Bleak House
“Do they look like that sort of thing?” said Ada, coming laughingly
behind me and clasping me merrily round the waist. “Oh, yes, indeed
they do, Dame Durden! They look very, very like that sort of thing.
Oh, very like it indeed, my dear!”
CHAPTER XVIII
Lady Dedlock
It was not so easy as it had appeared at first to arrange for
Richard’s making a trial of Mr. Kenge’s office. Richard himself was
the chief impediment. As soon as he had it in his power to leave Mr.
Badger at any moment, he began to doubt whether he wanted to leave
him at all. He didn’t know, he said, really. It wasn’t a bad
profession; he couldn’t assert that he disliked it; perhaps he liked
it as well as he liked any other—suppose he gave it one more chance!
Upon that, he shut himself up for a few weeks with some books and
some bones and seemed to acquire a considerable fund of information
with great rapidity. His fervour, after lasting about a month, began
to cool, and when it was quite cooled, began to grow warm again. His
vacillations between law and medicine lasted so long that midsummer
arrived before he finally separated from Mr. Badger and entered on an
experimental course of Messrs. Kenge and Carboy. For all his
waywardness, he took great credit to himself as being determined to
be in earnest “this time.” And he was so good-natured throughout, and
in such high spirits, and so fond of Ada, that it was very difficult
indeed to be otherwise than pleased with him.
“As to Mr. Jarndyce,” who, I may mention, found the wind much given,
during this period, to stick in the east; “As to Mr. Jarndyce,”
Richard would say to me, “he is the finest fellow in the world,
Esther! I must be particularly careful, if it were only for his
satisfaction, to take myself well to task and have a regular wind-up
of this business now.”
The idea of his taking himself well to task, with that laughing face
and heedless manner and with a fancy that everything could catch and
nothing could hold, was ludicrously anomalous. However, he told us
between-whiles that he was doing it to such an extent that he
wondered his hair didn’t turn grey. His regular wind-up of the
business was (as I have said) that he went to Mr. Kenge’s about
midsummer to try how he liked it.
All this time he was, in money affairs, what I have described him in
a former illustration—generous, profuse, wildly careless, but fully
persuaded that he was rather calculating and prudent. I happened to
say to Ada, in his presence, half jestingly, half seriously, about
the time of his going to Mr. Kenge’s, that he needed to have
Fortunatus’ purse, he made so light of money, which he answered in
this way, “My jewel of a dear cousin, you hear this old woman! Why
does she say that? Because I gave eight pounds odd (or whatever it
was) for a certain neat waistcoat and buttons a few days ago. Now, if
I had stayed at Badger’s I should have been obliged to spend twelve
pounds at a blow for some heart-breaking lecture-fees. So I make four
pounds—in a lump—by the transaction!”
It was a question much discussed between him and my guardian what
arrangements should be made for his living in London while he
experimented on the law, for we had long since gone back to Bleak
House, and it was too far off to admit of his coming there oftener
than once a week. My guardian told me that if Richard were to settle
down at Mr. Kenge’s he would take some apartments or chambers where
we too could occasionally stay for a few days at a time; “but, little
woman,” he added, rubbing his head very significantly, “he hasn’t
settled down there yet!” The discussions ended in our hiring for him,
by the month, a neat little furnished lodging in a quiet old house
near Queen Square. He immediately began to spend all the money he had
in buying the oddest little ornaments and luxuries for this lodging;
and so often as Ada and I dissuaded him from making any purchase that
he had in contemplation which was particularly unnecessary and
expensive, he took credit for what it would have cost and made out
that to spend anything less on something else was to save the
difference.
While these affairs were in abeyance, our visit to Mr. Boythorn’s was
postponed. At length, Richard having taken possession of his lodging,
there was nothing to prevent our departure. He could have gone with
us at that time of the year very well, but he was in the full novelty
of his new position and was making most energetic attempts to unravel
the mysteries of the fatal suit. Consequently we went without him,
and my darling was delighted to praise him for being so busy.
We made a pleasant journey down into Lincolnshire by the coach and
had an entertaining companion in Mr. Skimpole. His furniture had been
all cleared off, it appeared, by the person who took possession of it
on his blue-eyed daughter’s birthday, but he seemed quite relieved to
think that it was gone. Chairs and table, he said, were wearisome
objects; they were monotonous ideas, they had no variety of
expression, they looked you out of countenance, and you looked them
out of countenance. How pleasant, then, to be bound to no particular
chairs and tables, but to sport like a butterfly among all the
furniture on hire, and to flit from rosewood to mahogany, and from
mahogany to walnut, and from this shape to that, as the humour took
one!
“The oddity of the thing is,” said Mr. Skimpole with a quickened
sense of the ludicrous, “that my chairs and tables were not paid for,
and yet my landlord walks off with them as composedly as possible.
Now, that seems droll! There is something grotesque in it. The chair
and table merchant never engaged to pay my landlord my rent. Why
should my landlord quarrel with HIM? If I have a pimple on my nose
which is disagreeable to my landlord’s peculiar ideas of beauty, my
landlord has no business to scratch my chair and table merchant’s
nose, which has no pimple on it. His reasoning seems defective!”
“Well,” said my guardian good-humouredly, “it’s pretty clear that
whoever became security for those chairs and tables will have to pay
for them.”
“Exactly!” returned Mr. Skimpole. “That’s the crowning point of
unreason in the business! I said to my landlord, ‘My good man, you
are not aware that my excellent friend Jarndyce will have to pay for
those things that you are sweeping off in that indelicate manner.
Have you no consideration for HIS property?’ He hadn’t the least.”
“And refused all proposals,” said my guardian.
“Refused all proposals,” returned Mr. Skimpole. “I made him business
proposals. I had him into my room. I said, ‘You are a man of
business, I believe?’ He replied, ‘I am.’ ‘Very well,’ said I, ‘now
let us be business-like. Here is an inkstand, here are pens and
paper, here are wafers. What do you want? I have occupied your house
for a considerable period, I believe to our mutual satisfaction until
this unpleasant misunderstanding arose; let us be at once friendly
and business-like. What do you want?’ In reply to this, he made use
of the figurative expression—which has something Eastern about
it—that he had never seen the colour of my money. ‘My amiable
friend,’ said I, ‘I never have any money. I never know anything about
money.’ ‘Well, sir,’ said he, ‘what do you offer if I give you time?’
‘My good fellow,’ said I, ‘I have no idea of time; but you say you
are a man of business, and whatever you can suggest to be done in a
business-like way with pen, and ink, and paper—and wafers—I am
ready to do. Don’t pay yourself at another man’s expense (which is
foolish), but be business-like!’ However, he wouldn’t be, and there
was an end of it.”
If these were some of the inconveniences of Mr. Skimpole’s childhood,
it assuredly possessed its advantages too. On the journey he had a
very good appetite for such refreshment as came in our way (including
a basket of choice hothouse peaches), but never thought of paying for
anything. So when the coachman came round for his fee, he pleasantly
asked him what he considered a very good fee indeed, now—a liberal
one—and on his replying half a crown for a single passenger, said it
was little enough too, all things considered, and left Mr. Jarndyce
to give it him.
It was delightful weather. The green corn waved so beautifully, the
larks sang so joyfully, the hedges were so full of wild flowers, the
trees were so thickly out in leaf, the bean-fields, with a light wind
blowing over them, filled the air with such a delicious fragrance!
Late in the afternoon we came to the market-town where we were to
alight from the coach—a dull little town with a church-spire, and a
marketplace, and a market-cross, and one intensely sunny street, and
a pond with an old horse cooling his legs in it, and a very few men
sleepily lying and standing about in narrow little bits of shade.
After the rustling of the leaves and the waving of the corn all along
the road, it looked as still, as hot, as motionless a little town as
England could produce.
At the inn we found Mr. Boythorn on horseback, waiting with an open
carriage to take us to his house, which was a few miles off. He was
overjoyed to see us and dismounted with great alacrity.
“By heaven!” said he after giving us a courteous greeting. “This a
most infamous coach. It is the most flagrant example of an abominable
public vehicle that ever encumbered the face of the earth. It is
twenty-five minutes after its time this afternoon. The coachman ought
to be put to death!”
“IS he after his time?” said Mr. Skimpole, to whom he happened to
address himself. “You know my infirmity.”
“Twenty-five minutes! Twenty-six minutes!” replied Mr. Boythorn,
referring to his watch. “With two ladies in the coach, this scoundrel
has deliberately delayed his arrival six and twenty minutes.
Deliberately! It is impossible that it can be accidental! But his
father—and his uncle—were the most profligate coachmen that ever
sat upon a box.”
While he said this in tones of the greatest indignation, he handed us
into the little phaeton with the utmost gentleness and was all smiles
and pleasure.
“I am sorry, ladies,” he said, standing bare-headed at the
carriage-door when all was ready, “that I am obliged to conduct you
nearly two miles out of the way. But our direct road lies through Sir
Leicester Dedlock’s park, and in that fellow’s property I have sworn
never to set foot of mine, or horse’s foot of mine, pending the
present relations between us, while I breathe the breath of life!”
And here, catching my guardian’s eye, he broke into one of his
tremendous laughs, which seemed to shake even the motionless little
market-town.
“Are the Dedlocks down here, Lawrence?” said my guardian as we drove
along and Mr. Boythorn trotted on the green turf by the roadside.
“Sir Arrogant Numskull is here,” replied Mr. Boythorn. “Ha ha ha! Sir
Arrogant is here, and I am glad to say, has been laid by the heels
here. My Lady,” in naming whom he always made a courtly gesture as if
particularly to exclude her from any part in the quarrel, “is
expected, I believe, daily. I am not in the least surprised that she
postpones her appearance as long as possible. Whatever can have
induced that transcendent woman to marry that effigy and figure-head
of a baronet is one of the most impenetrable mysteries that ever
baffled human inquiry. Ha ha ha ha!”
“I suppose,” said my guardian, laughing, “WE may set foot in the park
while we are here? The prohibition does not extend to us, does it?”
“I can lay no prohibition on my guests,” he said, bending his head to
Ada and me with the smiling politeness which sat so gracefully upon
him, “except in the matter of their departure. I am only sorry that I
cannot have the happiness of being their escort about Chesney Wold,