Shipping Intelligence and Office Business
Mr Dombey’s offices were in a court where there was an old-established
stall of choice fruit at the corner: where perambulating merchants, of
both sexes, offered for sale at any time between the hours of ten and
five, slippers, pocket-books, sponges, dogs’ collars, and Windsor soap;
and sometimes a pointer or an oil-painting.
The pointer always came that way, with a view to the Stock Exchange,
where a sporting taste (originating generally in bets of new hats) is
much in vogue. The other commodities were addressed to the general
public; but they were never offered by the vendors to Mr Dombey. When
he appeared, the dealers in those wares fell off respectfully. The
principal slipper and dogs’ collar man—who considered himself a public
character, and whose portrait was screwed on to an artist’s door in
Cheapside—threw up his forefinger to the brim of his hat as Mr Dombey
went by. The ticket-porter, if he were not absent on a job, always ran
officiously before, to open Mr Dombey’s office door as wide as
possible, and hold it open, with his hat off, while he entered.
The clerks within were not a whit behind-hand in their demonstrations
of respect. A solemn hush prevailed, as Mr Dombey passed through the
outer office. The wit of the Counting-House became in a moment as mute
as the row of leathern fire-buckets hanging up behind him. Such vapid
and flat daylight as filtered through the ground-glass windows and
skylights, leaving a black sediment upon the panes, showed the books
and papers, and the figures bending over them, enveloped in a studious
gloom, and as much abstracted in appearance, from the world without, as
if they were assembled at the bottom of the sea; while a mouldy little
strong room in the obscure perspective, where a shaded lamp was always
burning, might have represented the cavern of some ocean monster,
looking on with a red eye at these mysteries of the deep.
When Perch the messenger, whose place was on a little bracket, like a
timepiece, saw Mr Dombey come in—or rather when he felt that he was
coming, for he had usually an instinctive sense of his approach—he
hurried into Mr Dombey’s room, stirred the fire, carried fresh coals
from the bowels of the coal-box, hung the newspaper to air upon the
fender, put the chair ready, and the screen in its place, and was round
upon his heel on the instant of Mr Dombey’s entrance, to take his
great-coat and hat, and hang them up. Then Perch took the newspaper,
and gave it a turn or two in his hands before the fire, and laid it,
deferentially, at Mr Dombey’s elbow. And so little objection had Perch
to being deferential in the last degree, that if he might have laid
himself at Mr Dombey’s feet, or might have called him by some such
title as used to be bestowed upon the Caliph Haroun Alraschid, he would
have been all the better pleased.
As this honour would have been an innovation and an experiment, Perch
was fain to content himself by expressing as well as he could, in his
manner, You are the light of my Eyes. You are the Breath of my Soul.
You are the commander of the Faithful Perch! With this imperfect
happiness to cheer him, he would shut the door softly, walk away on
tiptoe, and leave his great chief to be stared at, through a
dome-shaped window in the leads, by ugly chimney-pots and backs of
houses, and especially by the bold window of a hair-cutting saloon on a
first floor, where a waxen effigy, bald as a Mussulman in the morning,
and covered, after eleven o’clock in the day, with luxuriant hair and
whiskers in the latest Christian fashion, showed him the wrong side of
its head for ever.
Between Mr Dombey and the common world, as it was accessible through
the medium of the outer office—to which Mr Dombey’s presence in his own
room may be said to have struck like damp, or cold air—there were two
degrees of descent. Mr Carker in his own office was the first step; Mr
Morfin, in his own office, was the second. Each of these gentlemen
occupied a little chamber like a bath-room, opening from the passage
outside Mr Dombey’s door. Mr Carker, as Grand Vizier, inhabited the
room that was nearest to the Sultan. Mr Morfin, as an officer of
inferior state, inhabited the room that was nearest to the clerks.
The gentleman last mentioned was a cheerful-looking, hazel-eyed elderly
bachelor: gravely attired, as to his upper man, in black; and as to his
legs, in pepper-and-salt colour. His dark hair was just touched here
and there with specks of gray, as though the tread of Time had splashed
it; and his whiskers were already white. He had a mighty respect for Mr
Dombey, and rendered him due homage; but as he was of a genial temper
himself, and never wholly at his ease in that stately presence, he was
disquieted by no jealousy of the many conferences enjoyed by Mr Carker,
and felt a secret satisfaction in having duties to discharge, which
rarely exposed him to be singled out for such distinction. He was a
great musical amateur in his way—after business; and had a paternal
affection for his violoncello, which was once in every week transported
from Islington, his place of abode, to a certain club-room hard by the
Bank, where quartettes of the most tormenting and excruciating nature
were executed every Wednesday evening by a private party.
Mr Carker was a gentleman thirty-eight or forty years old, of a florid
complexion, and with two unbroken rows of glistening teeth, whose
regularity and whiteness were quite distressing. It was impossible to
escape the observation of them, for he showed them whenever he spoke;
and bore so wide a smile upon his countenance (a smile, however, very
rarely, indeed, extending beyond his mouth), that there was something
in it like the snarl of a cat. He affected a stiff white cravat, after
the example of his principal, and was always closely buttoned up and
tightly dressed. His manner towards Mr Dombey was deeply conceived and
perfectly expressed. He was familiar with him, in the very extremity of
his sense of the distance between them. “Mr Dombey, to a man in your
position from a man in mine, there is no show of subservience
compatible with the transaction of business between us, that I should
think sufficient. I frankly tell you, Sir, I give it up altogether. I
feel that I could not satisfy my own mind; and Heaven knows, Mr Dombey,
you can afford to dispense with the endeavour.” If he had carried these
words about with him printed on a placard, and had constantly offered
it to Mr Dombey’s perusal on the breast of his coat, he could not have
been more explicit than he was.
This was Carker the Manager. Mr Carker the Junior, Walter’s friend, was
his brother; two or three years older than he, but widely removed in
station. The younger brother’s post was on the top of the official
ladder; the elder brother’s at the bottom. The elder brother never
gained a stave, or raised his foot to mount one. Young men passed above
his head, and rose and rose; but he was always at the bottom. He was
quite resigned to occupy that low condition: never complained of it:
and certainly never hoped to escape from it.
“How do you do this morning?” said Mr Carker the Manager, entering Mr
Dombey’s room soon after his arrival one day: with a bundle of papers
in his hand.
“How do you do, Carker?” said Mr Dombey.
“Coolish!” observed Carker, stirring the fire.
“Rather,” said Mr Dombey.
“Any news of the young gentleman who is so important to us all?” asked
Carker, with his whole regiment of teeth on parade.
“Yes—not direct news—I hear he’s very well,” said Mr Dombey. Who had
come from Brighton over-night. But no one knew It.
“Very well, and becoming a great scholar, no doubt?” observed the
Manager.
“I hope so,” returned Mr Dombey.
“Egad!” said Mr Carker, shaking his head, “Time flies!”
“I think so, sometimes,” returned Mr Dombey, glancing at his newspaper.
“Oh! You! You have no reason to think so,” observed Carker. “One who
sits on such an elevation as yours, and can sit there, unmoved, in all
seasons—hasn’t much reason to know anything about the flight of time.
It’s men like myself, who are low down and are not superior in
circumstances, and who inherit new masters in the course of Time, that
have cause to look about us. I shall have a rising sun to worship,
soon.”
“Time enough, time enough, Carker!” said Mr Dombey, rising from his
chair, and standing with his back to the fire. “Have you anything there
for me?”
“I don’t know that I need trouble you,” returned Carker, turning over
the papers in his hand. “You have a committee today at three, you
know.”
“And one at three, three-quarters,” added Mr Dombey.
“Catch you forgetting anything!” exclaimed Carker, still turning over
his papers. “If Mr Paul inherits your memory, he’ll be a troublesome
customer in the House. One of you is enough.”
“You have an accurate memory of your own,” said Mr Dombey.
“Oh! I!” returned the manager. “It’s the only capital of a man like
me.”
Mr Dombey did not look less pompous or at all displeased, as he stood
leaning against the chimney-piece, surveying his (of course
unconscious) clerk, from head to foot. The stiffness and nicety of Mr
Carker’s dress, and a certain arrogance of manner, either natural to
him or imitated from a pattern not far off, gave great additional
effect to his humility. He seemed a man who would contend against the
power that vanquished him, if he could, but who was utterly borne down
by the greatness and superiority of Mr Dombey.
“Is Morfin here?” asked Mr Dombey after a short pause, during which Mr
Carker had been fluttering his papers, and muttering little abstracts
of their contents to himself.
“Morfin’s here,” he answered, looking up with his widest and almost
sudden smile; “humming musical recollections—of his last night’s
quartette party, I suppose—through the walls between us, and driving me
half mad. I wish he’d make a bonfire of his violoncello, and burn his
music-books in it.”
“You respect nobody, Carker, I think,” said Mr Dombey.
“No?” inquired Carker, with another wide and most feline show of his
teeth. “Well! Not many people, I believe. I wouldn’t answer perhaps,”
he murmured, as if he were only thinking it, “for more than one.”
A dangerous quality, if real; and a not less dangerous one, if feigned.
But Mr Dombey hardly seemed to think so, as he still stood with his
back to the fire, drawn up to his full height, and looking at his
head-clerk with a dignified composure, in which there seemed to lurk a
stronger latent sense of power than usual.
“Talking of Morfin,” resumed Mr Carker, taking out one paper from the
rest, “he reports a junior dead in the agency at Barbados, and proposes
to reserve a passage in the Son and Heir—she’ll sail in a month or
so—for the successor. You don’t care who goes, I suppose? We have
nobody of that sort here.”
Mr Dombey shook his head with supreme indifference.
“It’s no very precious appointment,” observed Mr Carker, taking up a
pen, with which to endorse a memorandum on the back of the paper. “I
hope he may bestow it on some orphan nephew of a musical friend. It may
perhaps stop his fiddle-playing, if he has a gift that way. Who’s that?
Come in!”
“I beg your pardon, Mr Carker. I didn’t know you were here, Sir,”
answered Walter; appearing with some letters in his hand, unopened, and
newly arrived. “Mr Carker the junior, Sir—”
At the mention of this name, Mr Carker the Manager was or affected to
be, touched to the quick with shame and humiliation. He cast his eyes
full on Mr Dombey with an altered and apologetic look, abased them on
the ground, and remained for a moment without speaking.
“I thought, Sir,” he said suddenly and angrily, turning on Walter,
“that you had been before requested not to drag Mr Carker the Junior
into your conversation.”
“I beg your pardon,” returned Walter. “I was only going to say that Mr
Carker the Junior had told me he believed you were gone out, or I
should not have knocked at the door when you were engaged with Mr
Dombey. These are letters for Mr Dombey, Sir.”
“Very well, Sir,” returned Mr Carker the Manager, plucking them sharply
from his hand. “Go about your business.”
But in taking them with so little ceremony, Mr Carker dropped one on
the floor, and did not see what he had done; 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 fell,” returned the other, “who set forward,
on his way, a boy like him, and missed his footing more and more, and
slipped a little and a little lower; and went on stumbling still, until
he fell headlong and found himself below a shattered man. Think what I
suffered, when I watched that boy.”
“You have only yourself to thank for it,” returned the brother.
“Only myself,” he assented with a sigh. “I don’t seek to divide the
blame or shame.”
“You have divided the shame,” James Carker muttered through his teeth.
And, through so many and such close teeth, he could mutter well.
“Ah, James,” returned his brother, speaking for the first time in an
accent of reproach, and seeming, by the sound of his voice, to have
covered his face with his hands, “I have been, since then, a useful
foil to you. You have trodden on me freely in your climbing up. Don’t
spurn me with your heel!”
A silence ensued. After a time, Mr Carker the Manager was heard
rustling among his papers, as if he had resolved to bring the interview
to a conclusion. At the same time his brother withdrew nearer to the
door.
“That’s all,” he said. “I watched him with such trembling and such
fear, as was some little punishment to me, until he passed the place
where I first fell; and then, though I had been his father, I believe I
never could have thanked God more devoutly. I didn’t dare to warn him,
and advise him; but if I had seen direct cause, I would have shown him
my example. I was afraid to be seen speaking with him, lest it should
be thought I did him harm, and tempted him to evil, and corrupted him:
or lest I really should. There may be such contagion in me; I don’t
know. Piece out my history, in connexion with young Walter Gay, and
what he has made me feel; and think of me more leniently, James, if you
can.”
With these words he came out to where Walter was standing. He turned a
little paler when he saw him there, and paler yet when Walter caught
him by the hand, and said in a whisper:
“Mr Carker, pray let me thank you! Let me say how much I feel for you!
How sorry I am, to have been the unhappy cause of all this! How I
almost look upon you now as my protector and guardian! How very, very
much, I feel obliged to you and pity you!” said Walter, squeezing both
his hands, and hardly knowing, in his agitation, what he did or said.
Mr Morfin’s room being close at hand and empty, and the door wide open,
they moved thither by one accord: the passage being seldom free from
someone passing to or fro. When they were there, and Walter saw in Mr
Carker’s face some traces of the emotion within, he almost felt as if
he had never seen the face before; it was so greatly changed.
“Walter,” he said, laying his hand on his shoulder. “I am far removed
from you, and may I ever be. Do you know what I am?”
“What you are!” appeared to hang on Walter’s lips, as he regarded him
attentively.
“It was begun,” said Carker, “before my twenty-first birthday—led up
to, long before, but not begun till near that time. I had robbed them
when I came of age. I robbed them afterwards. Before my twenty-second
birthday, it was all found out; and then, Walter, from all men’s
society, I died.”
Again his last few words hung trembling upon Walter’s lips, but he
could neither utter them, nor any of his own.
“The House was very good to me. May Heaven reward the old man for his
forbearance! This one, too, his son, who was then newly in the Firm,
where I had held great trust! I was called into that room which is now
his—I have never entered it since—and came out, what you know me. For
many years I sat in my present seat, alone as now, but then a known and
recognised example to the rest. They were all merciful to me, and I
lived. Time has altered that part of my poor expiation; and I think,
except the three heads of the House, there is no one here who knows my
story rightly. Before the little boy grows up, and has it told to him,
my corner may be vacant. I would rather that it might be so! This is
the only change to me since that day, when I left all youth, and hope,
and good men’s company, behind me in that room. God bless you, Walter!
Keep you, and all dear to you, in honesty, or strike them dead!”
Some recollection of his trembling from head to foot, as if with
excessive cold, and of his bursting into tears, was all that Walter
could add to this, when he tried to recall exactly what had passed
between them.
When Walter saw him next, he was bending over his desk in his old
silent, drooping, humbled way. Then, observing him at his work, and
feeling how resolved he evidently was that no further intercourse
should arise between them, and thinking again and again on all he had
seen and heard that morning in so short a time, in connexion with the
history of both the Carkers, Walter could hardly believe that he was
under orders for the West Indies, and would soon be lost to Uncle Sol,
and Captain Cuttle, and to glimpses few and far between of Florence
Dombey—no, he meant Paul—and to all he loved, and liked, and looked
for, in his daily life.
But it was true, and the news had already penetrated to the outer
office; for while he sat with a heavy heart, pondering on these things,
and resting his head upon his arm, Perch the messenger, descending from
his mahogany bracket, and jogging his elbow, begged his pardon, but
wished to say in his ear, Did he think he could arrange to send home to
England a jar of preserved Ginger, cheap, for Mrs Perch’s own eating,
in the course of her recovery from her next confinement?