The story of Paul Dombey and his sister Florence is one of the sweetest
and most pathetic stories Charles Dickens ever told. One can scarcely
think of these children--motherless (the mother died when Paul was
born), and Florence worse than fatherless, for her father had never
forgiven her birth six years before that of the wished-for son, and had
never given her a kind word or look, living in the great, comfortless,
lonely Dombey house, and finding all their happiness in each
other--without tears. For it was to the sister so cruelly neglected and
despised that Paul turned from the very first. It was she who on the day
of his christening won from him his first laugh. "As she hid behind her
nurse, he followed her with his eyes, and when she peeped out with a
merry cry to him, he sprang up and crowed lustily, laughing outright
when she ran in upon him, and seeming to fondle her curls with his tiny
hands while she smothered him with kisses." And as he grew out of
babyhood, much as it displeased the father (who would have had his idol
care for no one but himself), little Paul was never content save when
his sister was by his side.
A pale, delicate, old-fashioned child he proved to be, this boy whom Mr.
Dombey proudly thought would in years to come be his partner in the
immense business of which he had been the only head for twenty years,
but which then would be, as in old times, "Dombey & Son"; and in spite
of all the care that money could procure for him, he gradually grew
weaker and weaker. Mr. Dombey believed in "money," and in but little
else, and would have taught his little son also to believe in its
all-sufficient power, but the child was wiser than the father. "If it's
a good thing," said he, "and can do anything, I wonder why it didn't
save me my mamma; and it can't make me quite well and strong either." At
last it was decided that he should be sent to the sea-side, in hopes
that the fresh sea-air would bring the health and strength that could
not be found at home. And with him, of course, went Florence.
"But the boy remaining as weak as ever, a little carriage was got for
him, in which he could lie at his ease, and be wheeled to the sea-shore.
Consistent in his odd tastes, the child set aside the ruddy-faced lad
who was proposed as a drawer of this carriage, and selected instead his
grandfather--a weazen old crab-faced man in a suit of battered oil-skin,
who had got tough and stringy from long pickling in salt-water. With
this notable attendant to pull him along, and Florence walking by his
side, he went down to the margin of the ocean every day. 'Go away, if
you please,' he would say to any child that came to bear him company.
'Thank you, but I don't want you.' Then he would turn his head and watch
the child away, and say to Florence, 'We don't want any others, do
we?--kiss me, Floy.' His favorite spot was a lonely one far away from
most loungers; and with Florence sitting by his side at work, or reading
to him, or talking to him, and the wind blowing on his face, and the
water coming up among the wheels of his bed, he wanted nothing more.
"One time he fell asleep, and slept quietly for a long time. Awaking
suddenly, he listened, started up, and sat listening. Florence asked him
what he thought he heard. 'I want to know what it says,' he answered,
looking steadily into her face. 'The sea, Floy--what is it that it keeps
on saying?'
"She told him it was only the noise of the rolling waves.
"'Yes, yes,' he said. 'But I know that they are always saying
something--always the same thing. What place is that over there?' He
rose up, looking eagerly at the horizon.
"She told him that there was another country opposite; but he said he
didn't mean that: he meant farther away--farther away."
There was a strange, weird charm for little Paul in the ever-restless
ocean, and the winds that came he knew not whence and went he knew not
whither.
"If you had to die," he said once, looking up into the face of his odd,
shy friend Mr. Toots, "don't you think you would rather die on a
moonlight night, when the sky was quite clear, and the wind blowing, as
it did last night? Not blowing, at least, but sounding in the air like
the sea sounds in the shells. It was a beautiful night. When I had
listened to the water for a long time, I got up and looked out. There
was a boat over there, in the full light of the moon--a boat with a sail
like an arm, all silver. It went away into the distance, and it seemed
to beckon--to beckon me to come."
Poor little Paul! It was not long before he obeyed the fancied summons,
for soon after this visit to the sea-shore the gentle, loving little
fellow died--died with his arms about his sister's neck; and almost his
last words were, as he smiled at his mother's spirit waiting to bear him
to heaven: "Mamma is like you, Floy. I know her by the face."