Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0059/00598.txt

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$Unique_ID{bob00598}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Hard Times
Chapter IX}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Dickens, Charles}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{mrs
bounderby
louisa
sparsit
gradgrind
never
upon
sir
mother
old}
$Date{}
$Log{}
Title:       Hard Times
Book:        Book The Second: Reaping
Author:      Dickens, Charles

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 hoo 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
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 daresay 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
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 is 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 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 tea-cups 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 coalpits, 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
coalpits 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 fertilisation 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 old 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 gentleness of the other face in the room: the sweet face with the
trusting eyes, made paler than watching and sympathy made it, by the rich dark
hair.

     Left alone with her mother, Louisa saw her lying with an awful lull upon
her face, like one who was floating away upon some great water, all resistance
over, content to be carried down the stream.  She put the shadow of a hand to
her lips again, and recalled her.

     "You were going to speak to me, mother."

     "Eh?  Yes, to be sure, my dear.  You know that your father is almost
always away now, and therefore I must write to him about it."

     "About what, mother?  Don't be troubled.  About what!"

     "You must remember, my dear, that whenever I have said anything, on any
subject, I have never heard the last of it: and consequently, that I have long
left off saying anything."

     "I can hear you, mother." But it was only by dint of bending down her
ear, and at the same time attentively watching the lips as they moved, that
she could link such faint and broken sounds into any chain of connexion.

     "You learnt a great deal, Louisa, and so did your brother.  Ologies of
all kinds from morning to night.  If there is any Ology left, of any
description, that has not been worn to rags in this house, all I can say is, I
hope I shall never hear its name."

     "I can hear you, mother, when you have strength to go on." This, to keep
her from floating away.

     "But there is something - not an Ology at all - that your father has
missed, or forgotten, Louisa.  I don't know what it is.  I have often sat with
Sissy near me, and thought about it.  I shall never get its name now. But your
father may.  It makes me restless.  I want to write to him, to find out for
God's sake what it is.  Give me a pen, give me a pen."

     Even the power of restlessness was gone, except from the poor head, which
could just turn from side to side.

     She fancied, however, that her request had been complied with, and that
the pen she could not have held was in her hand.  It matters little what
figures of wonderful no-meaning she began to trace upon her wrappers. The hand
soon stopped in the midst of them; the light that had always been feeble and
dim behind the weak transparency, went out, and even Mrs. Gradgrind, emerged
from the shadow in which man walketh and disquieteth himself in vain, took
upon her the dread solemnity of the sages, and patriarchs.