Hard Times
availed myself of your obliging hints to correct my timidity, and it is
unnecessary to add that they were perfectly accurate. Mrs. Sparsit’s
talent for—in fact for anything requiring accuracy—with a combination of
strength of mind—and Family—is too habitually developed to admit of any
question.’ He was almost falling asleep over this compliment; it took
him so long to get through, and his mind wandered so much in the course
of its execution.
‘You found Miss Gradgrind—I really cannot call her Mrs. Bounderby; it’s
very absurd of me—as youthful as I described her?’ asked Mrs. Sparsit,
sweetly.
‘You drew her portrait perfectly,’ said Mr. Harthouse. ‘Presented her
dead image.’
‘Very engaging, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, causing her mittens slowly to
revolve over one another.
‘Highly so.’
‘It used to be considered,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘that Miss Gradgrind was
wanting in animation, but I confess she appears to me considerably and
strikingly improved in that respect. Ay, and indeed here _is_ Mr.
Bounderby!’ cried Mrs. Sparsit, nodding her head a great many times, as
if she had been talking and thinking of no one else. ‘How do you find
yourself this morning, sir? Pray let us see you cheerful, sir.’
Now, these persistent assuagements of his misery, and lightenings of his
load, had by this time begun to have the effect of making Mr. Bounderby
softer than usual towards Mrs. Sparsit, and harder than usual to most
other people from his wife downward. So, when Mrs. Sparsit said with
forced lightness of heart, ‘You want your breakfast, sir, but I dare say
Miss Gradgrind will soon be here to preside at the table,’ Mr. Bounderby
replied, ‘If I waited to be taken care of by my wife, ma’am, I believe
you know pretty well I should wait till Doomsday, so I’ll trouble _you_
to take charge of the teapot.’ Mrs. Sparsit complied, and assumed her
old position at table.
This again made the excellent woman vastly sentimental. She was so
humble withal, that when Louisa appeared, she rose, protesting she never
could think of sitting in that place under existing circumstances, often
as she had had the honour of making Mr. Bounderby’s breakfast, before
Mrs. Gradgrind—she begged pardon, she meant to say Miss Bounderby—she
hoped to be excused, but she really could not get it right yet, though
she trusted to become familiar with it by and by—had assumed her present
position. It was only (she observed) because Miss Gradgrind happened to
be a little late, and Mr. Bounderby’s time was so very precious, and she
knew it of old to be so essential that he should breakfast to the moment,
that she had taken the liberty of complying with his request; long as his
will had been a law to her.
‘There! Stop where you are, ma’am,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘stop where you
are! Mrs. Bounderby will be very glad to be relieved of the trouble, I
believe.’
‘Don’t say that, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, almost with severity,
‘because that is very unkind to Mrs. Bounderby. And to be unkind is not
to be you, sir.’
‘You may set your mind at rest, ma’am.—You can take it very quietly,
can’t you, Loo?’ said Mr. Bounderby, in a blustering way to his wife.
‘Of course. It is of no moment. Why should it be of any importance to
me?’
‘Why should it be of any importance to any one, Mrs. Sparsit, ma’am?’
said Mr. Bounderby, swelling with a sense of slight. ‘You attach too
much importance to these things, ma’am. By George, you’ll be corrupted
in some of your notions here. You are old-fashioned, ma’am. You are
behind Tom Gradgrind’s children’s time.’
‘What is the matter with you?’ asked Louisa, coldly surprised. ‘What has
given you offence?’
‘Offence!’ repeated Bounderby. ‘Do you suppose if there was any offence
given me, I shouldn’t name it, and request to have it corrected? I am a
straightforward man, I believe. I don’t go beating about for
side-winds.’
‘I suppose no one ever had occasion to think you too diffident, or too
delicate,’ Louisa answered him composedly: ‘I have never made that
objection to you, either as a child or as a woman. I don’t understand
what you would have.’
‘Have?’ returned Mr. Bounderby. ‘Nothing. Otherwise, don’t you, Loo
Bounderby, know thoroughly well that I, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown,
would have it?’
She looked at him, as he struck the table and made the teacups ring, with
a proud colour in her face that was a new change, Mr. Harthouse thought.
‘You are incomprehensible this morning,’ said Louisa. ‘Pray take no
further trouble to explain yourself. I am not curious to know your
meaning. What does it matter?’
Nothing more was said on this theme, and Mr. Harthouse was soon idly gay
on indifferent subjects. But from this day, the Sparsit action upon Mr.
Bounderby threw Louisa and James Harthouse more together, and
strengthened the dangerous alienation from her husband and confidence
against him with another, into which she had fallen by degrees so fine
that she could not retrace them if she tried. But whether she ever tried
or no, lay hidden in her own closed heart.
Mrs. Sparsit was so much affected on this particular occasion, that,
assisting Mr. Bounderby to his hat after breakfast, and being then alone
with him in the hall, she imprinted a chaste kiss upon his hand, murmured
‘My benefactor!’ and retired, overwhelmed with grief. Yet it is an
indubitable fact, within the cognizance of this history, that five
minutes after he had left the house in the self-same hat, the same
descendant of the Scadgerses and connexion by matrimony of the Powlers,
shook her right-hand mitten at his portrait, made a contemptuous grimace
at that work of art, and said ‘Serve you right, you Noodle, and I am glad
of it.’
Mr. Bounderby had not been long gone, when Bitzer appeared. Bitzer had
come down by train, shrieking and rattling over the long line of arches
that bestrode the wild country of past and present coal-pits, with an
express from Stone Lodge. It was a hasty note to inform Louisa that Mrs.
Gradgrind lay very ill. She had never been well within her daughter’s
knowledge; but, she had declined within the last few days, had continued
sinking all through the night, and was now as nearly dead, as her limited
capacity of being in any state that implied the ghost of an intention to
get out of it, allowed.
Accompanied by the lightest of porters, fit colourless servitor at
Death’s door when Mrs. Gradgrind knocked, Louisa rumbled to Coketown,
over the coal-pits past and present, and was whirled into its smoky jaws.
She dismissed the messenger to his own devices, and rode away to her old
home.
She had seldom been there since her marriage. Her father was usually
sifting and sifting at his parliamentary cinder-heap in London (without
being observed to turn up many precious articles among the rubbish), and
was still hard at it in the national dust-yard. Her mother had taken it
rather as a disturbance than otherwise, to be visited, as she reclined
upon her sofa; young people, Louisa felt herself all unfit for; Sissy she
had never softened to again, since the night when the stroller’s child
had raised her eyes to look at Mr. Bounderby’s intended wife. She had no
inducements to go back, and had rarely gone.
Neither, as she approached her old home now, did any of the best
influences of old home descend upon her. The dreams of childhood—its
airy fables; its graceful, beautiful, humane, impossible adornments of
the world beyond: so good to be believed in once, so good to be
remembered when outgrown, for then the least among them rises to the
stature of a great Charity in the heart, suffering little children to
come into the midst of it, and to keep with their pure hands a garden in
the stony ways of this world, wherein it were better for all the children
of Adam that they should oftener sun themselves, simple and trustful, and
not worldly-wise—what had she to do with these? Remembrances of how she
had journeyed to the little that she knew, by the enchanted roads of what
she and millions of innocent creatures had hoped and imagined; of how,
first coming upon Reason through the tender light of Fancy, she had seen
it a beneficent god, deferring to gods as great as itself; not a grim
Idol, cruel and cold, with its victims bound hand to foot, and its big
dumb shape set up with a sightless stare, never to be moved by anything
but so many calculated tons of leverage—what had she to do with these?
Her remembrances of home and childhood were remembrances of the drying up
of every spring and fountain in her young heart as it gushed out. The
golden waters were not there. They were flowing for the fertilization of
the land where grapes are gathered from thorns, and figs from thistles.
She went, with a heavy, hardened kind of sorrow upon her, into the house
and into her mother’s room. Since the time of her leaving home, Sissy
had lived with the rest of the family on equal terms. Sissy was at her
mother’s side; and Jane, her sister, now ten or twelve years old, was in
the room.
There was great trouble before it could be made known to Mrs. Gradgrind
that her eldest child was there. She reclined, propped up, from mere
habit, on a couch: as nearly in her old usual attitude, as anything so
helpless could be kept in. She had positively refused to take to her
bed; on the ground that if she did, she would never hear the last of it.
Her feeble voice sounded so far away in her bundle of shawls, and the
sound of another voice addressing her seemed to take such a long time in
getting down to her ears, that she might have been lying at the bottom of
a well. The poor lady was nearer Truth than she ever had been: which had
much to do with it.
On being told that Mrs. Bounderby was there, she replied, at
cross-purposes, that she had never called him by that name since he
married Louisa; that pending her choice of an objectionable name, she had
called him J; and that she could not at present depart from that
regulation, not being yet provided with a permanent substitute. Louisa
had sat by her for some minutes, and had spoken to her often, before she
arrived at a clear understanding who it was. She then seemed to come to
it all at once.
‘Well, my dear,’ said Mrs. Gradgrind, ‘and I hope you are going on
satisfactorily to yourself. It was all your father’s doing. He set his
heart upon it. And he ought to know.’
‘I want to hear of you, mother; not of myself.’
‘You want to hear of me, my dear? That’s something new, I am sure, when
anybody wants to hear of me. Not at all well, Louisa. Very faint and
giddy.’
‘Are you in pain, dear mother?’
‘I think there’s a pain somewhere in the room,’ said Mrs. Gradgrind, ‘but
I couldn’t positively say that I have got it.’
After this strange speech, she lay silent for some time. Louisa, holding
her hand, could feel no pulse; but kissing it, could see a slight thin
thread of life in fluttering motion.
‘You very seldom see your sister,’ said Mrs. Gradgrind. ‘She grows like
you. I wish you would look at her. Sissy, bring her here.’
She was brought, and stood with her hand in her sister’s. Louisa had
observed her with her arm round Sissy’s neck, and she felt the difference
of this approach.
‘Do you see the likeness, Louisa?’
‘Yes, mother. I should think her like me. But—’
‘Eh! Yes, I always say so,’ Mrs. Gradgrind cried, with unexpected
quickness. ‘And that reminds me. I—I want to speak to you, my dear.
Sissy, my good girl, leave us alone a minute.’ Louisa had relinquished
the hand: had thought that her sister’s was a better and brighter face
than hers had ever been: had seen in it, not without a rising feeling of
resentment, even in that place and at that time, something of the