THE interval-day before the second appearance of Herr Grosse, and the
experiment on Lucilla's sight that was to follow it, was marked by two
incidents which ought to be noticed in this place.
The first incident was the arrival, early in the morning, of another
letter addressed to me privately by Oscar Dubourg. Like many other shy
people, he had a perfect mania, where any embarrassing circumstances were
concerned, for explaining himself, with difficulty, by means of his pen,
in preference to explaining himself, with ease, by means of his tongue.
Oscar's present communication informed me that he had left us for London
by the first morning train, and that his object in taking this sudden
journey was--to state his present position towards Lucilla to a gentleman
especially conversant with the peculiarities of blind people. In plain
words, he had resolved on applying to Mr. Sebright for advice.
"I like Mr. Sebright" (Oscar wrote) "as cordially as I detest Herr
Grosse. The short conversation I had with him has left me with the
pleasantest impression of his delicacy and his kindness. If I freely
reveal to this skillful surgeon the sad situation in which I am placed, I
believe his experience will throw an entirely new light on the present
state of Lucilla's mind, and on the changes which we may expect to see
produced in her, if she really does recover her sight. The result may be
of incalculable benefit in teaching me how I may own the truth, most
harmlessly to her, as well as to myself. Pray don't suppose I undervalue
your advice. I only want to be doubly fortified, before I risk my
confession, by the advice of a scientific man."
All this I took to mean, in plain English, that vacillating Oscar wanted
to quiet his conscience by gaining time, and that his absurd idea of
consulting Mr. Sebright was nothing less than a new and plausible excuse
for putting off the evil day. His letter ended by pledging me to secrecy,
and by entreating me so to manage matters as to grant him a private
interview on his return to Dimchurch by the evening train.
I confess I felt some curiosity as to what would come of the proposed
consultation between unready Oscar and precise Mr. Sebright--and I
accordingly arranged to take my walk alone, towards eight o'clock that
evening, on the road that led to the distant railway station.
The second incident of the day may be described as a confidential
conversation between Lucilla and myself, on the subject which now equally
absorbed us both--the momentous subject of her restoration to the
blessing of sight.
She joined me at the breakfast-table with her ready distrust newly
excited, poor thing, by Oscar. He had accounted to her for his journey to
London by putting forward the commonplace excuse of "business." She
instantly suspected (knowing how he felt about it) that he was secretly
bent on interfering with the performance of the operation by Herr Grosse.
I contrived to compose the anxiety thus aroused in her mind, by informing
her, on Oscar's own authority, that he personally disliked and distrusted
the German oculist. "Make your mind easy," I said. "I answer for his not
venturing near Herr Grosse."
A long silence between us followed those words. When Lucilla next
referred to Oscar in connection with the coming operation, the depressed
state of her spirits seemed to have quite altered her view of her own
prospects. She, of all the people in the world, now spoke in
disparagement of the blessing conferred on the blind by the recovery of
their sight!
"Do you know one thing?" she said. "If I had not been going to be married
to Oscar, I doubt if I should have cared to put any oculist, native or
foreign, to the trouble of coming to Dimchurch."
"I don't think I understand you," I answered. "You cannot surely mean to
say that you would not have been glad, under any circumstances, to
recover your sight?"
"That is just what I do mean to say."
"What! you, who have written to Grosse to hurry the operation, don't care
to see?"
"I only care to see Oscar. And, what is more, I only care to see him
because I am in love with him. But for that, I really don't feel as if it
would give me any particular pleasure to use my eyes. I have been blind
so long, I have learnt to do without them."
"And yet, you looked perfectly entranced when Nugent first set you
doubting whether you were blind for life?"
"Nugent took me by surprise," she answered; "Nugent startled me out of my
senses. I have had time to think since; I am not carried away by the
enthusiasm of the moment now. You people who can see attach such an
absurd importance to your eyes! I set my touch, my dear, against your
eyes, as much the most trustworthy, and much the most intelligent sense
of the two. If Oscar was not, as I have said, the uppermost feeling with
me, shall I tell you what I should have infinitely preferred to
recovering my sight--supposing it could have been done?" She shook her
head with a comic resignation to circumstances. "Unfortunately, it can't
be done!"
"What can't be done?"
She suddenly held out both her arms over the breakfast-table.
"The stretching out of _these_ to an enormous and unheard-of length. That
is what I should have liked!" she answered. "I could find out better what
was going on at a distance with my hands, than you could with your eyes
and your telescopes. What doubts I might set at rest for instance about
the planetary system, among the people who can see, if I could only
stretch out far enough to touch the stars."
"This is talking sheer nonsense, Lucilla!"
"Is it? Just tell me which knows best in the dark--my touch or your eyes?
Who has got a sense that she can always trust to serve her equally well
through the whole four-and-twenty hours? You or me? But for Oscar--to
speak in sober earnest, this time--I tell you I would much rather perfect
the sense in me that I have already got, than have a sense given to me
that I have _not_ got. Until I knew Oscar, I don't think I ever honestly
envied any of you the use of your eyes."
"You astonish me, Lucilla!"
She rattled her teaspoon impatiently in her empty cup.
"Can you always trust your eyes, even in broad daylight?" she burst out.
"How often do they deceive you, in the simplest things? What did I hear
you all disputing about the other day in the garden? You were looking at
some view?"
"Yes--at the view down the alley of trees at the other end of the
churchyard wall."
"Some object in the alley had attracted general notice--had it not?"
"Yes--an object at the further end of it."
"I heard you up here. You all differed in opinion, in spite of your
wonderful eyes. My father said it moved. You said it stood still. Oscar
said it was a man. Mrs. Finch said it was a calf. Nugent ran off, and
examined this amazing object at close quarters. And what did it turn out
to be? A stump of an old tree blown across the road in the night! Why am
I to envy people the possession of a sense which plays them such tricks
as that? No! no! Herr Grosse is going to 'cut into my cataracts,' as he
calls it--because I am going to be married to a man I love; and I fancy,
like a fool, I may love him better still, if I can see him. I may be
quite wrong," she added archly. "It may end in my not loving him half as
well as I do now!"
I thought of Oscar's face, and felt a sickening fear that she might be
speaking far more seriously than she suspected. I tried to change the
subject. No! Her imaginative nature had found its way into a new region
of speculation before I could open my lips.
"I associate light," she said thoughtfully, "with all that is beautiful
and heavenly--and dark with all that is vile and horrible and devilish. I
wonder how light and dark will look to me when I see?"
"I believe they will astonish you," I answered, "by being entirely unlike
what you fancy them to be now."
She started. I had alarmed her without intending it.
"Will Oscar's face be utterly unlike what I fancy it to be now?" she
asked, in suddenly altered tones. "Do you mean to say that I have not had
the right image of him in my mind all this time?"
I tried again to draw her off to another topic. What more could I
do--with my tongue tied by the German's warning to us not to agitate her,
in the face of the operation to be performed on the next day?
It was quite useless. She went on, as before, without heeding me.
"Have I no means of judging rightly what Oscar is like?" she said. "I
touch my own face; I know how long it is and how broad it is; I know how
big the different features are, and where they are. And then I touch
Oscar, and compare his face with my knowledge of my own face. Not a
single detail escapes me. I see him in my mind as plainly as you see me
across this table. Do you mean to say, when I see him with my eyes, that
I shall discover something perfectly new to me? I don't believe it!" She
started up impatiently, and took a turn in the room. "Oh!" she exclaimed,
with a stamp of her foot, "why can't I take laudanum enough, or
chloroform enough to kill me for the next six weeks--and then come to
life again when the German takes the bandage off my eyes!" She sat down
once more, and drifted all on a sudden into a question of pure morality.
"Tell me this," she said. "Is the greatest virtue, the virtue which it is
most difficult to practice?"
"I suppose so," I answered.
She drummed with both hands on the table, petulantly, viciously, as hard
as she could.
"Then, Madame Pratolungo," she said, "the greatest of all the virtues
is--Patience. Oh, my friend, how I hate the greatest of all the virtues
at this moment!"
That ended it--there the conversation found its way into other topics at
last.
Thinking afterwards of the new side of her mind which Lucilla had shown
to me, I derived one consolation from what had passed at the
breakfast-table. If Mr. Sebright proved to be right, and if the operation
failed after all, I had Lucilla's word for it that blindness, of itself,
is not the terrible affliction to the blind which the rest of us fancy it
to be--because we can see.
Towards half-past seven in the evening, I went out alone, as I had
planned, to meet Oscar on his return from London.
At a long straight stretch of the road, I saw him advancing towards me.
He was walking more rapidly than usual, and singing as he walked. Even
through its livid discoloration, the poor fellow's face looked radiant
with happiness as he came nearer. He waved his walking-stick exultingly
in the air. "Good news!" he called out at the top of his voice. "Mr.
Sebright has made me a happy man again!" I had never before seen him so
like Nugent in manner, as I now saw him when we met and he shook hands
with me.
"Tell me all about it," I said.
He gave me his arm; and, talking all the way, we walked back slowly to
Dimchurch.
"In the first place," he began, "Mr. Sebright holds to his own opinion
more firmly than ever. He feels absolutely certain that the operation
will fail."
"Is that your good news?" I asked reproachfully.
"No," he said. "Though, mind, I own to my shame there was a time when I
almost hoped it would fail. Mr. Sebright has put me in a better frame of
mind. I have little or nothing to dread from the success of the
operation--if, by any extraordinary chance, it should succeed. I remind
you of Mr. Sebright's opinion merely to give you a right idea of the tone
which he took with me at starting. He only consented under protest to
contemplate the event which Lucilla and Herr Grosse consider to be a
certainty. 'If the statement of your position requires it,' he said, 'I
will admit that it is barely possible she may be able to see you two
months hence. Now begin.' I began by informing him of my marriage
engagement."
"Shall I tell you how Mr. Sebright received the information?" I said. "He
held his tongue, and made you a bow."
Oscar laughed.
"Quite true!" he answered. "I told him next of Lucilla's extraordinary
antipathy to dark people, and dark shades of color of all kinds. Can you
guess what he said to me when I had done?"
I owned that my observation of Mr. Sebright's character did not extend to
guessing that.
"He said it was a common antipathy in his experience of the blind. It was
one among the many strange influences exercised by blindness on the mind.
'The physical affliction has its mysterious moral influence,' he said.
'We can observe it, but we can't explain it. The special antipathy which
you mention, is an incurable antipathy, except on one condition--the
recovery of the sight.' There he stopped. I entreated him to go on. No!
He declined to go on until I had finished what I had to say to him first.
I had my confession still to make to him--and I made it."
"You concealed nothing?"
"Nothing. I laid my weakness bare before him. I told him that Lucilla was
still firmly convinced that Nugent's was the discolored face, instead of
mine. And then I put the question--What am I to do?"
"And how did he reply?"
"In these words:--'If you ask me what you are to do, in the event of her
remaining blind (which I tell you again will be the event), I decline to
advise you. Your own conscience and your own sense of honor must decide
the question. On the other hand, if you ask me what you are to do, in the
event of her recovering her sight, I can answer you unreservedly in the
plainest terms. Leave things as they are; and wait till she sees.' Those
were his own words. Oh, the load that they took off my mind! I made him
repeat them--I declare I was almost afraid to trust the evidence of my
own ears."
I understood the motive of Oscar's good spirits, better than I understood
the motive of Mr. Sebright's advice. "Did he give his reasons?" I asked.
"You shall hear his reasons directly. He insisted on first satisfying
himself that I thoroughly understood my position at that moment. 'The
prime condition of success, as Herr Grosse has told you,' he said, 'is
the perfect tranquillity of the patient. If you make your confession to
the young lady when you get back to-night to Dimchurch, you throw her
into a state of excitement which will render it impossible for my German
colleague to operate on her to-morrow. If you defer your confession, the
medical necessities of the case force you to be silent, until the
professional attendance of the oculist has ceased. There is your
position! My advice to you is to adopt the last alternative. Wait (and
make the other persons in the secret wait) until the result of the
operation has declared itself.' There I stopped him. 'Do you mean that I
am to be present, on the first occasion when she is able to use her
eyes?' I asked. 'Am I to let her see me, without a word beforehand to
prepare her for the color of my face?'"
We were now getting to the interesting part of it. You English people,
when you are out walking and are carrying on a conversation with a
friend, never come to a standstill at the points of interest. We
foreigners, on the other hand, invariably stop. I surprised Oscar by
suddenly pulling him up in the middle of the road.
"What is the matter?" he asked.
"Go on!" I said impatiently.
"I can't go on," he rejoined. "You're holding me."
I held him tighter than ever, and ordered him more resolutely than ever
to go on. Oscar resigned himself to a halt (foreign fashion) on the high
road.
"Mr. Sebright met my question by putting a question on his side," he
resumed. "He asked me how I proposed to prepare her for the color of my
face."
"And what did you tell him?"
"I said I had planned to make an excuse for leaving Dimchurch--and, once
away, to prepare her, by writing, for what she might expect to see when I
returned."
"What did he say to that?"
"He wouldn't hear of it. He said, 'I strongly recommend you to be present
on the first occasion when she is capable (if she ever is capable) of
using her sight. I attach the greatest importance to her being able to
correct the hideous and absurd image now in her mind of a face like
yours, by seeing you as you really are at the earliest available
opportunity.'"
We were just walking on again, when certain words in that last sentence
startled me. I stopped short once more.
"Hideous and absurd image?" I repeated, thinking instantly of my
conversation of that morning with Lucilla. "What did Mr. Sebright mean by
using such language as that?"
"Just what I asked him. His reply will interest you. It led him into that
explanation of his motives which you inquired for just now. Shall we walk
on?"
My petrified foreign feet recovered their activity. We went on again.
"When I had spoken to Mr. Sebright of Lucilla's inveterate prejudice,"
Oscar continued, "he had surprised me by saying that it was common in his
experience, and was only curable by her restoration to sight. In support
of those assertions, he now told me of two interesting cases which had
occurred in his professional practice. The first was the case of the
little daughter of an Indian officer--blind from infancy like Lucilla.
After operating successfully, the time came when he could permit his
patient to try her sight--that is to say, to try if she could see
sufficiently well at first, to distinguish dark objects from light. Among
the members of the household assembled to witness the removal of the
bandage, was an Indian nurse who had accompanied the family to England.
The first person the child saw was her mother--a fair woman. She clasped
her little hands in astonishment, and that was all. At the next turn of
her head, she saw the dark Indian nurse and instantly screamed with
terror. Mr. Sebright owned to me that he could not explain it. The child
could have no possible association with colors. Yet there nevertheless
was the most violent hatred and horror of a dark object (the hatred and
horror peculiar to the blind) expressing itself unmistakably in a child
of ten years old! My first thought, while he was telling me this, was of
myself, and of my chance with Lucilla. My first question was, 'Did the
child get used to the nurse?' I can give you his answer in his own words.
'In a week's time, I found the child sitting in the nurse's lap as
composedly as I am sitting in this chair.'--"That is encouraging--isn't
it?"
"Most encouraging--nobody can deny it."
"The second instance was more curious still. This time the case was the
case of a grown man--and the object was to show me what strange fantastic
images (utterly unlike the reality) the blind form of the people about
them. The patient was married, and was to see his wife (as Lucilla is one
day to see me) for the first time. He had been told, before he married
her, that she was personally disfigured by the scar of a wound on one of
her cheeks. The poor woman--ah, how well I can understand her!--trembled
for the consequences. The man who had loved her dearly while he was
blind, might hate her when he saw her scarred face. Her husband had been
the first to console her when the operation was determined on. He
declared that his sense of touch, and the descriptions given to him by
others, had enabled him to form, in his own mind, the most complete and
faithful image of his wife's face. Nothing that Mr. Sebright could say
would induce him to believe that it was physically impossible for him to
form a really correct idea of any object, animate or inanimate, which he
had never seen. He wouldn't hear of it. He was so certain of the result,
that he held his wife's hand in his, to encourage her, when the bandage
was removed from him. At his first look at her, he uttered a cry of
horror, and fell back in his chair in a swoon. His wife, poor thing, was
distracted. Mr. Sebright did his best to compose her, and waited till her
husband was able to answer the questions put to him. It then appeared
that his blind idea of his wife, and of her disfigurement had been
something so grotesquely and horribly unlike the reality, that it was
hard to know whether to laugh or to tremble at it. She was as beautiful
as an angel, by comparison with her husband's favorite idea of her--and
yet, because it was his idea, he was absolutely disgusted and terrified
at the first sight of her! In a few weeks he was able to compare his wife
with other women, to look at pictures, to understand what beauty was and
what ugliness was--and from that time they have lived together as happy a
married couple as any in the kingdom."
I was not quite sure which way this last example pointed. It alarmed me
when I thought of Lucilla. I came to a standstill again.
"How did Mr. Sebright apply this second case to Lucilla and to you?" I
asked.
"You shall hear," said Oscar. "He first appealed to the case as
supporting his assertion that Lucilla's idea of me must be utterly unlike
what I am myself. He asked if I was now satisfied that she could have no
correct conception of what faces and colors were really like? and if I
agreed with him in believing that the image in her mind of the man with
the blue face, was in all probability something fantastically and
hideously unlike the reality? After what I had heard, I agreed with him
as a matter of course. 'Very well,' says Mr. Sebright. 'Now let its
remember that there is one important difference between the case of Miss
Finch, and the case that I have just mentioned. The husband's blind idea
of his wife was the husband's favorite idea. The shock of the first sight
of her, was plainly a shock to him on that account. Now Miss Finch's
blind idea of the blue face is, on the contrary, a hateful idea to
her--the image is an image that she loathes. Is it not fair to conclude
from this, that the first sight of you as you really are, is likely to
be, in her case, a relief to her instead of a shock? Reasoning from my
experience, I reach that conclusion; and I advise you, in your own
interests, to be present when the bandage is taken off. Even if I prove
to be mistaken--even if she is not immediately reconciled to the sight of
you--there is the other example of the child and the Indian nurse to
satisfy you that it is only a question of time. Sooner or later, she will
take the discovery as any other young lady would take it. At first, she
will be indignant with you for deceiving her; and then, if you are sure
of your place in her affections, she will end in forgiving you.--There is
my view of your position, and there are the grounds on which I form it!
In the meantime, my own opinion remains unshaken. I firmly believe that
you will never have occasion to act on the advice that I have given to
you. When the bandage is taken off, the chances are five hundred to one
that she is no nearer to seeing you then than she is now.' These were his
last words--and on that we parted."
Oscar and I walked on again for a little way, in silence.
I had nothing to say against Mr. Sebright's reasons; it was impossible to
question the professional experience from which they were drawn. As to
blind people in general, I felt no doubt that his advice was good, and
that his conclusions were arrived at correctly. But Lucilla's was no
ordinary character. My experience of her was better experience than Mr.
Sebright's--and the more I thought of the future, the less inclined I
felt to share Oscar's hopeful view. She was just the person to say
something or do something, at the critical moment of the experiment,
which would take the wisest previous calculation by surprise. Oscar's
prospects never had looked darker to me than they looked at that moment.
It would have been useless and cruel to have said to him what I have just
said here. I put as bright a face on it as I could, and asked if he
proposed to follow Mr. Sebright's advice.
"Yes," he said. "With a certain reservation of my own, which occurred to
me after I had left his house."
"May I ask what it is?"
"Certainly. I mean to beg Nugent to leave Dimchurch, before Lucilla tries
her sight for the first time. He will do that, I know, to please me."
"And when he has done it, what then?"
"Then I mean to be present--as Mr. Sebright suggested--when the bandage
is taken off."
"Previously telling Lucilla," I interposed, "that it is you who are in
the room?"
"No. There I take the precaution that I alluded to just now. I propose to
leave Lucilla under the impression that it is I who have left Dimchurch,
and that Nugent's face is the face she sees. If Mr. Sebright proves to be
right, and if her first sensation is a sensation of relief, I will own
the truth to her the same day. If not, I will wait to make my confession
until she has become reconciled to the sight of me. That plan meets every
possible emergency. It is one of the few good ideas that my stupid head
has hit on since I have been at Dimchurch."
He said those last words with such an innocent air of triumph, that I
really could not find it in my heart to damp his ardor by telling him
what I thought of his idea. All I said was, "Don't forget, Oscar, that
the cleverest plans are at the mercy of circumstances. At the last
moment, an accident may happen which will force you to speak out."
We came in sight of the rectory as I gave him that final warning. Nugent
was strolling up and down the road on the look-out for us. I left Oscar
to tell his story over again to his brother, and went into the house.
Lucilla was at her piano when I entered the sitting-room. She was not
only playing--but (a rare thing with her) singing too. The song was,
poetry and music both, of her own composing. "I shall see him! I shall
see him!" In those four words the composition began and ended. She
adapted them to all the happy melodies in her memory. She accompanied
them with hands that seemed to be mad for joy--hands that threatened
every moment to snap the chords of the instrument. Never, since my first
day at the rectory, had I heard such a noise in our quiet sitting-room as
I heard now. She was in a fever of exhilaration which, in my foreboding
frame of mind at that moment, it pained and shocked me to see. I lifted
her off the music-stool, and shut up the piano by main force.
"Compose yourself for heaven's sake," I said. "Do you want to be
completely exhausted when the German comes tomorrow?"
That consideration instantly checked her. She suddenly became quiet, with
the abrupt facility of a child.
"I forgot that," she said, sitting down in a corner, with a face of
dismay. "He might refuse to perform the operation! Oh, my dear, quiet me
down somehow. Get a book, and read to me."
I got the book. Ah, the poor author! Neither she nor I paid the slightest
attention to him. Worse still, we abused him for not interesting us--and
then shut him up with a bang, and pushed him rudely into his place on the
book-shelf, and left him upside down and went to bed.
She was standing at her window when I went in to wish her good night. The
mellow moonlight fell tenderly on her lovely face.
"Moon that I have never seen," she murmured softly, "I feel you looking
at me! Is the time coming when I shall look at You?" She turned from the
window, and eagerly put my fingers on her pulse. "Am I quite composed
again?" she asked. "Will he find me well to-morrow? Feel it! feel it! Is
it quiet now?"