AT that astounding confession, abruptly revealed in those plain words,
even resolute Nugent lost all power of self-control. He burst out with a
cry which reached Lucilla's ears. She instantly turned towards us, and
instantly assumed that the cry had come from Oscar's lips.
"Ah! there you are!" she exclaimed. "Oscar! Oscar! what is the matter
with you to-day?"
Oscar was incapable of answering her. He had cast one glance of entreaty
at his brother as Lucilla came nearer to us. The mute reproach which had
answered him, in Nugent's eyes, had broken down his last reserves of
endurance. He was crying silently on Nugent's breast.
It was necessary that one of us should make his, or her, voice heard. I
spoke first.
"Nothing is the matter, my dear," I said, advancing to meet Lucilla. "We
were passing the house, and Oscar ran out to stop us and bring us in."
My excuses roused a new alarm in her.
"Us?" she repeated. "Who is with you?"
"Nugent is with me."
The result of the deplorable misunderstanding which had taken place,
instantly declared itself. She turned deadly pale under the horror of
feeling that she was in the presence of the man with the blue face.
"Take me near enough to speak to him, but not to touch him," she
whispered. "I have heard what he is like. (Oh, if you saw him, as I see
him, _in the dark!_) I must control myself. I must speak to Oscar's
brother, for Oscar's sake."
She seized my arm and held me close to her. What ought I to have said?
What ought I to have done? I neither knew what to say or what to do. I
looked from Lucilla to the twin brothers. There was Oscar the Weak,
overwhelmed by the humiliating position in which he had placed himself
towards the woman whom he was to marry, towards the brother whom he
loved! And there was Nugent the Strong, master of himself; with his arm
round his brother, with his head erect, with his hand signing to me to
keep silence. He was right. I had only to look back at Lucilla's face to
see that the delicate and perilous work of undeceiving her, was not work
to be done at a moment's notice, on the spot.
"You are not yourself to-day," I said to her. "Let us go home."
"No!" she answered. "I must accustom myself to speak to him. I will begin
to-day. Take me to him--but don't let him touch me!"
Nugent disengaged himself from Oscar--whose unfitness to help us through
our difficulties was too manifest to be mistaken--as he saw us
approaching. He pointed to the low wall in front of the house, and
motioned to his brother to wait there out of the way before Lucilla could
speak to him again. The wisdom of this proceeding was not long in
asserting itself. Lucilla asked for Oscar the moment after he had left
us. Nugent answered that Oscar had gone back to the house to get his hat.
The sound of Nugent's voice helped her to calculate her distance from him
without assistance from me. Still holding my arm, she stopped and spoke
to him.
"Nugent," she said, "I have made Oscar tell me--what he ought to have
told me long since." (She paused between each sentence; painfully
controlling herself, painfully catching her breath.) "He has discovered a
foolish antipathy of mine. I don't know how; I tried to keep it a secret
from him. I need not tell you what it is."
She made a longer pause at those words, holding me closer and closer to
her; struggling more and more painfully against the irresistible nervous
loathing that had got possession of her.
He listened, on his side, with the constraint which always fell upon him
in her presence more marked than ever. His eyes were on the ground. He
seemed reluctant even to look at her.
"I think I understand," she went on, "why Oscar was unwilling to tell
me----" she stopped, at a loss how to express herself without running the
risk of hurting his feelings--"to tell me," she resumed, "what it is in
you which is not like other people. He was afraid my stupid weakness
might prejudice me against you. I wish to say that I won't let it do
that. I never was more ashamed of it than now. I, too, have my
misfortune. I ought to sympathize with you, instead of----"
Her voice had been growing fainter and fainter as she proceeded. She
leaned against me heavily. One glance at her told me that if I let it go
on any longer she would fall into a swoon. "Tell your brother that we
have gone back to the rectory," I said to Nugent. He looked up at Lucilla
for the first time.
"You are right," he answered. "Take her home." He repeated the sign by
which he had already hinted to me to be silent--and joined Oscar at the
wall in front of the house.
"Has he gone?" she asked.
"He has gone."
The moisture stood thick on her forehead. I passed my handkerchief over
her face, and turned her towards the wind.
"Are you better now?"
"Yes."
"Can you walk home?"
"Easily."
I put her arm in mine. After advancing with me a few steps, she suddenly
stopped--with a blind apprehension, as it seemed, of something in front
of her. She lifted her little walking-cane, and moved it slowly backwards
and forwards in the empty air, with the action of some one who is
clearing away an encumbrance to a free advance--say the action of a
person walking in a thick wood, and pushing aside the lower twigs and
branches that intercept the way.
"What are you about?" I asked.
"Clearing the air," she answered. "The air is full of him. I am in a
forest of hovering figures, with faces of black-blue. Give me your arm.
Come through!"
"Lucilla!"
"Don't be angry with me. I am coming to my senses again. Nobody knows
what folly, what madness it is, better than I do. I have a will of my
own: suffer as I may, I promise to break myself of it this time. I can't,
and won't let Oscar's brother see that he is an object of horror to me."
She stopped once more, and gave me a little propitiatory kiss. "Blame my
blindness, dear, don't blame _me._ If I could only see--! Ah, how can I
make you understand me, you who don't live in the dark?" She went on a
few paces, silent and thoughtful--and then spoke again. "You won't laugh
at me, if I say something?"
"You know I won't."
"Suppose yourself to be in bed at night."
"Yes?"
"I have heard people say that they have sometimes woke in the middle of
the night, on a sudden, without any noise to disturb them. And they have
fancied (without anything particular to justify it) that there was
something, or somebody, in the dark room. Has that ever happened to you?"
"Certainly, my love.--It has happened to most people to fancy what you
say, when their nerves are a little out of order."
"Very well. There is _my_ fancy, and there are _my_ nerves. When it
happened to you, what did you do?"
"I struck a light, and satisfied myself that I was wrong."
"Suppose yourself without candle or matches, in a night without end, left
alone with your fancy in the dark. There you have Me! It would not be
easy, would it, to satisfy yourself; if you were in that helpless
condition? You might suffer under it--very unreasonably--and yet very
keenly for all that." She lifted her little cane, with a sad smile. "You
might be almost as great a fool as poor Lucilla, and clear the air before
you with this!"
The charm of her voice and her manner, added to the touching simplicity,
the pathetic truth of those words. She made me realize, as I had never
realized before, what it is to have, at one and the same time, the
blessing of imagination, and the curse of blindness. For a moment, I was
absorbed in my admiration and my love for her. For a moment, I forgot the
terrible position in which we were all placed. She unconsciously recalled
it to me when she spoke next.
"Perhaps I was wrong to force the truth out of Oscar?" she said, putting
her arm again in mine, and walking on. "I might have reconciled myself to
his brother, if I had never known what his brother was like. And yet I
felt there was something strange in him, without being told, and without
knowing what it was. There must have been a reason in me for the dislike
that I felt for him from the first."
Those words appeared to me to indicate the state of mind which had led to
Lucilla's deplorable mistake. I cautiously put some questions to her to
test the correctness of my own idea.
"You spoke just now of forcing the truth out of Oscar," I said, "What
made you suspect that he was concealing the truth from you?"
"He was so strangely embarrassed and confused," she answered. "Anybody in
my place would have suspected him of concealing the truth."
So far the answer was conclusive.
"And how came you to find out what the truth really was?" I asked next.
"I guessed at it," she replied, "from something he said in referring to
his brother. You know that I took a fanciful dislike to Nugent Dubourg
before he came to Dimchurch?"
"Yes."
"And you remember that my prejudice against him was confirmed, on the
first day when I passed my hand over his face to compare it with his
brother's."
"I remember."
"Well--while Oscar was rambling and contradicting himself--he said
something (a mere trifle) which suggested to me that the person with the
blue face must be his brother. There was the explanation that I had
sought for in vain--the explanation of my persistent dislike to Nugent!
That horrid dark face of his must have produced some influence on me when
I first touched it, like the influence which your horrid purple dress
produced on me, when I first touched _that._ Don't you see?"
I saw but too plainly. Oscar had been indebted for his escape from
discovery entirely to Lucilla's misinterpretation of his language. And
Lucilla's misinterpretation now stood revealed as the natural product of
her anxiety to account for her prejudice against Nugent Dubourg. Although
the mischief had been done--still, for the quieting of my own conscience,
I made an attempt to shake her faith in the false conclusion at which she
had arrived.
"There is one thing I don't see yet," I said. "I don't understand Oscar's
embarrassment in speaking to you. As you interpret him, what had he to be
afraid of?"
She smiled satirically.
"What has become of your memory, my dear?" she asked. "What were you
afraid of? You certainly never said a word to me of this poor man's
deformity. You felt yourself, I suppose, (just as Oscar felt himself),
placed between a choice of difficulties. On one side, my dislike of dark
colors and dark people warned Oscar to hold his tongue. On the other, my
hatred of having advantage taken of my blindness to keep things secret
from me, pressed him to speak out. Isn't that enough--with his shy
disposition, poor fellow--to account for his being embarrassed? Besides,"
she added, speaking more seriously, "perhaps he saw in my manner towards
him that he had disappointed and pained me."
"How?" I asked.
"Don't you remember his once acknowledging in the garden that he had
painted his face in the character of Bluebeard, to amuse the children? It
was not delicate, it was not affectionate--it was not like him--to show
such insensibility as that to his brother's shocking disfigurement. He
ought to have remembered it, he ought to have respected it. There! we
will say no more. We will go indoors and open the piano and try to
forget."
Even Oscar's clumsy excuse in the garden--instead of confirming her
suspicion--had lent itself to strengthen the foregone conclusion rooted
in her mind! At that critical moment--before I had consulted with the
twin-brothers as to what was to be done next--it was impossible to say
more. I felt seriously alarmed when I thought of the future. When she was
told--as told she must be--of the dreadful delusion into which she had
fallen, what would be the result to Oscar? what would be the effect on
herself? I own I shrank from pursuing the inquiry.
When we reached the turn in the valley, I looked back at Browndown for
the last time. The twin-brothers were still in the place at which we had
left them. Though the faces were indistinguishable, I could still see the
figures plainly--Oscar sitting crouched up on the wall; Nugent erect at
his side, with one hand laid on his shoulder. Even at that distance, the
types of the two characters were expressed in the attitudes of the two
men. As we entered the new winding of the valley which shut them out from
view, I felt (so easy is it to comfort a woman!) that the commanding
position of Nugent had produced its encouraging impression on my mind.
"He will find a way out of it," I said to myself, "Nugent will help us
through!"