Bleak House
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.”
The stranger only answered with another violent snort, whether in
acceptance of the poetry-tribute or in disdainful rejection of it, he
did not express to me.
“Now, my dear Miss Summerson, and my dear Mr. Richard,” said Mr.
Skimpole gaily, innocently, and confidingly as he looked at his
drawing with his head on one side, “here you see me utterly incapable
of helping myself, and entirely in your hands! I only ask to be free.
The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold
Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies!”
“My dear Miss Summerson,” said Richard in a whisper, “I have ten
pounds that I received from Mr. Kenge. I must try what that will do.”
I possessed fifteen pounds, odd shillings, which I had saved from my
quarterly allowance during several years. I had always thought that
some accident might happen which would throw me suddenly, without any
relation or any property, on the world and had always tried to keep
some little money by me that I might not be quite penniless. I told
Richard of my having this little store and having no present need of
it, and I asked him delicately to inform Mr. Skimpole, while I should
be gone to fetch it, that we would have the pleasure of paying his
debt.
When I came back, Mr. Skimpole kissed my hand and seemed quite
touched. Not on his own account (I was again aware of that perplexing
and extraordinary contradiction), but on ours, as if personal
considerations were impossible with him and the contemplation of our
happiness alone affected him. Richard, begging me, for the greater
grace of the transaction, as he said, to settle with Coavinses (as
Mr. Skimpole now jocularly called him), I counted out the money and
received the necessary acknowledgment. This, too, delighted Mr.
Skimpole.
His compliments were so delicately administered that I blushed less
than I might have done and settled with the stranger in the white
coat without making any mistakes. He put the money in his pocket and
shortly said, “Well, then, I’ll wish you a good evening, miss.”
“My friend,” said Mr. Skimpole, standing with his back to the fire
after giving up the sketch when it was half finished, “I should like
to ask you something, without offence.”
I think the reply was, “Cut away, then!”
“Did you know this morning, now, that you were coming out on this
errand?” said Mr. Skimpole.
“Know’d it yes’day aft’noon at tea-time,” said Coavinses.
“It didn’t affect your appetite? Didn’t make you at all uneasy?”
“Not a bit,” said Coavinses. “I know’d if you wos missed to-day, you
wouldn’t be missed to-morrow. A day makes no such odds.”
“But when you came down here,” proceeded Mr. Skimpole, “it was a fine