Miss Crespigny

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

“Laugh!” he said. “She laughed?”

“You see,” explained Lyon, “she had been asking about you; and when I finished telling her what I knew, she looked at you under her eyelashes, as you stood talking to Mrs. Despard, and then she laughed; and when I asked her if she was laughing at you, she said, ‘Ah, no! Not at you, but at another gentleman of the same name, whom she had known a long time ago.’”

It was not the best thing for himself, that Hector Anstruthers could have heard. He had outlived his boyish passion, but he had not lived down the sting of it. Having had his first young faith broken, he had given faith up, as a poor mockery. He had grown cynical and sneering. Bah! Why should he cling to his old ideals of truth and purity? What need that he should strive to be worthy of visions such as they had proved themselves? What was truth after all? What was purity, in the end? What had either done for him, when he had striven after and believed in them?

The accidental death of his cousin had made him a rich man, and he had given himself up to his own caprices. He had seen the world, and lived a lifetime during the last few years. What had there been to hold him back? Not love. He had done with that, he told himself. Not hope of any quiet bliss to come. If he ever married, he should marry some woman who knew what she was taking when she accepted what he had to offer.

And then he had gradually drifted into his artistic and literary pursuits, and his success had roused his vanity. He would be something more than the rest; and, incited by this noble motive, and his real love for the work, he had made himself something more. He had had no higher incentive than this vanity, and a fancy for popularity. It was not unpleasant to be pointed out as a genius—a man who, having no need to labor, had the whim to labor as hard when the mood seized, as the poorest Bohemian among them, and who would be paid for his work, too. “They will give me praise for nothing,” he would say, sardonically. “They won’t give me money for nothing. As long as they will pay me, my work means something. When it ceases to be worth a price, it is not worth my time.”

The experience of this evening had been a bad thing altogether for Anstruthers. It had roused in him much of sleeping evil. His meeting with Lisbeth Crespigny had been, as he told her, wholly unexpected. And because it had been unexpected, its effect had double force. He did not want to see her. If he had been aware of her presence in the house he was going to visit, he would have avoided it as he would have avoided the plague. The truth was, that in these days she had, in his mind, become the embodiment of all that was unnatural, and hard, and false. And meeting her suddenly, face to face, every bitter memory of her had come back to him with a fierce shock. When he had turned, as Mrs. Despard spoke, and had seen her standing in the doorway, framed in, as it were, with vines and flowers, and tropical plants, he had almost felt that he could turn on his heel and walk out of the room without a word of explanation. She would know well enough what it meant. Being the man he was, his eye had taken in at a glance every artistic effect about her; and she was artistic enough; for when Lisbeth Crespigny was not artistic she was nothing. He saw that the promise of her own undeveloped girlhood had fulfilled itself after its own rare, peculiar fashion, doubly and trebly. He saw in her what other men seldom saw at first sight, but always learned afterward, and his sense of repulsion and anger against her was all the more intense. Having been such a girl, what might she not be as such a woman? Having borne such blossoms, what could the fruit be but hard and bitter at the core? Only his ever-ruling vanity saved him from greeting her with some insane, caustic speech. Vanity will serve both men and women a good turn, by chance, sometimes, and his saved him from making a blatant idiot of himself—barely saved him. And having got through this, it was not soothing to hear that she had stood, in her sly way, and looked at him under her eyelashes, and laughed. He knew how she would laugh. He had heard her laugh at people in that quiet fashion, when she was fifteen, and the sound had always hurt him, through its suggestion of some ungirlish satire he could not grasp, and which was not worthy of so perfect a being as he deemed her.

So, he could not help breaking out again in new fury, when Bertie Lyon explained himself. It did not matter so much, breaking out before Lyon. Men could keep each other’s secrets. He flung his pipe aside with a rough word, and began to pace the room.

“There is more of devil than woman in her,” he said. “There always was. I’d give a few years of my life,” clenching his hand, “to be sure that she would find her match some day.”

“I should think you would be match enough for her,” remarked Lyon, astutely. “But what has she done to make you so savage? When were you in love with a woman?”

“Never!” bitterly. “I was in love with her, and she never belonged to the race, not even at fifteen years old. I was in love with her, and she has been the ruin of me.”