Poor Miss Finch Part 39

Thinking afterwards of the new side of her mind which Lucilla had shown to me, I derived one consolation from what had pa.s.sed 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 fas.h.i.+on) 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 a.s.sertions, 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 a.s.sembled 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 a.s.sociation 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--n.o.body 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 a.s.sertion 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?"