“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 upstairs 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 ain’t NO other character, ain’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 pocket-handkerchief, in the intervals. But he was not without a graver source of enjoyment to fall back upon, when so disposed, for he was repeatedly heard to say in an undertone, 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 dares 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.