Bleak House - Charles Dickens (read this if txt) 📗

them. I can lie down on the grass—in

fine weather—and float along an African river, embracing all the

natives I meet, as sensible of the deep silence and sketching the

dense overhanging tropical growth as accurately as if I were there.

I don’t know that it’s of any direct use my doing so, but it’s all

I can do, and I do it thoroughly. Then, for heaven’s sake, having

Harold Skimpole, a confiding child, petitioning you, the world, an

agglomeration of practical people of business habits, to let him

live and admire the human family, do it somehow or other, like good

souls, and suffer him to ride his rocking-horse!”

 

It was plain enough that Mr. Jarndyce had not been neglectful of

the adjuration. Mr. Skimpole’s general position there would have

rendered it so without the addition of what he presently said.

 

“It’s only you, the generous creatures, whom I envy,” said Mr.

Skimpole, addressing us, his new friends, in an impersonal manner.

“I envy you your power of doing what you do. It is what I should

revel in myself. I don’t feel any vulgar gratitude to you. I

almost feel as if YOU ought to be grateful to ME for giving you the

opportunity of enjoying the luxury of generosity. I know you like

it. For anything I can tell, I may have come into the world

expressly for the purpose of increasing your stock of happiness. I

may have been born to be a benefactor to you by sometimes giving

you an opportunity of assisting me in my little perplexities. Why

should I regret my incapacity for details and worldly affairs when

it leads to such pleasant consequences? I don’t regret it

therefore.”

 

Of all his playful speeches (playful, yet always fully meaning what

they expressed) none seemed to be more to the taste of Mr. Jarndyce

than this. I had often new temptations, afterwards, to wonder

whether it was really singular, or only singular to me, that he,

who was probably the most grateful of mankind upon the least

occasion, should so desire to escape the gratitude of others.

 

We were all enchanted. I felt it a merited tribute to the engaging

qualities of Ada and Richard that Mr. Skimpole, seeing them for the

first time, should be so unreserved and should lay himself out to

be so exquisitely agreeable. They (and especially Richard) were

naturally pleased, for similar reasons, and considered it no common

privilege to be so freely confided in by such an attractive man.

The more we listened, the more gaily Mr. Skimpole talked. And what

with his fine hilarious manner and his engaging candour and his

genial way of lightly tossing his own weaknesses about, as if he

had said, “I am a child, you know! You are designing people

compared with me” (he really made me consider myself in that light)

“but I am gay and innocent; forget your worldly arts and play with

me!” the effect was absolutely dazzling.

 

He was so full of feeling too and had such a delicate sentiment for

what was beautiful or tender that he could have won a heart by that

alone. In the evening, when I was preparing to make tea and Ada

was touching the piano in the adjoining room and softly humming a

tune to her cousin Richard, which they had happened to mention, he

came and sat down on the sofa near me and so spoke of Ada that I

almost loved him.

 

“She is like the morning,” he said. “With that golden hair, those

blue eyes, and that fresh bloom on her cheek, she is like the

summer morning. The birds here will mistake her for it. We will

not call such a lovely young creature as that, who is a joy to all

mankind, an orphan. She is the child of the universe.”

 

Mr. Jarndyce, I found, was standing near us with his hands behind

him and an attentive smile upon his face.

 

“The universe,” he observed, “makes rather an indifferent parent, I

am afraid.”

 

“Oh! I don’t know!” cried Mr. Skimpole buoyantly.

 

“I think I do know,” said Mr. Jarndyce.

 

“Well!” cried Mr. Skimpole. “You know the world (which in your

sense is the universe), and I know nothing of it, so you shall have

your way. But if I had mine,” glancing at the cousins, “there

should be no brambles of sordid realities in such a path as that.

It should be strewn with roses; it should lie through bowers, where

there was no spring, autumn, nor winter, but perpetual summer. Age

or change should never wither it. The base word money should never

be breathed near it!”

 

Mr. Jarndyce patted him on the head with a smile, as if he had been

really a child, and passing a step or two on, and stopping a

moment, glanced at the young cousins. His look was thoughtful, but

had a benignant expression in it which I often (how often!) saw

again, which has long been engraven on my heart. The room in which

they were, communicating with that in which he stood, was only

lighted by the fire. Ada sat at the piano; Richard stood beside

her, bending down. Upon the wall, their shadows blended together,

surrounded by strange forms, not without a ghostly motion caught

from the unsteady fire, though reflecting from motionless objects.

Ada touched the notes so softly and sang so low that the wind,

sighing away to the distant hills, was as audible as the music.

The mystery of the future and the little clue afforded to it by the

voice of the present seemed expressed in the whole picture.

 

But it is not to recall this fancy, well as I remember it, that I

recall the scene. First, I was not quite unconscious of the

contrast in respect of meaning and intention between the silent

look directed that way and the flow of words that had preceded it.

Secondly, though Mr. Jarndyce’s glance as he withdrew it rested for

but a moment on me, I felt as if in that moment he confided to me—

and knew that he confided to me and that I received the confidence

—his hope that Ada and Richard might one day enter on a dearer

relationship.

 

Mr. Skimpole could play on the piano and the violoncello, and he

was a composer—had composed half an opera once, but got tired of

it—and played what he composed with taste. After tea we had quite

a little concert, in which Richard—who was enthralled by Ada’s

singing and told me that she seemed to know all the songs that ever

were written—and Mr. Jarndyce, and I were the audience. After a

little while I missed first Mr. Skimpole and afterwards Richard,

and while I was thinking how could Richard stay away so long and

lose so much, the maid who had given me the keys looked in at the

door, saying, “If you please, miss, could you spare a minute?”

 

When I was shut out with her in the hall, she said, holding up her

hands, “Oh, if you please, miss, Mr. Carstone says would you come

upstairs to Mr. Skimpole’s room. He has been took, miss!”

 

“Took?” said I.

 

“Took, miss. Sudden,” said the maid.

 

I was apprehensive that his illness might be of a dangerous kind,

but of course I begged her to be quiet and not disturb any one and

collected myself, as I followed her quickly upstairs, sufficiently

to consider what were the best remedies to be applied if it should

prove to be a fit. She threw open a door and I went into a

chamber, where, to my unspeakable surprise, instead of finding Mr.

Skimpole stretched upon the bed or prostrate on the floor, I found

him standing before the fire smiling at Richard, while Richard,

with a face of great embarrassment, looked at a person on the sofa,

in a white great-coat, with smooth hair upon his head and not much

of it, which he was wiping smoother and making less of with a

pocket-handkerchief.

 

“Miss Summerson,” said Richard hurriedly, “I am glad you are come.

You will be able to advise us. Our friend Mr. Skimpole—don’t be

alarmed!—is arrested for debt.”

 

“And really, my dear Miss Summerson,” said Mr. Skimpole with his

agreeable candour, “I never was in a situation in which that

excellent sense and quiet habit of method and usefulness, which

anybody must observe in you who has the happiness of being a

quarter of an hour in your society, was more needed.”

 

The person on the sofa, who appeared to have a cold in his head,

gave such a very loud snort that he startled me.

 

“Are you arrested for much, sir?” I inquired of Mr. Skimpole.

 

“My dear Miss Summerson,” said he, shaking his head pleasantly, “I

don’t know. Some pounds, odd shillings, and halfpence, I think,

were mentioned.”

 

“It’s twenty-four pound, sixteen, and sevenpence ha’penny,”

observed the stranger. “That’s wot it is.”

 

“And it sounds—somehow it sounds,” said Mr. Skimpole, “like a

small sum?”

 

The strange man said nothing but made another snort. It was such a

powerful one that it seemed quite to lift him out of his seat.

 

“Mr. Skimpole,” said Richard to me, “has a delicacy in applying to

my cousin Jarndyce because he has lately—I think, sir, I

understood you that you had lately—”

 

“Oh, yes!” returned Mr. Skimpole, smiling. “Though I forgot how

much it was and when it was. Jarndyce would readily do it again,

but I have the epicure-like feeling that I would prefer a novelty

in help, that I would rather,” and he looked at Richard and me,

“develop generosity in a new soil and in a new form of flower.”

 

“What do you think will be best, Miss Summerson?” said Richard,

aside.

 

I ventured to inquire, generally, before replying, what would

happen if the money were not produced.

 

“Jail,” said the strange man, coolly putting his handkerchief into

his hat, which was on the floor at his feet. “Or Coavinses.”

 

“May I ask, sir, what is—”

 

“Coavinses?” said the strange man. “A ‘ouse.”

 

Richard and I looked at one another again. It was a most singular

thing that the arrest was our embarrassment and not Mr. Skimpole’s.

He observed us with a genial interest, but there seemed, if I may

venture on such a contradiction, nothing selfish in it. He had

entirely washed his hands of the difficulty, and it had become

ours.

 

“I thought,” he suggested, as if good-naturedly to help us out,

“that being parties in a Chancery suit concerning (as people say) a

large amount of property, Mr. Richard or his beautiful cousin, or

both, could sign something, or make over something, or give some

sort of undertaking, or pledge, or bond? I don’t know what the

business name of it may be, but I suppose there is some instrument

within their power that would settle this?”

 

“Not a bit on it,” said the strange man.

 

“Really?” returned Mr. Skimpole. “That seems odd, now, to one who

is no judge of these things!”

 

“Odd or even,” said the stranger gruffly, “I tell you, not a bit on

it!”

 

“Keep your temper, my good fellow, keep your temper!” Mr. Skimpole

gently reasoned with him as he made a little drawing of his head on

the fly-leaf of a book. “Don’t be ruffled by your occupation. We

can separate you from your office; we can separate the individual

from the pursuit. We are not so prejudiced as to suppose that in

private life you are otherwise than a very estimable man, with a

great deal of poetry in your nature, of which you may not be

conscious.”