CHARLES DICKENS DOMBEY AND SON CHAPTER I Dombey and ...

And the ruined man. How does he pass the hours, alone?
'Let him remember it in that room, years to come!' He did remember it. It
was heavy on his mind now; heavier than all the rest.
'Let him remember it in that room, years to come! The rain that falls upon
the roof, the wind that mourns outside the door, may have foreknowledge in
their melancholy sound. Let him remember it in that room, years to come!'
He did remember it. In the miserable night he thought of it; in the dreary
day, the wretched dawn, the ghostly, memory-haunted twilight. He did
remember it. In agony, in sorrow, in remorse, in despair! 'Papa! papa! Speak
to me, dear papa!' He heard the words again, and saw the face. He saw it
fall upon the trembling hands, and heard the one prolonged low cry go
upward.
He was fallen, never to be raised up any more. For the night of his worldly
ruin there was no to-morrow's sun; for the stain of his domestic shame there
was no purification; nothing, thank Heaven, could bring his dead child back
to life. But that which he might have made so different in all the
Past--which might have made the Past itself so different, though this he
hardly thought of now--that which was his own work, that which he could so
easily have wrought into a blessing, and had set himself so steadily for
years to form into a curse: that was the sharp grief of his soul.
Oh! He did remember it! The rain that fell upon the roof, the wind that
mourned outside the door that night, had had foreknowledge in their
melancholy sound. He knew, now, what he had done. He knew, now, that he had
called down that upon his head, which bowed it lower that the heaviest
stroke of fortune. He knew, now, what it was to be rejected and deserted;
now, when every loving blossom he had withered in his innocent daughter's
heart was snowing down in ashes on him.
He thought of her, as she had been that night when he and his bride came
home. He thought of her as she had been, in all the home-events, of the