Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens (ebook reader 7 inch .txt) 📖

neither did Mr Dombey observe the letter lying near his feet. Walter hesitated for a moment, thinking that one or other of them would notice it; but finding that neither did, he stopped, came back, picked it up, and laid it himself on Mr Dombey’s desk. The letters were post-letters; and it happened that the one in question was Mrs Pipchin’s regular report, directed as usual—for Mrs Pipchin was but an indifferent penwoman—by Florence. Mr Dombey, having his attention silently called to this letter by Walter, started, and looked fiercely at him, as if he believed that he had purposely selected it from all the rest.

‘You can leave the room, Sir!’ said Mr Dombey, haughtily.

He crushed the letter in his hand; and having watched Walter out at the door, put it in his pocket without breaking the seal.

‘These continual references to Mr Carker the Junior,’ Mr Carker the Manager began, as soon as they were alone, ‘are, to a man in my position, uttered before one in yours, so unspeakably distressing—’

‘Nonsense, Carker,’ Mr Dombey interrupted. ‘You are too sensitive.’

‘I am sensitive,’ he returned. ‘If one in your position could by any possibility imagine yourself in my place: which you cannot: you would be so too.’

As Mr Dombey’s thoughts were evidently pursuing some other subject, his discreet ally broke off here, and stood with his teeth ready to present to him, when he should look up.

‘You want somebody to send to the West Indies, you were saying,’ observed Mr Dombey, hurriedly.

‘Yes,’ replied Carker.

‘Send young Gay.’

‘Good, very good indeed. Nothing easier,’ said Mr Carker, without any show of surprise, and taking up the pen to re-endorse the letter, as coolly as he had done before. ‘“Send young Gay.”’

‘Call him back,’ said Mr Dombey.

Mr Carker was quick to do so, and Walter was quick to return.

‘Gay,’ said Mr Dombey, turning a little to look at him over his shoulder. ‘Here is a—’

‘An opening,’ said Mr Carker, with his mouth stretched to the utmost.

‘In the West Indies. At Barbados. I am going to send you,’ said Mr Dombey, scorning to embellish the bare truth, ‘to fill a junior situation in the counting-house at Barbados. Let your Uncle know from me, that I have chosen you to go to the West Indies.’

Walter’s breath was so completely taken away by his astonishment, that he could hardly find enough for the repetition of the words ‘West Indies.’

‘Somebody must go,’ said Mr Dombey, ‘and you are young and healthy, and your Uncle’s circumstances are not good. Tell your Uncle that you are appointed. You will not go yet. There will be an interval of a month—or two perhaps.’

‘Shall I remain there, Sir?’ inquired Walter.

‘Will you remain there, Sir!’ repeated Mr Dombey, turning a little more round towards him. ‘What do you mean? What does he mean, Carker?’

‘Live there, Sir,’ faltered Walter.

‘Certainly,’ returned Mr Dombey.

Walter bowed.

‘That’s all,’ said Mr Dombey, resuming his letters. ‘You will explain to him in good time about the usual outfit and so forth, Carker, of course. He needn’t wait, Carker.’

‘You needn’t wait, Gay,’ observed Mr Carker: bare to the gums.

‘Unless,’ said Mr Dombey, stopping in his reading without looking off the letter, and seeming to listen. ‘Unless he has anything to say.’

‘No, Sir,’ returned Walter, agitated and confused, and almost stunned, as an infinite variety of pictures presented themselves to his mind; among which Captain Cuttle, in his glazed hat, transfixed with astonishment at Mrs MacStinger’s, and his uncle bemoaning his loss in the little back parlour, held prominent places. ‘I hardly know—I—I am much obliged, Sir.’

‘He needn’t wait, Carker,’ said Mr Dombey.

And as Mr Carker again echoed the words, and also collected his papers as if he were going away too, Walter felt that his lingering any longer would be an unpardonable intrusion—especially as he had nothing to say—and therefore walked out quite confounded.

Going along the passage, with the mingled consciousness and helplessness of a dream, he heard Mr Dombey’s door shut again, as Mr Carker came out: and immediately afterwards that gentleman called to him.

‘Bring your friend Mr Carker the Junior to my room, Sir, if you please.’

Walter went to the outer office and apprised Mr Carker the Junior of his errand, who accordingly came out from behind a partition where he sat alone in one corner, and returned with him to the room of Mr Carker the Manager.

That gentleman was standing with his back to the fire, and his hands under his coat-tails, looking over his white cravat, as unpromisingly as Mr Dombey himself could have looked. He received them without any change in his attitude or softening of his harsh and black expression: merely signing to Walter to close the door.

‘John Carker,’ said the Manager, when this was done, turning suddenly upon his brother, with his two rows of teeth bristling as if he would have bitten him, ‘what is the league between you and this young man, in virtue of which I am haunted and hunted by the mention of your name? Is it not enough for you, John Carker, that I am your near relation, and can’t detach myself from that—’

‘Say disgrace, James,’ interposed the other in a low voice, finding that he stammered for a word. ‘You mean it, and have reason, say disgrace.’

‘From that disgrace,’ assented his brother with keen emphasis, ‘but is the fact to be blurted out and trumpeted, and proclaimed continually in the presence of the very House! In moments of confidence too? Do you think your name is calculated to harmonise in this place with trust and confidence, John Carker?’

‘No,’ returned the other. ‘No, James. God knows I have no such thought.’

‘What is your thought, then?’ said his brother, ‘and why do you thrust yourself in my way? Haven’t you injured me enough already?’

‘I have never injured you, James, wilfully.’

‘You are my brother,’ said the Manager. ‘That’s injury enough.’

‘I wish I could undo it, James.’

‘I wish you could and would.’

During this conversation, Walter had looked from one brother to the other, with pain and amazement. He who was the Senior in years, and Junior in the House, stood, with his eyes cast upon the ground, and his head bowed, humbly listening to the reproaches of the other. Though these were rendered very bitter by the tone and look with which they were accompanied, and by the presence of Walter whom they so much surprised and shocked, he entered no other protest against them than by slightly raising his right hand in a deprecatory manner, as if he would have said, ‘Spare me!’ So, had they been blows, and he a brave man, under strong constraint, and weakened by bodily suffering, he might have stood before the executioner.

Generous and quick in all his emotions, and regarding himself as the innocent occasion of these taunts, Walter now struck in, with all the earnestness he felt.

‘Mr Carker,’ he said, addressing himself to the Manager. ‘Indeed, indeed, this is my fault solely. In a kind of heedlessness, for which I cannot blame myself enough, I have, I have no doubt, mentioned Mr Carker the Junior much oftener than was necessary; and have allowed his name sometimes to slip through my lips, when it was against your expressed wish. But it has been my own mistake, Sir. We have never exchanged one word upon the subject—very few, indeed, on any subject. And it has not been,’ added Walter, after a moment’s pause, ‘all heedlessness on my part, Sir; for I have felt an interest in Mr Carker ever since I have been here, and have hardly been able to help speaking of him sometimes, when I have thought of him so much!’

Walter said this from his soul, and with the very breath of honour. For he looked upon the bowed head, and the downcast eyes, and upraised hand, and thought, ‘I have felt it; and why should I not avow it in behalf of this unfriended, broken man!’

Mr Carker the Manager looked at him, as he spoke, and when he had finished speaking, with a smile that seemed to divide his face into two parts.

‘You are an excitable youth, Gay,’ he said; ‘and should endeavour to cool down a little now, for it would be unwise to encourage feverish predispositions. Be as cool as you can, Gay. Be as cool as you can. You might have asked Mr John Carker himself (if you have not done so) whether he claims to be, or is, an object of such strong interest.’

‘James, do me justice,’ said his brother. ‘I have claimed nothing; and I claim nothing. Believe me, on my—’

‘Honour?’ said his brother, with another smile, as he warmed himself before the fire.

‘On my Me—on my fallen life!’ returned the other, in the same low voice, but with a deeper stress on his words than he had yet seemed capable of giving them. ‘Believe me, I have held myself aloof, and kept alone. This has been unsought by me. I have avoided him and everyone.

‘Indeed, you have avoided me, Mr Carker,’ said Walter, with the tears rising to his eyes; so true was his compassion. ‘I know it, to my disappointment and regret. When I first came here, and ever since, I am sure I have tried to be as much your friend, as one of my age could presume to be; but it has been of no use.

‘And observe,’ said the Manager, taking him up quickly, ‘it will be of still less use, Gay, if you persist in forcing Mr John Carker’s name on people’s attention. That is not the way to befriend Mr John Carker. Ask him if he thinks it is.’

‘It is no service to me,’ said the brother. ‘It only leads to such a conversation as the present, which I need not say I could have well spared. No one can be a better friend to me:’ he spoke here very distinctly, as if he would impress it upon Walter: ‘than in forgetting me, and leaving me to go my way, unquestioned and unnoticed.’

‘Your memory not being retentive, Gay, of what you are told by others,’ said Mr Carker the Manager, warming himself with great and increased satisfaction, ‘I thought it well that you should be told this from the best authority,’ nodding towards his brother. ‘You are not likely to forget it now, I hope. That’s all, Gay. You can go.’

Walter passed out at the door, and was about to close it after him, when, hearing the voices of the brothers again, and also the mention of his own name, he stood irresolutely, with his hand upon the lock, and the door ajar, uncertain whether to return or go away. In this position he could not help overhearing what followed.

‘Think of me more leniently, if you can, James,’ said John Carker, ‘when I tell you I have had—how could I help having, with my history, written here’—striking himself upon the breast—‘my whole heart awakened by my observation of that boy, Walter Gay. I saw in him when he first came here, almost my other self.’

‘Your other self!’ repeated the Manager, disdainfully.

‘Not as I am, but as I was when I first came here too; as sanguine, giddy, youthful, inexperienced; flushed with the same restless and adventurous fancies; and full of the same qualities, fraught with the same capacity of leading on to good or evil.’

‘I hope not,’ said his brother, with some hidden and sarcastic meaning in his tone.

‘You strike me sharply; and your hand is steady, and your thrust is very deep,’ returned the other, speaking (or so Walter thought) as if some cruel weapon actually stabbed him as he spoke. ‘I imagined all this when he was a boy. I believed it. It was a truth to me. I saw him lightly walking on the edge of an unseen gulf where so many others walk with equal gaiety, and from which—’

‘The old excuse,’ interrupted his brother, as he stirred the fire. ‘So many. Go on. Say, so many fall.’

‘From which ONE traveller