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 Simmerson, 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 sings 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.'
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?'
'Oh, 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 to-day. 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 armchairs, 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 headstrong, 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
