Afternoon Tea Mysteries Vol Three

by Anthology

  As the train rolled out of the station, I, the enemy of priests, began to make myself agreeable to this priest. He was young and shy—but I conquered him. Just as the other travellers were beginning (with the exception of Oscar) to compose themselves to sleep, I put my case to the clergyman. “A and B, sir, lady and gentleman, both of age, leave one place in England, and go to live in another place, on the fifth of this month—how soon, if you please, can they be lawfully married after that?”

  “I presume you mean in church?” said the young clergyman.

  “In church, of course.” (To that extent I believed I might answer for Lucilla, without any fear of making a mistake.)

  “They may be married by License,” said the clergyman—“provided one of them continues to reside in that other place to which they travelled on the fifth—on the twenty-first, or (possibly) even the twentieth of this month.”

  “Not before?”

  “Certainly not before.”

  It was then the night of the seventeenth. I gave my companion’s hand a little squeeze in the dark. Here was a glimpse of encouragement to cheer us on the journey. Before the marriage could take place, we should be in England. “We have time before us,” I whispered to Oscar. “We will save Lucilla yet.”

  “Shall we find Lucilla?” was all he whispered back.

  I had forgotten that serious difficulty. No answer to Oscar’s question could possibly present itself until we reached the rectory. Between this and then, there was nothing for it but to keep patience and to keep hope.

  I refrain from encumbering this part of my narrative with any detailed account of the little accidents, lucky and unlucky, which alternately hastened or retarded our journey home. Let me only say that, before midnight on the eighteenth, Oscar and I drove up to the rectory gate.

  Mr. Finch himself came out to receive us, with a lamp in his hand. He lifted his eyes (and his lamp) devotionally to the sky when he saw Oscar. The two first words he said, were:—

  “Inscrutable Providence!”

  “Have you found Lucilla?” I asked.

  Mr. Finch—with his whole attention fixed on Oscar—wrung my hand mechanically, and said I was a “good creature;” much as he might have patted, and spoken to, Oscar’s companion, if the companion had been a dog. I almost wished myself that animal for the moment—I should have had the privilege of biting Mr. Finch. Oscar impatiently repeated my question; the rector, at the time, officiously assisting him to descend from the carriage, and leaving me to get out as I could.

  “Did you hear Madame Pratolungo?” Oscar asked. “Is Lucilla found?”

  “Dear Oscar, we hope to find her, now you have come.”

  That answer revealed to me the secret of Mr. Finch’s extraordinary politeness to his young friend. The last chance, as things were, of preventing Lucilla’s marriage to a man who had squandered away every farthing of his money, was the chance of Oscar’s arrival in England before the ceremony could take place. The measure of Oscar’s importance to Mr. Finch was now, more literally than ever, the measure of Oscar’s fortune.

  I asked for news of Grosse as we went in. The rector actually found some comparatively high notes in his prodigious voice, to express his amazement at my audacity in speaking to him of anybody but Oscar.

  “Oh, dear, dear me!” cried Mr. Finch, impatiently conceding to me one precious moment of his attention. “Don’t bother about Grosse! Grosse is ill in London. There is a note for you from Grosse.—Take care of the door-step, dear Oscar,” he went on, in his deepest and gravest bass notes. “Mrs. Finch is so anxious to see you. We have both looked forward to your arrival with such eager hope—such impatient affection, so to speak. Let me put down your hat. Ah! how you must have suffered! Share my trust in an all-wise Providence, and meet this trial with cheerful submission as I do. All is not lost yet. Bear up! bear up!” He threw open the parlour door. “Mrs. Finch! compose yourself. Our dear adopted son. Our afflicted Oscar!”

  Is it necessary to say what Mrs. Finch was about, and how Mrs. Finch looked?

  There were the three unchangeable institutions—the novel, the baby, and the missing pocket-handkerchief There was the gaudy jacket over the long trailing dressing-gown—and the damp lady inside them, damp as ever! Receiving Oscar with a mouth drawn down at the corners, and a head that shook sadly in sympathy with him, Mrs. Finch’s face underwent a most extraordinary transformation when she turned my way next. To my astonishment, her dim eyes actually sparkled; a broad smile of irrepressible contentment showed itself cunningly to me, in place of the dismal expression which had welcomed Oscar. Holding up the baby in triumph, the lady of the rectory whispered these words in my ear:—“What do you think he has done since you have been away?”

  “I really don’t know,” I answered.

  “He has cut two teeth! Put your finger in and feel.”

  Others might bewail the family misfortune. The family triumph filled the secret mind of Mrs. Finch, to the exclusion of every other earthly consideration. I put my finger in as instructed, and got instantly bitten by the ferocious baby. But for a new outburst of the rector’s voice at the moment, Mrs. Finch (if I am any judge of physiognomy) must have certainly relieved herself by a scream of delight. As it was, she opened her mouth; and (having lost her handkerchief as already stated) retired into a corner, and gagged herself with the baby.

  In the meantime, Mr. Finch had produced from a cupboard near the fireplace, two letters. The first he threw down impatiently on the table. “Oh, dear, dear! what a nuisance other people’s letters are!” The second he handled with extraordinary care; offering it to Oscar with a heavy sigh, and with eyes that turned up martyr-like to the ceiling. “Rouse yourself, and read it,” said Mr. Finch in his most pathetic pulpit tones. “I would have spared you, Oscar, if I could. All our hopes depend, dear boy, on what you can say to guide us when you have read those lines.”

  Oscar took the enclosure out of the envelope—ran over the first words—glanced at the signature—and, with a look of mingled rage and horror, threw the letter on the floor.

  “Don’t ask me to read it!” he cried, in the first burst of passion which had escaped him yet. “If I read it, I shall kill him when we meet.” He dropped into a chair, and hid his face in his hands. “Oh, Nugent! Nugent! Nugent!” he moaned to himself, with a cry that was dreadful to hear.

  It was no time for standing on ceremony. I picked up the letter, and looked at it without asking leave. It proved to be the letter from Nugent (already inserted at the close of Lucilla’s Journal), informing Miss Batchford of her niece’s flight from Ramsgate, and signed in Oscar’s name. The only words which it is necessary to repeat here, are these:—“She accompanies me, at my express request, to the house of a married lady who is a relative of mine, and under whose care she will remain, until the time arrives for our marriage.”

  Those lines instantly lightened my heart of the burden that had oppressed it on the journey. Nugent’s married relative was Oscar’s married relative too. Oscar had only to tell us where the lady lived—and Lucilla would be found!

  I stopped Mr. Finch, in the act of maddening Oscar by administering pastoral consolation to him.

  “Leave it to me,” I said, showing him the letter. “I know what you want.”

  The rector stared at me indignantly. I turned to Mrs. Finch.

  “We have had a weary journey,” I went on. “Oscar is not so well used to travelling as I am. Where is his room?”

  Mrs. Finch rose to show the way. Her husband opened his lips to interfere.

  “Leave it to me,” I repeated. “I understand him; and you don’t.”

  For once in his life, the Pope of Dimchurch was reduced to silence. His amazement at my audacity defied even his powers of expression. I took Oscar’s arm, and said, “You are worn out. Go to your room. I will make you something warm and bring it up to you myself in a few minutes.” He neither looked at me nor answered me—he yielded silently and followed Mrs. Finch. I took from the sideb
oard, on which supper was waiting, the materials I wanted; set the kettle boiling; made my renovating mixture; and advanced to the door with it—followed from first to last, move where I might, by the staring and scandalized eyes of Mr. Finch. The moment in which I opened the door was also the moment in which the rector recovered himself. “Permit me to inquire, Madame Pratolungo,” he said with his loftiest emphasis, “in what capacity are You here?”

  “In the capacity of Oscar’s friend,” I answered. “You will get rid of us both tomorrow.” I banged the door behind me, and went upstairs. If I had been Mr. Finch’s wife, I believe I should have ended in making quite an agreeable man of him.

  Mrs. Finch met me in the passage on the first floor, and pointed out Oscar’s room. I found him walking backwards and forwards restlessly. The first words he said alluded to his brother’s letter. I had arranged not to disturb him by any reference to that painful matter until the next morning; and I tried to change the topic. It was useless. There was an anxiety in his mind which was not to be dismissed at will. He insisted on my instantly setting that anxiety at rest.

  “I don’t want to see the letter,” he said. “I only want to know all that it says about Lucilla.”

  “All that it says may be summed up in this. Lucilla is perfectly safe.”

  He caught me by the arm, and looked me searchingly in the face.

  “Where?” he asked. With him?”

  “With a married lady who is a relative of his.”

  He dropped my arm, and considered for a moment.

  “My cousin at Sydenham!” he exclaimed.

  “Do you know the house?”

  “Perfectly well.”

  “We will go there tomorrow. Let that content you for tonight. Get to rest.”

  I gave him my hand. He took it mechanically—absorbed in his own thoughts.

  “Didn’t I say something foolish down stairs?” he asked, putting the question suddenly, with an odd suspicious look at me.

  “You were quite worn out,” I said, consolingly. “Nobody noticed it.”

  “You are sure of that?”

  “Quite sure. Good night.”

  I left the room, feeling much as I had felt at the station at Marseilles. I was not satisfied with him. I thought his conduct very strange.

  On returning to the parlour, I found nobody there but Mrs. Finch. The rector’s offended dignity had left the rector no honourable alternative but to withdraw to his own room. I ate my supper in peace; and Mrs. Finch (rocking the cradle with her foot) chattered away to her heart’s content about all that had happened in my absence.

  I gathered, here and there, from what she said, some particulars worth mentioning.

  The new disagreement between Mr. Finch and Miss Batchford, which had driven the old lady out of the rectory almost as soon as she set foot in it, had originated in Mr. Finch’s exasperating composure when he heard of his daughter’s flight. He supposed, of course, that Lucilla had left Ramsgate with Oscar—whose signed settlements on his future wife were safe in Mr. Finch’s possession. It was only when Miss Batchford had communicated with Grosse, and when the discovery followed which revealed the penniless Nugent as the man who had eloped with Lucilla, that Mr. Finch’s parental anxiety (seeing no money likely to come of it) became roused to action. He, Miss Batchford, and Grosse, had all, in their various ways, done their best to trace the fugitives—and had all alike been baffled by the impossibility of discovering the residence of the lady mentioned in Nugent’s letter. My telegram, announcing my return to England with Oscar, had inspired them with their first hope of being able to interfere, and stop the marriage before it was too late.

  The occurrence of Grosse’s name in Mrs. Finch’s rambling narrative, recalled to my memory what the rector had told me at the garden gate. I had not yet received the letter which the German had sent to wait my arrival at Dimchurch. After a short search, we found it—where it had been contemptuously thrown by Mr. Finch—on the parlour table.

  A few lines comprised the whole letter. Grosse informed me that he had so fretted himself about Lucilla, that he had been attacked by “a visitation of gouts.” It was impossible to move his “foots” without instantly plunging into the torture of the infernal regions. “If it is you, my goot dear, who are going to find her,” he concluded, “come to me first in London. I have something most dismal-serious to say to you about our poor little Feench’s eyes.”

  No words can tell how that last sentence startled and grieved me. Mrs. Finch increased my anxiety and alarm by repeating what she had heard Miss Batchford say, during her brief visit to the rectory, on the subject of Lucilla’s sight. Grosse had been seriously dissatisfied with the state of his patient’s eyes, when he had seen them as long ago as the fourth of the month; and, on the morning of the next day, the servant had reported Lucilla as being hardly able to distinguish objects in the view from the window of her room. Later on the same day, she had secretly left Ramsgate; and Grosse’s letter proved that she had not been near her surgical attendant since.

  Weary as I was after the journey, this miserable news kept me waking long after I had gone to my bed. The next morning, I was up with the servants—impatient to start for London, by the first train.

  CHAPTER THE FORTY-EIGHTH

  On the Way to the End. Second Stage

  EARLY riser as I was, I found that Oscar had risen earlier still. He had left the rectory and had disturbed Mr. Gootheridge’s morning slumbers by an application at the inn for the key of Browndown.

  On his return to the rectory, he merely said that he had been to see after various things belonging to him, which were still left in the empty house. His look and manner as he gave us this brief explanation were, to my mind, more unsatisfactory than ever. I made no remark; and, observing that his loose travelling coat was buttoned awry over the breast, I set it right for him. My hand, as I did this, touched his breast-pocket. He started back directly—as if there was something in the pocket which he did not wish me to feel. Was it something he had brought from Browndown?

  We got away—encumbered by Mr. Finch, who insisted on attaching himself to Oscar—by the first express train, which took us straight to London. Comparison of time-tables, on reaching the terminus, showed that I had leisure to spare for a brief visit to Grosse, before we again took the railway back to Sydenham. Having decided not to mention the bad news about Lucilla’s sight to Oscar, until I had seen the German first, I made the best excuse that suggested itself, and drove away—leaving the two gentlemen in the waiting-room at the station.

  I found Grosse confined to his easy-chair, with his gouty foot enveloped in cool cabbage-leaves. Between pain and anxiety, his eyes were wilder, his broken English was more grotesque than ever. When I appeared at the door of his room and said good morning—in the frenzy of his impatience he shook his fist at me.

  “Good morning go-damn!” he roared out, “Where? where? where is Feench?”

  I told him where we believed Lucilla to be. Grosse turned his head, and shook his fist at a bottle on the chimney-piece next.

  “Get that bottles on the chimney,” he said. “And the eye-baths by the side of him. Don’t stop with your talky-talky-chatterations here. Go! Save her eyes. Look! You do this. You throw her head back—soh!” He illustrated the position so forcibly with his own head that he shook his gouty foot, and screamed with the pain of it. He went on nevertheless, glaring frightfully through his spectacles; gnashing his moustache fiercely between his teeth. “Throw her head back. Fill the eye-baths; turn him upsides-down over her open eyes. Drown them turn-turn-about in my mixtures. Drown them, I say, one-down-todder-come-on, and if she screech never mind it. Then bring her to me. For the lofe of Gott, bring her to me. If you tie her hands and foots, bring her to me. What is the womans stopping for? Go! go! go!”

  “I want to ask you a question about Oscar,” I said, “before I go.”

  He seized the pillow which supported his head—evidently intending to expedite my departure by throwi
ng it at me. I produced the railway time-table as the best defensive weapon at my command. “Look at it for yourself,” I said; “and you will see that I must wait at the station, if I don’t wait here.”

  With some difficulty, I satisfied him that it was impossible to leave London for Sydenham before a certain hour, and that I had at least ten minutes to spare which might be just as well passed in consulting him. He closed his glaring eyes, and laid his head back on the chair, thoroughly exhausted with his own outbreak of excitement. “No matter how things goes,” he said, “a womans must wag her tongue. Goot. Wag yours.”

  “I am placed in a very difficult position,” I began. “Oscar is going with me to Lucilla. I shall of course take care, in the first place, that he and Nugent do not meet, unless I am present at the interview. But I am not equally sure of what I ought to do in the case of Lucilla. Must I keep them apart until I have first prepared her to see Oscar?”

  “Let her see the devil himself if you like,” growled Grosse, “so long as you bring her here afterwards-directly to me. You will do the bettermost thing, if you prepare Oscar. She wants no preparations! She is enough disappointed in him as it is!”

  “Disappointed in him!” I repeated. “I don’t understand you.”

  He settled himself wearily in his chair, and referred, in a softened and saddened tone, to that private conversation of his with Lucilla, at Ramsgate, which has already been reported in the Journal. I was now informed, for the first time, of those changes in her sensations and in her ways of thinking which had so keenly vexed and mortified her. I heard of the ominous absence of the old thrill of pleasure, when Nugent took her hand on meeting her at the seaside—I heard how bitterly his personal appearance had disappointed her (when she had seen his features in detail) by comparison with the charming ideal picture which she had formed of her lover in the days of her blindness: those happier days, as she had called them, when she was Poor Miss Finch.