Chapter IX - Hearing the Last of It

Hard Times

by Charles Dickens

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 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 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 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 to 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.