On the Way to the End. Second Stage

EARLY riser as I was, I found that Oscar had risen earlier still. He had left the rectory and had disturbed Mr. Gootheridge’s morning slumbers by an application at the inn for the key of Browndown.

On his return to the rectory, he merely said that he had been to see after various things belonging to him, which were still left in the empty house. His look and manner as he gave us this brief explanation were, to my mind, more unsatisfactory than ever. I made no remark; and, observing that his loose traveling coat was buttoned awry over the breast, I set it right for him. My hand, as I did this, touched his breast-pocket. He started back directly — as if there was something in the pocket which he did not wish me to feel. Was it something he had brought from Browndown?

We got away — encumbered by Mr. Finch, who insisted on attaching himself to Oscar — by the first express train, which took us straight to London. Comparison of time-tables, on reaching the terminus, showed that I had leisure to spare for a brief visit to Grosse, before we again took the railway back to Sydenham. Having decided not to mention the bad news about Lucilla’s sight to Oscar, until I had seen the German first, I made the best excuse that suggested itself, and drove away — leaving the two gentlemen in the waiting-room at the station.

I found Grosse confined to his easy-chair, with his gouty foot enveloped in cool cabbage-leaves. Between pain and anxiety, his eyes were wilder, his broken English was more grotesque than ever. When I appeared at the door of his room and said good morning — in the frenzy of his impatience he shook his fist at me.

“Good morning go-damn!” he roared out, “Where? where? where is Feench?”

I told him where we believed Lucilla to be. Grosse turned his head, and shook his fist at a bottle on the chimney-piece next.

“Get that bottles on the chimney,” he said. “And the eye-baths by the side of him. Don’t stop with your talky-talky-chatterations here. Go! Save her eyes. Look! You do this. You throw her head back — soh!” He illustrated the position so forcibly with his own head that he shook his gouty foot, and screamed with the pain of it. He went on nevertheless, glaring frightfully through his spectacles; gnashing his mustache fiercely between his teeth. “Throw her head back. Fill the eye-baths; turn him upsides-down over her open eyes. Drown them turn-turn-about in my mixtures. Drown them, I say, one-down-todder-come-on, and if she screech never mind it. Then bring her to me. For the lofe of Gott, bring her to me. If you tie her hands and foots, bring her to me. What is the womans stopping for? Go! go! go!”

“I want to ask you a question about Oscar,” I said, “before I go.”

He seized the pillow which supported his head — evidently intending to expedite my departure by throwing it at me. I produced the railway time-table as the best defensive weapon at my command. “Look at it for yourself,” I said; “and you will see that I must wait at the station, if I don’t wait here.”

With some difficulty, I satisfied him that it was impossible to leave London for Sydenham before a certain hour, and that I had at least ten minutes to spare which might be just as well passed in consulting him. He closed his glaring eyes, and laid his head back on the chair, thoroughly exhausted with his own outbreak of excitement. “No matter how things goes,” he said, “a womans must wag her tongue. Goot. Wag yours.”

“I am placed in a very difficult position,” I began. “Oscar is going with me to Lucilla. I shall of course take care, in the first place, that he and Nugent do not meet, unless I am present at the interview. But I am not equally sure of what I ought to do in the case of Lucilla. Must I keep them apart until I have first prepared her to see Oscar?”

“Let her see the devil himself if you like,” growled Grosse, “so long as you bring her here afterwards-directly to me. You will do the bettermost thing, if you prepare Oscar. She wants no preparations! She is enough disappointed in him as it is!”

“Disappointed in him!” I repeated. “I don’t understand you.”

He settled himself wearily in his chair, and referred, in a softened and saddened tone, to that private conversation of his with Lucilla, at Ramsgate, which has already been reported in the Journal. I was now informed, for the first time, of those changes in her sensations and in her ways of thinking which had so keenly vexed and mortified her. I heard of the ominous absence of the old thrill of pleasure, when Nugent took her hand on meeting her at the seaside — I heard how bitterly his personal appearance had disappointed her (when she had seen his features in detail) by comparison with the charming ideal picture which she had formed of her lover in the days of her blindness: those happier days, as she had called them, when she was Poor Miss Finch.

“Surely,” I said, “all the old feelings will come back to her when she sees Oscar?”

“They will never come back to her — no, not if she sees fifty Oscars!”

He was beginning to frighten me, or to irritate me — I can hardly say which. I only know that I persisted in disputing with him. “When she sees the true man,” I went on, “do you mean to say she will feel the same disappointment ——?”

I could get no farther than that. He cut me short there, withou............