On going down in the morning, I found my aunt musing so profoundly over the breakfast-table, with her elbow on the tray, that the contents of the urn had overflowed the teapot and were laying the whole table-cloth under water, when my entrance put her meditations to flight. I felt sure that I had been the subject of her reflections, and was more than ever anxious to know her intentions towards me. Yet I dared not express my anxiety, lest it should give her offence.
My eyes, however, not being so much under controul as my tongue, were attracted towards my aunt very often during breakfast. I never could look at her for a few moments together but I found her looking at me – in an odd thoughtful manner, as if I were an immense way off, instead of being on the other side of the small round table. When she had finished her breakfast, my aunt very deliberately leaned back in her chair, knitted her brows, folded her arms, and contemplated me at her leisure, with such a fixedness of attention that I was quite overpowered by embarrassment. Not having as yet finished my own breakfast, I attempted to hide my confusion by proceeding with it; but my knife tumbled over my fork, my fork tripped up my knife, I chipped bits of bacon a surprising height into the air instead of cutting them for my own eating, and choked myself with my tea which persisted in going the wrong way instead of the right one, until I gave in altogether, and sat blushing under my aunt’s close scrutiny.
“Hallo!” said my aunt, after a long time.
I looked up, and met her sharp bright glance respectfully.
“I have written to him,” said my aunt.
“To – ?”
“To your father-in-law,” said my aunt. “I have sent him a letter that I’ll trouble him to attend to, or he and I will fall out, I can tell him!”
“Does he know where I am, aunt?” I inquired, alarmed.
“I have told him,” said my aunt, with a nod.
“Shall I – be – given up to him?” I faltered.
“I don’t know,” said my aunt. “We shall see.”
“Oh! I can’t think what I shall do,” I exclaimed, “if I have to go back to Mr. Murdstone!”
“I don’t know anything about it,” said my aunt, shaking her head. “I can’t say, I am sure. We shall see.”
My spirits sank under these words, and I became very downcast and heavy of heart. My aunt, without appearing to take much heed of me, put on a coarse apron with a bib, which she took out of the press; washed up the teacups with her own hands; and, when everything was washed and set in the tray again, and the cloth folded and put on the top of the whole, rang for Janet to remove it. She next swept up the crumbs with a little broom (putting on a pair of gloves first), until there did not appear to be one microscopic speck left on the carpet; next dusted and arranged the room, which was dusted and arranged to a hair’s breadth already. When all these tasks were performed to her satisfaction, she took off the gloves and apron, folded them up, put them in the particular corner of the press from which they had been taken, brought out her work-box to her own table in the open window, and sat down, with the green fan between her and the light, to work.
“I wish you’d go up stairs,” said my aunt, as she threaded her needle, “and give my compliments to Mr. Dick, and I’ll be glad to know how he gets on with his Memorial.”
I rose with all alacrity, to acquit myself of this commission.
“I suppose,” said my aunt, eyeing me as narrowly as she had eyed the needle in threading it, “you think Mr. Dick a short name, eh?”
“I thought it was rather a short name, yesterday,” I confessed.
“You are not to suppose that he hasn’t got a longer name, if he chose to use it,” said my aunt, with a loftier air. “Babley – Mr. Richard Babley – that’s the gentleman’s true name.”
I was going to suggest, with a modest sense of my youth and the familiarity I had been already guilty of, that I had better give him the full benefit of that name, when my aunt went on to say:
“But don’t you call him by it, whatever you do. He can’t bear his name. That’s a peculiarity of his. Though I don’t know that it’s much of a peculiarity, either; for he has been ill-used enough, by some that bear it, to have a mortal antipathy for it, Heaven knows. Mr. Dick is his name here, and everywhere else, now – if he ever went anywhere else, which he don’t. So take care, child, you don’t call him anything but Mr. Dick.”
I promised to obey, and went up-stairs with my message; thinking, as I went, that if Mr. Dick had been working at his Memorial long, at the same rate as I had seen him working at it, through the open door, when I came down, he was probably getting on very well indeed. I found him still driving at it with a long pen, and his head almost laid upon the paper. He was so intent upon it, that I had ample leisure to observe the large paper kite in a corner, the confusion of bundles of manuscript, the number of pens, and, above all, the quantity of ink (which he seemed to have in, in half-gallon jars by the dozen), before he observed my being present.
“Ha! Phœbus!” said Mr. Dick, laying down his pen. “How does the world go! I’ll tell you what,” he added, in a lower tone, “I shouldn’t wish it to be mentioned, but it’s a – ” here he beckoned to me, and put his lips close to my ear – “it’s a mad world. Mad as Bedlam, boy!” said Mr. Dick, taking snuff from a round box on the table, and laughing heartily.
Without presuming to give my opinion on this question, I delivered my message.
“Well,” said Mr. Dick, in answer, “my compliments to her, and I – I believe I have made a start. I think I have made a start,” said Mr. Dick, passing his hand among his grey hair, and casting anything but a confident look at his manuscript. “You have been to school?”
“Yes, sir,” I answered; “for a short time.”
“Do you recollect the date,” said Mr. Dick, looking earnestly at me, and taking up his pen to note it down, “when King Charles the First had his head cut off?”
I said I believed it happened in the year sixteen hundred and forty-nine.
“Well,” returned Mr. Dick, scratching his ear with his pen, and looking dubiously at me. “So the books say; but I don’t see how that can be. Because, if it was so long ago, how could the people about him have made that mistake of putting some of the trouble out of his head, after it was taken off, into mine?”
I was very much surprised by the inquiry; but could give no information on this point.
“It’s very strange,” said Mr. Dick, with a despondent look upon his papers, and with his hand among his hair again, “that I never can get that quite right. I never can make that perfectly clear. But no matter, no matter!” he said cheerfully, and rousing himself, “there’s time enough! My compliments to Miss Trotwood, I am getting on very well indeed.”
I was going away, when he directed my attention to the kite.
“What do you think of that for a kite?” he said.
I answered that it was a beautiful one. I should think it must have been as much as seven feet high.
“I made it. We’ll go and fly it, you and I,” said Mr. Dick. “Do you see this?”
He showed me that it was covered with manuscript, very closely and laboriously written; but so plainly, that as I looked along the lines, I thought I saw some allusion to King Charles the First’s head again, in one or two places.
“There’s plenty of string,” said Mr. Dick, “and when it flies high, it takes the facts a long way. That’s my manner of diffusing ’em. I don’t know where they may come down. It’s according to circumstances, and the wind, and so forth; but I take my chance of that.”
His face was so very mild and pleasant, and had something so reverend in it, though it was hale and hearty, that I was not sure but that he was having a good-humoured jest with me. So I laughed, and he laughed, and we parted the best friends possible.
“Well, child,” said my aunt, when I went down stairs. “And what of Mr. Dick, this morning?”
I informed her that he sent his compliments, and was getting on very well indeed.
“What do you think of him?” said my aunt.
I had some shadowy idea of endeavouring to evade the question, by replying that I thought him a very nice gentleman; but my aunt was not to be so put off, for she laid her work down in her lap, and said, folding her hands upon it:
“Come! Your sister Betsey Trotwood would have told me what she thought of any one, directly. Be as like your sister as you can, and speak out!”
“Is he – is Mr. Dick – I ask because I don’t know, aunt – is he at all out of his mind, then?” I stammered; for I felt I was on dangerous ground.
“Not a morsel,” said my aunt.
“Oh, indeed!” I observed faintly.
“If there is anything in the world,” said my aunt, with great decision and force of manner, “that Mr. Dick is not, it’s that.”
I had nothing better to offer, than another timid “Oh, indeed!”
“He has been called mad,” said my aunt. “I have a selfish pleasure in saying he has been called mad, or I should not have had the benefit of his society and advice for these last ten years and upwards – in fact, ever since your sister, Betsey Trotwood, disappointed me.”
“So long as that?” I said.
“And nice people they were, who had the audacity to call him mad,” pursued my aunt. “Mr. Dick is a sort of distant connexion of mine – it doesn’t matter how; I needn’t enter into that. If it hadn’t been for me, his own brother would have shut him up for life. That’s all.”
I am afraid it was hypocritical in me, but seeing that my aunt felt strongly on the subject, I tried to look as if I felt strongly too.
“A proud fool!” said my aunt. “Because his brother was a little eccentric – though he is not half so eccentric as a good many people – he didn’t like to have him visible about his house, and sent him away to some private asylum-place; though he had been left to his particular care by their deceased father, who thought him almost a natural. And a wise man he must have been to think so! Mad himself, no doubt.”
Again, as my aunt looked quite convinced, I endeavoured to look quite convinced also.
“So I stepped in,” said my aunt, “and made him an offer. I said, Your brother’s sane – a great deal more sane than you are, or ever will be, it is to be hoped. Let him have his little income, and come and live with me. I am not afraid of him, I am not proud, I am ready to take care of him, and shall not ill-treat him as some people (besides the asylum folks) have done. After a good deal of squabbling,” said my aunt, “I got him; and he has been here ever since. He is the most friendly and amenable creature in existence; and as for advice! – But nobody knows what that man’s mind is, except myself.”
My aunt smoothed her dress and shook her head, as if she smoothed defiance of the whole world out of the one, and shook it out of the other.
“He had a favorite sister,” said my aunt, “a good creature, and very kind to him. But she did what they all do – took a husband. And he did what they all do – made her wretched. It had such an effect upon the mind of Mr. Dick (that’s not madness I hope!) that, combined with his fear of his brother, and his sense of his unkindness, it threw him into a fever. That was before he came to me, but the recollection of it is oppressive to him even now. Did he say anything to you about King Charles the First, child?”
“Yes, aunt.”
“Ah!” said my aunt, rubbing her nose as if she were a little vexed. “That’s his allegorical way of expressing it. He connects his illness with great disturbance and agitation, naturally, and that’s the figure, or the simile, or whatever it’s called, which he chooses to use. And why shouldn’t he, if he thinks proper!”
I said: “Certainly, aunt.”
“It’s not a business-like way of speaking,” said my aunt, “nor a worldly way. I am aware of that; and that’s the reason why I insist upon it, that there shan’t be a word about it in his Memorial.”
“Is it a Memorial about his own history that he is writing, aunt?”
“Yes, child,” said my aunt, rubbing her nose again. “He is memorialising the Lord Chancellor, or the Lord Somebody or other – one of those people, at all events, who are paid to be memorialised – about his affairs. I suppose it will go in, one of these days. He hasn’t been able to draw it up yet, without introducing that mode of expressing himself; but it don’t signify; it keeps him employed.”
In fact, I found out afterwards that Mr. Dick had been for upwards of ten years endeavouring to keep King Charles the First out of the Memorial; but he had been constantly getting into it, and was there now.
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