Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  He stopped, and I said, “Exactly.”

  He went on: “Of course it’s rather anomalous, and I oughtn’t to let you get the impression that she has actually conceded anything. But she shows herself much more — er, shall I say? — affectionate, and I can’t help hoping there may be a change in her mood which will declare itself in an attitude more favorable to—”

  I said again, “Exactly,” and Glendenning resumed:

  “In spite of Edith’s not having been quite so well as usual — she’s wonderfully well now — it’s been a very happy summer with us, on account of this change. It seems to have come about in a very natural way with Mrs. Bentley, and out of a growing regard which I can’t specifically account for, as far as anything I’ve done is concerned.”

  “I think I could account for it,” said I. “She must be a stonier-hearted old lady than I imagine if she hasn’t felt your goodness, all along, Glendenning.”

  “Why, you’re very kind,” said the gentle creature. “You tempt me to repeat what she said, at the only time she expressed a wish to have me oftener with them: ‘You’ve been very patient with a contrary old woman. But I sha’n’t make you wait much longer.’”

  “Well, I think that was very encouraging, my dear fellow.”

  “Do you?” he asked, wistfully. “I thought so too, at first, but when I told Edith she could not take that view of it. She said that she did not believe her mother had changed her mind at all, and that she only meant she was growing older.”

  “But, at any rate,” I argued, “it was pleasant to have her make an open recognition of your patience.”

  “Yes, that was pleasant,” he said, cheerfully again, “And it was the beginning of the kind of relation that I have held ever since to her household. I am afraid I am there a good half of my time, and I believe I dine there oftener than I do at home. I am quite on the footing of a son, with her.”

  “There are some of the unregenerate, Glendenning,” I made bold to say, “who think it is your own fault that you weren’t on the footing of a son-in-law with her long ago. If you’ll excuse my saying so, you have been, if anything, too patient. It would have been far better for all if you had taken the bit in your teeth six or seven years back—”

  He drew a deep breath. “It wouldn’t have done; it wouldn’t have done! Edith herself would never have consented to it.”

  “Did you ever ask her?”

  “No,” he said, innocently. “How could I?”

  “And of course she could never ask you,” I laughed. “My opinion is that you have lost a great deal of time unnecessarily. I haven’t the least doubt that if you had brought a little pressure to bear with Mrs. Bentley herself, it would have sufficed.”

  He looked at me with a kind of dismay, as if my words had carried conviction, or had roused a conviction long dormant in his heart. “It wouldn’t have done,” he gasped.

  “It isn’t too late to try, yet,” I suggested.

  “Yes, it’s too late. We must wait now.” He hastened to add, “Until she yields entirely of herself.”

  He gave me a guilty glance when he drew near the Bentley place and we saw a buggy standing at the gate. “The doctor!” he said, and he hurried me up the walk to the door.

  The door stood open and we heard the doctor saying to some one within: “No, no, nothing organic at all, I assure you. One of the commonest functional disturbances.”

  Miss Bentley appeared at the threshold with him, and she and Glendenning had time to exchange a glance of anxiety and of smiling reassurance, before she put out her hand in greeting to me, a very glad and cordial greeting, apparently. The doctor and I shook hands, and he got himself away with what I afterwards remembered as undue quickness, and left us to Miss Bentley.

  Glendenning was quite right about her looking better. She looked even gay, and there was a vivid color in her checks such as I had not seen there for many years; her lips were red, her eyes brilliant. Her face was still perhaps as thin as ever, but it was indescribably younger.

  I cannot say that there were the materials of a merrymaking amongst us, exactly, and yet I remember that luncheon as rather a gay one, with some laughing. I had not been till now in discovering that Miss Bentley had a certain gift of humor, so shy and proud, if I may so express it, that it would not show itself except upon long acquaintance, and I distinctly perceived now that this enabled her to make light of a burden that might otherwise have been intolerable. It qualified her to treat with cheerfulness the grimness of her mother, which had certainly not grown less since I saw her last, and to turn into something like a joke her valetudinarian austerities of sentiment and opinion. She made a pleasant mock of the amenities which passed between her mother and Glendenning, whose gingerliness in the acceptance of the old lady’s condescension would, I confess, have been notably comical without this gloss. It was perfectly evident that Mrs. Bentley’s favor was bestowed with a mental reservation, and conditioned upon his forming no expectations from it, and poor Glendenning’s eagerness to show that he took it upon these terms was amusing as well as touching. I do not know how to express that Miss Bentley contrived to eliminate herself from the affair, or to have the effect of doing that, and to abandon it to them. I can only say that she left them to be civil to each other, and that, except when she recurred to them in playful sarcasm from time to time, she devoted herself to me.

  Evidently, Mrs. Bentley was very much worse than she had been; her breathing was painfully labored. But if her daughter had any anxiety about her condition, she concealed it most effectually from us. I decided that she had perhaps been asking the doctor as to certain symptoms that had alarmed her, and it was in the rebound from her anxiety that her spirits had risen to the height I saw. Glendenning seized the moment of her absence after luncheon, when she helped her mother up to her room, to impart to me that this was his conclusion too. He said that he had not seen her so cheerful for a long time, and when I praised her in every way he basked in my appreciation of her as if it had all been flattery for himself. She came back directly, and then I had a chance to see what she might have been under happier stars. She could not, at any moment, help showing herself an intellectual and cultivated woman, but her opportunities to show herself a woman of rare social gifts had been scanted by circumstances and perhaps by conscience. It seemed to me that even in devoting herself to her mother as she had always done she need not have enslaved herself, and that it was in this excess her inherited puritanism came out. She might sometimes openly rebel against her mother’s domination, as my wife and I had now and again seen her do; but inwardly she was almost passionately submissive. Here I thought that Glendenning, if he had been a different sort of man, might have been useful to her; he might have encouraged her in a little wholesome selfishness, and enabled her to withhold sacrifice where it was needless. But I am not sure; perhaps he would have made her more unhappy, if he had attempted this; perhaps he was the only sort of man whom, in her sense of his own utter unselfishness, she could have given her heart to in perfect peace. She now talked brilliantly and joyously to me, but all the time her eye sought his for his approval and sympathy; he, for his part, was content to listen in a sort of beatific pride in her which he did not, in his simple-hearted fondness, make any effort to mask.

  When we came away he made himself amends for his silence by a long hymn in worship of her, and I listened with all the acquiescence possible. He asked me questions — whether I had noticed this thing or that about her, or remembered what she had said upon one point or another, and led up to compliments of her which I was glad to pay. In the long ordeal they had undergone they had at least kept all the freshness of their love.

  XIII.

  Glendenning and I went back to the rectory, and sat down in his study, or rather he made me draw a chair to the open door, and sat down himself on a step below the threshold. The day was one of autumnal warmth; the haze of Indian summer blued the still air, and the wind that now and then stirred the stiff panoply of the t
rees was lullingly soft. This part of Gormanville quite overlooked the busier district about the mills, where the water-power found its way, and it was something of a climb even from the business street of the old hill village, which the rival prosperity of the industrial settlement in the valley had thrown into an aristocratic aloofness. From the upper windows of the rectory one could have seen only the red and yellow of the maples, but from the study door we caught glimpses past their boles of the outlying country, as it showed between the white mansions across the way. One of these, as I have already mentioned, was the Conwell place; and after we had talked of the landscape awhile, Glendenning said: “By the way! Why don’t you buy the Conwell place? You liked it so much, and you were all so well in Gormanville. The Conwells want to sell it, and it would be just the thing for you, five or six months of the year.”

  I explained, almost compassionately, the impossibility of a poor insurance man thinking of a summer residence like the Conwell place, and I combated as well as I could the optimistic reasons of my friend in its favor. I was not very severe with him, for I saw that his optimism was not so much from his wish to have me live in Gormanville as from the new hope that filled him. It was by a perfectly natural, if not very logical transition that we were presently talking of this greater interest again, and Glendenning was going over all the plans that it included. I encouraged him to believe, as he desired, that a sea-voyage would be the thing for Mrs. Bentley, and that it would be his duty to take her to Europe as soon as he was in authority to do so. They should always, he said, live in Gormanville, for they were greatly attached to the place, and they should keep up the old Bentley homestead in the style that he thought they owed to the region where the Bentleys had always lived. It is a comfort to a man to tell his dreams, whether of the night or of the day, and I enjoyed Glendenning’s pleasure in rehearsing these fond reveries of his.

  He interrupted himself to listen to the sound of hurried steps, and directly a man in his shirt-sleeves came running by on the sidewalk beyond the maples. In a village like Gormanville any passer is of interest to the spectator, and a man running is of thrilling moment. Glendenning started to his feet, and moved forward for a better sight of the flying passer. He called out to the man, who shouted back something I could not understand, and ran on.

  “What did he say?”

  “I don’t know.” Glendenning’s face as he turned to me again was quite white. “It is Mrs. Bentley’s farmer,” he added, feebly, and I could see that it was with an effort he kept himself from sinking. “Something has happened.”

  “Oh, I guess not, or not anything serious,” I answered, with an effort to throw off the weight I suddenly felt at my own heart. “People have been known to run for a plumber. But if you’re anxious, let us go and see what the matter is.”

  I turned and got my hat; Glendenning came in for his, but seemed unable to find it, though he stood before the table where it lay. I had to laugh, though I felt so little like it, as I put it in his hand.

  “Don’t leave me,” he entreated, as we hurried out through the maples to the sidewalk. “It has come at last, and I feel, as I always knew I should, like a murderer.”

  “What rubbish!” I retorted. “You don’t know that anything has happened. You don’t know what the man’s gone for.”

  “Yes, I do,” he said. “Mrs. Bentley is — He’s gone for the doctor.”

  As he spoke a buggy came tearing down the street behind us; the doctor was in it, and the man in shirt-sleeves beside him. We did not try to hail them, but as they whirled by the farmer turned his face, and again called something unintelligible to Glendenning.

  We made what speed we could after them, but they were long out of sight in the mile that it seemed to me we were an hour in covering before we reached the Bentley place. The doctor’s buggy stood at the gate, and I perceived that I was without authority to enter the house, on which some unknown calamity had fallen, no matter with what good-will I had come; I could see that Glendenning had suffered a sudden estrangement, also, which he had to make a struggle against. But he went in, leaving me without, as if he had forgotten me.

  I could not go away, and I walked down the path to the gate, and waited there, in case I should be in any wise wanted. After a very long time the doctor came bolting over the walk towards me, as if he did not see me, but he brought himself up short with an “Oh!” before he actually struck against me. I had known him during our summer at the Conwell place, where we used to have him in for our little ailments, and I would never have believed that his round, optimistic face could look so worried. I read the worst in it; Glendenning was right; but I asked the doctor, quite as if I did not know, whether there was anything serious the matter.

  “Serious — yes,” he said. “Get in with me; I have to see another patient, but I’ll bring you back.” We mounted into his buggy, and he went on. “She’s in no immediate danger, now. The faint lasted so long I didn’t know whether we should bring her out of it, at one time, but the most alarming part is over for the present. There is some trouble with the heart, but I don’t think anything organic.”

  “Yes, I heard you telling her daughter so, just before lunch. Isn’t it a frequent complication with asthma?”

  “Asthma? Her daughter? Whom are you talking about?”

  “Mrs. Bentley. Isn’t Mrs. Bentley—”

  “No!” shouted the doctor, in disgust, “Mrs. Bentley is as well as ever. It’s Miss Bentley. I wish there was a thousandth part of the chance for her that there is for her mother.”

  XIV.

  I stayed over for the last train to Boston, and then I had to go home without the hope which Miss Bentley’s first rally had given the doctor. My wife and I talked the affair over far into the night, and in the paucity of particulars I was almost driven to their invention. But I managed to keep a good conscience, and at the same time to satisfy the demand for facts in a measure by the indulgence of conjectures which Mrs. March continually took for them. The doctor had let fall, in his talk with me, that he had no doubt Miss Bentley had aggravated the affection of the heart from which she was suffering by her exertions in lifting her mother about so much; and my wife said that it needed only that touch to make the tragedy complete.

  “Unless,” I suggested, “you could add that her mother had just told her she would not oppose her marriage any longer, and it was the joy that brought on the access of the trouble that is killing her.”

  “Did the doctor say that?” Mrs. March demanded, severely.

  “No. And I haven’t the least notion that anything like it happened. But if it had—”

  “It would have been too tawdry. I’m ashamed of you for thinking of such a thing, Basil.”

  Upon reflection, I was rather ashamed myself; but I plucked up courage to venture: “It would be rather fine, wouldn’t it, when that poor girl is gone, if Mrs. Bentley had Glendenning come and live with her, and they devoted themselves to each other for her daughter’s sake?”

  “Fine! It would be ghastly. What are you thinking of, my dear? How would it be fine?”

  “Oh, I mean dramatically,” I apologized, and, not to make bad worse, I said no more.

  The next day, which was Sunday, a telegram came for me, which I decided, without opening it, to be the announcement of the end. But it proved to be a message from Mrs. Bentley, begging in most urgent terms that Mrs. March and I would come to her at once, if possible. These terms left the widest latitude for surmise, but none for choice, in the sad circumstances, and we looked up the Sunday trains for Gormanville, and went.

  We found the poor woman piteously grateful, but by no means so prostrated as we had expected. She was rather, as often happens, stayed and held upright by the burden that had been laid upon her, and it was with fortitude if not dignity that she appealed to us for our counsel, and if possible our help, in a matter about which she had already consulted the doctor. “The doctor says that the excitement cannot hurt Edith; it may even help her, to propose it. I should
like to do it, but if you do not think well of it, I will not do it. I know it is too late now to make up to her for the past,” said Mrs. Bentley, and here she gave way to the grief she had restrained hitherto.

  “There is no one else,” she went on, “who has been so intimately acquainted with the facts of my daughter’s engagement — no one else that I can confide in or appeal to.”

  We both murmured that she was very good; but she put our politeness somewhat peremptorily aside.

  “It is the only thing I can do now, and it is useless to do that now. It will be no reparation for the past, and it will be for myself and not for her, as all that I have done in the past has been; but I wish to know what you think of their getting married now.”

  I am afraid that if we had said what we thought of such a tardy and futile proof of penitence we should have brought little comfort to the mother’s heart, but we looked at each other in the disgust we both felt and said there would be a sacred fitness in it.

  She was apparently much consoled.

  It was touching enough, and I at least was affected by her tears; I am not so sure my wife was. But she had instantly to consider how best to propose the matter to Miss Bentley, and to act upon her decision.

  After all, as she reported the fact to me later, it was very simple to suggest her mother’s wish to the girl, who listened to it with a perfect intelligence in which there was no bitterness.

  “They think I am going to die,” she said, quietly, “and I can understand how she feels. It seems such a mockery; but if she wishes it; and Arthur—”

  It was my part to deal with Glendenning, and I did not find it so easy.

  “Marriage is for life and for earth,” he said, solemnly, and I thought very truly. “In the resurrection we shall be one another’s without it. I don’t like to go through the form of such a sacrament idly; it seems like a profanation of its mystery.”