shadows of night had gathered so fast, that he did not look about him
when he closed the door, but plodded straight along the street. Nothing
was further from his thoughts than the curious old woman he had
encountered on his previous visit to the same house, when he heard a step
behind him that he knew, and turning, saw her in Rachael’s company.
He saw Rachael first, as he had heard her only.
‘Ah, Rachael, my dear! Missus, thou wi’ her!’
‘Well, and now you are surprised to be sure, and with reason I must say,’
the old woman returned. ‘Here I am again, you see.’
‘But how wi’ Rachael?’ said Stephen, falling into their step, walking
between them, and looking from the one to the other.
‘Why, I come to be with this good lass pretty much as I came to be with
you,’ said the old woman, cheerfully, taking the reply upon herself. ‘My
visiting time is later this year than usual, for I have been rather
troubled with shortness of breath, and so put it off till the weather was
fine and warm. For the same reason I don’t make all my journey in one
day, but divide it into two days, and get a bed to-night at the
Travellers’ Coffee House down by the railroad (a nice clean house), and
go back Parliamentary, at six in the morning. Well, but what has this to
do with this good lass, says you? I’m going to tell you. I have heard
of Mr. Bounderby being married. I read it in the paper, where it looked
grand—oh, it looked fine!’ the old woman dwelt on it with strange
enthusiasm: ‘and I want to see his wife. I have never seen her yet.
Now, if you’ll believe me, she hasn’t come out of that house since noon
to-day. So not to give her up too easily, I was waiting about, a little
last bit more, when I passed close to this good lass two or three times;
and her face being so friendly I spoke to her, and she spoke to me.
There!’ said the old woman to Stephen, ‘you can make all the rest out for
yourself now, a deal shorter than I can, I dare say!’
Once again, Stephen had to conquer an instinctive propensity to dislike
this old woman, though her manner was as honest and simple as a manner
possibly could be. With a gentleness that was as natural to him as he
knew it to be to Rachael, he pursued the subject that interested her in
her old age.
‘Well, missus,’ said he, ‘I ha seen the lady, and she were young and
hansom. Wi’ fine dark thinkin eyes, and a still way, Rachael, as I ha
never seen the like on.’
‘Young and handsome. Yes!’ cried the old woman, quite delighted. ‘As
bonny as a rose! And what a happy wife!’
‘Aye, missus, I suppose she be,’ said Stephen. But with a doubtful
glance at Rachael.
‘Suppose she be? She must be. She’s your master’s wife,’ returned the
old woman.
Stephen nodded assent. ‘Though as to master,’ said he, glancing again at
Rachael, ‘not master onny more. That’s aw enden ’twixt him and me.’
‘Have you left his work, Stephen?’ asked Rachael, anxiously and quickly.
‘Why, Rachael,’ he replied, ‘whether I ha lef’n his work, or whether his
work ha lef’n me, cooms t’ th’ same. His work and me are parted. ’Tis
as weel so—better, I were thinkin when yo coom up wi’ me. It would ha
brought’n trouble upon trouble if I had stayed theer. Haply ’tis a
kindness to monny that I go; haply ’tis a kindness to myseln; anyways it
mun be done. I mun turn my face fro Coketown fur th’ time, and seek a
fort’n, dear, by beginnin fresh.’
‘Where will you go, Stephen?’
‘I donno t’night,’ said he, lifting off his hat, and smoothing his thin
hair with the flat of his hand. ‘But I’m not goin t’night, Rachael, nor
yet t’morrow. ’Tan’t easy overmuch t’ know wheer t’ turn, but a good
heart will coom to me.’
Herein, too, the sense of even thinking unselfishly aided him. Before he
had so much as closed Mr. Bounderby’s door, he had reflected that at
least his being obliged to go away was good for her, as it would save her
from the chance of being brought into question for not withdrawing from
him. Though it would cost him a hard pang to leave her, and though he
could think of no similar place in which his condemnation would not
pursue him, perhaps it was almost a relief to be forced away from the
endurance of the last four days, even to unknown difficulties and
distresses.
So he said, with truth, ‘I’m more leetsome, Rachael, under ’t, than I
could’n ha believed.’ It was not her part to make his burden heavier.
She answered with her comforting smile, and the three walked on together.
Age, especially when it strives to be self-reliant and cheerful, finds
much consideration among the poor. The old woman was so decent and
contented, and made so light of her infirmities, though they had
increased upon her since her former interview with Stephen, that they
both took an interest in her. She was too sprightly to allow of their
walking at a slow pace on her account, but she was very grateful to be
talked to, and very willing to talk to any extent: so, when they came to
their part of the town, she was more brisk and vivacious than ever.
‘Come to my poor place, missus,’ said Stephen, ‘and tak a coop o’ tea.
Rachael will coom then; and arterwards I’ll see thee safe t’ thy
Travellers’ lodgin. ’T may be long, Rachael, ere ever I ha th’ chance o’
thy coompany agen.’
They complied, and the three went on to the house where he lodged. When
they turned into a narrow street, Stephen glanced at his window with a
dread that always haunted his desolate home; but it was open, as he had
left it, and no one was there. The evil spirit of his life had flitted
away again, months ago, and he had heard no more of her since. The only
evidence of her last return now, were the scantier moveables in his room,
and the grayer hair upon his head.
He lighted a candle, set out his little tea-board, got hot water from
below, and brought in small portions of tea and sugar, a loaf, and some
butter from the nearest shop. The bread was new and crusty, the butter
fresh, and the sugar lump, of course—in fulfilment of the standard
testimony of the Coketown magnates, that these people lived like princes,
sir. Rachael made the tea (so large a party necessitated the borrowing
of a cup), and the visitor enjoyed it mightily. It was the first glimpse
of sociality the host had had for many days. He too, with the world a
wide heath before him, enjoyed the meal—again in corroboration of the
magnates, as exemplifying the utter want of calculation on the part of
these people, sir.
‘I ha never thowt yet, missus,’ said Stephen, ‘o’ askin thy name.’
The old lady announced herself as ‘Mrs. Pegler.’
‘A widder, I think?’ said Stephen.
‘Oh, many long years!’ Mrs. Pegler’s husband (one of the best on record)
was already dead, by Mrs. Pegler’s calculation, when Stephen was born.
‘’Twere a bad job, too, to lose so good a one,’ said Stephen. ‘Onny
children?’
Mrs. Pegler’s cup, rattling against her saucer as she held it, denoted
some nervousness on her part. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not now, not now.’
‘Dead, Stephen,’ Rachael softly hinted.
‘I’m sooary I ha spok’n on ’t,’ said Stephen, ‘I ought t’ hadn in my mind
as I might touch a sore place. I—I blame myseln.’
While he excused himself, the old lady’s cup rattled more and more. ‘I
had a son,’ she said, curiously distressed, and not by any of the usual
appearances of sorrow; ‘and he did well, wonderfully well. But he is not
to be spoken of if you please. He is—’ Putting down her cup, she moved
her hands as if she would have added, by her action, ‘dead!’ Then she
said aloud, ‘I have lost him.’
Stephen had not yet got the better of his having given the old lady pain,
when his landlady came stumbling up the narrow stairs, and calling him to
the door, whispered in his ear. Mrs. Pegler was by no means deaf, for
she caught a word as it was uttered.
‘Bounderby!’ she cried, in a suppressed voice, starting up from the
table. ‘Oh hide me! Don’t let me be seen for the world. Don’t let him
come up till I’ve got away. Pray, pray!’ She trembled, and was
excessively agitated; getting behind Rachael, when Rachael tried to
reassure her; and not seeming to know what she was about.
‘But hearken, missus, hearken,’ said Stephen, astonished. ‘’Tisn’t Mr.
Bounderby; ’tis his wife. Yo’r not fearfo’ o’ her. Yo was hey-go-mad
about her, but an hour sin.’
‘But are you sure it’s the lady, and not the gentleman?’ she asked, still
trembling.
‘Certain sure!’
‘Well then, pray don’t speak to me, nor yet take any notice of me,’ said
the old woman. ‘Let me be quite to myself in this corner.’
Stephen nodded; looking to Rachael for an explanation, which she was
quite unable to give him; took the candle, went downstairs, and in a few
moments returned, lighting Louisa into the room. She was followed by the
whelp.
Rachael had risen, and stood apart with her shawl and bonnet in her hand,
when Stephen, himself profoundly astonished by this visit, put the candle
on the table. Then he too stood, with his doubled hand upon the table
near it, waiting to be addressed.
For the first time in her life Louisa had come into one of the dwellings
of the Coketown Hands; for the first time in her life she was face to
face with anything like individuality in connection with them. She knew
of their existence by hundreds and by thousands. She knew what results
in work a given number of them would produce in a given space of time.
She knew them in crowds passing to and from their nests, like ants or
beetles. But she knew from her reading infinitely more of the ways of
toiling insects than of these toiling men and women.
Something to be worked so much and paid so much, and there ended;
something to be infallibly settled by laws of supply and demand;
something that blundered against those laws, and floundered into
difficulty; something that was a little pinched when wheat was dear, and
over-ate itself when wheat was cheap; something that increased at such a
rate of percentage, and yielded such another percentage of crime, and
such another percentage of pauperism; something wholesale, of which vast
fortunes were made; something that occasionally rose like a sea, and did
some harm and waste (chiefly to itself), and fell again; this she knew
the Coketown Hands to be. But, she had scarcely thought more of
separating them into units, than of separating the sea itself into its
component drops.
She stood for some moments looking round the room. From the few chairs,
the few books, the common prints, and the bed, she glanced to the two
women, and to Stephen.
‘I have come to speak to you, in consequence of what passed just now. I
should like to be serviceable to you, if you will let me. Is this your
wife?’
Rachael raised her eyes, and they sufficiently answered no, and dropped
again.
‘I remember,’ said Louisa, reddening at her mistake; ‘I recollect, now,
to have heard your domestic misfortunes spoken of, though I was not
attending to the particulars at the time. It was not my meaning to ask a
question that would give pain to any one here. If I should ask any other
question that may happen to have that result, give me credit, if you
please, for being in ignorance how to speak to you as I ought.’
As Stephen had but a little while ago instinctively addressed himself to
her, so she now instinctively addressed herself to Rachael. Her manner
was short and abrupt, yet faltering and timid.
‘He has told you what has passed between himself and my husband? You
would be his first resource, I think.’
‘I have heard the end of it, young lady,’ said Rachael.
‘Did I understand, that, being rejected by one employer, he would
probably be rejected by all? I thought he said as much?’
‘The chances are very small, young lady—next to nothing—for a man who
gets a bad name among them.’
‘What shall I understand that you mean by a bad name?’
‘The name of being troublesome.’
‘Then, by the prejudices of his own class, and by the prejudices of the
other, he is sacrificed alike? Are the two so deeply separated in this
town, that there is no place whatever for an honest workman between
them?’
Rachael shook her head in silence.
‘He fell into suspicion,’ said Louisa, ‘with his fellow-weavers,
because—he had made a promise not to be one of them. I think it must
have been to you that he made that promise. Might I ask you why he made
it?’
Rachael burst into tears. ‘I didn’t seek it of him, poor lad. I prayed
him to avoid trouble for his own good, little thinking he’d come to it
through me. But I know he’d die a hundred deaths, ere ever he’d break
his word. I know that of him well.’
Stephen had remained quietly attentive, in his usual thoughtful attitude,
with his hand at his chin. He now spoke in a voice rather less steady
than usual.
‘No one, excepting myseln, can ever know what honour, an’ what love, an’
respect, I bear to Rachael, or wi’ what cause. When I passed that
promess, I towd her true, she were th’ Angel o’ my life. ’Twere a solemn
promess. ’Tis gone fro’ me, for ever.’
Louisa turned her head to him, and bent it with a deference that was new
in her. She looked from him to Rachael, and her features softened.
‘What will you do?’ she asked him. And her voice had softened too.
‘Weel, ma’am,’ said Stephen, making the best of it, with a smile; ‘when I
ha finished off, I mun quit this part, and try another. Fortnet or
misfortnet, a man can but try; there’s nowt to be done wi’out tryin’—cept
laying down and dying.’
‘How will you travel?’
‘Afoot, my kind ledy, afoot.’
Louisa coloured, and a purse appeared in her hand. The rustling of a
bank-note was audible, as she unfolded one and laid it on the table.
‘Rachael, will you tell him—for you know how, without offence—that this
is freely his, to help him on his way? Will you entreat him to take it?’
‘I canna do that, young lady,’ she answered, turning her head aside.
‘Bless you for thinking o’ the poor lad wi’ such tenderness. But ’tis
for him to know his heart, and what is right according to it.’
Louisa looked, in part incredulous, in part frightened, in part overcome
with quick sympathy, when this man of so much self-command, who had been
so plain and steady through the late interview, lost his composure in a
moment, and now stood with his hand before his face. She stretched out
hers, as if she would have touched him; then checked herself, and
remained still.
‘Not e’en Rachael,’ said Stephen, when he stood again with his face
uncovered, ‘could mak sitch a kind offerin, by onny words, kinder. T’
show that I’m not a man wi’out reason and gratitude, I’ll tak two pound.
I’ll borrow ’t for t’ pay ’t back. ’Twill be the sweetest work as ever I
ha done, that puts it in my power t’ acknowledge once more my lastin
thankfulness for this present action.’
She was fain to take up the note again, and to substitute the much
smaller sum he had named. He was neither courtly, nor handsome, nor
picturesque, in any respect; and yet his manner of accepting it, and of
expressing his thanks without more words, had a grace in it that Lord
Chesterfield could not have taught his son in a century.
Tom had sat upon the bed, swinging one leg and sucking his walking-stick
with sufficient unconcern, until the visit had attained this stage.
Seeing his sister ready to depart, he got up, rather hurriedly, and put
in a word.
‘Just wait a moment, Loo! Before we go, I should like to speak to him a
moment. Something comes into my head. If you’ll step out on the stairs,
Blackpool, I’ll mention it. Never mind a light, man!’ Tom was
remarkably impatient of his moving towards the cupboard, to get one. ‘It
don’t want a light.’
Stephen followed him out, and Tom closed the room door, and held the lock
in his hand.
‘I say!’ he whispered. ‘I think I can do you a good turn. Don’t ask me
what it is, because it may not come to anything. But there’s no harm in
my trying.’
His breath fell like a flame of fire on Stephen’s ear, it was so hot.
‘That was our light porter at the Bank,’ said Tom, ‘who brought you the
message to-night. I call him our light porter, because I belong to the
Bank too.’
Stephen thought, ‘What a hurry he is in!’ He spoke so confusedly.
‘Well!’ said Tom. ‘Now look here! When are you off?’
‘T’ day’s Monday,’ replied Stephen, considering. ‘Why, sir, Friday or
Saturday, nigh ’bout.’
‘Friday or Saturday,’ said Tom. ‘Now look here! I am not sure that I
can do you the good turn I want to do you—that’s my sister, you know, in
your room—but I may be able to, and if I should not be able to, there’s
no harm done. So I tell you what. You’ll know our light porter again?’
‘Yes, sure,’ said Stephen.
‘Very well,’ returned Tom. ‘When you leave work of a night, between this
and your going away, just hang about the Bank an hour or so, will you?
Don’t take on, as if you meant anything, if he should see you hanging
about there; because I shan’t put him up to speak to you, unless I find I
can do you the service I want to do you. In that case he’ll have a note
or a message for you, but not else. Now look here! You are sure you
understand.’
He had wormed a finger, in the darkness, through a button-hole of
Stephen’s coat, and was screwing that corner of the garment tight up
round and round, in an extraordinary manner.
‘I understand, sir,’ said Stephen.
‘Now look here!’ repeated Tom. ‘Be sure you don’t make any mistake then,
and don’t forget. I shall tell my sister as we go home, what I have in
view, and she’ll approve, I know. Now look here! You’re all right, are
you? You understand all about it? Very well then. Come along, Loo!’
He pushed the door open as he called to her, but did not return into the
room, or wait to be lighted down the narrow stairs. He was at the bottom
when she began to descend, and was in the street before she could take
his arm.
Mrs. Pegler remained in her corner until the brother and sister were
gone, and until Stephen came back with the candle in his hand. She was
in a state of inexpressible admiration of Mrs. Bounderby, and, like an
unaccountable old woman, wept, ‘because she was such a pretty dear.’ Yet
Mrs. Pegler was so flurried lest the object of her admiration should
return by chance, or anybody else should come, that her cheerfulness was
ended for that night. It was late too, to people who rose early and
worked hard; therefore the party broke up; and Stephen and Rachael
escorted their mysterious acquaintance to the door of the Travellers’
Coffee House, where they parted from her.
They walked back together to the corner of the street where Rachael
lived, and as they drew nearer and nearer to it, silence crept upon them.
When they came to the dark corner where their unfrequent meetings always
ended, they stopped, still silent, as if both were afraid to speak.
‘I shall strive t’ see thee agen, Rachael, afore I go, but if not—’
‘Thou wilt not, Stephen, I know. ’Tis better that we make up our minds
to be open wi’ one another.’
‘Thou’rt awlus right. ’Tis bolder and better. I ha been thinkin then,
Rachael, that as ’tis but a day or two that remains, ’twere better for
thee, my dear, not t’ be seen wi’ me. ’T might bring thee into trouble,
fur no good.’
‘’Tis not for that, Stephen, that I mind. But thou know’st our old
agreement. ’Tis for that.’
‘Well, well,’ said he. ‘’Tis better, onnyways.’
‘Thou’lt write to me, and tell me all that happens, Stephen?’
‘Yes. What can I say now, but Heaven be wi’ thee, Heaven bless thee,
Heaven thank thee and reward thee!’
‘May it bless thee, Stephen, too, in all thy wanderings, and send thee
peace and rest at last!’
‘I towd thee, my dear,’ said Stephen Blackpool—‘that night—that I would
never see or think o’ onnything that angered me, but thou, so much better
than me, should’st be beside it. Thou’rt beside it now. Thou mak’st me
see it wi’ a better eye. Bless thee. Good night. Good-bye!’
It was but a hurried parting in a common street, yet it was a sacred
remembrance to these two common people. Utilitarian economists,
skeletons of schoolmasters, Commissioners of Fact, genteel and used-up
infidels, gabblers of many little dog’s-eared creeds, the poor you will
have always with you. Cultivate in them, while there is yet time, the
utmost graces of the fancies and affections, to adorn their lives so much
in need of ornament; or, in the day of your triumph, when romance is
utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand
face to face, Reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you.
Stephen worked the next day, and the next, uncheered by a word from any
one, and shunned in all his comings and goings as before. At the end of
the second day, he saw land; at the end of the third, his loom stood
empty.
He had overstayed his hour in the street outside the Bank, on each of the
two first evenings; and nothing had happened there, good or bad. That he
might not be remiss in his part of the engagement, he resolved to wait
full two hours, on this third and last night.
There was the lady who had once kept Mr. Bounderby’s house, sitting at
the first-floor window as he had seen her before; and there was the light
porter, sometimes talking with her there, and sometimes looking over the
blind below which had BANK upon it, and sometimes coming to the door and
standing on the steps for a breath of air. When he first came out,
Stephen thought he might be looking for him, and passed near; but the
light porter only cast his winking eyes upon him slightly, and said
nothing.
Two hours were a long stretch of lounging about, after a long day’s
labour. Stephen sat upon the step of a door, leaned against a wall under
an archway, strolled up and down, listened for the church clock, stopped
and watched children playing in the street. Some purpose or other is so
natural to every one, that a mere loiterer always looks and feels
remarkable. When the first hour was out, Stephen even began to have an
uncomfortable sensation upon him of being for the time a disreputable
character.
Then came the lamplighter, and two lengthening lines of light all down
the long perspective of the street, until they were blended and lost in
the distance. Mrs. Sparsit closed the first-floor window, drew down the
blind, and went up-stairs. Presently, a light went up-stairs after her,
passing first the fanlight of the door, and afterwards the two staircase
windows, on its way up. By and by, one corner of the second-floor blind
was disturbed, as if Mrs. Sparsit’s eye were there; also the other
corner, as if the light porter’s eye were on that side. Still, no
communication was made to Stephen. Much relieved when the two hours were
at last accomplished, he went away at a quick pace, as a recompense for
so much loitering.
He had only to take leave of his landlady, and lie down on his temporary
bed upon the floor; for his bundle was made up for to-morrow, and all was
arranged for his departure. He meant to be clear of the town very early;
before the Hands were in the streets.
It was barely daybreak, when, with a parting look round his room,
mournfully wondering whether he should ever see it again, he went out.
The town was as entirely deserted as if the inhabitants had abandoned it,
rather than hold communication with him. Everything looked wan at that
hour. Even the coming sun made but a pale waste in the sky, like a sad
sea.
By the place where Rachael lived, though it was not in his way; by the
red brick streets; by the great silent factories, not trembling yet; by
the railway, where the danger-lights were waning in the strengthening
day; by the railway’s crazy neighbourhood, half pulled down and half
built up; by scattered red brick villas, where the besmoked evergreens
were sprinkled with a dirty powder, like untidy snuff-takers; by
coal-dust paths and many varieties of ugliness; Stephen got to the top of
the hill, and looked back.
Day was shining radiantly upon the town then, and the bells were going
for the morning work. Domestic fires were not yet lighted, and the high
chimneys had the sky to themselves. Puffing out their poisonous volumes,
they would not be long in hiding it; but, for half an hour, some of the
many windows were golden, which showed the Coketown people a sun
eternally in eclipse, through a medium of smoked glass.
So strange to turn from the chimneys to the birds. So strange, to have
the road-dust on his feet instead of the coal-grit. So strange to have
lived to his time of life, and yet to be beginning like a boy this summer
morning! With these musings in his mind, and his bundle under his arm,
Stephen took his attentive face along the high road. And the trees
arched over him, whispering that he left a true and loving heart behind.
CHAPTER VII
GUNPOWDER
MR. JAMES HARTHOUSE, ‘going in’ for his adopted party, soon began to
score. With the aid of a little more coaching for the political sages, a
little more genteel listlessness for the general society, and a tolerable
management of the assumed honesty in dishonesty, most effective and most
patronized of the polite deadly sins, he speedily came to be considered
of much promise. The not being troubled with earnestness was a grand
point in his favour, enabling him to take to the hard Fact fellows with
as good a grace as if he had been born one of the tribe, and to throw all
other tribes overboard, as conscious hypocrites.
‘Whom none of us believe, my dear Mrs. Bounderby, and who do not believe
themselves. The only difference between us and the professors of virtue
or benevolence, or philanthropy—never mind the name—is, that we know it
is all meaningless, and say so; while they know it equally and will never
say so.’
Why should she be shocked or warned by this reiteration? It was not so
unlike her father’s principles, and her early training, that it need
startle her. Where was the great difference between the two schools,
when each chained her down to material realities, and inspired her with
no faith in anything else? What was there in her soul for James
Harthouse to destroy, which Thomas Gradgrind had nurtured there in its
state of innocence!
It was even the worse for her at this pass, that in her mind—implanted
there before her eminently practical father began to form it—a struggling
disposition to believe in a wider and nobler humanity than she had ever
heard of, constantly strove with doubts and resentments. With doubts,
because the aspiration had been so laid waste in her youth. With
resentments, because of the wrong that had been done her, if it were
indeed a whisper of the truth. Upon a nature long accustomed to
self-suppression, thus torn and divided, the Harthouse philosophy came as
a relief and justification. Everything being hollow and worthless, she
had missed nothing and sacrificed nothing. What did it matter, she had
said to her father, when he proposed her husband. What did it matter,
she said still. With a scornful self-reliance, she asked herself, What
did anything matter—and went on.
Towards what? Step by step, onward and downward, towards some end, yet
so gradually, that she believed herself to remain motionless. As to Mr.
Harthouse, whither _he_ tended, he neither considered nor cared. He had
no particular design or plan before him: no energetic wickedness ruffled
his lassitude. He was as much amused and interested, at present, as it
became so fine a gentleman to be; perhaps even more than it would have
been consistent with his reputation to confess. Soon after his arrival
he languidly wrote to his brother, the honourable and jocular member,
that the Bounderbys were ‘great fun;’ and further, that the female
Bounderby, instead of being the Gorgon he had expected, was young, and
remarkably pretty. After that, he wrote no more about them, and devoted
his leisure chiefly to their house. He was very often in their house, in
his flittings and visitings about the Coketown district; and was much
encouraged by Mr. Bounderby. It was quite in Mr. Bounderby’s gusty way
to boast to all his world that _he_ didn’t care about your highly
connected people, but that if his wife Tom Gradgrind’s daughter did, she
was welcome to their company.
Mr. James Harthouse began to think it would be a new sensation, if the
face which changed so beautifully for the whelp, would change for him.
He was quick enough to observe; he had a good memory, and did not forget
a word of the brother’s revelations. He interwove them with everything
he saw of the sister, and he began to understand her. To be sure, the
better and profounder part of her character was not within his scope of
perception; for in natures, as in seas, depth answers unto depth; but he
soon began to read the rest with a student’s eye.
Mr. Bounderby had taken possession of a house and grounds, about fifteen
miles from the town, and accessible within a mile or two, by a railway
striding on many arches over a wild country, undermined by deserted
coal-shafts, and spotted at night by fires and black shapes of stationary
engines at pits’ mouths. This country, gradually softening towards the
neighbourhood of Mr. Bounderby’s retreat, there mellowed into a rustic
landscape, golden with heath, and snowy with hawthorn in the spring of
the year, and tremulous with leaves and their shadows all the summer
time. The bank had foreclosed a mortgage effected on the property thus
pleasantly situated, by one of the Coketown magnates, who, in his
determination to make a shorter cut than usual to an enormous fortune,
overspeculated himself by about two hundred thousand pounds. These
accidents did sometimes happen in the best regulated families of
Coketown, but the bankrupts had no connexion whatever with the
improvident classes.
It afforded Mr. Bounderby supreme satisfaction to instal himself in this
snug little estate, and with demonstrative humility to grow cabbages in
the flower-garden. He delighted to live, barrack-fashion, among the
elegant furniture, and he bullied the very pictures with his origin.
‘Why, sir,’ he would say to a visitor, ‘I am told that Nickits,’ the late
owner, ‘gave seven hundred pound for that Seabeach. Now, to be plain
with you, if I ever, in the whole course of my life, take seven looks at
it, at a hundred pound a look, it will be as much as I shall do. No, by
George! I don’t forget that I am Josiah Bounderby of Coketown. For
years upon years, the only pictures in my possession, or that I could
have got into my possession, by any means, unless I stole ’em, were the
engravings of a man shaving himself in a boot, on the blacking bottles
that I was overjoyed to use in cleaning boots with, and that I sold when
they were empty for a farthing a-piece, and glad to get it!’
Then he would address Mr. Harthouse in the same style.
‘Harthouse, you have a couple of horses down here. Bring half a dozen
more if you like, and we’ll find room for ’em. There’s stabling in this
place for a dozen horses; and unless Nickits is belied, he kept the full
number. A round dozen of ’em, sir. When that man was a boy, he went to
Westminster School. Went to Westminster School as a King’s Scholar, when
I was principally living on garbage, and sleeping in market baskets.
Why, if I wanted to keep a dozen horses—which I don’t, for one’s enough
for me—I couldn’t bear to see ’em in their stalls here, and think what my
own lodging used to be. I couldn’t look at ’em, sir, and not order ’em
out. Yet so things come round. You see this place; you know what sort
of a place it is; you are aware that there’s not a completer place of its
size in this kingdom or elsewhere—I don’t care where—and here, got into
the middle of it, like a maggot into a nut, is Josiah Bounderby. While
Nickits (as a man came into my office, and told me yesterday), Nickits,
who used to act in Latin, in the Westminster School plays, with the
chief-justices and nobility of this country applauding him till they were
black in the face, is drivelling at this minute—drivelling, sir!—in a
fifth floor, up a narrow dark back street in Antwerp.’
It was among the leafy shadows of this retirement, in the long sultry
summer days, that Mr. Harthouse began to prove the face which had set him
wondering when he first saw it, and to try if it would change for him.
‘Mrs. Bounderby, I esteem it a most fortunate accident that I find you
alone here. I have for some time had a particular wish to speak to you.’
It was not by any wonderful accident that he found her, the time of day
being that at which she was always alone, and the place being her
favourite resort. It was an opening in a dark wood, where some felled
trees lay, and where she would sit watching the fallen leaves of last
year, as she had watched the falling ashes at home.
He sat down beside her, with a glance at her face.
‘Your brother. My young friend Tom—’
Her colour brightened, and she turned to him with a look of interest. ‘I
never in my life,’ he thought, ‘saw anything so remarkable and so
captivating as the lighting of those features!’ His face betrayed his
thoughts—perhaps without betraying him, for it might have been according
to its instructions so to do.
‘Pardon me. The expression of your sisterly interest is so beautiful—Tom
should be so proud of it—I know this is inexcusable, but I am so
compelled to admire.’
‘Being so impulsive,’ she said composedly.
‘Mrs. Bounderby, no: you know I make no pretence with you. You know I am
a sordid piece of human nature, ready to sell myself at any time for any
reasonable sum, and altogether incapable of any Arcadian proceeding
whatever.’
‘I am waiting,’ she returned, ‘for your further reference to my brother.’
‘You are rigid with me, and I deserve it. I am as worthless a dog as you
will find, except that I am not false—not false. But you surprised and
started me from my subject, which was your brother. I have an interest
in him.’
‘Have you an interest in anything, Mr. Harthouse?’ she asked, half
incredulously and half gratefully.
‘If you had asked me when I first came here, I should have said no. I
must say now—even at the hazard of appearing to make a pretence, and of
justly awakening your incredulity—yes.’
She made a slight movement, as if she were trying to speak, but could not
find voice; at length she said, ‘Mr. Harthouse, I give you credit for
being interested in my brother.’
‘Thank you. I claim to deserve it. You know how little I do claim, but
I will go that length. You have done so much for him, you are so fond of
him; your whole life, Mrs. Bounderby, expresses such charming
self-forgetfulness on his account—pardon me again—I am running wide of
the subject. I am interested in him for his own sake.’
She had made the slightest action possible, as if she would have risen in
a hurry and gone away. He had turned the course of what he said at that
instant, and she remained.
‘Mrs. Bounderby,’ he resumed, in a lighter manner, and yet with a show of
effort in assuming it, which was even more expressive than the manner he
dismissed; ‘it is no irrevocable offence in a young fellow of your
brother’s years, if he is heedless, inconsiderate, and expensive—a little
dissipated, in the common phrase. Is he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Allow me to be frank. Do you think he games at all?’
‘I think he makes bets.’ Mr. Harthouse waiting, as if that were not her
whole answer, she added, ‘I know he does.’
‘Of course he loses?’
‘Yes.’
‘Everybody does lose who bets. May I hint at the probability of your
sometimes supplying him with money for these purposes?’
She sat, looking down; but, at this question, raised her eyes searchingly
and a little resentfully.
‘Acquit me of impertinent curiosity, my dear Mrs. Bounderby. I think Tom
may be gradually falling into trouble, and I wish to stretch out a
helping hand to him from the depths of my wicked experience.—Shall I say
again, for his sake? Is that necessary?’
She seemed to try to answer, but nothing came of it.
‘Candidly to confess everything that has occurred to me,’ said James
Harthouse, again gliding with the same appearance of effort into his more
airy manner; ‘I will confide to you my doubt whether he has had many
advantages. Whether—forgive my plainness—whether any great amount of
confidence is likely to have been established between himself and his
most worthy father.’
‘I do not,’ said Louisa, flushing with her own great remembrance in that
wise, ‘think it likely.’
‘Or, between himself, and—I may trust to your perfect understanding of my
meaning, I am sure—and his highly esteemed brother-in-law.’
She flushed deeper and deeper, and was burning red when she replied in a
fainter voice, ‘I do not think that likely, either.’
‘Mrs. Bounderby,’ said Harthouse, after a short silence, ‘may there be a
better confidence between yourself and me? Tom has borrowed a
considerable sum of you?’
‘You will understand, Mr. Harthouse,’ she returned, after some
indecision: she had been more or less uncertain, and troubled throughout
the conversation, and yet had in the main preserved her self-contained
manner; ‘you will understand that if I tell you what you press to know,
it is not by way of complaint or regret. I would never complain of
anything, and what I have done I do not in the least regret.’
‘So spirited, too!’ thought James Harthouse.
‘When I married, I found that my brother was even at that time heavily in
debt. Heavily for him, I mean. Heavily enough to oblige me to sell some
trinkets. They were no sacrifice. I sold them very willingly. I
attached no value to them. They were quite worthless to me.’
Either she saw in his face that he knew, or she only feared in her
conscience that he knew, that she spoke of some of her husband’s gifts.
She stopped, and reddened again. If he had not known it before, he would
have known it then, though he had been a much duller man than he was.
‘Since then, I have given my brother, at various times, what money I
could spare: in short, what money I have had. Confiding in you at all,
on the faith of the interest you profess for him, I will not do so by
halves. Since you have been in the habit of visiting here, he has wanted
in one sum as much as a hundred pounds. I have not been able to give it
to him. I have felt uneasy for the consequences of his being so
involved, but I have kept these secrets until now, when I trust them to
your honour. I have held no confidence with any one, because—you
anticipated my reason just now.’ She abruptly broke off.
He was a ready man, and he saw, and seized, an opportunity here of
presenting her own image to her, slightly disguised as her brother.
‘Mrs. Bounderby, though a graceless person, of the world worldly, I feel
the utmost interest, I assure you, in what you tell me. I cannot
possibly be hard upon your brother. I understand and share the wise
consideration with which you regard his errors. With all possible
respect both for Mr. Gradgrind and for Mr. Bounderby, I think I perceive
that he has not been fortunate in his training. Bred at a disadvantage
towards the society in which he has his part to play, he rushes into
these extremes for himself, from opposite extremes that have long been
forced—with the very best intentions we have no doubt—upon him. Mr.
Bounderby’s fine bluff English independence, though a most charming
characteristic, does not—as we have agreed—invite confidence. If I might
venture to remark that it is the least in the world deficient in that
delicacy to which a youth mistaken, a character misconceived, and
abilities misdirected, would turn for relief and guidance, I should
express what it presents to my own view.’
As she sat looking straight before her, across the changing lights upon
the grass into the darkness of the wood beyond, he saw in her face her
application of his very distinctly uttered words.
‘All allowance,’ he continued, ‘must be made. I have one great fault to
find with Tom, however, which I cannot forgive, and for which I take him
heavily to account.’
Louisa turned her eyes to his face, and asked him what fault was that?
‘Perhaps,’ he returned, ‘I have said enough. Perhaps it would have been
better, on the whole, if no allusion to it had escaped me.’
‘You alarm me, Mr. Harthouse. Pray let me know it.’
‘To relieve you from needless apprehension—and as this confidence
regarding your brother, which I prize I am sure above all possible
things, has been established between us—I obey. I cannot forgive him for
not being more sensible in every word, look, and act of his life, of the
affection of his best friend; of the devotion of his best friend; of her
unselfishness; of her sacrifice. The return he makes her, within my
observation, is a very poor one. What she has done for him demands his
constant love and gratitude, not his ill-humour and caprice. Careless
fellow as I am, I am not so indifferent, Mrs. Bounderby, as to be
regardless of this vice in your brother, or inclined to consider it a
venial offence.’
The wood floated before her, for her eyes were suffused with tears. They
rose from a deep well, long concealed, and her heart was filled with
acute pain that found no relief in them.
‘In a word, it is to correct your brother in this, Mrs. Bounderby, that I
must aspire. My better knowledge of his circumstances, and my direction
and advice in extricating them—rather valuable, I hope, as coming from a
scapegrace on a much larger scale—will give me some influence over him,
and all I gain I shall certainly use towards this end. I have said
enough, and more than enough. I seem to be protesting that I am a sort
of good fellow, when, upon my honour, I have not the least intention to
make any protestation to that effect, and openly announce that I am
nothing of the sort. Yonder, among the trees,’ he added, having lifted
up his eyes and looked about; for he had watched her closely until now;
‘is your brother himself; no doubt, just come down. As he seems to be
loitering in this direction, it may be as well, perhaps, to walk towards
him, and throw ourselves in his way. He has been very silent and doleful
of late. Perhaps, his brotherly conscience is touched—if there are such
things as consciences. Though, upon my honour, I hear of them much too
often to believe in them.’
He assisted her to rise, and she took his arm, and they advanced to meet
the whelp. He was idly beating the branches as he lounged along: or he
stooped viciously to rip the moss from the trees with his stick. He was
startled when they came upon him while he was engaged in this latter
pastime, and his colour changed.
‘Halloa!’ he stammered; ‘I didn’t know you were here.’
‘Whose name, Tom,’ said Mr. Harthouse, putting his hand upon his shoulder
and turning him, so that they all three walked towards the house
together, ‘have you been carving on the trees?’
‘Whose name?’ returned Tom. ‘Oh! You mean what girl’s name?’
‘You have a suspicious appearance of inscribing some fair creature’s on
the bark, Tom.’
[Picture: Mr. Harthouse and Tom Gradgrind in the garden]
‘Not much of that, Mr. Harthouse, unless some fair creature with a
slashing fortune at her own disposal would take a fancy to me. Or she
might be as ugly as she was rich, without any fear of losing me. I’d
carve her name as often as she liked.’
‘I am afraid you are mercenary, Tom.’
‘Mercenary,’ repeated Tom. ‘Who is not mercenary? Ask my sister.’
‘Have you so proved it to be a failing of mine, Tom?’ said Louisa,
showing no other sense of his discontent and ill-nature.
‘You know whether the cap fits you, Loo,’ returned her brother sulkily.
‘If it does, you can wear it.’
‘Tom is misanthropical to-day, as all bored people are now and then,’
said Mr. Harthouse. ‘Don’t believe him, Mrs. Bounderby. He knows much
better. I shall disclose some of his opinions of you, privately
expressed to me, unless he relents a little.’
‘At all events, Mr. Harthouse,’ said Tom, softening in his admiration of
his patron, but shaking his head sullenly too, ‘you can’t tell her that I
ever praised her for being mercenary. I may have praised her for being
the contrary, and I should do it again, if I had as good reason.
However, never mind this now; it’s not very interesting to you, and I am
sick of the subject.’
They walked on to the house, where Louisa quitted her visitor’s arm and
went in. He stood looking after her, as she ascended the steps, and
passed into the shadow of the door; then put his hand upon her brother’s
shoulder again, and invited him with a confidential nod to a walk in the
garden.
‘Tom, my fine fellow, I want to have a word with you.’
They had stopped among a disorder of roses—it was part of Mr. Bounderby’s
humility to keep Nickits’s roses on a reduced scale—and Tom sat down on a
terrace-parapet, plucking buds and picking them to pieces; while his
powerful Familiar stood over him, with a foot upon the parapet, and his
figure easily resting on the arm supported by that knee. They were just
visible from her window. Perhaps she saw them.
‘Tom, what’s the matter?’
‘Oh! Mr. Harthouse,’ said Tom with a groan, ‘I am hard up, and bothered
out of my life.’
‘My good fellow, so am I.’
‘You!’ returned Tom. ‘You are the picture of independence. Mr.
Harthouse, I am in a horrible mess. You have no idea what a state I have
got myself into—what a state my sister might have got me out of, if she
would only have done it.’
He took to biting the rosebuds now, and tearing them away from his teeth
with a hand that trembled like an infirm old man’s. After one
exceedingly observant look at him, his companion relapsed into his
lightest air.
‘Tom, you are inconsiderate: you expect too much of your sister. You
have had money of her, you dog, you know you have.’
‘Well, Mr. Harthouse, I know I have. How else was I to get it? Here’s
old Bounderby always boasting that at my age he lived upon twopence a
month, or something of that sort. Here’s my father drawing what he calls
a line, and tying me down to it from a baby, neck and heels. Here’s my
mother who never has anything of her own, except her complaints. What
_is_ a fellow to do for money, and where _am_ I to look for it, if not to
my sister?’
He was almost crying, and scattered the buds about by dozens. Mr.
Harthouse took him persuasively by the coat.
‘But, my dear Tom, if your sister has not got it—’
‘Not got it, Mr. Harthouse? I don’t say she has got it. I may have
wanted more than she was likely to have got. But then she ought to get
it. She could get it. It’s of no use pretending to make a secret of
matters now, after what I have told you already; you know she didn’t
marry old Bounderby for her own sake, or for his sake, but for my sake.
Then why doesn’t she get what I want, out of him, for my sake? She is
not obliged to say what she is going to do with it; she is sharp enough;
she could manage to coax it out of him, if she chose. Then why doesn’t
she choose, when I tell her of what consequence it is? But no. There
she sits in his company like a stone, instead of making herself agreeable
and getting it easily. I don’t know what you may call this, but I call
it unnatural conduct.’
There was a piece of ornamental water immediately below the parapet, on
the other side, into which Mr. James Harthouse had a very strong
inclination to pitch Mr. Thomas Gradgrind junior, as the injured men of
Coketown threatened to pitch their property into the Atlantic. But he
preserved his easy attitude; and nothing more solid went over the stone
balustrades than the accumulated rosebuds now floating about, a little
surface-island.
‘My dear Tom,’ said Harthouse, ‘let me try to be your banker.’
‘For God’s sake,’ replied Tom, suddenly, ‘don’t talk about bankers!’ And
very white he looked, in contrast with the roses. Very white.
Mr. Harthouse, as a thoroughly well-bred man, accustomed to the best
society, was not to be surprised—he could as soon have been affected—but
he raised his eyelids a little more, as if they were lifted by a feeble
touch of wonder. Albeit it was as much against the precepts of his
school to wonder, as it was against the doctrines of the Gradgrind
College.
‘What is the present need, Tom? Three figures? Out with them. Say what
they are.’
‘Mr. Harthouse,’ returned Tom, now actually crying; and his tears were
better than his injuries, however pitiful a figure he made: ‘it’s too
late; the money is of no use to me at present. I should have had it
before to be of use to me. But I am very much obliged to you; you’re a
true friend.’
A true friend! ‘Whelp, whelp!’ thought Mr. Harthouse, lazily; ‘what an
Ass you are!’
‘And I take your offer as a great kindness,’ said Tom, grasping his hand.
‘As a great kindness, Mr. Harthouse.’
‘Well,’ returned the other, ‘it may be of more use by and by. And, my
good fellow, if you will open your bedevilments to me when they come
thick upon you, I may show you better ways out of them than you can find
for yourself.’
‘Thank you,’ said Tom, shaking his head dismally, and chewing rosebuds.
‘I wish I had known you sooner, Mr. Harthouse.’
‘Now, you see, Tom,’ said Mr. Harthouse in conclusion, himself tossing
over a rose or two, as a contribution to the island, which was always
drifting to the wall as if it wanted to become a part of the mainland:
‘every man is selfish in everything he does, and I am exactly like the
rest of my fellow-creatures. I am desperately intent;’ the languor of
his desperation being quite tropical; ‘on your softening towards your
sister—which you ought to do; and on your being a more loving and
agreeable sort of brother—which you ought to be.’
‘I will be, Mr. Harthouse.’
‘No time like the present, Tom. Begin at once.’
‘Certainly I will. And my sister Loo shall say so.’
‘Having made which bargain, Tom,’ said Harthouse, clapping him on the
shoulder again, with an air which left him at liberty to infer—as he did,
poor fool—that this condition was imposed upon him in mere careless good
nature to lessen his sense of obligation, ‘we will tear ourselves asunder
until dinner-time.’
When Tom appeared before dinner, though his mind seemed heavy enough, his
body was on the alert; and he appeared before Mr. Bounderby came in. ‘I
didn’t mean to be cross, Loo,’ he said, giving her his hand, and kissing
her. ‘I know you are fond of me, and you know I am fond of you.’
After this, there was a smile upon Louisa’s face that day, for some one
else. Alas, for some one else!
‘So much the less is the whelp the only creature that she cares for,’
thought James Harthouse, reversing the reflection of his first day’s
knowledge of her pretty face. ‘So much the less, so much the less.’
CHAPTER VIII
EXPLOSION
THE next morning was too bright a morning for sleep, and James Harthouse
rose early, and sat in the pleasant bay window of his dressing-room,
smoking the rare tobacco that had had so wholesome an influence on his
young friend. Reposing in the sunlight, with the fragrance of his
eastern pipe about him, and the dreamy smoke vanishing into the air, so
rich and soft with summer odours, he reckoned up his advantages as an
idle winner might count his gains. He was not at all bored for the time,
and could give his mind to it.
He had established a confidence with her, from which her husband was
excluded. He had established a confidence with her, that absolutely
turned upon her indifference towards her husband, and the absence, now
and at all times, of any congeniality between them. He had artfully, but
plainly, assured her that he knew her heart in its last most delicate
recesses; he had come so near to her through its tenderest sentiment; he
had associated himself with that feeling; and the barrier behind which
she lived, had melted away. All very odd, and very satisfactory!
And yet he had not, even now, any earnest wickedness of purpose in him.
Publicly and privately, it were much better for the age in which he
lived, that he and the legion of whom he was one were designedly bad,
than indifferent and purposeless. It is the drifting icebergs setting
with any current anywhere, that wreck the ships.
When the Devil goeth about like a roaring lion, he goeth about in a shape
by which few but savages and hunters are attracted. But, when he is
trimmed, smoothed, and varnished, according to the mode; when he is
aweary of vice, and aweary of virtue, used up as to brimstone, and used
up as to bliss; then, whether he take to the serving out of red tape, or
to the kindling of red fire, he is the very Devil.
So James Harthouse reclined in the window, indolently smoking, and
reckoning up the steps he had taken on the road by which he happened to
be travelling. The end to which it led was before him, pretty plainly;
but he troubled himself with no calculations about it. What will be,
will be.
As he had rather a long ride to take that day—for there was a public
occasion ‘to do’ at some distance, which afforded a tolerable opportunity
of going in for the Gradgrind men—he dressed early and went down to
breakfast. He was anxious to see if she had relapsed since the previous
evening. No. He resumed where he had left off. There was a look of
interest for him again.
He got through the day as much (or as little) to his own satisfaction, as
was to be expected under the fatiguing circumstances; and came riding
back at six o’clock. There was a sweep of some half-mile between the
lodge and the house, and he was riding along at a foot pace over the
smooth gravel, once Nickits’s, when Mr. Bounderby burst out of the
shrubbery, with such violence as to make his horse shy across the road.
‘Harthouse!’ cried Mr. Bounderby. ‘Have you heard?’
‘Heard what?’ said Harthouse, soothing his horse, and inwardly favouring
Mr. Bounderby with no good wishes.
‘Then you _haven’t_ heard!’
‘I have heard you, and so has this brute. I have heard nothing else.’
Mr. Bounderby, red and hot, planted himself in the centre of the path
before the horse’s head, to explode his bombshell with more effect.
‘The Bank’s robbed!’
‘You don’t mean it!’
‘Robbed last night, sir. Robbed in an extraordinary manner. Robbed with
a false key.’
‘Of much?’
Mr. Bounderby, in his desire to make the most of it, really seemed
mortified by being obliged to reply, ‘Why, no; not of very much. But it
might have been.’
‘Of how much?’
‘Oh! as a sum—if you stick to a sum—of not more than a hundred and fifty
pound,’ said Bounderby, with impatience. ‘But it’s not the sum; it’s the
fact. It’s the fact of the Bank being robbed, that’s the important
circumstance. I am surprised you don’t see it.’
‘My dear Bounderby,’ said James, dismounting, and giving his bridle to
his servant, ‘I _do_ see it; and am as overcome as you can possibly
desire me to be, by the spectacle afforded to my mental view.
Nevertheless, I may be allowed, I hope, to congratulate you—which I do
with all my soul, I assure you—on your not having sustained a greater
loss.’
‘Thank’ee,’ replied Bounderby, in a short, ungracious manner. ‘But I
tell you what. It might have been twenty thousand pound.’
‘I suppose it might.’
‘Suppose it might! By the Lord, you _may_ suppose so. By George!’ said
Mr. Bounderby, with sundry menacing nods and shakes of his head. ‘It
might have been twice twenty. There’s no knowing what it would have
been, or wouldn’t have been, as it was, but for the fellows’ being
disturbed.’
Louisa had come up now, and Mrs. Sparsit, and Bitzer.
‘Here’s Tom Gradgrind’s daughter knows pretty well what it might have
been, if you don’t,’ blustered Bounderby. ‘Dropped, sir, as if she was
shot when I told her! Never knew her do such a thing before. Does her
credit, under the circumstances, in my opinion!’
She still looked faint and pale. James Harthouse begged her to take his
arm; and as they moved on very slowly, asked her how the robbery had been
committed.
‘Why, I am going to tell you,’ said Bounderby, irritably giving his arm
to Mrs. Sparsit. ‘If you hadn’t been so mighty particular about the sum,
I should have begun to tell you before. You know this lady (for she _is_
a lady), Mrs. Sparsit?’
‘I have already had the honour—’
‘Very well. And this young man, Bitzer, you saw him too on the same
occasion?’ Mr. Harthouse inclined his head in assent, and Bitzer
knuckled his forehead.
‘Very well. They live at the Bank. You know they live at the Bank,
perhaps? Very well. Yesterday afternoon, at the close of business
hours, everything was put away as usual. In the iron room that this
young fellow sleeps outside of, there was never mind how much. In the
little safe in young Tom’s closet, the safe used for petty purposes,
there was a hundred and fifty odd pound.’
‘A hundred and fifty-four, seven, one,’ said Bitzer.
‘Come!’ retorted Bounderby, stopping to wheel round upon him, ‘let’s have
none of _your_ interruptions. It’s enough to be robbed while you’re
snoring because you’re too comfortable, without being put right with
_your_ four seven ones. I didn’t snore, myself, when I was your age, let
me tell you. I hadn’t victuals enough to snore. And I didn’t four seven
one. Not if I knew it.’
Bitzer knuckled his forehead again, in a sneaking manner, and seemed at
once particularly impressed and depressed by the instance last given of
Mr. Bounderby’s moral abstinence.
‘A hundred and fifty odd pound,’ resumed Mr. Bounderby. ‘That sum of
money, young Tom locked in his safe, not a very strong safe, but that’s
no matter now. Everything was left, all right. Some time in the night,
while this young fellow snored—Mrs. Sparsit, ma’am, you say you have
heard him snore?’
‘Sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, ‘I cannot say that I have heard him
precisely snore, and therefore must not make that statement. But on
winter evenings, when he has fallen asleep at his table, I have heard
him, what I should prefer to describe as partially choke. I have heard
him on such occasions produce sounds of a nature similar to what may be
sometimes heard in Dutch clocks. Not,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, with a lofty
sense of giving strict evidence, ‘that I would convey any imputation on
his moral character. Far from it. I have always considered Bitzer a
young man of the most upright principle; and to that I beg to bear my
testimony.’
‘Well!’ said the exasperated Bounderby, ‘while he was snoring, _or_
choking, _or_ Dutch-clocking, _or_ something _or_ other—being asleep—some
fellows, somehow, whether previously concealed in the house or not
remains to be seen, got to young Tom’s safe, forced it, and abstracted
the contents. Being then disturbed, they made off; letting themselves
out at the main door, and double-locking it again (it was double-locked,
and the key under Mrs. Sparsit’s pillow) with a false key, which was
picked up in the street near the Bank, about twelve o’clock to-day. No
alarm takes place, till this chap, Bitzer, turns out this morning, and
begins to open and prepare the offices for business. Then, looking at
Tom’s safe, he sees the door ajar, and finds the lock forced, and the
money gone.’
‘Where is Tom, by the by?’ asked Harthouse, glancing round.
‘He has been helping the police,’ said Bounderby, ‘and stays behind at
the Bank. I wish these fellows had tried to rob me when I was at his
time of life. They would have been out of pocket if they had invested
eighteenpence in the job; I can tell ’em that.’
‘Is anybody suspected?’
‘Suspected? I should think there was somebody suspected. Egod!’ said
Bounderby, relinquishing Mrs. Sparsit’s arm to wipe his heated head.
‘Josiah Bounderby of Coketown is not to be plundered and nobody
suspected. No, thank you!’
Might Mr. Harthouse inquire Who was suspected?
‘Well,’ said Bounderby, stopping and facing about to confront them all,
‘I’ll tell you. It’s not to be mentioned everywhere; it’s not to be
mentioned anywhere: in order that the scoundrels concerned (there’s a
gang of ’em) may be thrown off their guard. So take this in confidence.
Now wait a bit.’ Mr. Bounderby wiped his head again. ‘What should you
say to;’ here he violently exploded: ‘to a Hand being in it?’
‘I hope,’ said Harthouse, lazily, ‘not our friend Blackpot?’
‘Say Pool instead of Pot, sir,’ returned Bounderby, ‘and that’s the man.’
Louisa faintly uttered some word of incredulity and surprise.
‘O yes! I know!’ said Bounderby, immediately catching at the sound. ‘I
know! I am used to that. I know all about it. They are the finest
people in the world, these fellows are. They have got the gift of the
gab, they have. They only want to have their rights explained to them,
they do. But I tell you what. Show me a dissatisfied Hand, and I’ll
show you a man that’s fit for anything bad, I don’t care what it is.’
Another of the popular fictions of Coketown, which some pains had been
taken to disseminate—and which some people really believed.
‘But I am acquainted with these chaps,’ said Bounderby. ‘I can read ’em
off, like books. Mrs. Sparsit, ma’am, I appeal to you. What warning did
I give that fellow, the first time he set foot in the house, when the
express object of his visit was to know how he could knock Religion over,
and floor the Established Church? Mrs. Sparsit, in point of high
connexions, you are on a level with the aristocracy,—did I say, or did I
not say, to that fellow, “you can’t hide the truth from me: you are not
the kind of fellow I like; you’ll come to no good”?’
‘Assuredly, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, ‘you did, in a highly impressive
manner, give him such an admonition.’
‘When he shocked you, ma’am,’ said Bounderby; ‘when he shocked your
feelings?’
‘Yes, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, with a meek shake of her head, ‘he
certainly did so. Though I do not mean to say but that my feelings may
be weaker on such points—more foolish if the term is preferred—than they
might have been, if I had always occupied my present position.’
Mr. Bounderby stared with a bursting pride at Mr. Harthouse, as much as
to say, ‘I am the proprietor of this female, and she’s worth your
attention, I think.’ Then, resumed his discourse.
‘You can recall for yourself, Harthouse, what I said to him when you saw
him. I didn’t mince the matter with him. I am never mealy with ’em. I
KNOW ’em. Very well, sir. Three days after that, he bolted. Went off,
nobody knows where: as my mother did in my infancy—only with this
difference, that he is a worse subject than my mother, if possible. What
did he do before he went? What do you say;’ Mr. Bounderby, with his hat
in his hand, gave a beat upon the crown at every little division of his
sentences, as if it were a tambourine; ‘to his being seen—night after
night—watching the Bank?—to his lurking about there—after dark?—To its
striking Mrs. Sparsit—that he could be lurking for no good—To her calling
Bitzer’s attention to him, and their both taking notice of him—And to its
appearing on inquiry to-day—that he was also noticed by the neighbours?’
Having come to the climax, Mr. Bounderby, like an oriental dancer, put
his tambourine on his head.
‘Suspicious,’ said James Harthouse, ‘certainly.’
‘I think so, sir,’ said Bounderby, with a defiant nod. ‘I think so. But
there are more of ’em in it. There’s an old woman. One never hears of
these things till the mischief’s done; all sorts of defects are found out
in the stable door after the horse is stolen; there’s an old woman turns
up now. An old woman who seems to have been flying into town on a
broomstick, every now and then. _She_ watches the place a whole day
before this fellow begins, and on the night when you saw him, she steals
away with him and holds a council with him—I suppose, to make her report
on going off duty, and be damned to her.’
There was such a person in the room that night, and she shrunk from
observation, thought Louisa.
‘This is not all of ’em, even as we already know ’em,’ said Bounderby,
with many nods of hidden meaning. ‘But I have said enough for the
present. You’ll have the goodness to keep it quiet, and mention it to no
one. It may take time, but we shall have ’em. It’s policy to give ’em
line enough, and there’s no objection to that.’
‘Of course, they will be punished with the utmost rigour of the law, as
notice-boards observe,’ replied James Harthouse, ‘and serve them right.
Fellows who go in for Banks must take the consequences. If there were no
consequences, we should all go in for Banks.’ He had gently taken
Louisa’s parasol from her hand, and had put it up for her; and she walked
under its shade, though the sun did not shine there.
‘For the present, Loo Bounderby,’ said her husband, ‘here’s Mrs. Sparsit
to look after. Mrs. Sparsit’s nerves have been acted upon by this
business, and she’ll stay here a day or two. So make her comfortable.’
‘Thank you very much, sir,’ that discreet lady observed, ‘but pray do not
let My comfort be a consideration. Anything will do for Me.’
It soon appeared that if Mrs. Sparsit had a failing in her association
with that domestic establishment, it was that she was so excessively
regardless of herself and regardful of others, as to be a nuisance. On
being shown her chamber, she was so dreadfully sensible of its comforts
as to suggest the inference that she would have preferred to pass the
night on the mangle in the laundry. True, the Powlers and the Scadgerses
were accustomed to splendour, ‘but it is my duty to remember,’ Mrs.
Sparsit was fond of observing with a lofty grace: particularly when any
of the domestics were present, ‘that what I was, I am no longer.
Indeed,’ said she, ‘if I could altogether cancel the remembrance that Mr.
Sparsit was a Powler, or that I myself am related to the Scadgers family;
or if I could even revoke the fact, and make myself a person of common
descent and ordinary connexions; I would gladly do so. I should think
it, under existing circumstances, right to do so.’ The same Hermitical
state of mind led to her renunciation of made dishes and wines at dinner,
until fairly commanded by Mr. Bounderby to take them; when she said,
‘Indeed you are very good, sir;’ and departed from a resolution of which
she had made rather formal and public announcement, to ‘wait for the
simple mutton.’ She was likewise deeply apologetic for wanting the salt;
and, feeling amiably bound to bear out Mr. Bounderby to the fullest
extent in the testimony he had borne to her nerves, occasionally sat back
in her chair and silently wept; at which periods a tear of large
dimensions, like a crystal ear-ring, might be observed (or rather, must
be, for it insisted on public notice) sliding down her Roman nose.
But Mrs. Sparsit’s greatest point, first and last, was her determination
to pity Mr. Bounderby. There were occasions when in looking at him she
was involuntarily moved to shake her head, as who would say, ‘Alas, poor
Yorick!’ After allowing herself to be betrayed into these evidences of
emotion, she would force a lambent brightness, and would be fitfully
cheerful, and would say, ‘You have still good spirits, sir, I am thankful
to find;’ and would appear to hail it as a blessed dispensation that Mr.
Bounderby bore up as he did. One idiosyncrasy for which she often
apologized, she found it excessively difficult to conquer. She had a
curious propensity to call Mrs. Bounderby ‘Miss Gradgrind,’ and yielded
to it some three or four score times in the course of the evening. Her
repetition of this mistake covered Mrs. Sparsit with modest confusion;
but indeed, she said, it seemed so natural to say Miss Gradgrind:
whereas, to persuade herself that the young lady whom she had had the
happiness of knowing from a child could be really and truly Mrs.
Bounderby, she found almost impossible. It was a further singularity of
this remarkable case, that the more she thought about it, the more
impossible it appeared; ‘the differences,’ she observed, ‘being such.’
In the drawing-room after dinner, Mr. Bounderby tried the case of the
robbery, examined the witnesses, made notes of the evidence, found the
suspected persons guilty, and sentenced them to the extreme punishment of
the law. That done, Bitzer was dismissed to town with instructions to
recommend Tom to come home by the mail-train.
When candles were brought, Mrs. Sparsit murmured, ‘Don’t be low, sir.
Pray let me see you cheerful, sir, as I used to do.’ Mr. Bounderby, upon
whom these consolations had begun to produce the effect of making him, in
a bull-headed blundering way, sentimental, sighed like some large
sea-animal. ‘I cannot bear to see you so, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit. ‘Try
a hand at backgammon, sir, as you used to do when I had the honour of
living under your roof.’ ‘I haven’t played backgammon, ma’am,’ said Mr.
Bounderby, ‘since that time.’ ‘No, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, soothingly,
‘I am aware that you have not. I remember that Miss Gradgrind takes no
interest in the game. But I shall be happy, sir, if you will
condescend.’
They played near a window, opening on the garden. It was a fine night:
not moonlight, but sultry and fragrant. Louisa and Mr. Harthouse
strolled out into the garden, where their voices could be heard in the
stillness, though not what they said. Mrs. Sparsit, from her place at
the backgammon board, was constantly straining her eyes to pierce the
shadows without. ‘What’s the matter, ma’am?’ said Mr. Bounderby; ‘you
don’t see a Fire, do you?’ ‘Oh dear no, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, ‘I
was thinking of the dew.’ ‘What have you got to do with the dew, ma’am?’
said Mr. Bounderby. ‘It’s not myself, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, ‘I am
fearful of Miss Gradgrind’s taking cold.’ ‘She never takes cold,’ said
Mr. Bounderby. ‘Really, sir?’ said Mrs. Sparsit. And was affected with
a cough in her throat.
When the time drew near for retiring, Mr. Bounderby took a glass of
water. ‘Oh, sir?’ said Mrs. Sparsit. ‘Not your sherry warm, with
lemon-peel and nutmeg?’ ‘Why, I have got out of the habit of taking it
now, ma’am,’ said Mr. Bounderby. ‘The more’s the pity, sir,’ returned
Mrs. Sparsit; ‘you are losing all your good old habits. Cheer up, sir!
If Miss Gradgrind will permit me, I will offer to make it for you, as I
have often done.’
Miss Gradgrind readily permitting Mrs. Sparsit to do anything she
pleased, that considerate lady made the beverage, and handed it to Mr.
Bounderby. ‘It will do you good, sir. It will warm your heart. It is
the sort of thing you want, and ought to take, sir.’ And when Mr.
Bounderby said, ‘Your health, ma’am!’ she answered with great feeling,
‘Thank you, sir. The same to you, and happiness also.’ Finally, she
wished him good night, with great pathos; and Mr. Bounderby went to bed,
with a maudlin persuasion that he had been crossed in something tender,
though he could not, for his life, have mentioned what it was.
Long after Louisa had undressed and lain down, she watched and waited for
her brother’s coming home. That could hardly be, she knew, until an hour
past midnight; but in the country silence, which did anything but calm
the trouble of her thoughts, time lagged wearily. At last, when the
darkness and stillness had seemed for hours to thicken one another, she
heard the bell at the gate. She felt as though she would have been glad
that it rang on until daylight; but it ceased, and the circles of its
last sound spread out fainter and wider in the air, and all was dead
again.
She waited yet some quarter of an hour, as she judged. Then she arose,
put on a loose robe, and went out of her room in the dark, and up the
staircase to her brother’s room. His door being shut, she softly opened
it and spoke to him, approaching his bed with a noiseless step.
She kneeled down beside it, passed her arm over his neck, and drew his
face to hers. She knew that he only feigned to be asleep, but she said
nothing to him.
He started by and by as if he were just then awakened, and asked who that
was, and what was the matter?
‘Tom, have you anything to tell me? If ever you loved me in your life,
and have anything concealed from every one besides, tell it to me.’
‘I don’t know what you mean, Loo. You have been dreaming.’
‘My dear brother:’ she laid her head down on his pillow, and her hair
flowed over him as if she would hide him from every one but herself: ‘is
there nothing that you have to tell me? Is there nothing you can tell me
if you will? You can tell me nothing that will change me. O Tom, tell
me the truth!’
‘I don’t know what you mean, Loo!’
‘As you lie here alone, my dear, in the melancholy night, so you must lie
somewhere one night, when even I, if I am living then, shall have left
you. As I am here beside you, barefoot, unclothed, undistinguishable in
darkness, so must I lie through all the night of my decay, until I am
dust. In the name of that time, Tom, tell me the truth now!’
‘What is it you want to know?’
‘You may be certain;’ in the energy of her love she took him to her bosom
as if he were a child; ‘that I will not reproach you. You may be certain
that I will be compassionate and true to you. You may be certain that I
will save you at whatever cost. O Tom, have you nothing to tell me?
Whisper very softly. Say only “yes,” and I shall understand you!’
She turned her ear to his lips, but he remained doggedly silent.
‘Not a word, Tom?’
‘How can I say Yes, or how can I say No, when I don’t know what you mean?
Loo, you are a brave, kind girl, worthy I begin to think of a better
brother than I am. But I have nothing more to say. Go to bed, go to
bed.’
‘You are tired,’ she whispered presently, more in her usual way.
‘Yes, I am quite tired out.’
‘You have been so hurried and disturbed to-day. Have any fresh
discoveries been made?’
‘Only those you have heard of, from—him.’
‘Tom, have you said to any one that we made a visit to those people, and
that we saw those three together?’
‘No. Didn’t you yourself particularly ask me to keep it quiet when you
asked me to go there with you?’
‘Yes. But I did not know then what was going to happen.’
‘Nor I neither. How could I?’
He was very quick upon her with this retort.
‘Ought I to say, after what has happened,’ said his sister, standing by
the bed—she had gradually withdrawn herself and risen, ‘that I made that
visit? Should I say so? Must I say so?’
‘Good Heavens, Loo,’ returned her brother, ‘you are not in the habit of
asking my advice. Say what you like. If you keep it to yourself, I
shall keep it to _my_self. If you disclose it, there’s an end of it.’
It was too dark for either to see the other’s face; but each seemed very
attentive, and to consider before speaking.
‘Tom, do you believe the man I gave the money to, is really implicated in
this crime?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t see why he shouldn’t be.’
‘He seemed to me an honest man.’
‘Another person may seem to you dishonest, and yet not be so.’ There was
a pause, for he had hesitated and stopped.
‘In short,’ resumed Tom, as if he had made up his mind, ‘if you come to
that, perhaps I was so far from being altogether in his favour, that I
took him outside the door to tell him quietly, that I thought he might
consider himself very well off to get such a windfall as he had got from
my sister, and that I hoped he would make good use of it. You remember
whether I took him out or not. I say nothing against the man; he may be
a very good fellow, for anything I know; I hope he is.’
‘Was he offended by what you said?’
‘No, he took it pretty well; he was civil enough. Where are you, Loo?’
He sat up in bed and kissed her. ‘Good night, my dear, good night.’
‘You have nothing more to tell me?’
‘No. What should I have? You wouldn’t have me tell you a lie!’
‘I wouldn’t have you do that to-night, Tom, of all the nights in your
life; many and much happier as I hope they will be.’
‘Thank you, my dear Loo. I am so tired, that I am sure I wonder I don’t
say anything to get to sleep. Go to bed, go to bed.’
Kissing her again, he turned round, drew the coverlet over his head, and
lay as still as if that time had come by which she had adjured him. She
stood for some time at the bedside before she slowly moved away. She
stopped at the door, looked back when she had opened it, and asked him if
he had called her? But he lay still, and she softly closed the door and
returned to her room.
Then the wretched boy looked cautiously up and found her gone, crept out
of bed, fastened his door, and threw himself upon his pillow again:
tearing his hair, morosely crying, grudgingly loving her, hatefully but
impenitently spurning himself, and no less hatefully and unprofitably
spurning all the good in the world.
CHAPTER IX
HEARING THE LAST OF IT
MRS. SPARSIT, lying by to recover the tone of her nerves in Mr.
Bounderby’s retreat, kept such a sharp look-out, night and day, under her
Coriolanian eyebrows, that her eyes, like a couple of lighthouses on an
iron-bound coast, might have warned all prudent mariners from that bold
rock her Roman nose and the dark and craggy region in its neighbourhood,
but for the placidity of her manner. Although it was hard to believe
that her retiring for the night could be anything but a form, so severely
wide awake were those classical eyes of hers, and so impossible did it
seem that her rigid nose could yield to any relaxing influence, yet her
manner of sitting, smoothing her uncomfortable, not to say, gritty
mittens (they were constructed of a cool fabric like a meat-safe), or of
ambling to unknown places of destination with her foot in her cotton
stirrup, was so perfectly serene, that most observers would have been
constrained to suppose her a dove, embodied by some freak of nature, in
the earthly tabernacle of a bird of the hook-beaked order.
She was a most wonderful woman for prowling about the house. How she got
from story to story was a mystery beyond solution. A lady so decorous in
herself, and so highly connected, was not to be suspected of dropping
over the banisters or sliding down them, yet her extraordinary facility
of locomotion suggested the wild idea. Another noticeable circumstance
in Mrs. Sparsit was, that she was never hurried. She would shoot with
consummate velocity from the roof to the hall, yet would be in full
possession of her breath and dignity on the moment of her arrival there.
Neither was she ever seen by human vision to go at a great pace.
She took very kindly to Mr. Harthouse, and had some pleasant conversation
with him soon after her arrival. She made him her stately curtsey in the
garden, one morning before breakfast.
‘It appears but yesterday, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘that I had the
honour of receiving you at the Bank, when you were so good as to wish to
be made acquainted with Mr. Bounderby’s address.’
‘An occasion, I am sure, not to be forgotten by myself in the course of
Ages,’ said Mr. Harthouse, inclining his head to Mrs. Sparsit with the
most indolent of all possible airs.
‘We live in a singular world, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit.
‘I have had the honour, by a coincidence of which I am proud, to have
made a remark, similar in effect, though not so epigrammatically
expressed.’
‘A singular world, I would say, sir,’ pursued Mrs. Sparsit; after
acknowledging the compliment with a drooping of her dark eyebrows, not
altogether so mild in its expression as her voice was in its dulcet
tones; ‘as regards the intimacies we form at one time, with individuals
we were quite ignorant of, at another. I recall, sir, that on that
occasion you went so far as to say you were actually apprehensive of Miss
Gradgrind.’
‘Your memory does me more honour than my insignificance deserves. I
availed myself of your obliging hints to correct my timidity, and it is
unnecessary to add that they were perfectly accurate. Mrs. Sparsit’s
talent for—in fact for anything requiring accuracy—with a combination of
strength of mind—and Family—is too habitually developed to admit of any
question.’ He was almost falling asleep over this compliment; it took
him so long to get through, and his mind wandered so much in the course
of its execution.
‘You found Miss Gradgrind—I really cannot call her Mrs. Bounderby; it’s
very absurd of me—as youthful as I described her?’ asked Mrs. Sparsit,
sweetly.
‘You drew her portrait perfectly,’ said Mr. Harthouse. ‘Presented her
dead image.’
‘Very engaging, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, causing her mittens slowly to
revolve over one another.
‘Highly so.’
‘It used to be considered,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘that Miss Gradgrind was
wanting in animation, but I confess she appears to me considerably and
strikingly improved in that respect. Ay, and indeed here _is_ Mr.
Bounderby!’ cried Mrs. Sparsit, nodding her head a great many times, as
if she had been talking and thinking of no one else. ‘How do you find
yourself this morning, sir? Pray let us see you cheerful, sir.’
Now, these persistent assuagements of his misery, and lightenings of his
load, had by this time begun to have the effect of making Mr. Bounderby
softer than usual towards Mrs. Sparsit, and harder than usual to most
other people from his wife downward. So, when Mrs. Sparsit said with
forced lightness of heart, ‘You want your breakfast, sir, but I dare say
Miss Gradgrind will soon be here to preside at the table,’ Mr. Bounderby
replied, ‘If I waited to be taken care of by my wife, ma’am, I believe
you know pretty well I should wait till Doomsday, so I’ll trouble _you_
to take charge of the teapot.’ Mrs. Sparsit complied, and assumed her
old position at table.
This again made the excellent woman vastly sentimental. She was so
humble withal, that when Louisa appeared, she rose, protesting she never
could think of sitting in that place under existing circumstances, often
as she had had the honour of making Mr. Bounderby’s breakfast, before
Mrs. Gradgrind—she begged pardon, she meant to say Miss Bounderby—she
hoped to be excused, but she really could not get it right yet, though
she trusted to become familiar with it by and by—had assumed her present
position. It was only (she observed) because Miss Gradgrind happened to
be a little late, and Mr. Bounderby’s time was so very precious, and she
knew it of old to be so essential that he should breakfast to the moment,
that she had taken the liberty of complying with his request; long as his
will had been a law to her.
‘There! Stop where you are, ma’am,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘stop where you
are! Mrs. Bounderby will be very glad to be relieved of the trouble, I
believe.’
‘Don’t say that, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, almost with severity,
‘because that is very unkind to Mrs. Bounderby. And to be unkind is not
to be you, sir.’
‘You may set your mind at rest, ma’am.—You can take it very quietly,
can’t you, Loo?’ said Mr. Bounderby, in a blustering way to his wife.
‘Of course. It is of no moment. Why should it be of any importance to
me?’
‘Why should it be of any importance to any one, Mrs. Sparsit, ma’am?’
said Mr. Bounderby, swelling with a sense of slight. ‘You attach too
much importance to these things, ma’am. By George, you’ll be corrupted
in some of your notions here. You are old-fashioned, ma’am. You are
behind Tom Gradgrind’s children’s time.’
‘What is the matter with you?’ asked Louisa, coldly surprised. ‘What has
given you offence?’
‘Offence!’ repeated Bounderby. ‘Do you suppose if there was any offence
given me, I shouldn’t name it, and request to have it corrected? I am a
straightforward man, I believe. I don’t go beating about for
side-winds.’
‘I suppose no one ever had occasion to think you too diffident, or too
delicate,’ Louisa answered him composedly: ‘I have never made that
objection to you, either as a child or as a woman. I don’t understand
what you would have.’
‘Have?’ returned Mr. Bounderby. ‘Nothing. Otherwise, don’t you, Loo
Bounderby, know thoroughly well that I, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown,
would have it?’
She looked at him, as he struck the table and made the teacups ring, with
a proud colour in her face that was a new change, Mr. Harthouse thought.
‘You are incomprehensible this morning,’ said Louisa. ‘Pray take no
further trouble to explain yourself. I am not curious to know your
meaning. What does it matter?’
Nothing more was said on this theme, and Mr. Harthouse was soon idly gay
on indifferent subjects. But from this day, the Sparsit action upon Mr.
Bounderby threw Louisa and James Harthouse more together, and
strengthened the dangerous alienation from her husband and confidence
against him with another, into which she had fallen by degrees so fine
that she could not retrace them if she tried. But whether she ever tried
or no, lay hidden in her own closed heart.
Mrs. Sparsit was so much affected on this particular occasion, that,
assisting Mr. Bounderby to his hat after breakfast, and being then alone
with him in the hall, she imprinted a chaste kiss upon his hand, murmured
‘My benefactor!’ and retired, overwhelmed with grief. Yet it is an
indubitable fact, within the cognizance of this history, that five
minutes after he had left the house in the self-same hat, the same
descendant of the Scadgerses and connexion by matrimony of the Powlers,
shook her right-hand mitten at his portrait, made a contemptuous grimace
at that work of art, and said ‘Serve you right, you Noodle, and I am glad
of it.’
Mr. Bounderby had not been long gone, when Bitzer appeared. Bitzer had
come down by train, shrieking and rattling over the long line of arches
that bestrode the wild country of past and present coal-pits, with an
express from Stone Lodge. It was a hasty note to inform Louisa that Mrs.
Gradgrind lay very ill. She had never been well within her daughter’s
knowledge; but, she had declined within the last few days, had continued
sinking all through the night, and was now as nearly dead, as her limited
capacity of being in any state that implied the ghost of an intention to
get out of it, allowed.
Accompanied by the lightest of porters, fit colourless servitor at
Death’s door when Mrs. Gradgrind knocked, Louisa rumbled to Coketown,
over the coal-pits past and present, and was whirled into its smoky jaws.
She dismissed the messenger to his own devices, and rode away to her old
home.
She had seldom been there since her marriage. Her father was usually
sifting and sifting at his parliamentary cinder-heap in London (without
being observed to turn up many precious articles among the rubbish), and
was still hard at it in the national dust-yard. Her mother had taken it
rather as a disturbance than otherwise, to be visited, as she reclined
upon her sofa; young people, Louisa felt herself all unfit for; Sissy she
had never softened to again, since the night when the stroller’s child
had raised her eyes to look at Mr. Bounderby’s intended wife. She had no
inducements to go back, and had rarely gone.
Neither, as she approached her old home now, did any of the best
influences of old home descend upon her. The dreams of childhood—its
airy fables; its graceful, beautiful, humane, impossible adornments of
the world beyond: so good to be believed in once, so good to be
remembered when outgrown, for then the least among them rises to the
stature of a great Charity in the heart, suffering little children to
come into the midst of it, and to keep with their pure hands a garden in
the stony ways of this world, wherein it were better for all the children
of Adam that they should oftener sun themselves, simple and trustful, and
not worldly-wise—what had she to do with these? Remembrances of how she
had journeyed to the little that she knew, by the enchanted roads of what
she and millions of innocent creatures had hoped and imagined; of how,
first coming upon Reason through the tender light of Fancy, she had seen
it a beneficent god, deferring to gods as great as itself; not a grim
Idol, cruel and cold, with its victims bound hand to foot, and its big
dumb shape set up with a sightless stare, never to be moved by anything
but so many calculated tons of leverage—what had she to do with these?
Her remembrances of home and childhood were remembrances of the drying up
of every spring and fountain in her young heart as it gushed out. The
golden waters were not there. They were flowing for the fertilization of
the land where grapes are gathered from thorns, and figs from thistles.
She went, with a heavy, hardened kind of sorrow upon her, into the house
and into her mother’s room. Since the time of her leaving home, Sissy
had lived with the rest of the family on equal terms. Sissy was at her
mother’s side; and Jane, her sister, now ten or twelve years old, was in
the room.
There was great trouble before it could be made known to Mrs. Gradgrind
that her eldest child was there. She reclined, propped up, from mere
habit, on a couch: as nearly in her old usual attitude, as anything so
helpless could be kept in. She had positively refused to take to her
bed; on the ground that if she did, she would never hear the last of it.
Her feeble voice sounded so far away in her bundle of shawls, and the
sound of another voice addressing her seemed to take such a long time in
getting down to her ears, that she might have been lying at the bottom of
a well. The poor lady was nearer Truth than she ever had been: which had
much to do with it.
On being told that Mrs. Bounderby was there, she replied, at
cross-purposes, that she had never called him by that name since he
married Louisa; that pending her choice of an objectionable name, she had
called him J; and that she could not at present depart from that
regulation, not being yet provided with a permanent substitute. Louisa
had sat by her for some minutes, and had spoken to her often, before she
arrived at a clear understanding who it was. She then seemed to come to
it all at once.
‘Well, my dear,’ said Mrs. Gradgrind, ‘and I hope you are going on
satisfactorily to yourself. It was all your father’s doing. He set his
heart upon it. And he ought to know.’
‘I want to hear of you, mother; not of myself.’
‘You want to hear of me, my dear? That’s something new, I am sure, when
anybody wants to hear of me. Not at all well, Louisa. Very faint and
giddy.’
‘Are you in pain, dear mother?’
‘I think there’s a pain somewhere in the room,’ said Mrs. Gradgrind, ‘but
I couldn’t positively say that I have got it.’
After this strange speech, she lay silent for some time. Louisa, holding
her hand, could feel no pulse; but kissing it, could see a slight thin
thread of life in fluttering motion.
‘You very seldom see your sister,’ said Mrs. Gradgrind. ‘She grows like
you. I wish you would look at her. Sissy, bring her here.’
She was brought, and stood with her hand in her sister’s. Louisa had
observed her with her arm round Sissy’s neck, and she felt the difference
of this approach.
‘Do you see the likeness, Louisa?’
‘Yes, mother. I should think her like me. But—’
‘Eh! Yes, I always say so,’ Mrs. Gradgrind cried, with unexpected
quickness. ‘And that reminds me. I—I want to speak to you, my dear.
Sissy, my good girl, leave us alone a minute.’ Louisa had relinquished
the hand: had thought that her sister’s was a better and brighter face
than hers had ever been: had seen in it, not without a rising feeling of
resentment, even in that place and at that time, something of the
gentleness of the other face in the room; the sweet face with the
trusting eyes, made paler than watching and sympathy made it, by the rich
dark hair.
Left alone with her mother, Louisa saw her lying with an awful lull upon
her face, like one who was floating away upon some great water, all
resistance over, content to be carried down the stream. She put the
shadow of a hand to her lips again, and recalled her.
‘You were going to speak to me, mother.’
‘Eh? Yes, to be sure, my dear. You know your father is almost always
away now, and therefore I must write to him about it.’
‘About what, mother? Don’t be troubled. About what?’
‘You must remember, my dear, that whenever I have said anything, on any
subject, I have never heard the last of it: and consequently, that I have
long left off saying anything.’
‘I can hear you, mother.’ But, it was only by dint of bending down to
her ear, and at the same time attentively watching the lips as they
moved, that she could link such faint and broken sounds into any chain of
connexion.
‘You learnt a great deal, Louisa, and so did your brother. Ologies of
all kinds from morning to night. If there is any Ology left, of any
description, that has not been worn to rags in this house, all I can say
is, I hope I shall never hear its name.’
‘I can hear you, mother, when you have strength to go on.’ This, to keep
her from floating away.
‘But there is something—not an Ology at all—that your father has missed,
or forgotten, Louisa. I don’t know what it is. I have often sat with
Sissy near me, and thought about it. I shall never get its name now.
But your father may. It makes me restless. I want to write to him, to
find out for God’s sake, what it is. Give me a pen, give me a pen.’
Even the power of restlessness was gone, except from the poor head, which
could just turn from side to side.
She fancied, however, that her request had been complied with, and that
the pen she could not have held was in her hand. It matters little what
figures of wonderful no-meaning she began to trace upon her wrappers.
The hand soon stopped in the midst of them; the light that had always
been feeble and dim behind the weak transparency, went out; and even Mrs.
Gradgrind, emerged from the shadow in which man walketh and disquieteth
himself in vain, took upon her the dread solemnity of the sages and
patriarchs.
CHAPTER X
MRS. SPARSIT’S STAIRCASE
MRS. SPARSIT’S nerves being slow to recover their tone, the worthy woman
made a stay of some weeks in duration at Mr. Bounderby’s retreat, where,
notwithstanding her anchorite turn of mind based upon her becoming
consciousness of her altered station, she resigned herself with noble
fortitude to lodging, as one may say, in clover, and feeding on the fat
of the land. During the whole term of this recess from the guardianship
of the Bank, Mrs. Sparsit was a pattern of consistency; continuing to
take such pity on Mr. Bounderby to his face, as is rarely taken on man,
and to call his portrait a Noodle to _its_ face, with the greatest
acrimony and contempt.