WE looked at one another in silence. Both alike, we were obliged to wait a little and recover ourselves.
I may occupy the interval by answering two questions which will arise in your minds in this place. How did Dubourg come to be tried for his life? And what was the connection between this serious matter and the false testimony of a clock?
The reply to both these inquiries is to be found in the story which I call the Perjury of the Clock.
In briefly relating this curious incidental narrative (which I take from a statement of the circumstances placed in my possession) I shall speak of our new acquaintance at Browndown—and shall continue to speak of him throughout these pages—by his assumed name. In the first place, it was the maiden name of his mother, and he had a right to take it if he pleased. In the second place, the date of our domestic drama at Dimchurch goes back as far as the years 'fifty-eight and 'fifty-nine; and real names are (now that it is all over) of no consequence to anybody. With "Dubourg" we have begun. With "Dubourg" let us go on to the end.
On a summer evening, some years ago, a man was found murdered in a field near a certain town in the West of England. The name of the field was, "Pardon's Piece."
The man was a small carpenter and builder in the town, who bore an indifferent character. On the evening in question, a distant relative of his, employed as farm-bailiff by a gentleman in the neighborhood, happened to be passing a stile which led from the field into a road, and saw a gentleman leaving the field by way of this stile, rather in a hurry. He recognized the gentleman as Mr. Dubourg.
The two passed each other on the road in opposite directions. After a certain lapse of time—estimated as being half an hour—the farm-bailiff had occasion to pass back along the same road. On reaching the stile, he heard an alarm raised, and entered the field to see what was the matter. He found several persons running from the farther side of Pardon's Piece towards a boy who was standing at the back of a cattle-shed, in a remote part of the enclosure, screaming with terror. At the boy's feet lay, face downwards, the dead body of a man, with his head horribly beaten in. His watch was under him, hanging out of his pocket by the chain. It had stopped—evidently in consequence of the concussion of its owner's fall on it—at half-past eight. The body was still warm. All the other valuables, like the watch, were left on it. The farm-bailiff instantly recognized the man as the carpenter and builder mentioned above.
At the preliminary inquiry, the stoppage of the watch at half-past eight, was taken as offering good circumstantial evidence that the blow which had killed the man had been struck at that time.
The next question was—if any one had been seen near the body at half-past eight? The farm-bailiff declared that he had met Mr. Dubourg hastily leaving the field by the stile at that very time. Asked if he had looked at his watch, he owned that he had not done so. Certain previous circumstances which he mentioned as having impressed themselves on his memory, enabled him to feel sure of the truth of his assertion, without having consulted his watch. He was pressed on this important point; but he held to his declaration. At half-past eight he had seen Mr. Dubourg hurriedly leave the field. At half-past eight the watch of the murdered man had stopped.
Had any other person been observed in or near the field at that time?
No witness could be discovered who had seen anybody else near the place. Had the weapon turned up, with which the blow had been struck? It had not been found. Was anyone known (robbery having plainly not been the motive of the crime) to have entertained a grudge against the murdered man? It was no secret that he associated with doubtful characters, male and female; but suspicion failed to point to any one of them in particular.
In this state of things, there was no alternative but to request Mr. Dubourg—well known in, and out of the town, as a young gentleman of independent fortune; bearing an excellent character—to give some account of himself.
He immediately admitted that he had passed through the field. But in contradiction to the farm-bailiff, he declared thathehad looked at his watch at the moment before he crossed the stile, and that the time by it was exactly a quarter past eight. Five minutes later—that is to say ten minutes before the murder had been committed, on the evidence of the dead man's watch—he had paid a visit to a lady living near Pardon's Piece; and had remained with her, until his watch, consulted once more on leaving the lady's house, informed him that it was a quarter to nine.
Here was the defense called an "alibi." It entirely satisfied Mr. Dubourg's friends. To satisfy justice also, it was necessary to call the lady as a witness. In the meantime, another purely formal question was put to Mr. Dubourg. Did he know anything of the murdered man?
With some appearance of confusion, Mr. Dubourg admitted that he had been induced (by a friend) to employ the man on some work. Further interrogation extracted from him the following statement of facts.
That the work had been very badly done—that an exorbitant price had been charged for it—that the man, on being remonstrated with, had behaved in a grossly impertinent manner—that an altercation had taken place between them—that Mr. Dubourg had seized the man by the collar of his coat, and had turned him out of the house—that he had called the man an infernal scoundrel (being in a passion at the time), and had threatened to "thrash him within an inch of his life" (or words to that effect) if he ever presumed to come near the house again; that he had sincerely regretted his own violence the moment he recovered his self-possession; and, lastly, that, on his oath (the altercation having occurred six weeks ago), he had never spoken to the man, or set eyes on the man since.
As the matter then stood, these circumstances were considered as being unfortunate circumstances for Mr. Dubourg—nothing more. He had his "alibi" to appeal to, and his character to appeal to; and nobody doubted the result.
The lady appeared as witness.
Confronted with Mr. Dubourg on the question of time, and forced to answer, she absolutely contradicted him, on the testimony of the clock on her own mantelpiece. In substance, her evidence was simply this. She had looked at her clock, when Mr. Dubourg entered the room; thinking it rather a late hour for a visitor to call on her. The clock (regulated by the maker, only the day before) pointed to twenty-five minutes to nine. Practical experiment showed that the time required to walk the distance, at a rapid pace, from the stile to the lady's house, was just five minutes. Here then was the statement of the farm-bailiff (himself a respectable witness) corroborated by another witness of excellent position and character. The clock, on being examined next, was found to be right. The evidence of the clock-maker proved that he kept the key, and that there had been no necessity to set the clock and wind it up again, since he had performed both those acts on the day preceding Mr. Dubourg's visit. The accuracy of the clock thus vouched for, the conclusion on the evidence was irresistible. Mr. Dubourg stood convicted of having been in the field at the time when the murder was committed; of having, by his own admission, had a quarrel with the murdered man, not long before, terminating in an assault and a threat on his side; and, lastly, of having attempted to set up an alibi by a false statement of the question of time. There was no alternative but to commit him to take his trial at the Assizes, charged with the murder of the builder in Pardon's Piece.
The trial occupied two days.
No new facts of importance were discovered in the interval. The evidence followed the course which it had taken at the preliminary examinations—with this difference only, that it was more carefully sifted. Mr. Dubourg had the double advantage of securing the services of the leading barrister on the circuit, and of moving the irrepressible sympathies of the jury, shocked at his position and eager for proof of his innocence. By the end of the first day, the evidence had told against him with such irresistible force, that his own counsel despaired of the result. When the prisoner took his place in the dock on the second day, there was but one conviction in the minds of the people in court—everybody said, "The clock will hang him."
It was nearly two in the afternoon; and the proceedings were on the point of being adjourned for half an hour, when the attorney for the prisoner was seen to hand a paper to the counsel for the defense.
The counsel rose, showing signs of agitation which roused the curiosity of the audience. He demanded the immediate hearing of a new witness; whose evidence in the prisoner's favor he declared to be too important to be delayed for a single moment. After a short colloquy between the judge and the banisters on either side, the court decided to continue the sitting.
The witness, appearing in the box, proved to be a young woman, in delicate health. On the evening when the prisoner had paid his visit to the lady, she was in that lady's service as housemaid. The day after, she had been permitted (by previous arrangement with her mistress) to take a week's holiday, and to go on a visit to her parents, in the west of Cornwall. While there, she had fallen ill, and had not been strong enough since to return to her employment. Having given this preliminary account of herself, the housemaid then stated the following extraordinary particulars in relation to her mistress's clock.
On the morning of the day when Mr. Dubourg had called at the house, she had been cleaning the mantelpiece. She had rubbed the part of it which was under the clock with her duster, had accidentally struck the pendulum, and had stopped it. Having once before done this, she had been severely reproved. Fearing that a repetition of the offense, only the day after the clock had been regulated by the maker, might lead perhaps to the withdrawal of her leave of absence, she had determined to put matters right again, if possible, by herself.
After poking under the clock in the dark, and failing to set the pendulum going again properly in that way, she next attempted to lift the clock, and give it a shake. It was set in a marble case, with a bronze figure on the top; and it was so heavy that she was obliged to hunt for something which she could use as a lever. The thing proved to be not easy to find on the spur of the moment. Having at last laid her hand on what she wanted, she contrived so to lift the clock a few inches and drop it again on the mantelpiece, as to set it going once more.
The next necessity was of course to move the hands on. Here again she was met by an obstacle. There was a difficulty in opening the glass-case which protected the dial. After uselessly searching for some instrument to help her, she got from the footman (without telling him what she wanted it for) a small chisel. With this, she opened the case—after accidentally scratching the brass frame of it—and set the hands of the clock by guess. She was flurried at the time; fearing that her mistress would discover her. Later in the day, she found that she had over-estimated the interval of time that had passed while she was trying to put the clock right. She had, in fact, set it exactlya quarter of an hour too fast.
No safe opportunity of secretly putting the clock right again had occurred, until the last thing at night. She had then moved the hands back to the right time. At the hour of the evening when Mr. Dubourg had called on her mistress, she positively swore that the clock was a quarter of an hour too fast. It had pointed, as her mistress had declared, to twenty-five minutes to nine—the right time then being, as Mr. Dubourg had asserted, twenty minutes past eight.
Questioned why she had refrained from giving this extraordinary evidence at the inquiry before the magistrate, she declared that in the remote Cornish village to which she had gone the next day, and in which her illness had detained her from that time, nobody had heard of the inquiry or the trial. She would not have been then present to state the vitally important circumstances to which she had just sworn, if the prisoner's twin-brother had not found her out on the previous day—had not questioned her if she knew anything about the clock—and had not (hearing what she had to tell) insisted on her taking the journey with him to the court the next morning.
This evidence virtually decided the trial. There was a great burst of relief in the crowded assembly when the woman's statement had come to an end.
She was closely cross-examined as a matter of course. Her character was inquired into; corroborative evidence (relating to the chisel and the scratches on the frame) was sought for and was obtained. The end of it was that, at a late hour on the second evening, the jury acquitted the prisoner, without leaving their box. It was not too much to say that his life had been saved by his brother. His brother alone had persisted, from first to last, in obstinately disbelieving the clock—for no better reason than that the clock was the witness which asserted the prisoner's guilt! He had worried everybody with incessant inquiries—he had discovered the absence of the housemaid, after the trial had begun—and he had started off to interrogate the girl, knowing nothing, and suspecting nothing; simply determined to persist in the one everlasting question with which he persecuted everybody belonging to the house: "The clock is going to hang my brother; can you tell me anything about the clock?"
Four months later, the mystery of the crime was cleared up. One of the disreputable companions of the murdered man confessed on his death-bed that he had done the deed. There was nothing interesting or remarkable in the circumstances. Chance which had put innocence in peril, had offered impunity to guilt. An infamous woman; a jealous quarrel; and an absence at the moment of witnesses on the spot—these were really the commonplace materials which had composed the tragedy of Pardon's Piece.
"You have forced it out of me. Now you have had your way, never mind my feelings—Go!"
Those were the first words the Hero of the Trial said to me, when he was able to speak again! He withdrew with a curious sullen resignation to the farther end of the room. There he stood looking at me, as a man might have looked who carried some contagion about him, and who wished to preserve a healthy fellow-creature from the peril of touching him.
"Why should I go?" I asked.
"You are a bold woman," he said, "to remain in the same room with a man who has been pointed at as a murderer, and who has been tried for his life."
The same unhealthy state of mind which had brought him to Dimchurch, and which had led him to speak to me as he had spoken on the previous evening, was, as I understood it, now irritating him against me as a person who had made his own quick temper the means of entrapping him into letting out the truth. How was I to deal with a man in this condition? I decided to perform the feat which you call in England, "taking the bull by the horns."
"I see but one man here," I said. "A man honorably acquitted of a crime which he was incapable of committing. A man who deserves my interest, and claims my sympathy. Shake hands, Mr. Dubourg."
I spoke to him in a good hearty voice, and I gave him a good hearty squeeze. The poor, weak, lonely, persecuted young fellow dropped his head on my shoulder like a child, and burst out crying.
"Don't despise me!" he said, as soon as he had got his breath again. "It breaks a man down to have stood in the dock, and to have had hundreds of hard-hearted people staring at him in horror—without his deserving it. Besides, I have been very lonely, ma'am, since my brother left me."
We sat down again, side by side. He was the strangest compound of anomalies I had ever met with. Throw him into one of those passions in which he flamed out so easily—and you would have said, This is a tiger. Wait till he had cooled down again to his customary mild temperature—and you would have said with equal truth, This is a lamb.
"One thing rather surprises me, Mr. Dubourg," I went on. "I can't quite understand——"
"Don't call me Mr. Dubourg," he interposed. "You remind me of the disgrace which has forced me to change my name. Call me by my Christian name. It's a foreign name. You are a foreigner by your accent—you will like me all the better for having a foreign name. I was christened 'Oscar'—after my mother's brother: my mother was a Jersey woman. Call me 'Oscar.'—What is it you don't understand?"
"In your present situation," I resumed, "I don't understand your brother leaving you here all by yourself."
He was on the point of flaming out again at that.
"Not a word against my brother!" he exclaimed fiercely. "My brother is the noblest creature that God ever created! You must own that yourself—you know what he did at the trial. I should have died on the scaffold but for that angel. I insist on it that he is not a man. He is an angel!"
(I admitted that his brother was an angel. The concession instantly pacified him.)
"People say there is no difference between us," he went on, drawing his chair companionably close to mine. "Ah, people are so shallow! Personally, I grant you, we are exactly alike. (You have heard that we are twins?) But there it ends, unfortunately forme.Nugent—(my brother was christened Nugent after my father)—Nugent is a hero! Nugent is a genius. I should have died if he hadn't taken care of me after the trial. I had nobody but him. We are orphans; we have no brothers or sisters. Nugent felt the disgrace even more than I felt it—buthecould control himself. It fell more heavily on him than it did on me. I'll tell you why. Nugent was in a fair way to make our family name—the name that we have been obliged to drop—famous all over the world. He is a painter—a landscape painter. Have you never heard of him? Ah, you soon will! Where do you think he has gone to? He has gone to the wilds of America, in search of new subjects. He is going to found a school of landscape painting. On an immense scale. A scale that has never been attempted yet. Dear fellow! Shall I tell you what he said when he left me here? Noble words—I call them noble words. 'Oscar, I go to make our assumed name famous. You shall be honorably known—you shall be illustrious, as the brother of Nugent Dubourg.' Do you think I could stand in the way of such a career as that? After what he has sacrificed forme,could I let Such a Man stagnate here—for no better purpose than to keep me company? What does it matter aboutmyfeeling lonely? Who am I? Oh, if you had seen how he bore with the horrible notoriety that followed us, after the trial! He was constantly stared at and pointed at, forme.Not a word of complaint escaped him. He snapped his fingers at it. 'That for public opinion!' he said. What strength of mind—eh? From one place after another we moved and moved, and still there were the photographs, and the newspapers, and the whole infamous story ('romance in real life,' they called it), known beforehand to everybody.Henever lost heart. 'We shall find a place yet' (that was the cheerful way he put it); 'you have nothing to do with it, Oscar; you are safe in my hands; I promise you exactly the place of refuge you want.' It was he who got all the information, and found out this lonely part of England where you live.Ithought it pretty as we wandered about the hills—it wasn't half grand enough forhim.We lost ourselves. I began to feel nervous. He didn't mind it a bit. 'You have Me with you,' he said; 'My luck is always to be depended on. Mark what I say! We shall stumble on a village!' You will hardly believe me—in ten minutes more, we stumbled, exactly as he had foretold, on this place. He didn't leave me—when I had prevailed on him to go—without a recommendation. He recommended me to the landlord of the inn here. He said, 'My brother is delicate; my brother wishes to live in retirement; you will oblige me by looking after my brother.' Wasn't it kind? The landlord seemed to be quite affected by it. Nugent cried when he took leave of me. Ah, what would I not give to have a heart like his and a mind like his! It's something—isn't it?—to have a face like him. I often say that to myself when I look in the glass. Excuse my running on in this way. When I once begin to talk of Nugent, I don't know when to leave off."
One thing, at any rate, was plainly discernible in this otherwise inscrutable young man. He adored his twin-brother.
It would have been equally clear to me that Mr. Nugent Dubourg deserved to be worshipped, if I could have reconciled to my mind his leaving his brother to shift for himself in such a place as Dimchurch. I was obliged to remind myself of the admirable service which he had rendered at the trial, before I could decide to do him the justice of suspending my opinion of him, in his absence. Having accomplished this act of magnanimity, I took advantage of the first opportunity to change the subject. The most tiresome information that I am acquainted with, is the information which tells us of the virtues of an absent person—when that absent person happens to be a stranger.
"Is it true that you have taken Browndown for six months?" I asked. "Are you really going to settle at Dimchurch?"
"Yes—if you keep my secret," he answered. "The people here know nothing about me. Don't, pray don't, tell them who I am! You will drive me away, if you do."
"I must tell Miss Finch who you are," I said.
"No! no! no!" he exclaimed eagerly. "I can't bear the idea of her knowing it. I have been so horribly degraded. What will she think of me?" He burst into another explosion of rhapsodies on the subject of Lucilla—mixed up with renewed petitions to me to keep his story concealed from everybody. I lost all patience with his want of common fortitude and common sense.
"Young Oscar, I should like to box your ears!" I said. "You are in a villainously unwholesome state about this matter. Have you nothing else to think of? Have you no profession? Are you not obliged to work for your living?"
I spoke, as you perceive, with some force of expression—aided by a corresponding asperity of voice and manner.
Mr. Oscar Dubourg looked at me with the puzzled air of a man who feels an overflow of new ideas forcing itself into his mind. He modestly admitted the degrading truth. From his childhood upwards, he had only to put his hand in his pocket, and to find the money there, without any preliminary necessity of earning it first. His father had been a fashionable portrait-painter, and had married one of his sitters—an heiress. Oscar and Nugent had been left in the detestable position of independent gentlemen. The dignity of labor was a dignity unknown to these degraded young men. "I despise a wealthy idler," I said to Oscar, with my republican severity. "You want the ennobling influence of labor to make a man of you. Nobody has a right to be idle—nobody has a right to be rich. You would be in a more wholesome state of mind about yourself, my young gentleman, if you had to earn your bread and cheese before you ate it."
He stared at me piteously. The noble sentiments which I had inherited from Doctor Pratolungo, completely bewildered Mr. Oscar Dubourg.
"Don't be angry with me," he said, in his innocent way. "I couldn't eat my cheese, if I did earn it. I can't digest cheese. Besides, I employ myself as much as I can." He took his little golden vase from the table behind him, and told me what I had already heard him tell Lucilla while I was listening at the window. "You would have found me at work this morning," he went on, "if the stupid people who send me my metal plates had not made a mistake. The alloy, in the gold and silver both, is all wrong this time. I must return the plates to be melted again before I can do anything with them. They are all ready to go back to-day, when the cart comes. If there are any laboring people here who want money, I'm sure I will give them some of mine with the greatest pleasure. It isn't my fault, ma'am, that my father married my mother. And how could I help it if he left two thousand a year each to my brother and me?"
Two thousand a year each to his brother and him! And the illustrious Pratolungo had never known what it was to have five pounds sterling at his disposal before his union with Me!
I lifted my eyes to the ceiling. In my righteous indignation, I forgot Lucilla and her curiosity about Oscar—I forgot Oscar and his horror of Lucilla discovering who he was. I opened my lips to speak. In another moment I should have launched my thunderbolts against the whole infamous system of modern society, when I was silenced by the most extraordinary and unexpected interruption that ever closed a woman's lips.
THERE walked in, at the open door of the room—softly, suddenly, and composedly—a chubby female child, who could not possibly have been more than three years old. She had no hat or cap on her head. A dirty pinafore covered her from her chin to her feet. This amazing apparition advanced into the middle of the room, holding hugged under one arm a ragged and disreputable-looking doll; stared hard, first at Oscar, then at me; advanced to my knees; laid the disreputable doll on my lap; and, pointing to a vacant chair at my side, claimed the rights of hospitality in these words:
"Jicks will sit down."
How was it possible, under these circumstances, to attack the infamous system of modern society? It was only possible to kiss "Jicks."
"Do you know who this is?" I inquired, as I lifted our visitor on to the chair.
Oscar burst out laughing. Like me, he now saw this mysterious young lady for the first time. Like me, he wondered what the extraordinary nick-name under which she had presented herself could possibly mean.
We looked at the child. The child—with its legs stretched out straight before it, terminating in a pair of little dusty boots with holes in them—lifted its large round eyes, overshadowed by a penthouse of unbrushed flaxen hair; looked gravely at us in return; and made a second call on our hospitality, as follows:
"Jicks will have something to drink."
While Oscar ran into the kitchen for some milk, I succeeded in discovering the identity of "Jicks."
Something—I cannot well explain what—in the manner in which the child had drifted into the room with her doll, reminded me of the lymphatic lady of the rectory, drifting backwards and forwards with the baby in one hand and the novel in the other. I took the liberty of examining "Jicks's" pinafore, and discovered the mark in one corner:—"Selina Finch." Exactly as I had supposed, here was a member of Mrs. Finch's numerous family. Rather a young member, as it struck me, to be wandering hatless round the environs of Dimchurch, all by herself.
Oscar returned with the milk in a mug. The child—insisting on taking the mug into her own hands—steadily emptied it to the last drop—recovered her breath with a gasp—looked at me with a white mustache of milk on her upper lip—and announced the conclusion of her visit, in these terms:
"Jicks will get down again."
I deposited our young friend on the floor. She took her doll, and stood for a moment deep in thought. What was she going to do next? We were not kept long in suspense. She suddenly put her little hot fat hand into mine, and tried to pull me after her out of the room.
"What do you want?" I asked.
Jicks answered in one untranslatable compound word:
"Man-Gee-gee."
I suffered myself to be pulled out of the room—to see "Man-Gee-gee," to play "Man-Gee-gee," or to eat "Man-Gee-gee," it was impossible to tell which. I was pulled along the passage—I was pulled out to the front door. There—having approached the house inaudibly to us, over the grass—stood the horse, cart, and man, waiting to take the case of gold and silver plates back to London. I looked at Oscar, who had followed me. We now understood, not only the masterly compound word of Jicks (signifying man and horse, and passing over cart as unimportant), but the polite attention of Jicks in entering the house to inform us, after a rest and a drink, of a circumstance which had escaped our notice. The driver of the cart had, on his own acknowledgment, been investigated and questioned by this extraordinary child; strolling up to the door of Browndown to see what he was doing there. Jicks was a public character at Dimchurch. The driver knew all about her. She had been nicknamed "Gipsy" from her wandering habits, and had shortened the name in her own dialect, into "Jicks." There was no keeping her in at the rectory, try how you might: they had long since abandoned the effort in despair. Sooner or later, she turned up again—or somebody brought her back—or one of the sheep-dogs found her asleep under a bush, and gave the alarm. "What goes on in that child's head," said the driver, regarding Jicks with a sort of superstitious admiration, "the Lord only knows. She has a will of her own, and a way of her own. Sheisa child; and sheainta child. At three years of age, she's a riddle none of us can guess. And that's the long and the short of what I know about her."
While this explanation was in progress, the carpenter who had nailed up the case, and the carpenter's son, accompanying him, joined us in front of the house. They followed Oscar in, and came out again, bearing the heavy burden of precious metal—more than one man could conveniently lift—between them.
The case deposited in the cart, carpenter senior and carpenter junior got in after it, wanting "a lift" to Brighton.
Carpenter senior, a big burly man, made a joke. "It's a lonely country between this and Brighton, sir," he said to Oscar. "Three of us will be none too many to see your precious packing-case safe into the railway station." Oscar took it seriously. "Are there any robbers in this neighborhood?" he asked. "Lord love you, sir!" said the driver, "robbers would starve in these parts; we have got nothing worth thieving here." Jicks—still watching the proceedings with an interest which allowed no detail to escape unnoticed—assumed the responsibility of starting the men on their journey. The odd child waved her chubby hand imperiously to her friend the driver, and cried in her loudest voice, "Away!" The driver touched his hat with comic respect. "All right, miss—time's money, aint it?" He cracked his whip, and the cart rolled off noiselessly over the thick close turf of the South Downs.
It was time for me to go back to the rectory, and to restore the wandering Jicks, for the time being, to the protection of home. I returned to Oscar, to say good-bye.
"I wish I was going back with you," he said.
"You will be as free as I am to come and to go at the rectory," I answered, "when they know what has passed this morning between you and me. In your own interests, I am determined to tell them who you are. You have nothing to fear, and everything to gain, by my speaking out. Clear your mind of fancies and suspicions that are unworthy of you. By to-morrow we shall be good neighbors; by the end of the week we shall be good friends. For the present, as we say in France,au revoir!"
I turned to take Jicks by the hand. While I had been speaking to Oscar the child had slipped away from me. Not a sign of her was to be seen.
Before we could stir a step to search for our lost Gipsy, her voice reached our ears, raised shrill and angry in the regions behind us, at the side of the house.
"Go away!" we heard the child cry out impatiently. "Ugly men, go away!"
We turned the corner, and discovered two shabby strangers, resting themselves against the side wall of the house. Their cadaverous faces, their brutish expressions, and their frowzy clothes, proclaimed them, to my eye, as belonging to the vilest blackguard type that the civilized earth has yet produced—the blackguard of London growth. There they lounged, with their hands in their pockets and their backs against the wall, as if they were airing themselves on the outer side of a public-house—and there stood Jicks, with her legs planted wide apart on the turf, asserting the rights of property (even at that early age!) and ordering the rascals off.
"What are you doing there?" asked Oscar sharply.
One of the men appeared to be on the point of making an insolent answer. The other—the younger and the viler-looking villain of the two—checked him, and spoke first.
"We've had a longish walk, sir," said the fellow, with an impudent assumption of humility; "and we've took the liberty of resting our backs against your wall, and feasting our eyes on the beauty of your young lady here."
He pointed to the child. Jicks shook her fist at him, and ordered him off more fiercely than ever.
"There's an inn in the village," said Oscar. "Rest there, if you please—my house is not an inn."
The elder man made a second effort to speak, beginning with an oath. The younger checked him again.
"Shut up, Jim!" said the superior blackguard of the two. "The gentleman recommends the tap at the inn. Come and drink the gentleman's health." He turned to the child, and took off his hat to her with a low bow. "Wish you good morning, Miss! You're just the style, you are, that I admire. Please don't engage yourself to be married till I come back."
His savage companion was so tickled by this delicate pleasantry that he burst suddenly into a roar of laughter. Arm in arm, the two ruffians walked off together in the direction of the village. Our funny little Jicks became a tragic and terrible Jicks, all on a sudden. The child resented the insolence of the two men as if she really understood it. I never saw so young a creature in such a furious passion before. She picked up a stone, and threw it at them before I could stop her. She screamed, and stamped her tiny feet alternately on the ground, till she was purple in the face. She threw herself down, and rolled in fury on the grass. Nothing pacified her but a rash promise of Oscar's (which he was destined to hear of for many a long day afterwards) to send for the police, and to have the two men soundly beaten for daring to laugh at Jicks. She got up from the ground, and dried her eyes with her knuckles, and fixed a warning look on Oscar. "Mind!" said this curious child, with her bosom still heaving under the dirty pinafore, "the men are to be beaten. And Jicks is to see it."
I said nothing to Oscar, at the time, but I felt some secret uneasiness on the way home—an uneasiness inspired by the appearance of the two men in the neighborhood of Browndown.
It was impossible to say how long they might have been lurking about the outside of the house, before the child discovered them. They might have heard, through the open window, what Oscar had said to me on the subject of his plates of precious metal; and they might have seen the heavy packing-case placed in the cart. I felt no apprehension about the safe arrival of the case at Brighton; the three men in the cart were men enough to take good care of it. My fears were for the future. Oscar was living, entirely by himself, in a lonely house, more than half a mile distant from the village. His fancy for chasing in the precious metals might have its dangers, as well as its attractions, if it became known beyond the pastoral limits of Dimchurch. Advancing from one suspicion to another, I asked myself if the two men had roamed by mere accident into our remote part of the world—or whether they had deliberately found their way to Browndown with a purpose in view. Having this doubt in my mind, and happening to encounter the old nurse, Zillah, in the garden as I entered the rectory gates with my little charge, I put the question to her plainly, "Do you see many strangers at Dimchurch?"
"Strangers?" repeated the old woman. "Excepting yourself, ma'am, we see no strangers here, from one year's end to another."
I determined to say a warning word to Oscar before his precious metals were sent back to Browndown.
LUCILLA was at the piano when I entered the sitting-room.
"I wanted you of all things," she said. "I have sent all over the house in search of you. Where have you been?"
I told her.
She sprang to her feet with a cry of delight.
"You have persuaded him to trust you—you have discovered everything. You only said 'I have been at Browndown'—and I heard it in your voice. Out with it! out with it!"
She never moved—she seemed hardly to breathe—while I was telling her all that had passed at the interview between Oscar and me. As soon as I had done, she got up in a violent hurry—flushed and eager—and made straight for her bedroom door.
"What are you going to do?" I asked.
"I want my hat and my stick," she answered.
"You are going out?"
"Yes."
"Where?"
"Can you ask the question? To Browndown of course!"
I begged her to wait a moment, and hear a word or two that I had to say. It is, I suppose, almost needless to add that my object in speaking to her was to protest against the glaring impropriety of her paying a second visit, in one day, to a man who was a stranger to her. I declared, in the plainest terms, that such a proceeding would be sufficient, in the estimation of any civilized community, to put her reputation in peril. The result of my interference was curious and interesting in the extreme. It showed me that the virtue called Modesty (I am not speaking of Decency, mind) is a virtue of purely artificial growth; and that the successful cultivation of it depends in the first instance, not on the influence of the tongue, but on the influence of the eye.
Suppose the case of an average young lady (conscious of feeling a first love) to whom I might have spoken in the sense that I have just mentioned—what would she have done?
She would assuredly have shown some natural and pretty confusion, and would, in all human probability, have changed color more or less while she was listening to me. Lucilla's charming face revealed but one expression—an expression of disappointment, slightly mixed perhaps with surprise. I believed her to be then, what I knew her to be afterwards, as pure a creature as ever walked the earth. And yet, of the natural and becoming confusion, of the little inevitable feminine changes of color which I had expected to see, not so much as a vestige appeared—and this, remember, in the case of a person of unusually sensitive and impulsive nature: quick, on the most trifling occasions, to feel and to express its feeling in no ordinary degree.
What did it mean?
It meant that here was one strange side shown to me of the terrible affliction that darkened her life. It meant that modesty is essentially the growth of our own consciousness of the eyes of others judging us—and that blindness is never bashful, for the one simple reason that blindness cannot see. The most modest girl in existence is bolder with her lover in the dark than in the light. The female model who "sits" for the first time in a drawing academy, and who shrinks from the ordeal, is persuaded, in the last resort, to enter the students' room by having a bandage bound over her eyes. My poor Lucilla had always the bandage over her eyes. My poor Lucilla was never to meet her lover in the light. She had grown up with the passions of a woman—and yet, she had never advanced beyond the fearless and primitive innocence of a child. Ah, if ever there was a sacred charge confided to any mortal creature, here surely was a sacred charge confided to Me! I could not endure to see the poor pretty blind face turned so insensibly towards mine, after such words as I had just said to her. She was standing within my reach. I took her by the arm, and made her sit on my knee. "My dear!" I said, very earnestly, "you must not go to him again to-day."
"I have got so much to say to him," she answered impatiently, "I want to tell him how deeply I feel for him, and how anxious I am to make his life a happier one if I can."
"My dear Lucilla! you can't say this to a young man. It is as good as telling him, in plain words, that you are fond of him!"
"Iamfond of him."
"Hush! hush! Keep it to yourself, until you are sure thatheis fond ofyou.It is the man's place, my love—not the woman's—to own the truth first in matters of this sort."
"That is very hard on the women. If they feel it first, they ought to own it first." She paused for a moment, considering with herself—and abruptly got off my knee. "Imustspeak to him!" she burst out. "Imusttell him that I have heard his story, and that I think all the better of him after it, instead of the worse!"
She was again on her way to get her hat. My only chance of stopping her was to invent a compromise.
"Write him a note," I said—and then suddenly remembered that she was blind. "You shall dictate," I added; "and I will hold the pen. Be content with that for to-day. For my sake, Lucilla!"
She yielded—not very willingly, poor thing. But she jealously declined to let me hold the pen.
"My first note to him must be all written by me," she said. "I can write—in my own roundabout way. It's long and tiresome; but still I can do it. Come and see."
She led the way to a writing-table in a corner of the room, and sat for awhile with the pen in her hand, thinking. Her irresistible smile broke suddenly like a glow of light over her "Ah!" she exclaimed, "I know how to tell him what I think."
Guiding the pen in her right hand with the fingers of her left she wrote slowly, in large childish characters, these words:—"DEAR MR. OSCAR,—I have heard all about you. Please send the little gold vase.—Your friend, LUCILLA."
She enclosed and directed the letter, and clapped her hands for joy. "He will know whatthatmeans!" she said gaily.
It was useless to attempt making a second remonstrance. I rang the bell, under protest (imagine her receiving a present from a gentleman to whom she had spoken for the first time that morning!)—and the groom was sent off to Browndown with the letter. In making this concession, I privately said to myself, "I shall keep a tight hand over Oscar; he is the manageable person of the two!"
The interval before the return of the groom was not an easy interval to fill up. I proposed some music. Lucilla was still too full of her new interest to be able to give her attention to anything else. She suddenly remembered that her father and her step-mother ought both to be informed that Mr. Dubourg was a perfectly presentable person at the rectory: she decided on writing to her father.
On this occasion, she made no difficulty about permitting me to hold the pen, while she told me what to write. We produced between us rather a flighty, enthusiastic, high-flown sort of letter. I felt by no means sure that we should raise a favorable impression of our new neighbor in the mind of Reverend Finch. That was, however, not my affair. I appeared to excellent advantage in the matter, as the judicious foreign lady who had insisted on making inquiries. For the rest, it was a point of honor with me—writing for a person who was blind—not to change a single word in the sentences which Lucilla dictated to me. The letter completed, I wrote the address of the house in Brighton at which Mr. Finch then happened to be staying; and I was next about to close the envelope in due course—when Lucilla stopped me.
"Wait a little," she said. "Don't close the letter yet."
I wondered why the envelope was to be left open, and why Lucilla looked a little confused when she forbade me to close it. Another unexpected revelation of the influence of their affliction on the natures of the blind, was waiting to enlighten me on those two points.
After consultation between us, it had been decided, at Lucilla's express request, that I should inform Mrs. Finch that the mystery at Browndown was now cleared up. Lucilla openly owned to having no great relish for the society of her step-mother, or for the duty invariably devolving on anybody who was long in the company of that fertile lady, of either finding her handkerchief or holding her baby. A duplicate key of the door of communication between the two sides of the house was given to me; and I left the room.
Before performing my errand, I went for a minute into my bedchamber to put away my hat and parasol. Returning into the corridor, and passing the door of the sitting-room, I found that it had been left ajar by some one who had entered after I had left; and I heard Lucilla's voice say, "Take that letter out of the envelope, and read it to me."
I pursued my way along the passage—very slowly, I own—and I heard the first sentences of the letter which I had written under Lucilla's dictation, read aloud to her in the old nurse's voice. The incurable suspicion of the blind—always abandoned to the same melancholy distrust of the persons about them; always doubting whether some deceit is not being practiced on them by the happy people who can see—had urged Lucilla, even in the trifling matter of the letter, to put me to the test, behind my back. She was using Zillah's eyes to make sure that I had really written all that she had dictated to me—exactly as, on many an after occasion, she used my eyes to make sure of Zillah's complete performance of tasks allotted to her in the house. No experience of the faithful devotion of those who live with them ever thoroughly satisfies the blind. Ah, poor things, always in the dark! always in the dark!
In opening the door of communication, it appeared as if I had also opened all the doors of all the bedchambers in the rectory. The moment I stepped into the passage, out popped the children from one room after another, like rabbits out of their burrows.
"Where is your mamma?" I asked.
The rabbits answered by one universal shriek, and popped back again into their burrows.
I went down the stairs to try my luck on the ground floor. The window on the landing had a view over the front garden. I looked out, and saw the irrepressible Arab of the family, our small chubby Jicks, wandering in the garden, all by herself; evidently on the watch for her next opportunity of escaping from the house. This curious little creature cared nothing for the society of the other children. Indoors, she sat gravely retired in corners, taking her meals (whenever she could) on the floor. Out of doors, she roamed till she could walk no longer, and then lay down anywhere, like a little animal, to sleep. She happened to look up as I stood at the window. Seeing me, she waved her hand indicatively in the direction of the rectory gate. "What is it?" I asked. The Arab answered, "Jicks wants to get out."
At the same moment, the screaming of a baby below, informed me that I was in the near neighborhood of Mrs. Finch.
I advanced towards the noise, and found myself standing before the open door of a large store-room at the extreme end of the passage. In the middle of the room (issuing household commodities to the cook) sat Mrs. Finch. She was robed this time in a petticoat and a shawl; and she had the baby and the novel laid together flat on their backs in her lap.
"Eight pounds of soap? Where does it all go to I wonder!" groaned Mrs. Finch to the accompaniment of the baby's screams. "Five pounds of soda for the laundry? One would think we did the washing for the whole village. Six pounds of candles? You must eat candles, like the Russians: who ever heard of burning six pounds of candles in a week? Ten pounds of sugar? Who gets it all? I never taste sugar from one year's end to another. Waste, nothing but waste." Here Mrs. Finch looked my way, and saw me at the door. "Oh? Madame Pratolungo? How d'ye do? Don't go away—I've just done. A bottle of blacking? My shoes are a disgrace to the house. Five pounds of rice? If I had Indian servants, five pounds of rice would last them for a year. There! take the things away into the kitchen. Excuse my dress, Madame Pratolungo. HowamI to dress, with all I have got to do? What do you say? My time must indeed be fully occupied? Ah, that's just where it is! When you have lost half an hour in the morning, and can't pick it up again—to say nothing of having the store-room on your mind, and the children's dinner late, and the baby fractious—one slips on a petticoat and a shawl, and gives it up in despair. WhatcanI have done with my handkerchief? Would you mind looking among those bottles behind you? Oh, here it is, under the baby. Might I trouble you to hold my book for one moment? I think the baby will be quieter if I put him the other way." Here Mrs. Finch turned the baby over on his stomach, and patted him briskly on the back. At this change in his circumstances, the unappeasable infant only roared louder than ever. His mother appeared to be perfectly unaffected by the noise. This resigned domestic martyr looked placidly up at me, as I stood before her, bewildered, with the novel in my hand. "Ah, that's a very interesting story," she went on. "Plenty of love in it, you know. You have come for it, haven't you? I remember I promised to lend it to you yesterday." Before I could answer the cook appeared again, in search of more household commodities. Mrs. Finch repeated the woman's demands, one by one as she made them, in tones of despair. "Another bottle of vinegar? I believe you water the garden with vinegar! More starch? The Queen's washing, I'm firmly persuaded, doesn't come to so much as ours. Sandpaper? Sandpaper means wastepaper in this profligate house. I shall tell your master. I reallycanNOT make the housekeeping money last at this rate. Don't go, Madame Pratolungo! I shall have done directly. What! You must go! Oh, then, put the book back on my lap, please—and look behind that sack of flour. The first volume slipped down there this morning, and I haven't had time to pick it up since. (Sandpaper! Do you think I'm made of sandpaper!) Have you found the first volume? Ah, that's it. All over flour! there's a hole in the sack I suppose. Twelve sheets of sandpaper used in a week! What for? I defy any of you to tell me what for. Waste! waste! shameful sinful waste!" At this point in Mrs. Finch's lamentations, I made my escape with the book, and left the subject of Oscar Dubourg to be introduced at a fitter opportunity. The last words I heard, through the screams of the baby, as I ascended the stairs, were words still relating to the week's prodigal consumption of sandpaper. Let us drop a tear, if you please, over the woes of Mrs. Finch, and leave the British matron apostrophizing domestic economy in the odorous seclusion of her own storeroom.
I had just related to Lucilla the failure of my expedition to the other side of the house, when the groom returned, bringing with him the gold vase, and a letter.
Oscar's answer was judiciously modeled to imitate the brevity of Lucilla's note. "You have made me a happy man again. When may I follow the vase?" There, in two sentences, was the whole letter.
I had another discussion with Lucilla, relating to the propriety of our receiving Oscar in Reverend Finch's absence. It was only possible to persuade her to wait until she had at least heard from her father, by consenting to take another walk towards Browndown the next morning. This new concession satisfied her. She had received his present; she had exchanged letters with him—that was enough to content her for the time.
"Do you think he is getting fond of me?" she asked, the last thing at night; taking her gold vase to bed with her, poor dear—exactly as she might have taken a new toy to bed with her when she was a child. "Give him time, my love," I answered. "It isn't everybody who can travel at your pace in such a serious matter as this." My banter had no effect upon her. "Go away with your candle," she said. "The darkness makes no difference tome.I can see him in my thoughts." She nestled her head comfortably on the pillows, and tapped me saucily on the cheek, as I bent over her. "Own the advantage I have over you now," she said. "Youcan't see at night without your candle.Icould go all over the house, at this moment, without making a false step anywhere."
When I left her that night, I sincerely believe "poor Miss Finch" was the happiest woman in England.