Hard Times

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She went up to the house, keeping within the shrubbery, and went
round it, peeping between the leaves at the lower windows. Most of
them were open, as they usually were in such warm weather, but
there were no lights yet, and all was silent. She tried the garden
with no better effect. She thought of the wood, and stole towards
it, heedless of long grass and briers: of worms, snails, and
slugs, and all the creeping things that be. With her dark eyes and
her hook nose warily in advance of her, Mrs. Sparsit softly crushed
her way through the thick undergrowth, so intent upon her object
that she probably would have done no less, if the wood had been a
wood of adders.

Hark!

The smaller birds might have tumbled out of their nests, fascinated
by the glittering of Mrs. Sparsit's eyes in the gloom, as she
stopped and listened.

Low voices close at hand. His voice and hers. The appointment was
a device to keep the brother away! There they were yonder, by the
felled tree.

Bending low among the dewy grass, Mrs. Sparsit advanced closer to
them. She drew herself up, and stood behind a tree, like Robinson
Crusoe in his ambuscade against the savages; so near to them that
at a spring, and that no great one, she could have touched them
both. He was there secretly, and had not shown himself at the
house. He had come on horseback, and must have passed through the
neighbouring fields; for his horse was tied to the meadow side of
the fence, within a few paces.

'My dearest love,' said he, 'what could I do? Knowing you were
alone, was it possible that I could stay away?'

'You may hang your head, to make yourself the more attractive; I
don't know what they see in you when you hold it up,' thought Mrs.
Sparsit; 'but you little think, my dearest love, whose eyes are on
you!'

That she hung her head, was certain. She urged him to go away, she
commanded him to go away; but she neither turned her face to him,
nor raised it. Yet it was remarkable that she sat as still as ever
the amiable woman in ambuscade had seen her sit, at any period in
her life. Her hands rested in one another, like the hands of a
statue; and even her manner of speaking was not hurried.

'My dear child,' said Harthouse; Mrs. Sparsit saw with delight that
his arm embraced her; 'will you not bear with my society for a
little while?'

'Not here.'

'Where, Louisa?

'Not here.'

'But we have so little time to make so much of, and I have come so
far, and am altogether so devoted, and distracted. There never was
a slave at once so devoted and ill-used by his mistress. To look
for your sunny welcome that has warmed me into life, and to be
received in your frozen manner, is heart-rending.'

'Am I to say again, that I must be left to myself here?'

'But we must meet, my dear Louisa. Where shall we meet?'

They both started. The listener started, guiltily, too; for she
thought there was another listener among the trees. It was only
rain, beginning to fall fast, in heavy drops.

'Shall I ride up to the house a few minutes hence, innocently
supposing that its master is at home and will be charmed to receive
me?'

'No!'

'Your cruel commands are implicitly to be obeyed; though I am the
most unfortunate fellow in the world, I believe, to have been
insensible to all other women, and to have fallen prostrate at last
under the foot of the most beautiful, and the most engaging, and
the most imperious. My 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 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?'

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