Marcel de Crespigney, who had so greatly distinguished himself for martial courage and ability during the Mexican war, was weaker than a child where his sympathies were involved.
This weakness had betrayed him into all the misery of his life. It had drawn him, in his early youth, into a marriage with a plain, sickly, faded woman, who loved him with that morbid, exclusive, absorbing passion that, disappointed, sometimes sends its victim to the madhouse or the grave.
He had married her—let the truth be here told—from the promptings of compassion alone. He had given her all that he had to give—sympathy, tenderness, service. But this was not love—not the love she craved and missed. Hence came humiliation, morbid brooding, and the monomania that turned all his kindly acts and motives into outrage and offence.
Had children blessed their union, and so divided her thoughts and affections, or had they—the husband and wife—though childless, lived in a city, where society must have claimed some of her attention, and taught her something of life, she might have been much healthier in mind and body, and their marriage might have been happier.
But in the drear solitude of Promontory Hall, with no children to fondle, no society but that of the studious, intellectual man whom she vainly and madly loved, there could have been but one of two results for her—madness or death. The most merciful of the two was hers.
But it was also impossible that De Crespigney’s mind, under all these circumstances, should have retained its healthy tone, or that his long patience should not have at last become exhausted, so that in one moment of unexampled exasperation he lost the self-control of years and told her the truth—the truth, not “in love,” but in wrath and scorn, that had slain her.
Now he would not seek to palliate his fault or justify himself. He would not remember the jealousy, the violence, the acrimony with which she had driven him to frenzy; he would only remember her strong love for him and his secret indifference to her, and his deeply sympathetic, compassionate and conscientious spirit suffered pangs of remorse that would seem to others morbid, excessive and unjustifiable.
On the fifth day following the catastrophe, the remains of Eusebie de Crespigney were placed in an elegant rosewood casket and conveyed by boat to the little Gothic chapel on La Compte’s Landing, where they were met by a small number of old friends and neighbors, and where, after the religious services were over, they were consigned to the family vault under the chancel.
Immediately after the funeral, Marcel de Crespigney utterly broke down and fell ill of a brain fever.
Dr. Prout, taking authority on himself in the household anarchy, installed Mrs. Lindsay as nurse, and wrote to his family.