Bleak House
and there, and everywhere, from the moment of her coming into the
church. By degrees, though very slowly, I at last overcame my strange
emotion. After a long time, I looked towards Lady Dedlock again. It
was 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!”
“Miss Summerson really is my ward,” said Mr. Jarndyce. “I am
responsible to no Lord Chancellor in her case.”
“Has Miss Summerson lost both her parents?” said my Lady.
“Yes.”
“She is very fortunate in her guardian.”
Lady Dedlock looked at me, and I looked at her and said I was indeed.
All at once she turned from me with a hasty air, almost expressive of
displeasure or dislike, and spoke to him over her shoulder again.
“Ages have passed since we were in the habit of meeting, Mr.
Jarndyce.”
“A long time. At least I thought it was a long time, until I saw you
last Sunday,” he returned.
“What! Even you are a courtier, or think it necessary to become one
to me!” she said with some disdain. “I have achieved that reputation,
I suppose.”