Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (809 page)

Whether Lucilla arrived, on her side, at the same conclusion as mine, is what I cannot venture positively to declare. I can only relate that she looked ill at ease as the facts came out; and that she took the first opportunity of extinguishing her father, viewed as a topic of conversation.

As for Oscar, it was enough for him that he had already secured his place as friend of the house. He took leave of us in the highest spirits. I had my eye on them when he and Lucilla said good-bye. She squeezed his hand. I saw her do it. At the rate at which things were now going on, I began to ask myself whether Reverend Finch would not appear at tea-time in his robes of office, and celebrate the marriage of his “sorely-tried” young friend between the first cup and the second.

At our little social assembly in the evening, nothing passed worthy of much remark.

Lucilla and I (I cannot resist recording this) were both beautifully dressed, in honour of the occasion; Mrs. Finch serving us to perfection, by way of contrast. She had made an immense effort — she was half dressed. Her evening costume was an ancient green silk skirt (with traces of past babies visible on it to an experienced eye), topped by the everlasting blue merino jacket. “I lose everything belonging to me,” Mrs. Finch whispered in my ear. “I have got a body to this dress, and it can’t be found anywhere.” The rector’s prodigious voice was never silent: the pompous and plausible little man talked, talked, talked, in deeper and deeper bass, until the very teacups on the table shuddered under the influence of him. The elder children, admitted to the family festival, ate till they could eat no more; stared till they could stare no more; yawned till they could yawn no more — and then went to bed. Oscar got on well with everybody. Mrs. Finch was naturally interested in him as one of twins — though she was also surprised and disappointed at hearing that his mother had begun and ended with his brother and himself. As for Lucilla, she sat in silent happiness, absorbed in the inexhaustible delight of hearing Oscar’s voice. She found as many varieties of expression in listening to her beloved tones, as the rest of us find in looking at our beloved face. We had music later in the evening — and I then heard, for the first time, how charmingly Lucilla played. She was a born musician, with a delicacy and subtlety of touch such as few even of the greatest
virtuosi
possess. Oscar was enchanted. In a word, the evening was a success.

I contrived, when our guest took his departure, to say my contemplated word to him in private, on the subject of his solitary position at Browndown.

Those doubts of Oscar’s security in his lonely house, which I have described as having been suggested to me by the discovery of the two ruffians lurking under the wall, still maintained their place in my mind; and still urged me to warn him to take precautions of some sort, before the precious metals which he had sent to London to be melted, came back to him again. He gave me the opportunity I wanted, by looking at his watch, and apologising for protracting his visit to a terribly late hour, for the country — the hour of midnight.

“Is your servant sitting up for you?” I asked, assuming to be ignorant of his domestic arrangements.

He pulled out of his pocket a great clumsy key.

“This is my only servant at Browndown,” he said. “By four or five in the afternoon, the people at the inn have done all for me that I want. After that time, there is nobody in the house but myself.”

He shook hands with us. The rector escorted him as far as the front door. I slipped out while they were saying their last words, and joined Oscar, when he advanced alone into the garden.

“I want a breath of fresh air,” I said. “I’ll go with you as far as the gate.”

He began to talk of Lucilla directly. I surprised him by returning abruptly to the subject of his position at Browndown.

“Do you think it’s wise,” I asked, “to be all by yourself at night in such a lonely house as yours? Why don’t you have a manservant?”

“I detest strange servants,” he answered. “I infinitely prefer being by myself.”

“When do you expect your gold and silver plates to be returned to you?”

“In about a week.”

“What would be the value of them, in money — at a rough guess?”

“At a rough guess — about seventy or eighty pounds.”

“In a week’s time then,” I said, “you will have seventy or eighty pounds’ worth of property at Browndown. Property which a thief need only put into the melting-pot, to have no fear of its being traced into his hands.”

Oscar stopped, and looked at me.

“What
can
you be thinking of!” he asked. “There are no thieves in this primitive place.”

“There are thieves in other places,” I answered. “And they may come here. Have you forgotten those two men whom we caught hanging about Browndown yesterday?”

He smiled. I had recalled to him a humourous association — nothing more.

“It was not we who caught them,” he said. “It was that strange child. What do you say to my having Jicks to sleep in the house and take care of me?”

“I am not joking,” I rejoined. “I never met with two more ill-looking villains in my life. The window was open when you were telling me about the necessity for melting the plates again. They may know as well as we do, that your gold and silver will be returned to you after a time.”

“What an imagination you have got!” he exclaimed. “You see a couple of shabby excursionists from Brighton, who have wandered to Dimchurch — and you instantly transform them into a pair of housebreakers in a conspiracy to rob and murder me! You and my brother Nugent would just suit each other. His imagination runs away with him, exactly like yours.”

“Take my advice,” I answered gravely. “Don’t persist in sleeping at Browndown without a living creature in the house with you.”

He was in wild good spirits. He kissed my hand, and thanked me in his voluble exaggerated way for the interest that I took in him. “All right!” he said, as he opened the gate. “I’ll have a living creature in the house with me. I’ll get a dog.”

We parted. I had told him what was on my mind. I could do no more. After all, it might be quite possible that his view was the right one, and mine the wrong.

CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH

Second Appearance of Jicks

FIVE more days passed.

During that interval, we saw our new neighbour constantly. Either Oscar came to the rectory, or we went to Browndown. Reverend Finch waited, with a masterly assumption of suspecting nothing, until the relations between the two young people were ripe enough to develop into relations of acknowledged love. They were already (under Lucilla’s influence) advancing rapidly to that point. You are not to blame my poor blind girl, if you please, for frankly encouraging the man she loved. He was the most backward man — viewed as a suitor — whom I ever met with. The fonder he grew of her, the more timid and self-distrustful he became. I own I don’t like a modest man; and I cannot honestly say that Mr. Oscar Dubourg, on closer acquaintance, advanced himself much in my estimation. However, Lucilla understood him, and that was enough. She was determined to have the completest possible image of him in her mind. Everybody in the house who had seen him (the children included) she examined and cross-examined on the subject of his personal appearance, as she had already examined and cross-examined me. His features and his colour, his height and his breadth; his ornaments and his clothes — on all these points she collected evidence, in every direction and in the smallest detail. It was an especial relief and delight to her to hear, on all sides, that his complexion was fair. There was no reasoning with her against her blind horror of dark shades of colour, whether seen in men, women, or things. She was quite unable to account for it; she could only declare it.

“I have the strangest instincts of my own about some things,” she said to me one day. “For instance, I knew that Oscar was bright and fair — I mean I felt it in myself — on that delightful evening when I first heard the sound of his voice. It went straight from my ear to my heart; and it described him, just as the rest of you have described him to me since. Mrs. Finch tells me his complexion is lighter than mine. Do you think so too? I am so glad to hear that he is fairer than I am! Did you ever meet before with a person like me? I have the oddest ideas in this blind head of mine. I associate life and beauty with light colours, and death and crime with dark colours. If I married a man with a dark complexion, and if I recovered my sight afterwards, I should run away from him.”

This singular prejudice of hers against dark people was a little annoying to me on personal grounds. It was a sort of reflection on my own taste. Between ourselves, the late Doctor Pratolungo was of a fine mahogany brown all over.

As for affairs in general at Dimchurch, my chronicle of the five days finds little to dwell on that is worth recording.

We were not startled by any second appearance of the two ruffians at Browndown — neither was any change made by Oscar in his domestic establishment. He was favored with more than one visit from our little wandering Jicks. On each occasion, the child gravely reminded him of his rash promise to appeal to the police, and visit with corporal punishment the two ugly strangers who had laughed at her. When were the men to be beaten? and when was Jicks to see it? Such were the serious questions with which this young lady regularly opened the proceedings, on each occasion when she favored Oscar with a morning call.

On the sixth day, the gold and silver plates were returned to Browndown from the manufactory in London.

The next morning a note arrived for me from Oscar. It ran thus: —

“DEAR MADAME PRATOLUNGO, — I regret to inform you that nothing happened to me last night. My locks and bolts are in their usual good order; my gold and silver plates are safe in the workshop: and I myself am now eating my breakfast with an uncut throat — Yours ever,

“OSCAR.”

After this, there was no more to be said. Jicks might persist in remembering the two ill-looking strangers. Older and wiser people dismissed them from all further consideration.

Saturday came — making the tenth day since the memorable morning when I had forced Oscar to disclose himself to me in the little side-room at Browndown.

In the forenoon we had a visit from him at the rectory. In the afternoon we went to Browndown, to see him begin a new piece of chasing in gold — a casket for holding gloves — destined to take its place on Lucilla’s toilet-table when it was done. We left him industriously at work; determined to go on as long as the daylight lasted.

Early in the evening, Lucilla sat down at her pianoforte; and I paid a visit by appointment to the rectory side of the house.

Unhappy Mrs. Finch had determined to institute a complete reform of her wardrobe. She had entreated me to give her the benefit of “my French taste,” in the capacity of confidential critic and adviser. “I can’t afford to buy any new things,” said the poor lady. “But a deal might be done in altering what I have got by me, if a clever person took the matter up.” Who could resist that piteous appeal? I resigned myself to the baby, the novel, and the children in general; and (Reverend Finch being out of the way, writing his sermon) I presented myself in Mrs. Finch’s parlor, full of ideas, with my scissors and my pattern-paper ready in my hand.

We had only begun our operations, when one of the elder children arrived with a message from the nursery.

It was tea-time; and, as usual, Jicks was missing. She was searched for, first in the lower regions of the house; secondly in the garden. Not a trace of her was to be discovered in either quarter. Nobody was surprised or alarmed. We said, “Oh, dear, she has gone to Browndown again!” — and immersed ourselves once more in the shabby recesses of Mrs. Finch’s wardrobe.

I had just decided that the blue merino jacket was an article of wearing apparel which had done its duty, and earned its right to final retirement from the scene — when a plaintive cry reached my ear, through the open door which led into the back garden.

I stopped, and looked at Mrs. Finch.

The cry was repeated, louder and nearer: recognisable this time as a cry in a child’s voice. The door of the room had been left ajar, when we sent the messenger back to the nursery. I threw it open, and found myself face to face with Jicks in the passage.