Hard Times
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