Page:Dombey and Son.djvu/98

64 to stare and whistle. To all other intents and purposes he was alone in Princess’s Place. Miss Tox had ceased to mind what he did. He might have been black as well as blue, and it would have been of no consequence to her.

The perseverance with which she walked out of Princess’s Place to fetch this baby and its nurse, and walked back with them, and walked home with them again, and continually mounted guard over them; and the perseverance with which she nursed it herself, and fed it, and played with it, and froze its young blood with airs upon the harpsichord, was extraordinary. At about this same period too, she was seized with a passion for looking at a certain bracelet; also with a passion for looking at the moon, of which she would take long observations from her chamber window. But whatever she looked at; sun, moon, stars, or bracelet; she looked no more at the Major. And the Major whistled, and stared, and wondered, and dodged about his room, and could make nothing of it.

"You’ll quite win my brother Paul’s heart, and that’s the truth, my dear," said Mrs. Chick, one day. Miss Tox turned pale.

"He grows more like Paul every day," said Mrs. Chick.

Miss Tox returned no other reply than by taking the little Paul in her arms, and making his cockade perfectly flat and limp with her caresses.

"His mother, my dear," said Miss Tox, "whose acquaintance I was to have made through you, does he at all resemble her?"

"Not at all," returned Louisa

"She was—she was pretty, I believe?" faltered Miss Tox.

"Why, poor dear Fanny was interesting," said Mrs. Chick, after some judicial consideration. "Certainly interesting. She had not that air of commanding superiority which one would somehow expect, almost as a matter of course, to find in my brother’s wife; nor had she that strength and vigour of mind which such a man requires."

Miss Tox heaved a deep sigh.

"But she was pleasing:" said Mrs. Chick: "extremely so. And she meant!—oh, dear, how well poor Fanny meant!"

"You Angel!" cried Miss Tox to little Paul. "You Picture of your own Papa!"

If the Major could have known how many hopes and ventures, what a multitude of plans and speculations, rested on that baby head; and could have seen them hovering, in all their heterogeneous confusion and disorder, round the puckered cap of the unconscious little Paul; he might have stared indeed. Then would he have recognised, among the crowd, some few ambitious motes and beams belonging to Miss Tox; then would he perhaps have understood the nature of that lady’s faltering investment in the Dombey Firm.

If the child himself could have awakened in the night, and seen, gathered about his cradle-curtains, faint reflections of the dreams that other people had of him, they might have scared him, with good reason. But he slumbered on, alike unconscious of the kind intentions of Miss Tox, the wonder of the Major, the early sorrows of his sister, and the stern visions of his father; and innocent that any spot of earth contained a Dombey or a Son.