DOMBEY & SON (Illustrated). Charles Dickens
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the Doctor.
‘Always happy to see her,’ said Mrs Blimber.
‘I think,’ said Mr Dombey, ‘I have given all the trouble I need, and may take my leave. Paul, my child,’ he went close to him, as he sat upon the table. ‘Good-bye.’
‘Good-bye, Papa.’
The limp and careless little hand that Mr Dombey took in his, was singularly out of keeping with the wistful face. But he had no part in its sorrowful expression. It was not addressed to him. No, no. To Florence—all to Florence.
If Mr Dombey in his insolence of wealth, had ever made an enemy, hard to appease and cruelly vindictive in his hate, even such an enemy might have received the pang that wrung his proud heart then, as compensation for his injury.
He bent down, over his boy, and kissed him. If his sight were dimmed as he did so, by something that for a moment blurred the little face, and made it indistinct to him, his mental vision may have been, for that short time, the clearer perhaps.
‘I shall see you soon, Paul. You are free on Saturdays and Sundays, you know.’
‘Yes, Papa,’ returned Paul: looking at his sister. ‘On Saturdays and Sundays.’
‘And you’ll try and learn a great deal here, and be a clever man,’ said Mr Dombey; ‘won’t you?’
‘I’ll try,’ returned the child, wearily.
‘And you’ll soon be grown up now!’ said Mr Dombey.
‘Oh! very soon!’ replied the child. Once more the old, old look passed rapidly across his features like a strange light. It fell on Mrs Pipchin, and extinguished itself in her black dress. That excellent ogress stepped forward to take leave and to bear off Florence, which she had long been thirsting to do. The move on her part roused Mr Dombey, whose eyes were fixed on Paul. After patting him on the head, and pressing his small hand again, he took leave of Doctor Blimber, Mrs Blimber, and Miss Blimber, with his usual polite frigidity, and walked out of the study.
Despite his entreaty that they would not think of stirring, Doctor Blimber, Mrs Blimber, and Miss Blimber all pressed forward to attend him to the hall; and thus Mrs Pipchin got into a state of entanglement with Miss Blimber and the Doctor, and was crowded out of the study before she could clutch Florence. To which happy accident Paul stood afterwards indebted for the dear remembrance, that Florence ran back to throw her arms round his neck, and that hers was the last face in the doorway: turned towards him with a smile of encouragement, the brighter for the tears through which it beamed.
It made his childish bosom heave and swell when it was gone; and sent the globes, the books, blind Homer and Minerva, swimming round the room. But they stopped, all of a sudden; and then he heard the loud clock in the hall still gravely inquiring ‘how, is, my, lit, tle, friend? how, is, my, lit, tle, friend?’ as it had done before.
He sat, with folded hands, upon his pedestal, silently listening. But he might have answered ‘weary, weary! very lonely, very sad!’ And there, with an aching void in his young heart, and all outside so cold, and bare, and strange, Paul sat as if he had taken life unfurnished, and the upholsterer were never coming.
Chapter 12.
Paul’s Education
After the lapse of some minutes, which appeared an immense time to little Paul Dombey on the table, Doctor Blimber came back. The Doctor’s walk was stately, and calculated to impress the juvenile mind with solemn feelings. It was a sort of march; but when the Doctor put out his right foot, he gravely turned upon his axis, with a semi-circular sweep towards the left; and when he put out his left foot, he turned in the same manner towards the right. So that he seemed, at every stride he took, to look about him as though he were saying, ‘Can anybody have the goodness to indicate any subject, in any direction, on which I am uninformed? I rather think not.’
Mrs Blimber and Miss Blimber came back in the Doctor’s company; and the Doctor, lifting his new pupil off the table, delivered him over to Miss Blimber.
‘Cornelia,’ said the Doctor, ‘Dombey will be your charge at first. Bring him on, Cornelia, bring him on.’
Miss Blimber received her young ward from the Doctor’s hands; and Paul, feeling that the spectacles were surveying him, cast down his eyes.
‘How old are you, Dombey?’ said Miss Blimber.
‘Six,’ answered Paul, wondering, as he stole a glance at the young lady, why her hair didn’t grow long like Florence’s, and why she was like a boy.
‘How much do you know of your Latin Grammar, Dombey?’ said Miss Blimber.
‘None of it,’ answered Paul. Feeling that the answer was a shock to Miss Blimber’s sensibility, he looked up at the three faces that were looking down at him, and said:
‘I haven’t been well. I have been a weak child. I couldn’t learn a Latin Grammar when I was out, every day, with old Glubb. I wish you’d tell old Glubb to come and see me, if you please.’
‘What a dreadfully low name’ said Mrs Blimber. ‘Unclassical to a degree! Who is the monster, child?’
‘What monster?’ inquired Paul.
‘Glubb,’ said Mrs Blimber, with a great disrelish.
‘He’s no more a monster than you are,’ returned Paul.
‘What!’ cried the Doctor, in a terrible voice. ‘Ay, ay, ay? Aha! What’s that?’
Paul was dreadfully frightened; but still he made a stand for the absent Glubb, though he did it trembling.
‘He’s a very nice old man, Ma’am,’ he said. ‘He used to draw my couch. He knows all about the deep sea, and the fish that are in it, and the great monsters that come and lie on rocks in the sun, and dive into the water again when they’re startled, blowing and splashing so, that they can be heard for miles. There are some creatures, said Paul, warming with his subject, ‘I don’t know how many yards long, and I forget their names, but Florence knows, that pretend to be in distress; and when a man goes near them, out of compassion, they open their great jaws, and attack him. But all he has got to do,’ said Paul, boldly tendering this information to the very Doctor himself, ‘is to keep on turning as he runs away, and then, as they turn slowly, because they are so long, and can’t bend, he’s sure to beat them. And though old Glubb don’t know why the sea should make me think of my Mama that’s dead, or what it is that it is always saying—always saying! he knows a great deal about it. And I wish,’ the child concluded, with a sudden falling of his countenance, and failing in his animation, as he looked like one forlorn, upon the three strange faces, ‘that you’d let old Glubb come here to see me, for I know him very well, and he knows me.’
‘Ha!’ said the Doctor, shaking his head; ‘this is bad, but study will do much.’
Mrs Blimber opined, with something like a shiver, that he was an unaccountable child; and, allowing for the difference of visage, looked at him pretty much as Mrs Pipchin had been used to do.
‘Take him round the house, Cornelia,’ said the Doctor, ‘and familiarise him with his new sphere. Go with that young lady, Dombey.’
Dombey obeyed; giving his hand to the abstruse Cornelia, and looking at her sideways, with timid curiosity, as they went away together. For her spectacles, by reason of the glistening of the glasses, made her so mysterious, that he didn’t know where she was looking, and was not indeed quite sure that she had any eyes at all behind them.
Cornelia took him first to the schoolroom, which was situated at the back of the hall, and was approached through two baize doors, which deadened and muffled the young gentlemen’s voices. Here, there were eight young gentlemen in various stages of mental prostration, all very