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

you, sir,” returned Sissy, “and you will trust to me.”

His leaning against the chimneypiece reminded him of the night with the whelp. It was the selfsame chimneypiece, and somehow he felt as if he were the whelp tonight. He could make no way at all.

“I suppose a man never was placed in a more ridiculous position,” he said, after looking down, and looking up, and laughing, and frowning, and walking off, and walking back again. “But I see no way out of it. What will be, will be. This will be, I suppose. I must take off myself, I imagine⁠—in short, I engage to do it.”

Sissy rose. She was not surprised by the result, but she was happy in it, and her face beamed brightly.

“You will permit me to say,” continued Mr. James Harthouse, “that I doubt if any other ambassador, or ambassadress, could have addressed me with the same success. I must not only regard myself as being in a very ridiculous position, but as being vanquished at all points. Will you allow me the privilege of remembering my enemy’s name?”

“My name?” said the ambassadress.

“The only name I could possibly care to know, tonight.”

“Sissy Jupe.”

“Pardon my curiosity at parting. Related to the family?”

“I am only a poor girl,” returned Sissy. “I was separated from my father⁠—he was only a stroller⁠—and taken pity on by Mr. Gradgrind. I have lived in the house ever since.”

She was gone.

“It wanted this to complete the defeat,” said Mr. James Harthouse, sinking, with a resigned air, on the sofa, after standing transfixed a little while. “The defeat may now be considered perfectly accomplished. Only a poor girl⁠—only a stroller⁠—only James Harthouse made nothing of⁠—only James Harthouse a Great Pyramid of failure.”

The Great Pyramid put it into his head to go up the Nile. He took a pen upon the instant, and wrote the following note (in appropriate hieroglyphics) to his brother:

Dear Jack⁠—All up at Coketown. Bored out of the place, and going in for camels.

Affectionately,

Jem.

He rang the bell.

“Send my fellow here.”

“Gone to bed, sir.”

“Tell him to get up, and pack up.”

He wrote two more notes. One, to Mr. Bounderby, announcing his retirement from that part of the country, and showing where he would be found for the next fortnight. The other, similar in effect, to Mr. Gradgrind. Almost as soon as the ink was dry upon their superscriptions, he had left the tall chimneys of Coketown behind, and was in a railway carriage, tearing and glaring over the dark landscape.

The moral sort of fellows might suppose that Mr. James Harthouse derived some comfortable reflections afterwards, from this prompt retreat, as one of his few actions that made any amends for anything, and as a token to himself that he had escaped the climax of a very bad business. But it was not so, at all. A secret sense of having failed and been ridiculous⁠—a dread of what other fellows who went in for similar sorts of things, would say at his expense if they knew it⁠—so oppressed him, that what was about the very best passage in his life was the one of all others he would not have owned to on any account, and the only one that made him ashamed of himself.

III Very Decided

The indefatigable Mrs. Sparsit, with a violent cold upon her, her voice reduced to a whisper, and her stately frame so racked by continual sneezes that it seemed in danger of dismemberment, gave chase to her patron until she found him in the metropolis; and there, majestically sweeping in upon him at his hotel in St. James’s Street, exploded the combustibles with which she was charged, and blew up. Having executed her mission with infinite relish, this high-minded woman then fainted away on Mr. Bounderby’s coat-collar.

Mr. Bounderby’s first procedure was to shake Mrs. Sparsit off, and leave her to progress as she might through various stages of suffering on the floor. He next had recourse to the administration of potent restoratives, such as screwing the patient’s thumbs, smiting her hands, abundantly watering her face, and inserting salt in her mouth. When these attentions had recovered her (which they speedily did), he hustled her into a fast train without offering any other refreshment, and carried her back to Coketown more dead than alive.

Regarded as a classical ruin, Mrs. Sparsit was an interesting spectacle on her arrival at her journey’s end; but considered in any other light, the amount of damage she had by that time sustained was excessive, and impaired her claims to admiration. Utterly heedless of the wear and tear of her clothes and constitution, and adamant to her pathetic sneezes, Mr. Bounderby immediately crammed her into a coach, and bore her off to Stone Lodge.

“Now, Tom Gradgrind,” said Bounderby, bursting into his father-in-law’s room late at night; “here’s a lady here⁠—Mrs. Sparsit⁠—you know Mrs. Sparsit⁠—who has something to say to you that will strike you dumb.”

“You have missed my letter!” exclaimed Mr. Gradgrind, surprised by the apparition.

“Missed your letter, sir!” bawled Bounderby. “The present time is no time for letters. No man shall talk to Josiah Bounderby of Coketown about letters, with his mind in the state it’s in now.”

“Bounderby,” said Mr. Gradgrind, in a tone of temperate remonstrance, “I speak of a very special letter I have written to you, in reference to Louisa.”

“Tom Gradgrind,” replied Bounderby, knocking the flat of his hand several times with great vehemence on the table, “I speak of a very special messenger that has come to me, in reference to Louisa. Mrs. Sparsit, ma’am, stand forward!”

That unfortunate lady hereupon essaying to offer testimony, without any voice and with painful gestures expressive of an inflamed throat, became so aggravating and underwent so many facial contortions, that Mr. Bounderby, unable to bear it, seized her by the arm and shook her.

“If you can’t get it out, ma’am,” said Bounderby, “leave me to get it out. This is not a time for a lady, however highly connected, to be totally inaudible, and seemingly swallowing marbles. Tom Gradgrind, Mrs. Sparsit latterly found herself, by accident, in