An Extract from Dombey and Son, subsequent to the demise of the house of Dombey. The Counting House soon got to be dirty and neglected. The principal slipper and dogs' collar seller, at the corner of the court, would have doubted the propriety of throwing up his forefinger to the brim of his hat any more, if Mr Dombey had appeared there now; and the ticket porter with his hands under his white apron, moralised good sound morality about ambition which (he observed) was not, in his opinion, made to rhyme to perdition for nothing. Mr Morfin, the hazel-eyed bachelor, with the hair and whiskers sprinkled with grey, was perhaps the only person within the atmosphere of the House - its head, of course, excepted - who was heartily and deeply affected by the disaster that had befallen it. He had treated Mr Dombey with due respect and deference through many years, but he had never disguised his natural character, or meanly truckled to him, or pampered his master passion for the advancement of his own purposes. He had, therefore, no self-disrespect to avenge; no long-tightened springs to release with a quick recoil. He worked early and late to unravel whatever was complicated or difficult in the records of the transactions of the House; was always in attendance to explain whatever required explanation; sat in his old room sometimes very late at night, studying points by his mastery of which he could spare Mr Dombey the pain of being personally referred to; and then would go home to Islington, and calm his mind by producing the most dismal and forlorn sounds out of his violoncello before going to bed. He was solacing himself with this melodious grumbler one evening, and, having been much dispirited by the proceedings of the day, was scraping consolation out of its deepest notes, when his landlady (who was fortunately deaf, and had no other consciousness of these performances than a sensation of something rumbling in her bones) announced a lady. 'In mourning' she said. The violoncello stopped immediately; and the performer, laying it on the sofa with great tenderness and care, made a sign that the lady was to come in. He followed directly, and met Harriet Carker on the stair………… ............ He handed her down to a coach she had waiting at the door; and if his landlady had not been deaf, she would have heard him muttering as he went back upstairs, when the coach had driven off, that we were creatures of habit and it was a sorrowful habit to be an old bachelor. The
violoncello, lying on the sofa between the two chairs, he took it up,
without putting away the vacant chair, and sat droning on it, and slowly
shaking his head at the vacant chair, for a long, long time. The expression
he communicated to the instrument at first, though monstrously pathetic
and bland, was nothing to the expression he communicated to his own
face, and bestowed upon the empty chair: which was so sincere, that
he was obliged to have recourse to Captain Cuttle's remedy more than
once, and to rub his face with his sleeve. By degrees, however, the
violoncello, in unison with his own frame of mind, glided melodiously
into the Harmonious Blacksmith which he played over and over again,
until his ruddy and serene face gleamed like true metal on the anvil
of a veritable blacksmith. In fine, the violoncello and the empty chair
were the companions of his bachelorhood until nearly midnight; and when
he took his supper, the violoncello set up on end in the sofa corner,
big with the latent harmony of a whole foundry full of harmonious blacksmiths,
seemed to ogle the empty chair out of its crooked eyes, with unutterable
intelligence.
Charles Dickens 1848 |