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

Dombey and Son

by Charles Dickens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Yes, my pretty,' answered Richards. 'Come and kiss him.'

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

'What have you done with my Mama?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Where gone?' asked the child.

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

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

'Once upon a time,' said Richards, 'there was a lady - a very
good lady, and her little daughter dearly loved her.'

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

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

The child shuddered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Oh! but begging your pardon, Mrs Richards, that don't matter,
you know,' returned the black-eyed girl, who was so desperately sharp
and biting that she seemed to make one's eyes water. 'I may be very
fond of pennywinkles, Mrs Richards, but it don't follow that I'm to
have 'em for tea. 'Well, it don't matter,' said Polly. 'Oh, thank'ee,
Mrs Richards, don't it!' returned the sharp girl. 'Remembering,
however, if you'll be so good, that Miss Floy's under my charge, and
Master Paul's under your'n.'

'But still we needn't quarrel,' said Polly.

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

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

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

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

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

'Won't she then?' asked Polly.

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

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

'You surprise me!' cried Folly. 'Hasn't Mr Dombey seen her since
- '

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

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

'Oh! there's a Tartar within a hundred miles of where we're now
in conversation, I can tell you, Mrs Richards, present company always
excepted too,' said Susan Nipper; 'wish you good morning, Mrs
Richards, now Miss Floy, you come along with me, and don't go hanging
back like a naughty wicked child that judgments is no example to,
don't!'

In spite of being thus adjured, and in spite also of some
hauling on the part of Susan Nipper, tending towards the dislocation
of her right shoulder, little Florence broke away, and kissed her new
friend, affectionately.

'Oh dear! after it was given out so 'tickerlerly, that Mrs
Richards wasn't to be made free with!' exclaimed Susan. 'Very well,
Miss Floy!'

'God bless the sweet thing!' said Richards, 'Good-bye, dear!'

'Good-bye!' returned the child. 'God bless you! I shall come to
see you again soon, and you'll come to see me? Susan will let us.
Won't you, Susan?'

Spitfire seemed to be in the main a good-natured little body,
although a disciple of that school of trainers of the young idea
which holds that childhood, like money, must be shaken and rattled
and jostled about a good deal to keep it bright. For, being thus
appealed to with some endearing gestures and caresses, she folded her
small arms and shook her head, and conveyed a relenting expression
into her very-wide-open black eyes.

'It ain't right of you to ask it, Miss Floy, for you know I
can't refuse you, but Mrs Richards and me will see what can be done,
if Mrs Richards likes, I may wish, you see, to take a voyage to
Chaney, Mrs Richards, but I mayn't know how to leave the London
Docks.'

Richards assented to the proposition.

'This house ain't so exactly ringing with merry-making,' said
Miss Nipper, 'that one need be lonelier than one must be. Your Toxes
and your Chickses may draw out my two front double teeth, Mrs
Richards, but that's no reason why I need offer 'em the whole
set.'

This proposition was also assented to by Richards, as an obvious
one.

'So I'm able, I'm sure,'said Susan Nipper, 'to live friendly,
Mrs Richards, while Master Paul continues a permanency, if the means
can be planned out without going openly against orders, but goodness
gracious Miss Floy, you haven't got your things off yet, you naughty
child, you haven't, come along!'

With these words, Susan Nipper, in a transport of coercion, made
a charge at her young ward, and swept her out of the room.

The child, in her grief and neglect, was so gentle, so quiet,
and uncomplaining; was possessed of so much affection that no one
seemed to care to have, and so much sorrowful intelligence that no
one seemed to mind or think about the wounding of, that Polly's heart
was sore when she was left alone again. In the simple passage that
had taken place between herself and the motherless little girl, her
own motherly heart had been touched no less than the child's; and she
felt, as the child did, that there was something of confidence and
interest between them from that moment.

Notwithstanding Mr Toodle's great reliance on Polly, she was
perhaps in point of artificial accomplishments very little his
superior. She had been good-humouredly working and drudging for her
life all her life, and was a sober steady-going person, with
matter-of-fact ideas about the butcher and baker, and the division of
pence into farthings. But she was a good plain sample of a nature
that is ever, in the mass, better, truer, higher, nobler, quicker to
feel, and much more constant to retain, all tenderness and pity,
self-denial and devotion, than the nature of men. And, perhaps,
unlearned as she was, she could have brought a dawning knowledge home
to Mr Dombey at that early day, which would not then have struck him
in the end like lightning.

But this is from the purpose. Polly only thought, at that time,
of improving on her successful propitiation of Miss Nipper, and
devising some means of having little Florence aide her, lawfully, and
without rebellion. An opening happened to present itself that very
night.

She had been rung down into the glass room as usual, and had
walked about and about it a long time, with the baby in her arms,
when, to her great surprise and dismay, Mr Dombey - whom she had seen
at first leaning on his elbow at the table, and afterwards walking up
and down the middle room, drawing, each time, a little nearer, she
thought, to the open folding doors - came out, suddenly, and stopped
before her.

'Good evening, Richards.'

Just the same austere, stiff gentleman, as he had appeared to
her on that first day. Such a hard-looking gentleman, that she
involuntarily dropped her eyes and her curtsey at the same time.

'How is Master Paul, Richards?'

'Quite thriving, Sir, and well.'

'He looks so,' said Mr Dombey, glancing with great interest at
the tiny face she uncovered for his observation, and yet affecting to
be half careless of it. 'They give you everything you want, I
hope?'

'Oh yes, thank you, Sir.'

She suddenly appended such an obvious hesitation to this reply,
however, that Mr Dombey, who had turned away; stopped, and turned
round again, inquiringly.

'If you please, Sir, the child is very much disposed to take
notice of things,' said Richards, with another curtsey, 'and -
upstairs is a little dull for him, perhaps, Sir.'

'I begged them to take you out for airings, constantly,' said Mr
Dombey. 'Very well! You shall go out oftener. You're quite right to
mention it.'

'I beg your pardon, Sir,' faltered Polly, 'but we go out quite
plenty Sir, thank you.'

'What would you have then?' asked Mr Dombey.

'Indeed Sir, I don't exactly know,' said Polly, 'unless - '

'Yes?'

'I believe nothing is so good for making children lively and
cheerful, Sir, as seeing other children playing about 'em,' observed
Polly, taking courage.

'I think I mentioned to you, Richards, when you came here,' said
Mr Dombey, with a frown, 'that I wished you to see as little of your
family as possible.'

'Oh dear yes, Sir, I wasn't so much as thinking of that.'

'I am glad of it,' said Mr Dombey hastily. 'You can continue
your walk if you please.'

With that, he disappeared into his inner room; and Polly had the
satisfaction of feeling that he had thoroughly misunderstood her
object, and that she had fallen into disgrace without the least
advancement of her purpose.

Next night, she found him walking about the conservatory when
she came down. As she stopped at the door, checked by this unusual
sight, and uncertain whether to advance or retreat, he called her in.
His mind was too much set on Dombey and Son, it soon appeared, to
admit of his having forgotten her suggestion.

'If you really think that sort of society is good for the
child,' he said sharply, as if there had been no interval since she
proposed it, 'where's Miss Florence?'

'Nothing could be better than Miss Florence, Sir,' said Polly
eagerly, 'but I understood from her maid that they were not to - '

Mr Dombey rang the bell, and walked till it was answered.

'Tell them always to let Miss Florence be with Richards when she
chooses, and go out with her, and so forth. Tell them to let the
children be together, when Richards wishes it.'

The iron was now hot, and Richards striking on it boldly - it
was a good cause and she bold in it, though instinctively afraid of
Mr Dombey - requested that Miss Florence might be sent down then and
there, to make friends with her little brother.

She feigned to be dandling the child as the servant retired on
this errand, but she thought that she saw Mr Dombey's colour changed;
that the expression of his face quite altered; that he turned,
hurriedly, as if to gainsay what he had said, or she had said, or
both, and was only deterred by very shame.

And she was right. The last time he had seen his slighted child,
there had been that in the sad embrace between her and her dying
mother, which was at once a revelation and a reproach to him. Let him
be absorbed as he would in the Son on whom he built such high hopes,
he could not forget that closing scene. He could not forget that he
had had no part in it. That, at the bottom of its clear depths of
tenderness and truth' lay those two figures clasped in each other's
arms, while he stood on the bank above them, looking down a mere
spectator - not a sharer with them - quite shut out.

Unable to exclude these things from his remembrance, or to keep
his mind free from such imperfect shapes of the meaning with which
they were fraught, as were able to make themselves visible to him
through the mist of his pride, his previous feeling of indifference
towards little Florence changed into an uneasiness of an
extraordinary kind. Young as she was, and possessing in any eyes but
his (and perhaps in his too) even more than the usual amount of
childish simplicity and confidence, he almost felt as if she watched
and distrusted him. As if she held the clue to something secret in
his breast, of the nature of which he was hardly informed himself. As
if she had an innate knowledge of one jarring and discordant string
within him, and her very breath could sound it.

His feeling about the child had been negative from her birth. He
had never conceived an aversion to her: it had not been worth his
while or in his humour. She had never been a positively disagreeable
object to him. But now he was ill at ease about her. She troubled his
peace. He would have preferred to put her idea aside altogether, if
he had known how. Perhaps - who shall decide on such mysteries! - he
was afraid that he might come to hate her.

When little Florence timidly presented herself, Mr Dombey
stopped in his pacing up and down and looked towards her. Had he
looked with greater interest and with a father's eye, he might have
read in her keen glance the impulses and fears that made her waver;
the passionate desire to run clinging to him, crying, as she hid her
face in his embrace, 'Oh father, try to love me! there's no one
else!' the dread of a repulse; the fear of being too bold, and of
offending him; the pitiable need in which she stood of some assurance
and encouragement; and how her overcharged young heart was wandering
to find some natural resting-place, for its sorrow and affection.

But he saw nothing of this. He saw her pause irresolutely at the
door and look towards him; and he saw no more.

'Come in,' he said, 'come in: what is the child afraid of?'

She came in; and after glancing round her for a moment with an
uncertain air, stood pressing her small hands hard together, close
within the door.

'Come here, Florence,' said her father, coldly. 'Do you know who
I am?'

'Yes, Papa.'

'Have you nothing to say to me?'

The tears that stood in her eyes as she raised them quickly to
his face, were frozen by the expression it wore. She looked down
again, and put out her trembling hand.

Mr Dombey took it loosely in his own, and stood looking down
upon her for a moment, as if he knew as little as the child, what to
say or do.

'There! Be a good girl,' he said, patting her on the head, and
regarding her as it were by stealth with a disturbed and doubtful
look. 'Go to Richards! Go!'

His little daughter hesitated for another instant as though she
would have clung about him still, or had some lingering hope that he
might raise her in his arms and kiss her. She looked up in his face
once more. He thought how like her expression was then, to what it
had been when she looked round at the Doctor - that night - and
instinctively dropped her hand and turned away.

It was not difficult to perceive that Florence was at a great
disadvantage in her father's presence. It was not only a constraint
upon the child's mind, but even upon the natural grace and freedom of
her actions. As she sported and played about her baby brother that
night, her manner was seldom so winning and so pretty as it naturally
was, and sometimes when in his pacing to and fro, he came near her
(she had, perhaps, for the moment, forgotten him) it changed upon the
instant and became forced and embarrassed.

Still, Polly persevered with all the better heart for seeing
this; and, judging of Mr Dombey by herself, had great confidence in
the mute appeal of poor little Florence's mourning dress.' It's hard
indeed,' thought Polly, 'if he takes only to one little motherless
child, when he has another, and that a girl, before his eyes.'

So, Polly kept her before his eyes, as long as she could, and
managed so well with little Paul, as to make it very plain that he
was all the livelier for his sister's company. When it was time to
withdraw upstairs again, she would have sent Florence into the inner
room to say good-night to her father, but the child was timid and
drew back; and when she urged her again, said, spreading her hands
before her eyes, as if to shut out her own unworthiness, 'Oh no, no!
He don't want me. He don't want me!'

The little altercation between them had attracted the notice of
Mr Dombey, who inquired from the table where he was sitting at his
wine, what the matter was.

'Miss Florence was afraid of interrupting, Sir, if she came in
to say good-night,' said Richards.

'It doesn't matter,' returned Mr Dombey. 'You can let her come
and go without regarding me.'

The child shrunk as she listened - and was gone, before her
humble friend looked round again.

However, Polly triumphed not a little in the success of her
well-intentioned scheme, and in the address with which she had
brought it to bear: whereof she made a full disclosure to Spitfire
when she was once more safely entrenched upstairs. Miss Nipper
received that proof of her confidence, as well as the prospect of
their free association for the future, rather coldly, and was
anything but enthusiastic in her demonstrations of joy.

'I thought you would have been pleased,' said Polly.

'Oh yes, Mrs Richards, I'm very well pleased, thank you,'
returned Susan, who had suddenly become so very upright that she
seemed to have put an additional bone in her stays.

'You don't show it,' said Polly.

'Oh! Being only a permanency I couldn't be expected to show it
like a temporary,' said Susan Nipper. 'Temporaries carries it all
before 'em here, I find, but though there's a excellent party-wall
between this house and the next, I mayn't exactly like to go to it,
Mrs Richards, notwithstanding!'