Hard Times
robbery, examined the witnesses, made notes of the evidence, found the
suspected persons guilty, and sentenced them to the extreme punishment of
the law. That done, Bitzer was dismissed to town with instructions to
recommend Tom to come home by the mail-train.
When candles were brought, Mrs. Sparsit murmured, ‘Don’t be low, sir.
Pray let me see you cheerful, sir, as I used to do.’ Mr. Bounderby, upon
whom these consolations had begun to produce the effect of making him, in
a bull-headed blundering way, sentimental, sighed like some large
sea-animal. ‘I cannot bear to see you so, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit. ‘Try
a hand at backgammon, sir, as you used to do when I had the honour of
living under your roof.’ ‘I haven’t played backgammon, ma’am,’ said Mr.
Bounderby, ‘since that time.’ ‘No, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, soothingly,
‘I am aware that you have not. I remember that Miss Gradgrind takes no
interest in the game. But I shall be happy, sir, if you will
condescend.’
They played near a window, opening on the garden. It was a fine night:
not moonlight, but sultry and fragrant. Louisa and Mr. Harthouse
strolled out into the garden, where their voices could be heard in the
stillness, though not what they said. Mrs. Sparsit, from her place at
the backgammon board, was constantly straining her eyes to pierce the
shadows without. ‘What’s the matter, ma’am?’ said Mr. Bounderby; ‘you
don’t see a Fire, do you?’ ‘Oh dear no, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, ‘I
was thinking of the dew.’ ‘What have you got to do with the dew, ma’am?’
said Mr. Bounderby. ‘It’s not myself, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, ‘I am
fearful of Miss Gradgrind’s taking cold.’ ‘She never takes cold,’ said
Mr. Bounderby. ‘Really, sir?’ said Mrs. Sparsit. And was affected with
a cough in her throat.
When the time drew near for retiring, Mr. Bounderby took a glass of
water. ‘Oh, sir?’ said Mrs. Sparsit. ‘Not your sherry warm, with
lemon-peel and nutmeg?’ ‘Why, I have got out of the habit of taking it
now, ma’am,’ said Mr. Bounderby. ‘The more’s the pity, sir,’ returned
Mrs. Sparsit; ‘you are losing all your good old habits. Cheer up, sir!
If Miss Gradgrind will permit me, I will offer to make it for you, as I
have often done.’
Miss Gradgrind readily permitting Mrs. Sparsit to do anything she
pleased, that considerate lady made the beverage, and handed it to Mr.
Bounderby. ‘It will do you good, sir. It will warm your heart. It is
the sort of thing you want, and ought to take, sir.’ And when Mr.
Bounderby said, ‘Your health, ma’am!’ she answered with great feeling,
‘Thank you, sir. The same to you, and happiness also.’ Finally, she
wished him good night, with great pathos; and Mr. Bounderby went to bed,
with a maudlin persuasion that he had been crossed in something tender,
though he could not, for his life, have mentioned what it was.
Long after Louisa had undressed and lain down, she watched and waited for
her brother’s coming home. That could hardly be, she knew, until an hour
past midnight; but in the country silence, which did anything but calm
the trouble of her thoughts, time lagged wearily. At last, when the
darkness and stillness had seemed for hours to thicken one another, she
heard the bell at the gate. She felt as though she would have been glad
that it rang on until daylight; but it ceased, and the circles of its
last sound spread out fainter and wider in the air, and all was dead
again.
She waited yet some quarter of an hour, as she judged. Then she arose,
put on a loose robe, and went out of her room in the dark, and up the
staircase to her brother’s room. His door being shut, she softly opened
it and spoke to him, approaching his bed with a noiseless step.
She kneeled down beside it, passed her arm over his neck, and drew his
face to hers. She knew that he only feigned to be asleep, but she said
nothing to him.
He started by and by as if he were just then awakened, and asked who that
was, and what was the matter?
‘Tom, have you anything to tell me? If ever you loved me in your life,
and have anything concealed from every one besides, tell it to me.’
‘I don’t know what you mean, Loo. You have been dreaming.’
‘My dear brother:’ she laid her head down on his pillow, and her hair
flowed over him as if she would hide him from every one but herself: ‘is
there nothing that you have to tell me? Is there nothing you can tell me
if you will? You can tell me nothing that will change me. O Tom, tell
me the truth!’
‘I don’t know what you mean, Loo!’
‘As you lie here alone, my dear, in the melancholy night, so you must lie
somewhere one night, when even I, if I am living then, shall have left
you. As I am here beside you, barefoot, unclothed, undistinguishable in
darkness, so must I lie through all the night of my decay, until I am
dust. In the name of that time, Tom, tell me the truth now!’
‘What is it you want to know?’
‘You may be certain;’ in the energy of her love she took him to her bosom
as if he were a child; ‘that I will not reproach you. You may be certain
that I will be compassionate and true to you. You may be certain that I
will save you at whatever cost. O Tom, have you nothing to tell me?
Whisper very softly. Say only “yes,” and I shall understand you!’
She turned her ear to his lips, but he remained doggedly silent.
‘Not a word, Tom?’
‘How can I say Yes, or how can I say No, when I don’t know what you mean?
Loo, you are a brave, kind girl, worthy I begin to think of a better
brother than I am. But I have nothing more to say. Go to bed, go to
bed.’
‘You are tired,’ she whispered presently, more in her usual way.
‘Yes, I am quite tired out.’
‘You have been so hurried and disturbed to-day. Have any fresh
discoveries been made?’
‘Only those you have heard of, from—him.’
‘Tom, have you said to any one that we made a visit to those people, and
that we saw those three together?’
‘No. Didn’t you yourself particularly ask me to keep it quiet when you
asked me to go there with you?’
‘Yes. But I did not know then what was going to happen.’
‘Nor I neither. How could I?’
He was very quick upon her with this retort.
‘Ought I to say, after what has happened,’ said his sister, standing by
the bed—she had gradually withdrawn herself and risen, ‘that I made that
visit? Should I say so? Must I say so?’
‘Good Heavens, Loo,’ returned her brother, ‘you are not in the habit of
asking my advice. Say what you like. If you keep it to yourself, I
shall keep it to _my_self. If you disclose it, there’s an end of it.’
It was too dark for either to see the other’s face; but each seemed very
attentive, and to consider before speaking.
‘Tom, do you believe the man I gave the money to, is really implicated in
this crime?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t see why he shouldn’t be.’
‘He seemed to me an honest man.’
‘Another person may seem to you dishonest, and yet not be so.’ There was
a pause, for he had hesitated and stopped.
‘In short,’ resumed Tom, as if he had made up his mind, ‘if you come to
that, perhaps I was so far from being altogether in his favour, that I
took him outside the door to tell him quietly, that I thought he might
consider himself very well off to get such a windfall as he had got from
my sister, and that I hoped he would make good use of it. You remember
whether I took him out or not. I say nothing against the man; he may be
a very good fellow, for anything I know; I hope he is.’
‘Was he offended by what you said?’
‘No, he took it pretty well; he was civil enough. Where are you, Loo?’
He sat up in bed and kissed her. ‘Good night, my dear, good night.’
‘You have nothing more to tell me?’
‘No. What should I have? You wouldn’t have me tell you a lie!’
‘I wouldn’t have you do that to-night, Tom, of all the nights in your
life; many and much happier as I hope they will be.’
‘Thank you, my dear Loo. I am so tired, that I am sure I wonder I don’t
say anything to get to sleep. Go to bed, go to bed.’
Kissing her again, he turned round, drew the coverlet over his head, and
lay as still as if that time had come by which she had adjured him. She
stood for some time at the bedside before she slowly moved away. She
stopped at the door, looked back when she had opened it, and asked him if
he had called her? But he lay still, and she softly closed the door and
returned to her room.
Then the wretched boy looked cautiously up and found her gone, crept out
of bed, fastened his door, and threw himself upon his pillow again:
tearing his hair, morosely crying, grudgingly loving her, hatefully but
impenitently spurning himself, and no less hatefully and unprofitably
spurning all the good in the world.
CHAPTER IX
HEARING THE LAST OF IT
MRS. SPARSIT, lying by to recover the tone of her nerves in Mr.
Bounderby’s retreat, kept such a sharp look-out, night and day, under her
Coriolanian eyebrows, that her eyes, like a couple of lighthouses on an
iron-bound coast, might have warned all prudent mariners from that bold
rock her Roman nose and the dark and craggy region in its neighbourhood,
but for the placidity of her manner. Although it was hard to believe
that her retiring for the night could be anything but a form, so severely
wide awake were those classical eyes of hers, and so impossible did it
seem that her rigid nose could yield to any relaxing influence, yet her
manner of sitting, smoothing her uncomfortable, not to say, gritty
mittens (they were constructed of a cool fabric like a meat-safe), or of
ambling to unknown places of destination with her foot in her cotton
stirrup, was so perfectly serene, that most observers would have been
constrained to suppose her a dove, embodied by some freak of nature, in
the earthly tabernacle of a bird of the hook-beaked order.
She was a most wonderful woman for prowling about the house. How she got
from story to story was a mystery beyond solution. A lady so decorous in
herself, and so highly connected, was not to be suspected of dropping
over the banisters or sliding down them, yet her extraordinary facility
of locomotion suggested the wild idea. Another noticeable circumstance
in Mrs. Sparsit was, that she was never hurried. She would shoot with
consummate velocity from the roof to the hall, yet would be in full
possession of her breath and dignity on the moment of her arrival there.
Neither was she ever seen by human vision to go at a great pace.
She took very kindly to Mr. Harthouse, and had some pleasant conversation
with him soon after her arrival. She made him her stately curtsey in the
garden, one morning before breakfast.
‘It appears but yesterday, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘that I had the
honour of receiving you at the Bank, when you were so good as to wish to
be made acquainted with Mr. Bounderby’s address.’
‘An occasion, I am sure, not to be forgotten by myself in the course of
Ages,’ said Mr. Harthouse, inclining his head to Mrs. Sparsit with the
most indolent of all possible airs.
‘We live in a singular world, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit.
‘I have had the honour, by a coincidence of which I am proud, to have
made a remark, similar in effect, though not so epigrammatically
expressed.’
‘A singular world, I would say, sir,’ pursued Mrs. Sparsit; after
acknowledging the compliment with a drooping of her dark eyebrows, not
altogether so mild in its expression as her voice was in its dulcet
tones; ‘as regards the intimacies we form at one time, with individuals
we were quite ignorant of, at another. I recall, sir, that on that
occasion you went so far as to say you were actually apprehensive of Miss
Gradgrind.’
‘Your memory does me more honour than my insignificance deserves. I