Hard Times
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