At last, the guests were all gone, and the linkmen too; and the street, crowded so long with carriages, was clear; and the dying lights showed no one in the rooms, but Mr. Dombey and Mr. Carker, who were talking together apart, and Mrs. Dombey and her mother: the former seated on an ottoman; the latter reclining in the Cleopatra attitude, awaiting the arrival of her maid. Mr. Dombey having finished his communication to Carker, the latter advanced obsequiously to take leave.
“I trust,” he said, “that the fatigues of this delightful evening will not inconvenience Mrs. Dombey tomorrow.”
“Mrs. Dombey,” said Mr. Dombey, advancing, “has sufficiently spared herself fatigue, to relieve you from any anxiety of that kind. I regret to say, Mrs. Dombey, that I could have wished you had fatigued yourself a little more on this occasion.”
She looked at him with a supercilious glance, that it seemed not worth her while to protract, and turned away her eyes without speaking.
“I am sorry, Madam,” said Mr. Dombey, “that you should not have thought it your duty—”
She looked at him again.
“Your duty, Madam,” pursued Mr. Dombey, “to have received my friends with a little more deference. Some of those whom you have been pleased to slight tonight in a very marked manner, Mrs. Dombey, confer a distinction upon you, I must tell you, in any visit they pay you.”
“Do you know that there is someone here?” she returned, now looking at him steadily.
“No! Carker! I beg that you do not. I insist that you do not,” cried Mr. Dombey, stopping that noiseless gentleman in his withdrawal. “Mr. Carker, Madam, as you know, possesses my confidence. He is as well acquainted as myself with the subject on which I speak. I beg to tell you, for your information, Mrs. Dombey, that I consider these wealthy and important persons confer a distinction upon me:” and Mr. Dombey drew himself up, as having now rendered them of the highest possible importance.
“I ask you,” she repeated, bending her disdainful, steady gaze upon him, “do you know that there is someone here, Sir?”
“I must entreat,” said Mr. Carker, stepping forward, “I must beg, I must demand, to be released. Slight and unimportant as this difference is—”
Mrs. Skewton, who had been intent upon her daughter’s face, took him up here.
“My sweetest Edith,” she said, “and my dearest Dombey; our excellent friend Mr. Carker, for so I am sure I ought to mention him—”
Mr. Carker murmured, “Too much honour.”
“—has used the very words that were in my mind, and that I have been dying, these ages, for an opportunity of introducing. Slight and unimportant! My sweetest Edith, and my dearest Dombey, do we not know that any difference between you two—No, Flowers; not now.”
Flowers was the maid, who, finding gentlemen present, retreated with precipitation.
“That any difference between you two,” resumed Mrs. Skewton, “with the Heart you possess in common, and the excessively charming bond of feeling that there is between you, must be slight and unimportant? What words could better define the fact? None. Therefore I am glad to take this slight occasion—this trifling occasion, that is so replete with Nature, and your individual characters, and all that—so truly calculated to bring the tears into a parent’s eyes—to say that I attach no importance to them in the least, except as developing these minor elements of Soul; and that, unlike most Mamas-in-law (that odious phrase, dear Dombey!) as they have been represented to me to exist in this I fear too artificial world, I never shall attempt to interpose between you, at such a time, and never can much regret, after all, such little flashes of the torch of What’s-his-name—not Cupid, but the other delightful creature.”
There was a sharpness in the good mother’s glance at both her children as she spoke, that may have been expressive of a direct and well-considered purpose hidden between these rambling words. That purpose, providently to detach herself in the beginning from all the clankings of their chain that were to come, and to shelter herself with the fiction of her innocent belief in their mutual affection, and their adaptation to each other.
“I have pointed out to Mrs. Dombey,” said Mr. Dombey, in his most stately manner, “that in her conduct thus early in our married life, to which I object, and which, I request, may be corrected. Carker,” with a nod of dismissal, “good night to you!”
Mr. Carker bowed to the imperious form of the Bride, whose sparkling eye was fixed upon her husband; and stopping at Cleopatra’s couch on his way out, raised to his lips the hand she graciously extended to him, in lowly and admiring homage.
If his handsome wife had reproached him, or even changed countenance, or broken the silence in which she remained, by one word, now that they were alone (for Cleopatra
