Long after Louisa had undressed and lain down, she watched and waited for her brother's coming home. That could hardly be, she knew, until an hour past midnight; but in the country silence, which did anything but calm the trouble of her thoughts, time lagged wearily. At last, when the darkness and stillness had seemed for hours to thicken one another, she heard the bell at the gate. She felt as though she would have been glad that it rang on until daylight; but it ceased, and the circles of its last sound spread out fainter and wider in the air, and all was dead again.
She waited yet some quarter of an hour, as she judged. Then she arose, put on a loose robe, and went out of her room in the dark, and up the staircase to her brother's room. His door being shut, she softly opened it and spoke to him, approaching his bed with a noiseless step.
She kneeled down beside it, passed her arm over his neck, and drew his face to hers. She knew that he only feigned to be asleep, but she said nothing to him.
He started by and by as if he were just then awakened, and asked who that was, and what was the matter?
“Tom, have you anything to tell me? If ever you loved me in your life, and have anything concealed from every one besides, tell it to me.”
“I don't know what you mean, Loo. You have been dreaming.”
“My dear brother:” she laid her head down on his pillow, and her hair flowed over him as if she would hide him from every one but herself: “is there nothing that you have to tell me? Is there nothing you can tell me if you will? You can tell me nothing that will change me. O Tom, tell me the truth!”
“I don't know what you mean, Loo!”
“As you lie here alone, my dear, in the melancholy night, so you must lie somewhere one night, when even I, if I am living then, shall have left you. As I am here beside you, barefoot, unclothed, undistinguishable in darkness, so must I lie through all the night of my decay, until I am dust. In the name of that time, Tom, tell me the truth now!”
“What is it you want to know?”
“You may be certain;” in the energy of her love she took him to her bosom as if he were a child; “that I will not reproach you. You may be certain that I will be compassionate and true to you. You may be certain that I will save you at whatever cost. O Tom, have you nothing to tell me? Whisper very softly. Say only “yes,” and I shall understand you!”
She turned her ear to his lips, but he remained doggedly silent.
“Not a word, Tom?”
“How can I say Yes, or how can I say No, when I don't know what you mean? Loo, you are a brave, kind girl, worthy I begin to think of a better brother than I am. But I have nothing more to say. Go to bed, go to bed.”
“You are tired,” she whispered presently, more in her usual way.
“Yes, I am quite tired out.”
“You have been so hurried and disturbed to-day. Have any fresh discoveries been made?”
“Only those you have heard of, from—him.”
“Tom, have you said to any one that we made a visit to those people, and that we saw those three together?”
“No. Didn't you yourself particularly ask me to keep it quiet when you asked me to go there with you?”
“Yes. But I did not know then what was going to happen.”
“Nor I neither. How could I?”
He was very quick upon her with this retort.
“Ought I to say, after what has happened,” said his sister, standing by the bed—she had gradually withdrawn herself and risen, “that I made that visit? Should I say so? Must I say so?”
“Good Heavens, Loo,” returned her brother, “you are not in the habit of asking my advice. say what you like. If you keep it to yourself, I shall keep it to myself. If you disclose it, there's an end of it.”
It was too dark for either to see the other's face; but each seemed very attentive, and to consider before speaking.
“Tom, do you believe the man I gave the money to, is really implicated in this crime?”
“I don't know. I don't see why he shouldn't be.”
“He seemed to me an honest man.”
“Another person may seem to you dishonest, and yet not be so.” There was a pause, for he had hesitated and stopped.
“In short,” resumed Tom, as if he had made up his mind, “if you come to that, perhaps I was so far from being altogether in his favour, that I took him outside the door to tell him quietly, that I thought he might consider himself very well off to get such a windfall as he had got from my sister, and that I hoped he would make good use of it. You remember whether I took him out or not. I say nothing against the man; he may be a very good fellow, for anything I know; I hope he is.”
“Was he offended by what you said?”
“No, he took it pretty well; he was civil enough. Where are you, Loo?” He sat up in bed and kissed her. “Good night, my dear, good night.”
“You have nothing more to tell me?”
“No. What should I have? You wouldn't have me tell you a lie!”
“I wouldn't have you do that to-night, Tom, of all the nights in your life; many and much happier as I hope they will be.”
“Thank you, my dear Loo. I am so tired, that I am sure I wonder I don't say anything to get to sleep. Go to bed, go to bed.”
Kissing her again, he turned round, drew the coverlet over his head, and lay as still as if that time had come by which she had adjured him. She stood for some time at the bedside before she slowly moved away. She stopped at the door, looked back when she had opened it, and asked him if he had called her? But he lay still, and she softly closed the door and returned to her room.
Then the wretched boy looked cautiously up and found her gone, crept out of bed, fastened his door, and threw himself upon his pillow again: tearing his hair, morosely crying, grudgingly loving her, hatefully but impenitently spurning himself, and no less hatefully and unprofitably spurning all the good in the world.
CHAPTER IX
HEARING THE LAST OF IT
MRS. SPARSIT, lying by to recover the tone of her nerves in Mr. Bounderby's retreat, kept such a sharp look-out, night and day, under her Coriolanian eyebrows, that her eyes, like a couple of lighthouses on an iron-bound coast, might have warned all prudent mariners from that bold rock her Roman nose and the dark and craggy region in its neighbourhood, but for the placidity of her manner. Although it was hard to believe that her retiring for the night could be anything but a form, so severely wide awake were those classical eyes of hers, and so impossible did it seem that her rigid nose could yield to any relaxing influence, yet her manner of sitting, smoothing her uncomfortable, not to say, gritty mittens (they were constructed of a cool fabric like a meat-safe), or of ambling to unknown places of destination with her foot in her cotton stirrup, was so perfectly serene, that most observers would have been constrained to suppose her a dove, embodied by some freak of nature, in the earthly tabernacle of a bird of the hook-beaked order.
She was a most wonderful woman for prowling about the house. How she got from story to story was a mystery beyond solution. A lady so decorous in herself, and so highly connected, was not to be suspected of dropping over the banisters or sliding down them, yet her extraordinary facility of locomotion suggested the wild idea. Another noticeable circumstance in Mrs. Sparsit was, that she was never hurried. She would shoot with consummate velocity from the roof to the hall, yet would be in full possession of her breath and dignity on the moment of her arrival there. Neither was she ever seen by human vision to go at a great pace.
She took very kindly to Mr. Harthouse, and had some pleasant conversation with him soon after her arrival. She made him her stately curtsey in the garden, one morning before breakfast.
“It appears but yesterday, sir,” said Mrs. Sparsit, “that I had the honour of receiving you at the Bank, when you were so good as to wish to be made acquainted with Mr. Bounderby's address.”