WHEN he came downstairs to his wife, five minutes later, he told her desperately to what he had consented.
“There isn’t any alternative,” he said, in his defence against Mrs. Dodge’s outcry. “It was going to happen anyhow, in spite of everything we could do, and she’s grown so thin—I hadn’t realized it, but she’s lost heaven knows how many pounds! You don’t want the child to die, do you? Well, when I saw her there, so worn and stricken, it came over me what that alternative would mean to us! When it comes to risking her life, I give up. I’d give my own life to keep her from marrying this idiot, but not hers! There’s only one thing for us to do, and we’ve got to go through with it.”
“I can’t!”
“Yes, you can,” he told her, angrily. “And since we’ve got to do it we’ll do it right. Not another word to her from either of us in dispraise of her idiot. On the contrary! And he’s to be asked to dinner to-morrow night, and as often as she wants him afterward. Blast him, I’ll put him into my own office and try my darnedest to make it a job that’ll interest him. They can be married as soon as he’s saved enough to pay his own way. I’ll give her enough for hers. We’re beaten, Lydia. There’s nothing else to do.”
She protested despairingly, and in continued despair finally surrendered her “better judgment,” as she called it, to his weakness. Thus, after a painful evening of argument, they went unhappily to their uneasy beds, but woke in the morning determined to be thoroughbreds in the manner of their acceptance of Oswald Crabbe Osborne as their daughter’s betrothed.
Their encounter with him, when he came to dinner that evening in this recognized capacity, was an almost overwhelming trial of their gameness; but they succeeded in presenting the semblance of a somewhat strained beaming upon him, and were rewarded by the sight of a fading daughter blossoming again.
For Lily was radiant: her eyes and cheeks glowed; her feet danced; she was all light and love and gaiety. At the table she laughed at every nothing, caressed her father, patted her mother’s cheek again and again, and from her eyes poured sunshine upon her lover across the centrepiece of roses.
Crabbe received the sunshine with complacency, for he was accustomed to it; and although his position in regard to her father and mother was a novelty, he appeared to accept their change of front as something he had confidently expected all along. That is to say, he took it as a simple and natural matter, of course, and was not surprised to be shown every consideration by his former opponents.
In truth, they showed him more consideration than he was able to perceive. As was already well known to them, he had not the equipment for what is often spoken of as general conversation; his views upon religious, political, scientific, or literary subjects were tactfully not sought, because of his having omitted to acquire the information sometimes held to be a necessary preliminary to the formation of views;—in fact, as Lily’s parents were previously aware, he lacked even those vagrant symptoms of ambition, the views without the information. Therefore, Mr. and Mrs. Dodge kept the talk at first as weatherly, and then as personal, as they could make it, hoping he might shine a little, or at least that some faint spark might come from him to brighten their own impressions of him. They wanted to force themselves to like him; they had genuine yearnings to think better of him than had been their habit; but although they strove within themselves to attain these ends, they cannot be thought to have succeeded. The nearest Crabbe came to giving them a spark was when he spoke of his father; and even that apparent momentary gleam was not a happy one.
“He’s well,” Crabbe said, replying to Mrs. Dodge’s inquiry. “He’s usually well enough. He takes pretty good care of his health and all. I guess he’s a good deal surprised; but probably not enough to make him sick.”