When I was shut out with her in the hall, she said, holding up her hands, “Oh, if you please, miss, Mr. Carstone says would you come upstairs to Mr. Skimpole’s room. He has been took, miss!”
“Took?” said I.
“Took, miss. Sudden,” said the maid.
I was apprehensive that his illness might be of a dangerous kind, but of course I begged her to be quiet and not disturb anyone and collected myself, as I followed her quickly upstairs, sufficiently to consider what were the best remedies to be applied if it should prove to be a fit. She threw open a door and I went into a chamber, where, to my unspeakable surprise, instead of finding Mr. Skimpole stretched upon the bed or prostrate on the floor, I found him standing before the fire smiling at Richard, while Richard, with a face of great embarrassment, looked at a person on the sofa, in a white greatcoat, with smooth hair upon his head and not much of it, which he was wiping smoother and making less of with a pocket-handkerchief.
“Miss Summerson,” said Richard hurriedly, “I am glad you are come. You will be able to advise us. Our friend Mr. Skimpole—don’t be alarmed!—is arrested for debt.”
“And really, my dear Miss Summerson,” said Mr. Skimpole with his agreeable candour, “I never was in a situation in which that excellent sense and quiet habit of method and usefulness, which anybody must observe in you who has the happiness of being a quarter of an hour in your society, was more needed.”
The person on the sofa, who appeared to have a cold in his head, gave such a very loud snort that he startled me.
“Are you arrested for much, sir?” I inquired of Mr. Skimpole.
“My dear Miss Summerson,” said he, shaking his head pleasantly, “I don’t know. Some pounds, odd shillings, and halfpence, I think, were mentioned.”
“It’s twenty-four pound, sixteen, and sevenpence ha’penny,” observed the stranger. “That’s wot it is.”
“And it sounds—somehow it sounds,” said Mr. Skimpole, “like a small sum?”
The strange man said nothing but made another snort. It was such a powerful one that it seemed quite to lift him out of his seat.
“Mr. Skimpole,” said Richard to me, “has a delicacy in applying to my cousin Jarndyce because he has lately—I think, sir, I understood you that you had lately—”
“Oh, yes!” returned Mr. Skimpole, smiling. “Though I forgot how much it was and when it was. Jarndyce would readily do it again, but I have the epicure-like feeling that I would prefer a novelty in help, that I would rather,” and he looked at Richard and me, “develop generosity in a new soil and in a new form of flower.”
“What do you think will be best, Miss Summerson?” said Richard, aside.
I ventured to inquire, generally, before replying, what would happen if the money were not produced.
“Jail,” said the strange man, coolly putting his handkerchief into his hat, which was on the floor at his feet. “Or Coavinses.”
“May I ask, sir, what is—”
“Coavinses?” said the strange man. “A ’ouse.”
Richard and I looked at one another again. It was a most singular thing that the arrest was our embarrassment and not Mr. Skimpole’s. He observed us with a genial interest, but there seemed, if I may venture on such a contradiction, nothing selfish in it. He had entirely washed his hands of the difficulty, and it had become ours.
“I thought,” he suggested, as if good-naturedly to help us out, “that being parties in a Chancery suit concerning (as people say) a large amount of property, Mr. Richard or his beautiful cousin, or both, could sign something, or make over something, or give some sort of undertaking, or pledge, or bond? I don’t know what the business name of it may be, but I suppose there is some instrument within their power that would settle this?”
“Not a bit on it,” said the strange man.
“Really?” returned Mr. Skimpole. “That seems odd, now, to one who is no judge of these things!”
“Odd or even,” said the stranger gruffly, “I tell you, not a bit on it!”
“Keep your temper, my good fellow, keep your temper!” Mr. Skimpole gently reasoned with him as he made a little drawing of his head on the flyleaf of a book. “Don’t be ruffled by your occupation. We can separate you from your office; we can separate the individual from the pursuit. We are not so prejudiced as to suppose that in private life you are otherwise than a very estimable man, with a great deal of poetry in your nature, of which you may not be conscious.”
The stranger only answered with another violent snort, whether in acceptance of the poetry-tribute or in disdainful rejection of it, he did not express to me.
“Now, my dear Miss Summerson, and my dear Mr. Richard,” said Mr. Skimpole gaily, innocently, and confidingly as he looked at his drawing with his head on one side, “here you see me utterly incapable of helping myself, and entirely in your hands! I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies!”
“My dear Miss Summerson,” said Richard in a whisper, “I have ten pounds that I received from Mr. Kenge. I must try what that will do.”
I possessed fifteen pounds, odd shillings, which I had saved from my quarterly allowance during several years. I had always thought that some accident might happen which would throw me suddenly, without any relation or any property, on the world and had always tried to keep some little money by me that I might not be quite penniless. I told Richard of my having this little store and having no present need of it, and I asked him delicately to inform Mr. Skimpole, while I should be gone to fetch it, that we would have the pleasure of paying his debt.
When I came back, Mr. Skimpole kissed my hand and seemed quite touched.
