THE POWER OF AN “INJURED LOOK.”
1. CHAPTER I.
I had a sort of candle-light acquaintance with Mr.
Philip McRueit when we were in college. I mean to
say that I had a daylight repugnance to him, and never
walked with him, or talked with him, or rode with
him, or sat with him; and, indeed, seldom saw him—
expect as one of a club oyster-party of six. He was
a short, sharp, satirical man (nicknamed “my cruet,”
by his cronies—rather descriptively!) but as plausible
and as vindictive as Mephistopheles before and after
the ruin of a soul. In some other state of existence
I had probably known and suffered by Phil. McRueit
—for I knew him like the sleeve of an old coat, the
first day I laid eyes on him; though other people
seemed to have no such instinct. Oh, we were not
new acquaintances—from whatever star he had been
transported, for his sins, to this planet of dirt. I think
he was of the same opinion, himself. He chose between
open warfare and conciliation in the first five
minutes—after seeing me as a stranger—chose the
latter.
Six or seven years after leaving college, I was following
my candle up to bed rather musingly, one night
at the Astor, and on turning a corner, I was obliged to
walk round a short gentleman who stood at the head
of the stairs in an attitude of fixed contemplation. As
I weathered the top of his hat rather closely, I caught
the direction of his eye, and saw that he was regarding,
very fixedly, a pair of rather dusty kid slippers,
which had been set outside the door, probably for
cleaning, by the occupant of the chamber opposite.
As the gentleman did not move, I turned on the half
landing of the next flight of stairs, and looked back,
breaking in, by my sudden pause, upon his fit of abstraction.
It was McRueit, and on recognising me,
he immediately beckoned me to his side.
“Does it strike you,” said he, “that there is anything
peculiar in that pair of shoes?”
“No—except that they certify to two very small
feet on the other side of the door.”
“Not merely `small,' my dear fellow! Do you
see where the pressure has been in those slender shoes,
how straight the inside line, how arched the instep,
how confidingly flat the pressure downward of the
little great toe! It's a woman of sweet and relying
character who wore that shoe to-day, and I must know
her. More, sir, I must marry her! Ah, you laugh
—but I will! There's a magnetism in that pair of
shoes addressed to me only. Beg your pardon—good
night—I'll go down stairs and find out her number—
`74!' I'll be well acquainted with `74' by this time
to-morrow!”
For the unconscious young lady asleep in that room,
I lay awake half the night, troubled with foreboding
pity. I knew the man so well, I was so certain that
he would leave nothing possible undone to carry out
this whimsical purpose! I knew that from that moment
was levelled, point-blank, at the lady, whoever
she might be (if single) a battery of devilish and pertinactious
ingenuity which would carry most any
small fort of a heart, most any way barricaded and
defended. He was well off; he was well-looking
enough; he was-deep and crafty. But if he did win
her, she was gone! gone, I knew, from happiness,
like a stone from a sling. He was a tyrant—subtle
in his cruelties to all people dependant on him—and
her life would be one of refined torture, neglect, betrayal,
and tears.
A fit of intermittent disgust for strangers, to which
all persons living in hotels are more or less liable,
confined my travels, for some days after this rencontre,
to the silence-and-slop thorough-fare of the back
stairs, “Coming to my feed” of society one rainy
morning, I went into the drawing-room after breakfast,
and was not surprised to see McRueit in a posture of
absorbed attention beside a lady. His stick stood on
the floor, and with his left cheek rested on the gold
head, he was gazing into her face, and evidently keeping
her perfectly at her ease as to the wants and gaps
of conversation, as he knew how to do—for he was the
readiest man with his brick and mortar whom I ever
had encountered.
“Who is that lady?” I asked of an omni-acquainted
old bachelor friend of mine.
“Miss Jonthee Twitt—and what can be the secret
of that rather exclusive gentleman's attention to her.
I can not fancy.”
I pulled a newspaper from my pocket, and seating
myself in one of the deep windows, commenced rather
a compassionate study of Miss Twitt—intending fully,
if I should find her interesting, to save her from the
clutches of my detestable classmate.
She was a slight, hollow-chested, consumptive-looking
girl, with a cast of features that any casual
observer would be certain to describe as “interesting.”
With the first two minutes' gaze upon her, my sympathies
were active enough for a crusade against a
whole army of connubial tyrants. I suddenly paused,
however. Something McRueit said made a change
in the lady's countenance. She sat just as still; she
did not move her head from its negligent posture; her
eyebrows did not contract; her lips did not stir; but
the dull, sickly-colored lids descended calmly and
fixedly till they hid from sight the upper edges of the
pupils! and by this slight but infallible sign I knew
—but the story will tell what I knew. Napoleon was
nearly, but not quite right, when he said that there
was no reliance to be placed on peculiarities of feature
or expression.
2. CHAPTER II.
In August of that same year, I followed the world
to Saratoga. In my first reconnoitre of the drawing-room
of Congress Hall, I caught the eye of Mr. McRueit,
and received from him a cordial salutation.
As I put my head right, upon its pivot, after an easy
nod to my familiar aversion, my eyes fell upon Miss
Jonthee Twitt—that was—for I had seen, in the
newspapers of two months before, that the resolve
(born of the dusty slipper outside her door), had been
brought about, and she was now on the irrevocable
side of a honeymoon sixty days old.
Her eyelid was down upon the pupil—motionless,
concentrated, and vigilant as a couched panther—and
from beneath the hem of her dress curved out the
high arched instep of a foot pointed with desperate
tension to the carpet; the little great toe (whose relying
pressure on the soiled slipper Mr. McRueit had
been captivated by), now rigid with as strong a purpose
as spiritual homeopathy could concentrate in so
small a tenement. I thought I would make Mr. and
Mrs. McRueit the subject of quiet study while I remained
at Saratoga.
But I have not mentioned the immediate cause of
Mrs. McRueit's resentment. Her bridegroom was
walking up and down the room with a certain Mrs.
Wanmaker, a widow, who was a better woman than
she looked to be, as I chanced to know, but as nobody
could know without the intimate acquaintance with
Mrs. Wanmaker upon which I base this remark.
With beauty of the most voluptuous cast, and a
passion for admiration which induced her to throw
out every possible lure to men any way worth her
time as victims, Mrs. Wanmaker's blood was as
“cold as the flow of Iser,” and her propriety, in fact,
wholly impregnable. I had been myself “tried on”
by the widow Wanmaker, and twenty caravan-marches
might have been made across the Desert of Sahara,
while the conviction I have just stated was “getting
through my hair.” It was not wonderful, therefore,
that both the bride and her (usually) most penetratious
bridegroom, had sailed over the widow's shallows, unconscious
of soundings. She was a “deep” woman,
too—but in the love line.
I thought McRueit singularly off his guard, if it
were only for “appearances.” He monopolized the
widow effectually, and she thought it worth her while
to let the world think him (a bridegroom and a rising
young politician), mad for her, and, truth to say, they
carried on the war strenuously. Perfectly certain as I
was that “the whirligig of time” would “bring about
the revenges” of Mrs. McRueit, I began to feel a
meantime pity for her, and had myself presented duly
by McRueit the next morning after breakfast.
It was a tepid, flaccid, revery-colored August morning,
and the sole thought of the universe seemed to
be to sit down. The devotees to gayety and mineral
water dawdled out to the porticoes, and some sat on
chairs under the trees, and the dandies lay on the
grass, and the old ladies on the steps and the settees,
and here and there, a man on the balustrade, and, in
the large swing, vis-à-vis, sat McRueit and the widow
Wanmaker, chattering in an undertone quite inaudible.
Mrs. McRueit sat on a bench, with her back
against one of the high-shouldered pine trees in the
court-yard, and I had called McRueit out of his swing
to present me. But he returned immediately to the
widow.
I thought it would be alleviative and good-natured
to give Mrs. McRueit an insight to the harmlessness
of Mrs. Wanmaker, and I had done so very nearly to
my satisfaction, when I discovered that the slighted
wife did not care sixpence about the fact, and that,
unlike Hamlet, she only knew seems. The more I
developed the innocent object of the widow's outlay
of smiles and confidentialities, the more Mrs. McRueit
placed herself in a posture to be remarked by the
loungers in the court-yeard and the dawdlers on the
portico, and the more she deepened a certain look—
you must imagine it for the present, dear reader. It
would take a razor's edge of analysis, and a Flemish
paint-pot and patience, to carve that injured look into
language, or paint it truthfully to the eye! Juries
would hang husbands, and recording angels “ruthlessly
overcharge,” upon the unsupported evidence of
such a look. She looked as if her heart must have
suffocated with forbearance long before she began to
look so. She looked as if she had forgiven and wept,
and was ready to forgive and weep again. She looked
as if she would give her life if she could conceal “her
feelings,” and as if she was nerving soul, and heart,
and eyelids, and lachrymatory glands—all to agony—
to prevent bursting into tears with her unutterable
anguish! It was the most unresisting, unresentful,
patient, sweet miserableness! A lamb's willingness
to “furnish forth another meal” of chops and sweet-bread,
was testy to such meek endurance! She was
evidently a martyr, a victim, a crushed flower, a “poor
thing!” But she did, now and then—unseen by anybody
but me—give a glance from that truncated orb
of a pupil of hers, over the top of her handkerchief,
that, if incarnated, would have made a hole in the hide
of a rhinoceros! It was triumph, venom, implacability—such
as I had never before seen expressed in human
glances.
There are many persons with but one idea, and that
a good one. Mrs. McRueit, I presume, was incapable
of appreciating my interest in her. At any rate
she played the same game with me as with other
people, and managed her affairs altogether with perfect
unity. It was in vain that I endeavored to hear
from her tongue what I read in the lowering pupil of
her eye. She spoke of McRueit with evident reluctance,
but always with discretion—never blaming
him, nor leaving any opening that should betray resentment,
or turn the current of sympathy from herself.
The result was immediate. The women in the
house began to look black upon McRueit. The men
“sent him to Coventry” more unwillingly, for he was
amusing and popular—but “to Coventry” he went!
And at last the widow Wanmaker became aware that
she was wasting her time on a man whose attentions
were not wanted elsewhere—and she (the unkindest
cut of all) found reasons for looking another way when
he approached her. He had became aware, during
this process, what was “in the wind,” but he knew
too much to stay in the public eye when it was inflamed.
With his brows lowering, and his face
gloomy with feelings I could easily interpret, he took
the early coach on the third morning after my introduction
to Mrs. McRueit, and departed, probably for
a discipline trip, to some place where sympathy with
his wife would be less dangerous.
3. CHAPTER III.
I think, that within the next two or three years, I
heard McRueit's name mentioned several times, or
saw it in the papers, connected with strong political
movements. I had no very definite idea of where he
was residing, however. Business called me to a
western county, and on the road I fell into the company
of a great political schemer and partisan—one
of those joints (of the feline political body), the next
remove from the “cat's paw.” Finding that I cared
not a straw for politics, and that we were going to the
same town, he undertook the blandishment of an overflow
of confidence upon me, probably with the remote
possibility that he might have occasion to use me. I
gave in to it so far as courteously to receive all his
secrets, and we arrived at our destination excellent
friends.
The town was in a ferment with the coming election
of a member for the legislature, and the hotel being
very crowded, Mr. Develin (my fellow-traveller) and
myself were put into a double-bedded room. Busy
with my own affairs, I saw but little of him, and he
seemed quite too much occupied for conversation, till
the third night after our arrival. Lying in bed with
the moonlight streaming into the room, he began to
give me some account of the campaign, preparing for,
around us, and presently mentioned the name of
McRueit—(the name, by the way, that I had seen
upon the placards, without caring particularly to inquire
whether or not it was “mine ancient” aversion).
“They are not aware,” said Mr. Develin, after
talking on the subject awhile, “that this petty election,
is, in fact, the grain of sand that is to turn the presidential
scale. If McRueit should be elected (as I
am sorry to say there seems every chance he will be),
Van Buren's doom is sealed. I have come a little
too late here. I should have had time to know something
more of this man McRueit—”
“Perhaps I can give you some idea of him,” interrupted
I, “for he has chanced to be more in my way
than I would have bargained for. But what do you
wish to know particularly?” (I spoke, as the reader
will see, in the unsuspecting innocence of my heart.)
“Oh—anything—anything! Tell me all you know
of him!”
Mr. Develin's vividness rather surprised me, for he
raised himself on his elbow in bed—but I went on and
narrated very much what I have put down for the
reader in the two preceding chapters.
“How do you spell Mrs. Wanmaker's name?”
asked my imbedded vis-à-vis, as I stopped and turned
over to go to sleep.
I spelt it for him.
He jumped out of bed, dressed himself and left the
room. Will the reader permit me to follow him, like
Asmodeus, giving with Asmodean brevity the knowledge
I afterward gained of his use of my involuntary
revelation?
Mr. Develin roused the active member of the Van
Buren committee from his slumber, and in an hour
had the printers of their party paper at work upon a
placard. A large meeting was to be held the next
day in the town-hall, during which both candidates, it
was supposed, would address the people. Ladies
were to occupy the galleries. The hour came round.
Mrs. McRueit's carriage drove into the village a few
minutes before eleven, and as she stopped at a shop
for a moment, a letter was handed her by a boy. She
sat still and read it. She was alone. Her face turned
livid with paleness after its first flush, and forgetting
her errand at the shop, she drove on to the town-hall.
She took her seat in a prominent part of the gallery.
The preliminaries were gone through with, and her
husband rose to speak. He was a plausible orator,
an eloquent man. But there was a sentiment circulating
in the audience—something whispered from man
to man—that strangely took off the attention of the
audience. He could not, as he had never before found
difficulty in doing, keep their eyes upon his lips.
Every one was gazing on his wife! And there she
sat—with her INJURED LOOK!—pale, sad, apparently
striving to listen and conceal her mental suffering. It
was as convincing to the audience of the truth of the
insinuation that was passing from mouth to mouth—
as convincing as would have been a revelation from
Heaven. McRueit followed the many upturned eyes
at last, and saw that they were bent on his wife, and
that—once more—after years of conciliation, she wore
THAT INJURED LOOK! His heart failed him. He
evidently comprehended that the spirit that had driven
him from Saratoga, years before—popular sympathy
with women—had overtaken him and was plotting
against him once more. His speech began to lose
its concentration. He talked wide. The increasing
noise overpowered him, and he descended at last from
the platform in the midst of a universal hiss. The
other candidate rose and spoke; and at the close of
his speech the meeting broke up, and as they dispersed,
their eyes were met at every corner with a
large placard, in which “injured wife,” “unfaithful
husband,” “widow W—n—k—r,” were the words in
prominent capitals. The election came on the next
day, and Mr. McRueit being signally defeated, Mr.
Van Buren's election to the Presidency (if Mr. Develin
knew anything) was made certain—brought about by
a woman's INJURED LOOK.
My business in the county was the purchase of land,
and for a year or two afterward, I was a great deal
there. Feeling that I had unintentionally furnished
a weapon to his enemies, I did penance by cultivating
McRueit. I went often to his house. He was at
first a good deal broken up by the sudden check to
his ambition, but he rallied with a cliange in his
character for which I was not prepared. He gave up
all antagonism toward his wife. He assumed a new
manner to her. She had been skilfully managed before—but
he took her now confidingly behind his
shield. He felt overmastered by the key she had to
popular sympathy, and he determined wisely to make
it turn in his favor. By assiduity, by tenderness,
childlikeness, he succeeded in completely convincing
her that he had but one out-of-doors wish—that of
embellishing her existence by his success. The effort
on her was marvellous. She recovered her health,
gradually changed to a joyous and earnest promoter
of her husband's interests, and they were soon a marked
model in the county for conjugal devotion. The
popular impression soon gained ground that Mr. McRueit
had been shamefully wronged by the previous
prejudice against his character as a husband. The
tide that had already turned, soon swelled to a flood,
and Mr. McRueit now—but Mr. McRueit is too powerful
a person in the present government to follow any
farther. Suffice it to say that he might return to Mrs.
Wanmaker and his old courses if he liked—for his
wife's INJURED LOOK is entirely fattened out of possibility
by her happiness. She weighs two hundred, and
could no more look injured than Sir John Falstaff.
