Afternoon Tea Mysteries [Vol Three]

by Anthology

  “I believe whatever you tell me, my dear,” I answered. “You can find out a difference between them, I have no doubt. Still, I own I should like to see it put to the proof.”

  Her color rose. “How?” she asked abruptly.

  “Try your touch alternately on both their faces,” I suggested, “without knowing beforehand which position they each of them occupy. Make three trials—leaving them to change their places or not, between each trial, just as they please. If you guess which is which correctly three times following, there will be the proof that you can really lay your hand on a difference between them.”

  Lucilla shrank from accepting the challenge. She drew back a step, and silently shook her head. Nugent, who had overheard me, turned round suddenly from the window, and supported my proposal.

  “A capital notion!” he burst out. “Let’s try it! You don’t object, Oscar—do you?”

  “I object?” cried Oscar—amazed at the bare idea of his opposing any assertion of his will to the assertion of his brother’s will. “If Lucilla is willing, I say Yes, with all my heart.”

  The two brothers approached us, arm in arm. Lucilla, very reluctantly, allowed herself to be persuaded into trying the experiment. Two chairs, exactly alike, were placed in front of her. At a sign from Nugent, Oscar silently took the chair on her right. By this arrangement, the hand which she had used in touching Nugent’s face, would be now the hand that she would employ in touching Oscar’s face. When they were both seated, I announced that we were ready. Lucilla placed her hands on their faces, right and left, without the faintest idea in her mind of the positions which the two relatively occupied.

  After first touching them with both hands, and both together, she tried them separately next, beginning with Oscar, and using her right hand only. She left him for Nugent; again using her right hand—then came back to him again—then returned to Nugent—hesitated—-decided—tapped Nugent lightly on the head.

  “Oscar!” she said.

  Nugent burst out laughing. The laugh told her, before any of us could speak, that she had made a mistake at the first attempt.

  “Try again, Lucilla,” said Oscar kindly.

  “Never!” she answered, angrily stepping back from both of them. “One mystification is enough.”

  Nugent tried next to persuade her to renew the experiment. She checked him sternly at the first word.

  “Do you think if I won’t do it for Oscar,” she said, “that I would do it for you? You laughed at me. What was there to laugh at? Your brother’s features are your features; your brother’s hair is your hair; your brother’s height is your height. What is there so very ridiculous—with such a resemblance as that—in a poor blind girl like me mistaking you one for the other? I wish to preserve a good opinion of you, for Oscar’s sake. Don’t turn me into ridicule again—or I shall be forced to think that your brother’s good heart is not yours also!”

  Nugent and Oscar looked at each other, petrified by this sudden outbreak; Nugent, of the two, being the most completely overwhelmed by it.

  I attempted to interfere and put things right. My easy philosophy and my volatile French nature, failed to see any adequate cause for this vehement exhibition of resentment on Lucilla’s part. Something in my tone, as I suppose, only added to her irritation. I, in my turn, was checked sternly at the first word. “You proposed it,” she said; “You are the most to blame.” I hastened to make my apologies (inwardly remarking that the habit of raising a storm in a tea-cup is a growing habit with the rising generation in England). Nugent followed me with more apologies on his side. Oscar supported us with his superior influence. He took Lucilla’s hand—kissed it—and whispered something in her ear. The kiss and the whisper acted like a charm. She held out her hand to Nugent, she put her arm round my neck and embraced me, with all her own grace and sweetness. “Forgive me,” she said to us gently. “I wish I could learn to be patient. But, oh, Mr. Nugent, it is sometimes so hard to be blind!” I can repeat the words; but I can give no idea of the touching simplicity with which they were spoken—of her innocently earnest anxiety to win her pardon. She so affected Nugent that he too—after a look at Oscar which said, “May I?”—kissed the hand that she offered to him. As his lips touched her, she started. The bright flush which always indicated the sudden rising of a thought in her mind, flew over her face. She unconsciously held Nugent’s hand in her own, absorbed in the interest of realizing the new thought. For a moment, she stood, still as a statue, consulting with herself. The moment passed, she dropped Nugent’s hand, and turned gaily to me.

  “Will you think me very obstinate?” she asked.

  “Why, my love?”

  “I am not satisfied yet. I want to try again.”

  “No! no! At any rate not to-day.”

  “I want to try again,” she repeated. “Not in your way. In a way of my own that has just come into my head.” She turned to Oscar. “Will you humour me in this?” It is needless to set down Oscar’s reply. She turned to Nugent. “Will you?”

  “Only say what you wish me to do!” he answered.

  “Go with your brother,” she said, “to the other end of the room. I know where you are each of you standing, at this end. Madame Pratolungo will lead me to the place, and will put me just within reach of both your hands. I want each of you in turn (arrange by a sign between yourselves which is to begin) to take my hand, and hold it for a moment, and then drop it. I have an idea that I can distinguish between you, in that way—and I want very much to try it.”

  The brothers went silently to the other end of the room. I led Lucilla, after them, to the place in which they stood. At my suggestion, Nugent was the first to take her hand, as she had requested; to hold it for a moment, and then to drop it.

  “Nugent!” she said, without the slightest hesitation.

  “Quite right,” I answered.

  She laughed gaily. “Go on! Puzzle me if you possibly can.

  The brothers noiselessly changed places. Oscar took her hand, standing exactly where Nugent had stood.

  “Oscar!” she said.

  “Right again,” I told her.

  At a sign from Nugent, Oscar took her hand for the second time. She repeated his name. At a sign from me, the brothers noiselessly placed themselves, one on either side of her—Oscar on the left; Nugent on the right. I gave them the signal; and they each took one of her hands at the same moment. This time, she waited a little longer before she spoke. When she did speak, she was right once more. She turned smiling, towards the left side, pointed to him as he stood by her, and said, “Oscar!”

  We were all three equally surprised. I examined Oscar’s hand and Nugent’s hand alternately. Except the fatal difference in the color, they were, to all intents and purposes, the same hands—the same size, the same shape, the same texture of skin; no scar or mark on the hand of one to distinguish it from the hand of the other. By what mysterious process of divination had she succeeded in discovering which was which?

  She was unwilling, or unable, to reply to that question plainly.

  “Something in me answers to one of them and not to the other,” she said.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. It answers to Oscar. It doesn’t answer to Nugent—that’s all.”

  She stopped any further inquiries by proposing that we should finish the evening with some music, in her own sitting-room, on the other side of the house. When we were seated together at the pianoforte—with the twin-brothers established as our audience at the other end of the room—she whispered in my ear:

  “I’ll tell you!”

  “Tell me what?”

  “How I know which is which when they both of them take my hand. When Oscar takes it, a delicious tingle runs from his hand into mine, and steals all over me. I can’t describe it any better than that.”

  “I understand. And when Nugent takes your hand, what do you feel?”

  “Nothing!”

  “And that is how you found ou
t the difference between them downstairs?”

  “That is how I shall always find out the difference between them. If Oscar’s brother ever attempts to play tricks upon my blindness (he is quite capable of it—he laughed at my blindness!), that is how I shall find him out. I told you before I saw him that I hated him. I hate him still.”

  “My dear Lucilla!”

  “I hate him still!”

  She struck the first chords on the piano, with an obstinate frown on her pretty brow. Our little evening concert began.

  CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIFTH

  Nugent puzzles Madame Pratolungo

  I WAS far from sharing Lucilla’s opinion of Nugent Dubourg. His enormous self-confidence was, to my mind, too amusing to be in the least offensive. I liked the spirit and gaiety of the young fellow. He came much nearer than his brother did to my ideal of the dash and resolution which ought to distinguish a man on the right side of thirty. So far as my experience of them went, Nugent was (in the popular English phrase) good company—and Oscar was not. My nationality leads me to attach great importance to social qualities. The higher virtues of a man only show themselves occasionally on compulsion, His social qualities come familiarly in contact with us every day of our lives. I like to be cheerful: I am all for the social qualities.

  There was one little obstacle in those early days, which set itself up between my sympathies and Nugent.

  I was thoroughly at a loss to understand the impression which Lucilla had produced on him.

  The same constraint which had, in such a marked manner, subdued him at his first interview with her, still fettered him in the time when they became better acquainted with one another. He was never in high spirits in her presence. Mr. Finch could talk him down without difficulty, if Mr. Finch’s daughter happened to be by. Even when he was vapouring about himself, and telling us of the wonderful things he meant to do in Painting, Lucilla’s appearance was enough to check him, if she happened to come into the room. On the first day when he showed me his American sketches (I define them, if you ask my private opinion, as false pretences of Art, by a dashing amateur)—on that day, he was in full flow; marching up and down the room, smacking his forehead, and announcing himself quite gravely as “the coming man” in landscape painting.

  “My mission, Madame Pratolungo, is to reconcile Humanity and Nature. I propose to show (on an immense scale) how Nature (in her grandest aspects) can adapt herself to the spiritual wants of mankind. In your joy or your sorrow, Nature has subtle sympathies with you, if you only know where to look for them. My pictures—no! my poems in color—will show you. Multiply my works, as they certainly will be multiplied, by means of prints—and what does Art become in my hands? A Priesthood! In what aspect do I present myself to the public? As a mere landscape painter? No! As Grand Consoler!” In the midst of this rhapsody (how wonderfully he resembled Oscar in his bursts of excitement while he was talking!)—in the full torrent of his predictions of his own coming greatness, Lucilla quietly entered the room. The “Grand Consoler” shut up his portfolio; dropped Painting on the spot; asked for Music, and sat down, a model of conventional propriety, in a corner of the room. I inquired afterwards, why he had checked himself when she came in. “Did I?” he said. “I don’t know why.” The thing was really inexplicable. He honestly admired her—one had only to notice him when he was looking at her to see it. He had not the faintest suspicion of her dislike for him—she carefully concealed it for Oscar’s sake. He felt genuine sympathy for her in her affliction—his mad idea that her sight might yet be restored, was the natural offspring of a true feeling for her. He was not unfavourable to his brother’s marriage—on the contrary, he ruffled the rector’s dignity (he was always giving offence to Mr. Finch) by suggesting that the marriage might be hastened. I heard him say the words myself:—“The church is close by. Why can’t you put on your surplice and make Oscar happy tomorrow, after breakfast?” More even than this, he showed the most vivid interest—like a woman’s interest rather than a man’s—in learning how the love-affair between Oscar and Lucilla had begun. I referred him, so far as Oscar was concerned, to his brother as the fountain-head of information. He did not decline to consult his brother. He did not own to me that he felt any difficulty in doing so. He simply dropped Oscar in silence; and asked about Lucilla. How had it begun on her side? I reminded him of his brother’s romantic position at Dimchurch and told him to judge for himself of the effect it would produce on the excitable imagination of a young girl. He declined to judge for himself; he persisted in appealing to me. When I told the little love-story of the two young people, one event in it appeared to make a very strong impression on him. The effect produced on Lucilla (when she first heard it) by the sound of his brother’s voice, dwelt strangely on his mind. He failed to understand it; he ridiculed it; he declined to believe it. I was obliged to remind him that Lucilla was blind, and that love which, in other cases, first finds its way to the heart through the eyes, could only, in her case, first find its way through the ears. My explanation, thus offered, had its effect: it set him thinking. “The sound of his voice!” he said to himself, still turning the problem over and over in his mind. “People say my voice is exactly like Oscar’s,” he added, suddenly addressing himself to me. “Do you think so too?” I answered that there could be no doubt of it. He got up from his chair, with a quick little shudder, like a man who feels a chill—and changed the subject. On the next occasion when he and Lucilla met—so far from being more familiar with her, he was more constrained than ever. As it had begun between these two, so it seemed likely to continue to the end. In my society, he was always at his ease. In Lucilla’s society, never!

  What was the obvious conclusion which a person with my experience ought to have drawn from all this?

  I know well enough what it was, now. On my oath as an honest woman, I failed to see it at the time. We are not always (suffer me to remind you) consistent with ourselves. The cleverest people commit occasional lapses into stupidity—just as the stupid people light up with gleams of intelligence at certain times. You may have shown your usual good sense in conducting your affairs on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday in the week. But it doesn’t at all follow from this, that you may not make a fool of yourself on Thursday. Account for it as you may—for a much longer time than it suits my self-esteem to reckon up, I suspected nothing and discovered nothing. I noted his behaviour in Lucilla’s presence as odd behaviour and unaccountable behaviour—and that was all.

  During the first fortnight just mentioned, the London doctor came to see Oscar.

  He left again, perfectly satisfied with the results of his treatment. The dreadful epileptic malady would torture the patient and shock the friends about him no more: the marriage might safely be celebrated at the time agreed on. Oscar was cured.

  The doctor’s visit—reviving our interest in observing the effect of the medicine—also revived the subject of Oscar’s false position towards Lucilla. Nugent and I held a debate about it between ourselves. I opened the interview by suggesting that we should unite our forces to persuade his brother into taking the frank and manly course. Nugent neither said Yes nor No to that proposal at the outset. He, who made up his mind at a moment’s notice about everything else, took time to decide on this one occasion.

  “There is something that I want to know first,” he said. “I want to understand this curious antipathy of Lucilla’s which my brother regards with so much alarm. Can you explain it?”

  “Has Oscar attempted to explain it?” I inquired on my side.

  “He mentioned it in one of his letters to me; and he tried to explain it, when I asked (on my arrival at Browndown) if Lucilla had discovered the change in his complexion. But he failed entirely to meet my difficulty in understanding the case.”

  “What is your difficulty?”

  “This. So far as I can see, she fails to discover intuitively the presence of dark people in a room, or of dark colors in the ornaments of a room. It is only when she is told
that such persons or such things are present that her prejudice declares itself. In what state of mind does such a strange feeling as this take its rise? It seems impossible that she can have any conscious associations with colors, pleasant or painful—if it is true that she was blind at a year old. How do you account for it? Can there be such a thing as a purely instinctive antipathy; remaining passive until external influences rouse it; and resting on no sort of practical experience whatever?”

  “I think there may be,” I replied. “Why, when I was a child just able to walk, did I shrink away from the first dog I saw who barked at me? I could not have known, at that age, either by experience or teaching, that a dog’s bark is sometimes the prelude to a dog’s bite. My terror, on that occasion, was purely instinctive surely?”

  “Ingeniously put,” he said. “But I am not satisfied yet.”

  “You must also remember,” I continued, “that she has a positively painful association with dark colors, on certain occasions. They sometimes produce a disagreeable impression on her nerves, through her sense of touch. She discovered, in that way, that I had a dark gown on, on the day when I first saw her.”

  “And yet, she touches my brother’s face, and fails to discover any alteration in it.”

  I met that objection also—to my own satisfaction, though not to his.

  “I am far from sure that she might not have made the discovery,” I said, “if she had touched him for the first time, since the discoloration of his face. But she examines him now with a settled impression in her mind, derived from previous experience of what she has felt in touching his skin. Allow for the modifying influence of that impression on her sense of touch—and remember at the same time, that it is the color and not the texture of the skin that is changed—and his escape from discovery becomes, to my mind, intelligible.”