Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (856 page)

“If you had seen more of the world, Lucilla,” he said, “you would know that a true love like yours is a mystery to a woman like Madame Pratolungo. She doesn’t believe in it — she doesn’t understand it. She knows herself to be capable of breaking any engagement, if the circumstances encouraged her — and she estimates your fidelity by her knowledge of her own nature. There is nothing in her experience of you, or in her knowledge of my brother’s disfigurement, to discourage such a woman from scheming to part us. She has seen for herself — what you have already told me — that you have got over your first aversion to him. She knows that women as charming as you are, have over and over again married men far more personally repulsive than my brother. Lucilla! something which is not to be out-argued, and not to be contradicted, tells me that her return to England will be fatal to my hopes, if that return finds you and me with no closer tie between us than the tie that binds us now. Are these fanciful apprehensions, unworthy of a man? My darling! worthy or not worthy, you ought to make allowances for them. They are apprehensions inspired by my love for You!”

Under those circumstances, I could make every allowance for him — and I said so. He moved nearer to me; and put his arm round me.

“Are we not engaged to each other to be man and wife?” he whispered.

“Yes.”

“Are we not both of age, and both free to do as we like?”

“Yes.”

“Would you relieve me from the anxieties under which I am suffering, if you could?”

“You know I would!”

“You
can
relieve me.”

“How?”

“By giving me a husband’s claim to you, Lucilla — by consenting to marry me in London, in a fortnight’s time.”

I started back, and looked at him in amazement. For the moment, I was incapable of answering in any other way than that.

“I ask you to do nothing unworthy of you,” he said. “I have spoken to a relative of mine living near London — a married lady — whose house is open to you in the interval before our wedding day. When your visit has been prolonged over a fortnight only, we can be married. Write home by all means to prevent them from feeling anxious about you. Tell them that you are safe and happy, and under responsible and respectable care — but say no more. As long as it is possible for Madame Pratolungo to make mischief between us, conceal the place in which you are living. The instant we are married reveal everything. Let all your friends — let all the world know that we are man and wife!”

His arm trembled round me; his face flushed deep; his eyes devoured me. Some women, in my place, might have been offended; others might have been flattered. As for me — I can trust the secret to these pages — I was frightened.

“Is it an elopement that you are proposing to me?” I asked.

“An elopement!” he repeated. “Between two engaged people who have only themselves to think of.”

“I have my father to think of; and my aunt to think of,” I said. “You are proposing to me to run away from them, and to keep in hiding from them!”

“I am asking you to pay a fortnight’s visit at the house of a married lady — and to keep the knowledge of that visit from the ears of the worst enemy you have, until you have become my wife,” he answered. “Is there anything so very terrible in my request that you should turn pale at it, and look at me in that frightened way? Have I not courted you with your father’s consent? Am I not your promised husband? Are we not free to decide for ourselves? There is literally no reason — if it could be done — why we should not be married to-morrow. And you still hesitate? Lucilla! Lucilla! you force me to own the doubt that has made me miserable ever since I have been here. Are you indeed as changed towards me as you seem? Do you really no longer love me as you once loved me in the days that are gone?”

He rose, and walked away a few paces, leaning over the parapet with his face in his hands.

I sat alone, not knowing what to say or do. The uneasy sense in me that he had reason to complain of my treating him coldly, was not to be dismissed from my mind by any effort that I could make. He had no right to expect me to take the step which he had proposed — there were objections to it which any woman would have felt in my place. Still, though I was satisfied of this, there was an obstinate something in me which would take his part. It could not have been my conscience surely which said to me — ’There was a time when his entreaties would have prevailed on you; there was a time when you would not have hesitated as you are hesitating now?’

Whatever the influence was, it moved me to rise from my seat, and to join him at the parapet.

“You cannot expect me to decide on such a serious matter as this at once,” I said. “Will you give me a little time to think?”

“You are your own mistress,” he rejoined bitterly. “Why ask me to give you time? You can take any time you please — you can do as you like.”

“Give me till the end of the week,” I went on. “Let me be sure that my father persists in not answering either your letter or mine. Though I
am
my own mistress, nothing but his silence can justify me in going away secretly, and being married to you by a stranger. Don’t press me, Oscar! It isn’t very long to the end of the week.”

Something seemed to startle him — something in my voice perhaps which told him that I was really distressed. He looked round at me quickly, and caught me with the tears in my eyes.

“Don’t cry, for God’s sake!” he said. “It shall be as you wish. Take your time. We will say no more about it till the end of the week.”

He kissed me in a hurried startled way, and gave me his arm to walk back.

“Grosse is coming to-day,” he continued. “He mustn’t see you looking as you are looking now. You must rest and compose yourself. Come home.”

I went back with him, feeling — oh, so sad and sore at heart! My last faint hope of a renewal of my once-pleasant intimacy with Madame Pratolungo was at an end. She stood revealed to me now as a woman whom I ought never to have known — a woman with whom I could never again exchange a friendly word. I had lost the companion with whom I had once been so happy; and I had pained and disappointed Oscar. My life has never looked so wretched and so worthless to me as it looked to-day on the pier at Ramsgate.

He left me at the door, with a gentle encouraging pressure of my hand.

“I will call again later,” he said; “and hear what Grosse’s report of you is, before he goes back to London. Rest, Lucilla — rest and compose yourself.”

A heavy footstep sounded suddenly behind us as he spoke. We both turned round. Time had slipped by more rapidly than we had thought. There stood Herr Grosse, just arrived on foot from the railway station.

His first look at me seemed to startle and disappoint him. His eyes stared into mine through his spectacles with an expression of surprise and anxiety which I had never seen in them before. Then he turned his head and looked at Oscar with a sudden change — a change, unpleasantly suggestive (to my fancy) of anger or distrust. Not a word fell from his lips. Oscar was left to break the awkward silence. He spoke to Grosse.

“I won’t disturb you and your patient now,” he said. “I will come back in an hour’s time.”

“No! you will come in along with me, if you please. I have something, my young gentlemans, that I may want to say to you.” He spoke with a frown on his bushy eyebrows, and pointed in a very peremptory manner to the house-door.

Oscar rang the bell. At the same moment my aunt, hearing us outside, appeared on the balcony above the door.

“Good morning, Mr. Grosse,” she said. “I hope you find Lucilla looking her best. Only yesterday, I expressed my opinion that she was quite well again.”

Grosse took off his hat sulkily to my aunt, and looked back again at me — looked so hard and so long, that he began to confuse me.

“Your aunt’s opinions is not my opinions,” he growled, close at my ear. “I don’t like the looks of you, Miss. Go in!”

The servant was waiting for us at the open door. I went an without making any answer. Grosse waited to see Oscar enter the house before him. Oscar’s face darkened as he joined me in the hall. He looked half angry, half confused. Grosse pushed himself roughly between us, and gave me his arm. I went up-stairs with him, wondering what it all meant.

CHAPTER THE FORTY-FIFTH

Lucilla’s Journal, concluded

September
4th
(continued).

ARRIVED in the drawing-room, Grosse placed me in a chair near the window. He leaned forward, and looked at me close; he drew back, and looked at me from a distance; he took out his magnifying glass, and had a long stare through it at my eyes; he felt my pulse; dropped my wrist as if it disgusted him; and, turning to the window, looked out in grim silence, without taking the slightest notice of any one in the room.

My aunt was the first person who spoke, under these discouraging circumstances.

“Mr. Grosse!” she said sharply. “Have you nothing to tell me about your patient to-day? Do you find Lucilla —
 
— ”

He turned suddenly round from the window, and interrupted Miss Batchford without the slightest ceremony.

“I find her gone back, back, back!” he growled, getting louder and louder at each repetition of the word. “When I sent her here, I said — ’Keep her comfortable-easy.’ You have not kept her comfortable-easy. Something has turned her poor little mind topsy-turvies. What is it? Who is it?” He looked fiercely backwards and forwards between Oscar and my aunt — then turned my way, and putting his heavy hands on my shoulders, looked down at me with an odd angry kind of pity in his face. “My childs is melancholick; my childs is ill,” he went on. “Where is our goot-dear Pratolungo? What did you tell me about her, my little-lofe, when I last saw you? You said she had gone aways to see her Papa. Send a telegrams — and say I want Pratolungo here.”

At the repetition of Madame Pratolungo’s name, Miss Batchford rose to her feet and stood (apparently) several inches higher than usual.

“Am I to understand, sir,” inquired the old lady, “that your extraordinary language is intended to cast a reproach on my conduct towards my niece?”

“You are to understand this, madam. In the face of the goot sea-airs, Miss your niece is fretting herself ill. I sent her to this place, for to get a rosy face, for to put on a firm flesh. How do I find her? She has got nothing, she has put on nothing — she is emphatically flabby-pale. In this fine airs, she can be flabby-pale but for one reason. She is fretting herself about something or anodder. Is fretting herself goot for her eyes? Ho-damn-damn! it is as bad for her eyes as bad can be. If you can do no better than this, take her aways back again. You are wasting your moneys in this lodgment here.”

My aunt addressed herself to me in her grandest manner.

“You will understand, Lucilla, that it is impossible for me to notice such language as this in any other way than by leaving the room. If you can bring Mr. Grosse to his senses, inform him that I will receive his apologies and explanations in writing.” Pronouncing these lofty words with her severest emphasis, Miss Batchford rose another inch, and sailed majestically out of the room.

Grosse took no notice of the offended lady: he only put his hands in his pockets, and looked out of window once more. As the door closed, Oscar left the corner in which he had seated himself, not over-graciously, when we entered the room.

“Am I wanted here?” he asked.

Grosse was on the point of answering the question even less amiably than it had been put — when I stopped him by a look. “I want to speak to you,” I whispered in his ear. He nodded, and, turning sharply to Oscar, put this question to him:

“Are you living in the house?”

“I am staying at the hotel at the corner.”

“Go to the hotel, and wait there till I come to you.”

Greatly to my surprise, Oscar submitted to be treated in this peremptory manner. He took his leave of me silently, and left the room. Grosse drew a chair close to mine, and sat down by me in a comforting confidential fatherly way.