The Doctor’s Opinion

BEFORE another word had been exchanged between us, Lucilla entered the room. We looked at each other. If we could have spoken at that moment, I believe we should both have said, “Thank God, she is blind!”

“Have you all forgotten me?” she asked. “Oscar! where are you? What does the doctor say?”

She advanced into the room. In a moment more, she would have stumbled against the prostrate man still writhing on the floor. I laid my hand on her arm, and stopped her.

She suddenly caught my hand in hers. “Why did you tremble,” she asked, “when you took me by the arm? Why are you trembling now?” Her delicate sense of touch was not to be deceived. I vainly denied that anything had happened: my hand had betrayed me. “There is something wrong!” she exclaimed, “Oscar has not answered me.”

The doctor came to my assistance.

“There is nothing to be alarmed about,” he said. “Mr. Dubourg is not very well to-day.”

She turned on the doctor, with a sudden burst of anger.

“You are deceiving me!” she cried. “Something serious has happened to him. The truth! tell me the truth! Oh! it’s shameful, it’s heartless of both of you to deceive a wretched blind creature like me!”

The doctor still hesitated. I told her the truth.

“Where is he?” she asked, seizing me by the two shoulders, and shaking me in the violence of her agitation.

I entreated her to wait a little; I tried to place her in a chair. She pushed me contemptuously away, and went down on the floor on her hands and knees. “I shall find him,” she said to herself; “I shall find him in spite of them!” She began to crawl over the floor, feeling the empty space before her with her hand. It was horrible. I followed her, and raised her again, by main force.

“Don’t struggle with her,” said the doctor. “Let her come here. He is quiet now.”

I looked at Oscar. The worst of it was over. He was exhausted — he was quite still now. The doctor’s voice guided her to the place. She sat down by Oscar on the floor, and laid his head on her lap. The moment she touched him, the same effect was produced on her which would be produced (if our eyes were bandaged) on you or me when the bandage was taken off. An instant sense of relief diffused itself through her whole being. She became her gentler and sweeter self again. “I am sorry I lost my temper,” she said with the simplicity of a child. “But you don’t know how hard it is to be deceived when you are blind.” She stooped as she said those words, and passed her handkerchief lightly over his forehead. “Doctor,” she asked, “will this happen again?”

“I hope not.”

“Are you sure not?”

“I can’t say that.”

“What has brought it on?”

“I am afraid the blow he received on the head has brought it on.”

She asked no more questions; her eager face passed suddenly into a state of repose. Something seemed to have come into her mind — after the doctor’s answer to her own question — which absorbed her in herself. When Oscar recovered his consciousness, she left it to me to answer the first natural questions which he put. When he personally addressed her she spoke to him kindly, but briefly. Something in her, at that moment, seemed to keep her apart, even from him. When the doctor proposed taking him back to Browndown, she did not insist, as I had anticipated, on going with them. She took leave of him tenderly — but still she let him go. While he yet lingered near the door, looking back at her, she moved away slowly to the further end of the room; self-withdrawn into her own dark world — shut up in her thoughts from him and from us.

The doctor tried to rouse her.