第142章 CHAPTER THE FORTY-THIRD(5)

All sorts of diversions were going on. Monkeys, organs, girls on stilts, a conjurer, and a troop of negro minstrels, were all at work to amuse the visitors. I thought the varied color and bustling enjoyment of the crowd, with the bright blue sea beyond, and the glorious sunshine overhead, quite delightful--I declare I felt as if two eyes were not half enough to see with! A nice old lady, sitting near, entered into conversation with me; hospitably offering me biscuits and sherry out of her own bag. Oscar, to my disappointment, looked quite disgusted with all of us. He thought my nice old lady vulgar; and he called the company on the beach "a herd of snobs." While he was still muttering under his breath about the "mixture of low people," he suddenly cast a side-look at some person or thing--I could not at the moment tell which--and, rising, placed himself so as to intercept my view of the promenade on the sands immediately before me. I happened to have noticed, at the same moment, a lady approaching us in a dress of a peculiar color; and I pulled Oscar on one side, to look at her as she passed in front of me. "Why do you get in my way?" I asked. Before he could answer the question the lady passed, with two lovely children, and with a tall man at her side. My eyes, looking first at the lady and the children, found their way next to the gentleman--and saw repeated in his face, the same black-blue complexion which had startled me in the face of Oscar's brother, when I first opened my eyes at the rectory! For the moment I felt startled again--more, as I believe, by the unexpected repetition of the blue face in the face of a stranger, than by the ugliness of the complexion itself. At any rate, I was composed enough to admire the lady's dress, and the beauty of the children, before they had passed beyond my range of view. Oscar spoke to me, while I was looking at them, in a tone of reproach for which, as I thought, there was no occasion and no excuse.

"I tried to spare you," he said. "You have yourself to thank, if that man has frightened you."

"He has _not_ frightened me," I answered--sharply enough.

Oscar looked at me very attentively; and sat down again, without saying a word more.

The good-humoured old woman, on my other side, who had seen and heard all that had passed, began to talk of the gentleman with the discolored face, and of the lady and the children who accompanied him. He was a retired Indian officer, she said. The lady was his wife, and the two beautiful children were his own children. "It seems a pity that such a handsome man should be disfigured in that way," my new acquaintance remarked. "But still, it don't matter much, after all. There he is, as you see, with a fine woman for a wife, and with two lovely children. I know the landlady of the house where they lodge--and a happier family you couldn't lay your hand on in all England. That is my friend's account of them. Even a blue face don't seem such a dreadful misfortune, when you look at it in that light--does it, Miss?"

I entirely agreed with the old lady. Our talk seemed, for some incomprehensible reason, to irritate Oscar. He got up again impatiently, and looked at his watch.

"Your aunt will be wondering what has become of us," he said. "Surely you have had enough of the mob on the sands, by this time?"

I had not had enough of it, and I should have been quite content to have made one of the mob for some time longer. But I saw that Oscar would be seriously vexed if I persisted in keeping my place. So I took leave of my nice old lady, and left the pleasant sands--not very willingly.

He said nothing more, until we had threaded our way out of the crowd.

Then he returned, without any reason for it that I could discover, to the subject of the Indian officer, and to the remembrance which the stranger's complexion must have awakened in me of his brother's face.

"I don't understand your telling me you were not frightened when you saw that man," he said. "You were terribly frightened by my brother, when you saw him."

"I was terribly frightened by my own imagination, _before_ I saw him," I answered. "_After_ I saw him, I soon got over it."

"So you say!" he rejoined.

There is something excessively provoking--at least to me--in being told to my face that I have said something which is not worthy of belief. It was not a very becoming act on my part (after what he had told me in his letter about his brother's infatuation) to mention his brother. I ought not to have done it. I did it, for all that.

"I say what I mean," I replied. "Before I knew what you told me about your brother, I was going to propose to you, for your sake and for his, that he should live with us after we were married."

Oscar suddenly stopped. He had given me his arm to lead me through the crowd--he dropped it now.

"You say that, because you are angry with me!" he said.

I denied being angry with him; I declared, once more, that I was only speaking the truth.

"You really mean," he went on, "that you could have lived comfortably with my brother's blue face before you every hour of the day?"

"Quite comfortably--if he would have been my brother too." Oscar pointed to the house in which my aunt and I are living--within a few yards of the place on which we stood.

"You are close at home," he said, speaking in an odd muffled voice, with his eyes on the ground. "I want a longer walk. We shall meet at dinner-time."

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?