“I wish I could collect all the Facts we hear so much about,” said Tom, spitefully setting his teeth, “and all the Figures, and all the people who found them out; and I wish I could put a thousand barrels of gunpowder under them, and blow them all up together! However, when I go to live with old Bounderby, I’ll have my revenge.”
“Your revenge, Tom?”
“I mean, I’ll enjoy myself a little, and go about and see something and hear something. I’ll recompense myself for the way in which I have been brought up.”
“But don’t disappoint yourself beforehand, Tom. Mr. Bounderby thinks, as father thinks, and is a great deal rougher, and not half so kind.”
“Oh;” said Tom, laughing; “I don’t mind that. I shall very well know how to manage and smoothe old Bounderby!”
Their shadows were defined upon the wall, but those of the high presses in the room were all blended together on the wall and on the ceiling as if the brother and sister were overhung by a dark cavern. Or, a fanciful imagination – if such treason could have been there – might have made it out to be the shadow of their subject, of its lowering association with their future.
“What is your great mode of smoothing and managing, Tom? Is it a secret?”
“Oh!” said Tom, “if it is a secret, it’s not far off. It’s you. You are his little pet, you are his favourite; he’ll do anything for you. When he says to me what I don’t like, I shall say to him, ‘My sister Loo will be hurt and disappointed, Mr. Bounderby. She always used to tell me she was sure you would be easier with me than this.’ That’ll bring him about, or nothing will.”
After waiting for some answering remark, and getting none, Tom wearily relapsed into the present time, and twined himself yawning round and about the rails of his chair, and rumpled his head more and more, until he suddenly looked up, and asked:
“Have you gone to sleep, Loo?”
“No, Tom. I am looking at the fire.”
“You seem to find more to look at in it than ever I could find,” said Tom. “Another of the advantages, I suppose, of being a girl.”
“Tom,” enquired his sister, slowly, and in a curious tone, as if she were reading what she asked in the fire, and it were not quite plainly written there, “do you look forward with any satisfaction to this change to Mr. Bounderby’s?”
“Why, there’s one thing to be said of it,” returned Tom, pushing his chair from him, and standing up; “it will be getting away from home.”
“There’s one thing to be said of it,” Louise repeated in her former curious tone; “it will be getting away from home. Yes.”
“Not but what I shall be very unwilling, both to leave you, Loo, and to leave you here. But I must go, you know, whether I like it or not; and I had better go where I can take with me some advantage of your influence, than where I should lose it altogether. “Don’t you see?”
“Yes, Tom.”
The answer was so long in coming, though there was no indecision in it, that Tom went and leaned on the back of her chair, to contemplate the fire which so engrossed her, from her point of view, and see what he could make of
“Except that it is a fire,” said Tom, “it looks to me as stupid and blank as everything else looks. What do you see in it? Not a circus?”
“I don’t see anything in it, Tom, particularly. But since I have been looking it, I have been wondering about you and me grown up.”
“Wondering again!” said Tom.
“I have such unmanageable thoughts,” returned his sister, “that they will wonder.”
“Then I beg of you, Louisa,” said Mrs. Gradgrind, who had entered the door without being heard, “to do nothing of that description, for goodness’ take, you inconsiderate girl, or I shall never hear the last of it from your father. And Thomas, it is really shameful, with my poor head continually wearing me out, that a boy brought up as you have been, and whose education has cost what yours has, should be found encouraging his sister to wonder, when he knows his father has expressly said that she is not to do it.”