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

of the high presses in the room were all blended together on the wall and on the ceiling, as if the brother and sister were overhung by a dark cavern. Or, a fanciful imagination⁠—if such treason could have been there⁠—might have made it out to be the shadow of their subject, and of its lowering association with their future.

“What is your great mode of smoothing and managing, Tom? Is it a secret?”

“Oh!” said Tom, “if it is a secret, it’s not far off. It’s you. You are his little pet, you are his favourite; he’ll do anything for you. When he says to me what I don’t like, I shall say to him, ‘My sister Loo will be hurt and disappointed, Mr. Bounderby. She always used to tell me she was sure you would be easier with me than this.’ That’ll bring him about, or nothing will.”

After waiting for some answering remark, and getting none, Tom wearily relapsed into the present time, and twined himself yawning round and about the rails of his chair, and rumpled his head more and more, until he suddenly looked up, and asked:

“Have you gone to sleep, Loo?”

“No, Tom. I am looking at the fire.”

“You seem to find more to look at in it than ever I could find,” said Tom. “Another of the advantages, I suppose, of being a girl.”

“Tom,” enquired his sister, slowly, and in a curious tone, as if she were reading what she asked in the fire, and it was not quite plainly written there, “do you look forward with any satisfaction to this change to Mr. Bounderby’s?”

“Why, there’s one thing to be said of it,” returned Tom, pushing his chair from him, and standing up; “it will be getting away from home.”

“There is one thing to be said of it,” Louisa repeated in her former curious tone; “it will be getting away from home. Yes.”

“Not but what I shall be very unwilling, both to leave you, Loo, and to leave you here. But I must go, you know, whether I like it or not; and I had better go where I can take with me some advantage of your influence, than where I should lose it altogether. Don’t you see?”

“Yes, Tom.”

The answer was so long in coming, though there was no indecision in it, that Tom went and leaned on the back of her chair, to contemplate the fire which so engrossed her, from her point of view, and see what he could make of it.

“Except that it is a fire,” said Tom, “it looks to me as stupid and blank as everything else looks. What do you see in it? Not a circus?”

“I don’t see anything in it, Tom, particularly. But since I have been looking at it, I have been wondering about you and me, grown up.”

“Wondering again!” said Tom.

“I have such unmanageable thoughts,” returned his sister, “that they will wonder.”

“Then I beg of you, Louisa,” said Mrs. Gradgrind, who had opened the door without being heard, “to do nothing of that description, for goodness’ sake, you inconsiderate girl, or I shall never hear the last of it from your father. And, Thomas, it is really shameful, with my poor head continually wearing me out, that a boy brought up as you have been, and whose education has cost what yours has, should be found encouraging his sister to wonder, when he knows his father has expressly said that she is not to do it.”

Louisa denied Tom’s participation in the offence; but her mother stopped her with the conclusive answer, “Louisa, don’t tell me, in my state of health; for unless you had been encouraged, it is morally and physically impossible that you could have done it.”

“I was encouraged by nothing, mother, but by looking at the red sparks dropping out of the fire, and whitening and dying. It made me think, after all, how short my life would be, and how little I could hope to do in it.”

“Nonsense!” said Mrs. Gradgrind, rendered almost energetic. “Nonsense! Don’t stand there and tell me such stuff, Louisa, to my face, when you know very well that if it was ever to reach your father’s ears I should never hear the last of it. After all the trouble that has been taken with you! After the lectures you have attended, and the experiments you have seen! After I have heard you myself, when the whole of my right side has been benumbed, going on with your master about combustion, and calcination, and calorification, and I may say every kind of ation that could drive a poor invalid distracted, to hear you talking in this absurd way about sparks and ashes! I wish,” whimpered Mrs. Gradgrind, taking a chair, and discharging her strongest point before succumbing under these mere shadows of facts, “yes, I really do wish that I had never had a family, and then you would have known what it was to do without me!”

IX Sissy’s Progress

Sissy Jupe had not an easy time of it, between Mr. M’Choakumchild and Mrs. Gradgrind, and was not without strong impulses, in the first months of her probation, to run away. It hailed facts all day long so very hard, and life in general was opened to her as such a closely ruled ciphering-book, that assuredly she would have run away, but for only one restraint.

It is lamentable to think of; but this restraint was the result of no arithmetical process, was self-imposed in defiance of all calculation, and went dead against any table of probabilities that any actuary would have drawn up from the premises. The girl believed that her father had not deserted her; she lived in the hope that he would come back, and in the faith that he would be made the happier by her remaining where she was.

The wretched ignorance with which Jupe clung to this consolation, rejecting the superior comfort of knowing, on a sound arithmetical basis, that her father was an unnatural vagabond, filled Mr. Gradgrind with pity. Yet, what