"You have forced it out of me. Now you have had your way, never mind my
feelings--Go!"
Those were the first words the Hero of the Trial said to me, when he was
able to speak again! He withdrew with a curious sullen resignation to the
farther end of the room. There he stood looking at me, as a man might
have looked who carried some contagion about him, and who wished to
preserve a healthy fellow-creature from the peril of touching him.
"Why should I go?" I asked.
"You are a bold woman," he said, "to remain in the same room with a man
who has been pointed at as a murderer, and who has been tried for his
life."
The same unhealthy state of mind which had brought him to Dimchurch, and
which had led him to speak to me as he had spoken on the previous
evening, was, as I understood it, now irritating him against me as a
person who had made his own quick temper the means of entrapping him into
letting out the truth. How was I to deal with a man in this condition? I
decided to perform the feat which you call in England, "taking the bull
by the horns."
"I see but one man here," I said. "A man honorably acquitted of a crime
which he was incapable of committing. A man who deserves my interest, and
claims my sympathy. Shake hands, Mr. Dubourg."
I spoke to him in a good hearty voice, and I gave him a good hearty
squeeze. The poor, weak, lonely, persecuted young fellow dropped his head
on my shoulder like a child, and burst out crying.
"Don't despise me!" he said, as soon as he had got his breath again. "It
breaks a man down to have stood in the dock, and to have had hundreds of
hard-hearted people staring at him in horror--without his deserving it.
Besides, I have been very lonely, ma'am, since my brother left me."
We sat down again, side by side. He was the strangest compound of
anomalies I had ever met with. Throw him into one of those passions in
which he flamed out so easily--and you would have said, This is a tiger.
Wait till he had cooled down again to his customary mild temperature--and
you would have said with equal truth, This is a lamb.
"One thing rather surprises me, Mr. Dubourg," I went on. "I can't quite
understand----"
"Don't call me Mr. Dubourg," he interposed. "You remind me of the
disgrace which has forced me to change my name. Call me by my Christian
name. It's a foreign name. You are a foreigner by your accent--you will
like me all the better for having a foreign name. I was christened
'Oscar'--after my mother's brother: my mother was a Jersey woman. Call me
'Oscar.'--What is it you don't understand?"
"In your present situation," I resumed, "I don't understand your brother
leaving you here all by yourself."
He was on the point of flaming out again at that.
"Not a word against my brother!" he exclaimed fiercely. "My brother is
the noblest creature that God ever created! You must own that
yourself--you know what he did at the trial. I should have died on the
scaffold but for that angel. I insist on it that he is not a man. He is
an angel!"
(I admitted that his brother was an angel. The concession instantly
pacified him.)
"People say there is no difference between us," he went on, drawing his
chair companionably close to mine. "Ah, people are so shallow!
Personally, I grant you, we are exactly alike. (You have heard that we
are twins?) But there it ends, unfortunately for _me._ Nugent--(my
brother was christened Nugent after my father)--Nugent is a hero! Nugent
is a genius. I should have died if he hadn't taken care of me after the
trial. I had nobody but him. We are orphans; we have no brothers or
sisters. Nugent felt the disgrace even more than I felt it--but _he_
could control himself. It fell more heavily on him than it did on me.
I'll tell you why. Nugent was in a fair way to make our family name--the
name that we have been obliged to drop--famous all over the world. He is
a painter--a landscape painter. Have you never heard of him? Ah, you soon
will! Where do you think he has gone to? He has gone to the wilds of
America, in search of new subjects. He is going to found a school of
landscape painting. On an immense scale. A scale that has never been
attempted yet. Dear fellow! Shall I tell you what he said when he left me
here? Noble words--I call them noble words. 'Oscar, I go to make our
assumed name famous. You shall be honorably known--you shall be
illustrious, as the brother of Nugent Dubourg.' Do you think I could
stand in the way of such a career as that? After what he has sacrificed
for _me,_ could I let Such a Man stagnate here--for no better purpose
than to keep me company? What does it matter about _my_ feeling lonely?
Who am I? Oh, if you had seen how he bore with the horrible notoriety
that followed us, after the trial! He was constantly stared at and
pointed at, for _me._ Not a word of complaint escaped him. He snapped his
fingers at it. 'That for public opinion!' he said. What strength of
mind--eh? From one place after another we moved and moved, and still
there were the photographs, and the newspapers, and the whole infamous
story ('romance in real life,' they called it), known beforehand to
everybody. _He_ never lost heart. 'We shall find a place yet' (that was
the cheerful way he put it); 'you have nothing to do with it, Oscar; you
are safe in my hands; I promise you exactly the place of refuge you
want.' It was he who got all the information, and found out this lonely
part of England where you live. _I_ thought it pretty as we wandered
about the hills--it wasn't half grand enough for _him._ We lost
ourselves. I began to feel nervous. He didn't mind it a bit. 'You have Me
with you,' he said; 'My luck is always to be depended on. Mark what I
say! We shall stumble on a village!' You will hardly believe me--in ten
minutes more, we stumbled, exactly as he had foretold, on this place. He
didn't leave me--when I had prevailed on him to go--without a
recommendation. He recommended me to the landlord of the inn here. He
said, 'My brother is delicate; my brother wishes to live in retirement;
you will oblige me by looking after my brother.' Wasn't it kind? The
landlord seemed to be quite affected by it. Nugent cried when he took
leave of me. Ah, what would I not give to have a heart like his and a
mind like his! It's something--isn't it?--to have a face like him. I
often say that to myself when I look in the glass. Excuse my running on
in this way. When I once begin to talk of Nugent, I don't know when to
leave off."
One thing, at any rate, was plainly discernible in this otherwise
inscrutable young man. He adored his twin-brother.
It would have been equally clear to me that Mr. Nugent Dubourg deserved
to be worshipped, if I could have reconciled to my mind his leaving his
brother to shift for himself in such a place as Dimchurch. I was obliged
to remind myself of the admirable service which he had rendered at the
trial, before I could decide to do him the justice of suspending my
opinion of him, in his absence. Having accomplished this act of
magnanimity, I took advantage of the first opportunity to change the
subject. The most tiresome information that I am acquainted with, is the
information which tells us of the virtues of an absent person--when that
absent person happens to be a stranger.
"Is it true that you have taken Browndown for six months?" I asked. "Are
you really going to settle at Dimchurch?"
"Yes--if you keep my secret," he answered. "The people here know nothing
about me. Don't, pray don't, tell them who I am! You will drive me away,
if you do."
"I must tell Miss Finch who you are," I said.
"No! no! no!" he exclaimed eagerly. "I can't bear the idea of her knowing
it. I have been so horribly degraded. What will she think of me?" He
burst into another explosion of rhapsodies on the subject of
Lucilla--mixed up with renewed petitions to me to keep his story
concealed from everybody. I lost all patience with his want of common
fortitude and common sense.
"Young Oscar, I should like to box your ears!" I said. "You are in a
villainously unwholesome state about this matter. Have you nothing else
to think of? Have you no profession? Are you not obliged to work for your
living?"
I spoke, as you perceive, with some force of expression--aided by a
corresponding asperity of voice and manner.
Mr. Oscar Dubourg looked at me with the puzzled air of a man who feels an
overflow of new ideas forcing itself into his mind. He modestly admitted
the degrading truth. From his childhood upwards, he had only to put his
hand in his pocket, and to find the money there, without any preliminary
necessity of earning it first. His father had been a fashionable
portrait-painter, and had married one of his sitters--an heiress. Oscar
and Nugent had been left in the detestable position of independent
gentlemen. The dignity of labor was a dignity unknown to these degraded
young men. "I despise a wealthy idler," I said to Oscar, with my
republican severity. "You want the ennobling influence of labor to make a
man of you. Nobody has a right to be idle--nobody has a right to be rich.
You would be in a more wholesome state of mind about yourself, my young
gentleman, if you had to earn your bread and cheese before you ate it."
He stared at me piteously. The noble sentiments which I had inherited
from Doctor Pratolungo, completely bewildered Mr. Oscar Dubourg.
"Don't be angry with me," he said, in his innocent way. "I couldn't eat
my cheese, if I did earn it. I can't digest cheese. Besides, I employ
myself as much as I can." He took his little golden vase from the table
behind him, and told me what I had already heard him tell Lucilla while I
was listening at the window. "You would have found me at work this
morning," he went on, "if the stupid people who send me my metal plates
had not made a mistake. The alloy, in the gold and silver both, is all
wrong this time. I must return the plates to be melted again before I can
do anything with them. They are all ready to go back to-day, when the
cart comes. If there are any laboring people here who want money, I'm
sure I will give them some of mine with the greatest pleasure. It isn't
my fault, ma'am, that my father married my mother. And how could I help
it if he left two thousand a year each to my brother and me?"
Two thousand a year each to his brother and him! And the illustrious
Pratolungo had never known what it was to have five pounds sterling at
his disposal before his union with Me!
I lifted my eyes to the ceiling. In my righteous indignation, I forgot
Lucilla and her curiosity about Oscar--I forgot Oscar and his horror of
Lucilla discovering who he was. I opened my lips to speak. In another
moment I should have launched my thunderbolts against the whole infamous
system of modern society, when I was silenced by the most extraordinary
and unexpected interruption that ever closed a woman's lips.