At this meal they arranged their daily habits. The Major was to take the responsibility of ordering everything to eat and drink; and they were to have late breakfast together every morning, and a late dinner together every day. They occupied, no doubt, a suite of the private rooms referred to above, for there is no reference to the large dining-room, nor would it have suited the personal and special requirements of the two men and the friends they brought there.
It will be remembered that, whilst these two friends were taking a constitutional, they encountered the Major’s acquaintances, Mrs. Skewton and her daughter Edith, and Dombey was formally introduced. On taking their departure from the fair enchantress, the Major volunteered the fact that he was “staying at the Royal Hotel with his friend Dombey,” and invited the ladies to join them “one evening when you are good,” as he put it to Mrs. Skewton.
Having met once or twice in the pump-room and elsewhere, and the men having called upon the ladies, the latter were invited to breakfast at the Royal Hotel, prior to a drive to Kenilworth and Warwick. In the meantime, Carker had arrived to transact some business with his master, and in the evening the three men dined together. At a fitting moment the wine was consecrated “to a divinity whom Joe is proud to know, and at a distance humbly and reverently to admire. Edith,” went on the Major, “is her name; angelic Edith!” “Angelic Edith,” cried the smiling Carker, “Edith, by all means,” said Mr. Dombey. And thus, in a private dining-room of the Royal Hotel was pledged the toast of Dombey’s future wife—the second Mrs. Dombey.
The breakfast was punctually prepared next morning, and Dombey, Bagstock and Carker excitedly awaited the ladies’ arrival. A pleasant time ensued and ultimately all set out on the little trip which proved so momentous a one for Mr. Dombey. For had he not made an appointment with Edith for the next day, “for a purpose,” as he told Mrs. Skewton? At any rate, the three men returned to the Royal Hotel in good spirits, the Major being in such high glee that he cried out, “Damme, sir, old Joe has a mind to propose an alteration in the name of the hotel, and that it should be called the Three Jolly Bachelors in honour of ourselves and Carker.”
After keeping his appointment with Edith, and having been accepted, Mr. Dombey and the Major left Leamington, and the Royal Hotel has no further place in the story.
When Mr. Toots, having come into a portion of his worldly wealth and furnished his choice set of apartments, determined to apply himself to the science of life, he engaged the Game Chicken to instruct him in “the cultivation of those gentle arts which refine and humanise existence.” The Game Chicken, we are informed, was always to be heard of at the bar of the Black Badger. Towards the end of the book, when Toots and the Chicken part company, the latter seems to have chosen another house of call. “I’m afore the public, I’m to be heard on at the bar of the Little Helephant....” Whether these two taverns existed, or where, history does not relate.
Cousin Feenix, on his arrival from abroad expressly to attend Mr. Dombey’s wedding, stayed at Long’s Hotel in Bond Street. No incident of any great moment takes place within its walls, except that Lord Feenix slept and was shaved there.
Long’s Hotel does not now exist, but was a fashionable and well-known house in those days when Lord Feenix was a man about town. It stood at the junction of Clifford Street and Bond Street, and was a square-standing corner building.
It was frequented by the leading lights of the aristocracy and of the literary world in its flourishing days, and it is recorded that Byron lived there for a time. That he and Sir Walter Scott dined there together on one occasion is an outstanding fact of its history.
From Cousin Feenix’s fashionable hotel we turn to a very different kind of house in the King’s Arms, Balls Pond way, where Mr. Perch seemed to be a well-known figure. Mr. Perch had an air of feverish lassitude about him that seemed referable to drams, “and which, in fact, might no doubt have been traced to those numerous discoveries of himself in the bars of public-houses.” The King’s Arms was one of these, in whose parlour he met the man “with milintary frogs,” who took “a little obserwation” which he let drop about Carker and Mrs. Dombey, and worked it up in print “in a most surprising manner” in the Sunday paper, a journalistic method that apparently is not an invention of modern times.