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

while they were preparing to sing,

before the sermon. She took no heed of me, and the beating at my

heart was gone. Neither did it revive for more than a few moments

when she once or twice afterwards glanced at Ada or at me through

her glass.

 

The service being concluded, Sir Leicester gave his arm with much

taste and gallantry to Lady Dedlock—though he was obliged to walk

by the help of a thick stick—and escorted her out of church to the

pony carriage in which they had come. The servants then dispersed,

and so did the congregation, whom Sir Leicester had contemplated

all along (Mr. Skimpole said to Mr. Boythorn’s infinite delight) as

if he were a considerable landed proprietor in heaven.

 

“He believes he is!” said Mr. Boythorn. “He firmly believes it.

So did his father, and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather!”

 

“Do you know,” pursued Mr. Skimpole very unexpectedly to Mr.

Boythorn, “it’s agreeable to me to see a man of that sort.”

 

“IS it!” said Mr. Boythorn.

 

“Say that he wants to patronize me,” pursued Mr. Skimpole. “Very

well! I don’t object.”

 

“I do,” said Mr. Boythorn with great vigour.

 

“Do you really?” returned Mr. Skimpole in his easy light vein.

“But that’s taking trouble, surely. And why should you take

trouble? Here am I, content to receive things childishly as they

fall out, and I never take trouble! I come down here, for

instance, and I find a mighty potentate exacting homage. Very

well! I say ‘Mighty potentate, here IS my homage! It’s easier to

give it than to withhold it. Here it is. If you have anything of

an agreeable nature to show me, I shall be happy to see it; if you

have anything of an agreeable nature to give me, I shall be happy

to accept it.’ Mighty potentate replies in effect, ‘This is a

sensible fellow. I find him accord with my digestion and my

bilious system. He doesn’t impose upon me the necessity of rolling

myself up like a hedgehog with my points outward. I expand, I

open, I turn my silver lining outward like Milton’s cloud, and it’s

more agreeable to both of us.’ That’s my view of such things,

speaking as a child!”

 

“But suppose you went down somewhere else to-morrow,” said Mr.

Boythorn, “where there was the opposite of that fellow—or of this

fellow. How then?”

 

“How then?” said Mr. Skimpole with an appearance of the utmost

simplicity and candour. “Just the same then! I should say, ‘My

esteemed Boythorn’—to make you the personification of our

imaginary friend—‘my esteemed Boythorn, you object to the mighty

potentate? Very good. So do I. I take it that my business in the

social system is to be agreeable; I take it that everybody’s

business in the social system is to be agreeable. It’s a system of

harmony, in short. Therefore if you object, I object. Now,

excellent Boythorn, let us go to dinner!’”

 

“But excellent Boythorn might say,” returned our host, swelling and

growing very red, “I’ll be—”

 

“I understand,” said Mr. Skimpole. “Very likely he would.”

 

“—if I WILL go to dinner!” cried Mr. Boythorn in a violent burst

and stopping to strike his stick upon the ground. “And he would

probably add, ‘Is there such a thing as principle, Mr. Harold

Skimpole?’”

 

“To which Harold Skimpole would reply, you know,” he returned in

his gayest manner and with his most ingenuous smile, “‘Upon my life

I have not the least idea! I don’t know what it is you call by

that name, or where it is, or who possesses it. If you possess it

and find it comfortable, I am quite delighted and congratulate you

heartily. But I know nothing about it, I assure you; for I am a

mere child, and I lay no claim to it, and I don’t want it!’ So,

you see, excellent Boythorn and I would go to dinner after all!”

 

This was one of many little dialogues between them which I always

expected to end, and which I dare say would have ended under other

circumstances, in some violent explosion on the part of our host.

But he had so high a sense of his hospitable and responsible

position as our entertainer, and my guardian laughed so sincerely

at and with Mr. Skimpole, as a child who blew bubbles and broke

them all day long, that matters never went beyond this point. Mr.

Skimpole, who always seemed quite unconscious of having been on

delicate ground, then betook himself to beginning some sketch in

the park which he never finished, or to playing fragments of airs

on the piano, or to singing scraps of songs, or to lying down on

his back under a tree and looking at the sky—which he couldn’t

help thinking, he said, was what he was meant for; it suited him so

exactly.

 

“Enterprise and effort,” he would say to us (on his back), “are

delightful to me. I believe I am truly cosmopolitan. I have the

deepest sympathy with them. I lie in a shady place like this and

think of adventurous spirits going to the North Pole or penetrating

to the heart of the Torrid Zone with admiration. Mercenary

creatures ask, ‘What is the use of a man’s going to the North Pole?

What good does it do?’ I can’t say; but, for anything I CAN say,

he may go for the purpose—though he don’t know it—of employing my

thoughts as I lie here. Take an extreme case. Take the case of

the slaves on American plantations. I dare say they are worked

hard, I dare say they don’t altogether like it. I dare say theirs

is an unpleasant experience on the whole; but they people the

landscape for me, they give it a poetry for me, and perhaps that is

one of the pleasanter objects of their existence. I am very

sensible of it, if it be, and I shouldn’t wonder if it were!”

 

I always wondered on these occasions whether he ever thought of

Mrs. Skimpole and the children, and in what point of view they

presented themselves to his cosmopolitan mind. So far as I could

understand, they rarely presented themselves at all.

 

The week had gone round to the Saturday following that beating of

my heart in the church; and every day had been so bright and blue

that to ramble in the woods, and to see the light striking down

among the transparent leaves and sparkling in the beautiful

interlacings of the shadows of the trees, while the birds poured

out their songs and the air was drowsy with the hum of insects, had

been most delightful. We had one favourite spot, deep in moss and

last year’s leaves, where there were some felled trees from which

the bark was all stripped off. Seated among these, we looked

through a green vista supported by thousands of natural columns,

the whitened stems of trees, upon a distant prospect made so

radiant by its contrast with the shade in which we sat and made so

precious by the arched perspective through which we saw it that it

was like a glimpse of the better land. Upon the Saturday we sat

here, Mr. Jarndyce, Ada, and I, until we heard thunder muttering in

the distance and felt the large raindrops rattle through the

leaves.

 

The weather had been all the week extremely sultry, but the storm

broke so suddenly—upon us, at least, in that sheltered spot—that

before we reached the outskirts of the wood the thunder and

lightning were frequent and the rain came plunging through the

leaves as if every drop were a great leaden bead. As it was not a

time for standing among trees, we ran out of the wood, and up and

down the moss-grown steps which crossed the plantation-fence like

two broad-staved ladders placed back to back, and made for a

keeper’s lodge which was close at hand. We had often noticed the

dark beauty of this lodge standing in a deep twilight of trees, and

how the ivy clustered over it, and how there was a steep hollow

near, where we had once seen the keeper’s dog dive down into the

fern as if it were water.

 

The lodge was so dark within, now the sky was overcast, that we

only clearly saw the man who came to the door when we took shelter

there and put two chairs for Ada and me. The lattice-windows were

all thrown open, and we sat just within the doorway watching the

storm. It was grand to see how the wind awoke, and bent the trees,

and drove the rain before it like a cloud of smoke; and to hear the

solemn thunder and to see the lightning; and while thinking with

awe of the tremendous powers by which our little lives are

encompassed, to consider how beneficent they are and how upon the

smallest flower and leaf there was already a freshness poured from

all this seeming rage which seemed to make creation new again.

 

“Is it not dangerous to sit in so exposed a place?”

 

“Oh, no, Esther dear!” said Ada quietly.

 

Ada said it to me, but I had not spoken.

 

The beating of my heart came back again. I had never heard the

voice, as I had never seen the face, but it affected me in the same

strange way. Again, in a moment, there arose before my mind

innumerable pictures of myself.

 

Lady Dedlock had taken shelter in the lodge before our arrival

there and had come out of the gloom within. She stood behind my

chair with her hand upon it. I saw her with her hand close to my

shoulder when I turned my head.

 

“I have frightened you?” she said.

 

No. It was not fright. Why should I be frightened!

 

“I believe,” said Lady Dedlock to my guardian, “I have the pleasure

of speaking to Mr. Jarndyce.”

 

“Your remembrance does me more honour than I had supposed it would,

Lady Dedlock,” he returned.

 

“I recognized you in church on Sunday. I am sorry that any local

disputes of Sir Leicester’s—they are not of his seeking, however,

I believe—should render it a matter of some absurd difficulty to

show you any attention here.”

 

“I am aware of the circumstances,” returned my guardian with a

smile, “and am sufficiently obliged.”

 

She had given him her hand in an indifferent way that seemed

habitual to her and spoke in a correspondingly indifferent manner,

though in a very pleasant voice. She was as graceful as she was

beautiful, perfectly self-possessed, and had the air, I thought, of

being able to attract and interest any one if she had thought it

worth her while. The keeper had brought her a chair on which she

sat in the middle of the porch between us.

 

“Is the young gentleman disposed of whom you wrote to Sir Leicester

about and whose wishes Sir Leicester was sorry not to have it in

his power to advance in any way?” she said over her shoulder to my

guardian.

 

“I hope so,” said he.

 

She seemed to respect him and even to wish to conciliate him.

There was something very winning in her haughty manner, and it

became more familiar—I was going to say more easy, but that could

hardly be—as she spoke to him over her shoulder.

 

“I presume this is your other ward, Miss Clare?”

 

He presented Ada, in form.

 

“You will lose the disinterested part of your Don Quixote

character,” said Lady Dedlock to Mr. Jarndyce over her shoulder

again, “if you only redress the wrongs of beauty like this. But

present me,” and she turned full upon me, “to this young lady too!”