Bleak House by Charles Dickens (ebook reader that looks like a book TXT) 📕

again, and as he leaned against the wall, he shook the hovel.

“He has been talking off and on about such like all day, ma’am,”

said Jenny softly. “Why, how you stare! This is MY lady, Jo.”

“Is it?” returned the boy doubtfully, and surveying me with his arm

held out above his burning eyes. “She looks to me the t’other one.

It ain’t the bonnet, nor yet it ain’t the gownd, but she looks to

me the t’other one.”

My little Charley, with her premature experience of illness and

trouble, had pulled off her bonnet and shawl and now went quietly

up to him with a chair and sat him down in it like an old sick

nurse. Except that no such attendant could have shown him

Charley’s youthful face, which seemed to engage his confidence.

“I say!” said the boy. “YOU tell me. Ain’t the lady the t’other

lady?”

Charley shook her head as she methodically drew his rags about him

and made him as warm as she could.

“Oh!” the boy muttered. “Then I s’pose she ain’t.”

“I came to see if I could do you any good,” said I. “What is the

matter with you?”

“I’m a-being froze,” returned the boy hoarsely, with his haggard

gaze wandering about me, “and then burnt up, and then froze, and

then burnt up, ever so many times in a hour. And my head’s all

sleepy, and all a-going mad-like—and I’m so dry—and my bones

isn’t half so much bones as pain.”

“When did he come here?” I asked the woman.

“This morning, ma’am, I found him at the corner of the town. I had

known him up in London yonder. Hadn’t I, Jo?”

“Tom-all-Alone’s,” the boy replied.

Whenever he fixed his attention or his eyes, it was only for a very

little while. He soon began to droop his head again, and roll it

heavily, and speak as if he were half awake.

“When did he come from London?” I asked.

“I come from London yes’day,” said the boy himself, now flushed and

hot. “I’m a-going somewheres.”

“Where is he going?” I asked.

“Somewheres,” repeated the boy in a louder tone. “I have been

moved on, and moved on, more nor ever I was afore, since the

t’other one give me the sov’ring. Mrs. Snagsby, she’s always a-watching, and a-driving of me—what have I done to her?—and

they’re all a-watching and a-driving of me. Every one of ‘em’s

doing of it, from the time when I don’t get up, to the time when I

don’t go to bed. And I’m a-going somewheres. That’s where I’m agoing. She told me, down in Tom-all-Alone’s, as she came from

Stolbuns, and so I took the Stolbuns Road. It’s as good as

another.”

He always concluded by addressing Charley.

“What is to be done with him?” said I, taking the woman aside. “He

could not travel in this state even if he had a purpose and knew

where he was going!”

“I know no more, ma’am, than the dead,” she replied, glancing

compassionately at him. “Perhaps the dead know better, if they

could only tell us. I’ve kept him here all day for pity’s sake,

and I’ve given him broth and physic, and Liz has gone to try if any

one will take him in (here’s my pretty in the bed—her child, but I

call it mine); but I can’t keep him long, for if my husband was to

come home and find him here, he’d be rough in putting him out and

might do him a hurt. Hark! Here comes Liz back!”

The other woman came hurriedly in as she spoke, and the boy got up

with a half-obscured sense that he was expected to be going. When

the little child awoke, and when and how Charley got at it, took it

out of bed, and began to walk about hushing it, I don’t know.

There she was, doing all this in a quiet motherly manner as if she

were living in Mrs. Blinder’s attic with Tom and Emma again.

The friend had been here and there, and had been played about from

hand to hand, and had come back as she went. At first it was too

early for the boy to be received into the proper refuge, and at

last it was too late. One official sent her to another, and the

other sent her back again to the first, and so backward and

forward, until it appeared to me as if both must have been

appointed for their skill in evading their duties instead of

performing them. And now, after all, she said, breathing quickly,

for she had been running and was frightened too, “Jenny, your

master’s on the road home, and mine’s not far behind, and the Lord

help the boy, for we can do no more for him!” They put a few

halfpence together and hurried them into his hand, and so, in an

oblivious, half-thankful, half-insensible way, he shuffled out of

the house.

“Give me the child, my dear,” said its mother to Charley, “and

thank you kindly too! Jenny, woman dear, good night! Young lady,

if my master don’t fall out with me, I’ll look down by the kiln

by and by, where the boy will be most like, and again in the

morning!” She hurried off, and presently we passed her hushing

and singing to her child at her own door and looking anxiously

along the road for her drunken husband.

I was afraid of staying then to speak to either woman, lest I

should bring her into trouble. But I said to Charley that we must

not leave the boy to die. Charley, who knew what to do much better

than I did, and whose quickness equalled her presence of mind,

glided on before me, and presently we came up with Jo, just short

of the brick-kiln.

I think he must have begun his journey with some small bundle under

his arm and must have had it stolen or lost it. For he still

carried his wretched fragment of fur cap like a bundle, though he

went bare-headed through the rain, which now fell fast. He stopped

when we called to him and again showed a dread of me when I came

up, standing with his lustrous eyes fixed upon me, and even

arrested in his shivering fit.

I asked him to come with us, and we would take care that he had

some shelter for the night.

“I don’t want no shelter,” he said; “I can lay amongst the warm

bricks.”

“But don’t you know that people die there?” replied Charley.

“They dies everywheres,” said the boy. “They dies in their

lodgings—she knows where; I showed her—and they dies down in Tom-all-Alone’s in heaps. They dies more than they lives, according to

what I see.” Then he hoarsely whispered Charley, “If she ain’t the

t’other one, she ain’t the forrenner. Is there THREE of ‘em then?”

Charley looked at me a little frightened. I felt half frightened

at myself when the boy glared on me so.

But he turned and followed when I beckoned to him, and finding that

he acknowledged that influence in me, I led the way straight home.

It was not far, only at the summit of the hill. We passed but one

man. I doubted if we should have got home without assistance, the

boy’s steps were so uncertain and tremulous. He made no complaint,

however, and was strangely unconcerned about himself, if I may say

so strange a thing.

Leaving him in the hall for a moment, shrunk into the corner of the

window-seat and staring with an indifference that scarcely could be

called wonder at the comfort and brightness about him, I went into

the drawing-room to speak to my guardian. There I found Mr.

Skimpole, who had come down by the coach, as he frequently did

without notice, and never bringing any clothes with him, but always

borrowing everything he wanted.

They came out with me directly to look at the boy. The servants

had gathered in the hall too, and he shivered in the window-seat

with Charley standing by him, like some wounded animal that had

been found in a ditch.

“This is a sorrowful case,” said my guardian after asking him a

question or two and touching him and examining his eyes. “What do

you say, Harold?”

“You had better turn him out,” said Mr. Skimpole.

“What do you mean?” inquired my guardian, almost sternly.

“My dear Jarndyce,” said Mr. Skimpole, “you know what I am: I am a

child. Be cross to me if I deserve it. But I have a constitutional

objection to this sort of thing. I always had, when I was a medical

man. He’s not safe, you know. There’s a very bad sort of fever

about him.”

Mr. Skimpole had retreated from the hall to the drawing-room again

and said this in his airy way, seated on the music-stool as we

stood by.

“You’ll say it’s childish,” observed Mr. Skimpole, looking gaily at

us. “Well, I dare say it may be; but I AM a child, and I never

pretend to be anything else. If you put him out in the road, you

only put him where he was before. He will be no worse off than he

was, you know. Even make him better off, if you like. Give him

sixpence, or five shillings, or five pound ten—you are

arithmeticians, and I am not—and get rid of him!”

“And what is he to do then?” asked my guardian.

“Upon my life,” said Mr. Skimpole, shrugging his shoulders with his

engaging smile, “I have not the least idea what he is to do then.

But I have no doubt he’ll do it.”

“Now, is it not a horrible reflection,” said my guardian, to whom I

had hastily explained the unavailing efforts of the two women, “is

it not a horrible reflection,” walking up and down and rumpling his

hair, “that if this wretched creature were a convicted prisoner,

his hospital would be wide open to him, and he would be as well

taken care of as any sick boy in the kingdom?”

“My dear Jarndyce,” returned Mr. Skimpole, “you’ll pardon the

simplicity of the question, coming as it does from a creature who

is perfectly simple in worldly matters, but why ISN’T he a prisoner

then?”

My guardian stopped and looked at him with a whimsical mixture of

amusement and indignation in his face.

“Our young friend is not to be suspected of any delicacy, I should

imagine,” said Mr. Skimpole, unabashed and candid. “It seems to me

that it would be wiser, as well as in a certain kind of way more

respectable, if he showed some misdirected energy that got him into

prison. There would be more of an adventurous spirit in it, and

consequently more of a certain sort of poetry.”

“I believe,” returned my guardian, resuming his uneasy walk, “that

there is not such another child on earth as yourself.”

“Do you really?” said Mr. Skimpole. “I dare say! But I confess I

don’t see why our young friend, in his degree, should not seek to

invest himself with such poetry as is open to him. He is no doubt

born with an appetite—probably, when he is in a safer state of

health, he has an excellent appetite. Very well. At our young

friend’s natural dinner hour, most likely about noon, our young

friend says in effect to society, ‘I am hungry; will you have the

goodness to produce your spoon and feed me?’ Society,