Afternoon Tea Mysteries [Vol Three]

by Anthology

  My last answer appeared to relieve him. He sighed, and leaned back in his chair. “That’s right!” he said to himself. “I’m glad to hear that.”

  “Is the doctor’s treatment of you a secret?” I asked.

  “It must be a secret from Lucilla,” he said, speaking very earnestly. “If she attempts to find it out, she must be kept—for the present, at least—from all knowledge of it. Nobody has any influence over her but you. I look to you to help me.”

  “Is this the favour you had to ask me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Am I to know the secret of the medical treatment?”

  “Certainly! How can I expect you to help me unless you know what a serious reason there is for keeping Lucilla in the dark.”

  He laid a strong emphasis on the two words “serious reason. I began to feel a little uneasy. I had never yet taken the slightest advantage of my poor Lucilla’s blindness. And here was her promised husband—of all the people in the world—proposing to me to keep her in the dark.

  “Is the new doctor’s treatment dangerous?” I inquired.

  “Not in the least.”

  “Is it not so certain as he has led Lucilla to believe?”

  “It is quite certain.

  “Did the other doctors know of it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did they not try it?”

  “They were afraid.”

  “Afraid? What is the treatment?”

  “Medicine.”

  “Many medicines? or one?”

  “Only one.”

  “What is the name of it?”

  “Nitrate of Silver.”

  I started to my feet, looked at him, and dropped back into my chair.

  My mind reverted, the instant I recovered myself, to the effect produced on me when the blue man in Paris first entered my presence. In informing me of the effect of the medicine, he had (you will remember) concealed from me the malady for which he had taken it. It had been left to Oscar, of all the people in the world, to enlighten me—and that by a reference to his own case! I was so shocked that I sat speechless.

  With his quick sensibilities, there was no need for me to express myself in words. My face revealed to him what was passing in my mind.

  “You have seen a person who has taken Nitrate of Silver!” he exclaimed.

  “Have you?” I asked.

  “I know the price I pay for being cured,” he answered quietly.

  His composure staggered me. “How long have you been taking this horrible drug?” I inquired.

  “A little more than a week.”

  “I see no change in you yet.”

  “The doctor tells me there will be no visible change for weeks and weeks to come.”

  Those words roused a momentary hope in me. “There is time to alter your mind,” I said. “For heaven’s sake reconsider your resolution before it is too late!”

  He smiled bitterly. “Weak as I am,” he answered, “for once, my mind is made up.”

  I suppose I took a woman’s view of the matter. I lost my temper when I looked at his beautiful complexion and thought of the future.

  “Are you in your right senses?” I burst out. “Do you mean to tell me that you are deliberately bent on making yourself an object of horror to everybody who sees you?”

  “The one person whose opinion I care for,” he replied, “will never see me.”

  I understood him at last. That was the consideration which had reconciled him to it!

  Lucilla’s horror of dark people and dark shades of color, of all kinds, was, it is needless to say, recalled to my memory by the turn the conversation was taking now. Had she confessed it to him, as she had confessed it to me? No! I remembered that she had expressly warned me not to admit him into our confidence in this matter. At an early period of their acquaintance, she had asked him which of his parents he resembled. This led him into telling her that his father had been a dark man. Lucilla’s delicacy had at once taken the alarm. “He speaks very tenderly of his dead father,” she said to me. “It may hurt him if he finds out the antipathy I have to dark people. Let us keep it to ourselves.” As things now were, it was on the tip of my tongue to remind him, that Lucilla would hear of his disfigurement from other people; and then to warn him of the unpleasant result that might follow. On reflection, however, I thought it wiser to wait a little and sound his motives first.

  “Before you tell me how I can help you,” I said, “I want to know one thing more. Have you decided in this serious matter entirely by yourself? Have you taken no advice?”

  “I don’t want advice,” he answered sharply. “My case admits of no choice. Even such a nervous undecided creature as I am, can judge for himself where there is no alternative.”

  “Did the doctors tell you there was no alternative?” I asked.

  “The doctors were afraid to tell me. I had to force it out of them. I said, ‘I appeal to your honour to answer a plain question plainly. Is there any certain prospect of my getting the better of the fits?’ They only said, ‘At your time of life, we may reasonably hope so.’ I pressed them closer:—’Can you fix a date to which I may look forward as the date of my deliverance?’ They could neither of them do it. All they could say was, ‘Our experience justifies us in believing that you will grow out of it; but it does not justify us in saying when.’ ‘Then, I may be years growing out of it?’ They were obliged to own that it might be so. ‘Or I may never grow out of it, at all?’ They tried to turn the conversation. I wouldn’t have it. I said, ‘Tell me honestly, is that one of the possibilities, in my case?’ The Dimchurch doctor looked at the London doctor. The London man said, ‘If you will have it, it is one of the possibilities.’ Just consider the prospect which his answer placed before me! Day after day, week after week, month after month, always in danger, go where I may, of falling down in a fit—is that a miserable position? or is it not?”

  How could I answer him? What could I say?

  He went on:—

  “Add to that wretched state of things that I am engaged to be married. The hardest disappointment which can fall on a man, falls on me. The happiness of my life is within my reach—and I am forbidden to enjoy it. It is not only my health that is broken up, my prospects in life are ruined as well. The woman I love is a woman forbidden to me while I suffer as I suffer now. Realize that—and then fancy you see a man sitting at this table here, with pen, ink, and paper before him, who has only to scribble a line or two, and to begin the cure of you from that moment. Deliverance in a few months from the horror of the fits; marriage in a few months to the woman you love. That heavenly prospect in exchange for the hellish existence that you are enduring now. And the one price to pay for it, a discolored face for the rest of your life—which the one person who is dearest to you will never see? Would you have hesitated? When the doctor took up the pen to write the prescription—tell me, if you had been in my place, would you have said, No?”

  I still sat silent. My obstinacy—women are such mules!—declined to give way, even when my conscience told me that he was right.

  He sprang to his feet, in the same fever of excitement which I remembered so well, when I had irritated him at Browndown into telling me who he really was.

  “Would you have said, No?” he reiterated, stooping over me, flushed and heated, as he had stooped on that first occasion, when he had whispered his name in my ear. “Would you?” he repeated, louder and louder—“would you?”

  At the third reiteration of the words, the frightful contortion that I knew so well, seized on his face. The wrench to the right twisted his body. He dropped at my feet. Good God! who could have declared that he was wrong, with such an argument in his favour as I saw at that moment? Who would not have said that any disfigurement would be welcome as a refuge from this?

  The servant ran in, and helped me to move the furniture to a safe distance from him, “There won’t be much more of it, ma’am,” said the man, noticing my agitation, and trying to compose me. �
��In a month or two, the doctor says the medicine will get hold of him.” I could say nothing on my side—I could only reproach myself bitterly for disputing with him and exciting him, and leading perhaps to the hideous seizure which had attacked him in my presence for the second time.

  The fit on this occasion was a short one. Perhaps the drug was already beginning to have some influence over him? In twenty minutes, he was able to resume his chair, and to go on talking to me.

  “You think I shall horrify you when my face has turned blue,” he said with a faint smile. “Don’t I horrify you now when you see me in convulsions on the floor?”

  I entreated him to dwell on it no more.

  “God knows,” I said, “you have convinced me—obstinate as I am. Let us try to think of nothing now but of the prospect of your being cured. What do you wish me to do?”

  “You have great influence over Lucilla,” he said. “If she expresses any curiosity, in future conversations with you, about the effect of the medicine, check her at once. Keep her as ignorant of it as she is now!”

  “Why?”

  “Why! If she knows what you know, how will she feel? Shocked and horrified, as you felt. What will she do? She will come straight here, and try, as you have tried, to persuade me to give it up. Is that true or not?”

  (Impossible to deny that it was true.)

  “I am so fond of her,” he went on, “that I can refuse her nothing. She would end in making me give it up. The instant her back was turned, I should repent my own weakness, and return to the medicine. Here is a perpetual struggle in prospect, for a man who is already worn out. Is it desirable, after what you have just seen, to expose me to that?”

  It would have been useless cruelty to expose him to it. How could I do otherwise than consent to make his sacrifice of himself—his necessary sacrifice—as easy as I could? At the same time, I implored him to remember one thing.

  “Mind,” I said, “we can never hope to keep her in ignorance of the change in you, when the change comes. Sooner or later, some one will let the secret out.”

  “I only want it to be concealed from her while the disfigurement of me is in progress,” he answered. “When nothing she can say or do will alter it—I will tell her myself. She is so happy in the hope of my recovery! What good can be gained by telling her beforehand of the penalty that I pay for my deliverance? My ugly color will never terrify my poor darling. As for other persons, I shall not force myself on the view of the world. It is my one wish to live out of the world. The few people about me will soon get reconciled to my face. Lucilla will set them the example. She won’t trouble herself long about a change in me that she can neither feel nor see.

  Ought I to have warned him here of Lucilla’s inveterate prejudice, and of the difficulty there might be in reconciling her to the change in him when she heard of it? I dare say I ought, I daresay I was to blame in shrinking from inflicting new anxieties and new distresses on a man who had already suffered so much. The simple truth is—I could not do it. Would you have done it? Ah, if you would, I hope I may never come in contact with you. What a horrid wretch you must be! The end of it was that I left the house—pledged to keep Lucilla in ignorance of the cost at which Oscar had determined to purchase his cure, until Oscar thought fit to enlighten her himself.

  CHAPTER THE TWENTIETH

  Good Papa again!

  THE promise I had given did not expose me to the annoyance of being kept long on the watch against accidents. If we could pass safely over the next five days, we might feel pretty sure of the future. On the last day of the old year, Lucilla was bound by the terms of the will to go to London, and live her allotted three months under the roof of her aunt.

  In the brief interval that elapsed before her departure, she twice approached the dangerous subject.

  On the first occasion, she asked me if I knew what medicine Oscar was taking. I pleaded ignorance, and passed at once to other matters. On the second occasion, she advanced still further on the way to discovery of the truth. She now inquired if I had heard how the physic worked the cure. Having been already informed that the fits proceeded from a certain disordered condition of the brain, she was anxious to know whether the medical treatment was likely to affect the patient’s head. This question (which I was of course unable to answer) she put to both the doctors. Already warned by Oscar, they quieted her by declaring that the process of cure acted by general means, and did not attack the head. From that moment, her curiosity was satisfied. Her mind had other objects of interest to dwell on, before she left Dimchurch. She touched on the perilous topic no more.

  It was arranged that I was to accompany Lucilla to London. Oscar was to follow us, when the state of his health permitted him to take the journey. As betrothed husband of Lucilla, he had his right of entry, during her residence in her aunt’s house. As for me, I was admitted at Lucilla’s intercession. She declined to be separated from me for three months.

  Miss Batchford wrote, most politely, to offer me a hospitable welcome during the day. She had no second spare-room at her disposal—so we settled that I was to sleep at a lodging-house in the neighbourhood. In this same house, Oscar was also to be accommodated, when the doctors sanctioned his removal to London. It was now thought likely—if all went well—that the marriage might be celebrated at the end of the three months, from Miss Batchford’s residence in town.

  Three days before the date of Lucilla’s departure, these plans—so far as I was concerned in them—were all over-thrown.

  A letter from Paris reached me, with more bad news. My absence had produced the worst possible effect on good Papa.

  The moment my influence had been removed, he had become perfectly unmanageable. My sisters assured me that the abominable woman from whom I had rescued him, would most certainly end in marrying him after all, unless I reappeared immediately on the scene. What was to be done? Nothing was to be done, but to fly into a rage—to grind my teeth, and throw down all my things, in the solitude of my own room—and then to go back to Paris.

  Lucilla behaved charmingly. When she saw how angry and how distressed I was, she suppressed all exhibition of disappointment on her side, with the truest and kindest consideration for my feelings. “Write to me often,” said the charming creature, “and come back to me as soon as you can.” Her father took her to London. Two days before they left, I said good-bye at the rectory and at Browndown; and started—once more by the Newhaven and Dieppe route—for Paris.

  I was in no humour (as your English saying is) to mince matters, in controlling this new outbreak on the part of my evergreen parent. I insisted on instantly removing him from Paris, and taking him on a continental tour. I was proof against his paternal embraces; I was deaf to his noble sentiments. He declared he should die on the road. When I look back at it now, I am amazed at my own cruelty. I said, “En route, Papa!”—and packed him up, and took him to Italy.

  He became enamoured, at intervals, now of one fair traveller and now of another, all through the journey from Paris to Rome. (Wonderful old man!) Arrived at Rome—that hotbed of the enemies of mankind—I saw my way to putting a moral extinguisher on the author of my being. The Eternal City contains three hundred and sixty-five churches, and (say) three million and sixty-five pictures. I insisted on his seeing them all—at the advanced age of seventy-five years! The sedative result followed, exactly as I had anticipated. I stupefied good Papa with churches and pictures—and then I tried him with a marble woman to begin with. He fell asleep before the Venus of the Capitol. When I saw that, I said to myself, Now he will do; Don Juan is reformed at last.

  Lucilla’s correspondence with me—at first cheerful—gradually assumed a desponding tone.

  Six weeks had passed since her departure from Dimchurch; and still Oscar’s letters held out no hope of his being able to join her in London. His recovery was advancing, but not so rapidly as his medical adviser had anticipated. It was possible—to look the worst in the face boldly—that he might not get the doctor’
s permission to leave Browndown before the time arrived for Lucilla’s return to the rectory. In this event, he could only entreat her to be patient, and to remember that though he was gaining ground but slowly, he was still getting on. Under these circumstances, Lucilla was naturally vexed and dejected. She had never (she wrote), from her girlhood upward, spent such a miserable time with her aunt as she was spending now.

  On reading this letter, I instantly smelt something wrong.

  I corresponded with Oscar almost as frequently as with Lucilla. His last letter to me flatly contradicted his last letter to his promised wife. In writing to my address, he declared himself to be rapidly advancing towards recovery. Under the new treatment, the fits succeeded each other at longer and longer intervals, and endured a shorter and shorter time. Here then was plainly a depressing report sent to Lucilla, and an encouraging report sent to me.

  What did it mean?

  Oscar’s next letter to me answered the question.

  “I told you in my last” (he wrote), “that the discoloration of my skin had begun. The complexion which you were once so good as to admire, has disappeared for ever. I am now of a livid ashen color—so like death, that I sometimes startle myself when I look in the glass. In about six weeks more, as the doctor calculates, this will deepen to a blackish blue; and then, ‘the saturation’ (as he calls it) will be complete.

  “So far from feeling any useless regrets at having taken the medicine which is producing these ugly effects, I am more grateful to my Nitrate of Silver than words can say. If you ask for the secret of this extraordinary exhibition of philosophy on my part, I can give it in one line. For the last ten days, I have not had a fit. In other words, for the last ten days, I have lived in Paradise. I declare I would have cheerfully lost an arm or a leg to gain the blessed peace of mind, the intoxicating confidence in the future—it is nothing less—that I feel now.

  “Still there is a drawback which prevents me from enjoying perfect tranquillity even yet. When was there ever a pleasure in this world, without a lurking possibility of pain hidden away in it somewhere?