“Well,” Crespin retorted with a vexed, contemptuous laugh, “damn him, he might have told me!”
Lucilla smiled for the first time, and drew close to her husband, but her eyes were frightened and her heart was pounding. But Lucilla Crespin matched her pluck with theirs—she who had the most to live for, and the most to make her welcome death.
“If he had,” Traherne expostulated, “you wouldn’t have understood. The fellow seems to be the priest—you see, he’s begging the god’s pardon.”
“If I knew his confounded lingo I’d jolly well make him beg mine,” Crespin retorted with a murderous scowl at the still penancing, groveling priest, as oblivious of them in the stress of his penitential perturbation as if they’d been three ants in a crack of the rocks.
“But you don’t know his lingo,” Mrs. Crespin said, rather as if she did not regret it, and moving away cautiously but curiously towards the other side of the enclosure.
“We’d better be careful not to tread on their corns,” Traherne urged. “We have Mrs. Crespin to think of.”
Antony’s face knotted and crimsoned again. “Damn it, sir,” he growled rudely, “do you think I don’t know how to take care of my wife?”
“I think you’re a little hasty, Major, that’s all,” Traherne replied pleasantly. “These are evidently queer people, and we’re dependent on them, you know, to get out of our hobble.”
Crespin scowled and smoked on moodily, but made no reply. Some men, and not bad sorts at that, who knew him as Traherne did, might have felt inclined to throttle him as he sat there, surly, quarrelsome and ungrateful—a positive menace to them all in their grave predicament, the man who had ruined the life of the woman Traherne loved—as far as one human being can wreck the life of another—who had spoiled her joy, sullied her mind, and made of her radiant young wifehood a sour memory that ached and reeked; the man whose bloated, degenerated being stood the only barrier between Traherne and the woman he longed for, as only clean, upright men of scrupulous life can long—if the roué but knew what he misses of nature’s greatest impulse!—the man to whom Traherne had ministered unflaggingly for hard, patient years, between whose self and its worst parts and the impending consequences of ill-doing Traherne had stood persistently. But Basil Traherne had no such impulse. Towards Antony Crespin he had no harsher feeling than pity and sympathy. He pitied Lucilla and grieved for her, but his pity and grief for the husband were more. For his science told him that the recreant man’s plight and misery were greater than the guiltless woman’s. The physician knew. And he was true to his vocation—the vocation than which earth has none higher and finer. Traherne knew what Crespin’s lifelong handicap had been—ancestral taint, youth misguided and unprotected, and he did not judge the other who had succumbed to a strain and propensities that he himself, so circumstanced and tainted, might have succumbed to as completely and more. And, too, Traherne knew—for he had seen—as Lucilla willfully blind and incapacitated by nature never had seemed to see—how heroically Antony again and again had stood naked in Ephesus and fought his own soul beasts—knew and honored him for it. And the physician knew, as no lay mind can, the terrible provocation of torn, jumping nerves; and he sometimes, though without blaming her, wondered that Mrs. Crespin had not realized at least something of this. But nerves are the one part of masculine anatomy of which few women take any account, and of which such women as Lucilla Crespin take less than none—incapable always of intrinsic justice to the sex which they somewhat arrogantly judge by their own imperious and narrowed, if “nice,” standards, rather than by the measure nature has set. What Antony had done to her and her children she computed hotly over and over, but she gave less than a fair thought and pity to what he had done to himself, and made no mark at all of what he’d resisted. Dr. Traherne did, and he scanned Antony Crespin with a gentleness that was both masculine and splendid—and, because of his passion of heart, soul and body for the other’s wife, was heroic and fine. Lucilla Crespin would have been amazed could she have known how the scales of Traherne’s judgment weighed her and Antony against each other; and, being a woman, her resentment would have been more than her surprise.
Dr. Traherne loved Lucilla Crespin with the one man-love of his life; but he did not overrate her, and still less did he credit her with attributes and abilities that nature had denied her. For Major Crespin Traherne had little love left perhaps—but he had some, and far more than a meaner soul could have understood—and he had big, yearning pity. No matter how tender such men are to all womanhood, the wreck of manhood always must seem to such men as Traherne a deeper tragedy than any feminine suffering. And one thing else weighed with him on Crespin’s side of the balancing scales: Lucilla had and would hold the love and admiration of their children; Antony would lose it, if he lived. And Traherne sensed how intensely Crespin loved his youngsters. Lucilla did not. The Edelweiss keeps its admirable purity high up in the cold of the inscrutable Alps, the clover bloom is bruised and stained in the wayside dirt; but why praise the Edelweiss, why, in Heaven’s name, blame the clover “low i’ the dust”? Draggled and broken, the clover-head still gives a perfume, shows a color the unsmirched flower in the ice and snow forever lacks. And, if Traherne never forgot—what every physician knows—that “to step aside is human,” he not only pitied Crespin for all in the older man that was faulty and weak, he also liked and respected him for what was strong and good. And there was much.