Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (834 page)

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 out alone, as I had planned, to meet Oscar on his return from London.

At a long straight stretch of the road, I saw him advancing towards me. He was walking more rapidly than usual, and singing as he walked. Even through its livid discolouration, the poor fellow’s face looked radiant with happiness as he came nearer. He waved his walking-stick exultingly in the air. “Good news!” he called out at the top of his voice. “Mr. Sebright has made me a happy man again!” I had never before seen him so like Nugent in manner, as I now saw him when we met and he shook hands with me.

“Tell me all about it,” I said.

He gave me his arm; and, talking all the way, we walked back slowly to Dimchurch.

“In the first place,” he began, “Mr. Sebright holds to his own opinion more firmly than ever. He feels absolutely certain that the operation will fail.”

“Is that your good news?” I asked reproachfully.

“No,” he said. “Though, mind, I own to my shame there was a time when I almost hoped it would fail. Mr. Sebright has put me in a better frame of mind. I have little or nothing to dread from the success of the operation — if, by any extraordinary chance, it should succeed. I remind you of Mr. Sebright’s opinion merely to give you a right idea of the tone which he took with me at starting. He only consented under protest to contemplate the event which Lucilla and Herr Grosse consider to be a certainty. ‘If the statement of your position requires it,’ he said, ‘I will admit that it is barely possible she may be able to see you two months hence. Now begin.’ I began by informing him of my marriage engagement.”

“Shall I tell you how Mr. Sebright received the information?” I said. “He held his tongue, and made you a bow.”

Oscar laughed.

“Quite true!” he answered. “I told him next of Lucilla’s extraordinary antipathy to dark people, and dark shades of colour of all kinds. Can you guess what he said to me when I had done?”

I owned that my observation of Mr. Sebright’s character did not extend to guessing that.

“He said it was a common antipathy in his experience of the blind. It was one among the many strange influences exercised by blindness on the mind. ‘The physical affliction has its mysterious moral influence,’ he said. ‘We can observe it, but we can’t explain it. The special antipathy which you mention, is an incurable antipathy, except on one condition — the recovery of the sight.’ There he stopped. I entreated him to go on. No! He declined to go on until I had finished what I had to say to him first. I had my confession still to make to him — and I made it.”

“You concealed nothing?”

“Nothing. I laid my weakness bare before him. I told him that Lucilla was still firmly convinced that Nugent’s was the discoloured face, instead of mine. And then I put the question — What am I to do?”

“And how did he reply?”

“In these words: — ’If you ask me what you are to do, in the event of her remaining blind (which I tell you again will be the event), I decline to advise you. Your own conscience and your own sense of honour must decide the question. On the other hand, if you ask me what you are to do, in the event of her recovering her sight, I can answer you unreservedly in the plainest terms. Leave things as they are; and wait till she sees.’ Those were his own words. Oh, the load that they took off my mind! I made him repeat them — I declare I was almost afraid to trust the evidence of my own ears.”

I understood the motive of Oscar’s good spirits, better than I understood the motive of Mr. Sebright’s advice. “Did he give his reasons?” I asked.

“You shall hear his reasons directly. He insisted on first satisfying himself that I thoroughly understood my position at that moment. ‘The prime condition of success, as Herr Grosse has told you,’ he said, ‘is the perfect tranquillity of the patient. If you make your confession to the young lady when you get back to-night to Dimchurch, you throw her into a state of excitement which will render it impossible for my German colleague to operate on her to-morrow. If you defer your confession, the medical necessities of the case force you to be silent, until the professional attendance of the oculist has ceased. There is your position! My advice to you is to adopt the last alternative. Wait (and make the other persons in the secret wait) until the result of the operation has declared itself.’ There I stopped him. ‘Do you mean that I am to be present, on the first occasion when she is able to use her eyes?’ I asked. ‘Am I to let her see me, without a word beforehand to prepare her for the colour of my face?’“

We were now getting to the interesting part of it. You English people, when you are out walking and are carrying on a conversation with a friend, never come to a standstill at the points of interest. We foreigners, on the other hand, invariably stop. I surprised Oscar by suddenly pulling him up in the middle of the road.

“What is the matter?” he asked.

“Go on!” I said impatiently.

“I can’t go on,” he rejoined. “You’re holding me.”

I held him tighter than ever, and ordered him more resolutely than ever to go on. Oscar resigned himself to a halt (foreign fashion) on the high road.

“Mr. Sebright met my question by putting a question on his side,” he resumed. “He asked me how I proposed to prepare her for the colour of my face.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“I said I had planned to make an excuse for leaving Dimchurch — and, once away, to prepare her, by writing, for what she might expect to see when I returned.”

“What did he say to that?”

“He wouldn’t hear of it. He said, ‘I strongly recommend you to be present on the first occasion when she is capable (if she ever is capable) of using her sight. I attach the greatest importance to her being able to correct the hideous and absurd image now in her mind of a face like yours, by seeing you as you really are at the earliest available opportunity.’“

We were just walking on again, when certain words in that last sentence startled me. I stopped short once more.

“Hideous and absurd image?” I repeated, thinking instantly of my conversation of that morning with Lucilla. “What did Mr. Sebright mean by using such language as that?”

“Just what I asked him. His reply will interest you. It led him into that explanation of his motives which you inquired for just now. Shall we walk on?”

My petrified foreign feet recovered their activity. We went on again.

“When I had spoken to Mr. Sebright of Lucilla’s inveterate prejudice,” Oscar continued, “he had surprised me by saying that it was common in his experience, and was only curable by her restoration to sight. In support of those assertions, he now told me of two interesting cases which had occurred in his professional practice. The first was the case of the little daughter of an Indian officer — blind from infancy like Lucilla. After operating successfully, the time came when he could permit his patient to try her sight — that is to say, to try if she could see sufficiently well at first, to distinguish dark objects from light. Among the members of the household assembled to witness the removal of the bandage, was an Indian nurse who had accompanied the family to England. The first person the child saw was her mother — a fair woman. She clasped her little hands in astonishment, and that was all. At the next turn of her head, she saw the dark Indian nurse and instantly screamed with terror. Mr. Sebright owned to me that he could not explain it. The child could have no possible association with colours. Yet there nevertheless was the most violent hatred and horror of a dark object (the hatred and horror peculiar to the blind) expressing itself unmistakably in a child of ten years old! My first thought, while he was telling me this, was of myself, and of my chance with Lucilla. My first question was, ‘Did the child get used to the nurse?’ I can give you his answer in his own words. ‘In a week’s time, I found the child sitting in the nurse’s lap as composedly as I am sitting in this chair.’ — ”That is encouraging — isn’t it?”

“Most encouraging — nobody can deny it.”

“The second instance was more curious still. This time the case was the case of a grown man — and the object was to show me what strange fantastic images (utterly unlike the reality) the blind form of the people about them. The patient was married, and was to see his wife (as Lucilla is one day to see me) for the first time. He had been told, before he married her, that she was personally disfigured by the scar of a wound on one of her cheeks. The poor woman — ah, how well I can understand her! — trembled for the consequences. The man who had loved her dearly while he was blind, might hate her when he saw her scarred face. Her husband had been the first to console her when the operation was determined on. He declared that his sense of touch, and the descriptions given to him by others, had enabled him to form, in his own mind, the most complete and faithful image of his wife’s face. Nothing that Mr. Sebright could say would induce him to believe that it was physically impossible for him to form a really correct idea of any object, animate or inanimate, which he had never seen. He wouldn’t hear of it. He was so certain of the result, that he held his wife’s hand in his, to encourage her, when the bandage was removed from him. At his first look at her, he uttered a cry of horror, and fell back in his chair in a swoon. His wife, poor thing, was distracted. Mr. Sebright did his best to compose her, and waited till her husband was able to answer the questions put to him. It then appeared that his blind idea of his wife, and of her disfigurement had been something so grotesquely and horribly unlike the reality, that it was hard to know whether to laugh or to tremble at it. She was as beautiful as an angel, by comparison with her husband’s favorite idea of her — and yet, because it was his idea, he was absolutely disgusted and terrified at the first sight of her! In a few weeks he was able to compare his wife with other women, to look at pictures, to understand what beauty was and what ugliness was — and from that time they have lived together as happy a married couple as any in the kingdom.”