"Dickens, Charles - Combey And Son" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickens Charles)

As he added in one of his hoarse whispers, 'We means to bring up
little Biler to that line,' Mr Dombey inquired haughtily who little
Biler was.

'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 wam'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