"Are you in your right senses?" I burst out. "Do you mean to tell me that you are deliberately bent on making yourself an object of horror to everybody who sees you?"
"The one person whose opinion I care for," he replied, "will never see me."
I understood him at last. That was the consideration which had reconciled him to it!
Lucilla's horror of dark people and dark shades of color, of all kinds, was, it is needless to say, recalled to my memory by the turn the conversation was taking now. Had she confessed it to him, as she had confessed it to me? No! I remembered that she had expressly warned me not to admit him into our confidence in this matter. At an early period of their acquaintance, she had asked him which of his parents he resembled. This led him into telling her that his father had been a dark man. Lucilla's delicacy had at once taken the alarm. "He speaks very tenderly of his dead father," she said to me. "It may hurt him if he finds out the antipathy I have to dark people. Let us keep it to ourselves." As things now were, it was on the tip of my tongue to remind him, that Lucilla would hear of his disfigurement from other people; and then to warn him of the unpleasant result that might follow. On reflection, however, I thought it wiser to wait a little and sound his motives first.
"Before you tell me how I can help you," I said, "I want to know one thing more. Have you decided in this serious matter entirely by yourself? Have you taken no advice?"
"I don't want advice," he answered sharply. "My case admits of no choice. Even such a nervous undecided creature as I am, can judge for himself where there is no alternative."
"Did the doctors tell you there was no alternative?" I asked.
"The doctors were afraid to tell me. I had to force it out of them. I said, 'I appeal to your honor to answer a plain question plainly. Is there any certain prospect of my getting the better of the fits?' They only said, 'At your time of life, we may reasonably hope so.' I pressed them closer:--'Can you fix a date to which I may look forward as the date of my deliverance?' They could neither of them do it. All they could say was, 'Our experience justifies us in believing that you will grow out of it; but it does not justify us in saying when.' 'Then, I may be years growing out of it?' They were obliged to own that it might be so. 'Or I may never grow out of it, at all?' They tried to turn the conversation. I wouldn't have it. I said, 'Tell me honestly, is that one of the possibilities, in my case?' The Dimchurch doctor looked at the London doctor. The London man said, 'If you will have it, it is one of the possibilities.' Just consider the prospect which his answer placed before me! Day after day, week after week, month after month, always in danger, go where I may, of falling down in a fit--is that a miserable position? or is it not?"
How could I answer him? What could I say?
He went on:--
"Add to that wretched state of things that I am engaged to be married. The hardest disappointment which can fall on a man, falls on me. The happiness of my life is within my reach--and I am forbidden to enjoy it. It is not only my health that is broken up, my prospects in life are ruined as well. The woman I love is a woman forbidden to me while I suffer as I suffer now. Realize that--and then fancy you see a man sitting at this table here, with pen, ink, and paper before him, who has only to scribble a line or two, and to begin the cure of you from that moment. Deliverance in a few months from the horror of the fits; marriage in a few months to the woman you love. That heavenly prospect in exchange for the hellish existence that you are enduring now. And the one price to pay for it, a discolored face for the rest of your life--which the one person who is dearest to you will never see? Would you have hesitated? When the doctor took up the pen to write the prescription--tell me, if you had been in my place, would you have said, No?"
I still sat silent. My obstinacy--women are such mules!--declined to give way, even when my conscience told me that he was right.
He sprang to his feet, in the same fever of excitement which I remembered so well, when I had irritated him at Browndown into telling me who he really was.
"Would you have said, No?" he reiterated, stooping over me, flushed and heated, as he had stooped on that first occasion, when he had whispered his name in my ear. "Would you?" he repeated, louder and louder--"would you?"
At the third reiteration of the words, the frightful contortion that I knew so well, seized on his face. The wrench to the right twisted his body. He dropped at my feet. Good God! who could have declared that he was wrong, with such an argument in his favor as I saw at that moment? Who would not have said that any disfigurement would be welcome as a refuge from this?
The servant ran in, and helped me to move the furniture to a safe distance from him, "There won't be much more of it, ma'am," said the man, noticing my agitation, and trying to compose me. "In a month or two, the doctor says the medicine will get hold of him." I could say nothing on my side--I could only reproach myself bitterly for disputing with him and exciting him, and leading perhaps to the hideous seizure which had attacked him in my presence for the second time.
The fit on this occasion was a short one. Perhaps the drug was already beginning to have some influence over him? In twenty minutes, he was able to resume his chair, and to go on talking to me.
"You think I shall horrify you when my face has turned blue," he said with a faint smile. "Don't I horrify you now when you see me in convulsions on the floor?"
I entreated him to dwell on it no more.
"God knows," I said, "you have convinced me--obstinate as I am. Let us try to think of nothing now but of the prospect of your being cured. What do you wish me to do?"
"You have great influence over Lucilla," he said. "If she expresses any curiosity, in future conversations with you, about the effect of the medicine, check her at once. Keep her as ignorant of it as she is now!"
"Why?"
"Why! If she knows what you know, how will she feel? Shocked and horrified, as you felt. What will she do? She will come straight here, and try, as you have tried, to persuade me to give it up. Is that true or not?"
(Impossible to deny that it was true.)
"I am so fond of her," he went on, "that I can refuse her nothing. She would end in making me give it up. The instant her back was turned, I should repent my own weakness, and return to the medicine. Here is a perpetual struggle in prospect, for a man who is already worn out. Is it desirable, after what you have just seen, to expose me to that?"
It would have been useless cruelty to expose him to it. How could I do otherwise than consent to make his sacrifice of himself--his necessary sacrifice--as easy as I could? At the same time, I implored him to remember one thing.
"Mind," I said, "we can never hope to keep her in ignorance of the change in you, when the change comes.