Page:Dombey and Son.djvu/324

260 reached the bower of Cleopatra, he had the good fortune to find his Princess on her usual sofa, languishing over a cup of coffee, with the room so darkened and shaded for her more luxurious repose, that Withers, who was in attendance on her, loomed like a phantom page.

"What insupportable creature is this, coming in?" said Mrs. Skewton, "I cannot hear it. Go away, whoever you are!"

"You have not the heart to banish J. B., Ma’am!" said the Major halting midway, to remonstrate, with his cane over his shoulder.

"Oh it’s you, is it? On second thoughts, you may enter," observed Cleopatra.

The Major entered accordingly, and advancing to the sofa pressed her charming hand to his lips.

"Sit down," said Cleopatra, listlessly waving her fan, "a long way off. Don’t come too near me, for I am frightfully faint and sensitive this morning, and you smell of the Sun. You are absolutely tropical."

"By George, Ma’am," said the Major, "the time has been when Joseph Bagstock has been grilled and blistered by the Sun; then time was, when he was forced, Ma’am, into such full blow, by high hothouse heat in the West Indies, that he was known as the Flower. A man never heard of Bagstock, Ma’am, in those days; he heard of the Flower—the Flower of Ours. The Flower may have faded, more or less, Ma’am," observed the Major, dropping into a much nearer chair than had been indicated by his cruel Divinity, "but it is a tough plant yet, and constant as the evergreen."

Here the Major, under cover of the dark room, shut up one eye, rolled his head like a Harlequin, and, in his great self-satisfaction, perhaps went nearer to the confines of apoplexy than he had ever gone before.

"Where is Mrs. Granger?" inquired Cleopatra of her page.

Withers believed she was in her own room.

"Very well," said Mrs. Skewton. "Go away, and shut the door. I am engaged."

As Withers disappeared, Mrs. Skewton turned her head languidly towards the Major, without otherwise moving, and asked him how his friend was.

"Dombey, Ma’am," returned the Major, with a facetious gurgling in his throat, "is as well as a man in his condition can be. His condition is a desperate one, Ma’am. He is touched, is Dombey! Touched!" cried the Major. "He is bayonetted through the body."

Cleopatra cast a sharp look at the Major, that contrasted forcibly with the affected drawl in which she presently said:

"Major Bagstock, although I know but little of the world,—nor can I really regret my experience, for I fear it is a false place, full of withering conventionalities: where Nature is but little regarded, and where the music of the heart, and the gushing of the soul, and all that sort of thing, which is so truly poetical, is seldom heard,—I cannot misunderstand your meaning. There is an allusion to Edith—to my extremely dear child," said Mrs. Skewton, tracing the outline of her eyebrows with her forefinger, "in your words, to which the tenderest of chords vibrates excessively."

"Bluntness, Ma’am," returned the Major, "has ever been the characteristic of the Bagstock breed. You are right. Joe admits it."