by Anthology
Those words roused me. I lifted my head, and kissed her. “I have come back to comfort you,” I said: “and I have behaved like a fool.”
She smiled faintly. “How like you,” she exclaimed, “to say that!” She tapped my cheek with her fingers in the old familiar way. The repetition of that little trifling action almost broke my heart. I nearly choked myself in forcing back the stupid cowardly useless tears that tried to burst from me again. “Come!” she said. “No more crying! Let us sit down and talk as if we were at Dimchurch.”
I took her to the sofa: we sat side by side. She put her arm round my waist, and laid her head on my shoulder. Again the faint smile flickered like a dying light on her lovely face; wan and wasted, yet still beautiful—still the Virgin’s face in Raphael’s picture. “We are a strange pair,” she said, with a momentary flash of her old irresistible humour. “You are my bitterest enemy, and you burst out crying over me the moment we meet. I have been shockingly treated by you—and I have got my arm round your waist and my head on your shoulder, and I wouldn’t let go of you for the world!” Her face saddened again; her voice suddenly altered its tone. “Tell me,” she went on, “how is it that appearances were so terribly against you? Oscar satisfied me, at Ramsgate, that I ought to give you up, that I ought never to see you again. I took his view—there is no denying it, my dear—I agreed with him in detesting you, for a little while. But, when the blindness came back, I could keep it up no longer. Little by little, as the light died out, my heart would turn to you again. When I heard your letter read, when I knew that you were near me—it was just like the old times; I was mad to see you. And here I am—satisfied, before you explain it to me, that you have been the victim of some terrible mistake.”
I tried, in grateful acknowledgment of those generous words, to enter on my justification there and then. It was impossible. I could think of nothing, I could speak of nothing, but the dreadful discovery of her blindness.
“Give me a few minutes,” I said, “and you shall hear it all. I can’t talk of myself, yet—I can only talk of you. Oh, Lucilla, why did you keep away from Grosse? Come with me to him to-day. Let him try what he can do. At once, my love—before it is too late!”
“It is too late,” she said. “I have been to another oculist—a stranger. He said, what Mr. Sebright said: he doubted if there was ever any chance for me: he thought the operation ought never to have been performed.”
“Why did you go to a stranger?” I asked. “Why did you give up Grosse!”
“You must ask Oscar,” she answered. “It was at his desire that I kept away from Grosse.”
Hearing this, I penetrated for myself the motive which had actuated Nugent—as I afterwards found it indicated in the Journal. If he had let Lucilla go to Grosse, our good German might have noticed that her position was preying on her mind, and might have seen his reasons for exposing the deception that Nugent was practicing on her. For the rest, I still persisted in entreating Lucilla to go back with me to our old friend.
“Remember our conversation on this very subject,” she rejoined, shaking her head decisively. “I mean at the time when the operation was going to be performed. I told you I was used to being blind. I said I only wanted to recover my sight, to see Oscar. And when I did see him—what happened? The disappointment was so dreadful, I wished myself blind again. Don’t start! don’t cry out as if you were shocked! I mean what I say. You people who can see, attach such an absurd importance to your eyes! Don’t you recollect my saying that, when we last talked about it?”
I recollected perfectly. She had said those words. She had declared that she had never honestly envied any of us the use of our eyes. She had even reviled our eyes; comparing them contemptuously with her touch; deriding them as deceivers who were constantly leading us wrong. I acknowledged all this—without being in the least reconciled to the catastrophe that had happened. If she would only have listened to me, I should still have gone on obstinately pleading with her. But she flatly refused to listen. “We have very little time to spare,” she said. “Let us talk of something more interesting before I am obliged to leave you.”
“Obliged to leave me?” I repeated. “Are you not your own mistress?”
Her face clouded over; her manner became embarrassed.
“I cannot honestly tell you that I am a prisoner,” she answered. “I can only say I am watched. When Oscar is away from me, Oscar’s cousin—a sly, suspicious, false woman—always contrives to put herself in his place. I heard her say to her husband that she believed I should break my marriage engagement unless I was closely looked after. I don’t know what I should do, but for one of the servants in the house, who is an excellent creature—who sympathizes with me, and helps me.” She stopped, and lifted her head inquiringly. “Where is the servant?” she asked.
I had forgotten the woman who had brought her into the room. She must have delicately left us together after leading Lucilla in. When I looked up, she was not to be seen.
“The servant is no doubt waiting downstairs,” I said. “Go on.”
“But for that good creature,” Lucilla resumed, “I should never have got here. She brought me your letter, and read it to me, and wrote my reply. I arranged with her to slip out at the first opportunity. One chance was in our favour—we had only the cousin to keep an eye on us. Oscar was not in the house.”
She suddenly checked herself at the last word. A slight sound at the lower end of the room, which had passed unnoticed by me, had caught her delicate ear, “What is that noise?” she asked. “Anybody in the room with us?”
I looked up once more. While she was talking of the false Oscar, the true Oscar was standing listening to her, at the other end of the room.
When he discovered that I was looking at him, he entreated me by a gesture not to betray his presence. He had evidently heard what we had been saying to each other, before I detected him—for he touched his eyes, and lifted his hands pityingly in allusion to Lucilla’s blindness. Whatever his mood might be, that melancholy discovery must surely have affected him—Lucilla’s influence over him now, could only be an influence for good. I signed to him to remain—and told Lucilla that there was nothing to be alarmed about. She went on.
“Oscar left us for London early this morning,” she said. “Can you guess what he has gone for? He has gone to get the Marriage License—he has given notice of the marriage at the church. My last hope is in you. In spite of everything that I can say to him, he has fixed the day for the twenty-first—in two days more! I have done all I could to put it off; I have insisted on every possible delay. Oh, if you knew——!” Her rising agitation stifled her utterance at the moment. “I mustn’t waste the precious minutes; I must get back before Oscar returns,” she went on, rallying again. “Oh, my old friend, you are never at a loss; you always know what to do! Find me some way of putting off my marriage. Suggest something which will take them by surprise, and force them to give me time!”
I looked towards the lower end of the room. Listening in breathless interest, Oscar had noiselessly advanced half-way towards us. At a sign from me, he checked himself and came no farther.
“Do you really mean, Lucilla, that you no longer love him?” I said.
“I can tell you nothing about it,” she answered—“except that some dreadful change has come over me. While I had my sight, I could partly account for it—I believed that the new sense had made a new being of me. But now I have lost my sight again—now I am once more what I have been all my life—still the same horrible insensibility possesses me. I have so little feeling for him, that I sometimes find it hard to persuade myself that he really is Oscar. You know how I used to adore him. You know how enchanted I should once have been to marry him. Think of what I must suffer, feeling towards him as I feel now!”
I looked up again. Oscar had stolen nearer; I could see his face plainly. The good influence of Lucilla was beginning to do its good work! I saw the tears rising in his eyes; I saw love and pity taking the
place of hatred and revenge. The Oscar of my old recollections was standing before me once more!
“I don’t want to go away,” Lucilla went on; “I don’t want to leave him. All I ask for, is a little more time. Time must help me to get back again to my old self. My blind days have been the days of my whole life. Can a few weeks of sight have deprived me of the feelings which have been growing in me for years? I won’t believe it! I can find my way about the house; I can tell things by my touch; I can do all that I did in my blindness, just as well as ever, now I am blind again. The feeling for him will come back to me like the rest. Only give me time! only give me time!”
At the last word, she started to her feet in sudden alarm. “There is some one in the room,” she said. “Some one who is crying! Who is it?”
Oscar was close to us. The tears were falling fast over his cheeks—the one faint sobbing breath which had escaped him had caught my ear as well as Lucilla’s. I took his hand in one of my hands; and I took Lucilla’s hand in the other. For good or for evil, the result rested with God’s mercy. The time had come.
“Who is it?” Lucilla repeated impatiently.
“Try if you can tell, my love, without asking me.”
With those words, I put her hand in Oscar’s hand—and stood close, watching her face.
For one awful moment, when she first felt the familiar touch, the blood left her cheeks. Her blind eyes dilated fearfully. She stood petrified. Then, with a long low cry—a cry of breathless rapture—she flung her arms passionately round his neck. The life flowed back into her face; her lovely smile just trembled on her parted lips; her breath came faint and quick and fluttering. In soft tones of ecstasy, with her lips on his cheek, she murmured the delicious words:
“Oh, Oscar! I know you once more!”
CHAPTER THE FIFTIETH
The End of the Journey
A LITTLE interval of time elapsed.
Her first exquisite sense of the recognition by touch had passed away. Her mind had recovered its balance. She separated herself from Oscar, and turned to me, with the one inevitable question which I knew must follow the joining of their hands.
“What does it mean?”
The exposure of Nugent’s perfidy; the revelation of the fatal secret of Oscar’s face; and, last not least, the defence of my own conduct towards her, were all comprehended in the answer for which that question called. As carefully, as delicately, as mercifully as I could, I disclosed to her the whole truth. How the shock affected her, she did not tell me at the time, and has never told me since. With her hand in Oscar’s hand, with her face hidden on Oscar’s breast, she listened; not once interrupting me, from first to last, by so much as a single word. Now and then, I saw her tremble; now and then I heard her sigh heavily. That was all. It was only when I had ended—it was only after a long interval during which Oscar and I watched her in speechless anxiety—that she slowly lifted her head and broke the silence.
“Thank God,” we heard her say to herself fervently—“Thank God, I am blind.”
Those were her first words. They filled me with horror. I cried out to her to recall them.
She quietly laid her head back on Oscar’s breast.
“Why should I recall them?” she asked. “Do you think I wish to see him disfigured as he is now? No! I wish to see him—and I do see him!—as my fancy drew his picture in the first days of our love. My blindness is my blessing. It has given me back my old delightful sensation when I touch him; it keeps my own beloved image of him—the one image I care for—unchanged and unchangeable. You will persist in thinking that my happiness depends on my sight. I look back with horror at what I suffered when I had my sight—my one effort is to forget that miserable time. Oh, how little you know of me! Oh, what a shock it would be to me, if I saw him as you see him! Try to understand me, and you won’t talk of my loss—you will talk of my gain.”
“Your gain?” I repeated. “What have you gained?”
“Happiness,” she answered. “My life lives in my love. And my love lives in my blindness.”
There was the story of her whole existence—told in two words!
If you had seen her radiant face as she raised it again in the excitement of speaking; if you had remembered (as I remembered) what her surgeon had said of the penalty which she must inevitably pay for the recovery of her sight—how would you have answered her? It is barely possible, perhaps, that you might have done what I did. That is to say: You might have modestly admitted that she knew what the conditions of her happiness were better than you—and you might not have answered her at all!
I left them to talk together, and took a turn in the room, considering with myself what we were to do next.
It was not easy to say. The barren information which I had received from my darling was all the information that I possessed. Nugent had unflinchingly carried his cruel deception to its end. He had falsely given notice of his marriage at the church, in his brother’s name; and he was now in London, falsely obtaining his Marriage License, in his brother’s name also. So much I knew of his proceedings—and no more.
While I was still pondering, Lucilla cut the Gordian knot.
“Why are we stopping here?” she asked. “Let us go—and never return to this hateful place again!”
As she rose to her feet, we were startled by a soft knock at the door.
I answered the knock. The woman who had brought Lucilla to the hotel appeared once more. She seemed to be afraid to venture far from the door. Standing just inside the room, she looked nervously at Lucilla, and said, “Can I speak to you, Miss?”
“You can say anything you like, before this lady and gentleman,” Lucilla answered. “What is it?”
“I’m afraid we have been followed, Miss.”
“Followed? By whom?”
“By the lady’s maid. I saw her, a little while since, looking up at the hotel—and then she went back in a hurry on the way to the house—and that’s not the worse of it, Miss.”
“What else has happened?”
“We have made a mistake about the railway,” said the woman. “There’s a train from London that we didn’t notice in the timetable. They tell me downstairs it came in more than a quarter of an hour ago. Please to come back, Miss—or I fear we shall be found out.”
“You can go back at once, Jane,” said Lucilla.
“By myself?”
“Yes. Thank you for bringing me here—here I remain.”
She had barely taken her seat again between Oscar and me, before the door was softly opened from the outside. A long thin nervous hand stole in through the opening; took the servant by the arm; and drew her out into the passage. In her place, a man entered the room with his hat on. The man was Nugent Dubourg.
He stopped where the servant had stopped. He looked at Lucilla; he looked at his brother; he looked at me.
Not a word fell from him. There he stood, fronting the friend whom he had calumniated and the brother whom he had betrayed. There he stood—with his eyes fixed on Lucilla, sitting between us—knowing that it was all over; knowing that the woman for whom he had degraded himself, was a woman parted from him for ever. There he stood, in the hell of his own making—and devoured his torture in silence.
On his brother’s appearance, Oscar had risen, and had raised Lucilla with him. He now advanced a step towards Nugent, still holding to him his betrothed wife.
I followed them, eagerly watching his face. There was no fear in me now of what he might do. Lucilla’s blessed influence had found, and cast out, the lurking demon that had been hidden in him. With a mind attentive but not alarmed, I waited to see how he would meet the emergency that confronted him.
“Nugent!” he said, very quietly.
Nugent’s head drooped—he made no answer.
Lucilla, hearing Oscar pronounce the name, instantly understood what had happened. She shuddered with horror. Oscar gently placed her in my arms, and advanced again alone towards his brother. His face expressed the strugg
le in him of some subtly-mingling influences of love and anguish, of sorrow and shame. He recalled to me in the strangest manner my past experience of him, when he had first trusted me with the story of the Trial, and when he had told me that Nugent was the good angel of his life.
He went up to the place at which his brother was standing. In the simple, boyish way, so familiar to me in the bygone time, he laid his hand on his brother’s arm.
“Nugent!” he said. “Are you the same dear good brother who saved me from dying on the scaffold, and who cheered my hard life afterwards? Are you the same bright, clever, noble fellow that I was always so fond of, and so proud of?”
He paused, and removed his brother’s hat. With careful, caressing hand, he parted his brother’s ruffled hair over the forehead. Nugent’s head sank lower. His face was distorted, his hands were clenched, in the dumb agony of remembrance which that tender voice and that kind hand had set loose in him. Oscar gave him time to recover himself: Oscar spoke next to me.
“You know Nugent,” he said. “You remember when we first met, my telling you that Nugent was an angel? You saw for yourself, when he came to Dimchurch, how kindly he helped me; how faithfully he kept my secrets; what a true friend he was. Look at him—and you will feel, as I do, that we have misunderstood and misinterpreted him, in some monstrous way.” He turned again to Nugent. “I daren’t tell you,” he went on, “what I have heard about you, and what I have believed about you, and what vile unbrotherly thoughts I have had of being revenged on you. Thank God, they are gone! My dear fellow, I look back at them—now I see you—as I might look back at a horrible dream. How can I see you, Nugent, and believe that you have been false to me? You, a villain who has tried to rob poor Me of the only woman in the world who cares for me! You, so handsome and so popular, who may marry any woman you like! It can’t be. You have drifted innocently into some false position without knowing it. Defend yourself. No. Let me defend you. You shan’t humble yourself to anybody. Tell me how you have really acted towards Lucilla, and towards me—and leave it to your brother to set you right with everybody. Come, Nugent! lift up your head—and tell me what I shall say.”
