Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens (ebooks that read to you .txt) 📕

‘Mrs Dombey,’ he said, entering, ‘I must beg leave to have a few words with you.’

‘To-morrow,’ she replied.

‘There is no time like the present, Madam,’ he returned. ‘You mistake your position. I am used to choose my own times; not to have them chosen for me. I think you scarcely understand who and what I am, Mrs Dombey.’

‘I think,’ she answered, ‘that I understand you very well.’

She looked upon him as she said so, and folding her white arms, sparkling with gold and gems, upon her swelling breast, turned away her eyes.

If she had been less handsome, and less stately in her cold composure, she might not have had the power of impressing him with the sense of disadvantage that penetrated through his utmost pride. But she had the power, and he felt it keenly. He glanced round the room: saw how the splendid means of personal adornment, and the luxuries of dress, were scattered here and there, and disregarded; not in mere caprice and carelessness (or so he thought), but in a steadfast haughty disregard of costly things: and felt it more and more. Chaplets of flowers, plumes of feathers, jewels, laces, silks and satins; look where he would, he saw riches, despised, poured out, and made of no account. The very diamonds—a marriage gift—that rose and fell impatiently upon her bosom, seemed to pant to break the chain that clasped them round her neck, and roll down on the floor where she might tread upon them.

He felt his disadvantage, and he showed it. Solemn and strange among this wealth of colour and voluptuous glitter, strange and constrained towards its haughty mistress, whose repellent beauty it repeated, and presented all around him, as in so many fragments of a mirror, he was conscious of embarrassment and awkwardness. Nothing that ministered to her disdainful self-possession could fail to gall him. Galled and irritated with himself, he sat down, and went on, in no improved humour:

‘Mrs Dombey, it is very necessary that there should be some understanding arrived at between us. Your conduct does not please me, Madam.’

She merely glanced at him again, and again averted her eyes; but she might have spoken for an hour, and expressed less.

‘I repeat, Mrs Dombey, does not please me. I have already taken occasion to request that it may be corrected. I now insist upon it.’

‘You chose a fitting occasion for your first remonstrance, Sir, and you adopt a fitting manner, and a fitting word for your second. You insist! To me!’

‘Madam,’ said Mr Dombey, with his most offensive air of state, ‘I have made you my wife. You bear my name. You are associated with my position and my reputation. I will not say that the world in general may be disposed to think you honoured by that association; but I will say that I am accustomed to “insist,” to my connexions and dependents.’

‘Which may you be pleased to consider me? she asked.

‘Possibly I may think that my wife should partake—or does partake, and cannot help herself—of both characters, Mrs Dombey.’

She bent her eyes upon him steadily, and set her trembling lips. He saw her bosom throb, and saw her face flush and turn white. All this he could know, and did: but he could not know that one word was whispering in the deep recesses of her heart, to keep her quiet; and that the word was Florence.

Blind idiot, rushing to a precipice! He thought she stood in awe of him.

‘You are too expensive, Madam,’ said Mr Dombey. ‘You are extravagant. You waste a great deal of money—or what would be a great deal in the pockets of most gentlemen—in cultivating a kind of society that is useless to me, and, indeed, that upon the whole is disagreeable to me. I have to insist upon a total change in all these respects. I know that in the novelty of possessing a tithe of such means as Fortune has placed at your disposal, ladies are apt to run into a sudden extreme. There has been more than enough of that extreme. I beg that Mrs Granger’s very different experiences may now come to the instruction of Mrs Dombey.’

Still the fixed look, the trembling lips, the throbbing breast, the face now crimson and now white; and still the deep whisper Florence, Florence, speaking to her in the beating of her heart.

His insolence of self-importance dilated as he saw this alteration in her. Swollen no less by her past scorn of him, and his so recent feeling of disadvantage, than by her present submission (as he took it to be), it became too mighty for his breast, and burst all bounds. Why, who could long resist his lofty will and pleasure! He had resolved to conquer her, and look here!

‘You will further please, Madam,’ said Mr Dombey, in a tone of sovereign command, ‘to understand distinctly, that I am to be deferred to and obeyed. That I must have a positive show and confession of deference before the world, Madam. I am used to this. I require it as my right. In short I will have it. I consider it no unreasonable return for the worldly advancement that has befallen you; and I believe nobody will be surprised, either at its being required from you, or at your making it.—To Me—To Me!’ he added, with emphasis.

No word from her. No change in her. Her eyes upon him.

‘I have learnt from your mother, Mrs Dombey,’ said Mr Dombey, with magisterial importance, ‘what no doubt you know, namely, that Brighton is recommended for her health. Mr Carker has been so good.’

She changed suddenly. Her face and bosom glowed as if the red light of an angry sunset had been flung upon them. Not unobservant of the change, and putting his own interpretation upon it, Mr Dombey resumed:

‘Mr Carker has been so good as to go down and secure a house there, for a time. On the return of the establishment to London, I shall take such steps for its better management as I consider necessary. One of these, will be the engagement at Brighton (if it is to be effected), of a very respectable reduced person there, a Mrs Pipchin, formerly employed in a situation of trust in my family, to act as housekeeper. An establishment like this, presided over but nominally, Mrs Dombey, requires a competent head.’

She had changed her attitude before he arrived at these words, and now sat—still looking at him fixedly—turning a bracelet round and round upon her arm; not winding it about with a light, womanly touch, but pressing and dragging it over the smooth skin, until the white limb showed a bar of red.

‘I observed,’ said Mr Dombey—‘and this concludes what I deem it necessary to say to you at present, Mrs Dombey—I observed a moment ago, Madam, that my allusion to Mr Carker was received in a peculiar manner. On the occasion of my happening to point out to you, before that confidential agent, the objection I had to your mode of receiving my visitors, you were pleased to object to his presence. You will have to get the better of that objection, Madam, and to accustom yourself to it very probably on many similar occasions; unless you adopt the remedy which is in your own hands, of giving me no cause of complaint. Mr Carker,’ said Mr Dombey, who, after the emotion he had just seen, set great store by this means of reducing his proud wife, and who was perhaps sufficiently willing to exhibit his power to that gentleman in a new and triumphant aspect, ‘Mr Carker being in my confidence, Mrs Dombey, may very well be in yours to such an extent. I hope, Mrs Dombey,’ he continued, after a few moments, during which, in his increasing haughtiness, he had improved on his idea, ‘I may not find it necessary ever to entrust Mr Carker with any message of objection or remonstrance to you; but as it would be derogatory to my position and reputation to be frequently holding trivial disputes with a lady upon whom I have conferred the highest distinction that it is in my power to bestow, I shall not scruple to avail myself of his services if I see occasion.’

‘And now,’ he thought, rising in his moral magnificence, and rising a stiffer and more impenetrable man than ever, ‘she knows me and my resolution.’

The hand that had so pressed the bracelet was laid heavily upon her breast, but she looked at him still, with an unaltered face, and said in a low voice:

‘Wait! For God’s sake! I must speak to you.’

Why did she not, and what was the inward struggle that rendered her incapable of doing so, for minutes, while, in the strong constraint she put upon her face, it was as fixed as any statue’s—looking upon him with neither yielding nor unyielding, liking nor hatred, pride not humility: nothing but a searching gaze?

‘Did I ever tempt you to seek my hand? Did I ever use any art to win you? Was I ever more conciliating to you when you pursued me, than I have been since our marriage? Was I ever other to you than I am?’

‘It is wholly unnecessary, Madam,’ said Mr Dombey, ‘to enter upon such discussions.’

‘Did you think I loved you? Did you know I did not? Did you ever care, Man! for my heart, or propose to yourself to win the worthless thing? Was there any poor pretence of any in our bargain? Upon your side, or on mine?’

‘These questions,’ said Mr Dombey, ‘are all wide of the purpose, Madam.’

She moved between him and the door to prevent his going away, and drawing her majestic figure to its height, looked steadily upon him still.

‘You answer each of them. You answer me before I speak, I see. How can you help it; you who know the miserable truth as well as I? Now, tell me. If I loved you to devotion, could I do more than render up my whole will and being to you, as you have just demanded? If my heart were pure and all untried, and you its idol, could you ask more; could you have more?’

‘Possibly not, Madam,’ he returned coolly.

‘You know how different I am. You see me looking on you now, and you can read the warmth of passion for you that is breathing in my face.’ Not a curl of the proud lip, not a flash of the dark eye, nothing but the same intent and searching look, accompanied these words. ‘You know my general history. You have spoken of my mother. Do you think you can degrade, or bend or break, me to submission and obedience?’

Mr Dombey smiled, as he might have smiled at an inquiry whether he thought he could raise ten thousand pounds.

‘If there is anything unusual here,’ she said, with a slight motion of her hand before her brow, which did not for a moment flinch from its immovable and otherwise expressionless gaze, ‘as I know there are unusual feelings here,’ raising the hand she pressed upon her bosom, and heavily returning it, ‘consider that there is no common meaning in the appeal I am going to make you. Yes, for I am going;’ she said it as in prompt reply to something in his face; ‘to appeal to you.’

Mr Dombey, with a slightly condescending bend of his chin that rustled and crackled his stiff cravat, sat down on a sofa that was near him, to hear the appeal.

‘If you can believe that I am of such a nature now,’—he fancied he saw tears glistening in her eyes, and he thought, complacently, that he had forced them from her, though none fell on her cheek, and she regarded him as steadily as ever,—‘as would make what I now say almost incredible to myself, said to any man who had become my husband, but, above all, said to you,