Poor Miss Finch Part 72

"You were quite worn out," I said, consolingly. "n.o.body noticed it."

"You are sure of that?"

"Quite sure. Good night."

I left the room, feeling much as I had felt at the station at Ma.r.s.eilles.

I was not satisfied with him. I thought his conduct very strange.

On returning to the parlor, I found n.o.body there but Mrs. Finch. The rector's offended dignity had left the rector no honorable alternative but to withdraw to his own room. I ate my supper in peace; and Mrs. Finch (rocking the cradle with her foot) chattered away to her heart's content about all that had happened in my absence.

I gathered, here and there, from what she said, some particulars worth mentioning.

The new disagreement between Mr. Finch and Miss Batchford, which had driven the old lady out of the rectory almost as soon as she set foot in it, had originated in Mr. Finch's exasperating composure when he heard of his daughter's flight. He supposed, of course, that Lucilla had left Ramsgate with Oscar--whose signed settlements on his future wife were safe in Mr. Finch's possession. It was only when Miss Batchford had communicated with Grosse, and when the discovery followed which revealed the penniless Nugent as the man who had eloped with Lucilla, that Mr.

Finch's parental anxiety (seeing no money likely to come of it) became roused to action. He, Miss Batchford, and Grosse, had all, in their various ways, done their best to trace the fugitives--and had all alike been baffled by the impossibility of discovering the residence of the lady mentioned in Nugent's letter. My telegram, announcing my return to England with Oscar, had inspired them with their first hope of being able to interfere, and stop the marriage before it was too late.

The occurrence of Grosse's name in Mrs. Finch's rambling narrative, recalled to my memory what the rector had told me at the garden gate. I had not yet received the letter which the German had sent to wait my arrival at Dimchurch. After a short search, we found it--where it had been contemptuously thrown by Mr. Finch--on the parlor table.

A few lines comprised the whole letter. Grosse informed me that he had so fretted himself about Lucilla, that he had been attacked by "a visitation of gouts." It was impossible to move his "foots" without instantly plunging into the torture of the infernal regions. "If it is you, my goot dear, who are going to find her," he concluded, "come to me first in London. I have something most dismal-serious to say to you about our poor little Feench's eyes."

No words can tell how that last sentence startled and grieved me. Mrs.

Finch increased my anxiety and alarm by repeating what she had heard Miss Batchford say, during her brief visit to the rectory, on the subject of Lucilla's sight. Grosse had been seriously dissatisfied with the state of his patient's eyes, when he had seen them as long ago as the fourth of the month; and, on the morning of the next day, the servant had reported Lucilla as being hardly able to distinguish objects in the view from the window of her room. Later on the same day, she had secretly left Ramsgate; and Grosse's letter proved that she had not been near her surgical attendant since.

Weary as I was after the journey, this miserable news kept me waking long after I had gone to my bed. The next morning, I was up with the servants--impatient to start for London, by the first train.

CHAPTER THE FORTY-EIGHTH

On the Way to the End. Second Stage

EARLY riser as I was, I found that Oscar had risen earlier still. He had left the rectory and had disturbed Mr. Gootheridge's morning slumbers by an application at the inn for the key of Browndown.

On his return to the rectory, he merely said that he had been to see after various things belonging to him, which were still left in the empty house. His look and manner as he gave us this brief explanation were, to my mind, more unsatisfactory than ever. I made no remark; and, observing that his loose traveling coat was b.u.t.toned awry over the breast, I set it right for him. My hand, as I did this, touched his breast-pocket. He started back directly--as if there was something in the pocket which he did not wish me to feel. Was it something he had brought from Browndown?

We got away--enc.u.mbered by Mr. Finch, who insisted on attaching himself to Oscar--by the first express train, which took us straight to London.

Comparison of time-tables, on reaching the terminus, showed that I had leisure to spare for a brief visit to Grosse, before we again took the railway back to Sydenham. Having decided not to mention the bad news about Lucilla's sight to Oscar, until I had seen the German first, I made the best excuse that suggested itself, and drove away--leaving the two gentlemen in the waiting-room at the station.

I found Grosse confined to his easy-chair, with his gouty foot enveloped in cool cabbage-leaves. Between pain and anxiety, his eyes were wilder, his broken English was more grotesque than ever. When I appeared at the door of his room and said good morning--in the frenzy of his impatience he shook his fist at me.

"Good morning go-d.a.m.n!" he roared out, "Where? where? where is Feench?"

I told him where we believed Lucilla to be. Grosse turned his head, and shook his fist at a bottle on the chimney-piece next.

"Get that bottles on the chimney," he said. "And the eye-baths by the side of him. Don't stop with your talky-talky-chatterations here. Go!

Save her eyes. Look! You do this. You throw her head back--soh!" He ill.u.s.trated the position so forcibly with his own head that he shook his gouty foot, and screamed with the pain of it. He went on nevertheless, glaring frightfully through his spectacles; gnas.h.i.+ng his mustache fiercely between his teeth. "Throw her head back. Fill the eye-baths; turn him upsides-down over her open eyes. Drown them turn-turn-about in my mixtures. Drown them, I say, one-down-todder-come-on, and if she screech never mind it. Then bring her to me. For the lofe of Gott, bring her to me. If you tie her hands and foots, bring her to me. What is the womans stopping for? Go! go! go!"

"I want to ask you a question about Oscar," I said, "before I go."

He seized the pillow which supported his head--evidently intending to expedite my departure by throwing it at me. I produced the railway time-table as the best defensive weapon at my command. "Look at it for yourself," I said; "and you will see that I must wait at the station, if I don't wait here."

With some difficulty, I satisfied him that it was impossible to leave London for Sydenham before a certain hour, and that I had at least ten minutes to spare which might be just as well pa.s.sed in consulting him. He closed his glaring eyes, and laid his head back on the chair, thoroughly exhausted with his own outbreak of excitement. "No matter how things goes," he said, "a womans must wag her tongue. Goot. Wag yours."

"I am placed in a very difficult position," I began. "Oscar is going with me to Lucilla. I shall of course take care, in the first place, that he and Nugent do not meet, unless I am present at the interview. But I am not equally sure of what I ought to do in the case of Lucilla. Must I keep them apart until I have first prepared her to see Oscar?"

"Let her see the devil himself if you like," growled Grosse, "so long as you bring her here afterwards-directly to me. You will do the bettermost thing, if you prepare Oscar. _She_ wants no preparations! She is enough disappointed in him as it is!"

"Disappointed in him!" I repeated. "I don't understand you."

He settled himself wearily in his chair, and referred, in a softened and saddened tone, to that private conversation of his with Lucilla, at Ramsgate, which has already been reported in the Journal. I was now informed, for the first time, of those changes in her sensations and in her ways of thinking which had so keenly vexed and mortified her. I heard of the ominous absence of the old thrill of pleasure, when Nugent took her hand on meeting her at the seaside--I heard how bitterly his personal appearance had disappointed her (when she had seen his features in detail) by comparison with the charming ideal picture which she had formed of her lover in the days of her blindness: those happier days, as she had called them, when she was Poor Miss Finch.

"Surely," I said, "all the old feelings will come back to her when she sees Oscar?"

"They will never come back to her--no, not if she sees fifty Oscars!"

He was beginning to frighten me, or to irritate me--I can hardly say which. I only know that I persisted in disputing with him. "When she sees the true man," I went on, "do you mean to say she will feel the same disappointment----?"

I could get no farther than that. He cut me short there, without ceremony.

"You foolish womans!" he interposed, "she will feel more than the same. I have told you already it was one enormous disappointments to her when she saw the handsome brodder with the fair complexions. Ask your own self what it will be when she sees the ugly brodder with the blue face. I tell you this!--she will think your true man the worst impostor of the two."

There I indignantly contradicted him.

"His face _may_ be a disappointment to her," I said--"I own that. But there it will end. Her hand will tell her, when he takes it, that there is no impostor deceiving her this time."

"Her hand will tell her nothing--no more than yours. I had not so much hard hearts in me as to say that to _her,_ when she asked me. I say it to _you._ Hold your tongue and listen. All those thrill-tingles that she once had when he touched her, belong to anodder time--the time gone-by when her sight was in her fingers and not in her eyes. With those fine-superfine-feelings of the days when she was blind, she pays now for her grand new privilege of opening her eyes on the world. (And worth the price too!) Do you understand yet? It is a sort of swop-bargain between Nature and this poor girls of ours. I take away your eyes--I give you your fine touch. I give you your eyes--I take away your fine touch. Soh!

that is plain. You see now."

I was too mortified and too miserable to answer him. Through all our later troubles, I had looked forward so confidently to Oscar's re-appearance as the one sufficient condition on which Lucilla's happiness would be certainly restored! What had become of my antic.i.p.ations now? I sat silent; staring in stupid depression at the pattern of the carpet. Grosse took out his watch.

"Your ten-minutes-time has counted himself out," he said.

I neither moved nor heeded him. His ferocious eyes began to flame again behind his monstrous spectacles.

"Go-be-off-with-you!" he shouted at me as if I was deaf. "Her eyes! her eyes! While you stop chatterboxing here, her eyes are in danger. What with her frettings and her cryings and her d.a.m.n-nonsense-lofe-business, I swear you my solemn oath her sight was in danger when I saw her a whole fortnight gone-by. Do you want my big pillow to fly bang at your head?

You don't want him? Be-off-away with you then, or you will have him in one-two-three time! Be-off-away--and bring her back to me before night!"

I returned to the railway. Of all the women whom I pa.s.sed in the crowded streets, I doubt if one had a heavier heart in her bosom that morning than mine.

To make matters worse still, my traveling companions (one in the refreshment-room, and one pacing the platform) received my account of my interview with Grosse in a manner which seriously disappointed and discouraged me. Mr. Finch's inhuman conceit treated my melancholy news of his daughter as a species of complimentary tribute to his own foresight.

"You remember, Madame Pratolungo, I took high ground in this matter from the first. I protested against the proceedings of the man Grosse, as involving a purely worldly interference with the ways of an inscrutable Providence. With what effect? My paternal influence was repudiated; my Moral Weight was, so to speak, set aside. And now you see the result.

Take it to heart, dear friend. May it be a warning to you!" He sighed with ponderous complacency, and turned from me to the girl behind the counter. "I will take another cup of tea."

Oscar's reception of me, when I found him on the platform, and told him next of Lucilla's critical state, was more than discouraging. It is no exaggeration to say that he alarmed me. "Another item in the debt I owe to Nugent!" he said. Not a word of sympathy, not a word of sorrow. That vindictive answer, and nothing more.

We started for Sydenham.