Bleak House
day. The sun was shining, the wind was blowing, the lights and
shadows were passing across the fields, the birds were singing.”
“Nobody said they warn’t, in MY hearing,” returned Coavinses.
“No,” observed Mr. Skimpole. “But what did you think upon the road?”
“Wot do you mean?” growled Coavinses with an appearance of strong
resentment. “Think! I’ve got enough to do, and little enough to get
for it without thinking. Thinking!” (with profound contempt).
“Then you didn’t think, at all events,” proceeded Mr. Skimpole, “to
this effect: ‘Harold Skimpole loves to see the sun shine, loves to
hear the wind blow, loves to watch the changing lights and shadows,
loves to hear the birds, those choristers in Nature’s great
cathedral. And does it seem to me that I am about to deprive Harold
Skimpole of his share in such possessions, which are his only
birthright!’ You thought nothing to that effect?”
“I—certainly—did—NOT,” said Coavinses, whose doggedness in utterly
renouncing the idea was of that intense kind that he could only give
adequate expression to it by putting a long interval between each
word, and accompanying the last with a jerk that might have
dislocated his neck.
“Very odd and very curious, the mental process is, in you men of
business!” said Mr. Skimpole thoughtfully. “Thank you, my friend.
Good night.”
As our absence had been long enough already to seem strange
downstairs, I returned at once and found Ada sitting at work by the
fireside talking to her cousin John. Mr. Skimpole presently appeared,
and Richard shortly after him. I was sufficiently engaged during the
remainder of the evening in taking my first lesson in backgammon from
Mr. Jarndyce, who was very fond of the game and from whom I wished of
course to learn it as quickly as I could in order that I might be of
the very small use of being able to play when he had no better
adversary. But I thought, occasionally, when Mr. Skimpole played some
fragments of his own compositions or when, both at the piano and the
violoncello, and at our table, he preserved with an absence of all
effort his delightful spirits and his easy flow of conversation, that
Richard and I seemed to retain the transferred impression of having
been arrested since dinner and that it was very curious altogether.
It was late before we separated, for when Ada was going at eleven
o’clock, Mr. Skimpole went to the piano and rattled hilariously that
the best of all ways to lengthen our days was to steal a few hours
from night, my dear! It was past twelve before he took his candle and
his radiant face out of the room, and I think he might have kept us
there, if he had seen fit, until daybreak. Ada and Richard were
lingering for a few moments by the fire, wondering whether Mrs.
Jellyby had yet finished her dictation for the day, when Mr.
Jarndyce, who had been out of the room, returned.
“Oh, dear me, what’s this, what’s this!” he said, rubbing his head
and walking about with his good-humoured vexation. “What’s this they
tell me? Rick, my boy, Esther, my dear, what have you been doing? Why
did you do it? How could you do it? How much apiece was it? The
wind’s round again. I feel it all over me!”
We neither of us quite knew what to answer.
“Come, Rick, come! I must settle this before I sleep. How much are
you out of pocket? You two made the money up, you know! Why did you?
How could you? Oh, Lord, yes, it’s due east—must be!”
“Really, sir,” said Richard, “I don’t think it would be honourable in
me to tell you. Mr. Skimpole relied upon us—”
“Lord bless you, my dear boy! He relies upon everybody!” said Mr.
Jarndyce, giving his head a great rub and stopping short.
“Indeed, sir?”
“Everybody! And he’ll be in the same scrape again next week!” said
Mr. Jarndyce, walking again at a great pace, with a candle in his
hand that had gone out. “He’s always in the same scrape. He was born
in the same scrape. I verily believe that the announcement in the
newspapers when his mother was confined was ‘On Tuesday last, at her
residence in Botheration Buildings, Mrs. Skimpole of a son in
difficulties.’”
Richard laughed heartily but added, “Still, sir, I don’t want to
shake his confidence or to break his confidence, and if I submit to
your better knowledge again, that I ought to keep his secret, I hope
you will consider before you press me any more. Of course, if you do
press me, sir, I shall know I am wrong and will tell you.”
“Well!” cried Mr. Jarndyce, stopping again, and making several absent
endeavours to put his candlestick in his pocket. “I—here! Take it
away, my dear. I don’t know what I am about with it; it’s all the
wind—invariably has that effect—I won’t press you, Rick; you may be
right. But really—to get hold of you and Esther—and to squeeze you
like a couple of tender young Saint Michael’s oranges! It’ll blow a
gale in the course of the night!”
He was now alternately putting his hands into his pockets as if he
were going to keep them there a long time, and taking them out again
and vehemently rubbing them all over his head.
I ventured to take this opportunity of hinting that Mr. Skimpole,
being in all such matters quite a child—
“Eh, my dear?” said Mr. Jarndyce, catching at the word.
“Being quite a child, sir,” said I, “and so different from other
people—”
“You are right!” said Mr. Jarndyce, brightening. “Your woman’s wit
hits the mark. He is a child—an absolute child. I told you he was a
child, you know, when I first mentioned him.”
Certainly! Certainly! we said.
“And he IS a child. Now, isn’t he?” asked Mr. Jarndyce, brightening
more and more.
He was indeed, we said.
“When you come to think of it, it’s the height of childishness in
you—I mean me—” said Mr. Jarndyce, “to regard him for a moment as a
man. You can’t make HIM responsible. The idea of Harold Skimpole with
designs or plans, or knowledge of consequences! Ha, ha, ha!”
It was so delicious to see the clouds about his bright face clearing,
and to see him so heartily pleased, and to know, as it was impossible
not to know, that the source of his pleasure was the goodness which
was tortured by condemning, or mistrusting, or secretly accusing any
one, that I saw the tears in Ada’s eyes, while she echoed his laugh,
and felt them in my own.
“Why, what a cod’s head and shoulders I am,” said Mr. Jarndyce, “to
require reminding of it! The whole business shows the child from
beginning to end. Nobody but a child would have thought of singling
YOU two out for parties in the affair! Nobody but a child would have
thought of YOUR having the money! If it had been a thousand pounds,
it would have been just the same!” said Mr. Jarndyce with his whole
face in a glow.
We all confirmed it from our night’s experience.
“To be sure, to be sure!” said Mr. Jarndyce. “However, Rick, Esther,
and you too, Ada, for I don’t know that even your little purse is
safe from his inexperience—I must have a promise all round that
nothing of this sort shall ever be done any more. No advances! Not
even sixpences.”
We all promised faithfully, Richard with a merry glance at me
touching his pocket as if to remind me that there was no danger of
OUR transgressing.
“As to Skimpole,” said Mr. Jarndyce, “a habitable doll’s house with
good board and a few tin people to get into debt with and borrow
money of would set the boy up in life. He is in a child’s sleep by
this time, I suppose; it’s time I should take my craftier head to my
more worldly pillow. Good night, my dears. God bless you!”
He peeped in again, with a smiling face, before we had lighted our
candles, and said, “Oh! I have been looking at the weather-cock. I
find it was a false alarm about the wind. It’s in the south!” And
went away singing to himself.
Ada and I agreed, as we talked together for a little while upstairs,
that this caprice about the wind was a fiction and that he used the
pretence to account for any disappointment he could not conceal,
rather than he would blame the real cause of it or disparage or
depreciate any one. We thought this very characteristic of his
eccentric gentleness and of the difference between him and those
petulant people who make the weather and the winds (particularly that
unlucky wind which he had chosen for such a different purpose) the
stalking-horses of their splenetic and gloomy humours.
Indeed, so much affection for him had been added in this one evening
to my gratitude that I hoped I already began to understand him
through that mingled feeling. Any seeming inconsistencies in Mr.
Skimpole or in Mrs. Jellyby I could not expect to be able to
reconcile, having so little experience or practical knowledge.
Neither did I try, for my thoughts were busy when I was alone, with
Ada and Richard and with the confidence I had seemed to receive
concerning them. My fancy, made a little wild by the wind perhaps,
would not consent to be all unselfish, either, though I would have
persuaded it to be so if I could. It wandered back to my godmother’s
house and came along the intervening track, raising up shadowy
speculations which had sometimes trembled there in the dark as to
what knowledge Mr. Jarndyce had of my earliest history—even as to
the possibility of his being my father, though that idle dream was
quite gone now.
It was all gone now, I remembered, getting up from the fire. It was
not for me to muse over bygones, but to act with a cheerful spirit
and a grateful heart. So I said to myself, “Esther, Esther, Esther!
Duty, my dear!” and gave my little basket of housekeeping keys such a
shake that they sounded like little bells and rang me hopefully to
bed.
CHAPTER VII
The Ghost’s Walk
While Esther sleeps, and while Esther wakes, it is still wet weather
down at the place in Lincolnshire. The rain is ever falling—drip,
drip, drip—by day and night upon the broad flagged terrace-pavement,
the Ghost’s Walk. The weather is so very bad down in Lincolnshire
that the liveliest imagination can scarcely apprehend its ever being
fine again. Not that there is any superabundant life of imagination
on the spot, for Sir Leicester is not here (and, truly, even if he
were, would not do much for it in that particular), but is in Paris
with my Lady; and solitude, with dusky wings, sits brooding upon
Chesney Wold.
There may be some motions of fancy among the lower animals at Chesney
Wold. The horses in the stables—the long stables in a barren,
red-brick court-yard, where there is a great bell in a turret, and a
clock with a large face, which the pigeons who live near it and who
love to perch upon its shoulders seem to be always consulting—THEY
may contemplate some mental pictures of fine weather on occasions,
and may be better artists at them than the grooms. The old roan, so
famous for cross-country work, turning his large eyeball to the
grated window near his rack, may remember the fresh leaves that
glisten there at other times and the scents that stream in, and may
have a fine run with the hounds, while the human helper, clearing out
the next stall, never stirs beyond his pitchfork and birch-broom. The
grey, whose place is opposite the door and who with an impatient
rattle of his halter pricks his ears and turns his head so wistfully
when it is opened, and to whom the opener says, “Woa grey, then,
steady! Noabody wants you to-day!” may know it quite as well as the
man. The whole seemingly monotonous and uncompanionable half-dozen,
stabled together, may pass the long wet hours when the door is shut
in livelier communication than is held in the servants’ hall or at
the Dedlock Arms, or may even beguile the time by improving (perhaps
corrupting) the pony in the loose-box in the corner.
So the mastiff, dozing in his kennel in the court-yard with his large