Bleak House
us. “Well, I dare say it may be; but I AM a child, and I never
pretend to be anything else. If you put him out in the road, you only
put him where he was before. He will be no worse off than he was, you
know. Even make him better off, if you like. Give him sixpence, or
five shillings, or five pound ten—you are arithmeticians, and I am
not—and get rid of him!”
“And what is he to do then?” asked my guardian.
“Upon my life,” said Mr. Skimpole, shrugging his shoulders with his
engaging smile, “I have not the least idea what he is to do then. But
I have no doubt he’ll do it.”
“Now, is it not a horrible reflection,” said my guardian, to whom I
had hastily explained the unavailing efforts of the two women, “is it
not a horrible reflection,” walking up and down and rumpling his
hair, “that if this wretched creature were a convicted prisoner, his
hospital would be wide open to him, and he would be as well taken
care of as any sick boy in the kingdom?”
“My dear Jarndyce,” returned Mr. Skimpole, “you’ll pardon the
simplicity of the question, coming as it does from a creature who is
perfectly simple in worldly matters, but why ISN’T he a prisoner
then?”
My guardian stopped and looked at him with a whimsical mixture of
amusement and indignation in his face.
“Our young friend is not to be suspected of any delicacy, I should
imagine,” said Mr. Skimpole, unabashed and candid. “It seems to me
that it would be wiser, as well as in a certain kind of way more
respectable, if he showed some misdirected energy that got him into
prison. There would be more of an adventurous spirit in it, and
consequently more of a certain sort of poetry.”
“I believe,” returned my guardian, resuming his uneasy walk, “that
there is not such another child on earth as yourself.”
“Do you really?” said Mr. Skimpole. “I dare say! But I confess I
don’t see why our young friend, in his degree, should not seek to
invest himself with such poetry as is open to him. He is no doubt
born with an appetite—probably, when he is in a safer state of
health, he has an excellent appetite. Very well. At our young
friend’s natural dinner hour, most likely about noon, our young
friend says in effect to society, ‘I am hungry; will you have the
goodness to produce your spoon and feed me?’ Society, which has taken
upon itself the general arrangement of the whole system of spoons and
professes to have a spoon for our young friend, does NOT produce that
spoon; and our young friend, therefore, says ‘You really must excuse
me if I seize it.’ Now, this appears to me a case of misdirected
energy, which has a certain amount of reason in it and a certain
amount of romance; and I don’t know but what I should be more
interested in our young friend, as an illustration of such a case,
than merely as a poor vagabond—which any one can be.”
“In the meantime,” I ventured to observe, “he is getting worse.”
“In the meantime,” said Mr. Skimpole cheerfully, “as Miss Summerson,
with her practical good sense, observes, he is getting worse.
Therefore I recommend your turning him out before he gets still
worse.”
The amiable face with which he said it, I think I shall never forget.
“Of course, little woman,” observed my guardian, turning to me, “I
can ensure his admission into the proper place by merely going there
to enforce it, though it’s a bad state of things when, in his
condition, that is necessary. But it’s growing late, and is a very
bad night, and the boy is worn out already. There is a bed in the
wholesome loft-room by the stable; we had better keep him there till
morning, when he can be wrapped up and removed. We’ll do that.”
“Oh!” said Mr. Skimpole, with his hands upon the keys of the piano as
we moved away. “Are you going back to our young friend?”
“Yes,” said my guardian.
“How I envy you your constitution, Jarndyce!” returned Mr. Skimpole
with playful admiration. “You don’t mind these things; neither does
Miss Summerson. You are ready at all times to go anywhere, and do
anything. Such is will! I have no will at all—and no won’t—simply
can’t.”
“You can’t recommend anything for the boy, I suppose?” said my
guardian, looking back over his shoulder half angrily; only half
angrily, for he never seemed to consider Mr. Skimpole an accountable
being.
“My dear Jarndyce, I observed a bottle of cooling medicine in his
pocket, and it’s impossible for him to do better than take it. You
can tell them to sprinkle a little vinegar about the place where he
sleeps and to keep it moderately cool and him moderately warm. But it
is mere impertinence in me to offer any recommendation. Miss
Summerson has such a knowledge of detail and such a capacity for the
administration of detail that she knows all about it.”
We went back into the hall and explained to Jo what we proposed to
do, which Charley explained to him again and which he received with
the languid unconcern I had already noticed, wearily looking on at
what was done as if it were for somebody else. The servants
compassionating his miserable state and being very anxious to help,
we soon got the loft-room ready; and some of the men about the house
carried him across the wet yard, well wrapped up. It was pleasant to
observe how kind they were to him and how there appeared to be a
general impression among them that frequently calling him “Old Chap”
was likely to revive his spirits. Charley directed the operations and
went to and fro between the loft-room and the house with such little
stimulants and comforts as we thought it safe to give him. My
guardian himself saw him before he was left for the night and
reported to me when he returned to the growlery to write a letter on
the boy’s behalf, which a messenger was charged to deliver at
day-light in the morning, that he seemed easier and inclined to
sleep. They had fastened his door on the outside, he said, in case of
his being delirious, but had so arranged that he could not make any
noise without being heard.
Ada being in our room with a cold, Mr. Skimpole was left alone all
this time and entertained himself by playing snatches of pathetic
airs and sometimes singing to them (as we heard at a distance) with
great expression and feeling. When we rejoined him in the
drawing-room he said he would give us a little ballad which had come
into his head “apropos of our young friend,” and he sang one about a
peasant boy,
“Thrown on the wide world, doomed to wander and roam,
Bereft of his parents, bereft of a home.”
quite exquisitely. It was a song that always made him cry, he told
us.
He was extremely gay all the rest of the evening, for he absolutely
chirped—those were his delighted words—when he thought by what a
happy talent for business he was surrounded. He gave us, in his glass
of negus, “Better health to our young friend!” and supposed and gaily
pursued the case of his being reserved like Whittington to become
Lord Mayor of London. In that event, no doubt, he would establish the
Jarndyce Institution and the Summerson Almshouses, and a little
annual Corporation Pilgrimage to St. Albans. He had no doubt, he
said, that our young friend was an excellent boy in his way, but his
way was not the Harold Skimpole way; what Harold Skimpole was, Harold
Skimpole had found himself, to his considerable surprise, when he
first made his own acquaintance; he had accepted himself with all his
failings and had thought it sound philosophy to make the best of the
bargain; and he hoped we would do the same.
Charley’s last report was that the boy was quiet. I could see, from
my window, the lantern they had left him burning quietly; and I went
to bed very happy to think that he was sheltered.
There was more movement and more talking than usual a little before
daybreak, and it awoke me. As I was dressing, I looked out of my
window and asked one of our men who had been among the active
sympathizers last night whether there was anything wrong about the
house. The lantern was still burning in the loft-window.
“It’s the boy, miss,” said he.
“Is he worse?” I inquired.
“Gone, miss.”
“Dead!”
“Dead, miss? No. Gone clean off.”
At what time of the night he had gone, or how, or why, it seemed
hopeless ever to divine. The door remaining as it had been left, and
the lantern standing in the window, it could only be supposed that he
had got out by a trap in the floor which communicated with an empty
cart-house below. But he had shut it down again, if that were so; and
it looked as if it had not been raised. Nothing of any kind was
missing. On this fact being clearly ascertained, we all yielded to
the painful belief that delirium had come upon him in the night and
that, allured by some imaginary object or pursued by some imaginary
horror, he had strayed away in that worse than helpless state; all of
us, that is to say, but Mr. Skimpole, who repeatedly suggested, in
his usual easy light style, that it had occurred to our young friend
that he was not a safe inmate, having a bad kind of fever upon him,
and that he had with great natural politeness taken himself off.
Every possible inquiry was made, and every place was searched. The
brick-kilns were examined, the cottages were visited, the two women
were particularly questioned, but they knew nothing of him, and
nobody could doubt that their wonder was genuine. The weather had for
some time been too wet and the night itself had been too wet to admit
of any tracing by footsteps. Hedge and ditch, and wall, and rick and
stack, were examined by our men for a long distance round, lest the
boy should be lying in such a place insensible or dead; but nothing
was seen to indicate that he had ever been near. From the time when
he was left in the loft-room, he vanished.
The search continued for five days. I do not mean that it ceased even
then, but that my attention was then diverted into a current very
memorable to me.
As Charley was at her writing again in my room in the evening, and as
I sat opposite to her at work, I felt the table tremble. Looking up,
I saw my little maid shivering from head to foot.
“Charley,” said I, “are you so cold?”
“I think I am, miss,” she replied. “I don’t know what it is. I can’t
hold myself still. I felt so yesterday at about this same time, miss.
Don’t be uneasy, I think I’m ill.”
I heard Ada’s voice outside, and I hurried to the door of
communication between my room and our pretty sitting-room, and locked
it. Just in time, for she tapped at it while my hand was yet upon the
key.
Ada called to me to let her in, but I said, “Not now, my dearest. Go
away. There’s nothing the matter; I will come to you presently.” Ah!
It was a long, long time before my darling girl and I were companions
again.
Charley fell ill. In twelve hours she was very ill. I moved her to my
room, and laid her in my bed, and sat down quietly to nurse her. I
told my guardian all about it, and why I felt it was necessary that I
should seclude myself, and my reason for not seeing my darling above
all. At first she came very often to the door, and called to me, and
even reproached me with sobs and tears; but I wrote her a long letter
saying that she made me anxious and unhappy and imploring her, as she
loved me and wished my mind to be at peace, to come no nearer than
the garden. After that she came beneath the window even oftener than
she had come to the door, and if I had learnt to love her dear sweet
voice before when we were hardly ever apart, how did I learn to love
it then, when I stood behind the window-curtain listening and
replying, but not so much as looking out! How did I learn to love it
afterwards, when the harder time came!
They put a bed for me in our sitting-room; and by keeping the door
wide open, I turned the two rooms into one, now that Ada had vacated