He left me—without looking up, and without saying a word more.
Jealous of his brother! There is something unnatural, something degrading in such jealousy as that. I am ashamed of myself for thinking it of him. And yet what else could his conduct mean?
[Note.—It is for me to answer that question. Give the miserable wretch his due. His conduct meant, in one plain word—remorse. The only excuse left that he could make to his own conscience for the infamous part which he was playing, was this—that his brother's personal disfigurement presented a fatal obstacle in the way of his brother's marriage. And now Lucilla's own words, Lucilla's own actions, had told him that Oscar's face was no obstacle to her seeing Oscar perpetually in the familiar intercourse of domestic life. The torture of self-reproach which this discovery inflicted on him, drove him out of her presence. His own lips would have betrayed him, if he had spoken a word more to her at that moment. This is no speculation of mine. I know what I am now writing to be the truth.—P.]
It is night again. I am in my bed-room—too nervous and too anxious to go to rest yet. Let me employ myself in finishing this private record of the events of the day.
Oscar came a little before dinner-time; haggard and pale, and so absent in mind that he hardly seemed to know what he was talking about. No explanations passed between us. He asked my pardon for the hard things he had said, and the ill-temper he had shown, earlier in the day. I readily accepted his excuses—and did my best to conceal the uneasiness which his vacant, pre-occupied manner caused me. All the time he was speaking to me, he was plainly thinking of something else—he was more unlike the Oscar of my blind remembrances than ever. It was the old voice talking in a new way: I can only describe it to myself in those terms.
As for his manner, I know it used to be always more or less quiet and retiring in the old days: but was it ever so hopelessly subdued and depressed, as I have seen it to-day? Useless to ask! In the by-gone time, I was not able to see it. My past judgment of him and my present judgment of him have been arrived at by such totally different means, that it seems useless to compare them. Oh, how I miss Madame Pratolungo! What a relief, what a consolation it would have been, to have said all this to her, and to have heard what she thought of it in return!
There is, however, a chance of my finding my way out of some of my perplexities, at any rate—if I can only wait till tomorrow.
Oscar seems to have made up his mind at last to enter into the explanations which he has hitherto withheld from me. He has asked me to give him a private interview in the morning. The circumstances which led to his making this request have highly excited my curiosity. Something is evidently going on under the surface, in which my interests are concerned—and, possibly, Oscar's interests too.
It all came about in this way.
On returning to the house, after Oscar had left me, I found that a letter from Grosse had arrived by the afternoon post. My dear old surgeon wrote to say that he was coming to see me—and added in a postscript that he would arrive the next day at luncheon-time. Past experience told me that this meant a demand on my aunt's housekeeping for all the good things that it could produce. (Ah, dear! I thought of Madame Pratolungo and the Mayonnaise. Will those times never come again?) Well—at dinner, I announced Grosse's visit; adding significantly, "at luncheon-time."