"Make your mind easy," I said. "I answer for his not venturing near Herr Grosse."
A long silence between us followed those words. When Lucilla next referred to Oscar in connection with the coming operation, the depressed state of her spirits seemed to have quite altered her view of her own prospects. She, of all the people in the world, now spoke in disparagement of the blessing conferred on the blind by the recovery of their sight!
"Do you know one thing?" she said. "If I had not been going to be married to Oscar, I doubt if I should have cared to put any oculist, native or foreign, to the trouble of coming to Dimchurch."
"I don't think I understand you," I answered. "You cannot surely mean to say that you would not have been glad, under any circumstances, to recover your sight?"
"That is just what I do mean to say."
"What! you, who have written to Grosse to hurry the operation, don't care to see?"
"I only care to see Oscar. And, what is more, I only care to see him because I am in love with him. But for that, I really don't feel as if it would give me any particular pleasure to use my eyes. I have been blind so long, I have learnt to do without them."
"And yet, you looked perfectly entranced when Nugent first set you doubting whether you were blind for life?"
"Nugent took me by surprise," she answered; "Nugent startled me out of my senses. I have had time to think since; I am not carried away by the enthusiasm of the moment now. You people who can see attach such an absurd importance to your eyes! I set my touch, my dear, against your eyes, as much the most trustworthy, and much the most intelligent sense of the two. If Oscar was not, as I have said, the uppermost feeling with me, shall I tell you what I should have infinitely preferred to recovering my sight--supposing it could have been done?" She shook her head with a comic resignation to circumstances. "Unfortunately, it can't be done!"
"What can't be done?"
She suddenly held out both her arms over the breakfast-table.
"The stretching out of these to an enormous and unheard-of length. That is what I should have liked!" she answered. "I could find out better what was going on at a distance with my hands, than you could with your eyes and your telescopes. What doubts I might set at rest for instance about the planetary system, among the people who can see, if I could only stretch out far enough to touch the stars."
"This is talking sheer nonsense, Lucilla!"
"Is it? Just tell me which knows best in the dark--my touch or your eyes? Who has got a sense that she can always trust to serve her equally well through the whole four-and-twenty hours? You or me? But for Oscar--to speak in sober earnest, this time--I tell you I would much rather perfect the sense in me that I have already got, than have a sense given to me that I have not got. Until I knew Oscar, I don't think I ever honestly envied any of you the use of your eyes."
"You astonish me, Lucilla!"
She rattled her teaspoon impatiently in her empty cup.
"Can you always trust your eyes, even in broad daylight?" she burst out. "How often do they deceive you, in the simplest things? What did I hear you all disputing about the other day in the garden? You were looking at some view?"
"Yes--at the view down the alley of trees at the other end of the churchyard wall."
"Some object in the alley had attracted general notice--had it not?"
"Yes--an object at the further end of it."
"I heard you up here. You all differed in opinion, in spite of your wonderful eyes. My father said it moved. You said it stood still. Oscar said it was a man. Mrs. Finch said it was a calf. Nugent ran off, and examined this amazing object at close quarters. And what did it turn out to be? A stump of an old tree blown across the road in the night! Why am I to envy people the possession of a sense which plays them such tricks as that? No! no! Herr Grosse is going to 'cut into my cataracts,' as he calls it--because I am going to be married to a man I love; and I fancy, like a fool, I may love him better still, if I can see him. I may be quite wrong," she added archly. "It may end in my not loving him half as well as I do now!"
I thought of Oscar's face, and felt a sickening fear that she might be speaking far more seriously than she suspected. I tried to change the subject. No! Her imaginative nature had found its way into a new region of speculation before I could open my lips.
"I associate light," she said thoughtfully, "with all that is beautiful and heavenly--and dark with all that is vile and horrible and devilish. I wonder how light and dark will look to me when I see?"
"I believe they will astonish you," I answered, "by being entirely unlike what you fancy them to be now."
She started. I had alarmed her without intending it.
"Will Oscar's face be utterly unlike what I fancy it to be now?" she asked, in suddenly altered tones. "Do you mean to say that I have not had the right image of him in my mind all this time?"
I tried again to draw her off to another topic. What more could I do--with my tongue tied by the German's warning to us not to agitate her, in the face of the operation to be performed on the next day?
It was quite useless. She went on, as before, without heeding me.
"Have I no means of judging rightly what Oscar is like?" she said. "I touch my own face; I know how long it is and how broad it is; I know how big the different features are, and where they are. And then I touch Oscar, and compare his face with my knowledge of my own face. Not a single detail escapes me. I see him in my mind as plainly as you see me across this table. Do you mean to say, when I see him with my eyes, that I shall discover something perfectly new to me? I don't believe it!" She started up impatiently, and took a turn in the room. "Oh!" she exclaimed, with a stamp of her foot, "why can't I take laudanum enough, or chloroform enough to kill me for the next six weeks--and then come to life again when the German takes the bandage off my eyes!" She sat down once more, and drifted all on a sudden into a question of pure morality. "Tell me this," she said. "Is the greatest virtue, the virtue which it is most difficult to practice?"
"I suppose so," I answered.
She drummed with both hands on the table, petulantly, viciously, as hard as she could.
"Then, Madame Pratolungo," she said, "the greatest of all the virtues is--Patience. Oh, my friend, how I hate the greatest of all the virtues at this moment!"
That ended it--there the conversation found its way into other topics at last.
Thinking afterwards of the new side of her mind which Lucilla had shown to me, I derived one consolation from what had passed at the breakfast-table. If Mr. Sebright proved to be right, and if the operation failed after all, I had Lucilla's word for it that blindness, of itself, is not the terrible affliction to the blind which the rest of us fancy it to be--because we can see.
Towards half-past seven in the evening, I went o