by Anthology
Oscar suddenly stopped. He had given me his arm to lead me through the crowd—he dropped it now.
“You say that, because you are angry with me!” he said.
I denied being angry with him; I declared, once more, that I was only speaking the truth.
“You really mean,” he went on, “that you could have lived comfortably with my brother’s blue face before you every hour of the day?”
“Quite comfortably—if he would have been my brother too.” Oscar pointed to the house in which my aunt and I are living—within a few yards of the place on which we stood.
“You are close at home,” he said, speaking in an odd muffled voice, with his eyes on the ground. “I want a longer walk. We shall meet at dinner-time.”
He left me—without looking up, and without saying a word more.
Jealous of his brother! There is something unnatural, something degrading in such jealousy as that. I am ashamed of myself for thinking it of him. And yet what else could his conduct mean?
[Note.—It is for me to answer that question. Give the miserable wretch his due. His conduct meant, in one plain word—remorse. The only excuse left that he could make to his own conscience for the infamous part which he was playing, was this—that his brother’s personal disfigurement presented a fatal obstacle in the way of his brother’s marriage. And now Lucilla’s own words, Lucilla’s own actions, had told him that Oscar’s face was no obstacle to her seeing Oscar perpetually in the familiar intercourse of domestic life. The torture of self-reproach which this discovery inflicted on him, drove him out of her presence. His own lips would have betrayed him, if he had spoken a word more to her at that moment. This is no speculation of mine. I know what I am now writing to be the truth.—P.]
It is night again. I am in my bed-room—too nervous and too anxious to go to rest yet. Let me employ myself in finishing this private record of the events of the day.
Oscar came a little before dinner-time; haggard and pale, and so absent in mind that he hardly seemed to know what he was talking about. No explanations passed between us. He asked my pardon for the hard things he had said, and the ill-temper he had shown, earlier in the day. I readily accepted his excuses—and did my best to conceal the uneasiness which his vacant, pre-occupied manner caused me. All the time he was speaking to me, he was plainly thinking of something else—he was more unlike the Oscar of my blind remembrances than ever. It was the old voice talking in a new way: I can only describe it to myself in those terms.
As for his manner, I know it used to be always more or less quiet and retiring in the old days: but was it ever so hopelessly subdued and depressed, as I have seen it to-day? Useless to ask! In the by-gone time, I was not able to see it. My past judgment of him and my present judgment of him have been arrived at by such totally different means, that it seems useless to compare them. Oh, how I miss Madame Pratolungo! What a relief, what a consolation it would have been, to have said all this to her, and to have heard what she thought of it in return!
There is, however, a chance of my finding my way out of some of my perplexities, at any rate—if I can only wait till tomorrow.
Oscar seems to have made up his mind at last to enter into the explanations which he has hitherto withheld from me. He has asked me to give him a private interview in the morning. The circumstances which led to his making this request have highly excited my curiosity. Something is evidently going on under the surface, in which my interests are concerned—and, possibly, Oscar’s interests too.
It all came about in this way.
On returning to the house, after Oscar had left me, I found that a letter from Grosse had arrived by the afternoon post. My dear old surgeon wrote to say that he was coming to see me—and added in a postscript that he would arrive the next day at luncheon-time. Past experience told me that this meant a demand on my aunt’s housekeeping for all the good things that it could produce. (Ah, dear! I thought of Madame Pratolungo and the Mayonnaise. Will those times never come again?) Well—at dinner, I announced Grosse’s visit; adding significantly, “at luncheon-time.”
My aunt looked up from her plate with a little start—not interested, as I was prepared to hear, in the serious question of luncheon, but in the opinion which my medical adviser was likely to give of the state of my health.
“I am anxious to hear what Mr. Grosse says about you tomorrow,” the old lady began. “I shall insist on his giving me a far more complete report of you than he gave last time. The recovery of your sight appears to me, my dear, to be quite complete.”
“Do you want me to be cured, aunt, because you want to get away?” I asked. “Are you weary of Ramsgate?”
Miss Batchford’s quick temper flashed at me out of Miss Batchford’s bright old eyes.
“I am weary of keeping a letter of yours,” she answered, with a look of disgust.
“A letter of mine!” I exclaimed.
“Yes. A letter which is only to be given to you, when Mr. Grosse pronounces that you are quite yourself again.”
Oscar—who had not taken the slightest interest in the conversation thus far—suddenly stopped, with his fork half way to his mouth; changed color; and looked eagerly at my aunt.
“What letter?” I asked. “Who gave it to you? Why am I not to see it until I am quite myself again?”
Miss Batchford obstinately shook her head three times, in answer to those three questions.
“I hate secrets and mysteries,” she said impatiently. “This is a secret and a mystery—and I long to have done with it. That is all. I have said too much already. I shall say no more.”
All my entreaties were of no avail. My aunt’s quick temper had evidently led her into committing an imprudence of some sort. Having done that, she was now provokingly determined not to make bad worse. Nothing that I could say would induce her to open her lips on the subject of the mysterious letter. “Wait till Mr. Grosse comes tomorrow.” That was the only reply I could get.
As for Oscar, this little incident appeared to have an effect on him which added immensely to the curiosity that my aunt had roused in me.
He listened with breathless attention while I was trying to induce Miss Batchford to answer my questions. When I gave it up, he pushed away his plate, and ate no more. On the other hand (though generally the most temperate of men) he drank a great deal of wine, both at dinner and after. In the evening, he made so many mistakes in playing cards with my aunt, that she dismissed him from the game in disgrace. He sat in a corner for the rest of the time, pretending to listen while I was playing the piano—really lost to me and my music; buried, fathoms deep, in some uneasy thoughts of his own.
When he took his leave, he whispered these words in my ear; anxiously pressing my hand while he spoke:
“I must see you alone tomorrow, before Grosse comes. Can you manage it?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“At the stairs on the cliff, at eleven o’clock.”
On that, he left me. But one question has pursued me ever since. Does Oscar know the writer of the mysterious letter? I firmly believe he does. Tomorrow will prove whether I am right or wrong. How I long for tomorrow to come!
CHAPTER THE FORTY-FOURTH
Lucilla’s Journal, continued
September 4th.
I MARK this day as one of the saddest days of my life. Oscar has shown Madame Pratolungo to me, in her true colors. He has reasoned out this miserable matter with a plainness which it is impossible for me to resist. I have thrown away my love and my confidence on a false woman: there is no sense of honour, no feeling of gratitude or of delicacy in her nature. And I once thought her—it sickens me to recall it! I will see her no more.
[Note.—Did it ever occur to you to be obliged to copy out, with your own hand, this sort of opinion of your own character? I can recommend the sensation produced as something quite new, and the temptation to add a line or two on your own account to be as nearly as possible beyond mortal resistance.—P.]
He took me to the west pier. At that hour of the morning (excepting a few sailors who paid no heed to us) the place was a solitude. It was one of the loveliest days of the season. When we were tired of pacing to and fro, we could sit down under the mellow sunshine, and enjoy the balmy sea air. In that pure light, with all those lovely colors about us, there was something, to my mind, horribly and shamefully out of place in the talk that engrossed us—talk that still turned, hour after hour, on nothing but plots and lies, cruelty, ingratitude, and deceit!
I managed to ask my first question so as to make him enter on the subject at once—without wasting time in phrases to prepare me for what was to come.
“When my aunt mentioned that letter at dinner yesterday,” I said, “I fancied that you knew something about it. Was I right?”
“Very nearly right,” he answered. “I can’t say I knew anything about it. I only suspected that it was the production of an enemy of yours and mine.”
“Not Madame Pratolungo?”
“Yes! Madame Pratolungo.”
I disagreed with him at the outset. Madame Pratolungo and my aunt had quarrelled about politics. Any correspondence between them—a confidential correspondence especially—seemed to be one of the most unlikely things that could take place. I asked Oscar if he could guess what the letter contained, and why it was not to be given to me until Grosse reported that I was quite cured.
“I can’t guess at the contents—I can only guess at the object of the letter,” he said.
“What is it?”
“The object which she has had in view from the first—to place every possible obstacle in the way of my marrying you.”
“What interest can she have in doing that?”
“My brother’s interest.”
“Forgive me, Oscar. I cannot believe it of her.”
We were walking, while these words were passing between us. When I said that, he stopped, and looked at me very earnestly.
“You believed it of her, when you answered my letter,” he said.
I admitted that.
“I believed your letter,” I replied; “and I shared your opinion of her as long as she was in the same house with me. Her presence fed my anger and my horror of her in some way that I can’t account for. Now she has left me—now I have had time to think—there is something in her absence that pleads for her, and tortures me with doubts if I have done right. I can’t explain it—I don’t understand it. I only know that so it is.”
He still looked at me more and more attentively. “Your good opinion of her must have been very firmly rooted to assert itself in this obstinate manner,” he said. “What can she have done to deserve it?”
If I had looked back through all my old recollections of her, and had recalled them one by one, it would only have ended in making me cry. And yet, I felt that I ought to stand up for her as long as I could. I managed to meet the difficulty in this way.
“I will tell you what she did,” I said, “after I received your letter. Fortunately for me, she was not very well that morning; and she breakfasted in bed. I had plenty of time to compose myself, and to caution Zillah (who read your letter to me), before we met for the first time that day. On the previous day, I had felt hurt and offended with her for the manner in which she accounted for your absence from Browndown. I thought she was not treating me with the same confidence which I should have placed in her, if our positions had been reversed. When I next saw her, having your warning in my mind, I made my excuses, and said what I thought she would expect me to say, under the circumstances. In my excitement and my wretchedness, I daresay I over-acted my part. At any rate, I roused the suspicion in her that something was wrong. She not only asked me if anything had happened, she went the length of saying, in so many words, that she thought she saw a change in me. I stopped it there, by declaring that I did not understand her. She must have seen that I was not telling the truth: she must have known as well as I knew that I was concealing something from her. For all that, not one word more escaped her lips. A proud delicacy—I saw it as plainly in her face, as I now see you—a proud delicacy silenced her; she looked wounded and hurt. I have been thinking of that look, since I have been here. I have asked myself (what did not occur to me at the time) if a false woman, who knew herself to be guilty, would have behaved in that way? Surely a false woman would have set her wits against mine, and have tried to lead me into betraying to her what discoveries I had really made? Oscar! that delicate silence, that wounded look, will plead for her when I think of her in her absence! I can not feel as satisfied as I once did, that she is the abominable creature you declare her to be. I know you are incapable of deceiving me—I know you believe what you say. But is it not possible that appearances have misled you? Can you really be sure that you have not made some dreadful mistake?”
Without answering me, he suddenly stopped at a seat under the stone parapet of the pier, and signed to me to sit down by him. I obeyed. Instead of looking at me, he kept his head turned away; looking out over the sea. I could not make him out. He perplexed—he almost alarmed me.
“Have I offended you?” I asked.
He turned towards me again, as abruptly as he had turned away. His eyes wandered; his face was pale.
“You are a good generous creature,” he said, in a confused hasty way. “Let us talk of something else.”
“No!” I answered. “I am too deeply interested in knowing the truth to talk of anything else.”
His color changed again at that. His face flushed; he gave a heavy sigh as one does sometimes, when one is making a great effort.
“You will have it?” he said.
“I will have it?”
He rose again. The nearer he was to telling me all that he had kept concealed from me thus far, the harder it seemed to be to him to say the first words.
“Do you mind walking on again?” he asked.
I silently rose on my side, and put my arm in his. We walked on slowly towards the end of the pier. Arrived there, he stood still, and spoke those hard first words—looking out over the broad blue waters: not looking at me.
“I won’t ask you to take anything for granted, on my assertion only,” he began. “The woman’s own words, the woman’s own actions, shall prove her guilty.”
I interrupted him by a question.
“Tell me one thing,” I said. “What first made you suspect her?”
“You first made me suspect her, by what you said of her at Browndown,” he answered. “Now carry your memory back to the time I have already mentioned in my letter—when she betrayed herself to you in the rectory garden. Is it true that she said you would have fallen in love with Nugent, if you had met him first instead of me?”
“It is true that she said it,” I answered. “At a moment,” I added, “when her temper had got the better of her—and when mine had got the better of me.”
“Advance the hour a little,” he went on, “to the time when she followed you to Browndown. Was she still out of temper, when she made her excuses to you?”
“No.”
“Did she interfere, when Nugent took advantage of your blindness to make you believe you were talking to me?”
“No.”
“Was she out of temper then?”
I still defended her. “She might well have been angry,” I said. “She had made her excuses to me in the kindest manner; and I had received them with the most unpardonable rudeness.”
My defence produced no effect on him. He summed it up coolly so far. “She compared me disadvantageously with Nugent; and she allowed Nugent to personate me in speaking to you, without interfering to stop it. In both these cases, her temper excuses and accounts for her conduct. Very good. We may, or may not, differ so far. Before we go farther, let us—if we can—agree on one unanswerable fact. Which of us two brothers was her favourite, from the first?”
About that, there could be no dou
bt. I admitted at once that Nugent was her favourite. And more than this, I remembered accusing her myself of never having done justice to Oscar from the first.
[Note.—See the sixteenth chapter, and Madame Pratolungo’s remark, warning you that you would hear of this circumstance again.—P.]
Oscar went on.
“Bear that in mind,” he said. “And now let us get to the time when we were assembled in your sitting-room, to discuss the subject of the operation on your eyes. The question before us, as I remember it, was this. Were you to marry me, before the operation? Or were you to keep me waiting until the operation had been performed, and the cure was complete? How did Madame Pratolungo decide on that occasion? She decided against my interests; she encouraged you to delay our marriage.”
I persisted in defending her. “She did that out of sympathy with me,” I said.
He surprised me by again accepting my view of the matter, without attempting to dispute it.
“We will say she did it out of sympathy with you,” he proceeded. “Whatever her motives might be, the result was the same. My marriage to you was indefinitely put off; and Madame Pratolungo voted for that delay.”
“And your brother,” I added, “took the other side, and tried to persuade me to marry you first. How can you reconcile that with what you have told me—”
He interposed before I could say more. “Don’t bring my brother into the inquiry,” he said. “My brother, at that time, could still behave like an honourable man, and sacrifice his own feelings to his duty to me. Let us strictly confine ourselves, for the present, to what Madame Pratolungo said and did. And let us advance again to a few minutes later on the same day, when our little domestic debate had ended. My brother was the first to go. Then, you retired, and left Madame Pratolungo and me alone in the room. Do you remember?”
I remembered perfectly.
“You had bitterly disappointed me,” I said. “You had shown no sympathy with my eagerness to be restored to the blessing of sight. You made objections and started difficulties. I recollect speaking to you with some of the bitterness that I felt—blaming you for not believing in my future as I believed in it, and hoping as I hoped—and then leaving you, and locking myself up in my own room.”