“One hundred and forty-seven,” said Mrs. Chick. “The dress, Richards, is a nice, warm, blue baize tailed coat and cap, turned up with orange coloured binding; red worsted stockings; and very strong leather small-clothes. One might wear the articles one’s self,” said Mrs. Chick, with enthusiasm, “and be grateful.”
“There, Richards!” said Miss Tox. “Now, indeed, you may be proud. The Charitable Grinders!”
“I am sure I am very much obliged, Sir,” returned Richards faintly, “and take it very kind that you should remember my little ones.” At the same time a vision of Biler as a Charitable Grinder, with his very small legs encased in the serviceable clothing described by Mrs. Chick, swam before Richards’s eyes, and made them water.
“I am very glad to see you have so much feeling, Richards,” said Miss Tox.
“It makes one almost hope, it really does,” said Mrs. Chick, who prided herself on taking trustful views of human nature, “that there may yet be some faint spark of gratitude and right feeling in the world.”
Richards deferred to these compliments by curtseying and murmuring her thanks; but finding it quite impossible to recover her spirits from the disorder into which they had been thrown by the image of her son in his precocious nether garments, she gradually approached the door and was heartily relieved to escape by it.
Such temporary indications of a partial thaw that had appeared with her, vanished with her; and the frost set in again, as cold and hard as ever. Mr. Chick was twice heard to hum a tune at the bottom of the table, but on both occasions it was a fragment of the Dead March in Saul. The party seemed to get colder and colder, and to be gradually resolving itself into a congealed and solid state, like the collation round which it was assembled. At length Mrs. Chick looked at Miss Tox, and Miss Tox returned the look, and they both rose and said it was really time to go. Mr. Dombey receiving this announcement with perfect equanimity, they took leave of that gentleman, and presently departed under the protection of Mr. Chick; who, when they had turned their backs upon the house and left its master in his usual solitary state, put his hands in his pockets, threw himself back in the carriage, and whistled “With a hey ho chevy!” all through; conveying into his face as he did so, an expression of such gloomy and terrible defiance, that Mrs. Chick dared not protest, or in any way molest him.
Richards, though she had little Paul on her lap, could not forget her own firstborn. She felt it was ungrateful; but the influence of the day fell even on the Charitable Grinders, and she could hardly help regarding his pewter badge, number one hundred and forty-seven, as, somehow, a part of its formality and sternness. She spoke, too, in the nursery, of his “blessed legs,” and was again troubled by his spectre in uniform.
“I don’t know what I wouldn’t give,” said Polly, “to see the poor little dear before he gets used to ’em.”
“Why, then, I tell you what, Mrs. Richards,” retorted Nipper, who had been admitted to her confidence, “see him and make your mind easy.”
“Mr. Dombey wouldn’t like it,” said Polly.
“Oh, wouldn’t he, Mrs. Richards!” retorted Nipper, “he’d like it very much, I think, when he was asked.”
“You wouldn’t ask him, I suppose, at all?” said Polly.
“No, Mrs. Richards, quite contrairy,” returned Susan, “and them two inspectors Tox and Chick, not intending to be on duty tomorrow, as I heard ’em say, me and Miss Floy will go along with you tomorrow morning, and welcome, Mrs. Richards, if you like, for we may as well walk there as up and down a street, and better too.”
Polly rejected the idea pretty stoutly at first; but by little and little she began to entertain it, as she entertained more and more distinctly the forbidden pictures of her children, and her own home. At length, arguing that there could be no great harm in calling for a moment at the door, she yielded to the Nipper proposition.
The matter being settled thus, little Paul began to cry most piteously, as if he had a foreboding that no good would come of it.
“What’s the matter with the child?” asked Susan.
“He’s cold, I think,” said Polly, walking with him to and fro, and hushing him.
It was a bleak autumnal afternoon indeed; and as she walked, and hushed, and, glancing through the dreary windows, pressed the little fellow closer to her breast, the withered leaves came showering down.
VI
Paul’s Second Deprivation
Polly was beset by so many misgivings in the morning, that but for the incessant promptings of her black-eyed companion, she would have abandoned all thoughts of the expedition, and formally petitioned for leave to see number one hundred and forty-seven, under the awful shadow of Mr. Dombey’s roof. But Susan who was personally disposed in favour of the excursion, and who (like Tony Lumpkin), if she could bear the disappointments of other people with tolerable fortitude, could not abide to disappoint herself, threw so many ingenious doubts in the way of this second thought, and stimulated the original intention with so many ingenious arguments, that almost as soon as Mr. Dombey’s stately back was turned, and that gentleman was pursuing his daily road towards the City, his unconscious son was on his way to Staggs’s Gardens.
This euphonious locality was situated in a suburb, known by the inhabitants of Staggs’s Gardens by the name of Camberling Town; a designation which the Strangers’ Map of London, as printed (with a view to pleasant and commodious reference) on pocket handkerchiefs, condenses, with some show of reason, into Camden Town. Hither the two nurses bent their steps, accompanied by their charges; Richards carrying Paul, of course, and Susan leading little Florence by the hand, and
