Dombey and Son

"Florence!" said Walter, passionately, "I am hurried on to say, what I thought, but a few moments ago, nothing could have forced from my lips. If I had been prosperous; if I had any means or hope of being one day able to restore you to a station near your own: I would have told you that there was one name you might bestow upon me-a right above all others, to protect and cherish you that I was worthy of in nothing but the love and honor that I bore you, and in my whole heart being yours. I would have told you that it was the only claim that you could

and dare assive me to defend and guard you, which I dare accept

but that if I had that right, I would regard it as a trust so precious and so priceless, that the undivided truth and fervor of my life would poorly acknowledge its worth."

The head was still bent down, the tears still falling, and the bosom swelling with its sobs.

"Dear Florence! Dearest Florence! whom I called so in my thoughts. before I could consider how presumptuous and wild it was. One last time let me call you by your own dear name, and touch this gentle hand in token of your sisterly forgetfulness of what I have said."

She raised her head, and spoke to him with such a solemn sweetness in her eyes; with such a calm, bright, placid smile shining on him through her tears; with such a low, soft tremble in her frame and voice; that the innermost chords of his heart were touched, and his sight was dim as he listened.

"No, Walter, I cannot forget it. I would not forget it, for the world. Are you are you very poor?"

"I am but a wanderer," said Walter, "making voyages to live, across the sea. That is my calling now."

"Are you soon going away again, Walter?"

Very soon."

She sat looking at him for a moment; then timidly put her trembling hand in his.

"If you will take me for your wife, Walter, I will love you dearly. If you will let me go with you, Walter, I will go to the world's end without fear. I can give up nothing for you-I have nothing to resign, and no one to forsake; but all my love and life shall be devoted to you, and with my last breath I will breathe your name to God if I have sense and memory left."

He caught her to his heart, and laid her cheek against his own, and now, no more repulsed, no more forlorn, she wept, indeed, upon the breast of her dear lover.

Blessed Sunday Bells, ringing so tranquilly in their entranced and happy ears! Blessed Sunday, peace and quiet, harmonizing with the calmness in their souls, and making holy air around them!-Blessed twilight stealing on, and shading her so soothingly and gravely, as she falls asleep, like a hushed child, upon the bosom she has clung to!

Oh load of love and trustfulness that lies so lightly there! Ay, look down on the closed eyes, Walter, with a proudly tender gaze; for in all the wide world they seek but thee now-only thee!

The Captain remained in the little parlor until it was quite dark. He took the chair on which Walter had been sitting, and looked up at the skylight, until the day, by little and little, faded away, and the stars

peeped down. He lighted a candle, lighted a pipe, smoked it out, and wondered what on earth was going on up-stairs, and why they didn't

call him to tea.

Florence came to his side while he was in the height of his wonder

ment.

"Ay! lady lass!" said the Captain." Why, you and Wal'r have had a long spell o' talk, my beauty."

Florence put her little hand round one of the great buttons of his coat, and said, looking down into his face:

"Dear Captain, I want you to tell me something, if you please." The Captain raised his head pretty smartly, to hear what it was. Catching by this means a more distinct view of Florence, he pushed back his chair, and himself with it, as far as they could go.

"What! Heart's Delight!" cried the Captain, suddenly elated. "is it that ? "

"Yes!" said Florence, eagerly.

"Wal'r! Husband! THAT?" roared the Captain, tossing up his glazed hat into the skylight.

"Yes!" cried Florence, laughing and crying together.

The Captain immediately hugged her; and then, picking up the glazed hat and putting it on, drew her arm through his, and conducted her up stairs again; where he felt that the great joke of his life was now to be made.

"What, Wal'r, my lad!" said the Captain, looking in at the door, with his face like an amiable warming-pan. "So there an't no other character, an't there?"

He had like to have suffocated himself with this pleasantry, which he repeated at least forty times during tea; polishing his radiant face with the sleeve of his coat, and dabbing his head all over with his pockethandkerchief, in the intervals. But he was not without a graver source of enjoyment to fall back upon, when so disposed, for he was repeat edly heard to say in an under tone, as he looked with ineffable delight at Walter and Florence:

"Ed'ard Cuttle, my lad, you never shaped a better course in your life, than when you made that there little property over, jintly!"

CHAPTER LI.

MR. DOMBEY AND THE WORLD.

WHAT is the proud man doing, while the days go by? Does he ever think of his daughter, or wonder where she is gone? Does he suppose she has come home, and is leading her old life in the weary house? No one can answer for him. He has never uttered her name, since. His household dread him too much to approach a subject on which he is resolutely dumb; and the only person who dare question him, he silences immediately.

"My dear Paul!" murmurs his sister, sidling into the room, on the

day of Florence's departure, "your wife! that upstart woman! Is it possible that what I hear confusedly, is true, and that this is her return for your unparalleled devotion to her; extending, I am sure, even to the sacrifice of your own relations, to her caprices and haughtiness! My poor brother!"

With this speech, feelingly reminiscent of her not having been asked to dinner on the day of the first party, Mrs. Chick makes great use of her pocket handkerchief, and falls on Mr. Dombey's neck. But Mr. Dombey frigidly lifts her off, and hands her to a chair.

"I thank you, Louisa," he says, "for this mark of your affection; but desire that our conversation may refer to any other subject. When I bewail my fate, Louisa, or express myself as being in want of consolation, you can offer it, if you will have the goodness."

แ My dear Paul," rejoins his sister, with her handkerchief to her face, and shaking her head, "I know your great spirit, and will say no more upon a theme so painful and revolting;" on the heads of which two adjectives, Mrs. Chick visits scathing indignation; "but pray let me ask you though I dread to hear something that will shock and distress me that unfortunate child Florence-"

Louisa!" says her brother sternly, "silence! Not another word of this!"

Mrs. Chick can only shake her head, and use her handkerchief, and moan over degenerate Dombeys, who are no Dombeys. But whether Florence has been inculpated in the flight of Edith, or has followed her, or has done too much, or too little, or anything, or nothing, she has not the least idea.

He goes on, without deviation, keeping his thoughts and feelings close within his own breast, and imparting them to no one. He makes no search for his daughter. He may think that she is with his sister, or that she is under his own roof. He may think of her constantly, or he may never think about her. It is all one for any sign he makes.

But this is sure; he does not think that he has lost her. He has no suspicion of the truth. He has lived too long shut up in his towering supremacy, seeing her, a patient, gentle creature, in the path below it, to have any fear of that. Shaken as he is by his disgrace, he is not yet humbled to the level earth. The root is broad and deep, and in the course of years its fibres have spread out and gathered nourish ment from everything around it.' The tree is struck, but not down.

Though he hide the world within him from the world without-which he believes has but one purpose for the time, and that, to watch him eagerly wherever he goes-he cannot hide those rebel traces of it, which escape in hollow eyes and cheeks, a haggard forehead, and a moody, brooding air.-Impenetrable as before, he is still an altered man; and, proud as ever, he is humbled, or those marks would not be there.

The world. What the world thinks of him, how it looks at him, what it sees in him, and what it says-that is the haunting demon of his mind. It is everywhere where he is; and, worse than that, it is every where where he is not. It comes out with him among his servants, and yet he leaves it whispering behind; he sees it pointing after him in the street; it is waiting for him in his counting-house; it leers

you were able, then, in your generosity, to hide from me that you knew it too, you cannot do so now, although you try as generously as before. You do. I thank you for it, Walter, deeply, truly; but you cannot suc ceed. You have suffered too much in your own hardships, and in those of your dearest relation, quite to overlook the innocent cause of all the peril and affliction that has befallen you. You cannot quite forget me in that character, and we can be brother and sister no longer. But, dear Walter, do not think that I complain of you in this. I might have known it ought to have known it-but forgot it in my joy. All I hope is that you may think of me less irksomely when this feeling is no more a secret one; and all I ask is, Walter, in the name of the poor child who was your sister once, that you will not struggle with yourself, and pain yourself, for my sake, now that I know all !"

Walter had looked upon her while she said this, with a face so full of wonder and amazement that it had room for nothing else. Now he caught up the hand that touched his, so entreatingly, and held it between his own.

"Oh, Miss Dombey," he said, " is it possible that while I have been suffering so much, in striving with my sense of what is due to you, and must be rendered to you, I have made you suffer what your words dieclose to me. Never, never, before Heaven, have I thought of you bet as the single, bright, pure, blessed recollection of my boyhood and my youth. Never have I from the first, and never shall I to the last, regard your part in my life, but as something sacred, never to be lightly thought of, never to be esteemed enough, never, until death, to be forgotten. And to see you look, and hear you speak, as you did on that night when we parted, is happiness to me that there are no words to utter; and to be loved and trusted as your brother, is the next great gift I could receive and prize!"

"Walter," said Florence, looking at him earnestly, but with a chang ing face, "what is that which is due to me, and must be rendered to m at the sacrifice of all this?"

"Respect," said Walter, in a low tone, "Reverence."

The color dawned in her face, and she timidly and thoughtfully withdrew her hand; still looking at him with unabated earnestness.

"I have not a brother's right," said Walter. "I have not a brother's claim. I left a child. I find a woman."

The color overspread her face. She made a gesture as if of entreaty that he would say no more, and her face dropped upon her hands. They were both silent for a time; she weeping.

"I owe it to a heart so trusting, pure, and good," said Walter, "even to tear myself from it, though I rend my own. How dare I say it is my sister's!"

She was weeping still.

"If you had been happy; surrounded as you should be by loving and admiring friends, and by all that makes the station you were born to, enviable," said Walter; "and if you had called me brother, then, in your affectionate remembrance of the past, I could have answered to the name from my distant place, with no inward assurance that I wronged your spotless truth by doing so. But here and now!—" "Oh thank you, thank you, Walier! Forgive my having wronged you so much. I had no one to drise me. I am quite alone."

"Florence!" said Walter, passionately, "I am hurried on to say, what I thought, but a few monients ago, nothing could have forced from my lips. If I had been prosperous; if I had any means or hope of being one day able to restore you to a station near your own: I would have told you that there was one name you might bestow upon me—a right above all others, to protect and cherish you that I was worthy of in nothing but the love and honor that I bore you, and in my whole heart being yours. I would have told you that it was the only claim that you could give me to defend and guard you, which I dare accept. and dare assert but that if I had that right, I would regard it as a trust so precious and so priceless, that the undivided truth and fervor of my life would poorly acknowledge its worth."

-The head was still bent down, the tears still falling, and the bosom swelling with its sobs.

"Dear Florence! Dearest Florence! whom I called so in my thoughts before I could consider how presumptuous and wild it was. One last time let me call you by your own dear name, and touch this gentle hand in token of your sisterly forgetfulness of what I have said."

"No, Walter, I cannot forget it. I would not forget it, for the world. Are you are you very poor?"

"I am but a wanderer," said Walter, "making voyages to live, across the sea. That is my calling now."

"Are you soon going away again, Walter ? "

"Very soon."

She sat looking at him for a moment; then timidly put her trembling hand in his.

If you will take me for your wife, Walter, I will love you dearly. If you will let me go with you, Walter, I will go to the world's end without fear. I can give up nothing for you-I have nothing to resign, and no one to forsake; but all my love and life shall be devoted to you, and with my last breath I will breathe your name to God if I have sense and memory left."

He caught her to his heart, and laid her cheek against his own, and now, no more repulsed, no more forlorn, she wept, indeed, upon the breast of her dear lover.

Oh load of love and trustfulness that lies so lightly there! Ay, look down on the closed eyes, Walter, with a proudly tender gaze; for in all the wide world they seek but thee now-only thee!

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