Tales from Dickens Part 41

But the suit stopped of its own accord, for it was found now that there was no longer any fortune left to go to law about or to be willed to anybody. All the money had been eaten up by the costs.

After all the years of hope and strain, this disappointment was too much for Richard, and he died that night, at the very hour when poor crazed little Miss Flite (as she had said she would do when the famous suit ended) gave all her caged birds their liberty.

The time came at length, after the widowed Ada and her baby boy had come to make their home with Mr. Jarndyce, when Esther felt that she should fulfil her promise and become the mistress of Bleak House. So she told her guardian she was ready to marry him when he wished. He appointed a day, and she began to prepare her wedding-clothes.

But Mr. Jarndyce, true-hearted and generous as he had always been, had an idea very different from this in his mind. He had found, on Allan Woodcourt's return from his voyage, that the young surgeon still loved Esther. His keen eye had seen that she loved him in return, and he well knew that if she married him, Jarndyce, it would be because of her promise and because her grateful heart could not find it possible to refuse him. So, wis.h.i.+ng most of all her happiness, he determined to give up his own love for her sake.

He bought a house in the town in which Woodcourt had decided to practise medicine, remodeled it and named it "Bleak House," after his own. When it was finished in the way he knew Esther liked best, he took her to see it, telling her it was to be a present from him to the surgeon to repay him for his kindness to little Joe.

Then, when she had seen it all, he told her that he had guessed her love for Woodcourt, and that, though she married the surgeon and not himself, she would still be carrying out her promise and would still become the mistress of "Bleak House."

When she lifted her tearful face from his shoulder she saw that Woodcourt was standing near them.

"This is 'Bleak House,'" said Jarndyce. "This day I give this house its little mistress, and, before G.o.d, it is the brightest day of my life!"

HARD TIMES

Published 1854

_Scene_: c.o.ketown (an English factory town) and the Country.

_Time_: About 1850

CHARACTERS

Mr. Gradgrind A believer in "facts"

Mrs. Gradgrind His wife

Louisa Their daughter

Tom Their son

Josiah Bounderby A pompous mill owner and banker Later, Louisa's husband

"Mrs. Pegler" His mother

Mrs. Sparsit His housekeeper

Mr. M'Choak.u.mchild A schoolmaster

Sleary The proprietor of a circus

"Signor" Jupe The clown

Cecelia Jupe His daughter. Known as "Sissy"

Stephen Blackpool } } Mill workers Rachel }

James Harthouse A man of the world

"Merrylegs" Signor Jupe's performing dog

HARD TIMES

I

MR. GRADGRIND AND HIS "SYSTEM"

In a cheerless house called Stone Lodge, in c.o.ketown, a factory town in England, where great weaving mills made the sky a blur of soot and smoke, lived a man named Gradgrind. He was an obstinate, stubborn man, with a square wall of a forehead and a wide, thin, set mouth. His head was bald and s.h.i.+ning, covered with k.n.o.bs like the crust of a plum pie, and skirted with bristling hair. He had grown rich in the hardware business, and was a school director of the town.

He believed in nothing but "facts." Everything in the world to him was good only to weigh and measure, and wherever he went one would have thought he carried in his pocket a rule and scales and the multiplication table. He seemed a kind of human cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts.

"Now, what I want is facts!" he used to say to Mr. M'Choak.u.mchild, the schoolmaster. "Teach boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Nothing else is of any service to anybody. Stick to facts, sir."

He had several children whom he had brought up according to this system of his, and they led wretched lives. No little Gradgrind child had ever seen a face in the moon, or learned _Mother Goose_ or listened to fairy stories, or read _The Arabian Nights_. They all hated c.o.ketown, always rattling and throbbing with machinery; they hated its houses all built of brick as red as an Indian's face, and its black ca.n.a.l and river purple with dyes. And most of all they hated facts.

Louisa, the eldest daughter, looked jaded, for her imagination was quite starved under their teachings. Tom, her younger brother, was defiant and sullen. "I wish," he used to say, "that I could collect all the facts and all the figures in the world, and all the people who found them out, and I wish I could put a thousand pounds of gunpowder under them and blow them all up together!"

Louisa was generous, and the only love she knew was for her selfish, worthless brother, who repaid her with very little affection. Of their mother they saw very little; she was a thin, white, pink-eyed bundle of shawls, feeble and ailing, and had too little mind to oppose her husband in anything.

Strangely enough, Mr. Gradgrind had once had a tender heart, and down beneath the facts of his system he had it still, though it had been covered up so long that n.o.body would have guessed it. Least of all, perhaps, his own children.

Mr. Gradgrind's intimate friend,--one whom he was foolish enough to admire,--was Josiah Bounderby, a big, loud, staring man with a puffed head whose skin was stretched so tight it seemed to hold his eyes open.

He owned the c.o.ketown mills and a bank besides, and was very rich and pompous.

Bounderby was a precious hypocrite, of an odd sort. His greatest pride was to talk continually of his former poverty and wretchedness, and he delighted to tell everybody that he had been born in a ditch, deserted by his wicked mother, and brought up a vagabond by a drunken grandmother--from which low state he had made himself wealthy and respected by his own unaided efforts.

Now, this was not in the least true. As a matter of fact, his grandmother had been a respectable, honest soul, and his mother had pinched and saved to bring him up decently, had given him some schooling, and finally apprenticed him in a good trade. But Bounderby was so ungrateful and so anxious to have people think he himself deserved all the credit, that after he became rich he forbade his mother even to tell any one who she was, and made her live in a little shop in the country forty miles from c.o.ketown.

But in her good and simple heart the old woman was so proud of her son that she used to spend all her little savings to come into town, sometimes walking a good part of the way, cleanly and plainly dressed, and with her spare shawl and umbrella, just to watch him go into his fine house or to look in admiration at the mills or the fine bank he owned. On such occasions she called herself "Mrs. Pegler," and thought no one else would be the wiser.

The house in which Bounderby lived had no ornaments. It was cold and lonely and rich. He made his mill-hands more than earn their wages, and when any of them complained, he sneered that they wanted to be fed on turtle-soup and venison with a golden spoon.

Bounderby had for housekeeper a Mrs. Sparsit, who talked a great deal of her genteel birth, rich relatives and of the better days she had once seen. She was a busybody, and when she sat of an evening cutting out embroidery with sharp scissors, her bushy eyebrows and Roman nose made her look like a hawk picking out the eyes of a very tough little bird.

In her own mind she had set her cap at Bounderby.

So firmly had Mr. Gradgrind put his trust in the gospel of facts which he had taught Louisa and Tom that he was greatly shocked one day to catch them (instead of studying any one of the dry sciences ending in "ology" which he made them learn) peeping through the knot holes in a wooden pavilion along the road at the performance of a traveling circus.