“Oh, I am happy, I don’t deny it,” cried Crawford. “But I propose to be happier yet.” And he marched away with the step of a sun-god beginning his daily circuit.
He was happier yet, in the sense that with each succeeding week he became more convinced of the charms of Elizabeth Ingram, and more profoundly attuned to the harmonies of prospective matrimony. I, of course, saw little of him, for he was always in attendance upon his betrothed, at the dwelling of whose parents I was a rare visitor. Whenever I did see him, he seemed to have sunk another six inches further into the mystic depths. He formally swallowed his words when I recalled to him his former brave speeches about the single life.
“All I can say is,” he answered, “that I was an immeasurable donkey. Every argument that I formerly used in favor of not marrying, now seems to me to have an exactly opposite application. Every reason that used to seem to me so good for not taking a wife, now seems to me the best reason in the world for taking one. I not to marry, of all men on earth! Why, I am made on purpose for it, and if the thing did not exist, I should have invented it. In fact, I think I have invented some little improvements in the institution—of an extremely conservative kind—and when I put them into practice, you shall tell me what you think of them.”
This lasted several weeks. The day after Crawford told me of his engagement, I had gone to pay my respects to the two ladies, but they were not at home, and I wrote my compliments on a card. I did not repeat my visit until the engagement had become an old story—some three weeks before the date appointed for the marriage—I had then not seen Crawford in several days. I called in the evening, and was ushered into a small parlor reserved by Mrs. Ingram for familiar visitors. Here I found Crawford’s mother-in-law that was to be, seated, with an air of great dignity, on a low chair, with her hands folded rigidly in her lap, and her chin making an acuter angle than ever. Before the fire stood Peter Ingram, with his hands under his coat-tails; as soon as I came in, he fixed his eyes upon his wife. “She has either just been telling, or she is just about to tell, some particularly big fib,” I said to myself. Then I expressed my regret at not having found my cousin at home upon my former visit, and hoped it was not too late to offer my felicitations upon Elizabeth’s marriage.
For some moments, Mr. Ingram and his wife were silent; after which, Mrs. Ingram said with a little cough, “It is too late.”
“Really?” said I. “What has happened?”
“Had we better tell him, my dear?” asked Mr. Ingram.
“I didn’t mean to receive any one,” said Mrs. Ingram. “It was a mistake your coming in.”
“I don’t offer to go,” I answered, “because I suspect that you have some sorrow. I couldn’t think of leaving you at such a moment.”
Mr. Ingram looked at me with huge amazement. I don’t think he detected my irony, but he had a vague impression that I was measuring my wits with his wife. His ponderous attention acted upon me as an incentive, and I continued.
“Crawford has been behaving badly, I suspect?—Oh, the shabby fellow!”
“Oh, not exactly behaving,” said Mr. Ingram; “not exactly badly. We can’t say that, my dear, eh?”
“It is proper the world should know it,” said Mrs. Ingram, addressing herself to me; “and as I suspect you are a great gossip, the best way to diffuse the information will be to intrust it to you.”
“Pray tell me,” I said bravely, “and you may depend upon it the world shall have an account of it.” By this time I knew what was coming. “Perhaps you hardly need tell me,” I went on. “I have guessed your news; it is indeed most shocking. Crawford has broken his engagement!”
Mrs. Ingram started up, surprised into self-betrayal. “Oh, really?” she cried, with a momentary flash of elation. But in an instant she perceived that I had spoken fantastically, and her elation flickered down into keen annoyance. But she faced the situation with characteristic firmness. “We have broken the engagement,” she said. “Elizabeth has broken it with our consent.”
“You have turned Crawford away?” I cried.
“We have requested him to consider everything at an end.”
“Poor Crawford!” I exclaimed with ardor.
At this moment the door was thrown open, and Crawford in person stood on the threshold. He paused an instant, like a falcon hovering; then he darted forward at Mr. Ingram.
“In heaven’s name,” he cried, “what is the meaning of your letter?”
Mr. Ingram looked frightened and backed majestically away. “Really, sir,” he said; “I must beg you to desist from your threats.”
Crawford turned to Mrs. Ingram; he was intensely pale and profoundly agitated. “Please tell me,” he said, stepping toward her with clasped hands. “I don’t understand—I can’t take it this way. It’s a thunderbolt!”
“We were in hopes you would have the kindness not to make a scene,” said Mrs. Ingram. “It is very painful for us, too, but we cannot discuss the matter. I was afraid you would come.”
“Afraid I would come!” cried Crawford. “Could you have believed I would not come? Where is Elizabeth?”
“You cannot see her!”
“I cannot see her?”
“It is impossible. It is her wish,” said Mrs. Ingram.
Crawford stood staring, his eyes distended with grief, and rage, and helpless wonder. I have never seen a man so thoroughly agitated, but I have also never seen a man exert such an effort at self-control. He sat down; and then, after a moment—“What have I done?” he asked.
Mr. Ingram walked away to the window, and stood closely examining the texture of the drawn curtains. “You have done nothing, my dear Mr. Crawford,” said Mrs. Ingram. “We accuse you of nothing. We are very reasonable; I’m sure you can’t deny that, whatever you may say. Mr. Ingram explained everything in the letter. We have simply thought better of it. We have decided that we can’t part with our child for the present. She is all we have, and she is so very young. We ought never to have consented. But you urged us so, and we were so good-natured. We must keep her with us.”
“Is that all you have to say?” asked Crawford.
“It seems to me it is quite enough,” said Mrs Ingram.
Crawford leaned his head on his hands. “I must have done something without knowing it,” he said at last. “In heaven’s name tell me what it is, and I will do penance and make reparation to the uttermost limit.”
Mr. Ingram turned round, rolling his expressionless eyes in quest of virtuous inspiration. “We can’t say that you have done anything; that would be going too far. But if you had, we would have forgiven you.”
“Where is Elizabeth?” Crawford again demanded.
“In her own apartment,” said Mrs. Ingram majestically.
“Will you please to send for her?”
“Really, sir, we must decline to expose our child to this painful scene.”
“Your tenderness should have begun farther back. Do you expect me to go away without seeing her?”
“We request that you will.”
Crawford turned to me. “Was such a request ever made before?” he asked, in a trembling voice.
“For your own sake,” said Mrs. Ingram, “go away without seeing her.”
“For my own sake? What do you mean?”
Mrs. Ingram, very pale, and with her thin lips looking like the blades of a pair of scissors, turned to her husband. “Mr. Ingram,” she said, “rescue me from this violence. Speak out—do your duty.”
Mr. Ingram advanced with the air and visage of the stage manager of a theater, when he steps forward to announce that the favorite of the public will not be able to play. “Since you drive us so hard, sir, we must tell the painful truth. My poor child would rather have had nothing said about it. The truth is that she has mistaken the character of her affection for you. She has a high esteem for you, but she does not love you.”
Crawford stood silent, looking with formidable eyes from the father to the mother. “I must insist upon seeing Elizabeth,” he s
aid at last.
Mrs. Ingram gave a toss of her head. “Remember it was your own demand!” she cried, and rustled stiffly out of the room.
We remained silent; Mr. Ingram sat slowly rubbing his knees, and Crawford, pacing up and down, eyed him askance with an intensely troubled frown, as one might eye a person just ascertained to be liable to some repulsive form of dementia. At the end of five minutes, Mrs. Ingram returned, clutching the arm of her daughter, whom she pushed into the room. Then followed the most extraordinary scene of which I have ever been witness.
Crawford strode toward the young girl, and seized her by both hands; she let him take them, and stood looking at him. “Is this horrible news true?” he cried. “What infernal machination is at the bottom of it?”
Elizabeth Ingram appeared neither more nor less composed than on most occasions; the pink and white of her cheeks was as pure as usual, her golden tresses were as artistically braided, and her eyes showed no traces of weeping. Her face was never expressive, and at this moment it indicated neither mortification nor defiance. She met her lover’s eyes with the exquisite blue of her own pupils, and she looked as beautiful as an angel. “I am very sorry that we must separate,” she said. “But I have mistaken the nature of my affection for you. I have the highest esteem for you, but I do not love you.”
I listened to this, and the clear, just faintly trembling, childlike tone in which it was uttered, with absorbing wonder. Was the girl the most consummate of actresses, or had she, literally, no more sensibility than an expensive wax doll? I never discovered, and she has remained to this day, one of the unsolved mysteries of my experience. I incline to believe that she was, morally, absolutely nothing but the hollow reed through which her mother spoke, and that she was really no more cruel now than she 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, with well-meaning but injudicious frankness. The Ingrams were universally denounced, and whenever they appeared in public, at this time, were greeted with significant frigidity. Nothing could have better proved the friendly feeling, the really quite tender regard and admiration that were felt for Crawford, than the manner in which every one took up his cause. He knew it, and I heard him exclaim more than once with intense bitterness that he was that abject thing, an “object of sympathy.” Some people flattered themselves that they had made the town, socially speaking, too hot to hold Miss Elizabeth and her parents. The Ingrams anticipated by several weeks their projected departure for Newport—they had given out that they were to spend the summer there—and, quitting New York, quite left, like the gentleman in “The School for Scandal,” their reputations behind them.
I continued to observe Crawford with interest, and, although I did full justice to his wisdom and self-control, when the summer arrived I was ill at ease about him. He led exactly the life he had led before his engagement, and mingled with society neither more nor less. If he disliked to feel that pitying heads were being shaken over him, or voices lowered in tribute to his misadventure, he made at least no visible effort to ignore these manifestations, and he paid to the full the penalty of being “interesting.” But, on the other hand, he showed no disposition to drown his sorrow in violent pleasure, to deafen himself to its echoes. He never alluded to his disappointment, he discharged all the duties of politeness, and questioned people about their own tribulations or satisfactions as deferentially as if he had had no weight upon his heart. Nevertheless, I knew that his wound was rankling—that he had received a dent, and that he would keep it. From this point onward
, however, I do not pretend to understand his conduct. I only was witness of it, and I relate what I saw. I do not pretend to speak of his motives.
I had the prospect of leaving town for a couple of months—a friend and fellow-physician in the country having offered me his practice while he took a vacation. Before I went, I made a point of urging Crawford to seek a change of scene—to go abroad, to travel and distract himself.
“To distract myself from what?” he asked, with his usual clear smile.
“From the memory of the vile trick those people played you.”
“Do I look, do I behave as if I remembered it?” he demanded with sudden gravity.
“You behave very well, but I suspect that it is at the cost of a greater effort than it is wholesome for a man—quite unassisted—to make.”
“I shall stay where I am,” said Crawford, “and I shall behave as I have behaved—to the end. I find the effort, so far as there is an effort, extremely wholesome.”
“Well, then,” said I, “I shall take great satisfaction in hearing that you have fallen in love again. I should be delighted to know that you were well married.”
He was silent a while, and then—“It is not impossible,” he said. But, before I left him, he laid his hand on my arm, and, after looking at me with great gravity for some time, declared that it would please him extremely that I should never again allude to his late engagement.
The night before I left town, I went to spend half an hour with him. It was the end of June, the weather was hot, and I proposed that instead of sitting indoors, we should take a stroll. In those days, there stood, in the center of the city, a concert-garden, of a somewhat primitive structure, into which a few of the more adventurous representatives of the best society were occasionally seen—under stress of hot weather—to penetrate. It had trees and arbors, and little fountains and small tables, at which ice-creams and juleps were, after hope deferred, dispensed. Its musical attractions fell much below the modern standard, and consisted of three old fiddlers playing stale waltzes, or an itinerant ballad-singer, vocalizing in a language perceived to be foreign, but not further identified, and accompanied by a young woman who performed upon the triangle, and collected tribute at the tables. Most of the frequenters of this establishment were people who wore their gentility lightly, or had none at all to wear; but in compensation (in the latter case), they were generally provided with a substantial sweetheart. We sat down among the rest, and had each a drink with a straw in it, while we listened to a cracked Italian tenor in a velvet jacket and ear-rings. At the end of half an hour, Crawford proposed we should withdraw, whereupon I busied myself with paying for our juleps. There was some delay in making change, during which, my attention wandered; it was some ten minutes before the waiter returned. When at last he restored me my dues, I said to Crawford that I was ready to depart. He was looking another way and did not hear me; I repeated my observation, and then he started a little, looked round, and said that he would like to remain longer. In a moment I perceived the apparent cause of his changing mind. I checked myself just in time from making a joke about it, and yet—as I did so—I said to myself that it was surely not a thing one could take seriously.