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

doubt was by the uncertainty and deferred hope he had undergone, it seemed no violently strained misgiving, but only too probable.

Free from debt, and with no fear for his personal liberty, or the seizure of his goods, what else but such a state of madness could have hurried him away alone and secretly? As to his carrying some apparel with him, if he had really done so—and they were not even sure of that—he might have done so, the Captain argued, to prevent inquiry, to distract attention from his probable fate, or to ease the very mind that was now revolving all these possibilities. Such, reduced into plain language, and condensed within a small compass, was the final result and substance of Captain Cuttle’s deliberations: which took a long time to arrive at this pass, and were, like some more public deliberations, very discursive and disorderly.

Dejected and despondent in the extreme, Captain Cuttle felt it just to release Rob from the arrest in which he had placed him, and to enlarge him, subject to a kind of honourable inspection which he still resolved to exercise; and having hired a man, from Brogley the Broker, to sit in the shop during their absence, the Captain, taking Rob with him, issued forth upon a dismal quest after the mortal remains of Solomon Gills.

Not a station-house, or bone-house, or work-house in the metropolis escaped a visitation from the hard glazed hat. Along the wharves, among the shipping on the bank-side, up the river, down the river, here, there, everywhere, it went gleaming where men were thickest, like the hero’s helmet in an epic battle. For a whole week the Captain read of all the found and missing people in all the newspapers and handbills, and went forth on expeditions at all hours of the day to identify Solomon Gills, in poor little ship-boys who had fallen overboard, and in tall foreigners with dark beards who had taken poison—‘to make sure,’ Captain Cuttle said, ‘that it wam’t him.’ It is a sure thing that it never was, and that the good Captain had no other satisfaction.

Captain Cuttle at last abandoned these attempts as hopeless, and set himself to consider what was to be done next. After several new perusals of his poor friend’s letter, he considered that the maintenance of ‘a home in the old place for Walter’ was the primary duty imposed upon him. Therefore, the Captain’s decision was, that he would keep house on the premises of Solomon Gills himself, and would go into the instrument-business, and see what came of it.

But as this step involved the relinquishment of his apartments at Mrs MacStinger’s, and he knew that resolute woman would never hear of his deserting them, the Captain took the desperate determination of running away.

‘Now, look ye here, my lad,’ said the Captain to Rob, when he had matured this notable scheme, ‘to-morrow, I shan’t be found in this here roadstead till night—not till arter midnight p’rhaps. But you keep watch till you hear me knock, and the moment you do, turn-to, and open the door.’

‘Very good, Captain,’ said Rob.

‘You’ll continue to be rated on these here books,’ pursued the Captain condescendingly, ‘and I don’t say but what you may get promotion, if you and me should pull together with a will. But the moment you hear me knock to-morrow night, whatever time it is, turn-to and show yourself smart with the door.’

‘I’ll be sure to do it, Captain,’ replied Rob.

‘Because you understand,’ resumed the Captain, coming back again to enforce this charge upon his mind, ‘there may be, for anything I can say, a chase; and I might be took while I was waiting, if you didn’t show yourself smart with the door.’

Rob again assured the Captain that he would be prompt and wakeful; and the Captain having made this prudent arrangement, went home to Mrs MacStinger’s for the last time.

The sense the Captain had of its being the last time, and of the awful purpose hidden beneath his blue waistcoat, inspired him with such a mortal dread of Mrs MacStinger, that the sound of that lady’s foot downstairs at any time of the day, was sufficient to throw him into a fit of trembling. It fell out, too, that Mrs MacStinger was in a charming temper—mild and placid as a house—lamb; and Captain Cuttle’s conscience suffered terrible twinges, when she came up to inquire if she could cook him nothing for his dinner.

‘A nice small kidney-pudding now, Cap’en Cuttle,’ said his landlady: ‘or a sheep’s heart. Don’t mind my trouble.’

‘No thank’ee, Ma’am,’ returned the Captain.

‘Have a roast fowl,’ said Mrs MacStinger, ‘with a bit of weal stuffing and some egg sauce. Come, Cap’en Cuttle! Give yourself a little treat!’

‘No thank’ee, Ma’am,’ returned the Captain very humbly.

‘I’m sure you’re out of sorts, and want to be stimulated,’ said Mrs MacStinger. ‘Why not have, for once in a way, a bottle of sherry wine?’

‘Well, Ma’am,’ rejoined the Captain, ‘if you’d be so good as take a glass or two, I think I would try that. Would you do me the favour, Ma’am,’ said the Captain, torn to pieces by his conscience, ‘to accept a quarter’s rent ahead?’

‘And why so, Cap’en Cuttle?’ retorted Mrs MacStinger—sharply, as the Captain thought.

The Captain was frightened to dead ‘If you would Ma’am,’ he said with submission, ‘it would oblige me. I can’t keep my money very well. It pays itself out. I should take it kind if you’d comply.’

‘Well, Cap’en Cuttle,’ said the unconscious MacStinger, rubbing her hands, ‘you can do as you please. It’s not for me, with my family, to refuse, no more than it is to ask.’

‘And would you, Ma’am,’ said the Captain, taking down the tin canister in which he kept his cash, from the top shelf of the cupboard, ‘be so good as offer eighteen-pence a-piece to the little family all round? If you could make it convenient, Ma’am, to pass the word presently for them children to come for’ard, in a body, I should be glad to see ‘em.’

These innocent MacStingers were so many daggers to the Captain’s breast, when they appeared in a swarm, and tore at him with the confiding trustfulness he so little deserved. The eye of Alexander MacStinger, who had been his favourite, was insupportable to the Captain; the voice of Juliana MacStinger, who was the picture of her mother, made a coward of him.

Captain Cuttle kept up appearances, nevertheless, tolerably well, and for an hour or two was very hardly used and roughly handled by the young MacStingers: who in their childish frolics, did a little damage also to the glazed hat, by sitting in it, two at a time, as in a nest, and drumming on the inside of the crown with their shoes. At length the Captain sorrowfully dismissed them: taking leave of these cherubs with the poignant remorse and grief of a man who was going to execution.

In the silence of night, the Captain packed up his heavier property in a chest, which he locked, intending to leave it there, in all probability for ever, but on the forlorn chance of one day finding a man sufficiently bold and desperate to come and ask for it. Of his lighter necessaries, the Captain made a bundle; and disposed his plate about his person, ready for flight. At the hour of midnight, when Brig Place was buried in slumber, and Mrs MacStinger was lulled in sweet oblivion, with her infants around her, the guilty Captain, stealing down on tiptoe, in the dark, opened the door, closed it softly after him, and took to his heels.

Pursued by the image of Mrs MacStinger springing out of bed, and, regardless of costume, following and bringing him back; pursued also by a consciousness of his enormous crime; Captain Cuttle held on at a great pace, and allowed no grass to grow under his feet, between Brig Place and the Instrument-maker’s door. It opened when he knocked—for Rob was on the watch—and when it was bolted and locked behind him, Captain Cuttle felt comparatively safe.

‘Whew!’ cried the Captain, looking round him. ‘It’s a breather!’

‘Nothing the matter, is there, Captain?’ cried the gaping Rob.

‘No, no!’ said Captain Cuttle, after changing colour, and listening to a passing footstep in the street. ‘But mind ye, my lad; if any lady, except either of them two as you see t’other day, ever comes and asks for Cap’en Cuttle, be sure to report no person of that name known, nor never heard of here; observe them orders, will you?’

‘I’ll take care, Captain,’ returned Rob.

‘You might say—if you liked,’ hesitated the Captain, ‘that you’d read in the paper that a Cap’en of that name was gone to Australia, emigrating, along with a whole ship’s complement of people as had all swore never to come back no more.’

Rob nodded his understanding of these instructions; and Captain Cuttle promising to make a man of him, if he obeyed orders, dismissed him, yawning, to his bed under the counter, and went aloft to the chamber of Solomon Gills.

What the Captain suffered next day, whenever a bonnet passed, or how often he darted out of the shop to elude imaginary MacStingers, and sought safety in the attic, cannot be told. But to avoid the fatigues attendant on this means of self-preservation, the Captain curtained the glass door of communication between the shop and parlour, on the inside; fitted a key to it from the bunch that had been sent to him; and cut a small hole of espial in the wall. The advantage of this fortification is obvious. On a bonnet appearing, the Captain instantly slipped into his garrison, locked himself up, and took a secret observation of the enemy. Finding it a false alarm, the Captain instantly slipped out again. And the bonnets in the street were so very numerous, and alarms were so inseparable from their appearance, that the Captain was almost incessantly slipping in and out all day long.

Captain Cuttle found time, however, in the midst of this fatiguing service to inspect the stock; in connexion with which he had the general idea (very laborious to Rob) that too much friction could not be bestowed upon it, and that it could not be made too bright. He also ticketed a few attractive-looking articles at a venture, at prices ranging from ten shillings to fifty pounds, and exposed them in the window to the great astonishment of the public.

After effecting these improvements, Captain Cuttle, surrounded by the instruments, began to feel scientific: and looked up at the stars at night, through the skylight, when he was smoking his pipe in the little back parlour before going to bed, as if he had established a kind of property in them. As a tradesman in the City, too, he began to have an interest in the Lord Mayor, and the Sheriffs, and in Public Companies; and felt bound to read the quotations of the Funds every day, though he was unable to make out, on any principle of navigation, what the figures meant, and could have very well dispensed with the fractions. Florence, the Captain waited on, with his strange news of Uncle Sol, immediately after taking possession of the Midshipman; but she was away from home. So the Captain sat himself down in his altered station of life, with no company but Rob the Grinder; and losing count of time, as men do when great changes come upon them, thought musingly of Walter, and of Solomon Gills, and even of Mrs MacStinger herself, as among the things that had been.