Nugent puzzles Madame Pratolungo
I WAS far from sharing Lucilla’s opinion of Nugent Dubourg. His enormous self-confidence was, to my mind, too amusing to be in the least offensive. I liked the spirit and gaiety of the young fellow. He came much nearer than his brother did to my ideal of the dash and resolution which ought to distinguish a man on the right side of thirty. So far as my experience of them went, Nugent was (in the popular English phrase) good company — and Oscar was not. My nationality leads me to attach great importance to social qualities. The higher virtues of a man only show themselves occasionally on compulsion, His social qualities come familiarly in contact with us every day of our lives. I like to be cheerful: I am all for the social qualities.
There was one little obstacle in those early days, which set itself up between my sympathies and Nugent.
I was thoroughly at a loss to understand the impression which Lucilla had produced on him.
The same constraint which had, in such a marked manner, subdued him at his first interview with her, still fettered him in the time when they became better acquainted with one another. He was never in high spirits in her presence. Mr. Finch could talk him down without difficulty, if Mr. Finch’s daughter happened to be by. Even when he was vaporing about himself, and telling us of the wonderful things he meant to do in Painting, Lucilla’s appearance was enough to check him, if she happened to come into the room. On the first day when he showed me his American sketches (I define them, if you ask my private opinion, as false pretenses of Art, by a dashing amateur)— on that day, he was in full flow; marching up and down the room, smacking his forehead, and announcing himself quite gravely as “the coming man” in landscape painting.
“My mission, Madame Pratolungo, is to reconcile Humanity and Nature. I propose to show (on an immense scale) how Nature (in her grandest aspects) can adapt herself to the spiritual wants of mankind. In your joy or your sorrow, Nature has subtle sympathies with you, if you only know where to look for them. My pictures — no! my poems in color — will show you. Multiply my works, as they certainly will be multiplied, by means of prints — and what does Art become in my hands? A Priesthood! In what aspect do I present myself to the public? As a mere landscape painter? No! As Grand Consoler!” In the midst of this rhapsody (how wonderfully he resembled Oscar in his bursts of excitement while he was talking!)— in the full torrent of his predictions of his own coming greatness, Lucilla quietly entered the room. The “Grand Consoler” shut up his portfolio; dropped Painting on the spot; asked for Music, and sat down, a model of conventional propriety, in a corner of the room. I inquired afterwards, why he had checked himself when she came in. “Did I?” he said. “I don’t know why.” The thing was really inexplicable. He honestly admired her — one had only to notice him when he was looking at her to see it. He had not the faintest suspicion of her dislike for him — she carefully concealed it for Oscar’s sake. He felt genuine sympathy for her in her affliction — his mad idea that her sight might yet be restored, was the natural offspring of a true feeling for her. He was not unfavorable to his brother’s marriage — on the contrary, he ruffled the rector’s dignity (he was always giving offense to Mr. Finch) by suggesting that the marriage might be hastened. I heard him say the words myself:—“The church is close by. Why can’t you put on your surplice and make Oscar happy to-morrow, after breakfast?” More even than this, he showed the most vivid interest — like a woman’s interest rather than a man’s — in learning how the love-affair between Oscar and Lucilla had begun. I referred him, so far as Oscar was concerned, to his brother as the fountain-head of information. He did not decline to consult his brother. He did not own to me that he felt any difficulty in doing so. He simply dropped Oscar in silence; and asked about Lucilla. How had it begun on her side? I reminded him of his brother’s romantic position at Dimchurch and told him to judge for himself of the effect it would produce on the excitable imagination of a young girl. He declined to judge for himself; he persisted in appealing to me. When I told the little love-story of the two young people, one event in it appeared to make a very strong impression on him. The effect produced on Lucilla (when she first heard it) by the sound of his brother’s voice, dwelt strangely on his mind. He failed to understand it; he ridiculed it; he declined to believe it. I was obliged to remind him that Lucilla was blind, and that love which, in other cases, first finds its way to the heart through the eyes, could only, in her case, first find its way through the ears. My explanation, thus offered, had its effect: it set him thinking. “The sound of his voice!” he said to himself, still turning the problem over and over in his mind. “People say my voice is exactly like Oscar’s,” he added, suddenly addressing himself to me. “Do you think so too?” I answered that there could be no doubt of it. He got up from his chair, with a quick little shudder, like a man who feels a chill — and changed the subject. On the next occasion when he and Lucilla met — so far from being more familiar with her, he was more constrained than ever. As it had begun between these two, so it seemed likely to continue to the end. In my society, he was always at his ease. In Lucilla’s society, never!
What was the obvious conclusion which a person with my experience ought to have drawn from all this?
I know well enough what it was, now. On my oath as an honest woman, I failed to see it at the time. We are not always (suffer me to remind you) consistent with ourselves. The cleverest people commit occasional lapses into stupidity — just as the stupid people light up with gleams of intelligence at certain times. You may have shown your usual good sense in conducting your affairs on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday in the week. But it doesn’t at all follow from this, that you may not make a fool of yourself on Thursday. Account for it as you may — for a much longer time than it suits my self-esteem to reckon up, I suspected nothing and discovered nothing. I noted his behavior in Lucilla’s presence as odd behavior and unaccountable behavior — and that was all.
During the first fortnight just mentioned, the London doctor came to see Oscar.
He left again, perfectly satisfied with the results of his treatment. The dreadful epileptic malady would torture the patient and shock the friends about him no more: the marriage might safely be celebrated at the time agreed on. Oscar was cured.
The doctor’s visit — reviving our interest in observing the effect of the medicine — also revived the subject of Oscar’s false position towards Lucilla. Nugent and I held a debate about it between ourselves. I opened the interview by suggesting that we should unite our forces to persuade his brother into taking the frank and manly course. Nugent neither said Yes nor No to that proposal at the outset. He, who made up his mind at a moment’s notice about everything else, took time to decide on this one occasion.
“There is something that I want to know first,” he said. “I want to understand this curious antipathy of Lucilla’s which my brother regards with so much alarm. Can you explain it?”
“Has Oscar attempted to explain it?” I inquired on my side.
“He mentioned it in one of his letters to me; and he tried to explain it, when I asked (on my arrival at Browndown) if Lucilla had discovered the change in his complexion. But he failed entirely to meet my difficulty in understanding the case.”
“What is your difficulty?”
“This. So far as I can see, she fails to discover intuitively the presence of dark people in a room, or of dark colors in the ornaments of a room. It is only when she is told that such persons or such things are present that her prejudice declares itself. In what state of mind does such a strange feeling as this take its rise? It seems impossible that she can have any conscious associations with colors, pleasant or painful — if it is true that she was blind at a year old. How do you account for it? Can there be such a thing as a purely instinctive antipathy; remaining passive until external influences rouse it; and resting on no sort of practical experience whatever?”
“I think there may be,” I replied. “Why, when I was a child just able to walk, did I shrink away from the first dog I saw who barked at me? I could not have known, at that age, either by experience or teaching, that a dog’s bark is sometimes the prelude to a dog’s bite. My terror, on that occasion, was purely instinctive surely?”
“Ingeniously put,” he said. “But I am not satisfied yet.”
“You must also remember,” I continued, “that she has a positively painful association with dark colors, on certain occasions. They sometimes produce a disagreeable impression on her nerves, through her sense of touch. She discovered, in that way, that I had a dark gown on, on the day when I first saw her.”
“And yet, she touches my brother’s face, and fails to discover any alteration in it.”
I met that objection also — to my own satisfaction, though not to his.
“I am far from sure that she might not have made the discovery,” I said, “if she had touched him for the first time, since the discoloration of his face. But she examines him now with a settled impression in her mind, derived from previous experience of what she has felt in touching his skin. Allow for the modifying influence of that impression on her sense of touch — and remember at the same time, that it is the color and not the texture of the skin that is changed — and his es............