Events at the Bedside

I AM, if you will be so good as to remember, constitutionally French — and, therefore, constitutionally averse¹ to distressing² myself, if I can possibly help it. For this reason, I really cannot summon courage to describe what passed between my blind Lucilla and me when I returned to our pretty sitting-room³. She made me cry at the time; and she would make me (and perhaps you) cry again now, if I wrote the little melancholy⁴ story of what this tender young creature suffered when I told her my miserable⁵ news. I won’t write it; I am dead against tears. They affect the nose; and my nose is my best feature. Let us use our eyes, my fair friends, to conquer, not to cry.

Be it enough to say, that when I went back to Browndown, Lucilla went with me.

I now observed her, for the first time, to be jealous of the eyes of us happy people who could see. The instant she entered, she insisted on being near enough to the bed, to hear us, or to touch us, as we waited on the injured man. This was at once followed by her taking the place occupied by Mrs. Gootheridge at the bed-head, and herself bathing Oscar’s face and forehead. She was even jealous of me, when she discovered that I was moistening the bandages on the wound. I irritated her into boldly kissing the poor insensible face in our presence! The landlady⁶ of the Cross Hands was one of my sort: she took cheerful views of things. “Sweet on him — eh, ma’am?” she whispered in my ear; “we shall have a wedding in Dimchurch.” In presence of these kissings and whisperings, Mrs. Gootheridge’s brother, as the only man present, began to look very uncomfortable. This worthy⁷ creature belonged to that large and respectable order of Englishmen, who don’t know what to do with their hands, or how to get out of a room. I took pity on him — he was, I assure you, a fine man. “Smoke your pipe, sir, in the garden,” I said. “We will call to you from the window, if we want you up here.” Mrs. Gootheridge’s brother cast on me one look of unutterable

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