Towards the end of the dinner, there came news from Browndown at last. The servant sent in a message by Zillah, begging me to see him for a moment outside the sitting-room door.
I made my excuses to my guest, and hurried out.
The instant I saw the servant's face, my heart sank. Oscar's kindness had attached the man devotedly to his master. I saw his lips tremble, and his color come and go, when I looked at him.
He handed me a letter addressed to me in Oscar's handwriting.
"I bring sad news, ma'am. There's a break-up at Browndown."
I VAINLY believed I had prepared myself for any misfortune that could fall on us. The man's last words dispelled my delusion. My gloomiest forebodings had never contemplated such a disaster as had now happened. I stood petrified, thinking of Lucilla, and looking helplessly at the servant. Try as I might, I was perfectly incapable of speaking to him.
He felt no such difficulty on his side. One of the strangest peculiarities in the humbler ranks of the English people, is the sort of solemn relish which they have for talking of their own misfortunes. To be the objects of a calamity of any kind, seems to raise them in their own estimations. With a dreary enjoyment of his miserable theme, the servant expatiated on his position as a man deprived of the best of masters; turned adrift again in the world to seek another service; hopeless of ever again finding himself in such a situation as he had lost. He roused me at last into speaking to him, by sheer dint of irritating my nerves until I could endure him no longer.
"Has Mr. Oscar gone away alone?" I asked.
(What had become of Nugent? I was too much interested in Oscar to be able to put the question, at that moment.)
"I had Mr. Oscar's orders not to tell you, ma'am, till this time in the evening."
Wretched as I was already, my spirits sank lower still when I heard that. The order given to the servant looked like a premeditated design, not only to leave Dimchurch, but also to keep us in ignorance of his whereabouts afterwards.
"Has Mr. Oscar gone to London?" I inquired.
"He hired Gootheridge's chaise, ma'am, to take him to Brighton. And he told me with his own lips that he had left Browndown never to come back. I know no more of it than that."