Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (824 page)

“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 colours 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!”

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SEVENTH

He finds a Way out of it

WE sat down at the piano, as Lucilla had proposed. She wished me to play first, and to play alone. I was teaching her, at the time, one of the
Sonatas
of Mozart; and I now tried to go on with the lesson. Never before, or since, have I played so badly, as on that day! The divine serenity and completeness by which Mozart’s music is, to my mind, raised above all other music that ever was written, can only be worthily interpreted by a player whose whole mind is given undividedly to the work. Devoured as I then was by my own anxieties, I might profane those heavenly melodies — I could not play them. Lucilla accepted my excuses, and took my place.

Half an hour passed, without news from Browndown.

Calculated by reference to itself, half an hour is no doubt a short space of time. Calculated by reference to your own suspense, while your own interests are at stake, half an hour is an eternity. Every minute that passed, leaving Lucilla still undisturbed in her delusion, was a minute that pricked me in the conscience. The longer we left her in ignorance, the more painful to all of us the hard duty of enlightening her would become. I began to get restless. Lucilla, on her side, began to complain of fatigue. After the agitation that she had gone through, the inevitable reaction had come. I recommended her to go to her room and rest. She took my advice. In the state of my mind at that time, it was an inexpressible relief to me to be left by myself.

After pacing backwards and forwards for some little time in the sitting-room, and trying vainly to see my way through the difficulties that now beset us, I made up my mind to wait no longer for the news that never came. The brothers were still at Browndown. To Browndown I determined to return.

I peeped quietly into Lucilla’s room. She was asleep. After a word to Zillah, recommending her young mistress to her care, I slipped out. As I crossed the lawn, I heard the garden-gate opened. In a minute more, the man of all others whom I most wanted to see, presented himself before me, in the person of Nugent Dubourg. He had borrowed Oscar’s key, and had set off alone for the rectory to tell me what had passed between his brother and himself.

“This is the first stroke of luck that has fallen to me to-day,” he said. “I was wondering how I should contrive to speak to you privately. And here you are — accessible and alone. Where is Lucilla? Can we depend on having the garden to ourselves?”

I satisfied him on both those points. He looked sadly pale and worn. Before he opened his lips, I saw that he too had had his mind disturbed, and his patience tried, since I had left him. There was a summer-house at the end of the garden with a view over the breezy solitude of the Downs. Here we established ourselves; and here, in my headlong way, I opened the interview with the one formidable question: — ”Who is to tell her of the mistake she has made?”

“Nobody is to tell her.”

That answer staggered me at the outset. I looked at Nugent in silent astonishment.

“There is nothing to be surprised at,” he said. “Let me put my point of view before you in two words. I have had a serious talk with Oscar — ”

Women are proverbially bad listeners — and I am no better than the rest of them. I interrupted him, before he could get any farther.

“I suppose Oscar has told you how the mistake happened?” I said.

“He has no idea how it happened. He owns — when he found himself face to face with her — that his presence of mind completely failed him: he didn’t himself know what he was saying at the time.
He
lost his head; and
she
lost her patience. Think of his nervous confusion in collision with her nervous irritability — and the result explains itself: nothing
could
come of it but misapprehension and mistake. I turned the thing over in my mind, after you had left us; and the one course to take that
I
could see was to accept the position patiently, and to make the best instead of the worst of it. Having reached this conclusion, I settled the matter (as I settle most other difficulties) — by cutting the Gordian knot. I said to Oscar, ‘Would it be a relief to your mind to leave her present impression undisturbed until you are married?’ You know him — I needn’t tell you what his answer was. ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘Dry your eyes and compose yourself. I have begun as Blue Face. As Blue Face I will go on till further notice.’ I spare you the description of Oscar’s gratitude. I proposed; and he accepted. There is the way out of the difficulty as I see it.”

“Your way out of the difficulty is an unworthy way, and a false way,” I answered. “I protest against taking that cruel advantage of Lucilla’s blindness. I refuse to have anything to do with it.”

He opened his case, and took out a cigar.

“Do as you please,” he said. “You saw the pitiable state she was in, when she forced herself to speak to me. You saw how her disgust and horror overpowered her at the end. Transfer that disgust and horror to Oscar (with indignation and contempt added in
his
case); expose him to the result of rousing those feelings in her, before he is fortified by a husband’s influence over her mind, and a husband’s place in her affections — if you dare. I love the poor fellow; and
I
daren’t. May I smoke?”

I gave him his permission to smoke by a gesture. Before I said anything more to this inscrutable gentleman, I felt the necessity of understanding him — if I could.

There was no difficulty in accounting for his readiness to sacrifice himself in the interests of Oscar’s tranquillity. He never did things by halves — he liked dashing at difficulties which would have made other men pause. The same zeal in his brother’s service which had saved Oscar’s life at the Trial, might well be the zeal that animated him now. The perplexity that I felt was not roused in me by the course that he had taken — but by the language in which he justified himself, and, more still, by his behavior to me while he was speaking. The well-bred brilliant young fellow of my previous experience, had now turned as dogged and as ungracious as a man could be. He waited to hear what I had to say to him next, with a hard defiance and desperation of manner entirely uncalled for by the circumstances, and entirely out of harmony with his character, so far as I had observed it. That there was something lurking under the surface, some inner motive at work in him which he was concealing from his brother and concealing from me, was as plainly visible as the sunshine and shade on the view that I was looking at from the summer-house. But what that something was, or what that inner motive might be, it baffled my utmost sagacity to guess. Not the faintest idea of the terrible secret that he was hiding from me, crossed my mind. Innocent of all suspicion of the truth, there I sat opposite to him, the unconscious witness of that unhappy man’s final struggle to be true to the brother whom he loved, and to master the devouring passion that consumed him. So long as Lucilla falsely believed him to be disfigured by the drug, so long the commonest consideration for her tranquillity would, in the estimation of others, excuse and explain his keeping out of her presence. In that separation, lay his last chance of raising an insurmountable barrier between Lucilla and himself. He had already tried uselessly to place another obstacle in the way — he had vainly attempted to hasten the marriage which would have made Lucilla sacred to him as his brother’s wife. That effort having failed, there was but one honourable alternative left to him — to keep out of her society, until she was married to Oscar. He had accepted the position in which Oscar had placed him, as the one means of reaching the end in view without exciting suspicion of the truth — and he had encountered, as his reward for the sacrifice, my ignorant protest, my stupid opposition, set as obstacles in his way! There were the motives — the pure, the noble motives — which animated him, as I know them now. There is the right reading of the dogged language that mystified me, of the defiant manner that offended me; interpreted by the one light that I have to guide my pen — the light of later events!