Afternoon Tea Mysteries [Vol Three]

by Anthology

  He started to his feet, and flung his cigar into the empty fireplace.

  “Madame Pratolungo,” he said, “I have not the honour of knowing anything of your family. I can’t call a woman to account for insulting me. Do you happen to have any man related to you, in or out of England?”

  “I happen to have what will do equally well on this occasion,” I replied. “I have a hearty contempt for threats of all sorts, and a steady resolution in me to say what I think.”

  He walked to the door, and opened it.

  “I decline to give you the opportunity of saying anything more,” he rejoined. “I beg to leave you in possession of the room, and to wish you good evening.”

  He opened the door. I had entered the house, armed in my own mind with a last desperate resolve, only to be communicated to him, or to anybody, in the final emergency and at the eleventh hour. The time had come for saying what I had hoped with my whole heart to have left unsaid.

  I rose on my side, and stopped him as he was leaving the room.

  “Return to your chair and your book,” I said. “Our interview is at an end. In leaving the house, I have one last word to say. You are wasting your time in remaining at Dimchurch.”

  “I am the best judge of that,” he answered, making way for me to go out.

  “Pardon me, you are not in a position to judge at all. You don’t know what I mean to do as soon as I get back to the rectory.”

  He instantly changed his position; placing himself in the doorway so as to prevent me from leaving the room.

  “What do you mean to do?” he asked, keeping his eyes attentively fixed on mine.

  “I mean to force you to leave Dimchurch.”

  He laughed insolently. I went on as quietly as before. “You have personated your brother to Lucilla this morning,” I said. “You have done that, Mr. Nugent Dubourg, for the last time.”

  “Have I? Who will prevent me from doing it again?”

  “I will.”

  This time he took it seriously.

  “You?” he said. “How are you to control me, if you please?”

  “I can control you through Lucilla. When I get back to the rectory, I can, and will, tell Lucilla the truth.”

  He started—and instantly recovered himself.

  “You forget something, Madame Pratolungo. You forget what the surgeon in attendance on her has told us.”

  “I remember it perfectly. If we say or do anything to agitate his patient, in her present state, the surgeon refuses to answer for the consequences.”

  “Well?”

  “Well—between the alternative of leaving you free to break both their hearts, and the alternative of setting the surgeon’s warning at defiance—dreadful as the choice is, my choice is made. I tell you to your face, I would rather see Lucilla blind again than see her your wife.”

  His estimate of the strength of the position on his side, had been necessarily based on one conviction—the conviction that Grosse’s professional authority would tie my tongue. I had scattered his calculations to the winds. He turned so deadly pale that, dim as the light was, I could see the change in his face.

  “I don’t believe you!” he said.

  “Present yourself at the rectory tomorrow,” I answered—“and you will see. I have no more to say to you. Let me by.”

  You may suppose I was only trying to frighten him. I was doing nothing of the sort. Blame me, or approve of me, as you please, I was expressing the resolution which I had in my mind when I spoke. Whether my courage would have held out through the walk from Browndown to the rectory—whether I should have shrunk from it when I actually found myself in Lucilla’s presence—is more than I can venture to decide. All I say is that I did, in my desperation, positively mean doing it, at the moment when I threatened to do it—and that Nugent Dubourg heard something in my voice which told him I was in earnest.

  “You fiend!” he burst out, stepping close up to me with a look of fury.

  The whole passionate fervour of the love that the miserable wretch felt for her, shook him from head to foot, as his horror of me found its way to expression in those two words.

  “Spare me your opinion of my character,” I said. “I don’t expect you to understand the motives of an honest woman. For the last time, let me by!”

  Instead of letting me by, he locked the door, and put the key in his pocket. That done, he pointed to the chair that I had left.

  “Sit down,” he said, with a sudden sinking in his voice which implied a sudden change in his temper. “Let me have a minute to myself.”

  I returned to my place. He took his own chair on the other side of the table, and covered his face with his hands. We waited awhile in silence. I looked at him, once or twice, as the minutes followed each other. The shaded lamp-light glistened dimly on something between his fingers. I rose softly, and stretched across the table to look closer. Tears! On my word of honour, tears forcing their way through his fingers, as he held them over his face! I had been on the point of speaking. I sat down again in silence.

  “Say what you want of me. Tell me what you wish me to do.” Those were his first words. He spoke them without moving his hands; so quietly, so sadly, with such hopeless sorrow, such uncomplaining resignation in his voice, that I, who had entered that room, hating him, rose again, and went round to his chair. I—who a minute ago, if I had had the strength, would have struck him down on the floor at my feet—laid my hand on his shoulder, pitying him from the bottom of my heart. That is what women are! There is a specimen of their sense, firmness, and self-control!

  “Be just, Nugent,” I said. “Be honourable. Be all that I once thought you. I want no more.”

  He dropped his arms on the table: his head fell on them, and he burst into a fit of crying. It was so like his brother, that I could almost have fancied I, too, had mistaken one of them for the other. “Oscar over again,” I thought to myself, “on the first day when I spoke to him in this very room!”

  “Come!” I said, when he was quieter. We shall end in understanding each other and respecting each other after all.”

  He irritably shook my hand off his shoulder, and turned his face away from the light.

  “Don’t talk of understanding me,” he said. “Your sympathy is for Oscar. He is the victim; he is the martyr; he has all your consideration and all your pity. I am a coward; I am a villain; I have no honour and no heart. Tread Me under foot like a reptile. My misery is only what I deserve! Compassion is thrown away—isn’t it?—on such a scoundrel as I am?”

  I was sorely puzzled how to answer him. All that he had said against himself, I had thought of him in my own mind. And why not? He had behaved infamously—he was a fit object for righteous indignation. And yet—and yet—it is sometimes so very hard, however badly a man may have behaved, for women to hold out against forgiving him, when they know that a woman is at the bottom of it.

  “Whatever I may have thought of you,” I said, “it is still in your power, Nugent, to win back my old regard for you.”

  “Is it?” he answered scornfully. “I know better than that. You are not talking to Oscar now—you are talking to a man who has had some experience of women. I know how you all hold to your opinions because they are your opinions—without asking yourselves whether they are right or wrong. There are men who could understand me and pity me. No woman can do it. The best and cleverest among you don’t know what love is—as a man feels it. It isn’t the frenzy with You that it is with Us. It acknowledges restraints in a woman—it bursts through everything in a man. It robs him of his intelligence, his honour, his self-respect—it levels him with the brutes—it debases him into idiocy—it lashes him into madness. I tell you I am not accountable for my own actions. The kindest thing you could do for me would be to shut me up in a madhouse. The best thing I could do for myself would be to cut my throat.—Oh, yes! this is a shocking way of talking, isn’t it? I ought to struggle against it—as you say. I ought to summon my self-control. Ha! ha! ha! Here
is a clever woman—here is an experienced woman. And yet—though she has seen me in Lucilla’s company hundreds of times—she has never once discovered the signs of a struggle in me! From the moment when I first saw that heavenly creature, it has been one long fight against myself, one infernal torment of shame and remorse; and this clever friend of mine has observed so little and knows so little, that she can only view my conduct in one light—it is the conduct of a coward and a villain!”

  He got up, and took a turn in the room. I was—naturally, I think—a little irritated by his way of putting it. A man assuming to know more about love than a woman! Was there ever such a monstrous perversion of the truth as that? I appeal to the women!

  “You ought to be the last person to blame me,” I said. “I had too high an opinion of you to suspect what was going on. I will never make the same mistake again—I promise you that!”

  He came back, and stood still in front of me, looking me hard in the face.

  “Do you really mean to say you saw nothing to set you thinking, on the day when I first met her?” he asked. “You were there in the room—didn’t you see that she struck me dumb? Did you notice nothing suspicious at a later time? When I was suffering martyrdom, if I only looked at her—was there nothing to be seen in me which told its own tale?”

  “I noticed that you were never at your ease with her,” I replied. “But I liked you and trusted you—and I failed to understand it. That’s all.”

  “Did you fail to understand everything that followed? Didn’t I speak to her father? Didn’t I try to hasten Oscar’s marriage?”

  It was true. He had tried.

  “When we first talked of his telling Lucilla of the discoloration of his face, did I not agree with you that he ought to put himself right with her, in his own interests?”

  True again. Impossible to deny that he had sided with my view.

  “When she all but found it out for herself, whose influence was used to make him own it? Mine! What did I do, when he tried to confess it, and failed to make her understand him? what did I do when she first committed the mistake of believing me to be the disfigured man?”

  The audacity of that last question fairly took away my breath. “You cruelly helped to deceive her,” I answered indignantly. “You basely encouraged your brother in his fatal policy of silence.”

  He looked at me with an angry amazement on his side which more than equalled the angry amazement on mine.

  “So much for the delicate perception of a woman!” he exclaimed. “So much for the wonderful tact which is the peculiar gift of the sex! You can see no motive but a bad motive in my sacrificing myself for Oscar’s sake?”

  I began to discern faintly that there might have been another than a bad motive for his conduct. But—well! I dare say I was wrong; I resented the tone he was taking with me; I would have owned I had made a mistake to anybody else in the world; I wouldn’t own it to him. There!

  “Look back for one moment,” he resumed, in quieter and gentler tones. “See how hardly you have judged me! I seized the opportunity—I swear to you this is true—I seized the opportunity of making myself an object of horror to her, the moment I heard of the mistake that she had made. I felt in myself that I was growing less and less capable of avoiding her, and I caught at the chance of making her avoid me; I did that—and I did more! I entreated Oscar to let me leave Dimchurch. He appealed to me, in the name of our love for each other, to remain. I couldn’t resist him. Where do you see signs of the conduct of a scoundrel in all this? Would a scoundrel have betrayed himself to you a dozen times over—as I did in that talk of ours in the summer-house? I remember saying in so many words, I wished I had never come to Dimchurch. What reason but one could there be for my saying that? How is it that you never even asked me what I meant?”

  “You forget,” I interposed, “that I had no opportunity of asking you. Lucilla interrupted us, and diverted my attention to other things. What do you mean by putting me on my defence in this way?” I went on, more and more irritated by the tone he was taking with me. “What right have you to judge my conduct?”

  He looked at me with a kind of vacant surprise.

  “Have I been judging your conduct?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps I was thinking, if you had seen my infatuation in time you might have checked it in time. No!” he exclaimed, before I could answer him. “Nothing could have checked it—nothing will cure it but my death. Let us try to agree. I beg your pardon if I have offended you. I am willing to take a just view of your conduct. Will you take a just view of mine?”

  I tried hard to take a just view. Though I resented his manner of speaking to me, I nevertheless secretly felt for him, as I have confessed. Still I could not forget that he had attempted to attract to himself Lucilla’s first look, on the day when she tried her sight—that he had personated his brother to Lucilla that very morning—that he had suffered his brother to go away heart-broken, a voluntary exile from all that he held dear. No! I could feel for him, but I could not take a just view of him. I sat down, and said nothing.

  He returned to the question between us; treating me with the needful politeness, when he spoke next. For all that, he alarmed me, by what he now said, as he had not alarmed me yet.

  “I repeat what I have already told you,” he proceeded. “I am no longer accountable for what I do. If I know anything of myself, I believe it will be useless to trust me in the future. While I am capable of speaking the truth, let me tell it. Whatever happens at a later time—remember this, I have honestly made a clean breast of it tonight.”

  “Stop!” I cried. “I don’t understand your reckless way of talking. Every man is accountable for what he does.”

  He checked me there by an impatient wave of his hand.

  “Keep your opinion; I don’t dispute it. You will see; you will see.—Madame Pratolungo, the day when we had that private talk of ours in the rectory summer-house, marks a memorable date in my calendar. My last honest struggle to be true to my poor Oscar ended with that day. The efforts I have made since then have been little better than mere outbreaks of despair. They have done nothing to help me against the passion that has become the one feeling and the one misery of my life. Don’t talk of resistance. All resistance stops at a certain point. Since the time I have told you of, my resistance has reached its limits. You have heard how I struggled against temptation, as long as I could resist it. I have only to tell you how I have yielded to it now.”

  The reckless, shameless composure with which he said that, began to set me against him once more. The perpetual shifts and contradictions in him, bewildered and irritated me. Quicksilver itself seemed to be less slippery to lay hold of than this man.

  “Do you remember the day,” he asked, “when Lucilla lost her temper, and received you so rudely at your visit to Browndown?”

  I made a sign in the affirmative.

  “You spoke, a little while since, of my personating Oscar to her. I personated him, on the occasion I have just mentioned, for the first time. You were present and heard me. Did you care to speculate on the motives which made me impose myself on her as my brother?”

  “As well as I can remember,” I answered, “I made the first guess that occurred to me. I thought you were indulging in a moment’s mischievous amusement at Lucilla’s expense.

  “I was indulging the passion that consumed me! I longed to feel the luxury of her touching me and being familiar with me, under the impression that I was Oscar. Worse even than that, I wanted to try how completely I could impose on her—how easily I might marry her, if I could only deceive you all, and take her away somewhere by herself. The devil was in possession of me. I don’t know how it might have ended, if Oscar had not come in, and if Lucilla had not burst out as she did. She distressed me—she frightened me—she gave me back again to my better self. I rushed, without stopping to prepare her, into the question of her restoration to sight—as the only way of diverting her mind from the vile adv
antage that I had taken of her blindness. That night, Madame Pratolungo, I suffered pangs of self-reproach and remorse which would even have satisfied you. At the very next opportunity that offered, I made my atonement to Oscar. I supported his interests; I even put the words he was to say to Lucilla into his lips

  “When?” I broke in. “Where? How?”

  “When the two surgeons had left us. In Lucilla’s sitting-room. In the heat of the discussion whether she should submit to the operation at once—or whether she should marry Oscar first, and let Grosse try his experiment on her eyes at a later time. If you recall our conversation, you will remember that I did all I could to persuade Lucilla to marry my brother before Grosse tried his experiment on her sight. Quite useless! You threw all the weight of your influence into the opposite side of the scale. I failed. It made no difference. I had done what I had done in sheer despair: mere impulse—it didn’t last. When the next temptation tried me, I behaved like a scoundrel—as you say.”

  “I have said nothing,” I answered shortly.

  “Very well—as you think, then. Did you suspect me at last—when we met in the village, yesterday? Surely, even your eyes must have seen through me on that occasion!”

  I answered silently, by an inclination of my head. I had no wish to drift into another quarrel. Sorely as he was presuming on my endurance, I tried, in Lucilla’s interests, to keep on friendly terms with him.

  “You concealed it wonderfully well,” he went on, “when I tried to find out whether you had, or had not discovered me. You virtuous people are not bad hands at deception, when it suits your interests to deceive. I needn’t tell you what my temptation was yesterday. The first look of her eyes when they opened on the world; the first light of love and joy breaking on her heavenly face—what madness to expect me to let that look fall on another man, that light show itself to other eyes! No living being, adoring her as I adored her, would have acted otherwise than I did. I could have fallen down on my knees and worshipped Grosse, when he innocently proposed to me to take the very place in the room which I was determined to occupy. You saw what I had in my mind! You did your best—and did it admirably—to defeat me. Oh, you pattern people—you can be as shifty with your resources, when a cunning trick is to be played, as the worst of us! You saw how it ended. Fortune stood my friend at the eleventh hour; fortune can shine, like the sun, on the just and the unjust! I had the first look of her eyes! I felt the first light of love and joy in her face falling on me! I have had her arms round me, and her bosom on mine—”