“Beg your pardon, Sir,” said the man, “but I hope you’re a doin’ pretty well, Sir.”
He was dressed in a canvas suit abundantly besmeared with coal-dust and oil, and had cinders in his whiskers, and a smell of half-slaked ashes all over him. He was not a bad-looking fellow, nor even what could be fairly called a dirty-looking fellow, in spite of this; and, in short, he was Mr. Toodle, professionally clothed.
“I shall have the honour of stokin’ of you down, Sir,” said Mr. Toodle. “Beg your pardon, Sir. I hope you find yourself a coming round?”
Mr. Dombey looked at him, in return for his tone of interest, as if a man like that would make his very eyesight dirty.
“ ’Scuse the liberty, Sir,” said Toodle, seeing he was not clearly remembered, “but my wife Polly, as was called Richards in your family—”
A change in Mr. Dombey’s face, which seemed to express recollection of him, and so it did, but it expressed in a much stronger degree an angry sense of humiliation, stopped Mr. Toodle short.
“Your wife wants money, I suppose,” said Mr. Dombey, putting his hand in his pocket, and speaking (but that he always did) haughtily.
“No thank’ee, Sir,” returned Toodle, “I can’t say she does. I don’t.”
Mr. Dombey was stopped short now in his turn: and awkwardly: with his hand in his pocket.
“No, Sir,” said Toodle, turning his oilskin cap round and round; “we’re a doin’ pretty well, Sir; we haven’t no cause to complain in the worldly way, Sir. We’ve had four more since then, Sir, but we rubs on.”
Mr. Dombey would have rubbed on to his own carriage, though in so doing he had rubbed the stoker underneath the wheels; but his attention was arrested by something in connection with the cap still going slowly round and round in the man’s hand.
“We lost one babby,” observed Toodle, “there’s no denyin’.”
“Lately,” added Mr. Dombey, looking at the cap.
“No, Sir, up’ard of three years ago, but all the rest is hearty. And in the matter o’ readin’, Sir,” said Toodle, ducking again, as if to remind Mr. Dombey of what had passed between them on that subject long ago, “them boys o’ mine, they learned me, among ’em, arter all. They’ve made a wery tolerable scholar of me, Sir, them boys.”
“Come, Major!” said Mr. Dombey.
“Beg your pardon, Sir,” resumed Toodle, taking a step before them and deferentially stopping them again, still cap in hand: “I wouldn’t have troubled you with such a pint except as a way of gettin’ in the name of my son Biler—christened Robin—him as you was so good as to make a Charitable Grinder on.”
“Well, man,” said Mr. Dombey in his severest manner. “What about him?”
“Why, Sir,” returned Toodle, shaking his head with a face of great anxiety and distress, “I’m forced to say, Sir, that he’s gone wrong.”
“He has gone wrong, has he?” said Mr. Dombey, with a hard kind of satisfaction.
“He has fell into bad company, you see, genelmen,” pursued the father, looking wistfully at both, and evidently taking the Major into the conversation with the hope of having his sympathy. “He has got into bad ways. God send he may come to again, genelmen, but he’s on the wrong track now! You could hardly be off hearing of it somehow, Sir,” said Toodle, again addressing Mr. Dombey individually; “and it’s better I should out and say my boy’s gone rather wrong. Polly’s dreadful down about it, genelmen,” said Toodle with the same dejected look, and another appeal to the Major.
“A son of this man’s whom I caused to be educated, Major,” said Mr. Dombey, giving him his arm. “The usual return!”
“Take advice from plain old Joe, and never educate that sort of people, Sir,” returned the Major. “Damme, Sir, it never does! It always fails!”
The simple father was beginning to submit that he hoped his son, the quondam Grinder, huffed and cuffed, and flogged and badged, and taught, as parrots are, by a brute jobbed into his place of schoolmaster with as much fitness for it as a hound, might not have been educated on quite a right plan in some undiscovered respect, when Mr. Dombey angrily repeating “The usual return!” led the Major away. And the Major being heavy to hoist into Mr. Dombey’s carriage, elevated in midair, and having to stop and swear that he would flay the Native alive, and break every bone in his skin, and visit other physical torments upon him, every time he couldn’t get his foot on the step, and fell back on that dark exile, had barely time before they started to repeat hoarsely that it would never do: that it always failed: and that if he were to educate “his own vagabond,” he would certainly be hanged.
Mr. Dombey assented bitterly; but there was something more in his bitterness, and in his moody way of falling back in the carriage, and looking with knitted brows at the changing objects without, than the failure of that noble educational system administered by the Grinders’ Company. He had seen upon the man’s rough cap a piece of new crape, and he had assured himself, from his manner and his answers, that he wore it for his son.
So! from high to low, at home or abroad, from Florence in his great house to the coarse churl who was feeding the fire then smoking before them, everyone set up some claim or other to a share in his dead boy, and was a bidder against him! Could
