Mr. Bounderby, having got it into his explosive composition that Mrs.

Sparsit was a highly superior woman to perceive that he had that general

cross upon him in his deserts (for he had not yet settled what it was),

and further that Louisa would have objected to her as a frequent visitor

if it had comported with his greatness that she should object to anything

he chose to do, resolved not to lose sight of Mrs. Sparsit easily. So

when her nerves were strung up to the pitch of again consuming

sweetbreads in solitude, he said to her at the dinner-table, on the day

before her departure, ‘I tell you what, ma’am; you shall come down here

of a Saturday, while the fine weather lasts, and stay till Monday.’ To

which Mrs. Sparsit returned, in effect, though not of the Mahomedan

persuasion: ‘To hear is to obey.’

Now, Mrs. Sparsit was not a poetical woman; but she took an idea in the

nature of an allegorical fancy, into her head. Much watching of Louisa,

and much consequent observation of her impenetrable demeanour, which

keenly whetted and sharpened Mrs. Sparsit’s edge, must have given her as

it were a lift, in the way of inspiration. She erected in her mind a

mighty Staircase, with a dark pit of shame and ruin at the bottom; and

down those stairs, from day to day and hour to hour, she saw Louisa

coming.

It became the business of Mrs. Sparsit’s life, to look up at her

staircase, and to watch Louisa coming down. Sometimes slowly, sometimes

quickly, sometimes several steps at one bout, sometimes stopping, never

turning back. If she had once turned back, it might have been the death

of Mrs. Sparsit in spleen and grief.

She had been descending steadily, to the day, and on the day, when Mr.

Bounderby issued the weekly invitation recorded above. Mrs. Sparsit was

in good spirits, and inclined to be conversational.

‘And pray, sir,’ said she, ‘if I may venture to ask a question

appertaining to any subject on which you show reserve—which is indeed

hardy in me, for I well know you have a reason for everything you do—have

you received intelligence respecting the robbery?’

‘Why, ma’am, no; not yet. Under the circumstances, I didn’t expect it

yet. Rome wasn’t built in a day, ma’am.’

‘Very true, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, shaking her head.

‘Nor yet in a week, ma’am.’

‘No, indeed, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, with a gentle melancholy upon

her.

‘In a similar manner, ma’am,’ said Bounderby, ‘I can wait, you know. If

Romulus and Remus could wait, Josiah Bounderby can wait. They were

better off in their youth than I was, however. They had a she-wolf for a

nurse; I had only a she-wolf for a grandmother. She didn’t give any

milk, ma’am; she gave bruises. She was a regular Alderney at that.’

‘Ah!’ Mrs. Sparsit sighed and shuddered.

‘No, ma’am,’ continued Bounderby, ‘I have not heard anything more about

it. It’s in hand, though; and young Tom, who rather sticks to business

at present—something new for him; he hadn’t the schooling _I_ had—is

helping. My injunction is, Keep it quiet, and let it seem to blow over.

Do what you like under the rose, but don’t give a sign of what you’re

about; or half a hundred of ’em will combine together and get this fellow

who has bolted, out of reach for good. Keep it quiet, and the thieves

will grow in confidence by little and little, and we shall have ’em.’

‘Very sagacious indeed, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit. ‘Very interesting. The

old woman you mentioned, sir—’

‘The old woman I mentioned, ma’am,’ said Bounderby, cutting the matter

short, as it was nothing to boast about, ‘is not laid hold of; but, she

may take her oath she will be, if that is any satisfaction to her

villainous old mind. In the mean time, ma’am, I am of opinion, if you

ask me my opinion, that the less she is talked about, the better.’

The same evening, Mrs. Sparsit, in her chamber window, resting from her

packing operations, looked towards her great staircase and saw Louisa

still descending.

She sat by Mr. Harthouse, in an alcove in the garden, talking very low;

he stood leaning over her, as they whispered together, and his face

almost touched her hair. ‘If not quite!’ said Mrs. Sparsit, straining

her hawk’s eyes to the utmost. Mrs. Sparsit was too distant to hear a

word of their discourse, or even to know that they were speaking softly,

otherwise than from the expression of their figures; but what they said

was this:

‘You recollect the man, Mr. Harthouse?’

‘Oh, perfectly!’

‘His face, and his manner, and what he said?’

‘Perfectly. And an infinitely dreary person he appeared to me to be.

Lengthy and prosy in the extreme. It was knowing to hold forth, in the

humble-virtue school of eloquence; but, I assure you I thought at the

time, “My good fellow, you are over-doing this!”’

‘It has been very difficult to me to think ill of that man.’

‘My dear Louisa—as Tom says.’ Which he never did say. ‘You know no good

of the fellow?’

‘No, certainly.’

‘Nor of any other such person?’

‘How can I,’ she returned, with more of her first manner on her than he

had lately seen, ‘when I know nothing of them, men or women?’

‘My dear Louisa, then consent to receive the submissive representation of

your devoted friend, who knows something of several varieties of his

excellent fellow-creatures—for excellent they are, I am quite ready to

believe, in spite of such little foibles as always helping themselves to

what they can get hold of. This fellow talks. Well; every fellow talks.

He professes morality. Well; all sorts of humbugs profess morality.

From the House of Commons to the House of Correction, there is a general

profession of morality, except among our people; it really is that

exception which makes our people quite reviving. You saw and heard the

case. Here was one of the fluffy classes pulled up extremely short by my

esteemed friend Mr. Bounderby—who, as we know, is not possessed of that

delicacy which would soften so tight a hand. The member of the fluffy

classes was injured, exasperated, left the house grumbling, met somebody

who proposed to him to go in for some share in this Bank business, went

in, put something in his pocket which had nothing in it before, and

relieved his mind extremely. Really he would have been an uncommon,

instead of a common, fellow, if he had not availed himself of such an

opportunity. Or he may have originated it altogether, if he had the

cleverness.’

‘I almost feel as though it must be bad in me,’ returned Louisa, after

sitting thoughtful awhile, ‘to be so ready to agree with you, and to be

so lightened in my heart by what you say.’

‘I only say what is reasonable; nothing worse. I have talked it over

with my friend Tom more than once—of course I remain on terms of perfect

confidence with Tom—and he is quite of my opinion, and I am quite of his.

Will you walk?’

They strolled away, among the lanes beginning to be indistinct in the

twilight—she leaning on his arm—and she little thought how she was going

down, down, down, Mrs. Sparsit’s staircase.

Night and day, Mrs. Sparsit kept it standing. When Louisa had arrived at

the bottom and disappeared in the gulf, it might fall in upon her if it

would; but, until then, there it was to be, a Building, before Mrs.

Sparsit’s eyes. And there Louisa always was, upon it.

And always gliding down, down, down!

Mrs. Sparsit saw James Harthouse come and go; she heard of him here and

there; she saw the changes of the face he had studied; she, too, remarked

to a nicety how and when it clouded, how and when it cleared; she kept

her black eyes wide open, with no touch of pity, with no touch of

compunction, all absorbed in interest. In the interest of seeing her,

ever drawing, with no hand to stay her, nearer and nearer to the bottom

of this new Giant’s Staircase.

With all her deference for Mr. Bounderby as contradistinguished from his

portrait, Mrs. Sparsit had not the smallest intention of interrupting the

descent. Eager to see it accomplished, and yet patient, she waited for

the last fall, as for the ripeness and fulness of the harvest of her

hopes. Hushed in expectancy, she kept her wary gaze upon the stairs; and

seldom so much as darkly shook her right mitten (with her fist in it), at

the figure coming down.

CHAPTER XI

LOWER AND LOWER

THE figure descended the great stairs, steadily, steadily; always

verging, like a weight in deep water, to the black gulf at the bottom.

Mr. Gradgrind, apprised of his wife’s decease, made an expedition from

London, and buried her in a business-like manner. He then returned with

promptitude to the national cinder-heap, and resumed his sifting for the

odds and ends he wanted, and his throwing of the dust about into the eyes

of other people who wanted other odds and ends—in fact resumed his

parliamentary duties.

In the meantime, Mrs. Sparsit kept unwinking watch and ward. Separated

from her staircase, all the week, by the length of iron road dividing

Coketown from the country house, she yet maintained her cat-like

observation of Louisa, through her husband, through her brother, through

James Harthouse, through the outsides of letters and packets, through

everything animate and inanimate that at any time went near the stairs.

‘Your foot on the last step, my lady,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, apostrophizing

the descending figure, with the aid of her threatening mitten, ‘and all

your art shall never blind me.’

Art or nature though, the original stock of Louisa’s character or the

graft of circumstances upon it,—her curious reserve did baffle, while it

stimulated, one as sagacious as Mrs. Sparsit. There were times when Mr.

James Harthouse was not sure of her. There were times when he could not

read the face he had studied so long; and when this lonely girl was a

greater mystery to him, than any woman of the world with a ring of

satellites to help her.

So the time went on; until it happened that Mr. Bounderby was called away

from home by business which required his presence elsewhere, for three or

four days. It was on a Friday that he intimated this to Mrs. Sparsit at

the Bank, adding: ‘But you’ll go down to-morrow, ma’am, all the same.

You’ll go down just as if I was there. It will make no difference to

you.’

‘Pray, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, reproachfully, ‘let me beg you not to

say that. Your absence will make a vast difference to me, sir, as I

think you very well know.’

‘Well, ma’am, then you must get on in my absence as well as you can,’

said Mr. Bounderby, not displeased.

‘Mr. Bounderby,’ retorted Mrs. Sparsit, ‘your will is to me a law, sir;

otherwise, it might be my inclination to dispute your kind commands, not

feeling sure that it will be quite so agreeable to Miss Gradgrind to

receive me, as it ever is to your own munificent hospitality. But you

shall say no more, sir. I will go, upon your invitation.’

‘Why, when I invite you to my house, ma’am,’ said Bounderby, opening his

eyes, ‘I should hope you want no other invitation.’

‘No, indeed, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, ‘I should hope not. Say no

more, sir. I would, sir, I could see you gay again.’

‘What do you mean, ma’am?’ blustered Bounderby.

‘Sir,’ rejoined Mrs. Sparsit, ‘there was wont to be an elasticity in you

which I sadly miss. Be buoyant, sir!’

Mr. Bounderby, under the influence of this difficult adjuration, backed

up by her compassionate eye, could only scratch his head in a feeble and

ridiculous manner, and afterwards assert himself at a distance, by being

heard to bully the small fry of business all the morning.

‘Bitzer,’ said Mrs. Sparsit that afternoon, when her patron was gone on

his journey, and the Bank was closing, ‘present my compliments to young

Mr. Thomas, and ask him if he would step up and partake of a lamb chop

and walnut ketchup, with a glass of India ale?’ Young Mr. Thomas being

usually ready for anything in that way, returned a gracious answer, and

followed on its heels. ‘Mr. Thomas,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘these plain

viands being on table, I thought you might be tempted.’

‘Thank’ee, Mrs. Sparsit,’ said the whelp. And gloomily fell to.

‘How is Mr. Harthouse, Mr. Tom?’ asked Mrs. Sparsit.

‘Oh, he’s all right,’ said Tom.

‘Where may he be at present?’ Mrs. Sparsit asked in a light

conversational manner, after mentally devoting the whelp to the Furies

for being so uncommunicative.

‘He is shooting in Yorkshire,’ said Tom. ‘Sent Loo a basket half as big

as a church, yesterday.’

‘The kind of gentleman, now,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, sweetly, ‘whom one might

wager to be a good shot!’

‘Crack,’ said Tom.

He had long been a down-looking young fellow, but this characteristic had

so increased of late, that he never raised his eyes to any face for three

seconds together. Mrs. Sparsit consequently had ample means of watching

his looks, if she were so inclined.

‘Mr. Harthouse is a great favourite of mine,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘as

indeed he is of most people. May we expect to see him again shortly, Mr.

Tom?’

‘Why, _I_ expect to see him to-morrow,’ returned the whelp.

‘Good news!’ cried Mrs. Sparsit, blandly.

‘I have got an appointment with him to meet him in the evening at the

station here,’ said Tom, ‘and I am going to dine with him afterwards, I

believe. He is not coming down to the country house for a week or so,

being due somewhere else. At least, he says so; but I shouldn’t wonder

if he was to stop here over Sunday, and stray that way.’

‘Which reminds me!’ said Mrs. Sparsit. ‘Would you remember a message to

your sister, Mr. Tom, if I was to charge you with one?’

‘Well? I’ll try,’ returned the reluctant whelp, ‘if it isn’t a long un.’

‘It is merely my respectful compliments,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘and I fear

I may not trouble her with my society this week; being still a little

nervous, and better perhaps by my poor self.’

‘Oh! If that’s all,’ observed Tom, ‘it wouldn’t much matter, even if I

was to forget it, for Loo’s not likely to think of you unless she sees

you.’

Having paid for his entertainment with this agreeable compliment, he

relapsed into a hangdog silence until there was no more India ale left,

when he said, ‘Well, Mrs. Sparsit, I must be off!’ and went off.

Next day, Saturday, Mrs. Sparsit sat at her window all day long looking

at the customers coming in and out, watching the postmen, keeping an eye

on the general traffic of the street, revolving many things in her mind,

but, above all, keeping her attention on her staircase. The evening

come, she put on her bonnet and shawl, and went quietly out: having her

reasons for hovering in a furtive way about the station by which a

passenger would arrive from Yorkshire, and for preferring to peep into it

round pillars and corners, and out of ladies’ waiting-room windows, to

appearing in its precincts openly.

Tom was in attendance, and loitered about until the expected train came

in. It brought no Mr. Harthouse. Tom waited until the crowd had

dispersed, and the bustle was over; and then referred to a posted list of

trains, and took counsel with porters. That done, he strolled away idly,

stopping in the street and looking up it and down it, and lifting his hat

off and putting it on again, and yawning and stretching himself, and

exhibiting all the symptoms of mortal weariness to be expected in one who

had still to wait until the next train should come in, an hour and forty

minutes hence.

‘This is a device to keep him out of the way,’ said Mrs. Sparsit,

starting from the dull office window whence she had watched him last.

‘Harthouse is with his sister now!’

It was the conception of an inspired moment, and she shot off with her

utmost swiftness to work it out. The station for the country house was

at the opposite end of the town, the time was short, the road not easy;

but she was so quick in pouncing on a disengaged coach, so quick in

darting out of it, producing her money, seizing her ticket, and diving

into the train, that she was borne along the arches spanning the land of

coal-pits past and present, as if she had been caught up in a cloud and

whirled away.

All the journey, immovable in the air though never left behind; plain to

the dark eyes of her mind, as the electric wires which ruled a colossal

strip of music-paper out of the evening sky, were plain to the dark eyes

of her body; Mrs. Sparsit saw her staircase, with the figure coming down.

Very near the bottom now. Upon the brink of the abyss.

An overcast September evening, just at nightfall, saw beneath its

drooping eyelids Mrs. Sparsit glide out of her carriage, pass down the

wooden steps of the little station into a stony road, cross it into a

green lane, and become hidden in a summer-growth of leaves and branches.

One or two late birds sleepily chirping in their nests, and a bat heavily

crossing and recrossing her, and the reek of her own tread in the thick

dust that felt like velvet, were all Mrs. Sparsit heard or saw until she

very softly closed a gate.

She went up to the house, keeping within the shrubbery, and went round

it, peeping between the leaves at the lower windows. Most of them were

open, as they usually were in such warm weather, but there were no lights

yet, and all was silent. She tried the garden with no better effect.

She thought of the wood, and stole towards it, heedless of long grass and

briers: of worms, snails, and slugs, and all the creeping things that be.

With her dark eyes and her hook nose warily in advance of her, Mrs.

Sparsit softly crushed her way through the thick undergrowth, so intent

upon her object that she probably would have done no less, if the wood

had been a wood of adders.

Hark!

The smaller birds might have tumbled out of their nests, fascinated by

the glittering of Mrs. Sparsit’s eyes in the gloom, as she stopped and

listened.

Low voices close at hand. His voice and hers. The appointment _was_ a

device to keep the brother away! There they were yonder, by the felled

tree.

Bending low among the dewy grass, Mrs. Sparsit advanced closer to them.

She drew herself up, and stood behind a tree, like Robinson Crusoe in his

ambuscade against the savages; so near to them that at a spring, and that

no great one, she could have touched them both. He was there secretly,

and had not shown himself at the house. He had come on horseback, and

must have passed through the neighbouring fields; for his horse was tied

to the meadow side of the fence, within a few paces.

‘My dearest love,’ said he, ‘what could I do? Knowing you were alone,

was it possible that I could stay away?’

‘You may hang your head, to make yourself the more attractive; _I_ don’t

know what they see in you when you hold it up,’ thought Mrs. Sparsit;

‘but you little think, my dearest love, whose eyes are on you!’

That she hung her head, was certain. She urged him to go away, she

commanded him to go away; but she neither turned her face to him, nor

raised it. Yet it was remarkable that she sat as still as ever the

amiable woman in ambuscade had seen her sit, at any period in her life.

Her hands rested in one another, like the hands of a statue; and even her

manner of speaking was not hurried.

‘My dear child,’ said Harthouse; Mrs. Sparsit saw with delight that his

arm embraced her; ‘will you not bear with my society for a little while?’

‘Not here.’

‘Where, Louisa?

‘Not here.’

‘But we have so little time to make so much of, and I have come so far,

and am altogether so devoted, and distracted. There never was a slave at

once so devoted and ill-used by his mistress. To look for your sunny

welcome that has warmed me into life, and to be received in your frozen

manner, is heart-rending.’

‘Am I to say again, that I must be left to myself here?’

‘But we must meet, my dear Louisa. Where shall we meet?’

They both started. The listener started, guiltily, too; for she thought

there was another listener among the trees. It was only rain, beginning

to fall fast, in heavy drops.

‘Shall I ride up to the house a few minutes hence, innocently supposing

that its master is at home and will be charmed to receive me?’

‘No!’

‘Your cruel commands are implicitly to be obeyed; though I am the most

unfortunate fellow in the world, I believe, to have been insensible to

all other women, and to have fallen prostrate at last under the foot of

the most beautiful, and the most engaging, and the most imperious. My

dearest Louisa, I cannot go myself, or let you go, in this hard abuse of

your power.’

Mrs. Sparsit saw him detain her with his encircling arm, and heard him

then and there, within her (Mrs. Sparsit’s) greedy hearing, tell her how

he loved her, and how she was the stake for which he ardently desired to

play away all that he had in life. The objects he had lately pursued,

turned worthless beside her; such success as was almost in his grasp, he

flung away from him like the dirt it was, compared with her. Its

pursuit, nevertheless, if it kept him near her, or its renunciation if it

took him from her, or flight if she shared it, or secrecy if she

commanded it, or any fate, or every fate, all was alike to him, so that

she was true to him,—the man who had seen how cast away she was, whom she

had inspired at their first meeting with an admiration, an interest, of

which he had thought himself incapable, whom she had received into her

confidence, who was devoted to her and adored her. All this, and more,

in his hurry, and in hers, in the whirl of her own gratified malice, in

the dread of being discovered, in the rapidly increasing noise of heavy

rain among the leaves, and a thunderstorm rolling up—Mrs. Sparsit

received into her mind, set off with such an unavoidable halo of

confusion and indistinctness, that when at length he climbed the fence

and led his horse away, she was not sure where they were to meet, or

when, except that they had said it was to be that night.

But one of them yet remained in the darkness before her; and while she

tracked that one she must be right. ‘Oh, my dearest love,’ thought Mrs.

Sparsit, ‘you little think how well attended you are!’

Mrs. Sparsit saw her out of the wood, and saw her enter the house. What

to do next? It rained now, in a sheet of water. Mrs. Sparsit’s white

stockings were of many colours, green predominating; prickly things were

in her shoes; caterpillars slung themselves, in hammocks of their own

making, from various parts of her dress; rills ran from her bonnet, and

her Roman nose. In such condition, Mrs. Sparsit stood hidden in the

density of the shrubbery, considering what next?

Lo, Louisa coming out of the house! Hastily cloaked and muffled, and

stealing away. She elopes! She falls from the lowermost stair, and is

swallowed up in the gulf.

Indifferent to the rain, and moving with a quick determined step, she

struck into a side-path parallel with the ride. Mrs. Sparsit followed in

the shadow of the trees, at but a short distance; for it was not easy to

keep a figure in view going quickly through the umbrageous darkness.

When she stopped to close the side-gate without noise, Mrs. Sparsit

stopped. When she went on, Mrs. Sparsit went on. She went by the way

Mrs. Sparsit had come, emerged from the green lane, crossed the stony

road, and ascended the wooden steps to the railroad. A train for

Coketown would come through presently, Mrs. Sparsit knew; so she

understood Coketown to be her first place of destination.

In Mrs. Sparsit’s limp and streaming state, no extensive precautions were

necessary to change her usual appearance; but, she stopped under the lee

of the station wall, tumbled her shawl into a new shape, and put it on

over her bonnet. So disguised she had no fear of being recognized when

she followed up the railroad steps, and paid her money in the small

office. Louisa sat waiting in a corner. Mrs. Sparsit sat waiting in

another corner. Both listened to the thunder, which was loud, and to the

rain, as it washed off the roof, and pattered on the parapets of the

arches. Two or three lamps were rained out and blown out; so, both saw

the lightning to advantage as it quivered and zigzagged on the iron

tracks.

The seizure of the station with a fit of trembling, gradually deepening

to a complaint of the heart, announced the train. Fire and steam, and

smoke, and red light; a hiss, a crash, a bell, and a shriek; Louisa put

into one carriage, Mrs. Sparsit put into another: the little station a

desert speck in the thunderstorm.

Though her teeth chattered in her head from wet and cold, Mrs. Sparsit

exulted hugely. The figure had plunged down the precipice, and she felt

herself, as it were, attending on the body. Could she, who had been so

active in the getting up of the funeral triumph, do less than exult?

‘She will be at Coketown long before him,’ thought Mrs. Sparsit, ‘though

his horse is never so good. Where will she wait for him? And where will

they go together? Patience. We shall see.’

The tremendous rain occasioned infinite confusion, when the train stopped

at its destination. Gutters and pipes had burst, drains had overflowed,

and streets were under water. In the first instant of alighting, Mrs.

Sparsit turned her distracted eyes towards the waiting coaches, which

were in great request. ‘She will get into one,’ she considered, ‘and

will be away before I can follow in another. At all risks of being run

over, I must see the number, and hear the order given to the coachman.’

But, Mrs. Sparsit was wrong in her calculation. Louisa got into no

coach, and was already gone. The black eyes kept upon the

railroad-carriage in which she had travelled, settled upon it a moment

too late. The door not being opened after several minutes, Mrs. Sparsit

passed it and repassed it, saw nothing, looked in, and found it empty.

Wet through and through: with her feet squelching and squashing in her

shoes whenever she moved; with a rash of rain upon her classical visage;

with a bonnet like an over-ripe fig; with all her clothes spoiled; with

damp impressions of every button, string, and hook-and-eye she wore,

printed off upon her highly connected back; with a stagnant verdure on

her general exterior, such as accumulates on an old park fence in a

mouldy lane; Mrs. Sparsit had no resource but to burst into tears of

bitterness and say, ‘I have lost her!’

CHAPTER XII

DOWN

THE national dustmen, after entertaining one another with a great many

noisy little fights among themselves, had dispersed for the present, and

Mr. Gradgrind was at home for the vacation.

He sat writing in the room with the deadly statistical clock, proving

something no doubt—probably, in the main, that the Good Samaritan was a

Bad Economist. The noise of the rain did not disturb him much; but it

attracted his attention sufficiently to make him raise his head

sometimes, as if he were rather remonstrating with the elements. When it

thundered very loudly, he glanced towards Coketown, having it in his mind

that some of the tall chimneys might be struck by lightning.

The thunder was rolling into distance, and the rain was pouring down like

a deluge, when the door of his room opened. He looked round the lamp

upon his table, and saw, with amazement, his eldest daughter.

‘Louisa!’

‘Father, I want to speak to you.’

‘What is the matter? How strange you look! And good Heaven,’ said Mr.

Gradgrind, wondering more and more, ‘have you come here exposed to this

storm?’

She put her hands to her dress, as if she hardly knew. ‘Yes.’ Then she

uncovered her head, and letting her cloak and hood fall where they might,

stood looking at him: so colourless, so dishevelled, so defiant and

despairing, that he was afraid of her.

‘What is it? I conjure you, Louisa, tell me what is the matter.’

She dropped into a chair before him, and put her cold hand on his arm.

‘Father, you have trained me from my cradle?’

‘Yes, Louisa.’

‘I curse the hour in which I was born to such a destiny.’

He looked at her in doubt and dread, vacantly repeating: ‘Curse the hour?

Curse the hour?’

‘How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable

things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the

graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you

done, O father, what have you done, with the garden that should have

bloomed once, in this great wilderness here!’

She struck herself with both her hands upon her bosom.

‘If it had ever been here, its ashes alone would save me from the void in

which my whole life sinks. I did not mean to say this; but, father, you

remember the last time we conversed in this room?’

He had been so wholly unprepared for what he heard now, that it was with

difficulty he answered, ‘Yes, Louisa.’

‘What has risen to my lips now, would have risen to my lips then, if you

had given me a moment’s help. I don’t reproach you, father. What you

have never nurtured in me, you have never nurtured in yourself; but O! if

you had only done so long ago, or if you had only neglected me, what a

much better and much happier creature I should have been this day!’

On hearing this, after all his care, he bowed his head upon his hand and

groaned aloud.

‘Father, if you had known, when we were last together here, what even I

feared while I strove against it—as it has been my task from infancy to

strive against every natural prompting that has arisen in my heart; if

you had known that there lingered in my breast, sensibilities,

affections, weaknesses capable of being cherished into strength, defying

all the calculations ever made by man, and no more known to his

arithmetic than his Creator is,—would you have given me to the husband

whom I am now sure that I hate?’

He said, ‘No. No, my poor child.’

‘Would you have doomed me, at any time, to the frost and blight that have

hardened and spoiled me? Would you have robbed me—for no one’s

enrichment—only for the greater desolation of this world—of the

immaterial part of my life, the spring and summer of my belief, my refuge

from what is sordid and bad in the real things around me, my school in

which I should have learned to be more humble and more trusting with

them, and to hope in my little sphere to make them better?’

‘O no, no. No, Louisa.’

‘Yet, father, if I had been stone blind; if I had groped my way by my

sense of touch, and had been free, while I knew the shapes and surfaces

of things, to exercise my fancy somewhat, in regard to them; I should

have been a million times wiser, happier, more loving, more contented,

more innocent and human in all good respects, than I am with the eyes I

have. Now, hear what I have come to say.’

He moved, to support her with his arm. She rising as he did so, they

stood close together: she, with a hand upon his shoulder, looking fixedly

in his face.

‘With a hunger and thirst upon me, father, which have never been for a

moment appeased; with an ardent impulse towards some region where rules,

and figures, and definitions were not quite absolute; I have grown up,

battling every inch of my way.’

‘I never knew you were unhappy, my child.’

‘Father, I always knew it. In this strife I have almost repulsed and

crushed my better angel into a demon. What I have learned has left me

doubting, misbelieving, despising, regretting, what I have not learned;

and my dismal resource has been to think that life would soon go by, and

that nothing in it could be worth the pain and trouble of a contest.’

‘And you so young, Louisa!’ he said with pity.

‘And I so young. In this condition, father—for I show you now, without

fear or favour, the ordinary deadened state of my mind as I know it—you

proposed my husband to me. I took him. I never made a pretence to him

or you that I loved him. I knew, and, father, you knew, and he knew,

that I never did. I was not wholly indifferent, for I had a hope of

being pleasant and useful to Tom. I made that wild escape into something

visionary, and have slowly found out how wild it was. But Tom had been

the subject of all the little tenderness of my life; perhaps he became so

because I knew so well how to pity him. It matters little now, except as

it may dispose you to think more leniently of his errors.’

As her father held her in his arms, she put her other hand upon his other

shoulder, and still looking fixedly in his face, went on.

‘When I was irrevocably married, there rose up into rebellion against the

tie, the old strife, made fiercer by all those causes of disparity which

arise out of our two individual natures, and which no general laws shall

ever rule or state for me, father, until they shall be able to direct the

anatomist where to strike his knife into the secrets of my soul.’

‘Louisa!’ he said, and said imploringly; for he well remembered what had

passed between them in their former interview.

‘I do not reproach you, father, I make no complaint. I am here with

another object.’

‘What can I do, child? Ask me what you will.’

‘I am coming to it. Father, chance then threw into my way a new

acquaintance; a man such as I had had no experience of; used to the

world; light, polished, easy; making no pretences; avowing the low

estimate of everything, that I was half afraid to form in secret;

conveying to me almost immediately, though I don’t know how or by what

degrees, that he understood me, and read my thoughts. I could not find

that he was worse than I. There seemed to be a near affinity between us.

I only wondered it should be worth his while, who cared for nothing else,

to care so much for me.’

‘For you, Louisa!’

Her father might instinctively have loosened his hold, but that he felt

her strength departing from her, and saw a wild dilating fire in the eyes

steadfastly regarding him.

‘I say nothing of his plea for claiming my confidence. It matters very

little how he gained it. Father, he did gain it. What you know of the

story of my marriage, he soon knew, just as well.’

Her father’s face was ashy white, and he held her in both his arms.

‘I have done no worse, I have not disgraced you. But if you ask me

whether I have loved him, or do love him, I tell you plainly, father,

that it may be so. I don’t know.’

She took her hands suddenly from his shoulders, and pressed them both

upon her side; while in her face, not like itself—and in her figure,

drawn up, resolute to finish by a last effort what she had to say—the

feelings long suppressed broke loose.

‘This night, my husband being away, he has been with me, declaring

himself my lover. This minute he expects me, for I could release myself

of his presence by no other means. I do not know that I am sorry, I do

not know that I am ashamed, I do not know that I am degraded in my own

esteem. All that I know is, your philosophy and your teaching will not

save me. Now, father, you have brought me to this. Save me by some

other means!’

He tightened his hold in time to prevent her sinking on the floor, but

she cried out in a terrible voice, ‘I shall die if you hold me! Let me

fall upon the ground!’ And he laid her down there, and saw the pride of

his heart and the triumph of his system, lying, an insensible heap, at

his feet.

* * * * *

END OF THE SECOND BOOK

BOOK THE THIRD

_GARNERING_

CHAPTER I

ANOTHER THING NEEDFUL

LOUISA awoke from a torpor, and her eyes languidly opened on her old bed

at home, and her old room. It seemed, at first, as if all that had

happened since the days when these objects were familiar to her were the

shadows of a dream, but gradually, as the objects became more real to her

sight, the events became more real to her mind.

She could scarcely move her head for pain and heaviness, her eyes were

strained and sore, and she was very weak. A curious passive inattention

had such possession of her, that the presence of her little sister in the

room did not attract her notice for some time. Even when their eyes had

met, and her sister had approached the bed, Louisa lay for minutes

looking at her in silence, and suffering her timidly to hold her passive

hand, before she asked:

‘When was I brought to this room?’

‘Last night, Louisa.’

‘Who brought me here?’

‘Sissy, I believe.’

‘Why do you believe so?’

‘Because I found her here this morning. She didn’t come to my bedside to

wake me, as she always does; and I went to look for her. She was not in

her own room either; and I went looking for her all over the house, until

I found her here taking care of you and cooling your head. Will you see

father? Sissy said I was to tell him when you woke.’

‘What a beaming face you have, Jane!’ said Louisa, as her young

sister—timidly still—bent down to kiss her.

‘Have I? I am very glad you think so. I am sure it must be Sissy’s

doing.’

The arm Louisa had begun to twine around her neck, unbent itself. ‘You

can tell father if you will.’ Then, staying her for a moment, she said,

‘It was you who made my room so cheerful, and gave it this look of

welcome?’

‘Oh no, Louisa, it was done before I came. It was—’

Louisa turned upon her pillow, and heard no more. When her sister had

withdrawn, she turned her head back again, and lay with her face towards

the door, until it opened and her father entered.

He had a jaded anxious look upon him, and his hand, usually steady,

trembled in hers. He sat down at the side of the bed, tenderly asking

how she was, and dwelling on the necessity of her keeping very quiet

after her agitation and exposure to the weather last night. He spoke in

a subdued and troubled voice, very different from his usual dictatorial

manner; and was often at a loss for words.

‘My dear Louisa. My poor daughter.’ He was so much at a loss at that

place, that he stopped altogether. He tried again.

‘My unfortunate child.’ The place was so difficult to get over, that he

tried again.

‘It would be hopeless for me, Louisa, to endeavour to tell you how

overwhelmed I have been, and still am, by what broke upon me last night.

The ground on which I stand has ceased to be solid under my feet. The

only support on which I leaned, and the strength of which it seemed, and

still does seem, impossible to question, has given way in an instant. I

am stunned by these discoveries. I have no selfish meaning in what I

say; but I find the shock of what broke upon me last night, to be very

heavy indeed.’

She could give him no comfort herein. She had suffered the wreck of her

whole life upon the rock.

‘I will not say, Louisa, that if you had by any happy chance undeceived

me some time ago, it would have been better for us both; better for your

peace, and better for mine. For I am sensible that it may not have been

a part of my system to invite any confidence of that kind. I had proved

my—my system to myself, and I have rigidly administered it; and I must

bear the responsibility of its failures. I only entreat you to believe,

my favourite child, that I have meant to do right.’

He said it earnestly, and to do him justice he had. In gauging

fathomless deeps with his little mean excise-rod, and in staggering over

the universe with his rusty stiff-legged compasses, he had meant to do

great things. Within the limits of his short tether he had tumbled

about, annihilating the flowers of existence with greater singleness of

purpose than many of the blatant personages whose company he kept.

‘I am well assured of what you say, father. I know I have been your

favourite child. I know you have intended to make me happy. I have

never blamed you, and I never shall.’

He took her outstretched hand, and retained it in his.

‘My dear, I have remained all night at my table, pondering again and

again on what has so painfully passed between us. When I consider your

character; when I consider that what has been known to me for hours, has

been concealed by you for years; when I consider under what immediate

pressure it has been forced from you at last; I come to the conclusion

that I cannot but mistrust myself.’

He might have added more than all, when he saw the face now looking at

him. He did add it in effect, perhaps, as he softly moved her scattered

hair from her forehead with his hand. Such little actions, slight in

another man, were very noticeable in him; and his daughter received them

as if they had been words of contrition.

‘But,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, slowly, and with hesitation, as well as with a

wretched sense of happiness, ‘if I see reason to mistrust myself for the

past, Louisa, I should also mistrust myself for the present and the

future. To speak unreservedly to you, I do. I am far from feeling

convinced now, however differently I might have felt only this time

yesterday, that I am fit for the trust you repose in me; that I know how

to respond to the appeal you have come home to make to me; that I have

the right instinct—supposing it for the moment to be some quality of that

nature—how to help you, and to set you right, my child.’

She had turned upon her pillow, and lay with her face upon her arm, so

that he could not see it. All her wildness and passion had subsided;

but, though softened, she was not in tears. Her father was changed in

nothing so much as in the respect that he would have been glad to see her

in tears.

‘Some persons hold,’ he pursued, still hesitating, ‘that there is a

wisdom of the Head, and that there is a wisdom of the Heart. I have not

supposed so; but, as I have said, I mistrust myself now. I have supposed

the head to be all-sufficient. It may not be all-sufficient; how can I

venture this morning to say it is! If that other kind of wisdom should

be what I have neglected, and should be the instinct that is wanted,

Louisa—’

He suggested it very doubtfully, as if he were half unwilling to admit it

even now. She made him no answer, lying before him on her bed, still

half-dressed, much as he had seen her lying on the floor of his room last

night.

‘Louisa,’ and his hand rested on her hair again, ‘I have been absent from

here, my dear, a good deal of late; and though your sister’s training has

been pursued according to—the system,’ he appeared to come to that word

with great reluctance always, ‘it has necessarily been modified by daily

associations begun, in her case, at an early age. I ask you—ignorantly

and humbly, my daughter—for the better, do you think?’

‘Father,’ she replied, without stirring, ‘if any harmony has been

awakened in her young breast that was mute in mine until it turned to

discord, let her thank Heaven for it, and go upon her happier way, taking

it as her greatest blessing that she has avoided my way.’

‘O my child, my child!’ he said, in a forlorn manner, ‘I am an unhappy

man to see you thus! What avails it to me that you do not reproach me,

if I so bitterly reproach myself!’ He bent his head, and spoke low to

her. ‘Louisa, I have a misgiving that some change may have been slowly

working about me in this house, by mere love and gratitude: that what the

Head had left undone and could not do, the Heart may have been doing

silently. Can it be so?’

She made him no reply.

‘I am not too proud to believe it, Louisa. How could I be arrogant, and

you before me! Can it be so? Is it so, my dear?’ He looked upon her

once more, lying cast away there; and without another word went out of

the room. He had not been long gone, when she heard a light tread near

the door, and knew that some one stood beside her.

She did not raise her head. A dull anger that she should be seen in her

distress, and that the involuntary look she had so resented should come

to this fulfilment, smouldered within her like an unwholesome fire. All

closely imprisoned forces rend and destroy. The air that would be

healthful to the earth, the water that would enrich it, the heat that

would ripen it, tear it when caged up. So in her bosom even now; the

strongest qualities she possessed, long turned upon themselves, became a

heap of obduracy, that rose against a friend.

It was well that soft touch came upon her neck, and that she understood

herself to be supposed to have fallen asleep. The sympathetic hand did

not claim her resentment. Let it lie there, let it lie.

It lay there, warming into life a crowd of gentler thoughts; and she

rested. As she softened with the quiet, and the consciousness of being

so watched, some tears made their way into her eyes. The face touched

hers, and she knew that there were tears upon it too, and she the cause

of them.

As Louisa feigned to rouse herself, and sat up, Sissy retired, so that

she stood placidly near the bedside.

‘I hope I have not disturbed you. I have come to ask if you would let me

stay with you?’

‘Why should you stay with me? My sister will miss you. You are

everything to her.’

‘Am I?’ returned Sissy, shaking her head. ‘I would be something to you,

if I might.’

‘What?’ said Louisa, almost sternly.

‘Whatever you want most, if I could be that. At all events, I would like

to try to be as near it as I can. And however far off that may be, I

will never tire of trying. Will you let me?’

‘My father sent you to ask me.’

‘No indeed,’ replied Sissy. ‘He told me that I might come in now, but he

sent me away from the room this morning—or at least—’

She hesitated and stopped.

‘At least, what?’ said Louisa, with her searching eyes upon her.

‘I thought it best myself that I should be sent away, for I felt very

uncertain whether you would like to find me here.’

‘Have I always hated you so much?’

‘I hope not, for I have always loved you, and have always wished that you

should know it. But you changed to me a little, shortly before you left

home. Not that I wondered at it. You knew so much, and I knew so

little, and it was so natural in many ways, going as you were among other

friends, that I had nothing to complain of, and was not at all hurt.’

Her colour rose as she said it modestly and hurriedly. Louisa understood

the loving pretence, and her heart smote her.

‘May I try?’ said Sissy, emboldened to raise her hand to the neck that

was insensibly drooping towards her.

Louisa, taking down the hand that would have embraced her in another

moment, held it in one of hers, and answered:

‘First, Sissy, do you know what I am? I am so proud and so hardened, so

confused and troubled, so resentful and unjust to every one and to

myself, that everything is stormy, dark, and wicked to me. Does not that

repel you?’

‘No!’

‘I am so unhappy, and all that should have made me otherwise is so laid

waste, that if I had been bereft of sense to this hour, and instead of

being as learned as you think me, had to begin to acquire the simplest

truths, I could not want a guide to peace, contentment, honour, all the

good of which I am quite devoid, more abjectly than I do. Does not that

repel you?’

‘No!’

In the innocence of her brave affection, and the brimming up of her old

devoted spirit, the once deserted girl shone like a beautiful light upon

the darkness of the other.

Louisa raised the hand that it might clasp her neck and join its fellow

there. She fell upon her knees, and clinging to this stroller’s child

looked up at her almost with veneration.

‘Forgive me, pity me, help me! Have compassion on my great need, and let

me lay this head of mine upon a loving heart!’

‘O lay it here!’ cried Sissy. ‘Lay it here, my dear.’

CHAPTER II

VERY RIDICULOUS

MR. JAMES HARTHOUSE passed a whole night and a day in a state of so much

hurry, that the World, with its best glass in his eye, would scarcely

have recognized him during that insane interval, as the brother Jem of

the honourable and jocular member. He was positively agitated. He

several times spoke with an emphasis, similar to the vulgar manner. He

went in and went out in an unaccountable way, like a man without an

object. He rode like a highwayman. In a word, he was so horribly bored

by existing circumstances, that he forgot to go in for boredom in the

manner prescribed by the authorities.

After putting his horse at Coketown through the storm, as if it were a

leap, he waited up all night: from time to time ringing his bell with the

greatest fury, charging the porter who kept watch with delinquency in

withholding letters or messages that could not fail to have been

entrusted to him, and demanding restitution on the spot. The dawn

coming, the morning coming, and the day coming, and neither message nor

letter coming with either, he went down to the country house. There, the

report was, Mr. Bounderby away, and Mrs. Bounderby in town. Left for

town suddenly last evening. Not even known to be gone until receipt of

message, importing that her return was not to be expected for the

present.

In these circumstances he had nothing for it but to follow her to town.

He went to the house in town. Mrs. Bounderby not there. He looked in at

the Bank. Mr. Bounderby away and Mrs. Sparsit away. Mrs. Sparsit away?

Who could have been reduced to sudden extremity for the company of that

griffin!

‘Well! I don’t know,’ said Tom, who had his own reasons for being uneasy

about it. ‘She was off somewhere at daybreak this morning. She’s always

full of mystery; I hate her. So I do that white chap; he’s always got

his blinking eyes upon a fellow.’

‘Where were you last night, Tom?’

‘Where was I last night!’ said Tom. ‘Come! I like that. I was waiting

for you, Mr. Harthouse, till it came down as _I_ never saw it come down

before. Where was I too! Where were you, you mean.’

‘I was prevented from coming—detained.’

‘Detained!’ murmured Tom. ‘Two of us were detained. I was detained

looking for you, till I lost every train but the mail. It would have

been a pleasant job to go down by that on such a night, and have to walk

home through a pond. I was obliged to sleep in town after all.’

‘Where?’

‘Where? Why, in my own bed at Bounderby’s.’

‘Did you see your sister?’

‘How the deuce,’ returned Tom, staring, ‘could I see my sister when she

was fifteen miles off?’

Cursing these quick retorts of the young gentleman to whom he was so true

a friend, Mr. Harthouse disembarrassed himself of that interview with the

smallest conceivable amount of ceremony, and debated for the hundredth

time what all this could mean? He made only one thing clear. It was,

that whether she was in town or out of town, whether he had been

premature with her who was so hard to comprehend, or she had lost

courage, or they were discovered, or some mischance or mistake, at

present incomprehensible, had occurred, he must remain to confront his

fortune, whatever it was. The hotel where he was known to live when

condemned to that region of blackness, was the stake to which he was

tied. As to all the rest—What will be, will be.

‘So, whether I am waiting for a hostile message, or an assignation, or a

penitent remonstrance, or an impromptu wrestle with my friend Bounderby

in the Lancashire manner—which would seem as likely as anything else in

the present state of affairs—I’ll dine,’ said Mr. James Harthouse.

‘Bounderby has the advantage in point of weight; and if anything of a

British nature is to come off between us, it may be as well to be in

training.’

Therefore he rang the bell, and tossing himself negligently on a sofa,

ordered ‘Some dinner at six—with a beefsteak in it,’ and got through the

intervening time as well as he could. That was not particularly well;

for he remained in the greatest perplexity, and, as the hours went on,

and no kind of explanation offered itself, his perplexity augmented at

compound interest.

However, he took affairs as coolly as it was in human nature to do, and

entertained himself with the facetious idea of the training more than

once. ‘It wouldn’t be bad,’ he yawned at one time, ‘to give the waiter

five shillings, and throw him.’ At another time it occurred to him, ‘Or

a fellow of about thirteen or fourteen stone might be hired by the hour.’

But these jests did not tell materially on the afternoon, or his

suspense; and, sooth to say, they both lagged fearfully.

It was impossible, even before dinner, to avoid often walking about in

the pattern of the carpet, looking out of the window, listening at the

door for footsteps, and occasionally becoming rather hot when any steps

approached that room. But, after dinner, when the day turned to

twilight, and the twilight turned to night, and still no communication

was made to him, it began to be as he expressed it, ‘like the Holy Office

and slow torture.’ However, still true to his conviction that

indifference was the genuine high-breeding (the only conviction he had),

he seized this crisis as the opportunity for ordering candles and a

newspaper.

He had been trying in vain, for half an hour, to read this newspaper,

when the waiter appeared and said, at once mysteriously and

apologetically:

‘Beg your pardon, sir. You’re wanted, sir, if you please.’

A general recollection that this was the kind of thing the Police said to

the swell mob, caused Mr. Harthouse to ask the waiter in return, with

bristling indignation, what the Devil he meant by ‘wanted’?

‘Beg your pardon, sir. Young lady outside, sir, wishes to see you.’

‘Outside? Where?’

‘Outside this door, sir.’

Giving the waiter to the personage before mentioned, as a block-head duly

qualified for that consignment, Mr. Harthouse hurried into the gallery.

A young woman whom he had never seen stood there. Plainly dressed, very

quiet, very pretty. As he conducted her into the room and placed a chair

for her, he observed, by the light of the candles, that she was even

prettier than he had at first believed. Her face was innocent and

youthful, and its expression remarkably pleasant. She was not afraid of

him, or in any way disconcerted; she seemed to have her mind entirely

preoccupied with the occasion of her visit, and to have substituted that

consideration for herself.

‘I speak to Mr. Harthouse?’ she said, when they were alone.

‘To Mr. Harthouse.’ He added in his mind, ‘And you speak to him with the

most confiding eyes I ever saw, and the most earnest voice (though so

quiet) I ever heard.’

‘If I do not understand—and I do not, sir’—said Sissy, ‘what your honour

as a gentleman binds you to, in other matters:’ the blood really rose in

his face as she began in these words: ‘I am sure I may rely upon it to

keep my visit secret, and to keep secret what I am going to say. I will

rely upon it, if you will tell me I may so far trust—’

‘You may, I assure you.’

‘I am young, as you see; I am alone, as you see. In coming to you, sir,

I have no advice or encouragement beyond my own hope.’ He thought, ‘But

that is very strong,’ as he followed the momentary upward glance of her

eyes. He thought besides, ‘This is a very odd beginning. I don’t see

where we are going.’

‘I think,’ said Sissy, ‘you have already guessed whom I left just now!’

‘I have been in the greatest concern and uneasiness during the last

four-and-twenty hours (which have appeared as many years),’ he returned,

‘on a lady’s account. The hopes I have been encouraged to form that you

come from that lady, do not deceive me, I trust.’

‘I left her within an hour.’

‘At—!’

‘At her father’s.’

Mr. Harthouse’s face lengthened in spite of his coolness, and his

perplexity increased. ‘Then I certainly,’ he thought, ‘do _not_ see

where we are going.’

‘She hurried there last night. She arrived there in great agitation, and

was insensible all through the night. I live at her father’s, and was

with her. You may be sure, sir, you will never see her again as long as

you live.’

Mr. Harthouse drew a long breath; and, if ever man found himself in the

position of not knowing what to say, made the discovery beyond all

question that he was so circumstanced. The child-like ingenuousness with

which his visitor spoke, her modest fearlessness, her truthfulness which

put all artifice aside, her entire forgetfulness of herself in her

earnest quiet holding to the object with which she had come; all this,

together with her reliance on his easily given promise—which in itself

shamed him—presented something in which he was so inexperienced, and

against which he knew any of his usual weapons would fall so powerless;

that not a word could he rally to his relief.

At last he said:

‘So startling an announcement, so confidently made, and by such lips, is

really disconcerting in the last degree. May I be permitted to inquire,

if you are charged to convey that information to me in those hopeless

words, by the lady of whom we speak?’

‘I have no charge from her.’

‘The drowning man catches at the straw. With no disrespect for your

judgment, and with no doubt of your sincerity, excuse my saying that I

cling to the belief that there is yet hope that I am not condemned to

perpetual exile from that lady’s presence.’

‘There is not the least hope. The first object of my coming here, sir,

is to assure you that you must believe that there is no more hope of your

ever speaking with her again, than there would be if she had died when

she came home last night.’

‘Must believe? But if I can’t—or if I should, by infirmity of nature, be

obstinate—and won’t—’

‘It is still true. There is no hope.’

James Harthouse looked at her with an incredulous smile upon his lips;

but her mind looked over and beyond him, and the smile was quite thrown

away.

He bit his lip, and took a little time for consideration.

‘Well! If it should unhappily appear,’ he said, ‘after due pains and

duty on my part, that I am brought to a position so desolate as this

banishment, I shall not become the lady’s persecutor. But you said you

had no commission from her?’

‘I have only the commission of my love for her, and her love for me. I

have no other trust, than that I have been with her since she came home,

and that she has given me her confidence. I have no further trust, than

that I know something of her character and her marriage. O Mr.

Harthouse, I think you had that trust too!’

He was touched in the cavity where his heart should have been—in that

nest of addled eggs, where the birds of heaven would have lived if they

had not been whistled away—by the fervour of this reproach.

‘I am not a moral sort of fellow,’ he said, ‘and I never make any

pretensions to the character of a moral sort of fellow. I am as immoral

as need be. At the same time, in bringing any distress upon the lady who

is the subject of the present conversation, or in unfortunately

compromising her in any way, or in committing myself by any expression of

sentiments towards her, not perfectly reconcilable with—in fact with—the

domestic hearth; or in taking any advantage of her father’s being a

machine, or of her brother’s being a whelp, or of her husband’s being a

bear; I beg to be allowed to assure you that I have had no particularly

evil intentions, but have glided on from one step to another with a

smoothness so perfectly diabolical, that I had not the slightest idea the

catalogue was half so long until I began to turn it over. Whereas I

find,’ said Mr. James Harthouse, in conclusion, ‘that it is really in

several volumes.’

Though he said all this in his frivolous way, the way seemed, for that

once, a conscious polishing of but an ugly surface. He was silent for a

moment; and then proceeded with a more self-possessed air, though with

traces of vexation and disappointment that would not be polished out.

‘After what has been just now represented to me, in a manner I find it

impossible to doubt—I know of hardly any other source from which I could

have accepted it so readily—I feel bound to say to you, in whom the

confidence you have mentioned has been reposed, that I cannot refuse to

contemplate the possibility (however unexpected) of my seeing the lady no

more. I am solely to blame for the thing having come to this—and—and, I

cannot say,’ he added, rather hard up for a general peroration, ‘that I

have any sanguine expectation of ever becoming a moral sort of fellow, or

that I have any belief in any moral sort of fellow whatever.’

Sissy’s face sufficiently showed that her appeal to him was not finished.

‘You spoke,’ he resumed, as she raised her eyes to him again, ‘of your

first object. I may assume that there is a second to be mentioned?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will you oblige me by confiding it?’

‘Mr. Harthouse,’ returned Sissy, with a blending of gentleness and

steadiness that quite defeated him, and with a simple confidence in his

being bound to do what she required, that held him at a singular

disadvantage, ‘the only reparation that remains with you, is to leave

here immediately and finally. I am quite sure that you can mitigate in

no other way the wrong and harm you have done. I am quite sure that it

is the only compensation you have left it in your power to make. I do

not say that it is much, or that it is enough; but it is something, and

it is necessary. Therefore, though without any other authority than I

have given you, and even without the knowledge of any other person than

yourself and myself, I ask you to depart from this place to-night, under

an obligation never to return to it.’

If she had asserted any influence over him beyond her plain faith in the

truth and right of what she said; if she had concealed the least doubt or

irresolution, or had harboured for the best purpose any reserve or

pretence; if she had shown, or felt, the lightest trace of any

sensitiveness to his ridicule or his astonishment, or any remonstrance he

might offer; he would have carried it against her at this point. But he

could as easily have changed a clear sky by looking at it in surprise, as

affect her.

‘But do you know,’ he asked, quite at a loss, ‘the extent of what you

ask? You probably are not aware that I am here on a public kind of

business, preposterous enough in itself, but which I have gone in for,

and sworn by, and am supposed to be devoted to in quite a desperate

manner? You probably are not aware of that, but I assure you it’s the

fact.’

It had no effect on Sissy, fact or no fact.

‘Besides which,’ said Mr. Harthouse, taking a turn or two across the

room, dubiously, ‘it’s so alarmingly absurd. It would make a man so

ridiculous, after going in for these fellows, to back out in such an

incomprehensible way.’

‘I am quite sure,’ repeated Sissy, ‘that it is the only reparation in

your power, sir. I am quite sure, or I would not have come here.’

He glanced at her face, and walked about again. ‘Upon my soul, I don’t

know what to say. So immensely absurd!’

It fell to his lot, now, to stipulate for secrecy.

‘If I were to do such a very ridiculous thing,’ he said, stopping again

presently, and leaning against the chimney-piece, ‘it could only be in

the most inviolable confidence.’

‘I will trust to you, sir,’ returned Sissy, ‘and you will trust to me.’

His leaning against the chimney-piece reminded him of the night with the

whelp. It was the self-same chimney-piece, and somehow he felt as if

_he_ were the whelp to-night. He could make no way at all.

‘I suppose a man never was placed in a more ridiculous position,’ he

said, after looking down, and looking up, and laughing, and frowning, and

walking off, and walking back again. ‘But I see no way out of it. What

will be, will be. _This_ will be, I suppose. I must take off myself, I

imagine—in short, I engage to do it.’

Sissy rose. She was not surprised by the result, but she was happy in

it, and her face beamed brightly.

‘You will permit me to say,’ continued Mr. James Harthouse, ‘that I doubt

if any other ambassador, or ambassadress, could have addressed me with

the same success. I must not only regard myself as being in a very

ridiculous position, but as being vanquished at all points. Will you

allow me the privilege of remembering my enemy’s name?’

‘_My_ name?’ said the ambassadress.

‘The only name I could possibly care to know, to-night.’

‘Sissy Jupe.’

‘Pardon my curiosity at parting. Related to the family?’

‘I am only a poor girl,’ returned Sissy. ‘I was separated from my

father—he was only a stroller—and taken pity on by Mr. Gradgrind. I have

lived in the house ever since.’

She was gone.

‘It wanted this to complete the defeat,’ said Mr. James Harthouse,

sinking, with a resigned air, on the sofa, after standing transfixed a

little while. ‘The defeat may now be considered perfectly accomplished.

Only a poor girl—only a stroller—only James Harthouse made nothing

of—only James Harthouse a Great Pyramid of failure.’

The Great Pyramid put it into his head to go up the Nile. He took a pen

upon the instant, and wrote the following note (in appropriate

hieroglyphics) to his brother:

Dear Jack,—All up at Coketown. Bored out of the place, and going in

for camels.

Affectionately,

JEM.

He rang the bell.

‘Send my fellow here.’

‘Gone to bed, sir.’

‘Tell him to get up, and pack up.’

He wrote two more notes. One, to Mr. Bounderby, announcing his

retirement from that part of the country, and showing where he would be

found for the next fortnight. The other, similar in effect, to Mr.

Gradgrind. Almost as soon as the ink was dry upon their superscriptions,

he had left the tall chimneys of Coketown behind, and was in a railway

carriage, tearing and glaring over the dark landscape.

The moral sort of fellows might suppose that Mr. James Harthouse derived

some comfortable reflections afterwards, from this prompt retreat, as one

of his few actions that made any amends for anything, and as a token to

himself that he had escaped the climax of a very bad business. But it

was not so, at all. A secret sense of having failed and been

ridiculous—a dread of what other fellows who went in for similar sorts of

things, would say at his expense if they knew it—so oppressed him, that

what was about the very best passage in his life was the one of all

others he would not have owned to on any account, and the only one that

made him ashamed of himself.

CHAPTER III

VERY DECIDED

THE indefatigable Mrs. Sparsit, with a violent cold upon her, her voice

reduced to a whisper, and her stately frame so racked by continual

sneezes that it seemed in danger of dismemberment, gave chase to her

patron until she found him in the metropolis; and there, majestically

sweeping in upon him at his hotel in St. James’s Street, exploded the

combustibles with which she was charged, and blew up. Having executed

her mission with infinite relish, this high-minded woman then fainted

away on Mr. Bounderby’s coat-collar.

Mr. Bounderby’s first procedure was to shake Mrs. Sparsit off, and leave

her to progress as she might through various stages of suffering on the

floor. He next had recourse to the administration of potent

restoratives, such as screwing the patient’s thumbs, smiting her hands,

abundantly watering her face, and inserting salt in her mouth. When

these attentions had recovered her (which they speedily did), he hustled

her into a fast train without offering any other refreshment, and carried

her back to Coketown more dead than alive.

Regarded as a classical ruin, Mrs. Sparsit was an interesting spectacle

on her arrival at her journey’s end; but considered in any other light,

the amount of damage she had by that time sustained was excessive, and

impaired her claims to admiration. Utterly heedless of the wear and tear

of her clothes and constitution, and adamant to her pathetic sneezes, Mr.

Bounderby immediately crammed her into a coach, and bore her off to Stone

Lodge.

‘Now, Tom Gradgrind,’ said Bounderby, bursting into his father-in-law’s

room late at night; ‘here’s a lady here—Mrs. Sparsit—you know Mrs.

Sparsit—who has something to say to you that will strike you dumb.’

‘You have missed my letter!’ exclaimed Mr. Gradgrind, surprised by the

apparition.

‘Missed your letter, sir!’ bawled Bounderby. ‘The present time is no

time for letters. No man shall talk to Josiah Bounderby of Coketown

about letters, with his mind in the state it’s in now.’

‘Bounderby,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, in a tone of temperate remonstrance, ‘I

speak of a very special letter I have written to you, in reference to

Louisa.’

‘Tom Gradgrind,’ replied Bounderby, knocking the flat of his hand several

times with great vehemence on the table, ‘I speak of a very special

messenger that has come to me, in reference to Louisa. Mrs. Sparsit,

ma’am, stand forward!’

That unfortunate lady hereupon essaying to offer testimony, without any

voice and with painful gestures expressive of an inflamed throat, became

so aggravating and underwent so many facial contortions, that Mr.

Bounderby, unable to bear it, seized her by the arm and shook her.

‘If you can’t get it out, ma’am,’ said Bounderby, ‘leave _me_ to get it

out. This is not a time for a lady, however highly connected, to be

totally inaudible, and seemingly swallowing marbles. Tom Gradgrind, Mrs.

Sparsit latterly found herself, by accident, in a situation to overhear a

conversation out of doors between your daughter and your precious

gentleman-friend, Mr. James Harthouse.’

‘Indeed!’ said Mr. Gradgrind.

‘Ah! Indeed!’ cried Bounderby. ‘And in that conversation—’

‘It is not necessary to repeat its tenor, Bounderby. I know what

passed.’

‘You do? Perhaps,’ said Bounderby, staring with all his might at his so

quiet and assuasive father-in-law, ‘you know where your daughter is at

the present time!’

‘Undoubtedly. She is here.’

‘Here?’

‘My dear Bounderby, let me beg you to restrain these loud out-breaks, on

all accounts. Louisa is here. The moment she could detach herself from

that interview with the person of whom you speak, and whom I deeply

regret to have been the means of introducing to you, Louisa hurried here,

for protection. I myself had not been at home many hours, when I

received her—here, in this room. She hurried by the train to town, she

ran from town to this house, through a raging storm, and presented

herself before me in a state of distraction. Of course, she has remained

here ever since. Let me entreat you, for your own sake and for hers, to

be more quiet.’

Mr. Bounderby silently gazed about him for some moments, in every

direction except Mrs. Sparsit’s direction; and then, abruptly turning

upon the niece of Lady Scadgers, said to that wretched woman:

‘Now, ma’am! We shall be happy to hear any little apology you may think

proper to offer, for going about the country at express pace, with no

other luggage than a Cock-and-a-Bull, ma’am!’

‘Sir,’ whispered Mrs. Sparsit, ‘my nerves are at present too much shaken,

and my health is at present too much impaired, in your service, to admit

of my doing more than taking refuge in tears.’ (Which she did.)

‘Well, ma’am,’ said Bounderby, ‘without making any observation to you

that may not be made with propriety to a woman of good family, what I

have got to add to that, is that there is something else in which it

appears to me you may take refuge, namely, a coach. And the coach in

which we came here being at the door, you’ll allow me to hand you down to

it, and pack you home to the Bank: where the best course for you to

pursue, will be to put your feet into the hottest water you can bear, and

take a glass of scalding rum and butter after you get into bed.’ With

these words, Mr. Bounderby extended his right hand to the weeping lady,

and escorted her to the conveyance in question, shedding many plaintive

sneezes by the way. He soon returned alone.

‘Now, as you showed me in your face, Tom Gradgrind, that you wanted to

speak to me,’ he resumed, ‘here I am. But, I am not in a very agreeable

state, I tell you plainly: not relishing this business, even as it is,

and not considering that I am at any time as dutifully and submissively

treated by your daughter, as Josiah Bounderby of Coketown ought to be

treated by his wife. You have your opinion, I dare say; and I have mine,

I know. If you mean to say anything to me to-night, that goes against

this candid remark, you had better let it alone.’

Mr. Gradgrind, it will be observed, being much softened, Mr. Bounderby

took particular pains to harden himself at all points. It was his

amiable nature.

‘My dear Bounderby,’ Mr. Gradgrind began in reply.

‘Now, you’ll excuse me,’ said Bounderby, ‘but I don’t want to be too

dear. That, to start with. When I begin to be dear to a man, I

generally find that his intention is to come over me. I am not speaking

to you politely; but, as you are aware, I am _not_ polite. If you like

politeness, you know where to get it. You have your gentleman-friends,

you know, and they’ll serve you with as much of the article as you want.

I don’t keep it myself.’

‘Bounderby,’ urged Mr. Gradgrind, ‘we are all liable to mistakes—’

‘I thought you couldn’t make ’em,’ interrupted Bounderby.

‘Perhaps I thought so. But, I say we are all liable to mistakes and I

should feel sensible of your delicacy, and grateful for it, if you would

spare me these references to Harthouse. I shall not associate him in our

conversation with your intimacy and encouragement; pray do not persist in

connecting him with mine.’

‘I never mentioned his name!’ said Bounderby.

‘Well, well!’ returned Mr. Gradgrind, with a patient, even a submissive,

air. And he sat for a little while pondering. ‘Bounderby, I see reason

to doubt whether we have ever quite understood Louisa.’

‘Who do you mean by We?’

‘Let me say I, then,’ he returned, in answer to the coarsely blurted

question; ‘I doubt whether I have understood Louisa. I doubt whether I

have been quite right in the manner of her education.’

‘There you hit it,’ returned Bounderby. ‘There I agree with you. You

have found it out at last, have you? Education! I’ll tell you what

education is—To be tumbled out of doors, neck and crop, and put upon the

shortest allowance of everything except blows. That’s what _I_ call

education.’

‘I think your good sense will perceive,’ Mr. Gradgrind remonstrated in

all humility, ‘that whatever the merits of such a system may be, it would

be difficult of general application to girls.’

‘I don’t see it at all, sir,’ returned the obstinate Bounderby.

‘Well,’ sighed Mr. Gradgrind, ‘we will not enter into the question. I

assure you I have no desire to be controversial. I seek to repair what

is amiss, if I possibly can; and I hope you will assist me in a good

spirit, Bounderby, for I have been very much distressed.’

‘I don’t understand you, yet,’ said Bounderby, with determined obstinacy,

‘and therefore I won’t make any promises.’

‘In the course of a few hours, my dear Bounderby,’ Mr. Gradgrind

proceeded, in the same depressed and propitiatory manner, ‘I appear to

myself to have become better informed as to Louisa’s character, than in

previous years. The enlightenment has been painfully forced upon me, and

the discovery is not mine. I think there are—Bounderby, you will be

surprised to hear me say this—I think there are qualities in Louisa,

which—which have been harshly neglected, and—and a little perverted.

And—and I would suggest to you, that—that if you would kindly meet me in

a timely endeavour to leave her to her better nature for a while—and to

encourage it to develop itself by tenderness and consideration—it—it

would be the better for the happiness of all of us. Louisa,’ said Mr.

Gradgrind, shading his face with his hand, ‘has always been my favourite

child.’

The blustrous Bounderby crimsoned and swelled to such an extent on

hearing these words, that he seemed to be, and probably was, on the brink

of a fit. With his very ears a bright purple shot with crimson, he pent

up his indignation, however, and said:

‘You’d like to keep her here for a time?’

‘I—I had intended to recommend, my dear Bounderby, that you should allow

Louisa to remain here on a visit, and be attended by Sissy (I mean of

course Cecilia Jupe), who understands her, and in whom she trusts.’

‘I gather from all this, Tom Gradgrind,’ said Bounderby, standing up with

his hands in his pockets, ‘that you are of opinion that there’s what

people call some incompatibility between Loo Bounderby and myself.’

‘I fear there is at present a general incompatibility between Louisa,

and—and—and almost all the relations in which I have placed her,’ was her

father’s sorrowful reply.

‘Now, look you here, Tom Gradgrind,’ said Bounderby the flushed,

confronting him with his legs wide apart, his hands deeper in his

pockets, and his hair like a hayfield wherein his windy anger was

boisterous. ‘You have said your say; I am going to say mine. I am a

Coketown man. I am Josiah Bounderby of Coketown. I know the bricks of

this town, and I know the works of this town, and I know the chimneys of

this town, and I know the smoke of this town, and I know the Hands of

this town. I know ’em all pretty well. They’re real. When a man tells

me anything about imaginative qualities, I always tell that man, whoever

he is, that I know what he means. He means turtle soup and venison, with

a gold spoon, and that he wants to be set up with a coach and six.

That’s what your daughter wants. Since you are of opinion that she ought

to have what she wants, I recommend you to provide it for her. Because,

Tom Gradgrind, she will never have it from me.’

‘Bounderby,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘I hoped, after my entreaty, you would

have taken a different tone.’

‘Just wait a bit,’ retorted Bounderby; ‘you have said your say, I

believe. I heard you out; hear me out, if you please. Don’t make

yourself a spectacle of unfairness as well as inconsistency, because,

although I am sorry to see Tom Gradgrind reduced to his present position,

I should be doubly sorry to see him brought so low as that. Now, there’s

an incompatibility of some sort or another, I am given to understand by

you, between your daughter and me. I’ll give _you_ to understand, in

reply to that, that there unquestionably is an incompatibility of the

first magnitude—to be summed up in this—that your daughter don’t properly

know her husband’s merits, and is not impressed with such a sense as

would become her, by George! of the honour of his alliance. That’s plain

speaking, I hope.’

‘Bounderby,’ urged Mr. Gradgrind, ‘this is unreasonable.’

‘Is it?’ said Bounderby. ‘I am glad to hear you say so. Because when

Tom Gradgrind, with his new lights, tells me that what I say is

unreasonable, I am convinced at once it must be devilish sensible. With

your permission I am going on. You know my origin; and you know that for

a good many years of my life I didn’t want a shoeing-horn, in consequence

of not having a shoe. Yet you may believe or not, as you think proper,

that there are ladies—born ladies—belonging to families—Families!—who

next to worship the ground I walk on.’

He discharged this like a Rocket, at his father-in-law’s head.

‘Whereas your daughter,’ proceeded Bounderby, ‘is far from being a born

lady. That you know, yourself. Not that I care a pinch of candle-snuff

about such things, for you are very well aware I don’t; but that such is

the fact, and you, Tom Gradgrind, can’t change it. Why do I say this?’

‘Not, I fear,’ observed Mr. Gradgrind, in a low voice, ‘to spare me.’

‘Hear me out,’ said Bounderby, ‘and refrain from cutting in till your

turn comes round. I say this, because highly connected females have been

astonished to see the way in which your daughter has conducted herself,

and to witness her insensibility. They have wondered how I have suffered

it. And I wonder myself now, and I won’t suffer it.’

‘Bounderby,’ returned Mr. Gradgrind, rising, ‘the less we say to-night

the better, I think.’

‘On the contrary, Tom Gradgrind, the more we say to-night, the better, I

think. That is,’ the consideration checked him, ‘till I have said all I

mean to say, and then I don’t care how soon we stop. I come to a

question that may shorten the business. What do you mean by the proposal

you made just now?’

‘What do I mean, Bounderby?’

‘By your visiting proposition,’ said Bounderby, with an inflexible jerk

of the hayfield.

‘I mean that I hope you may be induced to arrange in a friendly manner,

for allowing Louisa a period of repose and reflection here, which may

tend to a gradual alteration for the better in many respects.’

‘To a softening down of your ideas of the incompatibility?’ said

Bounderby.

‘If you put it in those terms.’

‘What made you think of this?’ said Bounderby.

‘I have already said, I fear Louisa has not been understood. Is it

asking too much, Bounderby, that you, so far her elder, should aid in

trying to set her right? You have accepted a great charge of her; for

better for worse, for—’

Mr. Bounderby may have been annoyed by the repetition of his own words to

Stephen Blackpool, but he cut the quotation short with an angry start.

‘Come!’ said he, ‘I don’t want to be told about that. I know what I took

her for, as well as you do. Never you mind what I took her for; that’s

my look out.’

‘I was merely going on to remark, Bounderby, that we may all be more or

less in the wrong, not even excepting you; and that some yielding on your

part, remembering the trust you have accepted, may not only be an act of

true kindness, but perhaps a debt incurred towards Louisa.’

‘I think differently,’ blustered Bounderby. ‘I am going to finish this

business according to my own opinions. Now, I don’t want to make a

quarrel of it with you, Tom Gradgrind. To tell you the truth, I don’t

think it would be worthy of my reputation to quarrel on such a subject.

As to your gentleman-friend, he may take himself off, wherever he likes

best. If he falls in my way, I shall tell him my mind; if he don’t fall

in my way, I shan’t, for it won’t be worth my while to do it. As to your

daughter, whom I made Loo Bounderby, and might have done better by

leaving Loo Gradgrind, if she don’t come home to-morrow, by twelve

o’clock at noon, I shall understand that she prefers to stay away, and I

shall send her wearing apparel and so forth over here, and you’ll take

charge of her for the future. What I shall say to people in general, of

the incompatibility that led to my so laying down the law, will be this.

I am Josiah Bounderby, and I had my bringing-up; she’s the daughter of

Tom Gradgrind, and she had her bringing-up; and the two horses wouldn’t

pull together. I am pretty well known to be rather an uncommon man, I

believe; and most people will understand fast enough that it must be a

woman rather out of the common, also, who, in the long run, would come up

to my mark.’

‘Let me seriously entreat you to reconsider this, Bounderby,’ urged Mr.

Gradgrind, ‘before you commit yourself to such a decision.’

‘I always come to a decision,’ said Bounderby, tossing his hat on: ‘and

whatever I do, I do at once. I should be surprised at Tom Gradgrind’s

addressing such a remark to Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, knowing what he

knows of him, if I could be surprised by anything Tom Gradgrind did,

after his making himself a party to sentimental humbug. I have given you

my decision, and I have got no more to say. Good night!’

So Mr. Bounderby went home to his town house to bed. At five minutes

past twelve o’clock next day, he directed Mrs. Bounderby’s property to be

carefully packed up and sent to Tom Gradgrind’s; advertised his country

retreat for sale by private contract; and resumed a bachelor life.

CHAPTER IV

LOST

THE robbery at the Bank had not languished before, and did not cease to

occupy a front place in the attention of the principal of that

establishment now. In boastful proof of his promptitude and activity, as

a remarkable man, and a self-made man, and a commercial wonder more

admirable than Venus, who had risen out of the mud instead of the sea, he

liked to show how little his domestic affairs abated his business ardour.

Consequently, in the first few weeks of his resumed bachelorhood, he even

advanced upon his usual display of bustle, and every day made such a rout

in renewing his investigations into the robbery, that the officers who

had it in hand almost wished it had never been committed.

They were at fault too, and off the scent. Although they had been so

quiet since the first outbreak of the matter, that most people really did

suppose it to have been abandoned as hopeless, nothing new occurred. No

implicated man or woman took untimely courage, or made a self-betraying

step. More remarkable yet, Stephen Blackpool could not be heard of, and

the mysterious old woman remained a mystery.

Things having come to this pass, and showing no latent signs of stirring

beyond it, the upshot of Mr. Bounderby’s investigations was, that he

resolved to hazard a bold burst. He drew up a placard, offering Twenty

Pounds reward for the apprehension of Stephen Blackpool, suspected of

complicity in the robbery of Coketown Bank on such a night; he described

the said Stephen Blackpool by dress, complexion, estimated height, and

manner, as minutely as he could; he recited how he had left the town, and

in what direction he had been last seen going; he had the whole printed

in great black letters on a staring broadsheet; and he caused the walls

to be posted with it in the dead of night, so that it should strike upon

the sight of the whole population at one blow.

The factory-bells had need to ring their loudest that morning to disperse

the groups of workers who stood in the tardy daybreak, collected round

the placards, devouring them with eager eyes. Not the least eager of the

eyes assembled, were the eyes of those who could not read. These people,

as they listened to the friendly voice that read aloud—there was always

some such ready to help them—stared at the characters which meant so much

with a vague awe and respect that would have been half ludicrous, if any

aspect of public ignorance could ever be otherwise than threatening and

full of evil. Many ears and eyes were busy with a vision of the matter

of these placards, among turning spindles, rattling looms, and whirling

wheels, for hours afterwards; and when the Hands cleared out again into

the streets, there were still as many readers as before.

Slackbridge, the delegate, had to address his audience too that night;

and Slackbridge had obtained a clean bill from the printer, and had

brought it in his pocket. Oh, my friends and fellow-countrymen, the

down-trodden operatives of Coketown, oh, my fellow-brothers and

fellow-workmen and fellow-citizens and fellow-men, what a to-do was

there, when Slackbridge unfolded what he called ‘that damning document,’

and held it up to the gaze, and for the execration of the working-man

community! ‘Oh, my fellow-men, behold of what a traitor in the camp of

those great spirits who are enrolled upon the holy scroll of Justice and

of Union, is appropriately capable! Oh, my prostrate friends, with the

galling yoke of tyrants on your necks and the iron foot of despotism

treading down your fallen forms into the dust of the earth, upon which

right glad would your oppressors be to see you creeping on your bellies

all the days of your lives, like the serpent in the garden—oh, my

brothers, and shall I as a man not add, my sisters too, what do you say,

_now_, of Stephen Blackpool, with a slight stoop in his shoulders and

about five foot seven in height, as set forth in this degrading and

disgusting document, this blighting bill, this pernicious placard, this

abominable advertisement; and with what majesty of denouncement will you

crush the viper, who would bring this stain and shame upon the God-like

race that happily has cast him out for ever! Yes, my compatriots,

happily cast him out and sent him forth! For you remember how he stood

here before you on this platform; you remember how, face to face and foot

to foot, I pursued him through all his intricate windings; you remember

how he sneaked and slunk, and sidled, and splitted of straws, until, with

not an inch of ground to which to cling, I hurled him out from amongst

us: an object for the undying finger of scorn to point at, and for the

avenging fire of every free and thinking mind to scorch and scar! And

now, my friends—my labouring friends, for I rejoice and triumph in that

stigma—my friends whose hard but honest beds are made in toil, and whose

scanty but independent pots are boiled in hardship; and now, I say, my

friends, what appellation has that dastard craven taken to himself, when,

with the mask torn from his features, he stands before us in all his

native deformity, a What? A thief! A plunderer! A proscribed fugitive,

with a price upon his head; a fester and a wound upon the noble character

of the Coketown operative! Therefore, my band of brothers in a sacred

bond, to which your children and your children’s children yet unborn have

set their infant hands and seals, I propose to you on the part of the

United Aggregate Tribunal, ever watchful for your welfare, ever zealous

for your benefit, that this meeting does Resolve: That Stephen Blackpool,

weaver, referred to in this placard, having been already solemnly

disowned by the community of Coketown Hands, the same are free from the

shame of his misdeeds, and cannot as a class be reproached with his

dishonest actions!’

Thus Slackbridge; gnashing and perspiring after a prodigious sort. A few

stern voices called out ‘No!’ and a score or two hailed, with assenting

cries of ‘Hear, hear!’ the caution from one man, ‘Slackbridge, y’or over

hetter in’t; y’or a goen too fast!’ But these were pigmies against an

army; the general assemblage subscribed to the gospel according to

Slackbridge, and gave three cheers for him, as he sat demonstratively

panting at them.

These men and women were yet in the streets, passing quietly to their

homes, when Sissy, who had been called away from Louisa some minutes

before, returned.

‘Who is it?’ asked Louisa.

‘It is Mr. Bounderby,’ said Sissy, timid of the name, ‘and your brother

Mr. Tom, and a young woman who says her name is Rachael, and that you

know her.’

‘What do they want, Sissy dear?’

‘They want to see you. Rachael has been crying, and seems angry.’

‘Father,’ said Louisa, for he was present, ‘I cannot refuse to see them,

for a reason that will explain itself. Shall they come in here?’

As he answered in the affirmative, Sissy went away to bring them. She

reappeared with them directly. Tom was last; and remained standing in

the obscurest part of the room, near the door.

‘Mrs. Bounderby,’ said her husband, entering with a cool nod, ‘I don’t

disturb you, I hope. This is an unseasonable hour, but here is a young

woman who has been making statements which render my visit necessary.

Tom Gradgrind, as your son, young Tom, refuses for some obstinate reason

or other to say anything at all about those statements, good or bad, I am

obliged to confront her with your daughter.’

‘You have seen me once before, young lady,’ said Rachael, standing in

front of Louisa.

Tom coughed.

‘You have seen me, young lady,’ repeated Rachael, as she did not answer,

‘once before.’

Tom coughed again.

‘I have.’

Rachael cast her eyes proudly towards Mr. Bounderby, and said, ‘Will you

make it known, young lady, where, and who was there?’

‘I went to the house where Stephen Blackpool lodged, on the night of his

discharge from his work, and I saw you there. He was there too; and an

old woman who did not speak, and whom I could scarcely see, stood in a

dark corner. My brother was with me.’

‘Why couldn’t you say so, young Tom?’ demanded Bounderby.

‘I promised my sister I wouldn’t.’ Which Louisa hastily confirmed. ‘And

besides,’ said the whelp bitterly, ‘she tells her own story so precious

well—and so full—that what business had I to take it out of her mouth!’

‘Say, young lady, if you please,’ pursued Rachael, ‘why, in an evil hour,

you ever came to Stephen’s that night.’

‘I felt compassion for him,’ said Louisa, her colour deepening, ‘and I

wished to know what he was going to do, and wished to offer him

assistance.’