The voice in that last sentence is Paul's rather than the author's, whereas the first sentence seems to belong to both. The effect is to combine a sentimental reassurance from author to reader about human kindness with the child's surprise that people should take so much notice of him.
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In the deathbed scene itself there is nothing but goodwill. Mrs. Pipchin has lost her sharpness; Mr. Dombey has lost his sternness and sends for the old nurse, whom he had dismissed, and for Walter, whom he dislikes, simply because Paul asks for them. Clearly there is a parallel between the smoothing of the illness and the smoothing of the people: a sick child makes everyone better natured, and as a kind of reward this mollifies, even removes, the pangs of sickness.
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This is even more true of a child death that is seldom noticed, that of Lucie Manette's son in
A Tale of Two Cities
. That boy lives for only one paragraph and is never named:
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 | | Even when golden hair, like her own, lay in a halo on a pillow round the worn face of a little boy, and he said, with a radiant smile, "Dear papa and mamma, I am very sorry to leave you both, and to leave my pretty sister; but I am called, and I must go!" those were not tears all of agony that wetted his young mother's cheek, as the spirit departed from her embrace that had been entrusted to it. (Chapter 21)
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Here there is not even any sharpness to be smoothed away. This child is born only to excuse himself with well-bred politeness, and die.
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Nothing here to make the reader weep, only consolation, thrust upon us before there is anything to console us for. The one detail that is striking, when we pause to notice it, is the syntactic hiccup in the last sentence. We would expect "that" to refer to the spirit, and this was no doubt Dickens's intention: the boy, for his brief sojourn on earth, was entrusted to his mother's embrace. But it is, grammatically, more natural to attach "that" to its immediate antecedent, in which case the mother's embrace is entrusted to the boy, who briefly accepted the embrace, and then abandoned her. For all the reassurance, then, the angel did betray herby dying.
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Syntactic effects like this are the main concern of Garrett Stewart's extraordinary book
Death Sentences,
a structuralist study of "styles of dying in British fiction." Stewart describes Paul's waves as "a lulling signifier without a signified," and the fact that what they are saying is obviously death is, for him, less important than the fact that we are never told this: the answer is "elided out entirely, referred away to the unavailable in the
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