Hard Times
Bounderby’s again, ‘come out. But, he’s late this year, and I have not
seen him. You came out instead. Now, if I am obliged to go back without
a glimpse of him—I only want a glimpse—well! I have seen you, and you
have seen him, and I must make that do.’ Saying this, she looked at
Stephen as if to fix his features in her mind, and her eye was not so
bright as it had been.
With a large allowance for difference of tastes, and with all submission
to the patricians of Coketown, this seemed so extraordinary a source of
interest to take so much trouble about, that it perplexed him. But they
were passing the church now, and as his eye caught the clock, he
quickened his pace.
He was going to his work? the old woman said, quickening hers, too, quite
easily. Yes, time was nearly out. On his telling her where he worked,
the old woman became a more singular old woman than before.
‘An’t you happy?’ she asked him.
‘Why—there’s awmost nobbody but has their troubles, missus.’ He answered
evasively, because the old woman appeared to take it for granted that he
would be very happy indeed, and he had not the heart to disappoint her.
He knew that there was trouble enough in the world; and if the old woman
had lived so long, and could count upon his having so little, why so much
the better for her, and none the worse for him.
‘Ay, ay! You have your troubles at home, you mean?’ she said.
‘Times. Just now and then,’ he answered, slightly.
‘But, working under such a gentleman, they don’t follow you to the
Factory?’
No, no; they didn’t follow him there, said Stephen. All correct there.
Everything accordant there. (He did not go so far as to say, for her
pleasure, that there was a sort of Divine Right there; but, I have heard
claims almost as magnificent of late years.)
They were now in the black by-road near the place, and the Hands were
crowding in. The bell was ringing, and the Serpent was a Serpent of many
coils, and the Elephant was getting ready. The strange old woman was
delighted with the very bell. It was the beautifullest bell she had ever
heard, she said, and sounded grand!
She asked him, when he stopped good-naturedly to shake hands with her
before going in, how long he had worked there?
‘A dozen year,’ he told her.
‘I must kiss the hand,’ said she, ‘that has worked in this fine factory
for a dozen year!’ And she lifted it, though he would have prevented
her, and put it to her lips. What harmony, besides her age and her
simplicity, surrounded her, he did not know, but even in this fantastic
action there was a something neither out of time nor place: a something
which it seemed as if nobody else could have made as serious, or done
with such a natural and touching air.
He had been at his loom full half an hour, thinking about this old woman,
when, having occasion to move round the loom for its adjustment, he
glanced through a window which was in his corner, and saw her still
looking up at the pile of building, lost in admiration. Heedless of the
smoke and mud and wet, and of her two long journeys, she was gazing at
it, as if the heavy thrum that issued from its many stories were proud
music to her.
She was gone by and by, and the day went after her, and the lights sprung
up again, and the Express whirled in full sight of the Fairy Palace over
the arches near: little felt amid the jarring of the machinery, and
scarcely heard above its crash and rattle. Long before then his thoughts
had gone back to the dreary room above the little shop, and to the
shameful figure heavy on the bed, but heavier on his heart.
Machinery slackened; throbbing feebly like a fainting pulse; stopped.
The bell again; the glare of light and heat dispelled; the factories,
looming heavy in the black wet night—their tall chimneys rising up into
the air like competing Towers of Babel.
He had spoken to Rachael only last night, it was true, and had walked
with her a little way; but he had his new misfortune on him, in which no
one else could give him a moment’s relief, and, for the sake of it, and
because he knew himself to want that softening of his anger which no
voice but hers could effect, he felt he might so far disregard what she
had said as to wait for her again. He waited, but she had eluded him.
She was gone. On no other night in the year could he so ill have spared
her patient face.
O! Better to have no home in which to lay his head, than to have a home
and dread to go to it, through such a cause. He ate and drank, for he
was exhausted—but he little knew or cared what; and he wandered about in
the chill rain, thinking and thinking, and brooding and brooding.
No word of a new marriage had ever passed between them; but Rachael had
taken great pity on him years ago, and to her alone he had opened his
closed heart all this time, on the subject of his miseries; and he knew
very well that if he were free to ask her, she would take him. He
thought of the home he might at that moment have been seeking with
pleasure and pride; of the different man he might have been that night;
of the lightness then in his now heavy-laden breast; of the then restored
honour, self-respect, and tranquillity all torn to pieces. He thought of
the waste of the best part of his life, of the change it made in his
character for the worse every day, of the dreadful nature of his
existence, bound hand and foot, to a dead woman, and tormented by a demon
in her shape. He thought of Rachael, how young when they were first
brought together in these circumstances, how mature now, how soon to grow
old. He thought of the number of girls and women she had seen marry, how
many homes with children in them she had seen grow up around her, how she
had contentedly pursued her own lone quiet path—for him—and how he had
sometimes seen a shade of melancholy on her blessed face, that smote him
with remorse and despair. He set the picture of her up, beside the
infamous image of last night; and thought, Could it be, that the whole
earthly course of one so gentle, good, and self-denying, was subjugate to
such a wretch as that!
Filled with these thoughts—so filled that he had an unwholesome sense of
growing larger, of being placed in some new and diseased relation towards
the objects among which he passed, of seeing the iris round every misty
light turn red—he went home for shelter.
CHAPTER XIII
RACHAEL
A CANDLE faintly burned in the window, to which the black ladder had
often been raised for the sliding away of all that was most precious in
this world to a striving wife and a brood of hungry babies; and Stephen
added to his other thoughts the stern reflection, that of all the
casualties of this existence upon earth, not one was dealt out with so
unequal a hand as Death. The inequality of Birth was nothing to it.
For, say that the child of a King and the child of a Weaver were born
to-night in the same moment, what was that disparity, to the death of any
human creature who was serviceable to, or beloved by, another, while this
abandoned woman lived on!
From the outside of his home he gloomily passed to the inside, with
suspended breath and with a slow footstep. He went up to his door,
opened it, and so into the room.
Quiet and peace were there. Rachael was there, sitting by the bed.
She turned her head, and the light of her face shone in upon the midnight
of his mind. She sat by the bed, watching and tending his wife. That is
to say, he saw that some one lay there, and he knew too well it must be
she; but Rachael’s hands had put a curtain up, so that she was screened
from his eyes. Her disgraceful garments were removed, and some of
Rachael’s were in the room. Everything was in its place and order as he
had always kept it, the little fire was newly trimmed, and the hearth was
freshly swept. It appeared to him that he saw all this in Rachael’s
face, and looked at nothing besides. While looking at it, it was shut
out from his view by the softened tears that filled his eyes; but not
before he had seen how earnestly she looked at him, and how her own eyes
were filled too.
She turned again towards the bed, and satisfying herself that all was
quiet there, spoke in a low, calm, cheerful voice.
‘I am glad you have come at last, Stephen. You are very late.’
‘I ha’ been walking up an’ down.’
‘I thought so. But ’tis too bad a night for that. The rain falls very
heavy, and the wind has risen.’
The wind? True. It was blowing hard. Hark to the thundering in the
chimney, and the surging noise! To have been out in such a wind, and not
to have known it was blowing!
‘I have been here once before, to-day, Stephen. Landlady came round for
me at dinner-time. There was some one here that needed looking to, she
said. And ‘deed she was right. All wandering and lost, Stephen.
Wounded too, and bruised.’
He slowly moved to a chair and sat down, drooping his head before her.
‘I came to do what little I could, Stephen; first, for that she worked
with me when we were girls both, and for that you courted her and married
her when I was her friend—’
He laid his furrowed forehead on his hand, with a low groan.
‘And next, for that I know your heart, and am right sure and certain that
’tis far too merciful to let her die, or even so much as suffer, for want
of aid. Thou knowest who said, “Let him who is without sin among you
cast the first stone at her!” There have been plenty to do that. Thou
art not the man to cast the last stone, Stephen, when she is brought so
low.’
‘O Rachael, Rachael!’
‘Thou hast been a cruel sufferer, Heaven reward thee!’ she said, in
compassionate accents. ‘I am thy poor friend, with all my heart and
mind.’
[Picture: Stephen and Rachael in the sick room]
The wounds of which she had spoken, seemed to be about the neck of the
self-made outcast. She dressed them now, still without showing her. She
steeped a piece of linen in a basin, into which she poured some liquid
from a bottle, and laid it with a gentle hand upon the sore. The
three-legged table had been drawn close to the bedside, and on it there
were two bottles. This was one.
It was not so far off, but that Stephen, following her hands with his
eyes, could read what was printed on it in large letters. He turned of a
deadly hue, and a sudden horror seemed to fall upon him.
‘I will stay here, Stephen,’ said Rachael, quietly resuming her seat,
‘till the bells go Three. ’Tis to be done again at three, and then she
may be left till morning.’
‘But thy rest agen to-morrow’s work, my dear.’
‘I slept sound last night. I can wake many nights, when I am put to it.
’Tis thou who art in need of rest—so white and tired. Try to sleep in
the chair there, while I watch. Thou hadst no sleep last night, I can
well believe. To-morrow’s work is far harder for thee than for me.’
He heard the thundering and surging out of doors, and it seemed to him as
if his late angry mood were going about trying to get at him. She had
cast it out; she would keep it out; he trusted to her to defend him from
himself.
‘She don’t know me, Stephen; she just drowsily mutters and stares. I
have spoken to her times and again, but she don’t notice! ’Tis as well
so. When she comes to her right mind once more, I shall have done what I
can, and she never the wiser.’
‘How long, Rachael, is ’t looked for, that she’ll be so?’
‘Doctor said she would haply come to her mind to-morrow.’
His eyes fell again on the bottle, and a tremble passed over him, causing
him to shiver in every limb. She thought he was chilled with the wet.
‘No,’ he said, ‘it was not that. He had had a fright.’
‘A fright?’
‘Ay, ay! coming in. When I were walking. When I were thinking. When