Page:Bleak House.djvu/407

“This is a sorrowful case,” said my guardian, after asking him a question or two, and touching him, and examining his eyes you say, Leonard?”

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

“What do you mean?” enquired 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, which has taken upon itself the general arrangement of the whole system of spoons, and professes to have a spoon for our young friend, does