Afternoon Tea Mysteries [Vol Three]

by Anthology

  “Oh! Madame Pratolungo? Yes. I hope somebody has told Miss Finch you are here. She has her own establishment, and manages everything herself. Have you had a pleasant journey?” (These words were spoken vacantly, as if her mind was occupied with something else. My first impression of her suggested that she was a weak, good-natured woman, and that she must have originally occupied a station in the humbler ranks of life.)

  “Thank you, Mrs. Finch,” I said. “I have enjoyed most heartily my journey among your beautiful hills.”

  “Oh! you like the hills? Excuse my dress. I was half an hour late this morning. When you lose half an hour in this house, you never can pick it up again, try how you may.” (I soon discovered that Mrs. Finch was always losing half an hour out of her day, and that she never, by any chance, succeeded in ending it again, as she had just told me.)

  “I understand, madam. The cares of a numerous family—”

  “Ah! that’s just where it is.” (This was a favourite phrase with Mrs. Finch). “There’s Finch, he gets up in the morning and goes and works in the garden. Then there’s the washing of the children; and the dreadful waste that goes on in the kitchen. And Finch, he comes in without any notice, and wants his breakfast. And of course I can’t leave the baby. And half an hour does slip away so easily, that how to overtake it again, I do assure you I really don’t know.” Here the baby began to exhibit symptoms of having taken more maternal nourishment than his infant stomach could comfortably contain. I held the novel, while Mrs. Finch searched for her handkerchief—first in her bedgown pocket; secondly, here, there, and everywhere in the room.

  At this interesting moment there was a knock at the door. An elderly woman appeared—who offered a most refreshing contrast to the members of the household with whom I had made acquaintance thus far. She was neatly dressed, and she saluted me with the polite composure of a civilized being.

  “I beg your pardon, ma’am. My young lady has only this moment heard of your arrival. Will you be so kind as to follow me?”

  I turned to Mrs. Finch. She had found her handkerchief, and had put her overflowing baby to rights again. I respectfully handed back the novel. “Thank you,” said Mrs. Finch. “I find novels compose my mind. Do you read novels too? Remind me—and I’ll lend you this one tomorrow.” I expressed my acknowledgments, and withdrew. At the door, I look round, saluting the lady of the house. Mrs. Finch was promenading the room, with the baby in one hand and the novel in the other, and the dimity bedgown trailing behind her.

  We ascended the stairs, and entered a bare white-washed passage, with drab-coloured doors in it, leading, as I presumed, into the sleeping chambers of the house.

  Every door opened as we passed; children peeped out at me, screamed at me, and banged the door to again. “What family has the present Mrs. Finch?” I asked. The decent elderly woman was obliged to stop, and consider. “Including the baby, ma’am, and two sets of twins, and one seven months’ child of deficient intellect—fourteen in all.” Hearing this, I began—though I consider priests, kings, and capitalists to be the enemies of the human race—to feel a certain exceptional interest in Reverend Finch. Did he never wish that he had been a priest of the Roman Catholic Church, mercifully forbidden to marry at all? While the question passed through my mind, my guide took out a key, and opened a heavy oaken door at the further end of the passage.

  “We are obliged to keep the door locked, ma’am,” she explained, “or the children would be in and out of our part of the house all day long.”

  After my experience of the children, I own I looked at the oaken door with mingled sentiments of gratitude and respect.

  We turned a corner, and found ourselves in the vaulted corridor of the ancient portion of the house.

  The casement windows, on one side—sunk deep in recesses—looked into the garden. Each recess was filled with groups of flowers in pots. On the other side, the old wall was gaily decorated with hangings of bright chintz. The doors were coloured of a creamy white, with gilt mouldings. The brightly ornamented matting under our feet I at once recognized as of South American origin. The ceiling above was decorated in delicate pale blue, with borderings of flowers. Nowhere down the whole extent of the place was so much as a single morsel of dark colour to be seen anywhere.

  At the lower end of the corridor, a solitary figure in a pure white robe was bending over the flowers in the window. This was the blind girl whose dark hours I had come to cheer. In the scattered villages of the South Downs, the simple people added their word of pity to her name, and called her compassionately—“Poor Miss Finch.” As for me, I can only think of her by her pretty Christian name. She is “Lucilla” when my memory dwells on her. Let me call her “Lucilla” here.

  When my eyes first rested on her, she was picking off the dead leaves from her flowers. Her delicate ear detected the sound of my strange footstep, long before I reached the place at which she was standing. She lifted her head—and advanced quickly to meet me with a faint flush on her face, which came and died away again in a moment. I happen to have visited the picture gallery at Dresden in former years. As she approached me, nearer and nearer, I was irresistibly reminded of the gem of that superb collection—the matchless Virgin of Raphael, called “The Madonna di San Sisto.” The fair broad forehead; the peculiar fullness of the flesh between the eyebrow and the eyelid; the delicate outline of the lower face; the tender, sensitive lips; the colour of the complexion and the hair—all reflected, with a startling fidelity, the lovely creature of the Dresden picture. The one fatal point at which the resemblance ceased, was in the eyes. The divinely-beautiful eyes of Raphael’s Virgin were lost in the living likeness of her that confronted me now. There was no deformity; there was nothing to recoil from, in my blind Lucilla. The poor, dim, sightless eyes had a faded, changeless, inexpressive look—and that was all. Above them, below them, round them, to the very edges of her eyelids, there was beauty, movement, life. In them—death! A more charming creature—with that one sad drawback—I never saw. There was no other personal defect in her. She had the fine height, the well-balanced figure, and the length of the lower limbs, which make all a woman’s movements graceful of themselves. Her voice was delicious—clear, cheerful, sympathetic. This, and her smile—which added a charm of its own to the beauty of her mouth—won my heart, before she had got close enough to me to put her hand in mine. “Ah, my dear!” I said, in my headlong way, “I am so glad to see you!” The instant the words passed my lips, I could have cut my tongue out for reminding her in that brutal manner that she was blind.

  To my relief, she showed no sign of feeling it as I did. “May I see you, in my way?” she asked gently—and held up her pretty white hand. “May I touch your face?”

  I sat down at once on the window-seat. The soft rosy tips of her fingers seemed to cover my whole face in an instant. Three separate times she passed her hand rapidly over me; her own face absorbed all the while in breathless attention to what she was about. “Speak again!” she said suddenly, holding her hand over me in suspense. I said a few words. She stopped me by a kiss. “No more!” she exclaimed joyously. “Your voice says to my ears, what your face says to my fingers. I know I shall like you. Come in, and see the rooms we are going to live in together.”

  As I rose, she put her arm round my waist—then instantly drew it away again, and shook her fingers impatiently, as if something had hurt them.

  “A pin?” I asked.

  “No! no! What colored dress have you got on?”

  “Purple.”

  “Ah! I knew it! Pray don’t wear dark colors. I have my own blind horror of anything that is dark. Dear Madame Pratolungo, wear pretty bright colors, to please me!” She put her arm caressingly round me again—round my neck, however, this time, where her hand could rest on my linen collar. “You will change your dress before dinner—won’t you?” she whispered. “Let me unpack for you, and choose which dress I like.”

  The brilliant decorations of the corridor were explained to me
now!

  We entered the rooms; her bed-room, my bed-room, and our sitting-room between the two. I was prepared to find them, what they proved to be—as bright as looking-glasses, and gilding, and gaily-colored ornaments, and cheerful knick-knacks of all sorts could make them. They were more like rooms in my lively native country than rooms in sober colorless England. The one thing which I own did still astonish me, was that all this sparkling beauty of adornment in Lucilla’s habitation should have been provided for the express gratification of a young lady who could not see. Experience was yet to show me that the blind can live in their imaginations, and have their favourite fancies and illusions like the rest of us.

  To satisfy Lucilla by changing my dark purple dress, it was necessary that I should first have my boxes. So far as I knew, Finch’s boy had taken my luggage, along with the pony, to the stables. Before Lucilla could ring the bell to make inquiries, my elderly guide (who had silently left us while we were talking together in the corridor) re-appeared, followed by the boy and a groom, carrying my things. These servants also brought with them certain parcels for their young mistress, purchased in the town, together with a bottle, wrapped in fair white paper, which looked like a bottle of medicine—and which had a part of its own to play in our proceedings, later in the day.

  “This is my old nurse,” said Lucilla, presenting her attendant to me. “Zillah can do a little of everything—cooking included. She has had lessons at a London Club. You must like Zillah, Madame Pratolungo, for my sake. Are your boxes open?”

  She went down on her knees before the boxes, as she asked the question. No girl with the full use of her eyes could have enjoyed more thoroughly than she did the trivial amusement of unpacking my clothes. This time, however, her wonderful delicacy of touch proved to be at fault. Of two dresses of mine which happened to be exactly the same in texture, though widely different in color, she picked out the dark dress as being the light one. I saw that I disappointed her sadly when I told her of her mistake. The next guess she made, however, restored the tips of her fingers to their place in her estimation: she discovered the stripes in a smart pair of stockings of mine, and brightened up directly. “Don’t be long dressing,” she said, on leaving me. “We shall have dinner in half an hour. French dishes, in honour of your arrival. I like a nice dinner—I am what you call in your country, gourmande. See the sad consequence!” She put one finger to her pretty chin. “I am getting fat! I am threatened with a double chin—at two and twenty. Shocking! shocking!”

  So she left me. And such was the first impression produced on my mind by “Poor Miss Finch.”

  CHAPTER THE FOURTH

  Twilight View of the Man

  OUR nice dinner had long since come to an end. We had chattered, chattered, chattered—as usual with women—all about ourselves. The day had declined; the setting sun was pouring its last red lustre into our pretty sitting-room—when Lucilla started as if she had suddenly remembered something, and rang the bell.

  Zillah came in. “The bottle from the chemist’s,” said Lucilla. “I ought to have remembered it hours ago.”

  “Are you going to take it to Susan yourself, my dear?”

  I was glad to hear the old nurse address her young lady in that familiar way. It was so thoroughly un-English. Down with the devilish system of separation between the classes in this country—that is what I say!

  “Yes; I am going to take it to Susan myself.”

  “Shall I go with you?”

  “No, no. Not the least occasion.” She turned to me. “I suppose you are too tired to go out again, after your walk on the hills?” she said.

  I had dined; I had rested; I was quite ready to go out again, and I said so.

  Lucilla’s face brightened. For some reason of her own, she had apparently attached a certain importance to persuading me to go out with her.

  “It’s only a visit to a poor rheumatic woman in the village,” she said. “I have got an embrocation for her; and I can’t very well send it. She is old and obstinate. If I take it to her, she will believe in the remedy. If anybody else takes it, she will throw it away. I had utterly forgotten her, in the interest of our nice long talk. Shall we get ready?”

  I had hardly closed the door of my bedroom when there was a knock at it. Lucilla? No; the old nurse entering on tiptoe, with a face of mystery, and a finger confidentially placed on her lips.

  “I beg your pardon, ma’am,” she began in a whisper. “I think you ought to know that my young lady has a purpose in taking you out with her this evening. She is burning with curiosity—like all the rest of us for that matter. She took me out, and used my eyes to see with, yesterday evening; and they have not satisfied her. She is going to try your eyes, now.”

  “What is Miss Lucilla so curious about?” I inquired.

  “It’s natural enough, poor dear,” pursued the old woman, following her own train of thought, without the slightest reference to my question. “We none of us can find out anything about him. He usually takes his walk at twilight. You are pretty sure to meet him tonight; and you will judge for yourself, ma’am—with an innocent young creature like Miss Lucilla—what it may be best to do?”

  This extraordinary answer set my curiosity in a flame.

  “My good creature!” I said, “you forget that I am a stranger! I know nothing about it. Has this mysterious man got a name? Who is ‘He’?”

  As I said that, there was another knock at the door. Zillah whispered, eagerly, “Don’t tell upon me, ma’am! You will see for yourself. I only speak for my young lady’s good.” She hobbled away, and opened the door—and there was Lucilla, with her smart garden hat on, waiting for me.

  We went out by our own door into the garden, and passing through a gate in the wall, entered the village.

  After the caution which the nurse had given me, it was impossible to ask any questions, except at the risk of making mischief in our little household, on the first day of my joining it. I kept my eyes wide open, and waited for events. I also committed a blunder at starting—I offered Lucilla my hand to lead her. She burst out laughing.

  “My dear Madame Pratolungo! I know my way better than you do. I roam all over the neighbourhood, with nothing to help me but this.”

  She held up a smart ivory walking-cane, with a bright silk tassel attached. With her cane in one hand, and her chemical bottle in the other—and her roguish little hat on the top of her head—she made the quaintest and prettiest picture I had seen for many a long day. “You shall guide me, my dear,” I said—and took her arm. We went on down the village.

  Nothing in the least like a mysterious figure passed us in the twilight. The few scattered labouring people, whom I had already seen, I saw again—and that was all. Lucilla was silent—suspiciously silent as I thought, after what Zillah had told me. She had, as I fancied, the look of a person who was listening intently. Arrived at the cottage of the rheumatic woman, she stopped and went in, while I waited outside. The affair of the embrocation was soon over. She was out again in a minute—and this time, she took my arm of her own accord.

  “Shall we go a little farther?” she said. “It is so nice and cool at this hour of the evening.”

  Her object in view, whatever it might be, was evidently an object that lay beyond the village. In the solemn, peaceful twilight we followed the lonely windings of the valley along which I had passed in the morning. When we came opposite the little solitary house, which I had already learnt to know as “Browndown,” I felt her hand unconsciously tighten on my arm. “Aha!” I said to myself. “Has Browndown anything to do with this?”

  “Does the view look very lonely tonight?” she asked, waving her cane over the scene before us.

  The true meaning of that question I took to be, “Do you see anybody walking out tonight?” It was not my business to interpret her meaning, before she had thought fit to confide her secret to me. “To my mind, my dear,” was all I said, “it is a very beautiful view.”

  She fell silent again, a
nd absorbed herself in her own thoughts. We turned into a new winding of the valley—and there, walking towards us from the opposite direction, was a human figure at last—the figure of a solitary man!

  As we got nearer to each other I perceived that he was a gentleman; dressed in a light shooting-jacket, and wearing a felt hat of the conical Italian shape. A little nearer—and I saw that he was young. Nearer still—and I discovered that he was handsome, though in rather an effeminate way. At the same moment, Lucilla heard his footstep. Her color instantly rose; and once again I felt her hand tighten involuntarily round my arm. (Good! Here was the mysterious object of Zillah’s warning to me found at last!)

  I have, and I don’t mind acknowledging it, an eye for a handsome man. I looked at him as he passed us. Now I solemnly assure you, I am not an ugly woman. Nevertheless, as our eyes met, I saw the strange gentleman’s face suddenly contract, with an expression which told me plainly that I had produced a disagreeable impression on him. With some difficulty—for my companion was holding my arm, and seemed to be disposed to stop altogether—I quickened my pace so as to get by him rapidly; showing him, I dare say, that I thought the change in his face when I looked at him, an impertinence on his part. However that may be, after a momentary interval, I heard his step behind. The man had turned, and had followed us.

  He came close to me, on the opposite side to Lucilla, and took off his hat.

  “I beg your pardon, ma’am,” he said. “You looked at me just now.”

  At the first sound of his voice, I felt Lucilla start. Her hand began to tremble on my arm with some sudden agitation, inconceivable to me. In the double surprise of discovering this, and of finding myself charged so abruptly with the offence of looking at a gentleman, I suffered the most exceptional of all losses (where a woman is concerned)—the loss of my tongue.