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—”