As the husband did nothing but chuckle and grin, and continually draw his right hand across his mouth, moistening the palm, Mrs. Toodle, after nudging him twice or thrice in vain, dropped a curtsey and replied “that perhaps if she was to be called out of her name, it would be considered in the wages.”
“Oh, of course,” said Mr. Dombey. “I desire to make it a question of wages, altogether. Now, Richards, if you nurse my bereaved child, I wish you to remember this always. You will receive a liberal stipend in return for the discharge of certain duties, in the performance of which, I wish you to see as little of your family as possible. When those duties cease to be required and rendered, and the stipend ceases to be paid, there is an end of all relations between us. Do you understand me?”
Mrs. Toodle seemed doubtful about it; and as to Toodle himself, he had evidently no doubt whatever, that he was all abroad.
“You have children of your own,” said Mr. Dombey. “It is not at all in this bargain that you need become attached to my child, or that my child need become attached to you. I don’t expect or desire anything of the kind. Quite the reverse. When you go away from here, you will have concluded what is a mere matter of bargain and sale, hiring and letting: and will stay away. The child will cease to remember you; and you will cease, if you please, to remember the child.”
Mrs. Toodle, with a little more colour in her cheeks than she had had before, said “she hoped she knew her place.”
“I hope you do, Richards,” said Mr. Dombey. “I have no doubt you know it very well. Indeed it is so plain and obvious that it could hardly be otherwise. Louisa, my dear, arrange with Richards about money, and let her have it when and how she pleases. Mr. what’s-your name, a word with you, if you please!”
Thus arrested on the threshold as he was following his wife out of the room, Toodle returned and confronted Mr. Dombey alone. He was a strong, loose, round-shouldered, shuffling, shaggy fellow, on whom his clothes sat negligently: with a good deal of hair and whisker, deepened in its natural tint, perhaps by smoke and coal-dust: hard knotty hands: and a square forehead, as coarse in grain as the bark of an oak. A thorough contrast in all respects, to Mr. Dombey, who was one of those close-shaved close-cut moneyed gentlemen who are glossy and crisp like new banknotes, and who seem to be artificially braced and tightened as by the stimulating action of golden showerbaths.
“You have a son, I believe?” said Mr. Dombey.
“Four on ’em, Sir. Four hims and a her. All alive!”
“Why, it’s as much as you can afford to keep them!” said Mr. Dombey.
“I couldn’t hardly afford but one thing in the world less, Sir.”
“What is that?”
“To lose ’em, Sir.”
“Can you read?” asked Mr. Dombey.
“Why, not partick’ler, Sir.”
“Write?”
“With chalk, Sir?”
“With anything?”
“I could make shift to chalk a little bit, I think, if I was put to it,” said Toodle after some reflection.
“And yet,” said Mr. Dombey, “you are two or three and thirty, I suppose?”
“Thereabouts, I suppose, Sir,” answered Toodle, after more reflection.
“Then why don’t you learn?” asked Mr. Dombey.
“So I’m a going to, Sir. One of my little boys is a going to learn me, when he’s old enough, and been to school himself.”
“Well,” said Mr. Dombey, after looking at him attentively, and with no great favour, as he stood gazing round the room (principally round the ceiling) and still drawing his hand across and across his mouth. “You heard what I said to your wife just now?”
“Polly heerd it,” said Toodle, jerking his hat over his shoulder in the direction of the door, with an air of perfect confidence in his better half. “It’s all right.”
“As you appear to leave everything to her,” said Mr. Dombey, frustrated in his intention of impressing his views still more distinctly on the husband, as the stronger character, “I suppose it is of no use my saying anything to you.”
“Not a bit,” said Toodle. “Polly heerd it. She’s awake, Sir.”
“I won’t detain you any longer then,” returned Mr. Dombey, disappointed. “Where have you worked all your life?”
“Mostly underground, Sir, ’till I got married. I come to the level then. I’m a going on one of these here railroads when they comes into full play.”
As the last straw breaks the laden camel’s back, this piece of information crushed the sinking spirits of Mr. Dombey. He motioned his child’s foster-father to the door, who departed by no means unwillingly: and then turning the key, paced up and down the room in solitary wretchedness. For all his starched, impenetrable dignity and composure, he wiped blinding tears from his eyes as he did so, and often said, with an emotion of which he would not, for the world, have had a witness, “Poor little fellow!”
It may have been characteristic of Mr. Dombey’s pride, that he pitied himself through the child. Not poor me. Not poor widower, confiding by constraint in the wife of an ignorant Hind who has been working “mostly underground” all his life, and yet at whose door Death had never knocked, and at whose poor table four sons daily sit—but poor little fellow!
Those words being on his lips, it occurred to him—and it is an instance of the strong attraction with which his hopes and fears and all his thoughts
