At any rate, I was composed enough to admire the lady's dress, and the beauty of the children, before they had passed beyond my range of view. Oscar spoke to me, while I was looking at them, in a tone of reproach for which, as I thought, there was no occasion and no excuse.
"I tried to spare you," he said. "You have yourself to thank, if that man has frightened you."
"He has not frightened me," I answered--sharply enough.
Oscar looked at me very attentively; and sat down again, without saying a word more.
The good-humoured old woman, on my other side, who had seen and heard all that had passed, began to talk of the gentleman with the discolored face, and of the lady and the children who accompanied him. He was a retired Indian officer, she said. The lady was his wife, and the two beautiful children were his own children. "It seems a pity that such a handsome man should be disfigured in that way," my new acquaintance remarked. "But still, it don't matter much, after all. There he is, as you see, with a fine woman for a wife, and with two lovely children. I know the landlady of the house where they lodge--and a happier family you couldn't lay your hand on in all England. That is my friend's account of them. Even a blue face don't seem such a dreadful misfortune, when you look at it in that light--does it, Miss?"
I entirely agreed with the old lady. Our talk seemed, for some incomprehensible reason, to irritate Oscar. He got up again impatiently, and looked at his watch.
"Your aunt will be wondering what has become of us," he said. "Surely you have had enough of the mob on the sands, by this time?"
I had not had enough of it, and I should have been quite content to have made one of the mob for some time longer. But I saw that Oscar would be seriously vexed if I persisted in keeping my place. So I took leave of my nice old lady, and left the pleasant sands--not very willingly.
He said nothing more, until we had threaded our way out of the crowd. Then he returned, without any reason for it that I could discover, to the subject of the Indian officer, and to the remembrance which the stranger's complexion must have awakened in me of his brother's face.
"I don't understand your telling me you were not frightened when you saw that man," he said. "You were terribly frightened by my brother, when you saw him."
"I was terribly frightened by my own imagination, before I saw him," I answered. "After I saw him, I soon got over it."
"So you say!" he rejoined.
There is something excessively provoking--at least to me--in being told to my face that I have said something which is not worthy of belief. It was not a very becoming act on my part (after what he had told me in his letter about his brother's infatuation) to mention his brother. I ought not to have done it. I did it, for all that.
"I say what I mean," I replied. "Before I knew what you told me about your brother, I was going to propose to you, for your sake and for his, that he should live with us after we were married."
Oscar suddenly stopped. He had given me his arm to lead me through the crowd--he dropped it now.
"You say that, because you are angry with me!" he said.
I denied being angry with him; I declared, once more, that I was only speaking the truth.
"You really mean," he went on, "that you could have lived comfortably with my brother's blue face before you every hour of the day?"
"Quite comfortably--if he would have been my brother too." Oscar pointed to the house in which my aunt and I are living--within a few yards of the place on which we stood.
"You are close at home," he said, speaking in an odd muffled voice, with his eyes on the ground. "I want a longer walk. We shall meet at dinner-time."
He left me--without looking up, and without saying a word more.
Jealous of his brother! There is something unnatural, something degrading in such jealousy as that. I am ashamed of myself for thinking it of him. And yet what else could his conduct mean?
[Note.--It is for me to answer that question. Give the miserable wretch his due. His conduct meant, in one plain word--remorse. The only excuse left that he could make to his own conscience for the infamous part which he was playing, was this--that his brother's personal disfigurement presented a fatal obstacle in the way of his brother's marriage. And now Lucilla's own words, Lucilla's own actions, had told him that Oscar's face was no obstacle to her seeing Oscar perpetually in the familiar intercourse of domestic life. The torture of self-reproach which this discovery inflicted on him, drove him out of her presence. His own lips would have betrayed him, if he had spoken a word more to her at that moment. This is no speculation of mine. I know what I am now writing to be the truth.--P.]
It is night again. I am in my bed-room--too nervous and too anxious to go to rest yet. Let me employ myself in finishing this private record of the events of the day.
Oscar came a little before dinner-time; haggard and pale, and so absent in mind that he hardly seemed to know what he was talking about. No explanations passed between us. He asked my pardon for the hard things he had said, and the ill-temper he had shown, earlier in the day. I readily accepted his excuses--and did my best to conceal the uneasiness which his vacant, pre-occupied manner caused me. All the time he was speaking to me, he was plainly thinking of something else--he was more unlike the Oscar of my blind remembrances than ever. It was the old voice talking in a new way: I can only describe it to myself in those terms.
As for his manner, I know it used to be always more or less quiet and retiring in the old days: but was it ever so hopelessly subdued and depressed, as I have seen it to-day? Useless to ask! In the by-gone time, I was not able to see it. My past judgment of him and my present judgment of him have been arrived at by such totally different means, that it seems useless to compare them. Oh, how I miss Madame Pratolungo! What a relief, what a consolation it would have been, to have said all this to her, and to have heard what she thought of it in return!
There is, however, a chance of my finding my way out of some of my perplexities, at any rate--if I can only wait till tomorrow.
Oscar seems to have made up his mind at last to enter into the explanations which he has hitherto withheld from me. He has asked me to give him a private interview in the morning. The circumstances which led to his making this request have highly excited my curiosity. Something is evidently going on under the surface, in which my interests are concerned--and, possibly, Oscar's interests too.
It all came about in this way.
On returning to the house, after Oscar had left me, I found that a letter from Grosse had arrived by the afternoon post. My dear old surgeon wrote to say that he was coming to see me--and added in a postscript that he would arrive the next day at luncheon-time. Past experience told me that this meant a demand on my aunt's housekeeping for all the good things that it could produce.