Bleak House
passage to his best parlour, a neat carpeted room with more plants in
it than were quite convenient, a coloured print of Queen Caroline,
several shells, a good many tea-trays, two stuffed and dried fish in
glass cases, and either a curious egg or a curious pumpkin (but I
don’t know which, and I doubt if many people did) hanging from his
ceiling. I knew Mr. Grubble very well by sight, from his often
standing at his door. A pleasant-looking, stoutish, middle-aged man
who never seemed to consider himself cozily dressed for his own
fire-side without his hat and top-boots, but who never wore a coat
except at church.
He snuffed the candle, and backing away a little to see how it
looked, backed out of the room—unexpectedly to me, for I was going
to ask him by whom he had been sent. The door of the opposite parlour
being then opened, I heard some voices, familiar in my ears I
thought, which stopped. A quick light step approached the room in
which I was, and who should stand before me but Richard!
“My dear Esther!” he said. “My best friend!” And he really was so
warm-hearted and earnest that in the first surprise and pleasure of
his brotherly greeting I could scarcely find breath to tell him that
Ada was well.
“Answering my very thoughts—always the same dear girl!” said
Richard, leading me to a chair and seating himself beside me.
I put my veil up, but not quite.
“Always the same dear girl!” said Richard just as heartily as before.
I put up my veil altogether, and laying my hand on Richard’s sleeve
and looking in his face, told him how much I thanked him for his kind
welcome and how greatly I rejoiced to see him, the more so because of
the determination I had made in my illness, which I now conveyed to
him.
“My love,” said Richard, “there is no one with whom I have a greater
wish to talk than you, for I want you to understand me.”
“And I want you, Richard,” said I, shaking my head, “to understand
some one else.”
“Since you refer so immediately to John Jarndyce,” said Richard, “—I
suppose you mean him?”
“Of course I do.”
“Then I may say at once that I am glad of it, because it is on that
subject that I am anxious to be understood. By you, mind—you, my
dear! I am not accountable to Mr. Jarndyce or Mr. Anybody.”
I was pained to find him taking this tone, and he observed it.
“Well, well, my dear,” said Richard, “we won’t go into that now. I
want to appear quietly in your country-house here, with you under my
arm, and give my charming cousin a surprise. I suppose your loyalty
to John Jarndyce will allow that?”
“My dear Richard,” I returned, “you know you would be heartily
welcome at his house—your home, if you will but consider it so; and
you are as heartily welcome here!”
“Spoken like the best of little women!” cried Richard gaily.
I asked him how he liked his profession.
“Oh, I like it well enough!” said Richard. “It’s all right. It does
as well as anything else, for a time. I don’t know that I shall care
about it when I come to be settled, but I can sell out then
and—however, never mind all that botheration at present.”
So young and handsome, and in all respects so perfectly the opposite
of Miss Flite! And yet, in the clouded, eager, seeking look that
passed over him, so dreadfully like her!
“I am in town on leave just now,” said Richard.
“Indeed?”
“Yes. I have run over to look after my—my Chancery interests before
the long vacation,” said Richard, forcing a careless laugh. “We are
beginning to spin along with that old suit at last, I promise you.”
No wonder that I shook my head!
“As you say, it’s not a pleasant subject.” Richard spoke with the
same shade crossing his face as before. “Let it go to the four winds
for to-night. Puff! Gone! Who do you suppose is with me?”
“Was it Mr. Skimpole’s voice I heard?”
“That’s the man! He does me more good than anybody. What a
fascinating child it is!”
I asked Richard if any one knew of their coming down together. He
answered, no, nobody. He had been to call upon the dear old
infant—so he called Mr. Skimpole—and the dear old infant had told
him where we were, and he had told the dear old infant he was bent on
coming to see us, and the dear old infant had directly wanted to come
too; and so he had brought him. “And he is worth—not to say his
sordid expenses—but thrice his weight in gold,” said Richard. “He is
such a cheery fellow. No worldliness about him. Fresh and
green-hearted!”
I certainly did not see the proof of Mr. Skimpole’s worldliness in
his having his expenses paid by Richard, but I made no remark about
that. Indeed, he came in and turned our conversation. He was charmed
to see me, said he had been shedding delicious tears of joy and
sympathy at intervals for six weeks on my account, had never been so
happy as in hearing of my progress, began to understand the mixture
of good and evil in the world now, felt that he appreciated health
the more when somebody else was ill, didn’t know but what it might be
in the scheme of things that A should squint to make B happier in
looking straight or that C should carry a wooden leg to make D better
satisfied with his flesh and blood in a silk stocking.
“My dear Miss Summerson, here is our friend Richard,” said Mr.
Skimpole, “full of the brightest visions of the future, which he
evokes out of the darkness of Chancery. Now that’s delightful, that’s
inspiriting, that’s full of poetry! In old times the woods and
solitudes were made joyous to the shepherd by the imaginary piping
and dancing of Pan and the nymphs. This present shepherd, our
pastoral Richard, brightens the dull Inns of Court by making Fortune
and her train sport through them to the melodious notes of a judgment
from the bench. That’s very pleasant, you know! Some ill-conditioned
growling fellow may say to me, ‘What’s the use of these legal and
equitable abuses? How do you defend them?’ I reply, ‘My growling
friend, I DON’T defend them, but they are very agreeable to me. There
is a shepherd—youth, a friend of mine, who transmutes them into
something highly fascinating to my simplicity. I don’t say it is for
this that they exist—for I am a child among you worldly grumblers,
and not called upon to account to you or myself for anything—but it
may be so.’”
I began seriously to think that Richard could scarcely have found a
worse friend than this. It made me uneasy that at such a time when he
most required some right principle and purpose he should have this
captivating looseness and putting-off of everything, this airy
dispensing with all principle and purpose, at his elbow. I thought I
could understand how such a nature as my guardian’s, experienced in
the world and forced to contemplate the miserable evasions and
contentions of the family misfortune, found an immense relief in Mr.
Skimpole’s avowal of his weaknesses and display of guileless candour;
but I could not satisfy myself that it was as artless as it seemed or
that it did not serve Mr. Skimpole’s idle turn quite as well as any
other part, and with less trouble.
They both walked back with me, and Mr. Skimpole leaving us at the
gate, I walked softly in with Richard and said, “Ada, my love, I have
brought a gentleman to visit you.” It was not difficult to read the
blushing, startled face. She loved him dearly, and he knew it, and I
knew it. It was a very transparent business, that meeting as cousins
only.
I almost mistrusted myself as growing quite wicked in my suspicions,
but I was not so sure that Richard loved her dearly. He admired her
very much—any one must have done that—and I dare say would have
renewed their youthful engagement with great pride and ardour but
that he knew how she would respect her promise to my guardian. Still
I had a tormenting idea that the influence upon him extended even
here, that he was postponing his best truth and earnestness in this
as in all things until Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be off his mind.
Ah me! What Richard would have been without that blight, I never
shall know now!
He told Ada, in his most ingenuous way, that he had not come to make
any secret inroad on the terms she had accepted (rather too
implicitly and confidingly, he thought) from Mr. Jarndyce, that he
had come openly to see her and to see me and to justify himself for
the present terms on which he stood with Mr. Jarndyce. As the dear
old infant would be with us directly, he begged that I would make an
appointment for the morning, when he might set himself right through
the means of an unreserved conversation with me. I proposed to walk
with him in the park at seven o’clock, and this was arranged. Mr.
Skimpole soon afterwards appeared and made us merry for an hour. He
particularly requested to see little Coavinses (meaning Charley) and
told her, with a patriarchal air, that he had given her late father
all the business in his power and that if one of her little brothers
would make haste to get set up in the same profession, he hoped he
should still be able to put a good deal of employment in his way.
“For I am constantly being taken in these nets,” said Mr. Skimpole,
looking beamingly at us over a glass of wine-and-water, “and am
constantly being bailed out—like a boat. Or paid off—like a ship’s
company. Somebody always does it for me. I can’t do it, you know, for
I never have any money. But somebody does it. I get out by somebody’s
means; I am not like the starling; I get out. If you were to ask me
who somebody is, upon my word I couldn’t tell you. Let us drink to
somebody. God bless him!”
Richard was a little late in the morning, but I had not to wait for
him long, and we turned into the park. The air was bright and dewy
and the sky without a cloud. The birds sang delightfully; the
sparkles in the fern, the grass, and trees, were exquisite to see;
the richness of the woods seemed to have increased twenty-fold since
yesterday, as if, in the still night when they had looked so
massively hushed in sleep, Nature, through all the minute details of
every wonderful leaf, had been more wakeful than usual for the glory
of that day.
“This is a lovely place,” said Richard, looking round. “None of the
jar and discord of law-suits here!”
But there was other trouble.
“I tell you what, my dear girl,” said Richard, “when I get affairs in
general settled, I shall come down here, I think, and rest.”
“Would it not be better to rest now?” I asked.
“Oh, as to resting NOW,” said Richard, “or as to doing anything very
definite NOW, that’s not easy. In short, it can’t be done; I can’t do
it at least.”
“Why not?” said I.
“You know why not, Esther. If you were living in an unfinished house,
liable to have the roof put on or taken off—to be from top to bottom
pulled down or built up—to-morrow, next day, next week, next month,
next year—you would find it hard to rest or settle. So do I. Now?
There’s no now for us suitors.”
I could almost have believed in the attraction on which my poor
little wandering friend had expatiated when I saw again the darkened
look of last night. Terrible to think it had in it also a shade of
that unfortunate man who had died.
“My dear Richard,” said I, “this is a bad beginning of our
conversation.”
“I knew you would tell me so, Dame Durden.”
“And not I alone, dear Richard. It was not I who cautioned you once
never to found a hope or expectation on the family curse.”
“There you come back to John Jarndyce!” said Richard impatiently.
“Well! We must approach him sooner or later, for he is the staple of
what I have to say, and it’s as well at once. My dear Esther, how can
you be so blind? Don’t you see that he is an interested party and
that it may be very well for him to wish me to know nothing of the
suit, and care nothing about it, but that it may not be quite so well
for me?”