Hard Times by Charles Dickens (ebooks that read to you txt) 📕

He assisted her to rise, and she took his arm, and they advanced to meet the whelp. He was idly beating the branches as he lounged along: or he stooped viciously to rip the moss from the trees with his stick. He was startled when they came upon him while he was engaged in this latter pastime, and his colour changed.

“Halloa!” he stammered; “I didn’t know you were here.”

“Whose name, Tom,” said Mr. Harthouse, putting his hand upon his shoulder and turning him, so that they all three walked towards the house together, “have you been carving on the trees?”

“Whose name?” returned Tom. “Oh! You mean what girl’s name?”

“You have a suspicious appearance of inscribing some fair creature’s on the bark, Tom.”

“Not much of that, Mr. Harthouse, unless some fair creature with a slashing fortune at her own disposal would take a fancy to me. Or she might be as ugly as she was rich, without any fear of losing me. I’d carve her name as often as she liked.”

“I am afraid you are mercenary, Tom.”

“Mercenary,” repeated Tom. “Who is not mercenary? Ask my sister.”

“Have you so proved it to be a failing of mine, Tom?” said Louisa, showing no other sense of his discontent and ill-nature.

“You know whether the cap fits you, Loo,” returned her brother sulkily. “If it does, you can wear it.”

“Tom is misanthropical today, as all bored people are now and then,” said Mr. Harthouse. “Don’t believe him, Mrs. Bounderby. He knows much better. I shall disclose some of his opinions of you, privately expressed to me, unless he relents a little.”

“At all events, Mr. Harthouse,” said Tom, softening in his admiration of his patron, but shaking his head sullenly too, “you can’t tell her that I ever praised her for being mercenary. I may have praised her for being the contrary, and I should do it again, if I had as good reason. However, never mind this now; it’s not very interesting to you, and I am sick of the subject.”

They walked on to the house, where Louisa quitted her visitor’s arm and went in. He stood looking after her, as she ascended the steps, and passed into the shadow of the door; then put his hand upon her brother’s shoulder again, and invited him with a confidential nod to a walk in the garden.

“Tom, my fine fellow, I want to have a word with you.”

They had stopped among a disorder of roses⁠—it was part of Mr. Bounderby’s humility to keep Nickits’s roses on a reduced scale⁠—and Tom sat down on a terrace-parapet, plucking buds and picking them to pieces; while his powerful familiar stood over him, with a foot upon the parapet, and his figure easily resting on the arm supported by that knee. They were just visible from her window. Perhaps she saw them.

“Tom, what’s the matter?”

“Oh! Mr. Harthouse,” said Tom with a groan, “I am hard up, and bothered out of my life.”

“My good fellow, so am I.”

“You!” returned Tom. “You are the picture of independence. Mr. Harthouse, I am in a horrible mess. You have no idea what a state I have got myself into⁠—what a state my sister might have got me out of, if she would only have done it.”

He took to biting the rosebuds now, and tearing them away from his teeth with a hand that trembled like an infirm old man’s. After one exceedingly observant look at him, his companion relapsed into his lightest air.

“Tom, you are inconsiderate: you expect too much of your sister. You have had money of her, you dog, you know you have.”

“Well, Mr. Harthouse, I know I have. How else was I to get it? Here’s old Bounderby always boasting that at my age he lived upon twopence a month, or something of that sort. Here’s my father drawing what he calls a line, and tying me down to it from a baby, neck and heels. Here’s my mother who never has anything of her own, except her complaints. What is a fellow to do for money, and where am I to look for it, if not to my sister?”

He was almost crying, and scattered the buds about by dozens. Mr. Harthouse took him persuasively by the coat.

“But, my dear Tom, if your sister has not got it⁠—”

“Not got it, Mr. Harthouse? I don’t say she has got it. I may have wanted more than she was likely to have got. But then she ought to get it. She could get it. It’s of no use pretending to make a secret of matters now, after what I have told you already; you know she didn’t marry old Bounderby for her own sake, or for his sake, but for my sake. Then why doesn’t she get what I want, out of him, for my sake? She is not obliged to say what she is going to do with it; she is sharp enough; she could manage to coax it out of him, if she chose. Then why doesn’t she choose, when I tell her of what consequence it is? But no. There she sits in his company like a stone, instead of making herself agreeable and getting it easily. I don’t know what you may call this, but I call it unnatural conduct.”

There was a piece of ornamental water immediately below the parapet, on the other side, into which Mr. James Harthouse had a very strong inclination to pitch Mr. Thomas Gradgrind Junior, as the injured men of Coketown threatened to pitch their property into the Atlantic. But he preserved his easy attitude; and nothing more solid went over the stone balustrades than the accumulated rosebuds now floating about, a little surface-island.

“My dear Tom,” said Harthouse, “let me try to be your banker.”

“For God’s sake,” replied Tom, suddenly, “don’t talk about bankers!” And very white he looked, in contrast with the roses. Very white.

Mr. Harthouse, as a thoroughly well-bred man, accustomed to the best society, was not to be surprised⁠—he could as soon have been affected⁠—but he raised