Page:Scribner's Monthly, Volume 12 (May–October 1876).djvu/582

576 had been kind before. But there was something monstrous in her quiet, flute-like utterance of Crawford's damnation.

"Do you say this from your own heart, or have you been instructed to say it? You use the same words your father has just used."

"What can the poor child do better in her trouble than use her father's words?" cried Mrs. Ingram.

"Elizabeth," cried Crawford, "you don't love me?"

"No, Mr. Crawford."

"Why did you ever say so?"

"I never said so."

He stared at her in amazement, and then, after a little—"It is very true," he exclaimed. "You never said so. It was only I who said so."

"Good-bye!" said Elizabeth; and turning away, she glided out of the room.

"I hope you are satisfied, sir," said Mrs. Ingram. "The poor child is before all things sincere."

In calling this scene the most extraordinary that I ever beheld, I had particularly in mind the remarkable attitude of Crawford at this juncture. He effected a change of base, as it were, under the eyes of the enemy—he descended to the depths and rose to the surface again. Horrified, bewildered, outraged, fatally wounded at heart, he took the full measure of his loss, gauged its irreparableness, and, by an amazing effort of the will, while one could count fifty, superficially accepted the situation.

"I have understood nothing!" he said. "Good-night."

He went away, and of course I went with him. Outside the house, in the darkness, he paused and looked around at me.

"What were you doing there?" he asked.

"I had come—rather late in the day—to pay a visit of congratulation. I rather missed it."

"Do you understand—can you imagine?" He had taken his hat off, and he was pressing his hand to his head.

"They have backed out, simply!" I said. "The marriage had never satisfied their ambition—you were not rich enough. Perhaps they have heard of something better."

He stood gazing, lost in thought. "They," I had said; but he, of course, was thinking only of her; thinking with inexpressible bitterness. He made no allusion to her, and I never afterward heard him make one. I felt a great compassion for him, but knew not how to help him, nor hardly, even, what to say. It would have done me good to launch some objurgation against the precious little puppet, within doors, but this delicacy forbade. I felt that Crawford's silence covered a fathomless sense of injury; but the injury was terribly real and I could think of no healing words. He was injured in his love and his pride, his hopes and his honor, his sense of justice and of decency.

"To treat me so!" he said at last, in a low tone. "Me! me!—are they blind—are they imbecile? Haven't they seen what I have been to them—what I was going to be?"

"Yes, they are blind brutes!" I cried. "Forget them—don't think of them again. They are not worth it."

He turned away and, in the dark empty street, he leaned his arm on the iron railing that guarded a flight of steps, and dropped his head upon it. I left him standing so a few moments—I could just hear his sobs. Then I passed my arm into his own and walked home with him. Before I left him, he had recovered his outward composure. After this, so far as one could see, he kept it uninterruptedly. I saw him the next day, and for several days afterward. He looked like a man who had had a heavy blow, and who had yet not been absolutely stunned. He neither raved nor lamented, nor descanted upon his wrong. He seemed to be trying to shuffle it away, to resume his old occupations, and to appeal to the good offices of the arch-healer, Time. He looked very ill—pale, preoccupied, heavy-eyed, but this was an inevitable tribute to his deep disappointment. He gave me no particular opportunity to make consoling speeches, and not being eloquent, I was more inclined to take one by force. Moral and sentimental platitudes always seemed to me particularly flat upon my own lips, and, addressed to Crawford, they would have been fatally so. Nevertheless, I once told him with some warmth, that he was giving signal proof of being a philosopher. He knew that people always end by getting over things, and he was showing himself able to traverse with a stride a great moral waste. He made no rejoinder at the moment, but an hour later, as we were separating, he told me, with some formalism, that he could not take credit for virtues he had not.

"I am not a philosopher," he said; "on the contrary. And I am not getting over it."

His misfortune excited great compassion among all his friends, and I imagine that this sentiment was expressed, in some cases,