Hard Times, Charles Dickens [little red riding hood ebook txt] 📗

roses all over that lady’s path. “And yet, sir,” he would say, “how does it turn out after all? Why here she is at a hundred a year (I give her a hundred, which she is pleased to term handsome), keeping the house of Josiah Bounderby of Coketown!”

Nay, he made this foil of his so very widely known, that third parties took it up, and handled it on some occasions with considerable briskness. It was one of the most exasperating attributes of Bounderby, that he not only sang his own praises but stimulated other men to sing them. There was a moral infection of claptrap in him. Strangers, modest enough elsewhere, started up at dinners in Coketown, and boasted, in quite a rampant way, of Bounderby. They made him out to be the Royal arms, the Union-Jack, Magna Charta, John Bull, Habeas Corpus, the Bill of Rights, An Englishman’s house is his castle, Church and State, and God save the Queen, all put together. And as often (and it was very often) as an orator of this kind brought into his peroration⁠—

“Princes and lords may flourish or may fade,
A breath can make them, as a breath has made,”

it was, for certain, more or less understood among the company that he had heard of Mrs. Sparsit.

“Mr. Bounderby,” said Mrs. Sparsit, “you are unusually slow, sir, with your breakfast this morning.”

“Why, ma’am,” he returned, “I am thinking about Tom Gradgrind’s whim;” Tom Gradgrind, for a bluff independent manner of speaking⁠—as if somebody were always endeavouring to bribe him with immense sums to say Thomas, and he wouldn’t; “Tom Gradgrind’s whim, ma’am, of bringing up the tumbling-girl.”

“The girl is now waiting to know,” said Mrs. Sparsit, “whether she is to go straight to the school, or up to the Lodge.”

“She must wait, ma’am,” answered Bounderby, “till I know myself. We shall have Tom Gradgrind down here presently, I suppose. If he should wish her to remain here a day or two longer, of course she can, ma’am.”

“Of course she can if you wish it, Mr. Bounderby.”

“I told him I would give her a shakedown here, last night, in order that he might sleep on it before he decided to let her have any association with Louisa.”

“Indeed, Mr. Bounderby? Very thoughtful of you!” Mrs. Sparsit’s Coriolanian nose underwent a slight expansion of the nostrils, and her black eyebrows contracted as she took a sip of tea.

“It’s tolerably clear to me,” said Bounderby, “that the little puss can get small good out of such companionship.”

“Are you speaking of young Miss Gradgrind, Mr. Bounderby?”

“Yes, ma’am, I’m speaking of Louisa.”

“Your observation being limited to ‘little puss,’ ” said Mrs. Sparsit, “and there being two little girls in question, I did not know which might be indicated by that expression.”

“Louisa,” repeated Mr. Bounderby. “Louisa, Louisa.”

“You are quite another father to Louisa, sir.” Mrs. Sparsit took a little more tea; and, as she bent her again contracted eyebrows over her steaming cup, rather looked as if her classical countenance were invoking the infernal gods.

“If you had said I was another father to Tom⁠—young Tom, I mean, not my friend Tom Gradgrind⁠—you might have been nearer the mark. I am going to take young Tom into my office. Going to have him under my wing, ma’am.”

“Indeed? Rather young for that, is he not, sir?” Mrs. Spirit’s “sir,” in addressing Mr. Bounderby, was a word of ceremony, rather exacting consideration for herself in the use, than honouring him.

“I’m not going to take him at once; he is to finish his educational cramming before then,” said Bounderby. “By the Lord Harry, he’ll have enough of it, first and last! He’d open his eyes, that boy would, if he knew how empty of learning my young maw was, at his time of life.” Which, by the by, he probably did know, for he had heard of it often enough. “But it’s extraordinary the difficulty I have on scores of such subjects, in speaking to anyone on equal terms. Here, for example, I have been speaking to you this morning about tumblers. Why, what do you know about tumblers? At the time when, to have been a tumbler in the mud of the streets, would have been a godsend to me, a prize in the lottery to me, you were at the Italian Opera. You were coming out of the Italian Opera, ma’am, in white satin and jewels, a blaze of splendour, when I hadn’t a penny to buy a link to light you.”

“I certainly, sir,” returned Mrs. Sparsit, with a dignity serenely mournful, “was familiar with the Italian Opera at a very early age.”

“Egad, ma’am, so was I,” said Bounderby, “⁠—with the wrong side of it. A hard bed the pavement of its Arcade used to make, I assure you. People like you, ma’am, accustomed from infancy to lie on down feathers, have no idea how hard a paving-stone is, without trying it. No, no, it’s of no use my talking to you about tumblers. I should speak of foreign dancers, and the West End of London, and Mayfair, and lords and ladies and honourables.”

“I trust, sir,” rejoined Mrs. Sparsit, with decent resignation, “it is not necessary that you should do anything of that kind. I hope I have learnt how to accommodate myself to the changes of life. If I have acquired an interest in hearing of your instructive experiences, and can scarcely hear enough of them, I claim no merit for that, since I believe it is a general sentiment.”

“Well, ma’am,” said her patron, “perhaps some people may be pleased to say that they do like to hear, in his own unpolished way, what Josiah Bounderby, of Coketown, has gone through. But you must confess that you were born in the lap of luxury, yourself. Come, ma’am, you know you were born in the lap of luxury.”

“I do not, sir,” returned Mrs. Sparsit with a shake of her head, “deny it.”

Mr. Bounderby was obliged to get up from table, and stand with his back to the fire, looking at her; she was such an enhancement of his