"It is nothing, my pretty lofe," he said. "I am out of sort, as you call it. Your English climates sometimes gives your English blue devil to foreign mens like me. I have got him now--an English blue devil in a German inside. Soh! I shall go and walk him out, and come back empty-cheerful, and see you again." He rose, after this curious explanation, and attempted some sort of answer--a very odd one--to the question which I had asked of him. "As to that odder thing," he went on, "yes-indeed-yes. You have hit your nail on his head. It is, as you say, your seeings which has got in the way of your feelings. When your seeings-feelings has got used to one anodder, your seeings will stay where he is, your feelings will come back to where they was; one will balance the odder; you will feel as you did; you will see as you didn't; all at the same times, all jolly-nice again as before. You have my opinions. Now let me walk out my blue devil. I swear to come back again with a new inside. By-bye-my-Feench-good-bye."
Saying all this in a violent hurry, as if he was eager to get away, he gave me a kiss on the forehead, snatched up his shabby hat, and ran out of the room.
What did it mean?
Does he persist in thinking me seriously ill? I am too weary to puzzle my brains in the effort to understand my dear old surgeon. It is one o'clock in the morning; and I have still to write the story of all that happened later in the day. My eyes are beginning to ache; and, strange to say, I have hardly been able to see the last two or three lines I have written.
They look as if the ink was fading from them. If Grosse knew what I am about at this moment! His last words to me, when he went back to his patients in London, were:--"No more readings! no more writings till I come again!" It is all very well to talk in that way. I have got so used to my Journal that I can't do without it. Nevertheless, I must stop now--for the best of reasons. Though I have got three lighted candles on my table, I really cannot see to write any more.
To bed! to bed!
[Note.--I have purposely abstained from interrupting Lucilla's Journal until my extracts from it had reached this place. Here the writer pauses, and gives me a chance; and here there are matters that must be mentioned, of which she had personally no knowledge at the time.
You have seen how her faithful instinct still tries to reveal to my poor darling the cruel deception that is being practiced on her--and still tries in vain. In spite of herself, she shrinks from the man who is tempting her to go away with him--though he pleads in the character of her betrothed husband. In spite of herself, she detects the weak places in the case which Nugent has made out against me--the absence of sufficient motive for the conduct of which he accuses me, and the utter improbability of my plotting and intriguing (without anything to gain by it) to make her marry the man who was not the man of her choice. She feels these hesitations and difficulties. But what they really signify it is morally impossible for her to guess.
Thus far, no doubt, her strange and touching position has been plainly revealed to you. But can I feel quite so sure that you understand how seriously she has been affected by the anxiety, disappointment, and suspense which have combined together to torture her at this critical interval in her life?
I doubt it, for the sufficient reason that you have only had her Journal to enlighten you, and that her Journal shows she does not understand it herself. As things are, it seems to be time for me to step on the stage, and to discover to you plainly what her surgeon really thought of her, by telling you what passed between Grosse and Nugent, when the German presented himself at the hotel.
I am writing now (as a matter of course) from information given to me, at an after-period, by the persons themselves. As to particulars, the accounts vary. As to results, they both agree.
The discovery that Nugent was at Ramsgate necessarily took Grosse by surprise. With his previous knowledge, however, of the situation of affairs at Dimchurch, he could be at no loss to understand in what character Nugent had presented himself to Lucilla; and he could certainly not fail to understand--after what he had seen and what she had herself told him--that the deception was, under present circumstances, producing the worst possible effect on her mind. Arriving at this conclusion, he was not a man to hesitate about the duty that lay before him. When he entered the room at the hotel in which Nugent was waiting, he announced the object of his visit in these four plain words, as follows:
"Pack up, and go!"
Nugent coolly offered him a chair, and asked what he meant.
Grosse refused the chair--but consented to explain himself in terms variously reported by the two parties. Combining the statements, and translating Grosse (in this grave matter) into plain English, I find that the German must have expressed himself in these, or nearly in these, words:
"As a professional man, Mr. Nugent, I invariably refuse to enter into domestic considerations connected with my patients with which I have nothing to do. In the case of Miss Finch, my business is not with your family complications. My business is to secure the recovery of the young lady's sight. If I find her health improving, I don't inquire how or why.
No matter what private and personal frauds you may be practicing upon her, I have nothing to say to them--more, I am ready to take advantage of them myself--so long as their influence is directly beneficial in keeping her morally and physically in the condition in which I wish her to be.