The Solitary House (140 page)

The daughters, who appeared to be very fond of him, were amused by this droll fact; particularly the Comedy daughter.

“My dears, it is true,” said Mr. Skimpole, “is it not? So it is, and so it must be, because like the dogs in the hymn, ‘it is our nature to.’ Now, here is Miss Summerson with a fine administrative capacity, and a knowledge of details perfectly surprising. It will sound very strange in Miss Summerson’s ears, I dare say, that we know nothing about chops in this house. But we don’t; not the least. We can’t cook anything whatever. A needle and thread we don’t know how to use. We admire the people who possess the practical wisdom we want; but we don’t quarrel
with them. Then why should they quarrel with us? Live and let live, we say to them. Live upon your practical wisdom, and let us live upon you!”

He laughed, but, as usual, seemed quite candid, and really to mean what he said.

“We have sympathy, my roses,” said Mr. Skimpole, “sympathy for everything. Have we not?”

“O yes, papa!” cried the three daughters.

“In fact, that is our family department,” said Mr. Skimpole, “in this hurly-burly of life. We are capable of looking on and of being interested, and we
do
look on, and we
are
interested. What more can we do? Here is my Beauty daughter, married these three years. Now, I dare say her marrying another child, and having two more, was all wrong in point of political economy; but it was very agreeable. We had our little festivities on those occasions, and exchanged social ideas. She brought her young husband home one day, and they and their young fledglings have their nest upstairs. I dare say, at some time or other, Sentiment and Comedy will bring
their
husbands home, and have
their
nests upstairs too. So we get on, we don’t know how, but somehow.”

She looked very young, indeed, to be the mother of two children; and I could not help pitying both her and them. It was evident that the three daughters had grown up as they could, and had had just as little haphazard instruction as qualified them to be their father’s playthings in his idlest hours. His pictorial tastes were consulted, I observed, in their respective styles of wearing their hair; the Beauty daughter being in the classic manner; the Sentiment daughter luxuriant and flowing; and the Comedy daughter in the arch style, with a good deal of sprightly forehead, and vivacious little curls dotted about the corners of her eyes. They were dressed to correspond, though in a most untidy and negligent way.

Ada and I conversed with these young ladies, and found them wonderfully like their father. In the meanwhile Mr. Jarndyce (who had been rubbing his head to a great extent, and hinted at a change in the wind) talked with Mrs. Skimpole in a corner, where we could not help hearing the chink of money.
Mr. Skimpole had previously volunteered to go home with us, and had withdrawn to dress himself for the purpose.

“My roses,” he said, when he came back, “take care of mama. She is poorly today. By going home with Mr. Jarndyce for a day or two, I shall hear the larks sing, and preserve my amiability. It has been tried, you know, and would be tried again if I remained at home.”

“That bad man!” said the Comedy daughter.

“At the very time when he knew papa was lying ill by his wallflowers, looking at the blue sky,” Laura complained.

“And when the smell of hay was in the air!” said Arethusa.

“It showed a want of poetry in the man,” Mr. Skimpole assented; but with perfect good-humour. “It was coarse. There was an absence of the finer touches of humanity in it! My daughters have taken great offence,” he explained to us, “at an honest man—”

“Not honest, papa. Impossible!” they all three protested.

“At a rough kind of fellow—a sort of human hedgehog rolled up,” said Mr. Skimpole, “who is a baker in this neighbourhood, and from whom we borrowed a couple of arm-chairs. We wanted a couple of arm-chairs, and we hadn’t got them, and therefore of course we looked to a man who
had
got them, to lend them. Well! this morose person lent them, and we wore them out. When they were worn out, he wanted them back. He had them back. He was contented, you will say. Not at all. He objected to their being worn. I reasoned with him, and pointed out his mistake, I said, ‘Can you, at your time of life, be so head-strong, my friend, as to persist that an arm-chair is a thing to put upon a shelf and look at? That it is an object to contemplate, to survey from a distance, to consider from a point of sight? Don’t you
know
that these arm-chairs were borrowed to be sat upon?’ He was unreasonable and unpersuadable, and used intemperate language. Being as patient as I am at this minute, I addressed another appeal to him. I said, ‘Now, my good man, however our business capacities may vary, we are all children of one great mother, Nature. On this blooming summer morning here you see me’ (I was on the sofa) ‘with flowers before me, fruit upon the table, the cloudless sky above me, the air full of fragrance, contemplating
Nature. I entreat you, by our common brotherhood, not to interpose between me and a subject so sublime, the absurd figure of an angry baker!’ But he did,” said Mr. Skimpole, raising his laughing eyes in playful astonishment; “he did interpose that ridiculous figure, and he does, and he will again. And therefore I am very glad to get out of his way, and to go home with my friend Jarndyce.”

It seemed to escape his consideration that Mrs. Skimpole and the daughters remained behind to encounter the baker; but this was so old a story to all of them that it had become a matter of course. He took leave of his family with a tenderness as airy and graceful as any other aspect in which he showed himself, and rode away with us in perfect harmony of mind. We had an opportunity of seeing through some open doors, as we went downstairs, that his own apartment was a palace to the rest of the house.

I could have no anticipation, and I had none, that something very startling to me at the moment, and ever memorable to me in what ensued from it, was to happen before this day was out. Our guest was in such spirits on the way home, that I could do nothing but listen to him and wonder at him; nor was I alone in this, for Ada yielded to the same fascination. As to my guardian, the wind, which had threatened to become fixed in the east when we left Somers Town, veered completely round before we were a couple of miles from it.

Whether of questionable childishness or not, in any other matters, Mr. Skimpole had a child’s enjoyment of change and bright weather. In no way wearied by his sallies on the road, he was in the drawing-room before any of us; and I heard him at the piano while I was yet looking after my housekeeping, singing refrains of barcaroles and drinking songs, Italian and German, by the score.

We were all assembled shortly before dinner, and he was still at the piano idly picking out in his luxurious way little strains of music, and talking between whiles of finishing some sketches of the ruined old Verulam wall, tomorrow, which he had begun a year or two ago and had got tired of; when a card was brought in, and my guardian read aloud in a surprised voice:

“Sir Leicester Dedlock!”

The visitor was in the room while it was yet turning round with me, and before I had the power to stir. If I had had it, I should have hurried away. I had not even the presence of mind, in my giddiness, to retire to Ada in the window, or to see the window, or to know where it was. I heard my name, and found that my guardian was presenting me, before I could move to a chair.

“Pray be seated, Sir Leicester.”

“Mr. Jarndyce,” said Sir Leicester in reply, as he bowed and seated himself, “I do myself the honour of calling here—”

“You do
me
the honour, Sir Leicester.”

“Thank you—of calling here on my road from Lincolnshire, to express my regret that any cause of complaint, however strong, that I may have against a gentleman who—who is known to you and has been your host, and to whom therefore I will make no farther reference, should have prevented you, still more ladies under your escort and charge, from seeing whatever little there may be to gratify a polite and refined taste, at my house, Chesney Wold.”

“You are exceedingly obliging, Sir Leicester, and on behalf of those ladies (who are present) and for myself, I thank you very much.”

“It is possible, Mr. Jarndyce, that the gentleman to whom, for the reasons I have mentioned, I refrain from making further allusion—it is possible, Mr. Jarndyce, that that gentleman may have done me the honour so far to misapprehend my character, as to induce you to believe that you would not have been received by my local establishment in Lincolnshire with that urbanity, that courtesy, which its members are instructed to show to all ladies and gentlemen who present themselves at that house. I merely beg to observe, sir, that the fact is the reverse.”

My guardian delicately dismissed this remark without making any verbal answer.

“It has given me pain, Mr. Jarndyce,” Sir Leicester weightily proceeded. “I assure you, sir, it has given—Me—pain—to learn from the housekeeper at Chesney Wold, that a gentleman who was in your company in that part of the county, and who
would appear to possess a cultivated taste for the Fine Arts, was likewise deterred, by some such cause, from examining the family pictures with that leisure, that attention, that care, which he might have desired to bestow upon them, and which some of them might possibly have repaid.” Here he produced a card, and read, with much gravity and a little trouble, through his eye-glass, “Mr. Hirrold—Herald—Harold—Skampling—Skumpling—I beg your pardon—Skimpole.”

“This is Mr. Harold Skimpole,” said my guardian, evidently surprised.

“Oh!” exclaimed Sir Leicester, “I am happy to meet Mr. Skimpole, and to have the opportunity of tendering my personal regrets. I hope, sir, that when you again find yourself in my part of the county, you will be under no similar sense of restraint.”

“You are very obliging, Sir Leicester Dedlock. So encouraged, I shall certainly give myself the pleasure and advantage of another visit to your beautiful house. The owners of such places as Chesney Wold,” said Mr. Skimpole, with his usual happy and easy air, “are public benefactors. They are good enough to maintain a number of delightful objects for the admiration and pleasure of us poor men; and not to reap all the admiration and pleasure that they yield, is to be ungrateful to our benefactors.”

Sir Leicester seemed to approve of this sentiment highly. “An artist, sir?”

“No,” returned Mr. Skimpole. “A perfectly idle man. A mere amateur.”

Sir Leicester seemed to approve of this even more. He hoped he might have the good fortune to be at Chesney Wold when Mr. Skimpole next came down into Lincolnshire. Mr. Skimpole professed himself much flattered and honoured.

“Mr. Skimpole mentioned,” pursued Sir Leicester, addressing himself again to my guardian; “mentioned to the housekeeper, who, as he may have observed, is an old and attached retainer of the family—”

(“That is, when I walked through the house the other day, on the occasion of my going down to visit Miss Summerson and Miss Clare,” Mr. Skimpole airily explained to us.)

“That the friend with whom he had formerly been staying
there, was Mr. Jarndyce.” Sir Leicester bowed to the bearer of that name. “And hence I became aware of the circumstance for which I have professed my regret. That this should have occurred to any gentleman, Mr. Jarndyce, but especially a gentleman formerly known to Lady Dedlock, and indeed claiming some distant connexion with her, and for whom (as I learn from my Lady herself) she entertains a high respect, does, I assure you, give—Me—pain.”

“Pray say no more about it, Sir Leicester,” returned my guardian. “I am very sensible, as I am sure we all are, of your consideration. Indeed the mistake was mine, and I ought to apologize for it.”

I had not once looked up. I had not seen the visitor, and had not even appeared to myself to hear the conversation. It suprises me to find that I can recall it, for it seemed to make no impression on me as it passed. I heard them speaking, but my mind was so confused, and my instinctive avoidance of this gentleman made his presence so distressing to me, that I thought I understood nothing, through the rushing in my head and the beating of my heart.

“I mentioned the subject to Lady Dedlock,” said Sir Leicester, rising, “and my Lady informed me that she had had the pleasure of exchanging a few words with Mr. Jarndyce and his wards, on the occasion of an accidental meeting during their sojourn in the vicinity. Permit me, Mr. Jarndyce, to repeat to yourself, and to these ladies, the assurance I have already tendered to Mr. Skimpole. Circumstances undoubtedly prevent my saying that it would afford me any gratification to hear that Mr. Boythorn had favoured my house with his presence; but those circumstances are confined to that gentleman himself, and do not extend beyond him.”

“You know my old opinion of him,” said Mr. Skimpole, lightly appealing to us. “An amiable bull, who is determined to make every colour scarlet!”

Sir Leicester Dedlock coughed, as if he could not possibly hear another word in reference to such an individual; and took his leave with great ceremony and politeness. I got to my own room with all possible speed, and remained there until I had recovered
my self-command. I had been very much disturbed; but I was thankful to find, when I went downstairs again, that they only rallied me for having been shy and mute before the great Lincolnshire baronet.

By that time I had made up my mind that the period was come when I must tell my guardian what I knew. The possibility of my being brought into contact with my mother, of my being taken to her house—even of Mr. Skimpole’s, however distantly associated with me, receiving kindnesses and obligations from her husband—was so painful, that I felt I could no longer guide myself without his assistance.

When we had retired for the night, and Ada and I had had our usual talk in our pretty room, I went out at my door again, and sought my guardian among his books. I knew he always read at that hour; and as I drew near, I saw the light shining out into the passage from his reading-lamp.