Had any other person been observed in or near the field at that time?

No witness could be discovered who had seen anybody else near the place. Had the weapon turned up, with which the blow had been struck? It had not been found. Was anyone known (robbery having plainly not been the motive of the crime) to have entertained a grudge against the murdered man? It was no secret that he associated with doubtful characters, male and female; but suspicion failed to point to any one of them in particular.

In this state of things, there was no alternative but to request Mr. Dubourg—well known in, and out of the town, as a young gentleman of independent fortune; bearing an excellent character—to give some account of himself.

He immediately admitted that he had passed through the field. But in contradiction to the farm-bailiff, he declared that he had looked at his watch at the moment before he crossed the stile, and that the time by it was exactly a quarter past eight. Five minutes later—that is to say ten minutes before the murder had been committed, on the evidence of the dead man's watch—he had paid a visit to a lady living near Pardon's Piece; and had remained with her, until his watch, consulted once more on leaving the lady's house, informed him that it was a quarter to nine.

Here was the defense called an "alibi." It entirely satisfied Mr. Dubourg's friends. To satisfy justice also, it was necessary to call the lady as a witness. In the meantime, another purely formal question was put to Mr. Dubourg. Did he know anything of the murdered man?

With some appearance of confusion, Mr. Dubourg admitted that he had been induced (by a friend) to employ the man on some work. Further interrogation extracted from him the following statement of facts.

That the work had been very badly done—that an exorbitant price had been charged for it—that the man, on being remonstrated with, had behaved in a grossly impertinent manner—that an altercation had taken place between them—that Mr. Dubourg had seized the man by the collar of his coat, and had turned him out of the house—that he had called the man an infernal scoundrel (being in a passion at the time), and had threatened to "thrash him within an inch of his life" (or words to that effect) if he ever presumed to come near the house again; that he had sincerely regretted his own violence the moment he recovered his self-possession; and, lastly, that, on his oath (the altercation having occurred six weeks ago), he had never spoken to the man, or set eyes on the man since.

As the matter then stood, these circumstances were considered as being unfortunate circumstances for Mr. Dubourg—nothing more. He had his "alibi" to appeal to, and his character to appeal to; and nobody doubted the result.

The lady appeared as witness.

Confronted with Mr. Dubourg on the question of time, and forced to answer, she absolutely contradicted him, on the testimony of the clock on her own mantelpiece. In substance, her evidence was simply this. She had looked at her clock, when Mr. Dubourg entered the room; thinking it rather a late hour for a visitor to call on her. The clock (regulated by the maker, only the day before) pointed to twenty-five minutes to nine. Practical experiment showed that the time required to walk the distance, at a rapid pace, from the stile to the lady's house, was just five minutes. Here then was the statement of the farm-bailiff (himself a respectable witness) corroborated by another witness of excellent position and character. The clock, on being examined next, was found to be right. The evidence of the clock-maker proved that he kept the key, and that there had been no necessity to set the clock and wind it up again, since he had performed both those acts on the day preceding Mr. Dubourg's visit. The accuracy of the clock thus vouched for, the conclusion on the evidence was irresistible. Mr. Dubourg stood convicted of having been in the field at the time when the murder was committed; of having, by his own admission, had a quarrel with the murdered man, not long before, terminating in an assault and a threat on his side; and, lastly, of having attempted to set up an alibi by a false statement of the question of time. There was no alternative but to commit him to take his trial at the Assizes, charged with the murder of the builder in Pardon's Piece.

The trial occupied two days.

No new facts of importance were discovered in the interval. The evidence followed the course which it had taken at the preliminary examinations—with this difference only, that it was more carefully sifted. Mr. Dubourg had the double advantage of securing the services of the leading barrister on the circuit, and of moving the irrepressible sympathies of the jury, shocked at his position and eager for proof of his innocence. By the end of the first day, the evidence had told against him with such irresistible force, that his own counsel despaired of the result. When the prisoner took his place in the dock on the second day, there was but one conviction in the minds of the people in court—everybody said, "The clock will hang him."

It was nearly two in the afternoon; and the proceedings were on the point of being adjourned for half an hour, when the attorney for the prisoner was seen to hand a paper to the counsel for the defense.

The counsel rose, showing signs of agitation which roused the curiosity of the audience. He demanded the immediate hearing of a new witness; whose evidence in the prisoner's favor he declared to be too important to be delayed for a single moment. After a short colloquy between the judge and the banisters on either side, the court decided to continue the sitting.

The witness, appearing in the box, proved to be a young woman, in delicate health. On the evening when the prisoner had paid his visit to the lady, she was in that lady's service as housemaid. The day after, she had been permitted (by previous arrangement with her mistress) to take a week's holiday, and to go on a visit to her parents, in the west of Cornwall. While there, she had fallen ill, and had not been strong enough since to return to her employment. Having given this preliminary account of herself, the housemaid then stated the following extraordinary particulars in relation to her mistress's clock.

On the morning of the day when Mr. Dubourg had called at the house, she had been cleaning the mantelpiece. She had rubbed the part of it which was under the clock with her duster, had accidentally struck the pendulum, and had stopped it. Having once before done this, she had been severely reproved. Fearing that a repetition of the offense, only the day after the clock had been regulated by the maker, might lead perhaps to the withdrawal of her leave of absence, she had determined to put matters right again, if possible, by herself.

After poking under the clock in the dark, and failing to set the pendulum going again properly in that way, she next attempted to lift the clock, and give it a shake. It was set in a marble case, with a bronze figure on the top; and it was so heavy that she was obliged to hunt for something which she could use as a lever. The thing proved to be not easy to find on the spur of the moment. Having at last laid her hand on what she wanted, she contrived so to lift the clock a few inches and drop it again on the mantelpiece, as to set it going once more.

The next necessity was of course to move the hands on. Here again she was met by an obstacle. There was a difficulty in opening the glass-case which protected the dial. After uselessly searching for some instrument to help her, she got from the footman (without telling him what she wanted it for) a small chisel. With this, she opened the case—after accidentally scratching the brass frame of it—and set the hands of the clock by guess. She was flurried at the time; fearing that her mistress would discover her. Later in the day, she found that she had over-estimated the interval of time that had passed while she was trying to put the clock right. She had, in fact, set it exactly a quarter of an hour too fast.

No safe opportunity of secretly putting the clock right again had occurred, until the last thing at night. She had then moved the hands back to the right time. At the hour of the evening when Mr. Dubourg had called on her mistress, she positively swore that the clock was a quarter of an hour too fast. It had pointed, as her mistress had declared, to twenty-five minutes to nine—the right time then being, as Mr. Dubourg had asserted, twenty minutes past eight.

Questioned why she had refrained from giving this extraordinary evidence at the inquiry before the magistrate, she declared that in the remote Cornish village to which she had gone the next day, and in which her illness had detained her from that time, nobody had heard of the inquiry or the trial. She would not have been then present to state the vitally important circumstances to which she had just sworn, if the prisoner's twin-brother had not found her out on the previous day—had not questioned her if she knew anything about the clock—and had not (hearing what she had to tell) insisted on her taking the journey with him to the court the next morning.

This evidence virtually decided the trial. There was a great burst of relief in the crowded assembly when the woman's statement had come to an end.

She was closely cross-examined as a matter of course. Her character was inquired into; corroborative evidence (relating to the chisel and the scratches on the frame) was sought for and was obtained. The end of it was that, at a late hour on the second evening, the jury acquitted the prisoner, without leaving their box. It was not too much to say that his life had been saved by his brother. His brother alone had persisted, from first to last, in obstinately disbelieving the clock—for no better reason than that the clock was the witness which asserted the prisoner's guilt! He had worried everybody with incessant inquiries—he had discovered the absence of the housemaid, after the trial had begun—and he had started off to interrogate the girl, knowing nothing, and suspecting nothing; simply determined to persist in the one everlasting question with which he persecuted everybody belonging to the house: "The clock is going to hang my brother; can you tell me anything about the clock?"

Four months later, the mystery of the crime was cleared up. One of the disreputable companions of the murdered man confessed on his death-bed that he had done the deed. There was nothing interesting or remarkable in the circumstances. Chance which had put innocence in peril, had offered impunity to guilt. An infamous woman; a jealous quarrel; and an absence at the moment of witnesses on the spot—these were really the commonplace materials which had composed the tragedy of Pardon's Piece.



CHAPTER THE NINTH

The Hero of the Trial

"You have forced it out of me. Now you have had your way, never mind my feelings—Go!"

Those were the first words the Hero of the Trial said to me, when he was able to speak again! He withdrew with a curious sullen resignation to the farther end of the room. There he stood looking at me, as a man might have looked who carried some contagion about him, and who wished to preserve a healthy fellow-creature from the peril of touching him.

"Why should I go?" I asked.

"You are a bold woman," he said, "to remain in the same room with a man who has been pointed at as a murderer, and who has been tried for his life."

The same unhealthy state of mind which had brought him to Dimchurch, and which had led him to speak to me as he had spoken on the previous evening, was, as I understood it, now irritating him against me as a person who had made his own quick temper the means of entrapping him into letting out the truth. How was I to deal with a man in this condition? I decided to perform the feat which you call in England, "taking the bull by the horns."

"I see but one man here," I said. "A man honorably acquitted of a crime which he was incapable of committing. A man who deserves my interest, and claims my sympathy. Shake hands, Mr. Dubourg."

I spoke to him in a good hearty voice, and I gave him a good hearty squeeze. The poor, weak, lonely, persecuted young fellow dropped his head on my shoulder like a child, and burst out crying.

"Don't despise me!" he said, as soon as he had got his breath again. "It breaks a man down to have stood in the dock, and to have had hundreds of hard-hearted people staring at him in horror—without his deserving it. Besides, I have been very lonely, ma'am, since my brother left me."

We sat down again, side by side. He was the strangest compound of anomalies I had ever met with. Throw him into one of those passions in which he flamed out so easily—and you would have said, This is a tiger. Wait till he had cooled down again to his customary mild temperature—and you would have said with equal truth, This is a lamb.

"One thing rather surprises me, Mr. Dubourg," I went on. "I can't quite understand——"

"Don't call me Mr. Dubourg," he interposed. "You remind me of the disgrace which has forced me to change my name. Call me by my Christian name. It's a foreign name. You are a foreigner by your accent—you will like me all the better for having a foreign name. I was christened 'Oscar'—after my mother's brother: my mother was a Jersey woman. Call me 'Oscar.'—What is it you don't understand?"

"In your present situation," I resumed, "I don't understand your brother leaving you here all by yourself."

He was on the point of flaming out again at that.

"Not a word against my brother!" he exclaimed fiercely. "My brother is the noblest creature that God ever created! You must own that yourself—you know what he did at the trial. I should have died on the scaffold but for that angel. I insist on it that he is not a man. He is an angel!"

(I admitted that his brother was an angel. The concession instantly pacified him.)

"People say there is no difference between us," he went on, drawing his chair companionably close to mine. "Ah, people are so shallow! Personally, I grant you, we are exactly alike. (You have heard that we are twins?) But there it ends, unfortunately for me. Nugent—(my brother was christened Nugent after my father)—Nugent is a hero! Nugent is a genius. I should have died if he hadn't taken care of me after the trial. I had nobody but him. We are orphans; we have no brothers or sisters. Nugent felt the disgrace even more than I felt it—but he could control himself. It fell more heavily on him than it did on me. I'll tell you why. Nugent was in a fair way to make our family name—the name that we have been obliged to drop—famous all over the world. He is a painter—a landscape painter. Have you never heard of him? Ah, you soon will! Where do you think he has gone to? He has gone to the wilds of America, in search of new subjects. He is going to found a school of landscape painting. On an immense scale. A scale that has never been attempted yet. Dear fellow! Shall I tell you what he said when he left me here? Noble words—I call them noble words. 'Oscar, I go to make our assumed name famous. You shall be honorably known—you shall be illustrious, as the brother of Nugent Dubourg.' Do you think I could stand in the way of such a career as that? After what he has sacrificed for me, could I let Such a Man stagnate here—for no better purpose than to keep me company? What does it matter about my feeling lonely? Who am I? Oh, if you had seen how he bore with the horrible notoriety that followed us, after the trial! He was constantly stared at and pointed at, for me. Not a word of complaint escaped him. He snapped his fingers at it. 'That for public opinion!' he said. What strength of mind—eh? From one place after another we moved and moved, and still there were the photographs, and the newspapers, and the whole infamous story ('romance in real life,' they called it), known beforehand to everybody. He never lost heart. 'We shall find a place yet' (that was the cheerful way he put it); 'you have nothing to do with it, Oscar; you are safe in my hands; I promise you exactly the place of refuge you want.' It was he who got all the information, and found out this lonely part of England where you live. I thought it pretty as we wandered about the hills—it wasn't half grand enough for him. We lost ourselves. I began to feel nervous. He didn't mind it a bit. 'You have Me with you,' he said; 'My luck is always to be depended on. Mark what I say! We shall stumble on a village!' You will hardly believe me—in ten minutes more, we stumbled, exactly as he had foretold, on this place. He didn't leave me—when I had prevailed on him to go—without a recommendation. He recommended me to the landlord of the inn here. He said, 'My brother is delicate; my brother wishes to live in retirement; you will oblige me by looking after my brother.' Wasn't it kind? The landlord seemed to be quite affected by it. Nugent cried when he took leave of me. Ah, what would I not give to have a heart like his and a mind like his! It's something—isn't it?—to have a face like him. I often say that to myself when I look in the glass. Excuse my running on in this way. When I once begin to talk of Nugent, I don't know when to leave off."

One thing, at any rate, was plainly discernible in this otherwise inscrutable young man. He adored his twin-brother.

It would have been equally clear to me that Mr. Nugent Dubourg deserved to be worshipped, if I could have reconciled to my mind his leaving his brother to shift for himself in such a place as Dimchurch. I was obliged to remind myself of the admirable service which he had rendered at the trial, before I could decide to do him the justice of suspending my opinion of him, in his absence. Having accomplished this act of magnanimity, I took advantage of the first opportunity to change the subject. The most tiresome information that I am acquainted with, is the information which tells us of the virtues of an absent person—when that absent person happens to be a stranger.

"Is it true that you have taken Browndown for six months?" I asked. "Are you really going to settle at Dimchurch?"

"Yes—if you keep my secret," he answered. "The people here know nothing about me. Don't, pray don't, tell them who I am! You will drive me away, if you do."

"I must tell Miss Finch who you are," I said.

"No! no! no!" he exclaimed eagerly. "I can't bear the idea of her knowing it. I have been so horribly degraded. What will she think of me?" He burst into another explosion of rhapsodies on the subject of Lucilla—mixed up with renewed petitions to me to keep his story concealed from everybody. I lost all patience with his want of common fortitude and common sense.

"Young Oscar, I should like to box your ears!" I said. "You are in a villainously unwholesome state about this matter. Have you nothing else to think of? Have you no profession? Are you not obliged to work for your living?"

I spoke, as you perceive, with some force of expression—aided by a corresponding asperity of voice and manner.

Mr. Oscar Dubourg looked at me with the puzzled air of a man who feels an overflow of new ideas forcing itself into his mind. He modestly admitted the degrading truth. From his childhood upwards, he had only to put his hand in his pocket, and to find the money there, without any preliminary necessity of earning it first. His father had been a fashionable portrait-painter, and had married one of his sitters—an heiress. Oscar and Nugent had been left in the detestable position of independent gentlemen. The dignity of labor was a dignity unknown to these degraded young men. "I despise a wealthy idler," I said to Oscar, with my republican severity. "You want the ennobling influence of labor to make a man of you. Nobody has a right to be idle—nobody has a right to be rich. You would be in a more wholesome state of mind about yourself, my young gentleman, if you had to earn your bread and cheese before you ate it."

He stared at me piteously. The noble sentiments which I had inherited from Doctor Pratolungo, completely bewildered Mr. Oscar Dubourg.

"Don't be angry with me," he said, in his innocent way. "I couldn't eat my cheese, if I did earn it. I can't digest cheese. Besides, I employ myself as much as I can." He took his little golden vase from the table behind him, and told me what I had already heard him tell Lucilla while I was listening at the window. "You would have found me at work this morning," he went on, "if the stupid people who send me my metal plates had not made a mistake. The alloy, in the gold and silver both, is all wrong this time. I must return the plates to be melted again before I can do anything with them. They are all ready to go back to-day, when the cart comes. If there are any laboring people here who want money, I'm sure I will give them some of mine with the greatest pleasure. It isn't my fault, ma'am, that my father married my mother. And how could I help it if he left two thousand a year each to my brother and me?"

Two thousand a year each to his brother and him! And the illustrious Pratolungo had never known what it was to have five pounds sterling at his disposal before his union with Me!

I lifted my eyes to the ceiling. In my righteous indignation, I forgot Lucilla and her curiosity about Oscar—I forgot Oscar and his horror of Lucilla discovering who he was. I opened my lips to speak. In another moment I should have launched my thunderbolts against the whole infamous system of modern society, when I was silenced by the most extraordinary and unexpected interruption that ever closed a woman's lips.



CHAPTER THE TENTH

First Appearance of Jicks

THERE walked in, at the open door of the room—softly, suddenly, and composedly—a chubby female child, who could not possibly have been more than three years old. She had no hat or cap on her head. A dirty pinafore covered her from her chin to her feet. This amazing apparition advanced into the middle of the room, holding hugged under one arm a ragged and disreputable-looking doll; stared hard, first at Oscar, then at me; advanced to my knees; laid the disreputable doll on my lap; and, pointing to a vacant chair at my side, claimed the rights of hospitality in these words:

"Jicks will sit down."

How was it possible, under these circumstances, to attack the infamous system of modern society? It was only possible to kiss "Jicks."

"Do you know who this is?" I inquired, as I lifted our visitor on to the chair.

Oscar burst out laughing. Like me, he now saw this mysterious young lady for the first time. Like me, he wondered what the extraordinary nick-name under which she had presented herself could possibly mean.

We looked at the child. The child—with its legs stretched out straight before it, terminating in a pair of little dusty boots with holes in them—lifted its large round eyes, overshadowed by a penthouse of unbrushed flaxen hair; looked gravely at us in return; and made a second call on our hospitality, as follows:

"Jicks will have something to drink."

While Oscar ran into the kitchen for some milk, I succeeded in discovering the identity of "Jicks."

Something—I cannot well explain what—in the manner in which the child had drifted into the room with her doll, reminded me of the lymphatic lady of the rectory, drifting backwards and forwards with the baby in one hand and the novel in the other. I took the liberty of examining "Jicks's" pinafore, and discovered the mark in one corner:—"Selina Finch." Exactly as I had supposed, here was a member of Mrs. Finch's numerous family. Rather a young member, as it struck me, to be wandering hatless round the environs of Dimchurch, all by herself.

Oscar returned with the milk in a mug. The child—insisting on taking the mug into her own hands—steadily emptied it to the last drop—recovered her breath with a gasp—looked at me with a white mustache of milk on her upper lip—and announced the conclusion of her visit, in these terms:

"Jicks will get down again."

I deposited our young friend on the floor. She took her doll, and stood for a moment deep in thought. What was she going to do next? We were not kept long in suspense. She suddenly put her little hot fat hand into mine, and tried to pull me after her out of the room.

"What do you want?" I asked.

Jicks answered in one untranslatable compound word:

"Man-Gee-gee."

I suffered myself to be pulled out of the room—to see "Man-Gee-gee," to play "Man-Gee-gee," or to eat "Man-Gee-gee," it was impossible to tell which. I was pulled along the passage—I was pulled out to the front door. There—having approached the house inaudibly to us, over the grass—stood the horse, cart, and man, waiting to take the case of gold and silver plates back to London. I looked at Oscar, who had followed me. We now understood, not only the masterly compound word of Jicks (signifying man and horse, and passing over cart as unimportant), but the polite attention of Jicks in entering the house to inform us, after a rest and a drink, of a circumstance which had escaped our notice. The driver of the cart had, on his own acknowledgment, been investigated and questioned by this extraordinary child; strolling up to the door of Browndown to see what he was doing there. Jicks was a public character at Dimchurch. The driver knew all about her. She had been nicknamed "Gipsy" from her wandering habits, and had shortened the name in her own dialect, into "Jicks." There was no keeping her in at the rectory, try how you might: they had long since abandoned the effort in despair. Sooner or later, she turned up again—or somebody brought her back—or one of the sheep-dogs found her asleep under a bush, and gave the alarm. "What goes on in that child's head," said the driver, regarding Jicks with a sort of superstitious admiration, "the Lord only knows. She has a will of her own, and a way of her own. She is a child; and she aint a child. At three years of age, she's a riddle none of us can guess. And that's the long and the short of what I know about her."

While this explanation was in progress, the carpenter who had nailed up the case, and the carpenter's son, accompanying him, joined us in front of the house. They followed Oscar in, and came out again, bearing the heavy burden of precious metal—more than one man could conveniently lift—between them.

The case deposited in the cart, carpenter senior and carpenter junior got in after it, wanting "a lift" to Brighton.

Carpenter senior, a big burly man, made a joke. "It's a lonely country between this and Brighton, sir," he said to Oscar. "Three of us will be none too many to see your precious packing-case safe into the railway station." Oscar took it seriously. "Are there any robbers in this neighborhood?" he asked. "Lord love you, sir!" said the driver, "robbers would starve in these parts; we have got nothing worth thieving here." Jicks—still watching the proceedings with an interest which allowed no detail to escape unnoticed—assumed the responsibility of starting the men on their journey. The odd child waved her chubby hand imperiously to her friend the driver, and cried in her loudest voice, "Away!" The driver touched his hat with comic respect. "All right, miss—time's money, aint it?" He cracked his whip, and the cart rolled off noiselessly over the thick close turf of the South Downs.

It was time for me to go back to the rectory, and to restore the wandering Jicks, for the time being, to the protection of home. I returned to Oscar, to say good-bye.

"I wish I was going back with you," he said.

"You will be as free as I am to come and to go at the rectory," I answered, "when they know what has passed this morning between you and me. In your own interests, I am determined to tell them who you are. You have nothing to fear, and everything to gain, by my speaking out. Clear your mind of fancies and suspicions that are unworthy of you. By to-morrow we shall be good neighbors; by the end of the week we shall be good friends. For the present, as we say in France, au revoir!"

I turned to take Jicks by the hand. While I had been speaking to Oscar the child had slipped away from me. Not a sign of her was to be seen.

Before we could stir a step to search for our lost Gipsy, her voice reached our ears, raised shrill and angry in the regions behind us, at the side of the house.

"Go away!" we heard the child cry out impatiently. "Ugly men, go away!"

We turned the corner, and discovered two shabby strangers, resting themselves against the side wall of the house. Their cadaverous faces, their brutish expressions, and their frowzy clothes, proclaimed them, to my eye, as belonging to the vilest blackguard type that the civilized earth has yet produced—the blackguard of London growth. There they lounged, with their hands in their pockets and their backs against the wall, as if they were airing themselves on the outer side of a public-house—and there stood Jicks, with her legs planted wide apart on the turf, asserting the rights of property (even at that early age!) and ordering the rascals off.

"What are you doing there?" asked Oscar sharply.

One of the men appeared to be on the point of making an insolent answer. The other—the younger and the viler-looking villain of the two—checked him, and spoke first.

"We've had a longish walk, sir," said the fellow, with an impudent assumption of humility; "and we've took the liberty of resting our backs against your wall, and feasting our eyes on the beauty of your young lady here."

He pointed to the child. Jicks shook her fist at him, and ordered him off more fiercely than ever.

"There's an inn in the village," said Oscar. "Rest there, if you please—my house is not an inn."

The elder man made a second effort to speak, beginning with an oath. The younger checked him again.

"Shut up, Jim!" said the superior blackguard of the two. "The gentleman recommends the tap at the inn. Come and drink the gentleman's health." He turned to the child, and took off his hat to her with a low bow. "Wish you good morning, Miss! You're just the style, you are, that I admire. Please don't engage yourself to be married till I come back."

His savage companion was so tickled by this delicate pleasantry that he burst suddenly into a roar of laughter. Arm in arm, the two ruffians walked off together in the direction of the village. Our funny little Jicks became a tragic and terrible Jicks, all on a sudden. The child resented the insolence of the two men as if she really understood it. I never saw so young a creature in such a furious passion before. She picked up a stone, and threw it at them before I could stop her. She screamed, and stamped her tiny feet alternately on the ground, till she was purple in the face. She threw herself down, and rolled in fury on the grass. Nothing pacified her but a rash promise of Oscar's (which he was destined to hear of for many a long day afterwards) to send for the police, and to have the two men soundly beaten for daring to laugh at Jicks. She got up from the ground, and dried her eyes with her knuckles, and fixed a warning look on Oscar. "Mind!" said this curious child, with her bosom still heaving under the dirty pinafore, "the men are to be beaten. And Jicks is to see it."

I said nothing to Oscar, at the time, but I felt some secret uneasiness on the way home—an uneasiness inspired by the appearance of the two men in the neighborhood of Browndown.

It was impossible to say how long they might have been lurking about the outside of the house, before the child discovered them. They might have heard, through the open window, what Oscar had said to me on the subject of his plates of precious metal; and they might have seen the heavy packing-case placed in the cart. I felt no apprehension about the safe arrival of the case at Brighton; the three men in the cart were men enough to take good care of it. My fears were for the future. Oscar was living, entirely by himself, in a lonely house, more than half a mile distant from the village. His fancy for chasing in the precious metals might have its dangers, as well as its attractions, if it became known beyond the pastoral limits of Dimchurch. Advancing from one suspicion to another, I asked myself if the two men had roamed by mere accident into our remote part of the world—or whether they had deliberately found their way to Browndown with a purpose in view. Having this doubt in my mind, and happening to encounter the old nurse, Zillah, in the garden as I entered the rectory gates with my little charge, I put the question to her plainly, "Do you see many strangers at Dimchurch?"

"Strangers?" repeated the old woman. "Excepting yourself, ma'am, we see no strangers here, from one year's end to another."

I determined to say a warning word to Oscar before his precious metals were sent back to Browndown.



CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH

Blind Love

LUCILLA was at the piano when I entered the sitting-room.

"I wanted you of all things," she said. "I have sent all over the house in search of you. Where have you been?"

I told her.

She sprang to her feet with a cry of delight.

"You have persuaded him to trust you—you have discovered everything. You only said 'I have been at Browndown'—and I heard it in your voice. Out with it! out with it!"

She never moved—she seemed hardly to breathe—while I was telling her all that had passed at the interview between Oscar and me. As soon as I had done, she got up in a violent hurry—flushed and eager—and made straight for her bedroom door.

"What are you going to do?" I asked.

"I want my hat and my stick," she answered.

"You are going out?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

"Can you ask the question? To Browndown of course!"

I begged her to wait a moment, and hear a word or two that I had to say. It is, I suppose, almost needless to add that my object in speaking to her was to protest against the glaring impropriety of her paying a second visit, in one day, to a man who was a stranger to her. I declared, in the plainest terms, that such a proceeding would be sufficient, in the estimation of any civilized community, to put her reputation in peril. The result of my interference was curious and interesting in the extreme. It showed me that the virtue called Modesty (I am not speaking of Decency, mind) is a virtue of purely artificial growth; and that the successful cultivation of it depends in the first instance, not on the influence of the tongue, but on the influence of the eye.

Suppose the case of an average young lady (conscious of feeling a first love) to whom I might have spoken in the sense that I have just mentioned—what would she have done?

She would assuredly have shown some natural and pretty confusion, and would, in all human probability, have changed color more or less while she was listening to me. Lucilla's charming face revealed but one expression—an expression of disappointment, slightly mixed perhaps with surprise. I believed her to be then, what I knew her to be afterwards, as pure a creature as ever walked the earth. And yet, of the natural and becoming confusion, of the little inevitable feminine changes of color which I had expected to see, not so much as a vestige appeared—and this, remember, in the case of a person of unusually sensitive and impulsive nature: quick, on the most trifling occasions, to feel and to express its feeling in no ordinary degree.

What did it mean?

It meant that here was one strange side shown to me of the terrible affliction that darkened her life. It meant that modesty is essentially the growth of our own consciousness of the eyes of others judging us—and that blindness is never bashful, for the one simple reason that blindness cannot see. The most modest girl in existence is bolder with her lover in the dark than in the light. The female model who "sits" for the first time in a drawing academy, and who shrinks from the ordeal, is persuaded, in the last resort, to enter the students' room by having a bandage bound over her eyes. My poor Lucilla had always the bandage over her eyes. My poor Lucilla was never to meet her lover in the light. She had grown up with the passions of a woman—and yet, she had never advanced beyond the fearless and primitive innocence of a child. Ah, if ever there was a sacred charge confided to any mortal creature, here surely was a sacred charge confided to Me! I could not endure to see the poor pretty blind face turned so insensibly towards mine, after such words as I had just said to her. She was standing within my reach. I took her by the arm, and made her sit on my knee. "My dear!" I said, very earnestly, "you must not go to him again to-day."

"I have got so much to say to him," she answered impatiently, "I want to tell him how deeply I feel for him, and how anxious I am to make his life a happier one if I can."

"My dear Lucilla! you can't say this to a young man. It is as good as telling him, in plain words, that you are fond of him!"

"I am fond of him."

"Hush! hush! Keep it to yourself, until you are sure that he is fond of you. It is the man's place, my love—not the woman's—to own the truth first in matters of this sort."

"That is very hard on the women. If they feel it first, they ought to own it first." She paused for a moment, considering with herself—and abruptly got off my knee. "I must speak to him!" she burst out. "I must tell him that I have heard his story, and that I think all the better of him after it, instead of the worse!"

She was again on her way to get her hat. My only chance of stopping her was to invent a compromise.

"Write him a note," I said—and then suddenly remembered that she was blind. "You shall dictate," I added; "and I will hold the pen. Be content with that for to-day. For my sake, Lucilla!"

She yielded—not very willingly, poor thing. But she jealously declined to let me hold the pen.

"My first note to him must be all written by me," she said. "I can write—in my own roundabout way. It's long and tiresome; but still I can do it. Come and see."

She led the way to a writing-table in a corner of the room, and sat for awhile with the pen in her hand, thinking. Her irresistible smile broke suddenly like a glow of light over her "Ah!" she exclaimed, "I know how to tell him what I think."

Guiding the pen in her right hand with the fingers of her left she wrote slowly, in large childish characters, these words:—"DEAR MR. OSCAR,—I have heard all about you. Please send the little gold vase.—Your friend, LUCILLA."

She enclosed and directed the letter, and clapped her hands for joy. "He will know what that means!" she said gaily.

It was useless to attempt making a second remonstrance. I rang the bell, under protest (imagine her receiving a present from a gentleman to whom she had spoken for the first time that morning!)—and the groom was sent off to Browndown with the letter. In making this concession, I privately said to myself, "I shall keep a tight hand over Oscar; he is the manageable person of the two!"

The interval before the return of the groom was not an easy interval to fill up. I proposed some music. Lucilla was still too full of her new interest to be able to give her attention to anything else. She suddenly remembered that her father and her step-mother ought both to be informed that Mr. Dubourg was a perfectly presentable person at the rectory: she decided on writing to her father.

On this occasion, she made no difficulty about permitting me to hold the pen, while she told me what to write. We produced between us rather a flighty, enthusiastic, high-flown sort of letter. I felt by no means sure that we should raise a favorable impression of our new neighbor in the mind of Reverend Finch. That was, however, not my affair. I appeared to excellent advantage in the matter, as the judicious foreign lady who had insisted on making inquiries. For the rest, it was a point of honor with me—writing for a person who was blind—not to change a single word in the sentences which Lucilla dictated to me. The letter completed, I wrote the address of the house in Brighton at which Mr. Finch then happened to be staying; and I was next about to close the envelope in due course—when Lucilla stopped me.

"Wait a little," she said. "Don't close the letter yet."

I wondered why the envelope was to be left open, and why Lucilla looked a little confused when she forbade me to close it. Another unexpected revelation of the influence of their affliction on the natures of the blind, was waiting to enlighten me on those two points.

After consultation between us, it had been decided, at Lucilla's express request, that I should inform Mrs. Finch that the mystery at Browndown was now cleared up. Lucilla openly owned to having no great relish for the society of her step-mother, or for the duty invariably devolving on anybody who was long in the company of that fertile lady, of either finding her handkerchief or holding her baby. A duplicate key of the door of communication between the two sides of the house was given to me; and I left the room.

Before performing my errand, I went for a minute into my bedchamber to put away my hat and parasol. Returning into the corridor, and passing the door of the sitting-room, I found that it had been left ajar by some one who had entered after I had left; and I heard Lucilla's voice say, "Take that letter out of the envelope, and read it to me."

I pursued my way along the passage—very slowly, I own—and I heard the first sentences of the letter which I had written under Lucilla's dictation, read aloud to her in the old nurse's voice. The incurable suspicion of the blind—always abandoned to the same melancholy distrust of the persons about them; always doubting whether some deceit is not being practiced on them by the happy people who can see—had urged Lucilla, even in the trifling matter of the letter, to put me to the test, behind my back. She was using Zillah's eyes to make sure that I had really written all that she had dictated to me—exactly as, on many an after occasion, she used my eyes to make sure of Zillah's complete performance of tasks allotted to her in the house. No experience of the faithful devotion of those who live with them ever thoroughly satisfies the blind. Ah, poor things, always in the dark! always in the dark!

In opening the door of communication, it appeared as if I had also opened all the doors of all the bedchambers in the rectory. The moment I stepped into the passage, out popped the children from one room after another, like rabbits out of their burrows.

"Where is your mamma?" I asked.

The rabbits answered by one universal shriek, and popped back again into their burrows.

I went down the stairs to try my luck on the ground floor. The window on the landing had a view over the front garden. I looked out, and saw the irrepressible Arab of the family, our small chubby Jicks, wandering in the garden, all by herself; evidently on the watch for her next opportunity of escaping from the house. This curious little creature cared nothing for the society of the other children. Indoors, she sat gravely retired in corners, taking her meals (whenever she could) on the floor. Out of doors, she roamed till she could walk no longer, and then lay down anywhere, like a little animal, to sleep. She happened to look up as I stood at the window. Seeing me, she waved her hand indicatively in the direction of the rectory gate. "What is it?" I asked. The Arab answered, "Jicks wants to get out."

At the same moment, the screaming of a baby below, informed me that I was in the near neighborhood of Mrs. Finch.

I advanced towards the noise, and found myself standing before the open door of a large store-room at the extreme end of the passage. In the middle of the room (issuing household commodities to the cook) sat Mrs. Finch. She was robed this time in a petticoat and a shawl; and she had the baby and the novel laid together flat on their backs in her lap.

"Eight pounds of soap? Where does it all go to I wonder!" groaned Mrs. Finch to the accompaniment of the baby's screams. "Five pounds of soda for the laundry? One would think we did the washing for the whole village. Six pounds of candles? You must eat candles, like the Russians: who ever heard of burning six pounds of candles in a week? Ten pounds of sugar? Who gets it all? I never taste sugar from one year's end to another. Waste, nothing but waste." Here Mrs. Finch looked my way, and saw me at the door. "Oh? Madame Pratolungo? How d'ye do? Don't go away—I've just done. A bottle of blacking? My shoes are a disgrace to the house. Five pounds of rice? If I had Indian servants, five pounds of rice would last them for a year. There! take the things away into the kitchen. Excuse my dress, Madame Pratolungo. How am I to dress, with all I have got to do? What do you say? My time must indeed be fully occupied? Ah, that's just where it is! When you have lost half an hour in the morning, and can't pick it up again—to say nothing of having the store-room on your mind, and the children's dinner late, and the baby fractious—one slips on a petticoat and a shawl, and gives it up in despair. What can I have done with my handkerchief? Would you mind looking among those bottles behind you? Oh, here it is, under the baby. Might I trouble you to hold my book for one moment? I think the baby will be quieter if I put him the other way." Here Mrs. Finch turned the baby over on his stomach, and patted him briskly on the back. At this change in his circumstances, the unappeasable infant only roared louder than ever. His mother appeared to be perfectly unaffected by the noise. This resigned domestic martyr looked placidly up at me, as I stood before her, bewildered, with the novel in my hand. "Ah, that's a very interesting story," she went on. "Plenty of love in it, you know. You have come for it, haven't you? I remember I promised to lend it to you yesterday." Before I could answer the cook appeared again, in search of more household commodities. Mrs. Finch repeated the woman's demands, one by one as she made them, in tones of despair. "Another bottle of vinegar? I believe you water the garden with vinegar! More starch? The Queen's washing, I'm firmly persuaded, doesn't come to so much as ours. Sandpaper? Sandpaper means wastepaper in this profligate house. I shall tell your master. I really can NOT make the housekeeping money last at this rate. Don't go, Madame Pratolungo! I shall have done directly. What! You must go! Oh, then, put the book back on my lap, please—and look behind that sack of flour. The first volume slipped down there this morning, and I haven't had time to pick it up since. (Sandpaper! Do you think I'm made of sandpaper!) Have you found the first volume? Ah, that's it. All over flour! there's a hole in the sack I suppose. Twelve sheets of sandpaper used in a week! What for? I defy any of you to tell me what for. Waste! waste! shameful sinful waste!" At this point in Mrs. Finch's lamentations, I made my escape with the book, and left the subject of Oscar Dubourg to be introduced at a fitter opportunity. The last words I heard, through the screams of the baby, as I ascended the stairs, were words still relating to the week's prodigal consumption of sandpaper. Let us drop a tear, if you please, over the woes of Mrs. Finch, and leave the British matron apostrophizing domestic economy in the odorous seclusion of her own storeroom.

I had just related to Lucilla the failure of my expedition to the other side of the house, when the groom returned, bringing with him the gold vase, and a letter.

Oscar's answer was judiciously modeled to imitate the brevity of Lucilla's note. "You have made me a happy man again. When may I follow the vase?" There, in two sentences, was the whole letter.

I had another discussion with Lucilla, relating to the propriety of our receiving Oscar in Reverend Finch's absence. It was only possible to persuade her to wait until she had at least heard from her father, by consenting to take another walk towards Browndown the next morning. This new concession satisfied her. She had received his present; she had exchanged letters with him—that was enough to content her for the time.

"Do you think he is getting fond of me?" she asked, the last thing at night; taking her gold vase to bed with her, poor dear—exactly as she might have taken a new toy to bed with her when she was a child. "Give him time, my love," I answered. "It isn't everybody who can travel at your pace in such a serious matter as this." My banter had no effect upon her. "Go away with your candle," she said. "The darkness makes no difference to me. I can see him in my thoughts." She nestled her head comfortably on the pillows, and tapped me saucily on the cheek, as I bent over her. "Own the advantage I have over you now," she said. "You can't see at night without your candle. I could go all over the house, at this moment, without making a false step anywhere."

When I left her that night, I sincerely believe "poor Miss Finch" was the happiest woman in England.



CHAPTER THE TWELFTH

Mr. Finch smells Money

A DOMESTIC alarm deferred for some hours our proposed walk to Browndown.

The old nurse, Zillah, was taken ill in the night. She was so little relieved by such remedies as we were able to apply, that it became necessary to summon the doctor in the morning. He lived at some distance from Dimchurch; and he had to send back to his own house for the medicines required. As a necessary result of these delays, it was close on one o'clock in the afternoon before the medical remedies had their effect, and the nurse was sufficiently recovered to permit of our leaving her in the servant's care.

We had dressed for our walk (Lucilla being ready long before I was), and had got as far as the garden gate on our way to Browndown—when we heard, on the other side of the wall, a man's voice, pitched in superbly deep bass tones, pronouncing these words:

"Believe me, my dear sir, there is not the least difficulty. I have only to send the cheque to my bankers at Brighton."

Lucilla started, and caught hold of me by the arm.

"My father!" she exclaimed in the utmost astonishment. "Who is he talking to?"

The key of the gate was in my possession. "What a grand voice your father has got!" I said, as I took the key out of my pocket. I opened the gate. There, confronting us on the threshold, arm in arm, as if they had known each other from childhood, stood Lucilla's father, and—Oscar Dubourg!

Reverend Finch opened the proceedings by folding his daughter affectionately in his arms.

"My dear child!" he said, "I received your letter—your most interesting letter—this morning. The moment I read it I felt that I owed a duty to Mr. Dubourg. As pastor of Dimchurch, it was clearly incumbent on me to comfort a brother in affliction. I really felt, so to speak, a longing to hold out the right hand of friendship to this sorely-tried man. I borrowed my friend's carriage, and drove straight to Browndown. We have had a long and cordial talk. I have brought Mr. Dubourg home with me. He must be one of us. My dear child, Mr. Dubourg must be one of us. Let me introduce you. My eldest daughter—Mr. Dubourg."

He performed the ceremony of presentation, with the most impenetrable gravity, as if he really believed that Oscar and his daughter now met each other for the first time!

Never had I set my eyes on a meaner-looking man than this rector. In height he barely reached up to my shoulder. In substance, he was so miserably lean that he looked the living picture of starvation. He would have made his fortune in the streets of London, if he had only gone out and shown himself to the public in ragged clothes. His face was deeply pitted with the small-pox. His short grisly hair stood up stiff and straight on his head like hair fixed in a broom. His small whitish-grey eyes had a restless, inquisitive, hungry look in them, indescribably irritating and uncomfortable to see. The one personal distinction he possessed consisted in his magnificent bass voice—a voice which had no sort of right to exist in the person who used it. Until one became accustomed to the contrast, there was something perfectly unbearable in hearing those superb big tones come out of that contemptible little body. The famous Latin phrase conveys, after all, the best description I can give of Reverend Finch. He was in very truth—Voice, and nothing else.

"Madame Pratolungo, no doubt?" he went on, turning to me. "Delighted to make the acquaintance of my daughter's judicious companion and friend. You must be one of us—like Mr. Dubourg. Let me introduce you. Madame Pratolungo—Mr. Dubourg. This is the old side of the rectory, my dear sir. We had it put in repair—let me see: how long since?—we had it put in repair just after Mrs. Finch's last confinement but one." (I soon discovered that Mr. Finch reckoned time by his wife's confinements.) "You will find it very curious and interesting inside. Lucilla, my child! (It has pleased Providence, Mr. Dubourg, to afflict my daughter with blindness. Inscrutable Providence!) Lucilla, this is your side of the house. Take Mr. Dubourg's arm, and lead the way. Do the honors, my child. Madame Pratolungo, let me offer you my arm. I regret that I was not present, when you arrived, to welcome you at the rectory. Consider yourself—do pray consider yourself—one of us." He stopped, and lowered his prodigious voice to a confidential growl. "Delightful person, Mr. Dubourg. I can't tell you how pleased I am with him. And what a sad story! Cultivate Mr. Dubourg, my dear madam. As a favor to Me—cultivate Mr. Dubourg!"

He said this with an appearance of the deepest anxiety—and more, he emphasized it by affectionately squeezing my hand.

I have met with a great many audacious people in my time. But the audacity of Reverend Finch—persisting to our faces in the assumption that he had been the first to discover our neighbor, and that Lucilla and I were perfectly incapable of understanding and appreciating Oscar, unassisted by him—was entirely without a parallel in my experience. I asked myself what his conduct in this matter—so entirely unexpected by Lucilla, as well as by me—could possibly mean. My knowledge of his character, obtained through his daughter, and my memory of what we heard him say on the other side of the wall, suggested that his conduct might mean—Money.

We assembled in the sitting-room.

The only person among us who was quite at his ease was Mr. Finch. He never let his daughter and his guest alone for a single moment. "My child, show Mr. Dubourg this; show Mr. Dubourg that. Mr. Dubourg, my daughter possesses this; my daughter possesses that." So he went on, all round the room. Oscar appeared to feel a little daunted by the overwhelming attentions of his new friend. Lucilla was, as I could see, secretly irritated at finding herself authorized by her father to pay those attentions to Oscar which she would have preferred offering to him of her own accord. As for me, I was already beginning to weary of the patronizing politeness of the little priest with the big voice. It was a relief to us all, when a message on domestic affairs arrived in the midst of the proceedings from Mrs. Finch, requesting to see her husband immediately on the rectory side of the house.

Forced to leave us, Reverend Finch made his farewell speech; taking Oscar's hand into a kind of paternal custody in both his own hands. He spoke with such sonorous cordiality, that the china and glass ornaments on Lucilla's chiffonier actually jingled an accompaniment to his booming bass notes.

"Come to tea, my dear sir. Without ceremony. To-night at six. We must keep up your spirits, Mr. Dubourg. Cheerful society, and a little music. Lucilla, my dear child, you will play for Mr. Dubourg, won't you? Madame Pratolungo will do the same—at My request—I am sure. We shall make even dull Dimchurch agreeable to our new neighbor before we have done. What does the poet say? 'Fixed to no spot is happiness sincere; 'tis nowhere to be found, or everywhere.' How cheering! how true! Good day; good day."

The glasses left off jingling. Mr. Finch's wizen little legs took him out of the room.

The moment his back was turned, we both assailed Oscar with the same question. What had passed at the interview between the rector and himself? Men are all alike incompetent to satisfy women, when the question between the sexes is a question of small details. A woman, in Oscar's position, would have been able to relate to us, not only the whole conversation with the rector, but every little trifling incident which had noticeably illustrated it. As things were, we could only extract from our unsatisfactory man the barest outline of the interview. The coloring and the filling-in we were left to do for ourselves.

Oscar had, on his own confession, acknowledged his visitor's kindness, by opening his whole heart to the sympathizing rector, and placing that wary priest and excellent man of business in possession of the completest knowledge of all his affairs. In return, Reverend Finch had spoken in the frankest manner, on his side. He had drawn a sad picture of the poverty-stricken condition of Dimchurch, viewed as an ecclesiastical endowment; and he had spoken in such feeling terms of the neglected condition of the ancient and interesting church, that poor simple Oscar, smitten with pity, had produced his cheque-book, and had subscribed on the spot towards the Fund for repairing the ancient round tower. They had been still occupied with the subject of the tower and the subscription, when we had opened the garden gate and had let them in. Hearing this, I now understood the motives under which our reverend friend was acting as well as if they had been my own. It was plain to my mind that the rector had taken his financial measure of Oscar, and had privately satisfied himself, that if he encouraged the two young people in cultivating each other's society, money (to use his own phrase) might come of it. He had, as I believed, put forward "the round tower," in the first instance, as a feeler; and he would follow it up, in due time, by an appeal of a more personal nature to Oscar's well-filled purse. Brief, he was, in my opinion, quite sharp enough (after having studied his young friend's character) to foresee an addition to his income, rather than a subtraction from it, if the relations between Oscar and his daughter ended in a marriage.

Whether Lucilla arrived, on her side, at the same conclusion as mine, is what I cannot venture positively to declare. I can only relate that she looked ill at ease as the facts came out; and that she took the first opportunity of extinguishing her father, viewed as a topic of conversation.

As for Oscar, it was enough for him that he had already secured his place as friend of the house. He took leave of us in the highest spirits. I had my eye on them when he and Lucilla said good-bye. She squeezed his hand. I saw her do it. At the rate at which things were now going on, I began to ask myself whether Reverend Finch would not appear at tea-time in his robes of office, and celebrate the marriage of his "sorely-tried" young friend between the first cup and the second.

At our little social assembly in the evening, nothing passed worthy of much remark.

Lucilla and I (I cannot resist recording this) were both beautifully dressed, in honor of the occasion; Mrs. Finch serving us to perfection, by way of contrast. She had made an immense effort—she was half dressed. Her evening costume was an ancient green silk skirt (with traces of past babies visible on it to an experienced eye), topped by the everlasting blue merino jacket. "I lose everything belonging to me," Mrs. Finch whispered in my ear. "I have got a body to this dress, and it can't be found anywhere." The rector's prodigious voice was never silent: the pompous and plausible little man talked, talked, talked, in deeper and deeper bass, until the very teacups on the table shuddered under the influence of him. The elder children, admitted to the family festival, ate till they could eat no more; stared till they could stare no more; yawned till they could yawn no more—and then went to bed. Oscar got on well with everybody. Mrs. Finch was naturally interested in him as one of twins—though she was also surprised and disappointed at hearing that his mother had begun and ended with his brother and himself. As for Lucilla, she sat in silent happiness, absorbed in the inexhaustible delight of hearing Oscar's voice. She found as many varieties of expression in listening to her beloved tones, as the rest of us find in looking at our beloved face. We had music later in the evening—and I then heard, for the first time, how charmingly Lucilla played. She was a born musician, with a delicacy and subtlety of touch such as few even of the greatest virtuosi possess. Oscar was enchanted. In a word, the evening was a success.

I contrived, when our guest took his departure, to say my contemplated word to him in private, on the subject of his solitary position at Browndown.

Those doubts of Oscar's security in his lonely house, which I have described as having been suggested to me by the discovery of the two ruffians lurking under the wall, still maintained their place in my mind; and still urged me to warn him to take precautions of some sort, before the precious metals which he had sent to London to be melted, came back to him again. He gave me the opportunity I wanted, by looking at his watch, and apologizing for protracting his visit to a terribly late hour, for the country—the hour of midnight.

"Is your servant sitting up for you?" I asked, assuming to be ignorant of his domestic arrangements.

He pulled out of his pocket a great clumsy key.

"This is my only servant at Browndown," he said. "By four or five in the afternoon, the people at the inn have done all for me that I want. After that time, there is nobody in the house but myself."

He shook hands with us. The rector escorted him as far as the front door. I slipped out while they were saying their last words, and joined Oscar, when he advanced alone into the garden.

"I want a breath of fresh air," I said. "I'll go with you as far as the gate."

He began to talk of Lucilla directly. I surprised him by returning abruptly to the subject of his position at Browndown.

"Do you think it's wise," I asked, "to be all by yourself at night in such a lonely house as yours? Why don't you have a manservant?"

"I detest strange servants," he answered. "I infinitely prefer being by myself."

"When do you expect your gold and silver plates to be returned to you?"

"In about a week."

"What would be the value of them, in money—at a rough guess?"

"At a rough guess—about seventy or eighty pounds."

"In a week's time then," I said, "you will have seventy or eighty pounds' worth of property at Browndown. Property which a thief need only put into the melting-pot, to have no fear of its being traced into his hands."

Oscar stopped, and looked at me.

"What can you be thinking of!" he asked. "There are no thieves in this primitive place."

"There are thieves in other places," I answered. "And they may come here. Have you forgotten those two men whom we caught hanging about Browndown yesterday?"

He smiled. I had recalled to him a humourous association—nothing more.

"It was not we who caught them," he said. "It was that strange child. What do you say to my having Jicks to sleep in the house and take care of me?"

"I am not joking," I rejoined. "I never met with two more ill-looking villains in my life. The window was open when you were telling me about the necessity for melting the plates again. They may know as well as we do, that your gold and silver will be returned to you after a time."

"What an imagination you have got!" he exclaimed. "You see a couple of shabby excursionists from Brighton, who have wandered to Dimchurch—and you instantly transform them into a pair of housebreakers in a conspiracy to rob and murder me! You and my brother Nugent would just suit each other. His imagination runs away with him, exactly like yours."

"Take my advice," I answered gravely. "Don't persist in sleeping at Browndown without a living creature in the house with you."

He was in wild good spirits. He kissed my hand, and thanked me in his voluble exaggerated way for the interest that I took in him. "All right!" he said, as he opened the gate. "I'll have a living creature in the house with me. I'll get a dog."

We parted. I had told him what was on my mind. I could do no more. After all, it might be quite possible that his view was the right one, and mine the wrong.



CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH

Second Appearance of Jicks

FIVE more days passed.

During that interval, we saw our new neighbor constantly. Either Oscar came to the rectory, or we went to Browndown. Reverend Finch waited, with a masterly assumption of suspecting nothing, until the relations between the two young people were ripe enough to develop into relations of acknowledged love. They were already (under Lucilla's influence) advancing rapidly to that point. You are not to blame my poor blind girl, if you please, for frankly encouraging the man she loved. He was the most backward man—viewed as a suitor—whom I ever met with. The fonder he grew of her, the more timid and self-distrustful he became. I own I don't like a modest man; and I cannot honestly say that Mr. Oscar Dubourg, on closer acquaintance, advanced himself much in my estimation. However, Lucilla understood him, and that was enough. She was determined to have the completest possible image of him in her mind. Everybody in the house who had seen him (the children included) she examined and cross-examined on the subject of his personal appearance, as she had already examined and cross-examined me. His features and his color, his height and his breadth; his ornaments and his clothes—on all these points she collected evidence, in every direction and in the smallest detail. It was an especial relief and delight to her to hear, on all sides, that his complexion was fair. There was no reasoning with her against her blind horror of dark shades of color, whether seen in men, women, or things. She was quite unable to account for it; she could only declare it.

"I have the strangest instincts of my own about some things," she said to me one day. "For instance, I knew that Oscar was bright and fair—I mean I felt it in myself—on that delightful evening when I first heard the sound of his voice. It went straight from my ear to my heart; and it described him, just as the rest of you have described him to me since. Mrs. Finch tells me his complexion is lighter than mine. Do you think so too? I am so glad to hear that he is fairer than I am! Did you ever meet before with a person like me? I have the oddest ideas in this blind head of mine. I associate life and beauty with light colors, and death and crime with dark colors. If I married a man with a dark complexion, and if I recovered my sight afterwards, I should run away from him."

This singular prejudice of hers against dark people was a little annoying to me on personal grounds. It was a sort of reflection on my own taste. Between ourselves, the late Doctor Pratolungo was of a fine mahogany brown all over.

As for affairs in general at Dimchurch, my chronicle of the five days finds little to dwell on that is worth recording.

We were not startled by any second appearance of the two ruffians at Browndown—neither was any change made by Oscar in his domestic establishment. He was favored with more than one visit from our little wandering Jicks. On each occasion, the child gravely reminded him of his rash promise to appeal to the police, and visit with corporal punishment the two ugly strangers who had laughed at her. When were the men to be beaten? and when was Jicks to see it? Such were the serious questions with which this young lady regularly opened the proceedings, on each occasion when she favored Oscar with a morning call.

On the sixth day, the gold and silver plates were returned to Browndown from the manufactory in London.

The next morning a note arrived for me from Oscar. It ran thus:—

"DEAR MADAME PRATOLUNGO,—I regret to inform you that nothing happened to me last night. My locks and bolts are in their usual good order; my gold and silver plates are safe in the workshop: and I myself am now eating my breakfast with an uncut throat—Yours ever,

"OSCAR."

After this, there was no more to be said. Jicks might persist in remembering the two ill-looking strangers. Older and wiser people dismissed them from all further consideration.

Saturday came—making the tenth day since the memorable morning when I had forced Oscar to disclose himself to me in the little side-room at Browndown.

In the forenoon we had a visit from him at the rectory. In the afternoon we went to Browndown, to see him begin a new piece of chasing in gold—a casket for holding gloves—destined to take its place on Lucilla's toilet-table when it was done. We left him industriously at work; determined to go on as long as the daylight lasted.

Early in the evening, Lucilla sat down at her pianoforte; and I paid a visit by appointment to the rectory side of the house.

Unhappy Mrs. Finch had determined to institute a complete reform of her wardrobe. She had entreated me to give her the benefit of "my French taste," in the capacity of confidential critic and adviser. "I can't afford to buy any new things," said the poor lady. "But a deal might be done in altering what I have got by me, if a clever person took the matter up." Who could resist that piteous appeal? I resigned myself to the baby, the novel, and the children in general; and (Reverend Finch being out of the way, writing his sermon) I presented myself in Mrs. Finch's parlor, full of ideas, with my scissors and my pattern-paper ready in my hand.

We had only begun our operations, when one of the elder children arrived with a message from the nursery.

It was tea-time; and, as usual, Jicks was missing. She was searched for, first in the lower regions of the house; secondly in the garden. Not a trace of her was to be discovered in either quarter. Nobody was surprised or alarmed. We said, "Oh, dear, she has gone to Browndown again!"—and immersed ourselves once more in the shabby recesses of Mrs. Finch's wardrobe.

I had just decided that the blue merino jacket was an article of wearing apparel which had done its duty, and earned its right to final retirement from the scene—when a plaintive cry reached my ear, through the open door which led into the back garden.

I stopped, and looked at Mrs. Finch.

The cry was repeated, louder and nearer: recognizable this time as a cry in a child's voice. The door of the room had been left ajar, when we sent the messenger back to the nursery. I threw it open, and found myself face to face with Jicks in the passage.

I felt every nerve in my body shudder at the sight of the child.

The poor little thing was white and wild with terror. She was incapable of uttering a word. When I knelt down to fondle and soothe her, she caught convulsively at my hand, and attempted to raise me. I got on my feet again. She repeated her dumb cry more loudly—and tried to drag me out of the house. She was so weak that she staggered under the effort. I took her up in my arms. One of my hands, as I embraced her, touched the top of her frock, just below the back of her neck. I felt something on my fingers. I looked at them. Gracious God! I was stained with blood!

I turned the child round. My own blood froze. Her mother, standing behind me, screamed with horror.

The dear little thing's white frock was spotted and splashed with wet blood. Not her own blood. There was not a scratch on her. I looked closer at the horrid marks. They had been drawn purposely on her—drawn, as it seemed, with a finger. I took her out into the light. It was writing! A word had been feebly traced on the back of her frock. I made out something like the letter "H." Then a letter which it was impossible to read.

Then another next to it, which might have been "L," or might have been "J." Then a last letter, which I guessed to be "P."

Was the word—"Help"?

Yes!—traced on the back of the child's frock, with a finger dipped in blood—"HELP."



CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH

Discoveries at Browndown

IT is needless to tell you at what conclusion I arrived, as soon as I was sufficiently myself to think at all.

Thanks to my adventurous past life, I have got the habit of deciding quickly in serious emergencies of all sorts. In the present emergency—as I saw it—there were two things to be done. One, to go instantly with help to Browndown: the other, to keep the knowledge of what had happened from Lucilla until I could get back again, and prepare her for the discovery.

I looked at Mrs. Finch. She had dropped helplessly into a chair. "Rouse yourself!" I said—and shook her. It was no time for sympathizing with swoons and hysterics. The child was still in my arms; fast yielding, poor little thing, to the exhaustion of fatigue and terror. I could do nothing until I had relieved myself of the charge of her. Mrs. Finch looked up at me, trembling and sobbing. I put the child in her lap. Jicks feebly resisted being parted from me; but soon gave up, and dropped her weary little head on her mother's bosom. "Can you take off her frock?" I asked, with another shake—a good one, this time. The prospect of a domestic occupation (of any sort) appeared to rouse Mrs. Finch. She looked at the baby, in its cradle in one corner of the room, and at the novel, reposing on a chair in another corner of the room. The presence of these two familiar objects appeared to encourage her. She shivered, she swallowed a sob, she recovered her breath, she began to undo the frock.

"Put it away carefully," I said; "and say nothing to anybody of what has happened, until I come back. You can see for yourself that the child is not hurt. Soothe her, and wait here. Is Mr. Finch in the study?"

Mrs. Finch swallowed another sob, and said, "Yes." The child made a last effort. "Jicks will go with you," said the indomitable little Arab faintly. I ran out of the room, and left the three babies—big, little, and least—together.

After knocking at the study door without getting any reply, I opened it and went in. Reverend Finch, comfortably prostrate in a large arm-chair (with his sermon-paper spread out in fair white sheets by his side), started up, and confronted me in the character of a clergyman that moment awakened from a sound sleep.

The rector of Dimchurch instantly recovered his dignity.

"I beg your pardon, Madame Pratolungo, I was deep in thought. Please state your business briefly." Saying those words, he waved his hand magnificently over his empty sheets of paper, and added in his deepest bass: "Sermon-day."

I told him in the plainest words what I had seen on his child's frock, and what I feared had happened at Browndown. He turned deadly pale. If I ever yet set my two eyes on a man thoroughly frightened, Reverend Finch was that man.

"Do you anticipate danger?" he inquired. "Is it your opinion that criminal persons are in, or near, the house?"

"It is my opinion that there is not a moment to be lost," I answered. "We must go to Browndown; and we must get what help we can on the way."

I opened the door, and waited for him to come out with me. Mr. Finch (still apparently pre-occupied with the question of the criminal persons) looked as if he wished himself a hundred miles from his own rectory at that particular moment. But he was the master of the house; he was the principal man in the place—he had no other alternative, as matters now stood, than to take his hat and go.

We went out together into the village. My reverend companion was silent for the first time in my limited experience of him. We inquired for the one policeman who patrolled the district. He was away on his rounds. We asked if anybody had seen the doctor. No: it was not the doctor's day for visiting Dimchurch. I had heard the landlord of the Gross Hands described as a capable and respectable man; and I suggested stopping at the inn, and taking him with us. Mr. Finch instantly brightened at that proposal. His sense of his own importance rose again, like the mercury in a thermometer when you put it into a warm bath.

"Exactly what I was about to suggest," he said. "Gootheridge of the Gross Hands is a very worthy person—for his station in life. Let us have Gootheridge, by all means. Don't be alarmed, Madame Pratolungo. We are all in the hands of Providence. It is most fortunate for you that I was at home. What would you have done without me? Now don't, pray don't, be alarmed. In case of criminal persons—I have my stick, as you see. I am not tall; but I possess immense physical strength. I am, so to speak, all muscle. Feel!"

He held out one of his wizen little arms. It was about half the size of my arm. If I had not been far too anxious to think of playing tricks, I should certainly have declared that it was needless, with such a tower of strength by my side, to disturb the landlord. I dare not assert that Mr. Finch actually detected the turn my thoughts were taking—I can only declare that he did certainly shout for Gootheridge in a violent hurry, the moment we were in sight of the inn.

The landlord came out; and, hearing what our errand was, instantly consented to join us.

"Take your gun," said Mr. Finch.

Gootheridge took his gun. We hastened on to the house.

"Were Mrs. Gootheridge or your daughter at Browndown today?" I asked.

"Yes, ma'am—they were both at Browndown. They finished up their work as usual—and left the house more than an hour since."

"Did anything out of the common happen while they were there?"

"Nothing that I heard of, ma'am."

I considered with myself for a minute, and ventured on putting a few more questions to Mr. Gootheridge.

"Have any strangers been seen here this evening?" I inquired.

"Yes, ma'am. Nearly an hour ago two strangers drove by my house in a chaise."

"In what direction?"

"Coming from Brighton way, and going towards Browndown."

"Did you notice the men?"

"Not particularly, ma'am. I was busy at the time."

A sickening suspicion that the two strangers in the chaise might be the two men whom I had seen lurking under the wall, forced its way into my mind. I said no more until we reached the house.

All was quiet. The one sign of anything unusual was in the plain traces of the passage of wheels over the turf in front of Browndown. The landlord was the first to see them. "The chaise must have stopped at the house, sir," he said, addressing himself to the rector.

Reverend Finch was suffering under a second suspension of speech. All he could say as we approached the door of the silent and solitary building—and he said that with extreme difficulty—was, "Pray let us be careful!"

The landlord was the first to reach the door. I was behind him. The rector—at some little distance—acted as rear-guard, with the South Downs behind him to retreat upon. Gootheridge rapped smartly on the door, and called out, "Mr. Dubourg!" There was no answer. There was only a dreadful silence. The suspense was more than I could endure. I pushed by the landlord, and turned the handle of the unlocked door.

"Let me go first, ma'am," said Gootheridge.

He pushed by me, in his turn. I followed him close. We entered the house, and called again. Again there was no answer. We looked into the little sitting-room on one side of the passage, and into the dining-room on the other. Both were empty. We went on to the back of the house, where the room was situated which Oscar called his workshop. When we tried the door of the workshop it was locked.

We knocked, and called again. The horrid silence was all that followed—as before.

I tried the keyhole with my finger. The key was not in the lock. I knelt down, and looked through the keyhole. The next instant, I was up again on my feet, wild and giddy with horror.

"Burst open the door!" I screamed. "I can just see his hand lying on the floor!"

The landlord, like the rector, was a little man; and the door, like everything else at Browndown, was of the clumsiest and heaviest construction. Unaided by instruments, we should all three together have been too weak to burst it open. In this difficulty, Reverend Finch proved to be—for the first time, and also for the last—of some use.

"Stay!" he said. "My friends, if the back garden gate is open, we can get in by the window."

Neither the landlord nor I had thought of the window. We ran round to the back of the house; seeing the marks of the chaise-wheels leading in the same direction. The gate in the wall was wide open. We crossed the little garden. The window of the workshop—opening to the ground—gave us admission as the rector had foretold. We entered the room.

There he lay—poor harmless, unlucky Oscar—senseless, in a pool of his own blood. A blow on the left side of his head had, to all appearance, felled him on the spot. The wound had split the scalp. Whether it had also split the skull was more than I was surgeon enough to be able to say. I had gathered some experience of how to deal with wounded men, when I served the sacred cause of Freedom with my glorious Pratolungo. Cold water, vinegar, and linen for bandages—these were all in the house; and these I called for. Gootheridge found the key of the door flung aside in a corner of the room. He got the water and the vinegar, while I ran up-stairs to Oscar's bedroom, and provided myself with some of his handkerchiefs. In a few minutes, I had a cold water bandage over the wound, and was bathing his face in vinegar and water. He was still insensible; but he lived. Reverend Finch—not of the slightest help to anybody—assumed the duty of feeling Oscar's pulse. He did it as if, under the circumstances, this was the one meritorious action that could be performed. He looked as if nobody could feel a pulse but himself. "Most fortunate," he said, counting the slow, faint throbbing at the poor fellow's wrist—"most fortunate that I was at home. What would you have done without me?"

The next necessity was, of course, to send for the doctor, and to get help, in the meantime, to carry Oscar up-stairs to his bed.

Gootheridge volunteered to borrow a horse, and to ride off for the doctor. We arranged that he was to send his wife and his wife's brother to help me. This settled, the one last embarrassment left to deal with, was the embarrassment of Mr. Finch. Now that we were free from all fear of encountering bad characters in the house, the boom-boom of the little man's big voice went on unintermittingly, like a machine at work in the neighborhood. I had another of my inspirations—sitting on the floor with Oscar's head on my lap. I gave my reverend companion something to do. "Look about the room!" I said. "See if the packing-case with the gold and silver plates is here or not."

Mr. Finch did not quite relish being treated like an ordinary mortal, and being told what he was to do.

"Compose yourself, Madame Pratolungo," he said. "No hysterical activity, if you please. This business is in My hands. Quite needless, ma'am, to tell Me to look for the packing-case."

"Quite needless," I agreed. "I know beforehand the packing-case is gone."

That answer instantly set him fussing about the room. Not a sign of the case was to be seen.

All doubt in my mind was at an end now. The two ruffians lounging against the wall had justified, horribly justified, my worst suspicions of them.

On the arrival of Mrs. Gootheridge and her brother, we carried him up to his room. We laid him on the bed, with his neck-tie off, and his throat free, and the air blowing over him from the open window. He showed no sign yet of coming to his senses. But still the pulse went faintly on. No change was discernible for the worse.

It was useless to hope for the doctor's arrival, before another hour at least. I felt the necessity of getting back at once to the rectory, so as to be able to tell Lucilla (with all needful preparation) the melancholy truth. Otherwise, the news of what had happened would get abroad in the village, and might come to her ears, in the worst possible way, through one of the servants. To my infinite relief, Mr. Finch, when I rose to go, excused himself from accompanying me. He had discovered that it was his duty, as rector, to give the earliest information of the outrage at Browndown to the legal authorities. He went his way to the nearest magistrate. And I went mine—leaving Oscar under the care of Mrs. Gootheridge and her brother—back to the house. Mr. Finch's last words at parting reminded me, once more, that we had one thing at least to be thankful for under the circumstances—sad as they otherwise were.