“The eldest on ’em, Sir,” said Toodle, with a smile. “It ain’t a common name. Sermuchser that when he was took to church the gen’lm’n said, it wamm’t a chris’en one, and he couldn’t give it. But we always calls him Biler just the same. For we don’t mean no harm. Not we.”
“Do you mean to say, Man,” inquired Mr Dombey; looking at him with marked displeasure, “that you have called a child after a boiler?”
“No, no, Sir,” returned Toodle, with a tender consideration for his mistake. “I should hope not! No, Sir. Arter a BILER Sir. The Steamingine was a’most as good as a godfather to him, and so we called him Biler, don’t you see!”
As the last straw breaks the laden camel’s back, this piece of information crushed the sinking spirits of Mr Dombey. He motioned his child’s foster-father to the door, who departed by no means unwillingly: and then turning the key, paced up and down the room in solitary wretchedness.
It would be harsh, and perhaps not altogether true, to say of him that he felt these rubs and gratings against his pride more keenly than he had felt his wife’s death: but certainly they impressed that event upon him with new force, and communicated to it added weight and bitterness. It was a rude shock to his sense of property in his child, that these people—the mere dust of the earth, as he thought them—should be necessary to him; and it was natural that in proportion as he felt disturbed by it, he should deplore the occurrence which had made them so. For all his starched, impenetrable dignity and composure, he wiped blinding tears from his eyes as he paced up and down his room; and often said, with an emotion of which he would not, for the world, have had a witness, “Poor little fellow!”
It may have been characteristic of Mr Dombey’s pride, that he pitied himself through the child. Not poor me. Not poor widower, confiding by constraint in the wife of an ignorant Hind who has been working “mostly underground” all his life, and yet at whose door Death had never knocked, and at whose poor table four sons daily sit—but poor little fellow!
Those words being on his lips, it occurred to him—and it is an instance of the strong attraction with which his hopes and fears and all his thoughts were tending to one centre—that a great temptation was being placed in this woman’s way. Her infant was a boy too. Now, would it be possible for her to change them?
Though he was soon satisfied that he had dismissed the idea as romantic and unlikely—though possible, there was no denying—he could not help pursuing it so far as to entertain within himself a picture of what his condition would be, if he should discover such an imposture when he was grown old. Whether a man so situated would be able to pluck away the result of so many years of usage, confidence, and belief, from the impostor, and endow a stranger with it?
But it was idle speculating thus. It couldn’t happen. In a moment afterwards he determined that it could, but that such women were constantly observed, and had no opportunity given them for the accomplishment of such a design, even when they were so wicked as to entertain it. In another moment, he was remembering how few such cases seemed to have ever happened. In another moment he was wondering whether they ever happened and were not found out.
As his unusual emotion subsided, these misgivings gradually melted away, though so much of their shadow remained behind, that he was constant in his resolution to look closely after Richards himself, without appearing to do so. Being now in an easier frame of mind, he regarded the woman’s station as rather an advantageous circumstance than otherwise, by placing, in itself, a broad distance between her and the child, and rendering their separation easy and natural. Thence he passed to the contemplation of the future glories of Dombey and Son, and dismissed the memory of his wife, for the time being, with a tributary sigh or two.