“What insupportable creature is this, coming in?” said Mrs. Skewton, “I cannot hear it. Go away, whoever you are!”
“You have not the heart to banish J. B., Ma’am!” said the Major halting midway, to remonstrate, with his cane over his shoulder.
“Oh it’s you, is it? On second thoughts, you may enter,” observed Cleopatra.
The Major entered accordingly, and advancing to the sofa pressed her charming hand to his lips.
“Sit down,” said Cleopatra, listlessly waving her fan, “a long way off. Don’t come too near me, for I am frightfully faint and sensitive this morning, and you smell of the Sun. You are absolutely tropical.”
“By George, Ma’am,” said the Major, “the time has been when Joseph Bagstock has been grilled and blistered by the Sun; then time was, when he was forced, Ma’am, into such full blow, by high hothouse heat in the West Indies, that he was known as the Flower. A man never heard of Bagstock, Ma’am, in those days; he heard of the Flower—the Flower of Ours. The Flower may have faded, more or less, Ma’am,” observed the Major, dropping into a much nearer chair than had been indicated by his cruel Divinity, “but it is a tough plant yet, and constant as the evergreen.”
Here the Major, under cover of the dark room, shut up one eye, rolled his head like a Harlequin, and, in his great self-satisfaction, perhaps went nearer to the confines of apoplexy than he had ever gone before.
“Where is Mrs. Granger?” inquired Cleopatra of her page.
Withers believed she was in her own room.
“Very well,” said Mrs. Skewton. “Go away, and shut the door. I am engaged.”
As Withers disappeared, Mrs. Skewton turned her head languidly towards the Major, without otherwise moving, and asked him how his friend was.
“Dombey, Ma’am,” returned the Major, with a facetious gurgling in his throat, “is as well as a man in his condition can be. His condition is a desperate one, Ma’am. He is touched, is Dombey! Touched!” cried the Major. “He is bayonetted through the body.”
Cleopatra cast a sharp look at the Major, that contrasted forcibly with the affected drawl in which she presently said:
“Major Bagstock, although I know but little of the world—nor can I really regret my experience, for I fear it is a false place, full of withering conventionalities: where Nature is but little regarded, and where the music of the heart, and the gushing of the soul, and all that sort of thing, which is so truly poetical, is seldom heard—I cannot misunderstand your meaning. There is an allusion to Edith—to my extremely dear child,” said Mrs. Skewton, tracing the outline of her eyebrows with her forefinger, “in your words, to which the tenderest of chords vibrates excessively.”
“Bluntness, Ma’am,” returned the Major, “has ever been the characteristic of the Bagstock breed. You are right. Joe admits it.”
“And that allusion,” pursued Cleopatra, “would involve one of the most—if not positively the most—touching, and thrilling, and sacred emotions of which our sadly-fallen nature is susceptible, I conceive.”
The Major laid his hand upon his lips, and wafted a kiss to Cleopatra, as if to identify the emotion in question.
“I feel that I am weak. I feel that I am wanting in that energy, which should sustain a Mama: not to say a parent: on such a subject,” said Mrs. Skewton, trimming her lips with the laced edge of her pocket-handkerchief; “but I can hardly approach a topic so excessively momentous to my dearest Edith without a feeling of faintness. Nevertheless, bad man, as you have boldly remarked upon it, and as it has occasioned me great anguish:” Mrs. Skewton touched her left side with her fan: “I will not shrink from my duty.”
The Major, under cover of the dimness, swelled, and swelled, and rolled his purple face about, and winked his lobster eye, until he fell into a fit of wheezing, which obliged him to rise and take a turn or two about the room, before his fair friend could proceed.
“Mr. Dombey,” said Mrs. Skewton, when she at length resumed, “was obliging enough, now many weeks ago, to do us the honour of visiting us here; in company, my dear Major, with yourself. I acknowledge—let me be open—that it is my failing to be the creature of impulse, and to wear my heart as it were, outside. I know my failing full well. My enemy cannot know it better. But I am not penitent; I would rather not be frozen by the heartless world, and am content to bear this imputation justly.”
Mrs. Skewton arranged her tucker, pinched her wiry throat to give it a soft surface, and went on, with great complacency.
“It gave me (my dearest Edith too, I am sure) infinite pleasure to receive Mr. Dombey. As a friend of yours, my dear Major, we were naturally disposed to be prepossessed in his favour; and I fancied that I observed an amount of Heart in Mr. Dombey, that was excessively refreshing.”
“There is devilish little heart in Dombey now, Ma’am,” said the Major.
“Wretched man!” cried Mrs. Skewton, looking at him languidly, “pray be silent.”
“J. B. is dumb, Ma’am,” said the Major.
“Mr. Dombey,” pursued Cleopatra, smoothing the rosy hue upon her cheeks, “accordingly repeated his visit; and possibly finding some attraction in the simplicity and primitiveness of our tastes—for there is always a charm in nature—it is so very sweet—became one of our little circle every evening. Little did I think of the awful responsibility into which I plunged when I encouraged Mr. Dombey—to—”
“To beat up these quarters, Ma’am,” suggested Major Bagstock.
“Coarse person!” said Mrs. Skewton, “you anticipate my meaning, though in odious language.”
Here Mrs. Skewton rested her elbow on the little table at her side, and suffering her wrist to droop in what she considered a graceful and becoming manner, dangled her fan to and fro, and lazily admired her hand while speaking.
“The agony I have endured,” she said mincingly, “as the truth has
