearly as if it had been written in the coarsest words, and thrust into my hand at every turn) from one mean villain, that I felt as if I had never known humiliation till that time. This shame my husband fixed upon me; hemmed me round with, himself; steeped me in, with his own hands, and of his own act, repeated hundreds of times. And thus—forced by the two from every point of rest I had—forced by the two to yield up the last retreat of love and gentleness within me, or to be a new misfortune on its innocent object—driven from each to each, and beset by one when I escaped the other—my anger rose almost to distraction against both. I do not know against which it rose higher—the master or the man!”

He watched her closely, as she stood before him in the very triumph of her indignant beauty. She was resolute, he saw; undauntable; with no more fear of him than of a worm.

“What should I say of honour or of chastity to you!” she went on. “What meaning would it have to you; what meaning would it have from me! But if I tell you that the lightest touch of your hand makes my blood cold with antipathy; that from the hour when I first saw and hated you, to now, when my instinctive repugnance is enhanced by every minute’s knowledge of you I have since had, you have been a loathsome creature to me which has not its like on earth; how then?”

He answered with a faint laugh, “Ay! How then, my queen?”

“On that night, when, emboldened by the scene you had assisted at, you dared come to my room and speak to me,” she said, “what passed?”

He shrugged his shoulders, and laughed

“What passed?” she said.

“Your memory is so distinct,” he said, “that I have no doubt you can recall it.”

“I can,” she said. “Hear it! Proposing then, this flight—not this flight, but the flight you thought it—you told me that in the having given you that meeting, and leaving you to be discovered there, if you so thought fit; and in the having suffered you to be alone with me many times before,—and having made the opportunities, you said,—and in the having openly avowed to you that I had no feeling for my husband but aversion, and no care for myself—I was lost; I had given you the power to traduce my name; and I lived, in virtuous reputation, at the pleasure of your breath.”

“All stratagems in love—-” he interrupted, smiling. “The old adage—”

“On that night,” said Edith, “and then, the struggle that I long had had with something that was not respect for my good fame—that was I know not what—perhaps the clinging to that last retreat—was ended. On that night, and then, I turned from everything but passion and resentment. I struck a blow that laid your lofty master in the dust, and set you there, before me, looking at me now, and knowing what I mean.”

He sprung up from his chair with a great oath. She put her hand into her bosom, and not a finger trembled, not a hair upon her head was stirred. He stood still: she too: the table and chair between them.

“When I forget that this man put his lips to mine that night, and held me in his arms as he has done again tonight,” said Edith, pointing at him; “when I forget the taint of his kiss upon my cheek—the cheek that Florence would have laid her guiltless face against—when I forget my meeting with her, while that taint was hot upon me, and in what a flood the knowledge rushed upon me when I saw her, that in releasing her from the persecution I had caused by my love, I brought a shame and degradation on her name through mine, and in all time to come should be the solitary figure representing in her mind her first avoidance of a guilty creature—then, Husband, from whom I stand divorced henceforth, I will forget these last two years, and undo what I have done, and undeceive you!”

Her flashing eyes, uplifted for a moment, lighted again on Carker, and she held some letters out in her left hand.

“See these!” she said, contemptuously. “You have addressed these to me in the false name you go by; one here, some elsewhere on my road. The seals are unbroken. Take them back!”

She crunched them in her hand, and tossed them to his feet. And as she looked upon him now, a smile was on her face.

“We meet and part tonight,” she said. “You have fallen on Sicilian days and sensual rest, too soon. You might have cajoled, and fawned, and played your traitor’s part, a little longer, and grown richer. You purchase your voluptuous retirement dear!”

“Edith!” he retorted, menacing her with his hand. “Sit down! Have done with this! What devil possesses you?”

“Their name is Legion,” she replied, uprearing her proud form as if she would have crushed him; “you and your master have raised them in a fruitful house, and they shall tear you both. False to him, false to his innocent child, false every way and everywhere, go forth and boast of me, and gnash your teeth, for once, to know that you are lying!”

He stood before her, muttering and menacing, and scowling round as if for something that would help him to conquer her; but with the same indomitable spirit she opposed him, without faltering.

“In every vaunt you make,” she said, “I have my triumph. I single out in you the meanest man I know, the parasite and tool of the proud tyrant, that his wound may go the deeper, and may rankle more. Boast, and revenge me on him! You know how you came here tonight; you know how you stand cowering there; you see yourself in colours quite as despicable, if not as odious, as those in which I see you. Boast then, and revenge me on yourself.”

The foam was on his lips; the wet stood on his forehead. If she would have faltered once for only one half-moment, he would have pinioned her; but she was as firm as rock, and her searching eyes never left him.

“We don’t part so,” he said. “Do you think I am drivelling, to let you go in your mad temper?”

“Do you think,” she answered, “that I am to be stayed?”

“I’ll try, my dear,” he said with a ferocious gesture of his head.

“God’s mercy on you, if you try by coming near me!” she replied.

“And what,” he said, “if there are none of these same boasts and vaunts on my part? What if I were to turn too? Come!” and his teeth fairly shone again. “We must make a treaty of this, or I may take some unexpected course. Sit down, sit down!”

“Too late!” she cried, with eyes that seemed to sparkle fire. “I have thrown my fame and good name to the winds! I have resolved to bear the shame that will attach to me—resolved to know that it attaches falsely—that you know it too—and that he does not, never can, and never shall. I’ll die, and make no sign. For this, I am here alone with you, at the dead of night. For this, I have met you here, in a false name, as your wife. For this, I have been seen here by those men, and left here. Nothing can save you now.”

He would have sold his soul to root her, in her beauty, to the floor, and make her arms drop at her sides, and have her at his mercy. But he could not look at her, and not be afraid of her. He saw a strength within her that was resistless. He saw that she was desperate, and that her unquenchable hatred of him would stop at nothing. His eyes followed the hand that was put with such rugged uncongenial purpose into her white bosom, and he thought that if it struck at him, and failed, it would strike there, just as soon.

He did not venture, therefore, to advance towards her; but the door by which he had entered was behind him, and he stepped back to lock it.

“Lastly, take my warning! Look to yourself!” she said, and smiled again. “You have been betrayed, as all betrayers are. It has been made known that you are in this place, or were to be, or have been. If I live, I saw my husband in a carriage in the street tonight!”

“Strumpet, it’s false!” cried Carker.

At the moment, the bell rang loudly in the hall. He turned white, as she held her hand up like an enchantress, at whose invocation the sound had come.

“Hark! do you hear it?”

He set his back against the door; for he saw a change in her, and fancied she was coming on to pass him. But, in a moment, she was gone through the opposite doors communicating with the bed-chamber, and they shut upon her.

Once turned, once changed in her inflexible unyielding look, he felt that he could cope with her. He thought a sudden terror, occasioned by this night-alarm, had subdued her; not the less readily, for her overwrought condition. Throwing open the doors, he followed, almost instantly.

But the room was dark; and as she made no answer to his call, he was fain to go back for the lamp. He held it up, and looked round, everywhere, expecting to see her crouching in some corner; but the room was empty. So, into the drawing-room and dining-room he went, in succession, with the uncertain steps of a man in a strange place; looking fearfully about, and prying behind screens and couches; but she was not there. No, nor in the hall, which was so bare that he could see that, at a glance.

All this time, the ringing at the bell was constantly renewed, and those without were beating at the door. He put his lamp down at a distance, and going near it, listened. There were several voices talking together: at least two of them in English; and though the door was thick, and there was great confusion, he knew one of these too well to doubt whose voice it was.

He took up his lamp again, and came back quickly through all the rooms, stopping as he quitted each, and looking round for her, with the light raised above his head. He was standing thus in the bed-chamber, when the door, leading to the little passage in the wall, caught his eye. He went to it, and found it fastened on the other side; but she had dropped a veil in going through, and shut it in the door.

All this time the people on the stairs were ringing at the bell, and knocking with their hands and feet.

He was not a coward: but these sounds; what had gone before; the strangeness of the place, which had confused him, even in his return from the hall; the frustration of his schemes (for, strange to say, he would have been much bolder, if they had succeeded); the unseasonable time; the recollection of having no one near to whom he could appeal for any friendly office; above all, the sudden sense, which made even his heart beat like lead, that the man whose confidence he had outraged, and whom he had so treacherously deceived, was there to recognise and challenge him with his mask plucked off his face; struck a panic through him. He tried the door in which the veil was shut, but couldn’t force it. He opened one of the windows, and looked down through the lattice of the blind, into the court-yard; but it was a high leap, and the stones were pitiless.

The ringing and knocking still continuing—his panic too—he went back to the door in the bed-chamber, and with some new efforts, each more stubborn than the last, wrenched it open. Seeing the little staircase not far off, and feeling the night-air coming up, he stole back for his hat and coat, made the door as secure after him as he could, crept down lamp in hand, extinguished it on seeing the street, and having put it in a corner, went out where the stars were shining.

LV. Rob the Grinder loses his Place

The Porter at the iron gate which shut the court-yard from the street, had left the little wicket of his house open, and was gone away; no doubt to mingle in the distant noise at the door of the great staircase. Lifting the latch softly, Carker crept out, and shutting the jangling gate after him with as little noise as possible, hurried off.

In the fever of his mortification and unavailing rage, the panic that had seized upon him mastered him completely. It rose to such a height that he would have blindly encountered almost any risk, rather than meet the man of whom, two hours ago, he had been utterly regardless. His fierce arrival, which he had never expected; the sound of his voice; their having been so near a meeting, face to face; he would have braved out this, after the first momentary shock of alarm, and would have put as bold a front upon his guilt as any villain. But the springing of his mine upon himself, seemed to have rent and shivered all his hardihood and self-reliance. Spurned like any reptile; entrapped and mocked; turned upon, and trodden down by the proud woman whose mind he had slowly poisoned, as he thought, until she had sunk into the mere creature of his pleasure; undeceived in his deceit, and with his fox’s hide stripped off, he sneaked away, abashed, degraded, and afraid.

Some other terror came upon him quite removed from this of being pursued, suddenly, like an electric shock, as he was creeping through the streets Some visionary terror, unintelligible and inexplicable, associated with a trembling of the ground,—a rush and sweep of something through the air, like Death upon the wing. He shrunk, as if to let the thing go by. It was not gone, it never had been there, yet what a startling horror it had left behind.

He raised his wicked face so full of trouble, to the night sky, where the stars, so full of peace, were shining on him as they had been when he first stole out into the air; and stopped to think what he should do. The dread of being hunted in a strange remote place, where the laws might not protect him—the novelty of the feeling that it was strange and remote, originating in his being left alone so suddenly amid the ruins of his plans—his greater dread of seeking refuge now, in Italy or in Sicily, where men might be hired to assassinate him, he thought, at any dark street corner—the waywardness of guilt and fear—perhaps some sympathy of action with the turning back of all his schemes—impelled him to turn back too, and go to England.

“I am safer there, in any case. If I should not decide,” he thought, “to give this fool a meeting, I am less likely to be traced there, than abroad here, now. And if I should (this cursed fit being over), at least I shall not be alone, without a soul to speak to, or advise with, or stand by me. I shall not be run in upon and worried like a rat.”

He muttered Edith’s name, and clenched his hand. As he crept along, in the shadow of the massive buildings, he set his teeth, and muttered dreadful imprecations on her head, and looked from side to side, as if in search of her. Thus, he stole on to the gate of an inn-yard. The people were a-bed; but his ringing at the bell soon produced a man with a lantern, in company with whom he was presently in a dim coach-house, bargaining for the hire of an old phaeton, to Paris.

The bargain was a short one; and the horses were soon sent for. Leaving word that the carriage was to follow him when they came, he stole away again, beyond the town, past the old ramparts, out on the open road, which seemed to glide away along the dark plain, like a stream.

Whither did it flow? What was the end of it? As he paused, with some such suggestion within him, looking over the gloomy flat where the slender trees marked out the way, again that flight of Death came rushing up, again went on, impetuous and resistless, again was nothing but a horror in his mind, dark as the scene and undefined as its remotest verge.

There was no wind; there was no passing shadow on the deep shade of the night; there was no noise. The city lay behind him, lighted here and there, and starry worlds were hidden by the masonry of spire and roof that hardly made out any shapes against the sky. Dark and lonely distance lay around him everywhere, and the clocks were faintly striking two.

He went forward for what appeared a long time, and a long way; often stopping to listen. At last the ringing of horses’ bells greeted his anxious ears. Now softer, and now louder, now inaudible, now ringing very slowly over bad ground, now brisk and merry, it came on; until with a loud shouting and lashing, a shadowy postillion muffled to the eyes, checked his four struggling horses at his side.

“Who goes there! Monsieur?”

“Yes.”

“Monsieur has walked a long way in the dark midnight.”

“No matter. Everyone to his task. Were there any other horses ordered at the Post-house?”

“A thousand devils!—and pardons! other horses? at this hour? No.”

“Listen, my friend. I am much hurried. Let us see how fast we can travel! The faster, the more money there will be to drink. Off we go then! Quick!”

“Halloa! whoop! Halloa! Hi!” Away, at a gallop, over the black landscape, scattering the dust and dirt like spray!

The clatter and commotion echoed to the hurry and discordance of the fugitive’s ideas. Nothing clear without, and nothing clear within. Objects flitting past, merging into one another, dimly descried, confusedly lost sight of, gone! Beyond the changing scraps of fence and cottage immediately upon the road, a lowering waste. Beyond the shifting images that rose up in his mind and vanished as they showed themselves, a black expanse of dread and rage and baffled villainy. Occasionally, a sigh of mountain air came from the distant Jura, fading along the plain. Sometimes that rush which was so furious and horrible, again came sweeping through his fancy, passed away, and left a chill upon his blood.

The lamps, gleaming on the medley of horses’ heads, jumbled with the shadowy driver, and the fluttering of his cloak, made a thousand indistinct shapes, answering to his thoughts. Shadows of familiar people, stooping at their desks and books, in their remembered attitudes; strange apparitions of the man whom he was flying from, or of Edith; repetitions in the ringing bells and rolling wheels, of words that had been spoken; confusions of time and place, making last night a month ago, a month ago last night—home now distant beyond hope, now instantly accessible; commotion, discord, hurry, darkness, and confusion in his mind, and all around him.—Hallo! Hi! away at a gallop over the black landscape; dust and dirt flying like spray, the smoking horses snorting and plunging as if each of them were ridden by a demon, away in a frantic triumph on the dark road—whither?

Again the nameless shock comes speeding up, and as it passes, the bells ring in his ears “whither?” The wheels roar in his ears “whither?” All the noise and rattle shapes itself into that cry. The lights and shadows dance upon the horses’ heads like imps. No stopping now: no slackening! On, on! Away with him upon the dark road wildly!

He could not think to any purpose. He could not separate one subject of reflection from another, sufficiently to dwell upon it, by itself, for a minute at a time. The crash of his project for the gaining of a voluptuous compensation for past restraint; the overthrow of his treachery to one who had been true and generous to him, but whose least proud word and look he had treasured up, at interest, for years—for false and subtle men will always secretly despise and dislike the object upon which they fawn and always resent the payment and receipt of homage that they know to be worthless; these were the themes uppermost in his mind. A lurking rage against the woman who had so entrapped him and avenged herself was always there; crude and misshapen schemes of retaliation upon her, floated in his brain; but nothing was distinct. A hurry and contradiction pervaded all his thoughts. Even while he was so busy with this fevered, ineffectual thinking, his one constant idea was, that he would postpone reflection until some indefinite time.

Then, the old days before the second marriage rose up in his remembrance. He thought how jealous he had been of the boy, how jealous he had been of the girl, how artfully he had kept intruders at a distance, and drawn a circle round his dupe that none but himself should cross; and then he thought, had he done all this to be flying now, like a scared thief, from only the poor dupe?

He could have laid hands upon himself for his cowardice, but it was the very shadow of his defeat, and could not be separated from it. To have his confidence in his own knavery so shattered at a blow—to be within his own knowledge such a miserable tool—was like being paralysed. With an impotent ferocity he raged at Edith, and hated Mr Dombey and hated himself, but still he fled, and could do nothing else.

Again and again he listened for the sound of wheels behind. Again and again his fancy heard it, coming on louder and louder. At last he was so persuaded of this, that he cried out, “Stop” preferring even the loss of ground to such uncertainty.

The word soon brought carriage, horses, driver, all in a heap together, across the road.

“The devil!” cried the driver, looking over his shoulder, “what’s the matter?”

“Hark! What’s that?”

“What?”

“That noise?”

“Ah Heaven, be quiet, cursed brigand!” to a horse who shook his bells “What noise?”

“Behind. Is it not another carriage at a gallop? There! what’s that?”

“Miscreant with a Pig’s head, stand still!” to another horse, who bit another, who frightened the other two, who plunged and backed. “There is nothing coming.”

“Nothing.”

“No, nothing but the day yonder.”

“You are right, I think. I hear nothing now, indeed. Go on!”

The entangled equipage, half hidden in the reeking cloud from the horses, goes on slowly at first, for the driver, checked unnecessarily in his progress, sulkily takes out a pocket-knife, and puts a new lash to his whip. Then “Hallo, whoop! Hallo, hi!” Away once more, savagely.

And now the stars faded, and the day glimmered, and standing in the carriage, looking back, he could discern the track by which he had come, and see that there was no traveller within view, on all the heavy expanse. And soon it was broad day, and the sun began to shine on cornfields and vineyards; and solitary labourers, risen from little temporary huts by heaps of stones upon the road, were, here and there, at work repairing the highway, or eating bread. By and by, there were peasants going to their daily labour, or to market, or lounging at the doors of poor cottages, gazing idly at him as he passed. And then there was a postyard, ankle-deep in mud, with steaming dunghills and vast outhouses half ruined; and looking on this dainty prospect, an immense, old, shadeless, glaring, stone chateau, with half its windows blinded, and green damp crawling lazily over it, from the balustraded terrace to the taper tips of the extinguishers upon the turrets.

Gathered up moodily in a corner of the carriage, and only intent on going fast—except when he stood up, for a mile together, and looked back; which he would do whenever there was a piece of open country—he went on, still postponing thought indefinitely, and still always tormented with thinking to no purpose.

Shame, disappointment, and discomfiture gnawed at his heart; a constant apprehension of being overtaken, or met—for he was groundlessly afraid even of travellers, who came towards him by the way he was going—oppressed him heavily. The same intolerable awe and dread that had come upon him in the night, returned unweakened in the day. The monotonous ringing of the bells and tramping of the horses; the monotony of his anxiety, and useless rage; the monotonous wheel of fear, regret, and passion, he kept turning round and round; made the journey like a vision, in which nothing was quite real but his own torment.

It was a vision of long roads, that stretched away to an horizon, always receding and never gained; of ill-paved towns, up hill and down, where faces came to dark doors and ill-glazed windows, and where rows of mudbespattered cows and oxen were tied up for sale in the long narrow streets, butting and lowing, and receiving blows on their blunt heads from bludgeons that might have beaten them in; of bridges, crosses, churches, postyards, new horses being put in against their wills, and the horses of the last stage reeking, panting, and laying their drooping heads together dolefully at stable doors; of little cemeteries with black crosses settled sideways in the graves, and withered wreaths upon them dropping away; again of long, long roads, dragging themselves out, up hill and down, to the treacherous horizon.

Of morning, noon, and sunset; night, and the rising of an early moon. Of long roads temporarily left behind, and a rough pavement reached; of battering and clattering over it, and looking up, among house-roofs, at a great church-tower; of getting out and eating hastily, and drinking draughts of wine that had no cheering influence; of coming forth afoot, among a host of beggars—blind men with quivering eyelids, led by old women holding candles to their faces; idiot girls; the lame, the epileptic, and the palsied—of passing through the clamour, and looking from his seat at the upturned countenances and outstretched hands, with a hurried dread of recognising some pursuer pressing forward—of galloping away again, upon the long, long road, gathered up, dull and stunned, in his corner, or rising to see where the moon shone faintly on a patch of the same endless road miles away, or looking back to see who followed.

Of never sleeping, but sometimes dozing with unclosed eyes, and springing up with a start, and a reply aloud to an imaginary voice. Of cursing himself for being there, for having fled, for having let her go, for not having confronted and defied him. Of having a deadly quarrel with the whole world, but chiefly with himself. Of blighting everything with his black mood as he was carried on and away.

It was a fevered vision of things past and present all confounded together; of his life and journey blended into one. Of being madly hurried somewhere, whither he must go. Of old scenes starting up among the novelties through which he travelled. Of musing and brooding over what was past and distant, and seeming to take no notice of the actual objects he encountered, but with a wearisome exhausting consciousness of being bewildered by them, and having their images all crowded in his hot brain after they were gone.

A vision of change upon change, and still the same monotony of bells and wheels, and horses’ feet, and no rest. Of town and country, postyards, horses, drivers, hill and valley, light and darkness, road and pavement, height and hollow, wet weather and dry, and still the same monotony of bells and wheels, and horses’ feet, and no rest. A vision of tending on at last, towards the distant capital, by busier roads, and sweeping round, by old cathedrals, and dashing through small towns and villages, less thinly scattered on the road than formerly, and sitting shrouded in his corner, with his cloak up to his face, as people passing by looked at him.

Of rolling on and on, always postponing thought, and always racked with thinking; of being unable to reckon up the hours he had been upon the road, or to comprehend the points of time and place in his journey. Of being parched and giddy, and half mad. Of pressing on, in spite of all, as if he could not stop, and coming into Paris, where the turbid river held its swift course undisturbed, between two brawling streams of life and motion.

A troubled vision, then, of bridges, quays, interminable streets; of wine-shops, water-carriers, great crowds of people, soldiers, coaches, military drums, arcades. Of the monotony of bells and wheels and horses’ feet being at length lost in the universal din and uproar. Of the gradual subsidence of that noise as he passed out in another carriage by a different barrier from that by which he had entered. Of the restoration, as he travelled on towards the seacoast, of the monotony of bells and wheels, and horses’ feet, and no rest.

Of sunset once again, and nightfall. Of long roads again, and dead of night, and feeble lights in windows by the roadside; and still the old monotony of bells and wheels, and horses’ feet, and no rest. Of dawn, and daybreak, and the rising of the sun. Of tolling slowly up a hill, and feeling on its top the fresh sea-breeze; and seeing the morning light upon the edges of the distant waves. Of coming down into a harbour when the tide was at its full, and seeing fishing-boats float on, and glad women and children waiting for them. Of nets and seamen’s clothes spread out to dry upon the shore; of busy sailors, and their voices high among ships’ masts and rigging; of the buoyancy and brightness of the water, and the universal sparkling.

Of receding from the coast, and looking back upon it from the deck when it was a haze upon the water, with here and there a little opening of bright land where the Sun struck. Of the swell, and flash, and murmur of the calm sea. Of another grey line on the ocean, on the vessel’s track, fast growing clearer and higher. Of cliffs and buildings, and a windmill, and a church, becoming more and more visible upon it. Of steaming on at last into smooth water, and mooring to a pier whence groups of people looked down, greeting friends on board. Of disembarking, passing among them quickly, shunning every one; and of being at last again in England.

He had thought, in his dream, of going down into a remote country-place he knew, and lying quiet there, while he secretly informed himself of what transpired, and determined how to act, Still in the same stunned condition, he remembered a certain station on the railway, where he would have to branch off to his place of destination, and where there was a quiet Inn. Here, he indistinctly resolved to tarry and rest.

With this purpose he slunk into a railway carriage as quickly as he could, and lying there wrapped in his cloak as if he were asleep, was soon borne far away from the sea, and deep into the inland green. Arrived at his destination he looked out, and surveyed it carefully. He was not mistaken in his impression of the place. It was a retired spot, on the borders of a little wood. Only one house, newly-built or altered for the purpose, stood there, surrounded by its neat garden; the small town that was nearest, was some miles away. Here he alighted then; and going straight into the tavern, unobserved by anyone, secured two rooms upstairs communicating with each other, and sufficiently retired.

His object was to rest, and recover the command of himself, and the balance of his mind. Imbecile discomfiture and rage—so that, as he walked about his room, he ground his teeth—had complete possession of him. His thoughts, not to be stopped or directed, still wandered where they would, and dragged him after them. He was stupefied, and he was wearied to death.

But, as if there were a curse upon him that he should never rest again, his drowsy senses would not lose their consciousness. He had no more influence with them, in this regard, than if they had been another man’s. It was not that they forced him to take note of present sounds and objects, but that they would not be diverted from the whole hurried vision of his journey. It was constantly before him all at once. She stood there, with her dark disdainful eyes again upon him; and he was riding on nevertheless, through town and country, light and darkness, wet weather and dry, over road and pavement, hill and valley, height and hollow, jaded and scared by the monotony of bells and wheels, and horses’ feet, and no rest.

“What day is this?” he asked of the waiter, who was making preparations for his dinner.

“Day, Sir?”

“Is it Wednesday?”

“Wednesday, Sir? No, Sir. Thursday, Sir.”

“I forgot. How goes the time? My watch is unwound.”

“Wants a few minutes of five o’clock, Sir. Been travelling a long time, Sir, perhaps?”

“Yes”

“By rail, Sir?”

“Yes”

“Very confusing, Sir. Not much in the habit of travelling by rail myself, Sir, but gentlemen frequently say so.”

“Do many gentlemen come here?

“Pretty well, Sir, in general. Nobody here at present. Rather slack just now, Sir. Everything is slack, Sir.”

He made no answer; but had risen into a sitting posture on the sofa where he had been lying, and leaned forward with an arm on each knee, staring at the ground. He could not master his own attention for a minute together. It rushed away where it would, but it never, for an instant, lost itself in sleep.

He drank a quantity of wine after dinner, in vain. No such artificial means would bring sleep to his eyes. His thoughts, more incoherent, dragged him more unmercifully after them—as if a wretch, condemned to such expiation, were drawn at the heels of wild horses. No oblivion, and no rest.

How long he sat, drinking and brooding, and being dragged in imagination hither and thither, no one could have told less correctly than he. But he knew that he had been sitting a long time by candle-light, when he started up and listened, in a sudden terror.

For now, indeed, it was no fancy. The ground shook, the house rattled, the fierce impetuous rush was in the air! He felt it come up, and go darting by; and even when he had hurried to the window, and saw what it was, he stood, shrinking from it, as if it were not safe to look.

A curse upon the fiery devil, thundering along so smoothly, tracked through the distant valley by a glare of light and lurid smoke, and gone! He felt as if he had been plucked out of its path, and saved from being torn asunder. It made him shrink and shudder even now, when its faintest hum was hushed, and when the lines of iron road he could trace in the moonlight, running to a point, were as empty and as silent as a desert.

Unable to rest, and irresistibly attracted—or he thought so—to this road, he went out, and lounged on the brink of it, marking the way the train had gone, by the yet smoking cinders that were lying in its track. After a lounge of some half hour in the direction by which it had disappeared, he turned and walked the other way—still keeping to the brink of the road—past the inn garden, and a long way down; looking curiously at the bridges, signals, lamps, and wondering when another Devil would come by.

A trembling of the ground, and quick vibration in his ears; a distant shriek; a dull light advancing, quickly changed to two red eyes, and a fierce fire, dropping glowing coals; an irresistible bearing on of a great roaring and dilating mass; a high wind, and a rattle—another come and gone, and he holding to a gate, as if to save himself!

He waited for another, and for another. He walked back to his former point, and back again to that, and still, through the wearisome vision of his journey, looked for these approaching monsters. He loitered about the station, waiting until one should stay to call there; and when one did, and was detached for water, he stood parallel with it, watching its heavy wheels and brazen front, and thinking what a cruel power and might it had. Ugh! To see the great wheels slowly turning, and to think of being run down and crushed!

Disordered with wine and want of rest—that want which nothing, although he was so weary, would appease—these ideas and objects assumed a diseased importance in his thoughts. When he went back to his room, which was not until near midnight, they still haunted him, and he sat listening for the coming of another.

So in his bed, whither he repaired with no hope of sleep. He still lay listening; and when he felt the trembling and vibration, got up and went to the window, to watch (as he could from its position) the dull light changing to the two red eyes, and the fierce fire dropping glowing coals, and the rush of the giant as it fled past, and the track of glare and smoke along the valley. Then he would glance in the direction by which he intended to depart at sunrise, as there was no rest for him there; and would lie down again, to be troubled by the vision of his journey, and the old monotony of bells and wheels and horses’ feet, until another came. This lasted all night. So far from resuming the mastery of himself, he seemed, if possible, to lose it more and more, as the night crept on. When the dawn appeared, he was still tormented with thinking, still postponing thought until he should be in a better state; the past, present, and future all floated confusedly before him, and he had lost all power of looking steadily at any one of them.

“At what time,” he asked the man who had waited on him over-night, now entering with a candle, “do I leave here, did you say?”

“About a quarter after four, Sir. Express comes through at four, Sir.—It don’t stop.”

He passed his hand across his throbbing head, and looked at his watch. Nearly half-past three.

“Nobody going with you, Sir, probably,” observed the man. “Two gentlemen here, Sir, but they’re waiting for the train to London.”

“I thought you said there was nobody here,” said Carker, turning upon him with the ghost of his old smile, when he was angry or suspicious.

“Not then, sir. Two gentlemen came in the night by the short train that stops here, Sir. Warm water, Sir?”

“No; and take away the candle. There’s day enough for me.”

Having thrown himself upon the bed, half-dressed he was at the window as the man left the room. The cold light of morning had succeeded to night and there was already, in the sky, the red suffusion of the coming sun. He bathed his head and face with water—there was no cooling influence in it for him—hurriedly put on his clothes, paid what he owed, and went out.

The air struck chill and comfortless as it breathed upon him. There was a heavy dew; and, hot as he was, it made him shiver. After a glance at the place where he had walked last night, and at the signal-lights burning in the morning, and bereft of their significance, he turned to where the sun was rising, and beheld it, in its glory, as it broke upon the scene.

So awful, so transcendent in its beauty, so divinely solemn. As he cast his faded eyes upon it, where it rose, tranquil and serene, unmoved by all the wrong and wickedness on which its beams had shone since the beginning of the world, who shall say that some weak sense of virtue upon Earth, and its in Heaven, did not manifest itself, even to him? If ever he remembered sister or brother with a touch of tenderness and remorse, who shall say it was not then?

He needed some such touch then. Death was on him. He was marked off—the living world, and going down into his grave.

He paid the money for his journey to the country-place he had thought of; and was walking to and fro, alone, looking along the lines of iron, across the valley in one direction, and towards a dark bridge near at hand in the other; when, turning in his walk, where it was bounded by one end of the wooden stage on which he paced up and down, he saw the man from whom he had fled, emerging from the door by which he himself had entered. And their eyes met.

In the quick unsteadiness of the surprise, he staggered, and slipped on to the road below him. But recovering his feet immediately, he stepped back a pace or two upon that road, to interpose some wider space between them, and looked at his pursuer, breathing short and quick.

He heard a shout—another—saw the face change from its vindictive passion to a faint sickness and terror—felt the earth tremble—knew in a moment that the rush was come—uttered a shriek—looked round—saw the red eyes, bleared and dim, in the daylight, close upon him—was beaten down, caught up, and whirled away upon a jagged mill, that spun him round and round, and struck him limb from limb, and licked his stream of life up with its fiery heat, and cast his mutilated fragments in the air.

When the traveller, who had been recognised, recovered from a swoon, he saw them bringing from a distance something covered, that lay heavy and still, upon a board, between four men, and saw that others drove some dogs away that sniffed upon the road, and soaked his blood up, with a train of ashes.

LVI. Several People delighted, and the Game Chicken disgusted

The Midshipman was all alive. Mr Toots and Susan had arrived at last. Susan had run upstairs like a young woman bereft of her senses, and Mr Toots and the Chicken had gone into the Parlour.

“Oh my own pretty darling sweet Miss Floy!” cried the Nipper, running into Florence’s room, “to think that it should come to this and I should find you here my own dear dove with nobody to wait upon you and no home to call your own but never never will I go away again Miss Floy for though I may not gather moss I’m not a rolling stone nor is my heart a stone or else it wouldn’t bust as it is busting now oh dear oh dear!”

Pouring out these words, without the faintest indication of a stop, of any sort, Miss Nipper, on her knees beside her mistress, hugged her close.

“Oh love!” cried Susan, “I know all that’s past I know it all my tender pet and I’m a choking give me air!”

“Susan, dear good Susan!” said Florence.

“Oh bless her! I that was her little maid when she was a little child! and is she really, really truly going to be married?” exclaimed Susan, in a burst of pain and pleasure, pride and grief, and Heaven knows how many other conflicting feelings.

“Who told you so?” said Florence.

“Oh gracious me! that innocentest creetur Toots,” returned Susan hysterically. “I knew he must be right my dear, because he took on so. He’s the devotedest and innocentest infant! And is my darling,” pursued Susan, with another close embrace and burst of tears, “really really going to be married!”

The mixture of compassion, pleasure, tenderness, protection, and regret with which the Nipper constantly recurred to this subject, and at every such once, raised her head to look in the young face and kiss it, and then laid her head again upon her mistress’s shoulder, caressing her and sobbing, was as womanly and good a thing, in its way, as ever was seen in the world.

“There, there!” said the soothing voice of Florence presently. “Now you’re quite yourself, dear Susan!”

Miss Nipper, sitting down upon the floor, at her mistress’s feet, laughing and sobbing, holding her pocket-handkerchief to her eyes with one hand, and patting Diogenes with the other as he licked her face, confessed to being more composed, and laughed and cried a little more in proof of it.

“I-I-I never did see such a creetur as that Toots,” said Susan, “in all my born days never!”

“So kind,” suggested Florence.

“And so comic!” Susan sobbed. “The way he’s been going on inside with me with that disrespectable Chicken on the box!”

“About what, Susan?” inquired Florence, timidly.

“Oh about Lieutenant Walters, and Captain Gills, and you my dear Miss Floy, and the silent tomb,” said Susan.

“The silent tomb!” repeated Florence.

“He says,” here Susan burst into a violent hysterical laugh, “that he’ll go down into it now immediately and quite comfortable, but bless your heart my dear Miss Floy he won’t, he’s a great deal too happy in seeing other people happy for that, he may not be a Solomon,” pursued the Nipper, with her usual volubility, “nor do I say he is but this I do say a less selfish human creature human nature never knew!”

Miss Nipper being still hysterical, laughed immoderately after making this energetic declaration, and then informed Florence that he was waiting below to see her; which would be a rich repayment for the trouble he had had in his late expedition.

Florence entreated Susan to beg of Mr Toots as a favour that she might have the pleasure of thanking him for his kindness; and Susan, in a few moments, produced that young gentleman, still very much dishevelled in appearance, and stammering exceedingly.

“Miss Dombey,” said Mr Toots. “To be again permitted to—to—gaze—at least, not to gaze, but—I don’t exactly know what I was going to say, but it’s of no consequence.”

“I have to thank you so often,” returned Florence, giving him both her hands, with all her innocent gratitude beaming in her face, “that I have no words left, and don’t know how to do it.”

“Miss Dombey,” said Mr Toots, in an awful voice, “if it was possible that you could, consistently with your angelic nature, Curse me, you would—if I may be allowed to say so—floor me infinitely less, than by these undeserved expressions of kindness Their effect upon me—is—but,” said Mr Toots, abruptly, “this is a digression, and of no consequence at all.”

As there seemed to be no means of replying to this, but by thanking him again, Florence thanked him again.

“I could wish,” said Mr Toots, “to take this opportunity, Miss Dombey, if I might, of entering into a word of explanation. I should have had the pleasure of—of returning with Susan at an earlier period; but, in the first place, we didn’t know the name of the relation to whose house she had gone, and, in the second, as she had left that relation’s and gone to another at a distance, I think that scarcely anything short of the sagacity of the Chicken, would have found her out in the time.”

Florence was sure of it.

“This, however,” said Mr Toots, “is not the point. The company of Susan has been, I assure you, Miss Dombey, a consolation and satisfaction to me, in my state of mind, more easily conceived than described. The journey has been its own reward. That, however, still, is not the point. Miss Dombey, I have before observed that I know I am not what is considered a quick person. I am perfectly aware of that. I don’t think anybody could be better acquainted with his own—if it was not too strong an expression, I should say with the thickness of his own head—than myself. But, Miss Dombey, I do, notwithstanding, perceive the state of—of things—with Lieutenant Walters. Whatever agony that state of things may have caused me (which is of no consequence at all), I am bound to say, that Lieutenant Walters is a person who appears to be worthy of the blessing that has fallen on his—on his brow. May he wear it long, and appreciate it, as a very different, and very unworthy individual, that it is of no consequence to name, would have done! That, however, still, is not the point. Miss Dombey, Captain Gills is a friend of mine; and during the interval that is now elapsing, I believe it would afford Captain Gills pleasure to see me occasionally coming backwards and forwards here. It would afford me pleasure so to come. But I cannot forget that I once committed myself, fatally, at the corner of the Square at Brighton; and if my presence will be, in the least degree, unpleasant to you, I only ask you to name it to me now, and assure you that I shall perfectly understand you. I shall not consider it at all unkind, and shall only be too delighted and happy to be honoured with your confidence.”

“Mr Toots,” returned Florence, “if you, who are so old and true a friend of mine, were to stay away from this house now, you would make me very unhappy. It can never, never, give me any feeling but pleasure to see you.

“Miss Dombey,” said Mr Toots, taking out his pocket-handkerchief, “if I shed a tear, it is a tear of joy. It is of no consequence, and I am very much obliged to you. I may be allowed to remark, after what you have so kindly said, that it is not my intention to neglect my person any longer.”

Florence received this intimation with the prettiest expression of perplexity possible.

“I mean,” said Mr Toots, “that I shall consider it my duty as a fellow-creature generally, until I am claimed by the silent tomb, to make the best of myself, and to—to have my boots as brightly polished, as—as—circumstances will admit of. This is the last time, Miss Dombey, of my intruding any observation of a private and personal nature. I thank you very much indeed. If I am not, in a general way, as sensible as my friends could wish me to be, or as I could wish myself, I really am, upon my word and honour, particularly sensible of what is considerate and kind. I feel,” said Mr Toots, in an impassioned tone, “as if I could express my feelings, at the present moment, in a most remarkable manner, if—if—I could only get a start.”

Appearing not to get it, after waiting a minute or two to see if it would come, Mr Toots took a hasty leave, and went below to seek the Captain, whom he found in the shop.

“Captain Gills,” said Mr Toots, “what is now to take place between us, takes place under the sacred seal of confidence. It is the sequel, Captain Gills, of what has taken place between myself and Miss Dombey, upstairs.”

“Alow and aloft, eh, my lad?” murmured the Captain.

“Exactly so, Captain Gills,” said Mr Toots, whose fervour of acquiescence was greatly heightened by his entire ignorance of the Captain’s meaning. “Miss Dombey, I believe, Captain Gills, is to be shortly united to Lieutenant Walters?”

“Why, ay, my lad. We’re all shipmets here,—Wal”r and sweet—heart will be jined together in the house of bondage, as soon as the askings is over,” whispered Captain Cuttle, in his ear.

“The askings, Captain Gills!” repeated Mr Toots.

“In the church, down yonder,” said the Captain, pointing his thumb over his shoulder.

“Oh! Yes!” returned Mr Toots.

“And then,” said the Captain, in his hoarse whisper, and tapping Mr Toots on the chest with the back of his hand, and falling from him with a look of infinite admiration, “what follers? That there pretty creetur, as delicately brought up as a foreign bird, goes away upon the roaring main with Wal”r on a woyage to China!”

“Lord, Captain Gills!” said Mr Toots.

“Ay!” nodded the Captain. “The ship as took him up, when he was wrecked in the hurricane that had drove her clean out of her course, was a China trader, and Wal”r made the woyage, and got into favour, aboard and ashore—being as smart and good a lad as ever stepped—and so, the supercargo dying at Canton, he got made (having acted as clerk afore), and now he’s supercargo aboard another ship, same owners. And so, you see,” repeated the Captain, thoughtfully, “the pretty creetur goes away upon the roaring main with Wal”r, on a woyage to China.”

Mr Toots and Captain Cuttle heaved a sigh in concert. “What then?” said the Captain. “She loves him true. He loves her true. Them as should have loved and tended of her, treated of her like the beasts as perish. When she, cast out of home, come here to me, and dropped upon them planks, her wownded heart was broke. I know it. I, Ed’ard Cuttle, see it. There’s nowt but true, kind, steady love, as can ever piece it up again. If so be I didn’t know that, and didn’t know as Wal”r was her true love, brother, and she his, I’d have these here blue arms and legs chopped off, afore I’d let her go. But I know it, and what then! Why, then, I say, Heaven go with ’em both, and so it will! Amen!”

“Captain Gills,” said Mr Toots, “let me have the pleasure of shaking hands. You’ve a way of saying things, that gives me an agreeable warmth, all up my back. I say Amen. You are aware, Captain Gills, that I, too, have adored Miss Dombey.”

“Cheer up!” said the Captain, laying his hand on Mr Toots’s shoulder. “Stand by, boy!”

“It is my intention, Captain Gills,” returned the spirited Mr Toots, “to cheer up. Also to standby, as much as possible. When the silent tomb shall yawn, Captain Gills, I shall be ready for burial; not before. But not being certain, just at present, of my power over myself, what I wish to say to you, and what I shall take it as a particular favour if you will mention to Lieutenant Walters, is as follows.”

“Is as follers,” echoed the Captain. “Steady!”

“Miss Dombey being so inexpressably kind,” continued Mr Toots with watery eyes, “as to say that my presence is the reverse of disagreeable to her, and you and everybody here being no less forbearing and tolerant towards one who—who certainly,” said Mr Toots, with momentary dejection, “would appear to have been born by mistake, I shall come backwards and forwards of an evening, during the short time we can all be together. But what I ask is this. If, at any moment, I find that I cannot endure the contemplation of Lieutenant Walters’s bliss, and should rush out, I hope, Captain Gills, that you and he will both consider it as my misfortune and not my fault, or the want of inward conflict. That you’ll feel convinced I bear no malice to any living creature-least of all to Lieutenant Walters himself—and that you’ll casually remark that I have gone out for a walk, or probably to see what o’clock it is by the Royal Exchange. Captain Gills, if you could enter into this arrangement, and could answer for Lieutenant Walters, it would be a relief to my feelings that I should think cheap at the sacrifice of a considerable portion of my property.”

“My lad,” returned the Captain, “say no more. There ain’t a colour you can run up, as won’t be made out, and answered to, by Wal”r and self.”

“Captain Gills,” said Mr Toots, “my mind is greatly relieved. I wish to preserve the good opinion of all here. I—I—mean well, upon my honour, however badly I may show it. You know,” said Mr Toots, “it’s as exactly as Burgess and Co. wished to oblige a customer with a most extraordinary pair of trousers, and could not cut out what they had in their minds.”

With this apposite illustration, of which he seemed a little Proud, Mr Toots gave Captain Cuttle his blessing and departed.

The honest Captain, with his Heart’s Delight in the house, and Susan tending her, was a beaming and a happy man. As the days flew by, he grew more beaming and more happy, every day. After some conferences with Susan (for whose wisdom the Captain had a profound respect, and whose valiant precipitation of herself on Mrs MacStinger he could never forget), he proposed to Florence that the daughter of the elderly lady who usually sat under the blue umbrella in Leadenhall Market, should, for prudential reasons and considerations of privacy, be superseded in the temporary discharge of the household duties, by someone who was not unknown to them, and in whom they could safely confide. Susan, being present, then named, in furtherance of a suggestion she had previously offered to the Captain, Mrs Richards. Florence brightened at the name. And Susan, setting off that very afternoon to the Toodle domicile, to sound Mrs Richards, returned in triumph the same evening, accompanied by the identical rosy-cheeked apple-faced Polly, whose demonstrations, when brought into Florence’s presence, were hardly less affectionate than those of Susan Nipper herself.

This piece of generalship accomplished; from which the Captain derived uncommon satisfaction, as he did, indeed, from everything else that was done, whatever it happened to be; Florence had next to prepare Susan for their approaching separation. This was a much more difficult task, as Miss Nipper was of a resolute disposition, and had fully made up her mind that she had come back never to be parted from her old mistress any more.

“As to wages dear Miss Floy,” she said, “you wouldn’t hint and wrong me so as think of naming them, for I’ve put money by and wouldn’t sell my love and duty at a time like this even if the Savings’ Banks and me were total strangers or the Banks were broke to pieces, but you’ve never been without me darling from the time your poor dear Ma was took away, and though I’m nothing to be boasted of you’re used to me and oh my own dear mistress through so many years don’t think of going anywhere without me, for it mustn’t and can’t be!”

“Dear Susan, I am going on a long, long voyage.”

“Well Miss Floy, and what of that? the more you’ll want me. Lengths of voyages ain’t an object in my eyes, thank God!” said the impetuous Susan Nipper.

“But, Susan, I am going with Walter, and I would go with Walter anywhere—everywhere! Walter is poor, and I am very poor, and I must learn, now, both to help myself, and help him.”

“Dear Miss Floy!” cried Susan, bursting out afresh, and shaking her head violently, “it’s nothing new to you to help yourself and others too and be the patientest and truest of noble hearts, but let me talk to Mr Walter Gay and settle it with him, for suffer you to go away across the world alone I cannot, and I won’t.”

“Alone, Susan?” returned Florence. “Alone? and Walter taking me with him!” Ah, what a bright, amazed, enraptured smile was on her face!—He should have seen it. “I am sure you will not speak to Walter if I ask you not,” she added tenderly; “and pray don’t, dear.”

Susan sobbed “Why not, Miss Floy?”

“Because,” said Florence, “I am going to be his wife, to give him up my whole heart, and to live with him and die with him. He might think, if you said to him what you have said to me, that I am afraid of what is before me, or that you have some cause to be afraid for me. Why, Susan, dear, I love him!”

Miss Nipper was so much affected by the quiet fervour of these words, and the simple, heartfelt, all-pervading earnestness expressed in them, and making the speaker’s face more beautiful and pure than ever, that she could only cling to her again, crying. Was her little mistress really, really going to be married, and pitying, caressing, and protecting her, as she had done before.

But the Nipper, though susceptible of womanly weaknesses, was almost as capable of putting constraint upon herself as of attacking the redoubtable MacStinger. From that time, she never returned to the subject, but was always cheerful, active, bustling, and hopeful. She did, indeed, inform Mr Toots privately, that she was only “keeping up” for the time, and that when it was all over, and Miss Dombey was gone, she might be expected to become a spectacle distressful; and Mr Toots did also express that it was his case too, and that they would mingle their tears together; but she never otherwise indulged her private feelings in the presence of Florence or within the precincts of the Midshipman.

Limited and plain as Florence’s wardrobe was—what a contrast to that prepared for the last marriage in which she had taken part!—there was a good deal to do in getting it ready, and Susan Nipper worked away at her side, all day, with the concentrated zeal of fifty sempstresses. The wonderful contributions Captain Cuttle would have made to this branch of the outfit, if he had been permitted—as pink parasols, tinted silk stockings, blue shoes, and other articles no less necessary on shipboard—would occupy some space in the recital. He was induced, however, by various fraudulent representations, to limit his contributions to a work-box and dressing case, of each of which he purchased the very largest specimen that could be got for money. For ten days or a fortnight afterwards, he generally sat, during the greater part of the day, gazing at these boxes; divided between extreme admiration of them, and dejected misgivings that they were not gorgeous enough, and frequently diving out into the street to purchase some wild article that he deemed necessary to their completeness. But his master-stroke was, the bearing of them both off, suddenly, one morning, and getting the two words FLORENCE GAY engraved upon a brass heart inlaid over the lid of each. After this, he smoked four pipes successively in the little parlour by himself, and was discovered chuckling, at the expiration of as many hours.

Walter was busy and away all day, but came there every morning early to see Florence, and always passed the evening with her. Florence never left her high rooms but to steal downstairs to wait for him when it was his time to come, or, sheltered by his proud, encircling arm, to bear him company to the door again, and sometimes peep into the street. In the twilight they were always together. Oh blessed time! Oh wandering heart at rest! Oh deep, exhaustless, mighty well of love, in which so much was sunk!

The cruel mark was on her bosom yet. It rose against her father with the breath she drew, it lay between her and her lover when he pressed her to his heart. But she forgot it. In the beating of that heart for her, and in the beating of her own for him, all harsher music was unheard, all stern unloving hearts forgotten. Fragile and delicate she was, but with a might of love within her that could, and did, create a world to fly to, and to rest in, out of his one image.

How often did the great house, and the old days, come before her in the twilight time, when she was sheltered by the arm, so proud, so fond, and, creeping closer to him, shrunk within it at the recollection! How often, from remembering the night when she went down to that room and met the never-to-be forgotten look, did she raise her eyes to those that watched her with such loving earnestness, and weep with happiness in such a refuge! The more she clung to it, the more the dear dead child was in her thoughts: but as if the last time she had seen her father, had been when he was sleeping and she kissed his face, she always left him so, and never, in her fancy, passed that hour.

“Walter, dear,” said Florence, one evening, when it was almost dark. “Do you know what I have been thinking today?”

“Thinking how the time is flying on, and how soon we shall be upon the sea, sweet Florence?”

“I don’t mean that, Walter, though I think of that too. I have been thinking what a charge I am to you.”

“A precious, sacred charge, dear heart! Why, I think that sometimes.”

“You are laughing, Walter. I know that’s much more in your thoughts than mine. But I mean a cost.

“A cost, my own?”

“In money, dear. All these preparations that Susan and I are so busy with—I have been able to purchase very little for myself. You were poor before. But how much poorer I shall make you, Walter!”

“And how much richer, Florence!”

Florence laughed, and shook her head.

“Besides,” said Walter, “long ago—before I went to sea—I had a little purse presented to me, dearest, which had money in it.”

“Ah!” returned Florence, laughing sorrowfully, “very little! very little, Walter! But, you must not think,” and here she laid her light hand on his shoulder, and looked into his face, “that I regret to be this burden on you. No, dear love, I am glad of it. I am happy in it. I wouldn’t have it otherwise for all the world!”

“Nor I, indeed, dear Florence.”

“Ay! but, Walter, you can never feel it as I do. I am so proud of you! It makes my heart swell with such delight to know that those who speak of you must say you married a poor disowned girl, who had taken shelter here; who had no other home, no other friends; who had nothing—nothing! Oh, Walter, if I could have brought you millions, I never could have been so happy for your sake, as I am!”

“And you, dear Florence? are you nothing?” he returned.

“No, nothing, Walter. Nothing but your wife.” The light hand stole about his neck, and the voice came nearer—nearer. “I am nothing any more, that is not you. I have no earthly hope any more, that is not you. I have nothing dear to me any more, that is not you.”

Oh! well might Mr Toots leave the little company that evening, and twice go out to correct his watch by the Royal Exchange, and once to keep an appointment with a banker which he suddenly remembered, and once to take a little turn to Aldgate Pump and back!

But before he went upon these expeditions, or indeed before he came, and before lights were brought, Walter said:

“Florence, love, the lading of our ship is nearly finished, and probably on the very day of our marriage she will drop down the river. Shall we go away that morning, and stay in Kent until we go on board at Gravesend within a week?”

“If you please, Walter. I shall be happy anywhere. But—”

“Yes, my life?”

“You know,” said Florence, “that we shall have no marriage party, and that nobody will distinguish us by our dress from other people. As we leave the same day, will you—will you take me somewhere that morning, Walter—early—before we go to church?”

Walter seemed to understand her, as so true a lover so truly loved should, and confirmed his ready promise with a kiss—with more than one perhaps, or two or three, or five or six; and in the grave, peaceful evening, Florence was very happy.

Then into the quiet room came Susan Nipper and the candles; shortly afterwards, the tea, the Captain, and the excursive Mr Toots, who, as above mentioned, was frequently on the move afterwards, and passed but a restless evening. This, however, was not his habit: for he generally got on very well, by dint of playing at cribbage with the Captain under the advice and guidance of Miss Nipper, and distracting his mind with the calculations incidental to the game; which he found to be a very effectual means of utterly confounding himself.

The Captain’s visage on these occasions presented one of the finest examples of combination and succession of expression ever observed. His instinctive delicacy and his chivalrous feeling towards Florence, taught him that it was not a time for any boisterous jollity, or violent display of satisfaction; floating reminiscences of Lovely Peg, on the other hand, were constantly struggling for a vent, and urging the Captain to commit himself by some irreparable demonstration. Anon, his admiration of Florence and Walter—well-matched, truly, and full of grace and interest in their youth, and love, and good looks, as they sat apart—would take such complete possession of him, that he would lay down his cards, and beam upon them, dabbing his head all over with his pocket-handkerchief; until warned, perhaps, by the sudden rushing forth of Mr Toots, that he had unconsciously been very instrumental, indeed, in making that gentleman miserable. This reflection would make the Captain profoundly melancholy, until the return of Mr Toots; when he would fall to his cards again, with many side winks and nods, and polite waves of his hook at Miss Nipper, importing that he wasn’t going to do so any more. The state that ensued on this, was, perhaps, his best; for then, endeavouring to discharge all expression from his face, he would sit staring round the room, with all these expressions conveyed into it at once, and each wrestling with the other. Delighted admiration of Florence and Walter always overthrew the rest, and remained victorious and undisguised, unless Mr Toots made another rush into the air, and then the Captain would sit, like a remorseful culprit, until he came back again, occasionally calling upon himself, in a low reproachful voice, to “Stand by!” or growling some remonstrance to “Ed’ard Cuttle, my lad,” on the want of caution observable in his behaviour.

One of Mr Toots’s hardest trials, however, was of his own seeking. On the approach of the Sunday which was to witness the last of those askings in church of which the Captain had spoken, Mr Toots thus stated his feelings to Susan Nipper.

“Susan,” said Mr Toots, “I am drawn towards the building. The words which cut me off from Miss Dombey for ever, will strike upon my ears like a knell you know, but upon my word and honour, I feel that I must hear them. Therefore,” said Mr Toots, “will you accompany me to-morrow, to the sacred edifice?”

Miss Nipper expressed her readiness to do so, if that would be any satisfaction to Mr Toots, but besought him to abandon his idea of going.

“Susan,” returned Mr Toots, with much solemnity, “before my whiskers began to be observed by anybody but myself, I adored Miss Dombey. While yet a victim to the thraldom of Blimber, I adored Miss Dombey. When I could no longer be kept out of my property, in a legal point of view, and—and accordingly came into it—I adored Miss Dombey. The banns which consign her to Lieutenant Walters, and me to—to Gloom, you know,” said Mr Toots, after hesitating for a strong expression, “may be dreadful, will be dreadful; but I feel that I should wish to hear them spoken. I feel that I should wish to know that the ground was certainly cut from under me, and that I hadn’t a hope to cherish, or a—or a leg, in short, to—to go upon.”

Susan Nipper could only commiserate Mr Toots’s unfortunate condition, and agree, under these circumstances, to accompany him; which she did next morning.

The church Walter had chosen for the purpose, was a mouldy old church in a yard, hemmed in by a labyrinth of back streets and courts, with a little burying-ground round it, and itself buried in a kind of vault, formed by the neighbouring houses, and paved with echoing stones. It was a great dim, shabby pile, with high old oaken pews, among which about a score of people lost themselves every Sunday; while the clergyman’s voice drowsily resounded through the emptiness, and the organ rumbled and rolled as if the church had got the colic, for want of a congregation to keep the wind and damp out. But so far was this city church from languishing for the company of other churches, that spires were clustered round it, as the masts of shipping cluster on the river. It would have been hard to count them from its steeple-top, they were so many. In almost every yard and blind-place near, there was a church. The confusion of bells when Susan and Mr Toots betook themselves towards it on the Sunday morning, was deafening. There were twenty churches close together, clamouring for people to come in.

The two stray sheep in question were penned by a beadle in a commodious pew, and, being early, sat for some time counting the congregation, listening to the disappointed bell high up in the tower, or looking at a shabby little old man in the porch behind the screen, who was ringing the same, like the Bull in Cock Robin, with his foot in a stirrup. Mr Toots, after a lengthened survey of the large books on the reading-desk, whispered Miss Nipper that he wondered where the banns were kept, but that young lady merely shook her head and frowned; repelling for the time all approaches of a temporal nature.

Mr Toots, however, appearing unable to keep his thoughts from the banns, was evidently looking out for them during the whole preliminary portion of the service. As the time for reading them approached, the poor young gentleman manifested great anxiety and trepidation, which was not diminished by the unexpected apparition of the Captain in the front row of the gallery. When the clerk handed up a list to the clergyman, Mr Toots, being then seated, held on by the seat of the pew; but when the names of Walter Gay and Florence Dombey were read aloud as being in the third and last stage of that association, he was so entirley conquered by his feelings as to rush from the church without his hat, followed by the beadle and pew-opener, and two gentlemen of the medical profession, who happened to be present; of whom the first-named presently returned for that article, informing Miss Nipper in a whisper that she was not to make herself uneasy about the gentleman, as the gentleman said his indisposition was of no consequence.

Miss Nipper, feeling that the eyes of that integral portion of Europe which lost itself weekly among the high-backed pews, were upon her, would have been sufficient embarrassed by this incident, though it had terminated here; the more so, as the Captain in the front row of the gallery, was in a state of unmitigated consciousness which could hardly fail to express to the congregation that he had some mysterious connection with it. But the extreme restlessness of Mr Toots painfully increased and protracted the delicacy of her situation. That young gentleman, incapable, in his state of mind, of remaining alone in the churchyard, a prey to solitary meditation, and also desirous, no doubt, of testifying his respect for the offices he had in some measure interrupted, suddenly returned—not coming back to the pew, but stationing himself on a free seat in the aisle, between two elderly females who were in the habit of receiving their portion of a weekly dole of bread then set forth on a shelf in the porch. In this conjunction Mr Toots remained, greatly disturbing the congregation, who felt it impossible to avoid looking at him, until his feelings overcame him again, when he departed silently and suddenly. Not venturing to trust himself in the church any more, and yet wishing to have some social participation in what was going on there, Mr Toots was, after this, seen from time to time, looking in, with a lorn aspect, at one or other of the windows; and as there were several windows accessible to him from without, and as his restlessness was very great, it not only became difficult to conceive at which window he would appear next, but likewise became necessary, as it were, for the whole congregation to speculate upon the chances of the different windows, during the comparative leisure afforded them by the sermon. Mr Toots’s movements in the churchyard were so eccentric, that he seemed generally to defeat all calculation, and to appear, like the conjuror’s figure, where he was least expected; and the effect of these mysterious presentations was much increased by its being difficult to him to see in, and easy to everybody else to see out: which occasioned his remaining, every time, longer than might have been expected, with his face close to the glass, until he all at once became aware that all eyes were upon him, and vanished.

These proceedings on the part of Mr Toots, and the strong individual consciousness of them that was exhibited by the Captain, rendered Miss Nipper’s position so responsible a one, that she was mightily relieved by the conclusion of the service; and was hardly so affable to Mr Toots as usual, when he informed her and the Captain, on the way back, that now he was sure he had no hope, you know, he felt more comfortable—at least not exactly more comfortable, but more comfortably and completely miserable.

Swiftly now, indeed, the time flew by until it was the evening before the day appointed for the marriage. They were all assembled in the upper room at the Midshipman’s, and had no fear of interruption; for there were no lodgers in the house now, and the Midshipman had it all to himself. They were grave and quiet in the prospect of to-morrow, but moderately cheerful too. Florence, with Walter close beside her, was finishing a little piece of work intended as a parting gift to the Captain. The Captain was playing cribbage with Mr Toots. Mr Toots was taking counsel as to his hand, of Susan Nipper. Miss Nipper was giving it, with all due secrecy and circumspection. Diogenes was listening, and occasionally breaking out into a gruff half-smothered fragment of a bark, of which he afterwards seemed half-ashamed, as if he doubted having any reason for it.

“Steady, steady!” said the Captain to Diogenes, “what’s amiss with you? You don’t seem easy in your mind tonight, my boy!”

Diogenes wagged his tail, but pricked up his ears immediately afterwards, and gave utterance to another fragment of a bark; for which he apologised to the Captain, by again wagging his tail.

“It’s my opinion, Di,” said the Captain, looking thoughtfully at his cards, and stroking his chin with his hook, “as you have your doubts of Mrs Richards; but if you’re the animal I take you to be, you’ll think better o’ that; for her looks is her commission. Now, Brother:” to Mr Toots: “if so be as you’re ready, heave ahead.”

The Captain spoke with all composure and attention to the game, but suddenly his cards dropped out of his hand, his mouth and eyes opened wide, his legs drew themselves up and stuck out in front of his chair, and he sat staring at the door with blank amazement. Looking round upon the company, and seeing that none of them observed him or the cause of his astonishment, the Captain recovered himself with a great gasp, struck the table a tremendous blow, cried in a stentorian roar, “Sol Gills ahoy!” and tumbled into the arms of a weather-beaten pea-coat that had come with Polly into the room.

In another moment, Walter was in the arms of the weather-beaten pea-coat. In another moment, Florence was in the arms of the weather-beaten pea-coat. In another moment, Captain Cuttle had embraced Mrs Richards and Miss Nipper, and was violently shaking hands with Mr Toots, exclaiming, as he waved his hook above his head, “Hooroar, my lad, hooroar!” To which Mr Toots, wholly at a loss to account for these proceedings, replied with great politeness, “Certainly, Captain Gills, whatever you think proper!”

The weather-beaten pea-coat, and a no less weather-beaten cap and comforter belonging to it, turned from the Captain and from Florence back to Walter, and sounds came from the weather-beaten pea-coat, cap, and comforter, as of an old man sobbing underneath them; while the shaggy sleeves clasped Walter tight. During this pause, there was an universal silence, and the Captain polished his nose with great diligence. But when the pea-coat, cap, and comforter lifted themselves up again, Florence gently moved towards them; and she and Walter taking them off, disclosed the old Instrument-maker, a little thinner and more careworn than of old, in his old Welsh wig and his old coffee-coloured coat and basket buttons, with his old infallible chronometer ticking away in his pocket.

“Chock full o’ science,” said the radiant Captain, “as ever he was! Sol Gills, Sol Gills, what have you been up to, for this many a long day, my ould boy?”

“I’m half blind, Ned,” said the old man, “and almost deaf and dumb with joy.”

“His wery woice,” said the Captain, looking round with an exultation to which even his face could hardly render justice—“his wery woice as chock full o’ science as ever it was! Sol Gills, lay to, my lad, upon your own wines and fig-trees like a taut ould patriark as you are, and overhaul them there adwentures o’ yourn, in your own formilior woice. “Tis the woice,” said the Captain, impressively, and announcing a quotation with his hook, “of the sluggard, I heerd him complain, you have woke me too soon, I must slumber again. Scatter his ene-mies, and make ’em fall!”

The Captain sat down with the air of a man who had happily expressed the feeling of everybody present, and immediately rose again to present Mr Toots, who was much disconcerted by the arrival of anybody, appearing to prefer a claim to the name of Gills.

“Although,” stammered Mr Toots, “I had not the pleasure of your acquaintance, Sir, before you were—you were—”

“Lost to sight, to memory dear,” suggested the Captain, in a low voice.

“Exactly so, Captain Gills!” assented Mr Toots. “Although I had not the pleasure of your acquaintance, Mr—Mr Sols,” said Toots, hitting on that name in the inspiration of a bright idea, “before that happened, I have the greatest pleasure, I assure you, in—you know, in knowing you. I hope,” said Mr Toots, “that you’re as well as can be expected.”

With these courteous words, Mr Toots sat down blushing and chuckling.

The old Instrument-maker, seated in a corner between Walter and Florence, and nodding at Polly, who was looking on, all smiles and delight, answered the Captain thus:

“Ned Cuttle, my dear boy, although I have heard something of the changes of events here, from my pleasant friend there—what a pleasant face she has to be sure, to welcome a wanderer home!” said the old man, breaking off, and rubbing his hands in his old dreamy way.

“Hear him!” cried the Captain gravely. “’Tis woman as seduces all mankind. For which,” aside to Mr Toots, “you’ll overhaul your Adam and Eve, brother.”

“I shall make a point of doing so, Captain Gills,” said Mr Toots.

“Although I have heard something of the changes of events, from her,” resumed the Instrument-maker, taking his old spectacles from his pocket, and putting them on his forehead in his old manner, “they are so great and unexpected, and I am so overpowered by the sight of my dear boy, and by the,”—glancing at the downcast eyes of Florence, and not attempting to finish the sentence—“that I—I can’t say much tonight. But my dear Ned Cuttle, why didn’t you write?”

The astonishment depicted in the Captain’s features positively frightened Mr Toots, whose eyes were quite fixed by it, so that he could not withdraw them from his face.

“Write!” echoed the Captain. “Write, Sol Gills?”

“Ay,” said the old man, “either to Barbados, or Jamaica, or Demerara, that was what I asked.”

“What you asked, Sol Gills?” repeated the Captain.

“Ay,” said the old man. “Don’t you know, Ned? Sure you have not forgotten? Every time I wrote to you.”

The Captain took off his glazed hat, hung it on his hook, and smoothing his hair from behind with his hand, sat gazing at the group around him: a perfect image of wondering resignation.

“You don’t appear to understand me, Ned!” observed old Sol.

“Sol Gills,” returned the Captain, after staring at him and the rest for a long time, without speaking, “I’m gone about and adrift. Pay out a word or two respecting them adwenturs, will you! Can’t I bring up, nohows? Nohows?” said the Captain, ruminating, and staring all round.

“You know, Ned,” said Sol Gills, “why I left here. Did you open my packet, Ned?”

“Why, ay, ay,” said the Captain. “To be sure, I opened the packet.”

“And read it?” said the old man.

“And read it,” answered the Captain, eyeing him attentively, and proceeding to quote it from memory. “‘My dear Ned Cuttle, when I left home for the West Indies in forlorn search of intelligence of my dear-’ There he sits! There’s Wal”r!” said the Captain, as if he were relieved by getting hold of anything that was real and indisputable.

“Well, Ned. Now attend a moment!” said the old man. “When I wrote first—that was from Barbados—I said that though you would receive that letter long before the year was out, I should be glad if you would open the packet, as it explained the reason of my going away. Very good, Ned. When I wrote the second, third, and perhaps the fourth times—that was from Jamaica—I said I was in just the same state, couldn’t rest, and couldn’t come away from that part of the world, without knowing that my boy was lost or saved. When I wrote next—that, I think, was from Demerara, wasn’t it?”

“That he thinks was from Demerara, warn’t it!” said the Captain, looking hopelessly round.

“—I said,” proceeded old Sol, “that still there was no certain information got yet. That I found many captains and others, in that part of the world, who had known me for years, and who assisted me with a passage here and there, and for whom I was able, now and then, to do a little in return, in my own craft. That everyone was sorry for me, and seemed to take a sort of interest in my wanderings; and that I began to think it would be my fate to cruise about in search of tidings of my boy, until I died.”

“Began to think as how he was a scientific Flying Dutchman!” said the Captain, as before, and with great seriousness.

“But when the news come one day, Ned,—that was to Barbados, after I got back there,—that a China trader home’ard bound had been spoke, that had my boy aboard, then, Ned, I took passage in the next ship and came home; arrived at home tonight to find it true, thank God!” said the old man, devoutly.

The Captain, after bowing his head with great reverence, stared all round the circle, beginning with Mr Toots, and ending with the Instrument-maker; then gravely said:

“Sol Gills! The observation as I’m a-going to make is calc’lated to blow every stitch of sail as you can carry, clean out of the bolt-ropes, and bring you on your beam ends with a lurch. Not one of them letters was ever delivered to Ed’ard Cuttle. Not one o’ them letters,” repeated the Captain, to make his declaration the more solemn and impressive, “was ever delivered unto Ed’ard Cuttle, Mariner, of England, as lives at home at ease, and doth improve each shining hour!”

“And posted by my own hand! And directed by my own hand, Number nine Brig Place!” exclaimed old Sol.

The colour all went out of the Captain’s face and all came back again in a glow.

“What do you mean, Sol Gills, my friend, by Number nine Brig Place?” inquired the Captain.

“Mean? Your lodgings, Ned,” returned the old man. “Mrs What’s-her-name! I shall forget my own name next, but I am behind the present time—I always was, you recollect—and very much confused. Mrs—”

“Sol Gills!” said the Captain, as if he were putting the most improbable case in the world, “it ain’t the name of MacStinger as you’re a trying to remember?”

“Of course it is!” exclaimed the Instrument-maker. “To be sure Ned. Mrs MacStinger!”

Captain Cuttle, whose eyes were now as wide open as they would be, and the knobs upon whose face were perfectly luminous, gave a long shrill whistle of a most melancholy sound, and stood gazing at everybody in a state of speechlessness.

“Overhaul that there again, Sol Gills, will you be so kind?” he said at last.

“All these letters,” returned Uncle Sol, beating time with the forefinger of his right hand upon the palm of his left, with a steadiness and distinctness that might have done honour, even to the infallible chronometer in his pocket, “I posted with my own hand, and directed with my own hand, to Captain Cuttle, at Mrs MacStinger’s, Number nine Brig Place.”

The Captain took his glazed hat off his hook, looked into it, put it on, and sat down.

“Why, friends all,” said the Captain, staring round in the last state of discomfiture, “I cut and run from there!”

“And no one knew where you were gone, Captain Cuttle?” cried Walter hastily.

“Bless your heart, Wal”r,” said the Captain, shaking his head, “she’d never have allowed o’ my coming to take charge o’ this here property. Nothing could be done but cut and run. Lord love you, Wal”r!” said the Captain, “you’ve only seen her in a calm! But see her when her angry passions rise—and make a note on!”

“I’d give it her!” remarked the Nipper, softly.

“Would you, do you think, my dear?” returned the Captain, with feeble admiration. “Well, my dear, it does you credit. But there ain’t no wild animal I wouldn’t sooner face myself. I only got my chest away by means of a friend as nobody’s a match for. It was no good sending any letter there. She wouldn’t take in any letter, bless you,” said the Captain, “under them circumstances! Why, you could hardly make it worth a man’s while to be the postman!”

“Then it’s pretty clear, Captain Cuttle, that all of us, and you and Uncle Sol especially,” said Walter, “may thank Mrs MacStinger for no small anxiety.”

The general obligation in this wise to the determined relict of the late Mr MacStinger, was so apparent, that the Captain did not contest the point; but being in some measure ashamed of his position, though nobody dwelt upon the subject, and Walter especially avoided it, remembering the last conversation he and the Captain had held together respecting it, he remained under a cloud for nearly five minutes—an extraordinary period for him when that sun, his face, broke out once more, shining on all beholders with extraordinary brilliancy; and he fell into a fit of shaking hands with everybody over and over again.

At an early hour, but not before Uncle Sol and Walter had questioned each other at some length about their voyages and dangers, they all, except Walter, vacated Florence’s room, and went down to the parlour. Here they were soon afterwards joined by Walter, who told them Florence was a little sorrowful and heavy-hearted, and had gone to bed. Though they could not have disturbed her with their voices down there, they all spoke in a whisper after this: and each, in his different way, felt very lovingly and gently towards Walter’s fair young bride: and a long explanation there was of everything relating to her, for the satisfaction of Uncle Sol; and very sensible Mr Toots was of the delicacy with which Walter made his name and services important, and his presence necessary to their little council.

“Mr Toots,” said Walter, on parting with him at the house door, “we shall see each other to-morrow morning?”

“Lieutenant Walters,” returned Mr Toots, grasping his hand fervently, “I shall certainly be present.”

“This is the last night we shall meet for a long time—the last night we may ever meet,” said Walter. “Such a noble heart as yours, must feel, I think, when another heart is bound to it. I hope you know that I am very grateful to you?”

“Walters,” replied Mr Toots, quite touched, “I should be glad to feel that you had reason to be so.”

“Florence,” said Walter, “on this last night of her bearing her own name, has made me promise—it was only just now, when you left us together—that I would tell you—with her dear love—”

Mr Toots laid his hand upon the doorpost, and his eyes upon his hand.

“—With her dear love,” said Walter, “that she can never have a friend whom she will value above you. That the recollection of your true consideration for her always, can never be forgotten by her. That she remembers you in her prayers tonight, and hopes that you will think of her when she is far away. Shall I say anything for you?”

“Say, Walter,” replied Mr Toots indistinctly, “that I shall think of her every day, but never without feeling happy to know that she is married to the man she loves, and who loves her. Say, if you please, that I am sure her husband deserves her—even her!—and that I am glad of her choice.”

Mr Toots got more distinct as he came to these last words, and raising his eyes from the doorpost, said them stoutly. He then shook Walter’s hand again with a fervour that Walter was not slow to return and started homeward.

Mr Toots was accompanied by the Chicken, whom he had of late brought with him every evening, and left in the shop, with an idea that unforeseen circumstances might arise from without, in which the prowess of that distinguished character would be of service to the Midshipman. The Chicken did not appear to be in a particularly good humour on this occasion. Either the gas-lamps were treacherous, or he cocked his eye in a hideous manner, and likewise distorted his nose, when Mr Toots, crossing the road, looked back over his shoulder at the room where Florence slept. On the road home, he was more demonstrative of aggressive intentions against the other foot-passengers, than comported with a professor of the peaceful art of self-defence. Arrived at home, instead of leaving Mr Toots in his apartments when he had escorted him thither, he remained before him weighing his white hat in both hands by the brim, and twitching his head and nose (both of which had been many times broken, and but indifferently repaired), with an air of decided disrespect.

His patron being much engaged with his own thoughts, did not observe this for some time, nor indeed until the Chicken, determined not to be overlooked, had made divers clicking sounds with his tongue and teeth, to attract attention.

“Now, Master,” said the Chicken, doggedly, when he, at length, caught Mr Toots’s eye, “I want to know whether this here gammon is to finish it, or whether you’re a going in to win?”

“Chicken,” returned Mr Toots, “explain yourself.”

“Why then, here’s all about it, Master,” said the Chicken. “I ain’t a cove to chuck a word away. Here’s wot it is. Are any on ’em to be doubled up?”

When the Chicken put this question he dropped his hat, made a dodge and a feint with his left hand, hit a supposed enemy a violent blow with his right, shook his head smartly, and recovered himself.

“Come, Master,” said the Chicken. “Is it to be gammon or pluck? Which?”

“Chicken,” returned Mr Toots, “your expressions are coarse, and your meaning is obscure.”

“Why, then, I tell you what, Master,” said the Chicken. “This is where it is. It’s mean.”

“What is mean, Chicken?” asked Mr Toots.

“It is,” said the Chicken, with a frightful corrugation of his broken nose. “There! Now, Master! Wot! When you could go and blow on this here match to the stiff’un;” by which depreciatory appellation it has been since supposed that the Game One intended to signify Mr Dombey; “and when you could knock the winner and all the kit of ’em dead out o’ wind and time, are you going to give in? To give in?” said the Chicken, with contemptuous emphasis. “Wy, it’s mean!”

“Chicken,” said Mr Toots, severely, “you’re a perfect Vulture! Your sentiments are atrocious.”

“My sentiments is Game and Fancy, Master,” returned the Chicken. “That’s wot my sentiments is. I can’t abear a meanness. I’m afore the public, I’m to be heerd on at the bar of the Little Helephant, and no Gov’ner o’ mine mustn’t go and do what’s mean. Wy, it’s mean,” said the Chicken, with increased expression. “That’s where it is. It’s mean.”

“Chicken,” said Mr Toots, “you disgust me.”

“Master,” returned the Chicken, putting on his hat, “there’s a pair on us, then. Come! Here’s a offer! You’ve spoke to me more than once”t or twice’t about the public line. Never mind! Give me a fi’typunnote to-morrow, and let me go.”

“Chicken,” returned Mr Toots, “after the odious sentiments you have expressed, I shall be glad to part on such terms.”

“Done then,” said the Chicken. “It’s a bargain. This here conduct of yourn won’t suit my book, Master. Wy, it’s mean,” said the Chicken; who seemed equally unable to get beyond that point, and to stop short of it. “That’s where it is; it’s mean!”

So Mr Toots and the Chicken agreed to part on this incompatibility of moral perception; and Mr Toots lying down to sleep, dreamed happily of Florence, who had thought of him as her friend upon the last night of her maiden life, and who had sent him her dear love.

LVII. Another Wedding

Mr Sownds the beadle, and Mrs Miff the pew-opener, are early at their posts in the fine church where Mr Dombey was married. A yellow-faced old gentleman from India, is going to take unto himself a young wife this morning, and six carriages full of company are expected, and Mrs Miff has been informed that the yellow-faced old gentleman could pave the road to church with diamonds and hardly miss them.

The nuptial benediction is to be a superior one, proceeding from a very reverend, a dean, and the lady is to be given away, as an extraordinary present, by somebody who comes express from the Horse Guards.

Mrs Miff is more intolerant of common people this morning, than she generally is; and she has always strong opinions on that subject, for it is associated with free sittings. Mrs Miff is not a student of political economy (she thinks the science is connected with dissenters; “Baptists or Wesleyans, or some o’ them,” she says), but she can never understand what business your common folks have to be married. “Drat ’em,” says Mrs Miff “you read the same things over ’em and instead of sovereigns get sixpences!”

Mr Sownds the beadle is more liberal than Mrs Miff—but then he is not a pew-opener. “It must be done, Ma’am,” he says. “We must marry ’em. We must have our national schools to walk at the head of, and we must have our standing armies. We must marry ’em, Ma’am,” says Mr Sownds, “and keep the country going.”

Mr Sownds is sitting on the steps and Mrs Miff is dusting in the church, when a young couple, plainly dressed, come in. The mortified bonnet of Mrs Miff is sharply turned towards them, for she espies in this early visit indications of a runaway match. But they don’t want to be married—“Only,” says the gentleman, “to walk round the church.” And as he slips a genteel compliment into the palm of Mrs Miff, her vinegary face relaxes, and her mortified bonnet and her spare dry figure dip and crackle.

Mrs Miff resumes her dusting and plumps up her cushions—for the yellow-faced old gentleman is reported to have tender knees—but keeps her glazed, pew-opening eye on the young couple who are walking round the church. “Ahem,” coughs Mrs Miff whose cough is drier than the hay in any hassock in her charge, “you’ll come to us one of these mornings, my dears, unless I’m much mistaken!”

They are looking at a tablet on the wall, erected to the memory of someone dead. They are a long way off from Mrs Miff, but Mrs Miff can see with half an eye how she is leaning on his arm, and how his head is bent down over her. “Well, well,” says Mrs Miff, “you might do worse. For you’re a tidy pair!”

There is nothing personal in Mrs Miff’s remark. She merely speaks of stock-in-trade. She is hardly more curious in couples than in coffins. She is such a spare, straight, dry old lady—such a pew of a woman—that you should find as many individual sympathies in a chip. Mr Sownds, now, who is fleshy, and has scarlet in his coat, is of a different temperament. He says, as they stand upon the steps watching the young couple away, that she has a pretty figure, hasn’t she, and as well as he could see (for she held her head down coming out), an uncommon pretty face. “Altogether, Mrs Miff,” says Mr Sownds with a relish, “she is what you may call a rose-bud.”

Mrs Miff assents with a spare nod of her mortified bonnet; but approves of this so little, that she inwardly resolves she wouldn’t be the wife of Mr Sownds for any money he could give her, Beadle as he is.

And what are the young couple saying as they leave the church, and go out at the gate?

“Dear Walter, thank you! I can go away, now, happy.”

“And when we come back, Florence, we will come and see his grave again.”

Florence lifts her eyes, so bright with tears, to his kind face; and clasps her disengaged hand on that other modest little hand which clasps his arm.

“It is very early, Walter, and the streets are almost empty yet. Let us walk.”

“But you will be so tired, my love.”

“Oh no! I was very tired the first time that we ever walked together, but I shall not be so today.”

And thus—not much changed—she, as innocent and earnest-hearted—he, as frank, as hopeful, and more proud of her—Florence and Walter, on their bridal morning, walk through the streets together.

Not even in that childish walk of long ago, were they so far removed from all the world about them as today. The childish feet of long ago, did not tread such enchanted ground as theirs do now. The confidence and love of children may be given many times, and will spring up in many places; but the woman’s heart of Florence, with its undivided treasure, can be yielded only once, and under slight or change, can only droop and die.

They take the streets that are the quietest, and do not go near that in which her old home stands. It is a fair, warm summer morning, and the sun shines on them, as they walk towards the darkening mist that overspreads the City. Riches are uncovering in shops; jewels, gold, and silver flash in the goldsmith’s sunny windows; and great houses cast a stately shade upon them as they pass. But through the light, and through the shade, they go on lovingly together, lost to everything around; thinking of no other riches, and no prouder home, than they have now in one another.

Gradually they come into the darker, narrower streets, where the sun, now yellow, and now red, is seen through the mist, only at street corners, and in small open spaces where there is a tree, or one of the innumerable churches, or a paved way and a flight of steps, or a curious little patch of garden, or a burying-ground, where the few tombs and tombstones are almost black. Lovingly and trustfully, through all the narrow yards and alleys and the shady streets, Florence goes, clinging to his arm, to be his wife.

Her heart beats quicker now, for Walter tells her that their church is very near. They pass a few great stacks of warehouses, with waggons at the doors, and busy carmen stopping up the way—but Florence does not see or hear them—and then the air is quiet, and the day is darkened, and she is trembling in a church which has a strange smell like a cellar.

The shabby little old man, ringer of the disappointed bell, is standing in the porch, and has put his hat in the font—for he is quite at home there, being sexton. He ushers them into an old brown, panelled, dusty vestry, like a corner-cupboard with the shelves taken out; where the wormy registers diffuse a smell like faded snuff, which has set the tearful Nipper sneezing.

Youthful, and how beautiful, the young bride looks, in this old dusty place, with no kindred object near her but her husband. There is a dusty old clerk, who keeps a sort of evaporated news shop underneath an archway opposite, behind a perfect fortification of posts. There is a dusty old pew-opener who only keeps herself, and finds that quite enough to do. There is a dusty old beadle (these are Mr Toots’s beadle and pew-opener of last Sunday), who has something to do with a Worshipful Company who have got a Hall in the next yard, with a stained-glass window in it that no mortal ever saw. There are dusty wooden ledges and cornices poked in and out over the altar, and over the screen and round the gallery, and over the inscription about what the Master and Wardens of the Worshipful Company did in one thousand six hundred and ninety-four. There are dusty old sounding-boards over the pulpit and reading-desk, looking like lids to be let down on the officiating ministers in case of their giving offence. There is every possible provision for the accommodation of dust, except in the churchyard, where the facilities in that respect are very limited.

The Captain, Uncle Sol, and Mr Toots are come; the clergyman is putting on his surplice in the vestry, while the clerk walks round him, blowing the dust off it; and the bride and bridegroom stand before the altar. There is no bridesmaid, unless Susan Nipper is one; and no better father than Captain Cuttle. A man with a wooden leg, chewing a faint apple and carrying a blue bag in has hand, looks in to see what is going on; but finding it nothing entertaining, stumps off again, and pegs his way among the echoes out of doors.

No gracious ray of light is seen to fall on Florence, kneeling at the altar with her timid head bowed down. The morning luminary is built out, and don’t shine there. There is a meagre tree outside, where the sparrows are chirping a little; and there is a blackbird in an eyelet-hole of sun in a dyer’s garret, over against the window, who whistles loudly whilst the service is performing; and there is the man with the wooden leg stumping away. The amens of the dusty clerk appear, like Macbeth’s, to stick in his throat a little; but Captain Cuttle helps him out, and does it with so much goodwill that he interpolates three entirely new responses of that word, never introduced into the service before.

They are married, and have signed their names in one of the old sneezy registers, and the clergyman’s surplice is restored to the dust, and the clergyman is gone home. In a dark corner of the dark church, Florence has turned to Susan Nipper, and is weeping in her arms. Mr Toots’s eyes are red. The Captain lubricates his nose. Uncle Sol has pulled down his spectacles from his forehead, and walked out to the door.

“God bless you, Susan; dearest Susan! If you ever can bear witness to the love I have for Walter, and the reason that I have to love him, do it for his sake. Good-bye! Good-bye!”

They have thought it better not to go back to the Midshipman, but to part so; a coach is waiting for them, near at hand.

Miss Nipper cannot speak; she only sobs and chokes, and hugs her mistress. Mr Toots advances, urges her to cheer up, and takes charge of her. Florence gives him her hand—gives him, in the fulness of her heart, her lips—kisses Uncle Sol, and Captain Cuttle, and is borne away by her young husband.

But Susan cannot bear that Florence should go away with a mournful recollection of her. She had meant to be so different, that she reproaches herself bitterly. Intent on making one last effort to redeem her character, she breaks from Mr Toots and runs away to find the coach, and show a parting smile. The Captain, divining her object, sets off after her; for he feels it his duty also to dismiss them with a cheer, if possible. Uncle Sol and Mr Toots are left behind together, outside the church, to wait for them.

The coach is gone, but the street is steep, and narrow, and blocked up, and Susan can see it at a stand-still in the distance, she is sure. Captain Cuttle follows her as she flies down the hill, and waves his glazed hat as a general signal, which may attract the right coach and which may not.

Susan outstrips the Captain, and comes up with it. She looks in at the window, sees Walter, with the gentle face beside him, and claps her hands and screams:

“Miss Floy, my darling! look at me! We are all so happy now, dear! One more good-bye, my precious, one more!”

How Susan does it, she don’t know, but she reaches to the window, kisses her, and has her arms about her neck, in a moment.

“We are all so—so happy now, my dear Miss Floy!” says Susan, with a suspicious catching in her breath. “You, you won’t be angry with me now. Now will you?”

“Angry, Susan!”

“No, no; I am sure you won’t. I say you won’t, my pet, my dearest!” exclaims Susan; “and here’s the Captain too—your friend the Captain, you know—to say good-bye once more!”

“Hooroar, my Heart’s Delight!” vociferates the Captain, with a countenance of strong emotion. “Hooroar, Wal”r my lad. Hooroar! Hooroar!”

What with the young husband at one window, and the young wife at the other; the Captain hanging on at this door, and Susan Nipper holding fast by that; the coach obliged to go on whether it will or no, and all the other carts and coaches turbulent because it hesitates; there never was so much confusion on four wheels. But Susan Nipper gallantly maintains her point. She keeps a smiling face upon her mistress, smiling through her tears, until the last. Even when she is left behind, the Captain continues to appear and disappear at the door, crying “Hooroar, my lad! Hooroar, my Heart’s Delight!” with his shirt-collar in a violent state of agitation, until it is hopeless to attempt to keep up with the coach any longer. Finally, when the coach is gone, Susan Nipper, being rejoined by the Captain, falls into a state of insensibility, and is taken into a baker’s shop to recover.

Uncle Sol and Mr Toots wait patiently in the churchyard, sitting on the coping-stone of the railings, until Captain Cuttle and Susan come back. Neither being at all desirous to speak, or to be spoken to, they are excellent company, and quite satisfied. When they all arrive again at the little Midshipman, and sit down to breakfast, nobody can touch a morsel. Captain Cuttle makes a feint of being voracious about toast, but gives it up as a swindle. Mr Toots says, after breakfast, he will come back in the evening; and goes wandering about the town all day, with a vague sensation upon him as if he hadn’t been to bed for a fortnight.

There is a strange charm in the house, and in the room, in which they have been used to be together, and out of which so much is gone. It aggravates, and yet it soothes, the sorrow of the separation. Mr Toots tells Susan Nipper when he comes at night, that he hasn’t been so wretched all day long, and yet he likes it. He confides in Susan Nipper, being alone with her, and tells her what his feelings were when she gave him that candid opinion as to the probability of Miss Dombey’s ever loving him. In the vein of confidence engendered by these common recollections, and their tears, Mr Toots proposes that they shall go out together, and buy something for supper. Miss Nipper assenting, they buy a good many little things; and, with the aid of Mrs Richards, set the supper out quite showily before the Captain and old Sol came home.

The Captain and old Sol have been on board the ship, and have established Di there, and have seen the chests put aboard. They have much to tell about the popularity of Walter, and the comforts he will have about him, and the quiet way in which it seems he has been working early and late, to make his cabin what the Captain calls “a picter,” to surprise his little wife. “A admiral’s cabin, mind you,” says the Captain, “ain’t more trim.”

But one of the Captain’s chief delights is, that he knows the big watch, and the sugar-tongs, and tea-spoons, are on board: and again and again he murmurs to himself, “Ed’ard Cuttle, my lad, you never shaped a better course in your life than when you made that there little property over jintly. You see how the land bore, Ed’ard,” says the Captain, “and it does you credit, my lad.”

The old Instrument-maker is more distraught and misty than he used to be, and takes the marriage and the parting very much to heart. But he is greatly comforted by having his old ally, Ned Cuttle, at his side; and he sits down to supper with a grateful and contented face.

“My boy has been preserved and thrives,” says old Sol Gills, rubbing his hands. “What right have I to be otherwise than thankful and happy!”

The Captain, who has not yet taken his seat at the table, but who has been fidgeting about for some time, and now stands hesitating in his place, looks doubtfully at Mr Gills, and says:

“Sol! There’s the last bottle of the old Madeira down below. Would you wish to have it up tonight, my boy, and drink to Wal”r and his wife?”

The Instrument-maker, looking wistfully at the Captain, puts his hand into the breast-pocket of his coffee-coloured coat, brings forth his pocket-book, and takes a letter out.

“To Mr Dombey,” says the old man. “From Walter. To be sent in three weeks’ time. I’ll read it.”

“‘Sir. I am married to your daughter. She is gone with me upon a distant voyage. To be devoted to her is to have no claim on her or you, but God knows that I am.

“‘Why, loving her beyond all earthly things, I have yet, without remorse, united her to the uncertainties and dangers of my life, I will not say to you. You know why, and you are her father.

“‘Do not reproach her. She has never reproached you.

“‘I do not think or hope that you will ever forgive me. There is nothing I expect less. But if an hour should come when it will comfort you to believe that Florence has someone ever near her, the great charge of whose life is to cancel her remembrance of past sorrow, I solemnly assure you, you may, in that hour, rest in that belief.’”

Solomon puts back the letter carefully in his pocket-book, and puts back his pocket-book in his coat.

“We won’t drink the last bottle of the old Madeira yet, Ned,” says the old man thoughtfully. “Not yet.

“Not yet,” assents the Captain. “No. Not yet.”

Susan and Mr Toots are of the same opinion. After a silence they all sit down to supper, and drink to the young husband and wife in something else; and the last bottle of the old Madeira still remains among its dust and cobwebs, undisturbed.

A few days have elapsed, and a stately ship is out at sea, spreading its white wings to the favouring wind.

Upon the deck, image to the roughest man on board of something that is graceful, beautiful, and harmless—something that it is good and pleasant to have there, and that should make the voyage prosperous—is Florence. It is night, and she and Walter sit alone, watching the solemn path of light upon the sea between them and the moon.

At length she cannot see it plainly, for the tears that fill her eyes; and then she lays her head down on his breast, and puts her arms around his neck, saying, “Oh Walter, dearest love, I am so happy!”

Her husband holds her to his heart, and they are very quiet, and the stately ship goes on serenely.

“As I hear the sea,” says Florence, “and sit watching it, it brings so many days into my mind. It makes me think so much—”

“Of Paul, my love. I know it does.”

Of Paul and Walter. And the voices in the waves are always whispering to Florence, in their ceaseless murmuring, of love—of love, eternal and illimitable, not bounded by the confines of this world, or by the end of time, but ranging still, beyond the sea, beyond the sky, to the invisible country far away!