Traherne played with the youngsters often too. They were attractive children—not ayah-spoiled yet, and the bachelor physician was very fond of children. And little Iris and Ronald Crespin soon came to claim him as very much a possession of their own.
If his regiment was at once Colonel Agnew’s weakness and strength, equally her babies were Lucilla Crespin’s—her weakness and her strength. Iris was four now, Ronald was two. And Antony Crespin loved them both almost as much as he loved his wife.
All the regiment knew, and as good as all of the station, that there was an ugly, desperate rift in the Crespins’ lute.
Major Crespin drank.
And he had not been faithful.
Every one blamed him fiercely. And no one in the least blamed Mrs. Crespin for anything that had come or might come—no one but Basil Traherne.
He blamed them both, and pitied them both. He believed that Mrs. Crespin could have handled the tragedy more wisely and more usefully than she did. He believed that she, unconsciously, withheld help and rescue which she, but no one else, might have given, and Antony seized. No one else saw or thought anything of the sort—Lucilla Crespin least of all. But it’s a habit and gift able physicians have: to see into things. Each finger a scalpel, each pore a magnifying glass; exquisite manhood, a vigilant brain, a great sympathetic heart, an absolute balance and sense of justice, and an intelligence that cannot be tricked—and that is what good doctors are made of! Basil Traherne was a very great physician.
He saw the rift as clearly as any—deplored it more than most, and knew, what no one else but Antony himself did, that because of it and of what had made it, Major Crespin suffered and regretted even more intensely than the woman did.
Dr. Traherne believed that some, not much, but some, of the fault was Lucilla Crespin’s. And that he did, proves him as fine in manhood as he was in physicianship; for, before he had known her a month Traherne knew that he loved Antony Crespin’s wife. He had never loved a woman before—or even thought that he had. He believed he never could care for another. And Dr. Traherne was thirty-six.