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

touch her. She belongs to me. Come in, ma’am!” then said Mrs. Sparsit, reversing her former word of command. “Come in, ma’am, or we’ll have you dragged in!”

The spectacle of a matron of classical deportment, seizing an ancient woman by the throat, and hauling her into a dwelling-house, would have been under any circumstances, sufficient temptation to all true English stragglers so blest as to witness it, to force a way into that dwelling-house and see the matter out. But when the phenomenon was enhanced by the notoriety and mystery by this time associated all over the town with the Bank robbery, it would have lured the stragglers in, with an irresistible attraction, though the roof had been expected to fall upon their heads. Accordingly, the chance witnesses on the ground, consisting of the busiest of the neighbours to the number of some five-and-twenty, closed in after Sissy and Rachael, as they closed in after Mrs. Sparsit and her prize; and the whole body made a disorderly irruption into Mr. Bounderby’s dining-room, where the people behind lost not a moment’s time in mounting on the chairs, to get the better of the people in front.

“Fetch Mr. Bounderby down!” cried Mrs. Sparsit. “Rachael, young woman; you know who this is?”

“It’s Mrs. Pegler,” said Rachael.

“I should think it is!” cried Mrs. Sparsit, exulting. “Fetch Mr. Bounderby. Stand away, everybody!” Here old Mrs. Pegler, muffling herself up, and shrinking from observation, whispered a word of entreaty. “Don’t tell me,” said Mrs. Sparsit, aloud. “I have told you twenty times, coming along, that I will not leave you till I have handed you over to him myself.”

Mr. Bounderby now appeared, accompanied by Mr. Gradgrind and the whelp, with whom he had been holding conference upstairs. Mr. Bounderby looked more astonished than hospitable, at sight of this uninvited party in his dining-room.

“Why, what’s the matter now!” said he. “Mrs. Sparsit, ma’am?”

“Sir,” explained that worthy woman, “I trust it is my good fortune to produce a person you have much desired to find. Stimulated by my wish to relieve your mind, sir, and connecting together such imperfect clues to the part of the country in which that person might be supposed to reside, as have been afforded by the young woman, Rachael, fortunately now present to identify, I have had the happiness to succeed, and to bring that person with me⁠—I need not say most unwillingly on her part. It has not been, sir, without some trouble that I have effected this; but trouble in your service is to me a pleasure, and hunger, thirst, and cold a real gratification.”

Here Mrs. Sparsit ceased; for Mr. Bounderby’s visage exhibited an extraordinary combination of all possible colours and expressions of discomfiture, as old Mrs. Pegler was disclosed to his view.

“Why, what do you mean by this?” was his highly unexpected demand, in great warmth. “I ask you, what do you mean by this, Mrs. Sparsit, ma’am?”

“Sir!” exclaimed Mrs. Sparsit, faintly.

“Why don’t you mind your own business, ma’am?” roared Bounderby. “How dare you go and poke your officious nose into my family affairs?”

This allusion to her favourite feature overpowered Mrs. Sparsit. She sat down stiffly in a chair, as if she were frozen; and with a fixed stare at Mr. Bounderby, slowly grated her mittens against one another, as if they were frozen too.

“My dear Josiah!” cried Mrs. Pegler, trembling. “My darling boy! I am not to blame. It’s not my fault, Josiah. I told this lady over and over again, that I knew she was doing what would not be agreeable to you, but she would do it.”

“What did you let her bring you for? Couldn’t you knock her cap off, or her tooth out, or scratch her, or do something or other to her?” asked Bounderby.

“My own boy! She threatened me that if I resisted her, I should be brought by constables, and it was better to come quietly than make that stir in such a”⁠—Mrs. Pegler glanced timidly but proudly round the walls⁠—“such a fine house as this. Indeed, indeed, it is not my fault! My dear, noble, stately boy! I have always lived quiet, and secret, Josiah, my dear. I have never broken the condition once. I have never said I was your mother. I have admired you at a distance; and if I have come to town sometimes, with long times between, to take a proud peep at you, I have done it unbeknown, my love, and gone away again.”

Mr. Bounderby, with his hands in his pockets, walked in impatient mortification up and down at the side of the long dining-table, while the spectators greedily took in every syllable of Mrs. Pegler’s appeal, and at each succeeding syllable became more and more round-eyed. Mr. Bounderby still walking up and down when Mrs. Pegler had done, Mr. Gradgrind addressed that maligned old lady:

“I am surprised, madam,” he observed with severity, “that in your old age you have the face to claim Mr. Bounderby for your son, after your unnatural and inhuman treatment of him.”

“Me unnatural!” cried poor old Mrs. Pegler. “Me inhuman! To my dear boy?”

“Dear!” repeated Mr. Gradgrind. “Yes; dear in his self-made prosperity, madam, I dare say. Not very dear, however, when you deserted him in his infancy, and left him to the brutality of a drunken grandmother.”

“I deserted my Josiah!” cried Mrs. Pegler, clasping her hands. “Now, Lord forgive you, sir, for your wicked imaginations, and for your scandal against the memory of my poor mother, who died in my arms before Josiah was born. May you repent of it, sir, and live to know better!”

She was so very earnest and injured, that Mr. Gradgrind, shocked by the possibility which dawned upon him, said in a gentler tone:

“Do you deny, then, madam, that you left your son to⁠—to be brought up in the gutter?”

“Josiah in the gutter!” exclaimed Mrs. Pegler. “No such a thing, sir. Never! For shame on you! My dear boy knows, and will give you to know, that though he come of humble parents, he come of parents that loved him as dear as the best could, and never thought it hardship on themselves to pinch a bit that he might write and