The Solitary House (139 page)

It matters little now how often I recalled the tones of my mother’s voice, wondered whether I should ever hear it again as I so longed to do, and thought how strange and desolate it was that it should be so new to me. It matters little that I watched for
every public mention of my mother’s name; that I passed and repassed the door of her house in town, loving it, but afraid to look at it; that I once sat in the theatre when my mother was there and saw me, and when we were so wide asunder, before the great company of all degrees, that any link or confidence between us seemed a dream. It is all, all over. My lot has been so blest that I can relate little of myself which is not a story of goodness and generosity in others. I may well pass that little, and go on.

When we were settled at home again, Ada and I had many conversations with my guardian, of which Richard was the theme. My dear girl was deeply grieved that he should do their kind cousin so much wrong; but she was so faithful to Richard, that she could not bear to blame him, even for that. My guardian was assured of it, and never coupled his name with a word of reproof. “Rick is mistaken, my dear,” he would say to her. “Well, well! we have all been mistaken over and over again. We must trust to you and time to set him right.”

We knew afterwards what we suspected then; that he did not trust to time until he had often tried to open Richard’s eyes. That he had written to him, gone to him, talked with him, tried every gentle and persuasive art his kindness could devise. Our poor devoted Richard was deaf and blind to all. If he were wrong, he would make amends when the Chancery suit was over. If he were groping in the dark, he could not do better than do his utmost to clear away those clouds in which so much was confused and obscured. Suspicion and misunderstanding were the fault of the suit? Then let him work the suit out, and come through it to his right mind. This was his unvarying reply. Jarndyce and Jarndyce had obtained such possession of his whole nature, that it was impossible to place any consideration before him which he did not—with a distorted kind of reason—make a new argument in favour of his doing what he did. “So that it is even more mischievous,” said my guardian once to me, “to remonstrate with the poor dear fellow, than to leave him alone.”

I took one of these opportunities of mentioning my doubts of Mr. Skimpole as a good adviser for Richard.

“Adviser!” returned my guardian, laughing. “My dear, who would advise with Skimpole?”

“Encourager would perhaps have been a better word,” said I.

“Encourager!” returned my guardian again. “Who could be encouraged by Skimpole?”

“Not Richard?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “Such an unworldly, uncalculating, gossamer creature, is a relief to him, and an amusement. But as to advising or encouraging, or occupying a serious station towards anybody or anything, it is simply not to be thought of in such a child as Skimpole.”

“Pray, cousin John,” said Ada, who had just joined us, and now looked over my shoulder, “what made him such a child?”

“What made him such a child?” inquired my guardian, rubbing his head, a little at a loss.

“Yes, cousin John.”

“Why,” he slowly replied, roughening his head more and more, “he is all sentiment, and—and susceptibility, and—and sensibility, and—and imagination. And these qualities are not regulated in him, somehow. I suppose the people who admired him for them in his youth, attached too much importance to them, and too little to any training that would have balanced and adjusted them; and so he became what he is. Hey?” said my guardian, stopping short, and looking at us hopefully. “What do you think, you two?”

Ada, glancing at me, said she thought it was a pity he should be an expense to Richard.

“So it is, so it is,” returned my guardian, hurriedly. “That must not be. We must arrange that. I must prevent it. That will never do.”

And I said I thought it was to be regretted that he had ever introduced Richard to Mr. Vholes, for a present of five pounds.

“Did he?” said my guardian, with a passing shade of vexation on his face. “But there you have the man. There you have the man! There is nothing mercenary in that, with him. He has no idea of the value of money. He introduces Rick; and then he is good friends with Mr. Vholes, and borrows five pounds of
him. He means nothing by it, and thinks nothing of it. He told you himself, I’ll be bound, my dear?”

“Oh yes!” said I.

“Exactly!” cried my guardian, quite triumphant. “There you have the man! If he had meant any harm by it, or was conscious of any harm in it, he wouldn’t tell it. He tells it as he does it, in mere simplicity. But you shall see him in his own home, and then you’ll understand him better. We must pay a visit to Harold Skimpole, and caution him on these points. Lord bless you, my dears, an infant, an infant!”

In pursuance of this plan, we went into London on an early day, and presented ourselves at Mr. Skimpole’s door.

He lived in a place called the Polygon, in Somers Town, where there were at that time a number of poor Spanish refugees walking about in cloaks, smoking little paper cigars. Whether he was a better tenant than one might have supposed, in consequence of his friend Somebody always paying his rent at last, or whether his inaptitude for business rendered it particularly difficult to turn him out, I don’t know; but he had occupied the same house some years. It was in a state of dilapidation quite equal to our expectation. Two or three of the area railings were gone; the water-butt was broken; the knocker was loose; the bellhandle had been pulled off a long time, to judge from the rusty state of the wire; and dirty footprints on the steps were the only signs of its being inhabited.

A slatternly full-blown girl, who seemed to be bursting out at the rents in her gown and the cracks in her shoes, like an overripe berry, answered our knock by opening the door a very little way, and stopping up the gap with her figure. As she knew Mr. Jarndyce (indeed Ada and I both thought that she evidently associated him with the receipt of her wages), she immediately relented and allowed us to pass in. The lock of the door being in a disabled condition, she then applied herself to securing it with the chain which was not in good action either, and said would we go upstairs?

We went upstairs to the first floor, still seeing no other furniture than the dirty footprints. Mr. Jarndyce, without further ceremony, entered a room there, and we followed. It was dingy
enough, and not at all clean; but furnished with an odd kind of shabby luxury, with a large footstool, a sofa, and plenty of cushions, an easy-chair, and plenty of pillows, a piano, books, drawing materials, music, newspapers, and a few sketches and pictures. A broken pane of glass in one of the dirty windows was papered and wafered over; but there was a little plate of hothouse nectarines on the table, and there was another of grapes, and another of sponge-cakes, and there was a bottle of light wine. Mr. Skimpole himself reclined upon the sofa, in a dressing-gown, drinking some fragrant coffee from an old china cup—it was then about mid-day—and looking at a collection of wallflowers in the balcony.

He was not in the least disconcerted by our appearance, but rose and received us in his usual airy manner.

“Here I am, you see!” he said, when we were seated: not without some little difficulty, the greater part of the chairs being broken. “Here I am! This is my frugal breakfast. Some men want legs of beef and mutton for breakfast; I don’t. Give me my peach, my cup of coffee, and my claret; I am content. I don’t want them for themselves, but they remind me of the sun. There’s nothing solar about legs of beef and mutton. Mere animal satisfaction!”

“This is our friend’s consulting-room (or would be, if he ever prescribed), his sanctum, his studio,” said my guardian to us.

“Yes,” said Mr. Skimpole, turning his bright face about, “this is the bird’s cage. This is where the bird lives and sings. They pluck his feathers now and then, and clip his wings; but he sings, he sings!”

He handed us the grapes, repeating in his radiant way, “he sings! Not an ambitious note, but still he sings.”

“These are very fine,” said my guardian. “A present?”

“No,” he answered. “No! Some amiable gardener sells them. His man wanted to know, when he brought them last evening, whether he should wait for the money. ‘Really, my friend,’ I said, ‘I think not—if your time is of any value to you.’ I suppose it was, for he went away.”

My guardian looked at us with a smile, as though he asked us, “is it possible to be worldly with this baby?”

“This is a day,” said Mr. Skimpole, gaily taking a little claret in a tumbler, “that will ever be remembered here. We shall call it Saint Clare and Saint Summerson day. You must see my daughters. I have a blue-eyed daughter who is my Beauty daughter, I have a Sentiment daughter, and I have a Comedy daughter. You must see them all. They’ll be enchanted.”

He was going to summon them, when my guardian interposed, and asked him to pause a moment, as he wished to say a word to him first. “My dear Jarndyce,” he cheerfully replied, going back to his sofa, “as many moments as you please. Time is no object here. We never know what o’clock it is, and we never care. Not the way to get on in life, you’ll tell me? Certainly. But we
don’t
get on in life. We don’t pretend to do it.”

My guardian looked at us again, plainly saying, “You hear him?”

“Now, Harold,” he began, “the word I have to say, relates to Rick.”

“The dearest friend I have!” returned Mr. Skimpole, cordially. “I suppose he ought not to be my dearest friend, as he is not on terms with you. But he is, I can’t help it; he is full of youthful poetry, and I love him. If you don’t like it, I can’t help it. I love him.”

The engaging frankness with which he made this declaration, really had a disinterested appearance, and captivated my guardian; if not, for the moment, Ada too.

“You are welcome to love him as much as you like,” returned Mr. Jarndyce, “but we must save his pocket, Harold.”

“Oh!” said Mr. Skimpole. “His pocket? Now you are coming to what I don’t understand.” Taking a little more claret, and dipping one of the cakes in it, he shook his head, and smiled at Ada and me with an ingenious foreboding that he never could be made to understand.

“If you go with him here or there,” said my guardian, plainly, “you must not let him pay for both.”

“My dear Jarndyce,” returned Mr. Skimpole, his genial face irradiated by the comicality of this idea, “what am I to do? If he takes me anywhere, I must go. And how can
I
pay? I never have any money. If I had any money, I don’t know anything about it.
Suppose I say to a man, how much? Suppose the man says to me seven and sixpence! I know nothing about seven and sixpence. It is impossible for me to pursue the subject, with any consideration for the man. I don’t go about asking busy people what seven and sixpence is in Moorish—which I don’t understand. Why should I go about asking them what seven and sixpence is in Money—which I don’t understand?”

“Well,” said my guardian, by no means displeased with this artless reply, “if you come to any kind of journeying with Rick, you must borrow the money of me (never breathing the least allusion to that circumstance), and leave the calculation to him.”

“My dear Jarndyce,” returned Mr. Skimpole, “I will do anything to give you pleasure, but it seems an idle form—a superstition. Besides, I give you my word, Miss Clare and my dear Miss Summerson, I thought Mr. Carstone was immensely rich. I thought he had only to make over something, or to sign a bond, or a draft, or a cheque, or a bill, or to put something on a file somewhere, to bring down a shower of money.”

“Indeed, it is not so, sir,” said Ada. “He is poor.”

“No, really?” returned Mr. Skimpole, with his bright smile. “You surprise me.”

“And not being the richer for trusting in a rotten reed,” said my guardian, laying his hand emphatically on the sleeve of Mr. Skimpole’s dressing-gown, “be you very careful not to encourage him in that reliance, Harold.”

“My dear good friend,” returned Mr. Skimpole, “and my dear Miss Summerson, and my dear Miss Clare, how can I do that? It’s business, and I don’t know business. It is he who encourages me. He emerges from great feats of business, presents the brightest prospects before me as their result, and calls upon me to admire them. I do admire them—as bright prospects. But I know no more about them, and I tell him so.”

The helpless kind of candour with which he presented this before us, the light-hearted manner in which he was amused by his innocence, the fantastic way in which he took himself under his own protection and argued about that curious person, combined with the delightful ease of everything he said exactly to make out my guardian’s case. The more I saw of him, the more
unlikely it seemed to me, when he was present, that he could design, conceal, or influence anything; and yet the less likely that appeared when he was not present, and the less agreeable it was to think of his having anything to do with any one for whom I cared.

Hearing that his examination (as he called it) was now over, Mr. Skimpole left the room with a radiant face to fetch his daughters (his sons had run away at various times), leaving my guardian quite delighted by the manner in which he had vindicated his childish character. He soon came back, bringing with him the three young ladies and Mrs. Skimpole, who had once been a beauty, but was now a delicate high-nosed invalid, suffering under a complication of disorders.

“This,” said Mr. Skimpole, “is my Beauty daughter, Arethusa—plays and signs odds and ends like her father. This is my Sentiment daughter, Laura—plays a little but don’t sing. This is my Comedy daughter, Kitty—sings a little but don’t play. We all draw a little, and compose a little, and none of us have any idea of time or money.”

Mrs. Skimpole sighed, I thought, as if she would have been glad to strike out this item in the family attainments. I also thought that she rather impressed her sigh upon my guardian, and that she took every opportunity of throwing in another.

“It is pleasant,” said Mr. Skimpole, turning his sprightly eyes from one to the other of us, “and it is whimsically interesting, to trace peculiarities in families. In this family we are all children, and I am the youngest.”